The Satanic Verses (53 page)

           
"But what's the project?" Allie Cone demanded. Mr. "Whisky"
Sisodia beamed from ear to ear. "Dear mamadam," he said. "He
will play the archangel, Gibreel."

           
* * * * *

           
The proposal was for a series of films, both historical and contemporary, each
concentrating on one incident from the angel's long and illustrious career: a
trilogy, at least. "Don't tell me," Allie said, mocking the small
shining mogul. "
Gibreel in Jahilia, Gibreel Meets the Imam, Gibreel
with the Butterfly Girl
." Sisodia wasn't one bit embarrassed, but
nodded proudly. "Stostorylines, draft scenarios, cacasting options are
already well in haha hand." That was too much for Allie. "It
stinks," she raged at him, and he retreated from her, a trembling and
placatory knee, while she. pursued him, until she was actually chasing him
around the apartment, banging into the furniture, slamming doors. "It
exploits his sickness, has nothing to do with his present needs, and shows an
utter contempt for his own wishes. He's retired; can't you people respect that?
He doesn't want to be a star. And will you please stand still. I'm not going to
eat you."

           
He stopped running, but kept a cautious sofa between them. "Please see
that this is imp imp imp," he cried, his stammer crippling his tongue on
account of his anxiety. "Can the moomoon retire? Also, excuse, there are
his seven sig sig sig.
Signatures
. Committing him absolutely. Unless and
until you decide to commit him to a papapa." He gave up, sweating freely.

           
"
A what?
"

           
"Pagal Khana. Asylum. That would be another wwwway."

           
Allie lifted a heavy brass inkwell in the shape of Mount Everest and prepared
to hurl it. "You really are a skunk," she began, but then Gibreel was
standing in the doorway, still rather pale, bony and hollow-eyed.
"Alleluia," he said, "I am thinking that maybe I want this.
Maybe I need to go back to work."

           
* * * * *

           
"Gibreel sahib! I can't tell you how delighted. A star is reborn."
Billy Battuta was a surprise: no longer the hair-gel-and-fingerrings society
column shark, he was unshowily dressed in brass- buttoned blazer and blue
jeans, and instead of the cocksure swagger Allie had expected there was an
attractive, almost deferential reticence. He had grown a neat goatee beard
which gave him a striking resemblance to the Christ-image on the Turin Shroud.
Welcoming the three of them (Sisodia had picked them up in his limo, and the
driver, Nigel, a sharp dresser from St Lucia, spent the journey telling Gibreel
how many other pedestrians his lightning reflexes had saved from serious injury
or death, punctuating these reminiscences with car-phone conversations in which
mysterious deals involving amazing sums of money were discussed), Billy had
shaken Allie's hand warmly, and then fallen upon Gibreel and hugged him in
pure, infectious joy. His companion Mimi Mamoulian was rather less low-key.
"It's all fixed," she announced. "Fruit, starlets, paparazzi,
talk- shows, rumours, little hints of scandal: everything a world figure
requires. Flowers, personal security, zillion-pound contracts. Make yourselves
at home."

           
That was the general idea, Allie thought. Her initial opposition to the whole scheme
had been overcome by Gibreel's own interest, which, in turn, prompted his
doctors to go along with it, estimating that his restoration to his familiar
milieu―
going home
, in a way―might indeed be beneficial. And
Sisodia's purloining of the dream-narratives he'd heard at Gibreel's bedside
could be seen as serendipitous: for once those stories were clearly placed in
the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to become easier for
Gibreel to see them as fantasies, too. That Berlin Wall between the dreaming
and waking state might well be more rapidly rebuilt as a result. The bottom
line was that it was worth the try.

           
Things (being things) didn't work out quite as planned. Allie found herself
resenting the extent to which Sisodia, Battuta and Mimi moved in on Gibreel's
life, taking over his wardrobe and daily schedules, and moving him out of
Allie's apartment, declaring that the time for a "permanent liaison"
was not yet ripe, "imagewise". After the stint at the Ritz, the movie
star was given three rooms in Sisodia's cavernous, designer-chic flat in an old
mansion block near Grosvenor Square, all Art Deco marbled floors and scumbling
on the walls. Gibreel's own passive acceptance of these changes was, for Allie,
the most infuriating aspect of all, and she began to comprehend the size of the
step he'd taken when he left behind what was clearly second nature to him, and
came hunting for her. Now that he was sinking back into that universe of armed
bodyguards and maids with breakfast trays and giggles, would he dump her as
dramatically as he had entered her life? Had she helped to engineer a reverse
migration that would leave her high and dry? Gibreel stared out of newspapers,
magazines, television sets, with many different women on his arm, grinning
foolishly. She hated it, but he refused to notice. "What are you
worrying?" he dismissed her, while sinking into a leather sofa the size of
a small pick-up truck. "It's only photo opportunities: business, that's
all."

