The Satanic Verses

filthy, his hair lank and greasy, his chin sprouting hair in uncontrollable tufts. It was in this sorry condition that he arrived at the Angel Underground.
    It must have been early in the morning, because the station staff drifted up as he watched, to unlock and then roll back the metal grille of night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets (the street atlas had been discarded long ago); and raising his eyes at last, found himself looking into a face on the verge of dissolving into tears.
    ‘Good morning,’ he ventured, and the young woman in the ticket office responded bitterly, ‘What’s good about it, that’s what I want to know,’ and now her tears did come, plump, globular and plenteous. ‘There, there, child,’ he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You’re no priest,’ she opined. He answered, a little tentatively: ‘I am the Angel, Gibreel.’ She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. ‘Only angels roun here hang from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them by their necks.’ He was not to be put off ‘I am Gibreel,’ herepeated, fixing her with his eye. ‘Recite.’ And, to her own emphatically expressed astonishment,
I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I not like this, you know
, the ticket clerk began to speak.
    Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years old, both parents alive and dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth had lost her job as a physiotherapist by ‘gettin up to she nonsense’. The young man’s name, for of course there was a young man, was Uriah Moseley. The station had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and Orphia and Uriah were their operators. During rush-hours, when both lifts were working, they had little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection point just along from the elevator-shaft, and Uri managed to spend a good deal of time down there with her, leaning against the door-jamb of his gleaming lift and picking his teeth with the silver toothpick his great-grandfather had liberated from some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. ‘But I jus get carry away,’ Orphia wailed at Gibreel. ‘I always too hasty for sense.’ One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right in front of him as he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look in her eye he put away the pick. After that he came to work with a spring in his step; she, too, was in heaven as she descended each day into the bowels of the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would not detach herself when the buzzer rang for the lift; Uriah would have to push her back, with a cry of, ‘Cool off, girl, the public.’ Uriah had a vocational attitude to his work. He spoke to her of his pride in his uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, ‘Uri, man, you jus a elevator boy here,’ but intuiting that such realism would not be well received, she held her troublesome tongue, or, rather, pushed it into his mouth.
    Their embraces in the tunnel became wars. Now he was tryingto get away, straightening his tunic, while she bit his ear and pushed her hand down inside his trousers. ‘You crazy,’ he said, but she, continuing, inquired: ‘So? You vex?’
    They were, inevitably, caught: a complaint was lodged by a kindly lady in headscarf and tweeds. They had been lucky to keep their jobs. Orphia had been ‘grounded’, deprived of elevator-shafts and boxed into the ticket booth. Worse still, her place had been taken by the station beauty, Rochelle Watkins. ‘I know what going on,’ she cried angrily. ‘I see Rochelle expression when she come up, fixin up her hair an all o’ dat.’ Uriah, nowadays, avoided Orphia’s eyes.
    ‘Can’t figure out how you get me to tell you me business,’ she concluded, uncertainly. ‘You not no angel. That is for sure.’ But she was unable, try as she might, to break away from his transfixing gaze. ‘I know,’ he told her, ‘what is in your heart.’
    He reached in through the booth’s window and took her unresisting hand. – Yes, this was it, the force of her desires filling him up, enabling him to translate them back to her, making action possible, allowing her to say and do what she