The Satanic Verses

half-conceded, and then again. Maybe dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.
    Chamcha’s room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad: the caricature of an actor’s room full of signed photographs of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of movie-star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life, a mask’s mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin’s need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks. The desperation there wasin him, Jumpy recognized, he’d do anything, put on any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving word. Saladin, who wasn’t by any means unsuccessful with women, see above. The poor stumblebum. Even Pamela, with all her beauty and brightness, hadn’t been enough.
    It was clear he’d been getting to be a long way from enough for her. Somewhere around the bottom of the second whisky bottle she leaned her head on his shoulder and said boozily, ‘You can’t imagine the relief of being with someone with whom I don’t have to have a fight every time I express an opinion. Someone on the side of the goddamn angels.’ He waited; after a pause, there was more. ‘Him and his Royal Family, you wouldn’t believe. Cricket, the Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never stopped being a picture postcard to him. You couldn’t get him to look at what was really real.’ She closed her eyes and allowed her hand, by accident, to rest on his. ‘He was a real Saladin,’ Jumpy said. ‘A man with a holy land to conquer, his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too.’ She rolled away from him and stretched out on top of magazines, crumpled balls of waste paper, mess. ‘Part of it? I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies, common-sense and me. But I’m really real, too, J.J.; I really am.’ She reached over to him, pulled him across to where her mouth was waiting, kissed him with a great un-Pamela-like slurp. ‘See what I mean?’ Yes, he saw.
    ‘You should have heard him on the Falklands war,’ she said later, disengaging herself and fiddling with her hair. ‘ “Pamela, suppose you heard a noise downstairs in the middle of the night and went to investigate and found a huge man in the living-room with a shotgun, and he said, Go back upstairs, what would you do?” I’d go upstairs, I said. “Well, it’s like that. Intruders in the home. It won’t do.” ’ Jumpy noticed her fists had clenched and her knuckles were bone-white. ‘I said, if you must use these blasted cosy metaphors, then get them right. What’s it
like
is if two people claim they own a house, and one of them is squatting the place, and
then
the other turns up with the shotgun. That’s whatit’s
like
.’ ‘That’s what’s really real,’ Jumpy nodded, seriously.
‘Right,’
she slapped his knee. ‘That’s really right, Mr Real Jam … it’s really like that. Actually. Another drink.’
    She leaned over to the tape deck and pushed a button. Jesus, Jumpy thought,
Boney M
? Give me a break. For all her tough, race-professional attitudes, the lady still had a lot to learn about music. Here it came, boomchickaboom. Then, without warning, he was crying, provoked into real tears by counterfeit emotion, by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, ‘Super flumina’. King David calling out across the centuries. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
    ‘I had to learn the psalms at school,’ Pamela Chamcha said, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed, her eyes shut tight.
By the river of Babylon, where we sat down, oh oh we wept
… she stopped the tape, leaned back again, began to recite. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth.’
    Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school, of