The Satanic Verses

inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to damage what he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
    This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction’s antagonist … he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to meet her; and embraced Gibreel.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him
. Allie, suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off, as she put it, to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step or two; then paused, and strode off strongly. Among the things he did not know about her was her pain.
    Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and perfunctory in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical supervision; – or that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain drugs that dulled his senses, because of the very real possibility of a recurrence of his no-longer-nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid schizophrenia; – or that he had long been kept away, at Allie’s absolute insistence, from the movie people whom she had come strongly to distrust, ever since his last rampage; – or that their presence at the Battuta-Mamoulian party was a thing to which she had been whole-heartedly opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared that he would be kept a prisoner no longer, and that he was determined to make a further effort to re-enter his ‘real life’; – or that the effort of looking after a disturbed lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like imps hanging upside down in the refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch – requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; – not knowing any of this, failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he was looking, and believed he saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Fury-haunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, ashis invented-resented Allie, that classic drop-dead blonde or femme fatale conjured up by his envious, tormented, Oresteian imagination, – Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless penetrated, by the merest chance, the chink in Gibreel’s (admittedly somewhat quixotic) armour, and understood how his hated Other might most swiftly be unmade.
    Gibreel’s banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to small-talk, he asked vaguely: ‘And how, tell me, is your goodwife?’ At which Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: ‘How? Knocked up. Enceinte. Great with fucking child.’ Soporific Gibreel missed the violence in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin’s shoulders. ‘Shabash, mubarak,’ he offered congratulations. ‘Spoono! Damn speedy work.’
    ‘Congratulate her lover,’ Saladin thickly raged. ‘My old friend, Jumpy Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God knows why. They want his goddamn babies and they don’t even wait to ask his leave.’
    ‘For instance who?’ Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha recoil in surprise. ‘Who who who?’ he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. ‘I’ll tell you who for instance. My wife for instance, that’s who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel. Pamela, my no-lady wife.’
    At this very moment, as luck would have it, – while Saladin in his cups was quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel, – for whom two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory of Rekha Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie’s secret wish to have a baby without informing the father,
who asks the seed for permission to plant
, and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial arts instructor conjoined in high-kicking carnality with the same Miss Alleluia Cone, – the figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ in a state of some agitation, – hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from whom he had become separated during the samerush of singing Dickensians which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman in the Curiosity Shop. ‘Talk of the devil,’