*

   ‘I'm going crazy,’ Gibreel thought. ‘She's dying, but I'm losing my mind.’ The moon was out, and Rosa's breathing was the only sound in the room: snoring as she breathed in and exhaling heavily, with small grunting noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he could not. Even in these intervals between the visions his body remained impossibly heavy. As if a boulder had been placed upon his chest. And the images, when they came, continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at Los Alamos, making love to her while she murmured his name, over and over, Martin of the Cross, – and the next moment she was ignoring him in broad daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol, – so that it was not possible to distinguish memory from wishes, or guilty reconstructions from confessional truths, – because even on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.
   Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it appeared to pass right through her, and indeed Gibreel was beginning to be able to make out the pattern of the lace embroidery on her pillowcase. Then he saw Don Enrique and his friend, the puritanical and disapproving Dr Babington, standing on the balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that as the apparitions increased in clarity Rosa grew fainter and fainter, fading away, exchanging places, one might say, with the ghosts. And because he had also understood that the manifestations depended on him, his stomach-ache, his stone-like weightiness, he began to fear for his own life as well.
   ‘You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate,’ Dr Babington was saying. ‘I did so out of our old friendship. But it was wrong to do so; and I see the result before me. You have sheltered a killer and it is, perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go home, and take that wife of yours, before something worse happens.’
   ‘I am home,’ Henry Diamond said. ‘And I take exception to your mention of my wife.’
   ‘Wherever the English settle, they never leave England,’ Dr Babington said as he faded into the moonlight. ‘Unless, like Dona Rosa, they fall in love.’
   A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty Gibreel Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to his feet. Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor, but he reached the window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there were giant thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there was now an ocean of thistles, extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high as a full-grown man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr Babington mutter in his ear: ‘The first plague of thistles for fifty years. The past, it seems, returns.’ He saw a woman running through the thick, rippling growth, barefoot, with loose dark hair. ‘She did it,’ Rosa's voice said clearly behind him. ‘After betraying him with the Vulture and making him into a murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right. Very dangerous one, that one. Very.’ Gibreel lost sight of Aurora del Sol in the thistles; one mirage obscured another.
   He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him flat on his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that she had given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt helpless, ignorant... she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.
   Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he spoke comforting words.
   Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out of the thistles and took hold of his silver-hafted knife...
   No! No! No, this way!
   Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted, looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her rejections any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he tore at her clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the handle of a knife...
   No! No, never, no! This way: here!
   Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow caresses; and now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the lovers rushed apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his rival's heart, —
   – and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is for Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English whore, —
   – and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed him, once, twice, and again, —
   – and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.
   Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.
   When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. ‘The pampero came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found him, or was it before.’ The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Dona Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat beside her, and said defiantly, I brought something. A little souvenir. And unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.
   ‘Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The end.’ She paused. ‘To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn't to be borne.’ And, after a further silence: ‘Everything shrinks.’
   There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the patchwork counterpane. She looked: normal. Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent him from walking out of the door.
   He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by his wife's own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it, jammed it back on. London shareef, here I come. He had the city in his pocket: Geographers’ London, the whole dog-eared metropolis, A to Z.
   ‘What to do?’ he was thinking. ‘Phone or not phone? No, just turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you. – Okay, maybe not quite, but words to that effect. – Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie Bibi, boo to you.’
   Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boat-house with the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar, although a little different, less quavery; younger. The boathouse door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song.
   ‘Take your coat off,’ she said. She was dressed as she had been on the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless. He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.
   ‘How can you like me?’ she murmured. ‘I am so much older than you.’

3

   When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of these – the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein – who had ‘de-bagged’ Saladin with a merry cry of, ‘Opening time, Packy; let's see what you're made of!’ Red-and-white stripes were dragged off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, the wheel-arch, the uncarpeted floor or a policeman's shin – on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law-enforcement officer – and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.
   His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. ‘What's this, then?’ joked Novak – the former ‘Hisser’ – giving it a playful tweak. ‘Fancy one of us, maybe?’ Whereupon the ‘moaning’ immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted, ‘Nah, that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat.’
   ‘I get it,’ Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. ‘Hey! Hey!’ howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. ‘Listen, here's an even better ... no wonder he's so fucking horny.’
   At which the three of them, repeating many times ‘Got his goat... horny...’ fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat-bleats, and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented – that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp – was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine. ‘This isn't England,’ he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish. – But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being, whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which every schoolboy knew? – Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually perished in the Bostan disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call, and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget... He felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear.
   Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. ‘Animal,’ Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: ‘You're all the same. Can't expect animals to observe civilized standards. Eh?’ And Novak took up the thread: ‘We're talking about fucking personal hygiene here, you little fuck.’
   Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish now. The humiliation of it! He was – had gone to some lengths to become – a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! ‘My good fellows,’ he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, ‘my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it's too late.’
   Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. ‘What's that? What was that noise?’ he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, ‘Search me.’ ‘Tell you what it sounded like,’ Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: ‘Maa-aa-aa!’ Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
   The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. ‘In this country,’ he informed Saladin, ‘we clean up our messes.’
   The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position. ‘That's right,’ said Novak, ‘clean it up.’ Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. ‘Off you go,’ he said, in a conversational voice. ‘Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off.’

