The Satanic Verses

hair-gel-and-finger-rings society column shark, he was unshowily dressed in brass-buttoned blazer and blue jeans, and instead of the cocksureswagger 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 marbledfloors 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