The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  God save the Queen, Hawthorne Crossley salutes his father extravagantly, And he probably ought to keep an eye on that Elizabeth Windsor as well.

  In Ormus Cama’s classic rock ’n’ roll belter “Ooh Tar Baby”—an encrypted remembrance of his English years, sung in the sour-sour, down-and-dirty cool-cat growl that became his abiding gift to the male singers of the New York underground—the Tar Baby is England itself. England kidnaps people, he says in interviews, when, on his comeback tour, late in his career, he breaks the habit of a lifetime and consents to a few journalistic encounters. England seizes hold, he says, and won’t let go. It’s uncanny. You arrive for whatever reason, just passing through en route to the rest of your life, but watch out, or you’ll get stuck for years. That old Tar Baby, you can greet her courteously but she won’t give you the time of day, you can speak to her as nice as pie but she won’t act polite, ’til finally you’re so ticked off that you bust her in the mouth, and then, too late!, you’re held fast. Once you attack her you’re in her thrall. It’s a strange kind of love, what I call stuck love, but you can’t get away. You’re only some dumb rabbit anyhow, how smart can you be to be punching out that sticky old sister, if you know what I mean. So you’re hanging there, and you can’t help yourself, you’re beginning to think in a way she’s cute, but then you start worrying that maybe in the bushes there’s that hungry fox, lying low and saying nothing and waiting for his supper.

  Ooh Tar Baby yeah you got me stuck on you. Ooh Tar Baby and I can’t get loose it’s true. Come on Tar Baby won’t you hold me tight, we can stick together all through the night. Ooh Tar Baby and maybe I’m in love with you.

  10

  SEASON OF THE WITCH

  At first the music is the only thing he can get a grip on. Mull Standish XII, who chooses the playlists for all his boats, has a good ear and sure instincts. As he becomes familiar with these lists, Ormus privately concedes that his premature dismissal of cisatlantic rock music was way off beam. This is the golden age of British rock ’n’ roll. After Sinatra and Parker, this is the third revolution.

  Mull visits each boat once in every two-week period. (The terms of employment for DJs aboard Radio Freddie are also based on a fourteen-day rotation, two weeks on, two weeks off.) He arrives with a clattering canvas bag of the latest platters and announces the musical marching orders for the next fortnight: push this, spotlight that, play this one once in a while but only because we can’t not play it, listen to this one, you guys, this kid’s going to be vast. There is a sense of an audience building, and the terrestrial bosses are definitely getting nervous. You can tell this is so because the frequency of the drug-squad raids is increasing. In Ormus’s first shift they are boarded twice, the boat is turned upside down, its human cargo is strip-searched, there is a good deal of sneering and shoving, and finally they are left alone again.

  My fucking rectum’s getting so habituated to being probed by these rozzers’ rubber-gloved fingers, announces Hawthorne, it’s beginning to fucking like it.

  Waldo gravely assents. Probably something in the genes.

  Ormus, however, finds it hard to see the funny side. Naked and innocent before the officers of the law, suffering their jolly rogerings, he shakes with rage and shame. This is an England his father never knew, at whose existence he could not have guessed.

  Except during the police searches, Cap’n Pugwash (not his real name) and the crew of the Frederica have little time for the broadcasting staff. Their quarters are separate, and few words are exchanged. The raids, however, are forging a curious bond between the two camps. The bluebottles’ stings act as a unifying force. The invasions, the gibes, transcend the gulfs of world-view and class between the mariners and the radio upstarts. After one raid Pugwash himself—a stubbly, beer-bellied grouch with an appropriately piratical moustache—unbends so far as to say to Hawthorne Crossley, You keep at it, mate, yeah? You give ’em what bleeding for. Then, gradually, the surly standoff resumes.

  Such are the shock troops of Mull Standish’s conquering navy, the navy of peace and music, to whom all England must—according to the chief pirate’s strategy—inevitably succumb. In spite of his new-found admiration for the music, Ormus is finding it hard to get a handle on England. Water slurps beneath his feet. Everything shifts. He is told that the kids are crazy for Freddie, but the England he sees on the horizon is a low dark shape below a low grey sky, distantly mooing with uninterest.