*

   Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, – or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outré – Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called ‘Mack’ or ‘Jockey’, turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. ‘Tha's the ticket,’ he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. ‘An actor, was it? I'm partial to watchin’ a guid man perform.’
   This observation prompted Officer Novak – that is, ‘Kim’ – who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap-opera stars and game-show hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, – Bruno, the youngest of the three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin’ girls, then, that's my game. This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. ‘Little children,’ Mr. Stein admonished them, ‘should be seen an’ no hearrud.’
   By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself not to vomit, knowing that such an error would only prolong his misery. He was crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer's rebuke, began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly started up their own version of the immigration officers’ conversation, and set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players, professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a bad humour by the loftiness of ‘Jockey’ Stein, they were unable to maintain the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur ‘double’ team of the early 1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, – in which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the great Danny Blanchflower was a ‘luxury’ player, a cream puff, flower by name, pansy by nature; – whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting that in the case of Liverpool it was the supporters who were the bum-boys, the Spurs mob could take them apart with their arms tied behind their backs. Of course all the constables were familiar with the techniques of football hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching the spectators in the various stadiums up and down the country, and as their argument grew heated they reached the point of wishing to demonstrate, to their opposing colleagues, exactly what they meant by ‘tearing apart’, ‘bollocking’, ‘bottling’ and the like. The angry factions glared at one another and then, all together, they turned to gaze upon the person of Saladin Chamcha.
   Well, the ruckus in that police van grew noisier and noisier, – and it's true to say that Chamcha was partly to blame, because he had started squealing like a pig, – and the young bobbies were thumping and gouging various parts of his anatomy, using him both as a guinea-pig and a safety-valve, remaining careful, in spite of their excitation, to confine their blows to his softer, more fleshy parts, to minimize the risk of breakages and bruises; and when Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their fun.
   Besides, all this talk of watching had brought Stein, Bruno and Novak round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and judicious voices, they were speaking of the need, in this day and age, for an increase in observation, not merely in the sense of ‘spectating’, but in that of ‘watchfulness’, and ‘surveillance’. The young constables’ experience was extremely relevant, Stein intoned: watch the crowd, not the game. ‘Eternal vigilance is the price o’ liberty,’ he proclaimed.
   ‘Eek,’ cried Chamcha, unable to avoid interrupting. ‘Aargh, unnhh, owoo.’


*

   After a time a curious mood of detachment fell upon Saladin. He no longer had any idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria of his hard fall from grace, nor could he have hazarded a guess as to the proximity of their ultimate destination, even though the tinnitus in his ears was growing gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps, ellowen, deeowen, London. The blows raining down on him now felt as soft as a lover's caresses; the grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no longer appalled him; even the last pellets of goat-excrement failed to stir his much-abused stomach. Numbly, he crouched down in his little world, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom.
   The talk of surveillance techniques had reunited immigration officers and policemen, healing the breach caused by Jockey Stein's words of puritanical reproof. Chamcha, the insect on the floor of the van, heard, as if through a telephone scrambler, the faraway voices of his captors speaking eagerly of the need for more video equipment at public events and of the benefits of computerized information, and, in what appeared to be a complete contradiction, of the efficacy of placing too rich a mixture in the nosebags of police horses on the night before a big match, because when equine stomach-upsets led to the marchers being showered with shit it always provoked them into violence, an’ then we can really get amongst them, can't we just. Unable to find a way of making this universe of soap operas, matchoftheday, cloaks and daggers cohere into any recognizable whole, Chamcha closed his ears to the chatter and listened to the footsteps in his ears.
   Then the penny dropped.
   ‘Ask the Computer!’
   Three immigration officers and five policemen fell silent as the foul-smelling creature sat up and hollered at them. ‘What's he on about?’ asked the youngest policeman – one of the Tottenham supporters, as it happened – doubtfully. ‘Shall I fetch him another whack?’
   ‘My name is Salahuddin Chamchawala, professional name Saladin Chamcha,’ the demi-goat gibbered. ‘I am a member of Actors’ Equity, the Automobile Association and the Garrick Club. My car registration number is suchandsuch. Ask the Computer. Please.’
   ‘Who're you trying to kid?’ inquired one of the Liverpool fans, but he, too, sounded uncertain. ‘Look at yourself. You're a fucking Packy billy. Sally-who? – What kind of name is that for an Englishman?’
   Chamcha found a scrap of anger from somewhere. ‘And what about them?’ he demanded, jerking his head at the immigration officers. ‘They don't sound so Anglo-Saxon to me.’
   For a moment it seemed that they might all fall upon him and tear him limb from limb for such temerity, but at length the skull-faced Officer Novak merely slapped his face a few times while replying, ‘I'm from Weybridge, you cunt. Get it straight: Weybridge, where the fucking Beatles used to live.’
   Stein said: ‘Better check him out.’ Three and a half minutes later the Black Maria came to a halt and three immigration officers, five constables and one police driver held a crisis conference – here's a pretty effing pickle– and Chamcha noted that in their new mood all nine had begun to look alike, rendered equal and identical by their tension and fear. Nor was it long before he understood that the call to the Police National Computer, which had promptly identified him as a British Citizen first class, had not improved his situation, but had placed him, if anything, in greater danger than before.
   – We could say, – one of the nine suggested, – that he was lying unconscious on the beach. – Won't work, – came the reply, on account of the old lady and the other geezer. – Then he resisted arrest and turned nasty and in the ensuing altercation he kind of fainted. – Or the old bag was ga-ga, made no sense to any of us, and the other guy wossname never spoke up, and as for this bugger, you only have to clock the bleeder, looks like the very devil, what were we supposed to think? – And then he went and passed out on us, so what could we do, in all fairness, I ask you, your honour, but bring him in to the medical facility at the Detention Centre, for proper care followed by observation and questioning, using our reason-to-believe guidelines; what do you reckon on something of that nature? – It's nine against one, but the old biddy and the second bloke make it a bit of a bastard. – Look, we can fix the tale later, first thing like I keep saying is to get him unconscious. – Right.

