The Satanic Verses

which Allie had hung in a group by her front door, mounted in cream and framed in old gold, all bearing the same message, scrawled across the lower right-hand corner of the cream mounts:
To A., in hopes, from Brunel
. When Gibreel noticed these inscriptions he demanded an explanation, pointing furiously at the cartoons with fully extended arm, while with his free hand he clutched a bedsheet around him (he was attired in this informal manner because he’d decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection of the premises,
can’t spend one’s whole life on one’s back, or even yours
, he’d said); Allie, forgivably, laughed. ‘You look like Brutus, all murder and dignity,’ she teased him. ‘The picture of an honourable man.’ He shocked her by shouting violently: ‘Tell me at once who the bastard is.’
    ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. Jack Brunel worked as an animator, was in his late fifties and had known her father. She had never had the faintest interest in him, but he had taken to courting her by the strangulated, wordless method of sending her, from time to time, these graphic gifts.
    ‘Why you didn’t throw them in the wpb?’ Gibreel howled. Allie, still not fully understanding the size of his rage, continued lightly. She had kept the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old
Punch
cartoon in which Leonardo da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils, and hurled the Mona Lisa like a frisbee across the room.
‘Mark my words,’
he said in the caption,
‘one day men shall fly to Padua in such as these
.’ In the second frame there was a page from
Toff
, a British boys’ comic dating from World War II. It had been thought necessary in a time when so many children became evacuees to create, by way of explanation, a comic-strip version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of the weekly encounters between the home team –the Toff (an appalling monocled child in Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers) and cloth-capped, scuff-kneed Bert – and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and the Nastiparts (a bunch of thuggish fiends, each of whom had one extremely nasty part, e.g. a steel hook instead of a hand, feet like claws, teeth that could bite through your arm). The British team invariably came out on top. Gibreel, glancing at the framed comic, was scornful. ‘You bloody
Angrez
. You really think like this; this is what the war was really like for you.’ Allie decided not to mention her father, or to tell Gibreel that one of the
Toff
artists, a virulently anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one day and led away for internment along with all the other Germans in Britain, and, according to Brunel, his colleagues hadn’t lifted a finger to save him. ‘Heartlessness,’ Jack had reflected. ‘Only thing a cartoonist really needs. What an artist Disney would have been if he hadn’t had a heart. It was his fatal flaw.’ Brunel ran a small animation studio named Scarecrow Productions, after the character in
The Wizard of Oz
.
    The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the great Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose uniquely cynical output perfectly exemplified Brunel’s unsentimental view of the cartoonist’s art. In this film, a man fell off a skyscraper; a fire engine rushed to the scene and positioned itself beneath the falling man. The roof slid back, permitting a huge steel spike to emerge, and, in the still on Allie’s wall, the man arrived head first and the spike rammed into his brain. ‘Sick,’ Gibreel Farishta pronounced.
    These lavish gifts having failed to get results, Brunel was obliged to break cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie’s apartment one night, unannounced and already considerably the worse for alcohol, and produced a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next morning he had drunk the rum but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going ostentatiously off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the animator standing stark naked in the centre of her living-room rug, revealing a surprisingly shapely body covered by an inordinate amount of thick grey hair. When he saw her he spread hisarms and cried: ‘Take me! Do what you will!’ She made him dress, as kindly as she could, and put him and his briefcase gently out of the door. He never returned.
    Allie told Gibreel the story, in an open, giggling manner that suggested she was