           
Worst of all:
he
got jealous. As he came off the heavy drugs, and as his
work (as well as hers) began to force separations upon them, he began to be
possessed, once again, by that irrational, out-of-control suspiciousness which
had precipitated the ridiculous quarrel over the Brunel cartoons. Whenever they
met he would put her through the mill, interrogating her minutely: where had
she been, who had she seen, what did he do, did she lead him on? She felt as if
she were suffocating. His mental illness, the new influences in his life, and
now this nightly third-degree treatment: it was as though her real life, the
one she wanted, the one she was hanging in there and fighting for, was being
buried deeper and deeper under this avalanche of wrongnesses.
What about
what I need
, she felt like screaming,
when do I get to set the terms?
Driven to the very edge of her self-control, she asked, as a last resort, her
mother's advice. In her father's old study in the Moscow Road house―which
Alicja had kept just the way Otto liked it, except that now the curtains were
drawn back to let in what light England could come up with, and there were
flower-vases at strategic points―Alicja at first offered little more than
world-weariness. "So a woman's life-plans are being smothered by a
man's," she said, not unkindly. "So welcome to your gender. I see
it's strange for you to be out of control." And Allie confessed: she
wanted to leave him, but found she couldn't. Not just because of guilt about
abandoning a seriously unwell person; also because of "grand
passion", because of the word that still dried her tongue when she tried
to say it. "You want his child," Alicja put her finger on it. At
first Allie blazed: "I want my child," but then, subsiding abruptly,
blowing her nose, she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.

           
"You want your head examining is what," Alicja comforted her. How
long since they had been like this in one another's arms? Too long. And maybe
it would be the last time... Alicja hugged her daughter, said: "So dry your
eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but your
old mother is in better shape."

           
There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in genetic
engineering. "Now don't start, dear, you don't know anything, it's not all
Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications," Alicja said
with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her own
red-rimmed unhappiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of laughter; in
which her mother joined. "At your age," Allie wept, "you ought
to be ashamed."―"Well, I'm not," the future Mrs. Boniek
rejoined. "A professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the
sunshine also. I intend to spend many hours working on my tan."

           
* * * * *

           
When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the Sisodia
palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at last, make
the break. She scribbled a note―
This is killing me
―slipped
it inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying
goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for his
grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage
song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy
Battuta's companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise
top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had been rehearsing dance routines with the
show's chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of
mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or Dark
Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta's promo men, and
the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of
"teaser" radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign.
Gibreel's arrival on the Earls Court stage―he was to be lowered from the
flies surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke―was the intended climax
to the English segment of his re-entry into his superstardom; next stop,
Bombay. Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more "refused
to crawl"; and immersed himself in work.

           
The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself arrested in
New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the Sunday papers,
swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms to warn him
against consorting with such patently criminal elements. "Battuta's a
hood," she insisted. "His whole manner was a performance, a fake. He
wanted to be sure he'd be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he made us his
tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God's sake: how did we
fall for it?" But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had ditched him, in
his book, and he wasn't about to take advice from deserters. Besides, Sisodia
and the Battuta promo team had assured him―and he had grilled them about
it all right―that Billy's problems had no relevance to the gala night
(Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial arrangements remained
solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already been allocated, all the
Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would participate as planned. "Plans
fifilling up fast," Sisodia promised. "Shoshow must go on."

           
The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.

           
* * * * *

           
Sisodia's determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star meant that
Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-door dressed in a burqa. So that
even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest dressing-room―a
black five-pointed star had been stuck on the door―and was
unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled genuform producer. In the
dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when
tied around his forehead, would cause lightbulbs to glow behind him, creating
the illusion of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which he would be
able to watch the show―Mithun and Kimi cavorting for the "disco
diwane" set; Jayapradha and Rekha (no relation: the megastar, not a
figment on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews, in which Jaya
divulged her views on polygamy while Rekha fantasized about alternative
lives―"If I'd been born out of India, I'd have been a painter in
Paris"; he-man stunts from Vinod and Dharmendra; Sridevi getting her sari
wet―until it was time for him to take up his position on a winch-operated
"chariot" high above the stage. There was a cordless telephone, on
which Sisodia called to tell him that the house was full―"All sorts
are here," he triumphed, and proceeded to offer Gibreel his technique of
crowd analysis: you could tell the Pakistanis because they dressed up to the
gills, the Indians because they dressed down, and the Bangladeshis because they
dressed badly, "all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold gota that they
like"―and which otherwise remained silent; and, finally, a large
gift-wrapped box, a little present from his thoughtful producer, which turned
out to contain Miss Pimple Billimoria wearing a winsome expression and a
quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.

           
* * * * *

           
The strange feeling began―that is,
returned
―when he was in
the "chariot", waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving
along a route on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a
choice―the thought formulated itself in his head without any help from
him―between two realities, this world and another that was also right
there, visible but unseen. He felt slow, heavy, distanced from his own consciousness,
and realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose,
which world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to
treat him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe.
As the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun
to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line―
My name is Gibreel
Farishta, and I'm back
―and heard it, so to speak, in stereo, because
it, too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each;―and
now the lights hit him, he raised his arms high, he was returning wreathed in
clouds,―and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too;
people were rising from their seats, every man, woman and child in the
auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea.―The first
man to reach him had time to scream out
Remember me, Gibreel? With the six
toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence among us; but
yes, I have been speaking out about the coming of the Lord, I have gone before
you, a voice crying in the wilderness, the crooked shall be made straight and
the rough places plain
―but then he had been dragged away, and the
security guards were around Gibreel,
they're out of control, it's a fucking
riot, you'll have to
―but he wouldn't go, because he'd seen that at
least half the crowd were wearing bizarre headgear, rubber horns to make them
look like demons, as if they were badges of belonging and defiance;―and
in that instant when he saw the adversary's sign he felt the universe fork and
he stepped down the left-hand path.