*

   Chamcha woke up in a hospital bed with green slime coming up from his lungs. His bones felt as if somebody had put them in the icebox for a long while. He began to cough, and when the fit ended nineteen and a half minutes later he fell back into a shallow, sickly sleep without having taken in any aspect of his present whereabouts. When he surfaced again a friendly woman's face was looking down at him, smiling reassuringly. ‘You goin to be fine,’ she said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘A lickle pneumonia is all you got.’ She introduced herself as his physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. And added, ‘I never judge a person by appearances. No, sir. Don't you go thinking I do.’
   With that, she rolled him over on to his side, placed a small cardboard box by his lips, hitched up her white housecoat, kicked off her shoes, and leaped athletically on to the bed to sit astride him, for all the world as if he were a horse that she meant to ride right through the screens surrounding his bed and out into goodness knew what manner of transmogrified landscape. ‘Doctor's orders,’ she explained. ‘Thirty-minute sessions, twice a day.’ Without further preamble, she began pummelling him briskly about the middle body, with lightly clenched, but evidently expert, fists.
   For poor Saladin, fresh from his beating in the police van, this new assault was the last straw. He began to struggle beneath her pounding fists, crying loudly, ‘Let me out of here; has anybody informed my wife?’ The effort of shouting out induced a second coughing spasm that lasted seventeen and three-quarter minutes and earned him a telling off from the physiotherapist, Hyacinth. ‘You wastin my time,’ she said. ‘I should be done with your right lung by now and instead I hardly get started. You go behave or not?’ She had remained on the bed, straddling him, bouncing up and down as his body convulsed, like a rodeo rider hanging on for the nine-second bell. He subsided in defeat, and allowed her to beat the green fluid out of his inflamed lungs. When she finished he was obliged to admit that he felt a good deal better. She removed the little box which was now half-full of slime and said cheerily, ‘You be standin up firm in no time,’ and then, colouring in confusion, apologized, ‘Excuse me,’ and fled without remembering to pull back the encircling screens.
   ‘Time to take stock of the situation,’ he told himself. A quick physical examination informed him that his new, mutant condition had remained unchanged. This cast his spirits down, and he realized that he had been half-hoping that the nightmare would have ended while he slept. He was dressed in a new pair of alien pyjamas, this time of an undifferentiated pale green colour, which matched both the fabric of the screens and what he could see of the walls and ceiling of that cryptic and anonymous ward. His legs still ended in those distressing hoofs, and the horns on his head were as sharp as before ... he was distracted from this morose inventory by a man's voice from nearby, crying out in heart-rending distress: ‘Oh, if ever a body suffered... !’
   ‘What on earth?’ Chamcha thought, and determined to investigate. But now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the first. It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal noises: the snorting of bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty-polly mimic-squawks of parrots or talking budgerigars. Then, from another direction, he heard a woman grunting and shrieking, at what sounded like the end of a painful labour; followed by the yowling of a new-born baby. However, the woman's cries did not subside when the baby's began; if anything, they redoubled in their intensity, and perhaps fifteen minutes later Chamcha distinctly heard a second infant's voice joining the first. Still the woman's birth-agony refused to end, and at intervals ranging from fifteen to thirty minutes for what seemed like an endless time she continued to add new babies to the already improbable numbers marching, like conquering armies, from her womb.
   His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling in clarified butter – coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves. ‘This is too much,’ he thought firmly. ‘Time to get a few things sorted out.’ He swung his legs out of bed, tried to stand up, and promptly fell to the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around an hour to overcome this problem – learning to walk by holding on to the bed and stumbling around it until his confidence grew. At length, and not a little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat-like, between two of the screens to his left, followed rapidly by the rest of the fellow, who drew the screens together behind him with suspicious rapidity. ‘Doing all right?’ Stein asked, his smile remaining wide. ‘When can I see the doctor? When can I go to the toilet? When can I leave?’ Chamcha asked in a rush. Stein answered equably: the doctor would be round presently; Nurse Phillips would bring him a bedpan; he could leave as soon as he was well. ‘Damn decent of you to come down with the lung thing,’ Stein added, with the gratitude of an author whose character had unexpectedly solved a ticklish technical problem. ‘Makes the story much more convincing. Seems you were that sick, you did pass out on us after all. Nine of us remember it well. Thanks.’ Chamcha could not find any words. ‘And another thing,’ Stein went on. ‘The old burd, Mrs. Diamond. Turns out to be dead in her bed, cold as mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul play has no as yet been eliminated.’
   ‘In conclusion,’ he said before disappearing forever from Saladin's new life, ‘I suggest, Mr. Citizen Saladin, that you dinna trouble with a complaint. You'll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and your great hoofs you wouldna look the most reliable of witnesses. Good day to you now.’
   Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and when he opened them his tormentor had turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. ‘Why you wan go walking?’ she asked. ‘Whatever your heart desires, you jus ask me, Hyacinth, and we'll see what we can fix.’


*

   ‘Ssst.’
   That night, in the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin was. awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar.
   ‘Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up.’
   Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted to bury his head under the sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself...? ‘That's right,’ the creature said. ‘You see, you're not alone.’
   It had an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth. ‘The night guards often doze off,’ it explained. That's how we manage to get to talk.’
   Just then a voice from one of the other beds – each bed, as Chamcha now knew, was protected by its own ring of screens – wailed loudly: ‘Oh, if ever a body suffered!’ and the man-tiger, or manticore, as it called itself, gave an exasperated growl. That Moaner Lisa,’ it exclaimed. ‘All they did to him was make him blind.’
   ‘Who did what?’ Chamcha was confused.
   ‘The point is,’ the manticore continued, ‘are you going to put up with it?’
   Saladin was still puzzled. The other seemed to be suggesting that these mutations were the responsibility of – of whom? How could they be? – ‘I don't see,’ he ventured, ‘who can be blamed…’
   The manticore ground its three rows of teeth in evident frustration. ‘There's a woman over that way,’ it said, ‘who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holiday makers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes. I myself am in the rag trade; for some years now I have been a highly paid male model, based in Bombay, wearing a wide range of suitings and shirtings also. But who will employ me now?’ he burst into sudden and unexpected tears. ‘There, there,’ said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. ‘Everything will be all right, I'm sure of it. Have courage.’
   The creature composed itself. ‘The point is,’ it said fiercely, ‘some of us aren't going to stand for it. We're going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me beginning to change. I've started, for example, to break wind continually ... I beg your pardon... you see what I mean? By the way, try these,’ he slipped Chamcha a packet of extra-strength peppermints. ‘They'll help your breath. I've bribed one of the guards to bring in a supply.’
   ‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know.
   ‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’
   ‘It's hard to believe,’ Chamcha argued. ‘I've lived here for many years and it never happened before...’ His words dried up because he saw the manticore looking at him through narrow, distrustful eyes. ‘Many years?’ it asked. ‘How could that be? – Maybe you're an informer? – Yes, that's it, a spy?’
   Just then a wail came from a far corner of the ward. ‘Lemme go,’ a woman's voice howled. ‘O Jesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O God, O Jesus God.’ A very lecherous-looking wolf put its head through Saladin's screens and spoke urgently to the manticore. ‘The guards'll be here soon,’ it hissed. ‘It's her again, Glass Bertha.’
   ‘Glass... ?’ Saladin began. ‘Her skin turned to glass,’ the manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha's worst dream to life. ‘And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can't even walk to the toilet.’
   A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. ‘For God's sake, woman. Go in the fucking bedpan.’
   The wolf was pulling the manticore away. ‘Is he with us or not?’ it wanted to know. The manticore shrugged. ‘He can't make up his mind,’ it answered. ‘Can't believe his own eyes, that's his trouble.’
   They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards’ heavy boots.

