The Satanic Verses

says, is where the Dutch king decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that his courtiers might have places in which to reside. Not all migrants are powerless, the still-standing edifices whisper. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh. But look out, the city warns. Incoherence, too, must have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he’d chosen to live – which he’d
civilized –
William III was thrown byhis horse, fell hard against the recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.
    Some days he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they’re done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes.
But you’re dead
, he shouts at them.
Zombies, get into your graves
. They ignore him, or laugh, or look embarrassed, or menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries on.
    The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to describe the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge. As does she: Allie, Al-Lat.
She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be desired
. He remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy’s poetry.
He’s trying to make a collection. A book
. The thumb-sucking artist with his infernal views. A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he’d told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he’s lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy’s point) it’s the Devil who wins.
    What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel’s brain? Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.
    The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket:
Pick me up! Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff up your cheeks and rooty-toot-toot. Come on, it’s party time
.
    How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London: not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He wanders through a confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian ‘babilu’. ‘The gate of God.’ Babylondon.
    Where’s this?
    – Yes. – He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London.Anonymous King’s Cross, the bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red-and-black gas-holders inflating and deflating like giant iron lungs. Where once in battle Queen Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.
    The Goodsway: – but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way! – Swinging handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights: these are not only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all have been thrown out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of them are white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings. Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they’re trash.
    – Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps; and quickens, at first, his pace.
What’s this to do with me? Bloody pussies-galore
. But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just under the tinny voices of ten-pound tarts. His footsteps slow down, then halt. He is held by their desires.
For what
? They are moving towards him now, drawn to him like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near him their walks change, their hips lose their swagger, their faces start looking their age, in spite of all the make-up. When they reach him, they kneel.
Who do you say that I am
? he asks, and wants to add:
I know your names. I met you once before, elsewhere, behind a curtain. Twelve of you then as now. Ayesha, Hafsah, Ramlah, Sawdah, Zainab, Zainab, Maimunah, Sofia, Juwairiyah, Umm Salamah the Makhzumite,