The Satanic Verses

beast, – put him in a tight spot. ‘Who was
that
?’ Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, ‘Just a breather, don’t worry about it,’ which was all very well, except then he had to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking, for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
    He was a small person with wire coathanger shoulders and an enormous capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken-eyed face; his thinning hair – still entirely black and curly – which had been ruffled so often by his frenzied hands that it no longer took the slightest notice of brushes or combs, but stuck out every which way and gave its owner the perpetual air of having just woken up, late, and in a hurry; and his endearingly high, shy and self-deprecating, but also hiccoughy and over-excited, giggle;all of which had helped turn his name, Jamshed, into this
Jumpy
that everybody, even first-time acquaintances, now automatically used; everybody, that, is, except Pamela Chamcha. Saladin’s wife, he thought, sucking away feverishly. – Or widow? – Or, God help me, wife, after all. He found himself resenting Chamcha. A return from a watery grave: so operatic an event, in this day and age, seemed almost indecent, an act of bad faith.
    He had rushed over to Pamela’s place the moment he heard the news, and found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her clutter-lover’s study on whose walls watercolours of rose-gardens hung between clenched-fist posters reading
Partido Socialista
, photographs of friends and a cluster of African masks, and as he picked his way across the floor between ashtrays and the
Voice
newspaper and feminist science-fiction novels she said, flatly, ‘The surprising thing is that when they told me I thought, well, shrug, his death will actually make a pretty small hole in my life.’ Jumpy, who was close to tears, and bursting with memories, stopped in his tracks and flapped his arms, looking, in his great shapeless black coat, and with his pallid, terror-stricken face, like a vampire caught in the unexpected and hideous light of day. Then he saw the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had started drinking, she said, some hours back, and since then she had been going at it steadily, rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance runner. He sat down beside her on her low, squashy sofa-bed, and offered to act as a pacemaker. ‘Whatever you want,’ she said, and passed him the bottle.
    Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and his hangover banging equally painfully inside his head (he had never been a drinking or a secretive man), Jumpy felt tears coming on once again, and decided to get up and walk himself around. Where he went was upstairs, to what Saladin had insisted on calling his ‘den’, a large loft-space with skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of communal gardens dotted with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of the plague years.
First the elms, now us
, Jumpy reflected.
Maybe the trees were a warning
. He shook himself to banish such small-hourmorbidities, and perched on the edge of his friend’s mahogany desk. Once at a college party he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to an emaciated girl in black lace minidress, purple feather boa and eyelids like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage to say hello. Finally he did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a look of absolute contempt and said without moving her black-lacquer lips,
conversation’s dead, man
. He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted out,
tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude
?, and she answered, without pausing to think,
because most of the boys are like you
. A few moments later Chamcha came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta, everybody’s goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left with him five minutes later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought as the old bitterness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be anything they wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna dharma-bum, you wouldn’t have caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there. Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the girls never went for you, that’s the truth, and the rest is envy. Well, maybe so, he