*
   The next day there was no sign of a doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two conditions no longer required to be thought of as opposites, but as states that flowed into and out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses... he found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her, joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight.
   Hyacinth came at the appointed times to ride and pummel him, and he submitted without any fuss. But when she finished she whispered into his ear: ‘You in with the rest?’ and he understood that she was involved in the great conspiracy, too. ‘If you are,’ he heard himself saying, ‘then you can count me in.’ She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist's exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout came from the direction of the blind man: ‘My stick, I've lost my stick.’
   ‘Poor old bugger,’ said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to its owner, and came back to Saladin. ‘Now,’ she said. I'll see you this pm; okay, no problems?’
   He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk, ‘I'm a busy woman, Mr. Chamcha. Things to do, people to see.’
   When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing, because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman; and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next door began, once again, to speak.
   ‘I have noticed you,’ Chamcha heard him say, ‘I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding.’ Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. ‘I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too...’ Chamcha did not have the courage to call out, she isn't there, old man, she left some time back. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: ‘I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?’ Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: ‘Oh,’ the soliloquist bellowed, ‘oh, if ever a body suffered... !’
   We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins.
   Still no Pamela. What the hell. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.


*
   The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the detenus, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without hope, but also without shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip-clopping on the hard pavements: east she told him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town.

4

   Jumpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha's lover by what she afterwards called ‘sheer chance’ on the night she learned of her husband's death in the Bostan explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin's voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering the five gnomic words sorry, excuse please, wrong number, – speaking, moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-backed beast, – put him in a tight spot. ‘Who was that?’ Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, ‘Just a breather, don't worry about it,’ which was all very well, except then he had to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking, for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
   He was a small person with wire coathanger shoulders and an enormous capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken-eyed face; his thinning hair – still entirely black and curly – which had been ruffled so often by his frenzied hands that it no longer took the slightest notice of brushes or combs, but stuck out every which way and gave its owner the perpetual air of having just woken up, late, and in a hurry; and his endearingly high, shy and self-deprecating, but also hiccoughy and over-excited, giggle; all of which had helped turn his name, Jamshed, into this Jumpy that everybody, even first-time acquaintances, now automatically used; everybody, that is, except Pamela Chamcha. Saladin's wife, he thought, sucking away feverishly. – Or widow? – Or, God help me, wife, after all. He found himself resenting Chamcha. A return from a watery grave: so operatic an event, in this day and age, seemed almost indecent, an act of bad faith.
   He had rushed over to Pamela's place the moment he heard the news, and found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her clutter-lover's study on whose walls watercolours of rose-gardens hung between clenched-fist posters reading Partido Socialista, photographs of friends and a cluster of African masks, and as he picked his way across the floor between ashtrays and the Voice newspaper and feminist science-fiction novels she said, flatly, ‘The surprising thing is that when they told me I thought, well, shrug, his death will actually make a pretty small hole in my life.’ Jumpy, who was close to tears, and bursting with memories, stopped in his tracks and flapped his arms, looking, in his great shapeless black coat, and with his pallid, terror-stricken face, like a vampire caught in the unexpected and hideous light of day. Then he saw the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had started drinking, she said, some hours back, and since then she had been going at it steadily, rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance runner. He sat down beside her on her low, squashy sofa-bed, and offered to act as a pacemaker. ‘Whatever you want,’ she said, and passed him the bottle.
   Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and his hangover banging equally painfully inside his head (he had never been a drinking or a secretive man), Jumpy felt tears coming on once again, and decided to get up and walk himself around. Where he went was upstairs, to what Saladin had insisted on calling his ‘den’, a large loft-space with skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of communal gardens dotted with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of the plague years. First the elms, now us, Jumpy reflected. Maybe the trees were a warning. He shook himself to banish such small-hour morbidities, and perched on the edge of his friend's mahogany desk. Once at a college party he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to an emaciated girl in black lace minidress, purple feather boa and eyelids like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage to say hello. Finally he did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a look of absolute contempt and said without moving her black-lacquer lips, conversation's dead, man. He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted out, tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude?, and she answered, without pausing to think, because most of the boys are like you. A few moments later Chamcha came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta, everybody's goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left with him five minutes later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought as the old bitterness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be anything they wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna dharma-bum, you wouldn't have caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there. Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the girls never went for you, that's the truth, and the rest is envy. Well, maybe so, he half-conceded, and then again. Maybe dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.
   Chamcha's room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad: the caricature of an actor's room full of signed photographs of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of movie-star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life, a mask's mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin's need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks. The desperation there was in him, Jumpy recognized, he'd do anything, put on any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving word. Saladin, who wasn't by any means unsuccessful with women, see above. The poor stumblebum. Even Pamela, with all her beauty and brightness, hadn't been enough.
   It was clear he'd been getting to be a long way from enough for her. Somewhere around the bottom of the second whisky bottle she leaned her head on his shoulder and said boozily, ‘You can't imagine the relief of being with someone with whom I don't have to have a fight every time I express an opinion. Someone on the side of the goddamn angels.’ He waited; after a pause, there was more. ‘Him and his Royal Family, you wouldn't believe. Cricket, the Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never stopped being a picture postcard to him. You couldn't get him to look at what was really real.’ She closed her eyes and allowed her hand, by accident, to rest on his. ‘He was a real Saladin,’ Jumpy said. ‘A man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too.’ She rolled away from him and stretched out on top of magazines, crumpled balls of waste paper, mess. ‘Part of it? I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies, common-sense and me. But I'm really real, too, J.J.; I really really am.’ She reached over to him, pulled him across to where her mouth was waiting, kissed him with a great un-Pamela-like slurp. ‘See what I mean?’ Yes, he saw.
   ‘You should have heard him on the Falklands war,’ she said later, disengaging herself and fiddling with her hair. ‘“Pamela, suppose you heard a noise downstairs in the middle of the night and went to investigate and found a huge man in the living-room with a shotgun, and he said, Go back upstairs, what would you do?” I'd go upstairs, I said. “Well, it's like that. Intruders in the home. It won't do.”’ Jumpy noticed her fists had clenched and her knuckles were bone-white. ‘I said, if you must use these blasted cosy metaphors, then get them right. What it's like is if two people claim they own a house, and one of them is squatting the place, and then the other turns up with the shotgun. That's what it's like.’
   ‘That's what's really real,’ Jumpy nodded, seriously. ‘Right,’ she slapped his knee. ‘That's really right, Mr. Real Jam... it's really truly like that. Actually. Another drink.’
   She leaned over to the tape deck and pushed a button. Jesus, Jumpy thought, Boney M? Give me a break. For all her tough, race-professional attitudes, the lady still had a lot to learn about music. Here it came, boomchickaboom. Then, without warning, he was crying, provoked into real tears by counterfeit emotion, by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, ‘Super flumina’. King David calling out across the centuries. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land.
   ‘I had to learn the psalms at school,’ Pamela Chamcha said, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed, her eyes shut tight. By the river of Babylon, where we sat down, oh oh we wept... she stopped the tape, leaned back again, began to recite. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth.’
   Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school, of matins and evensong, of the chanting of psalms, when Jumpy rushed in and shook her awake, shouting, ‘It's no good, I've got to tell you. He isn't dead. Saladin: he's bloody well alive.’

