The Satanic Verses

reappearance, having perhaps accepted, at some level deeper than consciousness, that this infernal, childlike evil was what would finish him off for good.

    But O how easy it all turned out to be! How comfortably evil lodged in those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster’s strings! How surely it stepped out along the high wires of the telephone system, poised as a barefoot acrobat; how confidently it entered the victims’ presence, as certain of its effect as a handsome man in a perfectly tailored suit! And how carefully it bided its time, sending forth every voice but the voice that would deliver the coup de grâce – for Saladin, too, had understood thedoggerel’s special potency – deep voices and squeaky voices, slow ones, quick ones, sad and cheerful, aggression-laden and shy. One by one, they dripped into Gibreel’s ears, weakening his hold on the real world, drawing him little by little into their deceitful web, so that little by little their obscene, invented women began to coat the real woman like a viscous, green film, and in spite of his protestations to the contrary he started slipping away from her; and then it was time for the return of the little, satanic verses that made him mad.

    Roses are red, violets are blue
,
Sugar never tasted sweet as you
.

    Pass it on
. He returned as innocent as ever, giving birth to a turmoil of butterflies in Gibreel’s knotting stomach. After that the rhymes came thick and fast. They could have the smuttiness of the school playground:
    When she’s down at Waterloo

She don’t wear no yes she do

When she’s up at Leicester Square

She don’t wear no underwear;

    or, once or twice, the rhythm of a cheerleader’s chant.
    Knickerknacker, firecracker
,
Sis! Boom! Bah
!
Alleluia! Alleluia
!
Rah! Rah! Rah
!

    And lastly, when they had returned to London, and Allie was absent at the ceremonial opening of a freezer food mart in Hounslow, the last rhyme.
    Violets are blue, roses are red
,
I’ve got her right here in my bed
.

    Goodbye, sucker
.
    Dialling tone.

    Alleluia Cone returned to find Gibreel gone, and in the vandalized silence of her apartment she determined that this time she would not have him back, no matter in what sorry condition or how wheedlingly he came crawling to her, pleading for forgiveness and for love; because before he left he had wrought a terrible vengeance upon her, destroying every one of the surrogate Himalayas she had collected over the years, thawing the ice-Everest she kept in her freezer, pulling down and ripping to shreds the parachute-silk peaks that rose above her bed, and hacking to pieces (he’d used the small axe she kept with the fire extinguisher in the broom cupboard) the priceless whittled memento of her conquest of Chomolungma, given her by Pemba the sherpa, as a warning as well as a commemoration.
To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again
.
    She flung open sash windows and screamed abuse at the innocent Fields beneath. ‘Die slowly! Burn in hell!’
    Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.

    Mr John Maslama, owner of the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of the same name, and of ‘Fair Winds’, the legendary store where you could get yourself the finest horns – clarinets, saxophones, trombones – that a person could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy man, so he would always ascribe to the intervention of Divine Providence the happy chance that caused him to be present in the trumpet store whenthe Archangel of God walked in with thunder and lightning sitting like laurels upon his noble brow. Being a practical businessman, Mr. Maslama had up to this point concealed from his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of the returned Celestial and Semi-Godlike Being, sticking posters in his shop-windows only when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the display advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable personal expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of the Lord. He issued press releases through a public relations subsidiary of the Valance agency, asking that his own anonymity be guarded carefully. ‘Our client is in a position to state,’ these releases – which enjoyed, for a time, an amused vogue among Fleet Street diarists – cryptically announced, ‘that his eyes have seen the Glory referred to above. Gibreel is among us at this moment, somewhere in the inner city of London