The Satanic Verses

which indicates with all the insight of modern science that the lunatic is lying.’ Blake again, Alliethought.
Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He –
i.e. Isaiah –
replied. All poets believe that it does. & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing
. ‘Are you listening to me, young woman? I’m serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your nightly attentions – excuse me but I’ll speak plainly, seeing I must – but, to be frank, a padded cell.’
    ‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you,’ Allie hit back. ‘You’d throw away the key. Maybe you’d even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange how our prejudices never change.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Alicja ruminated, adopting her vaguest and most innocent expression in order to infuriate her daughter. ‘What can it harm? Yes, maybe a little voltage, a little dose of the juice …’
    ‘What he needs is what he’s getting, mother. Proper medical supervision, plenty of rest, and something you maybe forgot about.’ She dried suddenly, her tongue knotted, and it was in quite a different, low voice, staring at her untouched salad, that she got out the last word. ‘Love.’
    ‘Ah, the power of love,’ Alicja patted her daughter’s (at once withdrawn) hand. ‘No, it’s not what I forgot, Alleluia. It’s what you just begun for the first time in your beautiful life to learn. And who do you pick?’ She returned to the attack. ‘An out-to-lunch! A ninety-pennies-in-the-pound! A butterflies-in-the-brainbox! I mean,
angels
, darling, I never heard the like. Men are always claiming special privileges, but this one is a first.’
    ‘Mother …’ Allie began, but Alicja’s mood had changed again, and this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing the pain they both revealed and concealed, the pain of a woman to whom history had most brutally happened, who had already lost a husband and seen one daughter precede her to what she once, with unforgettable black humour, referred to (she must have read the sports pages, by some chance, to come across the phrase) as an
early bath
. ‘Allie, my baby,’ Alicja Cohen said, ‘we’re going to have to take good care of you.’
    One reason why Allie was able to spot that panic-anguish in her mother’s face was her recent sighting of the same combination onthe features of Gibreel Farishta. After Sisodia returned him to her care, it became plain that Gibreel had been shaken to the very marrow, and there was a haunted look to him, a scarified popeyed quality, that quite pierced her heart. He faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to play it down or call it by a false name, but his recognition of it had, understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient vulgarian for whom she had conceived her ‘grand passion’, he became for her, in this newly vulnerable incarnation, more lovable than ever. She grew determined to lead him back to sanity, to stick it out; to wait out the storm, and conquer the peak. And he was, for the moment, the easiest and most malleable of patients, somewhat dopey as a result of the heavy-duty medication he was being given by the specialists at the Maudsley Hospital, sleeping long hours, and acquiescing, when awake, in all her requests, without a murmur of protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full background to his illness: the strange serial dreams, and before that the near-fatal breakdown in India. ‘I am no longer afraid of sleep,’ he told her. ‘Because what’s happened in my waking time is now so much worse.’ His greatest fear reminded her of Charles II’s terror, after his Restoration, of being sent ‘on his travels’ again: ‘I’d give anything only to know it won’t happen any more,’ he told her, meek as a lamb.
    Lives there who loves his pain
? ‘It won’t happen,’ she reassured him. ‘You’ve got the best help there is.’ He quizzed her about money, and, when she tried to deflect the questions, insisted that she withdraw the psychiatric fees from the small fortune stashed in his money-belt. His spirits remained low. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say,’ he mumbled in response to her cheery optimisms. ‘The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to think it could get out any minute, right now, and
he
would be in charge again.’