*

   She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick, curly, hennaed hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning to be noticeable; she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in her hair, unable to move, until Jumpy had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she began to hit out at him, punching him on the chest and arms and shoulders and even his face, as hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside her, looking ridiculous in her frilly dressing-gown, while she beat him; he allowed his body to go loose, to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran out of punches her body was covered in perspiration and he thought she might have broken one of his arms. She sat down beside him, panting, and they were silent.
   Her dog entered the bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer her his paw, and to lick at her left leg. Jumpy stirred, cautiously. ‘I thought he got stolen,’ he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for yes, but. The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name of Glenn. That's okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly, anyway.’
   After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk. ‘What you did, just now,’ he began.
   ‘Oh, God.’
   ‘No. It's like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever did.’ In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the ‘apolitical’ twenty-year-old Saladin along on an anti-war demonstration. ‘Once in your life, Mister Snoot, I'm going to drag you down to my level.’ Harold Wilson was coming to town, and because of the Labour Government's support of US involvement in Vietnam, a mass protest had been planned. Chamcha went along, ‘out of curiosity,’ he said. ‘I want to see how allegedly intelligent people turn themselves into a mob.’
   That day it rained an ocean. The demonstrators in Market Square were soaked through. Jumpy and Chamcha, swept along by the crowd, found themselves pushed up against the steps of the town hall; grandstand view, Chamcha said with heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as Russian assassins, in black fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying shoeboxes filled with ink-dipped tomatoes and labelled in large block letters, bombs. Shortly before the Prime Minister's arrival, one of them tapped a policeman on the shoulder and said: ‘Excuse, please. When Mr. Wilson, self-styled Prime Meenster, conies in long car, kindly request to wind down weendow so my friend can throw with him the bombs.’ The policeman answered, ‘Ho, ho, sir. Very good. Now I'll tell you what. You can throw eggs at him, sir, ‘cause that's all right with me. And you can throw tomatoes at him, sir, like what you've got there in that box, painted black, labelled bombs, ‘cause that's all right with me. You throw anything hard at him, sir, and my mate here’ll get you with his gun.’ O days of innocence when the world was young... when the car arrived there was a surge in the crowd and Chamcha and Jumpy were separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on to the bonnet of Harold Wilson's limousine, and began to jump up and down on the bonnet, creating large dents, leaping like a wild man to the rhythm of the crowd's chanting: We shall fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh.
   ‘Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was full of Special Branch types converging on the limo, but mainly because he was so damn embarrassed.’ But he kept leaping, up higher and down harder, drenched to the bone, long hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping into the mythology of those antique years. And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back seat. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! At the last possible moment Jumpy took a deep breath, and dived head-first into a sea of wet and friendly faces; and vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. ‘Saladin wouldn't speak to me for over a week,’ Jumpy remembered. ‘And when he did, all he said was, “I hope you realize those cops could have shot you to pieces, but they didn't.”’
   They were still sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. Jumpy touched Pamela on the forearm. ‘I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, bam. It felt incredible. It felt necessary.’
   ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Oh, my God, I'm sorry, but yes, it did.’


*

   In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account of the volume of calls still being generated by the catastrophe, and then another twenty-five minutes of insistence – but he telephoned, it was his voice– while at the other end of the phone a woman's voice, professionally trained to deal with human beings in crisis, understood how she felt and sympathized with her in this awful moment and remained very patient, but clearly didn't believe a word she said. I'm sorry, madam, I don't mean to be brutal, but the plane broke up in mid-air at thirty thousand feet. By the end of the call Pamela Chamcha, normally the most controlled of women, who locked herself in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the line, for God's sake, woman, will you shut up with your little good-samaritan speeches and listen to what I'm saying? Finally she slammed down the receiver and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began to tremble in fright. ‘You fucking creep,’ she cursed him. ‘Still alive, is he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking wings and headed straight for the nearest phone booth to change out of his fucking Superman costume and ring the little wife.’ They were in the kitchen and Jumpy noticed a group of kitchen knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall next to Pamela's left arm. He opened his mouth to speak, but she wouldn't let him. ‘Get out before I do something,’ she said. ‘I can't believe I fell for it. You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known.’
   In the early 1970s Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn's Thumb in honour of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. ‘I need an hour to think,’ he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs. Onassis's offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. ‘Mrs. Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure,’ he had concluded, and Jumpy had worriedly replied, ‘Please tell her it's nothing personal, as a matter of fact personally I admire her a great deal.’
   We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.

