The Satanic Verses

said, turning to him. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, but yes, it did.’

    In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account of the volume of calls still being generated by the catastrophe, and then another twenty-five minutes of insistence –
but he telephoned, it was his voice –
while at the other end of the phone a woman’s voice, professionally trained to deal with human beings in crisis, understood how she felt and sympathized with her in this awful moment and remained very patient, but clearly didn’t believe a word she said.
I’m sorry, madam, I don’t mean to be brutal, but the plane broke up in mid-air at thirty thousand feet
. By the end of the call Pamela Chamcha, normally the most controlled ofwomen, who locked herself in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the line, for God’s sake, woman, will you shut up with your little good-samaritan speeches and listen to what I’m saying? Finally she slammed down the receiver and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began to tremble in fright. ‘You fucking creep,’ she cursed him. “Still alive, is he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking
wings
and headed straight for the nearest phone booth to change out of his fucking Superman costume and ring the little wife.’ They were in the kitchen and Jumpy noticed a group of kitchen knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall next to Pamela’s left arm. He opened his mouth to speak, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘Get out before I do something,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I fell for it. You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known.’
    In the early 1970s Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn’s Thumb in honour of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. ‘I need an hour to think,’ he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs Onassis’s offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. ‘Mrs Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure,’ he had concluded, and Jumpy had worriedly replied, ‘Please tell her it’s nothing personal, as a matter of fact personally I admire her a great deal.’
    We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.

    On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed, ‘quite ideologically unsound’, – on that subject, I really ought to be more charitable.
    Pamela Chamcha, née Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which, in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey-sticks, thatched houses, saddle-soap, house-parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs’ delights and somethings in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and peacemarchers and world-changers with whom she instinctively felt at home treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be
on the side of the angels
when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one moved one’s lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One of the reasons she had decided to
admit it
end her marriage before fate did it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was not in love with her