The Satanic Verses

come between them. Jumpy’s martial arts sessions increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.
    Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about her estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the community relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being ‘Out of control’ – Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington – but witchcraft? Jumpy was sceptical. ‘The trouble with you,’ Pamela told him in her loftiest shooting-stickvoice, ‘is that you still think of normality as being normal. My God: look at what’s happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn’t so weird. Call it working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I’ve got black people coming in every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails, the lot. The goddamn bastards are
enjoying
this: scare the coons with their own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely? Bloody
wake up
.’ Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from Matthew Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela’s voice, speaking at public meetings, on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could be heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction.
New Broomstick Needed to Sweep Out Witches
. There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy wild, however, was Pamela’s refusal to connect her arguments in the question of the occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea that normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal, ‘normal’ elements. ‘Nothing to do with it,’ she said flatly when he tried to make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.

    After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with Hanif Johnson, Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha’s had to stifle a number of bigoted thoughts, such as
if his father hadn’t been white he’d never have done it;
Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut notches in his cock to keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with aspirations to represent his people who couldn’t wait until they were of age before he started shafting them! … couldn’t he see that Mishal with her omniscient body was just a, just a, child? –
No she wasn’t. –
Damn him, then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.
    Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif,
his friend Hanif
were primarily – how to put it? –
linguistic
. Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power.
But you bastard you rummage in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven’t got a clue
. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat.
Nobody’s going to elect me to anything. No power-base, no constituency: just the battle with the words
. But he, Jumpy, also had to admit that his envy of Hanif was as much as anything rooted in the other’s greater control of the languages of desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he wouldn’t have known how, even if he’d thought of, he’d never have dared. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
    When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity had been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.
    ‘It just happened,’ she said. ‘One must not rule out the possibility that I have been bewitched.’
    He wasn’t standing for that. ‘Or the notion of a reaction, however delayed, to the news of your husband’s