*

   On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed, ‘quite ideologically unsound’, – on that subject, I really ought to be more charitable.
   Pamela Chamcha, née Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which, in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey-sticks, thatched houses, saddle-soap, house-parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs’ delights and somethings in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and peacemarchers and world-changers with whom she instinctively felt at home treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be on the side of the angels when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one moved one's lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One of the reasons she had decided to admit it end her marriage before fate did it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was not in love with her at all, but with that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit. It had been a marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing from which the other was in flight.
   No survivors. And in the middle of the night, Jumpy the idiot and his stupid false alarm. She was so shaken up by it that she hadn't even got round to being shaken up by having gone to bed with Jumpy and made love in what admit it had been a pretty satisfying fashion, spare me your nonchalance, she rebuked herself, when did you last have so much fun. She had a lot to deal with and so here she was, dealing with it by running away as fast as she could go. A few days of pampering oneself in an expensive country hotel and the world may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole. Therapy by luxury: okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm reverting to class. Fuck it; watch me go. If you've got any objections, blow them out of your ass. Arse. Ass.
   One hundred miles an hour past Swindon, and the weather turned nasty. Sudden, dark clouds, lightning, heavy rain; she kept her foot on the accelerator. No survivors. People were always dying on her, leaving her with a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at. Her father the classical scholar who could make puns in ancient Greek and from whom she inherited the Voice, her legacy and curse; and her mother who pined for him during the War, when he was a Pathfinder pilot, obliged to fly home from Germany one hundred and eleven times in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own flares had just illuminated for the benefit of the bombers, – and who vowed, when he returned with the noise of the ack-ack in his ears, that she would never leave him, – and so followed him everywhere, into the slow hollow of depression from which he never really emerged, – and into debt, because he didn't have the face for poker and used her money when he ran out of his own, – and at last to the top of a tall building, where they found their way at last. Pamela never forgave them, especially for making it impossible for her to tell them of her unforgiveness. To get her own back, she set about rejecting everything of them that remained within her. Her brains, for example: she refused to go to college. And because she could not shake off her voice, she made it speak ideas which her conservative suicides of parents would have anathematized. She married an Indian. And, because he turned out to be too much like them, would have left him. Had decided to leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.
   She was overtaking a frozen-food road train, blinded by the spray kicked up by its wheels, when she hit the expanse of water that had been waiting for her in a slight declivity, and then the MG was aquaplaning at terrifying speed, swerving out of the fast lane and spinning round so that she saw the headlights of the road train staring at her like the eyes of the exterminating angel, Azrael. ‘Curtains,’ she thought; but her car swung and skidded out of the path of the juggernaut, slewing right across all three lanes of the motorway, all of them miraculously empty, and coming to rest with rather less of a thump than one might have expected against the crash barrier at the edge of the hard shoulder, after spinning through a further one hundred and eighty degrees to face, once again, into the west, where with all the corny timing of real life, the sun was breaking up the storm.


*

   The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. That night, in an oak-panelled dining-room decorated with medieval flags, Pamela Chamcha in her most dazzling gown ate venison and drank a bottle of Chateau Talbot at a table heavy with silver and crystal, celebrating a new beginning, an escape from the jaws of, a fresh start, to be born again first you have to: well, almost, anyway. Under the lascivious eyes of Americans and salesmen she ate and drank alone, retiring early to a princess's bedroom in a stone tower to take a long bath and watch old movies on television. In the aftermath of her brush with death she felt the past dropping away from her: her adolescence, for example, in the care of her wicked uncle Harry Higham, who lived in a seventeenth-century manor house once owned by a distant relative, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General, who had named it Gremlins in, no doubt, a macabre attempt at humour. Remembering Mr. Justice Higham in order to forget him, she murmured to the absent Jumpy that she, too, had her Vietnam story. After the first big Grosvenor Square demonstration at which many people threw marbles under the feet of charging police horses, there occurred the one and only instance in British law in which the marble was deemed to be a lethal weapon, and young persons were jailed, even deported, for possessing the small glass spheres. The presiding judge in the case of the Grosvenor Marbles was this same Henry (thereafter known as ‘Hang'em’) Higham, and to be his niece had been a further burden for a young woman already weighed down by her right-wing voice. Now, warm in bed in her temporary castle, Pamela Chamcha rid herself of this old demon, goodbye, Hang'em, I've no more time for you; and of her parents’ ghosts; and prepared to be free of the most recent ghost of all.
   Sipping cognac, Pamela watched vampires on TV and allowed herself to take pleasure in, well, in herself. Had she not invented herself in her own image? I am that I am, she toasted herself in Napoleon brandy. I work in a community relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London, nei; deputy community relations officer and damn good at it, ifisaysomyself. Cheers! We just elected our first black Chair and all the votes cast against him were white. Down the hatch! Last week a respected Asian street trader, for whom MPs of all parties had interceded, was deported after eighteen years in Britain because, fifteen years ago, he posted a certain form forty-eight hours late. Chin-chin! Next week in Brickhall Magistrates’ Court the police will be trying to fit up a fifty-year-old Nigerian woman, accusing her of assault, having previously beaten her senseless. Skol! This is my head: see it? What I call my job: bashing my head against Brickhall.
   Saladin was dead and she was alive.
   She drank to that. There were things I was waiting to tell you, Saladin. Some big things: about the new high-rise office building in Brickhall High Street, across from McDonald's; – they built it to be perfectly sound-proof, but the workers were so disturbed by the silence that now they play tapes of white noise on the tannoy system. – You'd have liked that, eh? – And about this Parsi woman I know, Bapsy, that's her name, she lived in Germany for a while and fell in love with a Turk. – Trouble was, the only language they had in common was German; now Bapsy has forgotten almost all she knew, while his gets better and better; he writes her increasingly poetic letters and she can hardly reply in nursery rhyme. – Love dying, because of an inequality of language, what do you think of that? – Love dying. There's a subject for us, eh? Saladin? What do you say?
   And a couple of tiny little things. There's a killer on the loose in my patch, specializes in killing old women; so don't worry, I'm safe. Plenty older than me.
   One more thing: I'm leaving you. It's over. We're through.
   I could never say anything to you, not really, not the least thing. If I said you were putting on weight you'd yell for an hour, as if it would change what you saw in the mirror, what the tightness of your own trousers was telling you. You interrupted me in public. People noticed it, what you thought of me. I forgave you, that was my fault; I could see the centre of you, that question so frightful that you had to protect it with all that posturing certainty. That empty space.
   Goodbye, Saladin. She drained her glass and set it down beside her. The returning rain knocked at her leaded windows; she drew her curtains shut and turned out the light.
   Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing she needed to tell her late husband. ‘In bed,’ the words came, ‘you never seemed interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I needed, not really ever. I came to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant.’ There. Now rest in peace.
   She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. ‘Things are ending,’ he told her. ‘This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls.’
   She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now.

