The Satanic Verses

matins and evensong, of the chanting of psalms, when Jumpy rushed in and shook her awake, shouting, ‘It’s no good, I’ve got to tell you. He isn’t dead. Saladin: he’s bloody well alive.’

    She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick, curly, hennaed hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning to be noticeable; she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in her hair, unable to move, until Jumpy had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she began to hit out at him, punching him on the chest and arms and shoulders and even his face, as hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside her, looking ridiculous in her frilly dressing-gown, while she beat him; he allowed his body to go loose, to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran out of punches her body was covered in perspiration and he thought she might have broken one of his arms. She sat down beside him, panting, and they were silent.
    Her dog entered the bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer her his paw, and to lick at her left leg. Jumpy stirred, cautiously. ‘I thought he got stolen,’ he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for
yes, but
. ‘The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name of Glenn. That’s okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly, anyway.’
    After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk. ‘What you did, just now,’ he began.
    ‘Oh, God.’
    ‘No. It’s like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever did.’ In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the ‘apolitical’ twenty-year-old Saladin along on an anti-war demonstration. ‘Once in your life, Mister Snoot, I’m going to drag you down to my level.’ Harold Wilson was coming to town, and because of the Labour Government’s support of US involvement in Vietnam, a mass protest had been planned. Chamcha went along, ‘out of curiosity,’ he said. ‘I want to see how allegedly intelligent people turn themselves into a mob.’
    That day it rained an ocean. The demonstrators in Market Square were soaked through. Jumpy and Chamcha, swept along by the crowd, found themselves pushed up against the steps of the town hall;
grandstand view
, Chamcha said with heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as Russian assassins, in black fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying shoeboxes filled with ink-dipped tomatoes and labelled in large block letters,
bombs
. Shortly before the Prime Minister’s arrival, one of them tapped a policeman on the shoulder and said: ‘Excuse, please. When Mr Wilson, self-styled Prime Meenster, comes in long car, kindly request to wind down weendow so my friend can throw with him the bombs. The policeman answered, ‘Ho, ho, sir. Very good. Now I’ll tell you what. You can throw eggs at him, sir, ’cause that’s all right with me. And you can throw tomatoes at him, sir, like what you’ve got there in that box, painted black, labelled
bombs
, ’cause that’s all right with me. You throw anything hard at him, sir, and my mate here’ll get you with his gun.’ O days of innocence when the world was young … when the car arrivedthere was a surge in the crowd and Chamcha and Jumpy were separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on to the bonnet of Harold Wilson’s limousine, and began to jump up and down on the bonnet, creating large dents, leaping like a wild man to the rhythm of the crowd’s chanting:
We shall fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh
.
    ‘Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was full of Special Branch types converging on the limo, but mainly because he was so damn embarrassed.’ But he kept leaping, up higher and down harder, drenched to the bone, long hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping into the mythology of those antique years. And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back seat.
Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh
! At the last possible moment Jumpy took a deep breath, and dived head-first into a sea of wet and friendly faces; and vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. ‘Saladin wouldn’t speak to me for over a week,’ Jumpy remembered. ‘And when he did, all he said was, “I hope you realize those cops could have shot you to pieces, but they didn’t.” ’
    They were still sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. Jumpy touched Pamela on the forearm. ‘I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, bam. It felt incredible. It felt necessary.’
    ‘Oh, my God,’ she