The Satanic Verses (25 page)

           
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, match-of-theday, 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 fightly 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."