*

   After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr Sufyan's Shaandaar Café in Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to decide if he was a fool. It was early in the day, so the place was almost empty, apart from a fat lady buying a box of pista barfi and jalebis, a couple of bachelor garment workers drinking chaloo chai and an elderly Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who ran the sweatshops round here, who sat all day in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one puri and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who came in that she was only there because ‘it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you can’. Jumpy sat down with his coffee beneath the lurid painting of a bare-breasted myth-woman with several heads and wisps of clouds obscuring her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because the rush hadn't started yet Mr. Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.
   ‘Hey, Saint Jumpy,’ he sang out, ‘why you bringing your bad weather into my place? This country isn't full enough of clouds?’
   Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of devotion pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red after its owner's recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly, thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of him as a sort of elder relative. ‘Listen, Uncle,’ he said when the cafe proprietor was standing over him, ‘you think I'm a real idiot or what?’
   ‘You ever make any money?’ Sufyan asked.
   ‘Not me, Uncle.’
   ‘Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?’
   ‘I never understood figures.’
   ‘And where your family members are?’
   ‘I've got no family, Uncle. There's only me.’
   ‘Then you must be praying to God continually for guidance in your loneliness?’
   ‘You know me, Uncle. I don't pray.’
   ‘No question about it,’ Sufyan concluded. ‘You're an even bigger fool than you know.’
   ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. ‘You've been a great help.’
   Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the other man up in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned, blue-eyed Asian man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat with extra-wide lapels. ‘You, Hanif Johnson,’ he called out, ‘come here and solve a mystery. ‘Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who maintained an office above the Shaandaar Cafe, tore himself away from Sufyan's two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy's table. ‘You explain this fellow,’ Sufyan said. ‘Beats me. Doesn't drink, thinks of money like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no VCR, forty years old and isn't married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and what-all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn't have any faith, going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a college education, you work it out.’
   Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. ‘He hears voices,’ he said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. ‘Voices, oop-baba! Voices from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?’
   ‘Inner voices,’ Hanif said solemnly. ‘Upstairs on his desk there's a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title: The River of Blood.’
   Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. ‘I'll kill you,’ he shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, ‘We got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that's the poet's point. Also the individual human being,’ he broke off to run around to the far side of an eight-seater table as Jumpy came after him, blushing furiously, flapping his arms. ‘In our very bodies, does the river of blood not flow?’ Like the Roman, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. ‘This is like rape,’ he pleaded with Hanif. ‘For God's sake, stop.’
   ‘Voices that one hears are outside, but,’ the cafe proprietor was musing. ‘Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn-again Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This one however is not great, and poor.’
   ‘Enough.’ Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really wanting to. ‘I surrender.’
   For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr. Sufyan, Mrs. Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, ‘More a Dumpy than a Jumpy,’ as Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Cafe.
   ‘Mr. Jamshed Joshi,’ Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an upper-class English accent. ‘Will Mr. Joshi please come to the instrument? There is a personal call.’
   Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy's face and murmured softly to his wife, ‘Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is not inner by any manner of means.’


*

   The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm, infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you'd have thought the procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably was; but he needn't have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman. At this point he understood that he could do no wrong, and for the first time in his life he began to feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha.
   On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. ‘I've got a hockey-stick under my bed,’ Pamela whispered, terrified. ‘Give it to me,’ Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. ‘I'm coming with you,’ quaked Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, ‘Oh, no you don't.’ In the end they both crept downstairs, each wearing one of Pamela's frilly dressing-gowns, each with a hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it's a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun saying, Go back upstairs... They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody turned on the lights.
   Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the hockey-stick and ran upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hall, standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat, a man's torso covered in goat's hair, human arms, and a horned but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the floor and lay still.
   Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin's ‘den’, Mrs. Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover's arms, crying her heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: ‘It isn't true. My husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse is beastly dead.’

5

   Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his fists deep in scarlet-lined gabardine and panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to account for the miracles, metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days? ‘It's a straight choice,’ he trembled silently. ‘It's A, I'm off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules.’
   Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm-rests were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn't work, the mirror was missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little circular red-and-white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which – and not beyond! – it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and instructions gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the authority of his crescent-cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the threads of his old life – that is, his old new life, the new life he had planned before the er interruption – to be picked up again. As the train carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of his arrival and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his seat and thumped down on the opposite side of the compartment, with his face symbolically towards London, even though it meant giving up the window. What did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his mind's eye. He spoke her name aloud: ‘Alleluia.’
   ‘Alleluia, brother,’ the compartment's only other occupant affirmed. ‘Hosanna, my good sir, and amen.’


