The Satanic Verses

Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. ‘These are museum-values,’ she used to tell him. ‘Sanctified, hanging in golden frames on honorific walls.’ She had never had any time for what endured. Change everything! Rip it up! He said: ‘If you succeed you will make it impossible for anybody like you, in one or two generations’ time, to come along.’ She celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended up like the dodo – a stuffed relic, Class Traitor, 1980$ – that would, she said, certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to differ, but by this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he conceded the other point.

(One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man counter-protest. Didn't these people know what the stuff inside was worth? There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage... Pamela put her foot down, ‘Don't you dare,’ she said. She held the then-correct view: that the museums were too valuable to charge for. So: ‘Don't you dare,’ and to his surprise he found he did not. He had not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his life for what was in those museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended position.)

– And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. —

Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tu

‘What will you do now?’ Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the Hot Wax nightclub, and he'd answered, too lightly: ‘Me? I think I'll come back to life.’ Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman, with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolò Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? – enough, at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain go away; – yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic, that all-too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if Niccolo could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue, Il Principe, following it with the magisterial Discorsi, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.

Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla – in whose eyes Chamcha's metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects fantasy-movies (Labyrinth, Legend, Howard the Duck) entered the Real – drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. ‘Good luck,’ said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. ‘No, thanks,’ Saladin replied. ‘When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?’ He waved goodbye. ‘Good for you,’ Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: ‘Fast forward!’ His was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the next. Welcome home, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.

Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. ‘I didn't think people did that any more,’ he said. ‘Not since Dr Strangelove.’ Her pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. ‘So far so good.’ She was naturally off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she ‘stuck with’ her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which he'd been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha's discomfiture – and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood – was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that he'd never really cared for pets.

‘I suppose,’ she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, ‘that what I did was unforgivable, huh?’