*

   ‘Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly non-denominational,’ the stranger continued. ‘Had you said “Lailaha”, I would gladly have responded with a full-throated “illallah”.’
   Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his inadvertent taking of Allie's unusual name had been mistaken by his companion for overtures both social and theological. ‘John Maslama,’ the fellow cried, snapping a card out of a little crocodile-skin case and pressing it upon Gibreel. ‘Personally, I follow my own variant of the universal faith invented by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is something akin to the Music of the Spheres.’
   It was plain that Mr. Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the torrent to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a prize-fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta spotted the glint of the True Believer, a light which, until recently, he had seen in his own shaving-mirror every day.
   ‘I have done well for myself, sir,’ Maslama was boasting in his well-modulated Oxford drawl. ‘For a brown man, exceptionally well, considering the quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow.’ With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel had already taken careful note. ‘Pretty fancy,’ Gibreel now conceded, some response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. ‘I have always tended,’ he admitted, ‘towards the ornate.’
   He had made what he called his first pile producing advertising jingles, ‘that ol’ devil music', leading women into lingerie and lip-gloss and men into temptation. Now he owned record stores all over town, a successful nightclub called Hot Wax, and a store full of gleaming musical instruments that was his special pride and joy. He was an Indian from Guyana, ‘but there's nothing left in that place, sir. People are leaving it faster than planes can fly.’ He had made good in quick time, ‘by the grace of God Almighty. I'm a regular Sunday man, sir; I confess to a weakness for the English Hymnal, and I sing to raise the roof.’
   The autobiography was concluded with a brief mention of the existence of a wife and some dozen children. Gibreel offered his congratulations and hoped for silence, but now Maslama dropped his bombshell. ‘You don't need to tell me about yourself,’ he said jovially. ‘Naturally I know who you are, even if one does not expect to see such a personage on the Eastbourne—Victoria line.’ He winked leeringly and placed a finger alongside his nose. ‘Mum's the word. I respect a man's privacy, no question about it; no question at all.’
   ‘I? Who am I?’ Gibreel was startled into absurdity. The other nodded weightily, his eyebrows waving like soft antlers. ‘The prize question, in my opinion. These are problematic times, sir, for a moral man. When a man is unsure of his essence, how may he know if he be good or bad? But you are finding me tedious. I answer my own questions by my faith in It, sir,’ – here Maslama pointed to the ceiling of the railway compartment – ‘and of course you are not in the least confused about your identity, for you are the famous, the may I say legendary Mr. Gibreel Farishta, star of screen and, increasingly, I'm sorry to add, of pirate video; my twelve children, one wife and I are all long-standing, unreserved admirers of your divine heroics.’ He grabbed, and pumped Gibreel's right hand.
   ‘Tending as I do towards the pantheistic view,’ Maslama thundered on, ‘my own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities of every conceivable water. You, sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future. Permit me to salute you.’ He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was getting alarmed and measuring the distance to the door with anxious little glances. ‘I incline, sir,’ Maslama was saying, ‘towards the opinion that whatever name one calls It by is no more than a code; a cypher, Mr. Farishta, behind which the true name lies concealed.’
   Gibreel remained silent, and Maslama, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, was obliged to speak for him. ‘What is that true name, I hear you inquire,’ he said, and then Gibreel knew he was right; the man was a full-fledged lunatic, and his autobiography was very likely as much of a concoction as his ‘faith’. Fictions were walking around wherever he went, Gibreel reflected, fictions masquerading as real human beings. ‘I have brought him upon me,’ he accused himself. ‘By fearing for my own sanity I have brought forth, from God knows what dark recess, this voluble and maybe dangerous nut.’
   ‘You don't know it!’ Maslama yelled suddenly, jumping to his feet. ‘Charlatan! Poser! Fake! You claim to be the screen immortal, avatar of a hundred and one gods, and you haven't a foggy! How is it possible that I, a poor boy made good from Bartica on the Essequibo, can know such things while Gibreel Farishta does not? Phoney! Phooey to you!’
   Gibreel got to his feet, but the other was filling almost all the available standing room, and he, Gibreel, had to lean over awkwardly to one side to escape Maslama's windmilling arms, one of which knocked off his grey trilby. At once Maslama's mouth fell open. He seemed to shrink several inches, and after a few frozen moments, he fell to his knees with a thud.
   What's he doing down there, Gibreel wondered, picking up my hat? But the madman was begging for forgiveness. ‘I never doubted you would come,’ he was saying. ‘Pardon my clumsy rage.’ The train entered a tunnel, and Gibreel saw that they were surrounded by a warm golden light that was coming from a point just behind his head. In the glass of the sliding door, he saw the reflection of the halo around his hair.
   Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. ‘All my life, sir, I knew I had been chosen,’ he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been menacing. ‘Even as a child in Bartica, I knew.’ He pulled off his right shoe and began to roll down his sock. ‘I was given,’ he said, ‘a sign.’ The sock was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize, foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. ‘The same on the other foot,’ Maslama said proudly. ‘I never doubted the meaning for a minute.’ He was the self-appointed helpmate of the Lord, the sixth toe on the foot of the Universal Thing. Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, thought Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
   The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision. ‘Stand, six-toed John,’ he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. ‘Maslama, arise.’
   The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his head bowed. ‘What I want to know, sir,’ he mumbled, ‘is, which is it to be? Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?’
   Gibreel thought rapidly. ‘It is for judging,’ he finally answered. ‘Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here it is the human race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons.’ He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.
   Maslama was nodding furiously. ‘You can depend on me,’ he promised. ‘I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum’ – for the second time! – ‘is the word.’
   Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns in hot pursuit. As he rushed to the far end of the train Maslama's paeans remained faintly audible behind him. ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ Apparently his new disciple had launched into selections from Handel's Messiah.
   However: Gibreel wasn't followed, and there was, fortunately, a first-class carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of open-plan design, with comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around tables, and Gibreel settled down by a window, staring towards London, with his chest thumping and his hat jammed down on his head. He was trying to come to terms with the undeniable fact of the halo, and failing to do so, because what with the derangement of John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a television set after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.