  Drunkenly, clumsily, the station gets through the days and nights. The weather is continuously dreadful: rain, wind, more wind, more rain. The Frederica pitches and rolls. Waldo Crossley is frequently sick, and not always over the side. Somehow, a minimum level of hygiene is maintained, so that the health inspectors, when they make their raids, are unable to close the show down, and leave angry and frustrated. Ormus, learning the art of gonzo broadcasting, comes to see that Eno, the person of tint, is the key. Eno dresses in immaculate whites and sports a cream Borsalino hat, and he is a world unto himself, wanting nothing to do with DJs or crew. He appears not to eat or drink or sleep or (in spite of the Crossleys’ fruit-salts slur) even shit or piss. In the ship’s studio he keeps things moving from his position behind a desk that looks like an electric hedgehog, bristling with switches. That’s where he stays, on the far side of his glass window, Ali Barber in Aladdin’s cave, and there’s a large sign on the wall behind him saying Know Your Place. Eno believes in apartheid, Hawthorne explains, and that means you too. You know that in South Africa the blacks hate the Indians more than they hate the whites.

  He’s from South Africa, then? Ormus surmises.

  Waldo shakes his head gravely. No. Stockwell.

  The music is extraordinary. Keening slow-hand guitar playing, the old wise voices of ridiculously young blues rockers, the hard-edged raunch ’n’ roll women and the soft ethereal crystal-voiced maidens, the screaming feedback swirls of psychedelia, the ballads of war and love, the hallucinated visions of the great troubadours. By clinging to the music Ormus can keep a hold on what’s real. The music tells him truths he finds he already knows. The music is a great wild bird calling out to the bird of the same species that lies hidden in his own throat, in the egg of his Adam’s apple, hatching, nearing its time.

  Ormus, Hawthorne and Waldo set up a sleep rota. They crowd into the confined studio space two at a time, Ormus and Hawthorne, Hawthorne and Waldo, Waldo and Ormus. Time stretches endlessly before them, the land drifts off like a fantasy, and cocooned as they are in rain and alcohol it’s easy for them to imagine they’re talking to themselves. What goes out over the air in between songs: their interior monologues, the fatigue-and-whisky-polluted streams of their wrecked consciousness.

  Ormus, during one night shift, in the small hours when the monsters crawl, notices that his co-jockey Waldo has fallen asleep. Whispering, as if speaking privately to his beloved, he calls out across the skies for Vina. Eno, impassive in his booth, offers no comment. He is lost in electricity, devoted to the maintenance of the signal, dedicated to purity of sound. Perhaps he isn’t even listening to Ormus’s cry, just hearing the level and timbre of it, throwing his switches, watching his gauges, the flickering of illuminated needles reflected in his eyes.

  Are you there, my love, Ormus murmurs. Oh my long-lost love. You did not trust me and I was wounded, proud, I let you go away. Now I must prove myself worthy, I must perform labours, pursue quests, shoulder the burdensome world.

  Mull Standish sends an urgent message via the ship’s radio. The first mate, who is also the radio operator, transcribes the text, and Cap’n Pugwash—who has been tuning in to Ormus’s soliloquy—is sufficiently moved (he’s a big lump-in-throat softy, really) to bring Standish’s message personally to Eno, who flattens the paper against the glass window. This is an inspiration, Ormus reads. Who is she? Is she real? Did you make her up? Certainly you mustn’t find her too soon. Keep it going. Instalments every night. This will build the audience like nothing else. The lovesick floating romeo sings to
his unheeding love. You want a singing career? You just found the door. This will give you profile, saliency, share of mind. This will make your make your name.

  Vina Apsara has not heard Ormus’s appeal. She’s in America and doesn’t know he’s floating off the coast of England, damp and yearning, and calling out her name.

  Nobody tells her. It isn’t time.

  The migraines come. They’re getting worse. Sometimes he is unable to sleep at all during his allotted hours. He picks up one of the paperbacks abandoned in his cabin—it must be Mull Standish who brought them aboard in the hope of pushing a little culture into his sons, who have promptly tossed them into the spare cabin, the one they never enter, the one that’s now Ormus’s little hole of privacy. Books by famous American writers, Sal Paradise’s odes to wanderlust, Nathan Zuckerman’s Carnovsky, science fiction by Kilgore Trout, a playscript—Von Trenck—by Charlie Citrine, who would go on to write the hit movie Caldofreddo. The poetry of John Shade. Also Europeans: Dedalus, Matzerath. The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Ménard. F. Alexander’s A Clockwork Orange.

  Here’s the year’s hit fantasy-thriller, The Watergate Affair, in which the future President Nixon (President Nixon! that’s how wild a fantasy it is) has to leave office after trying to bug the Democrats’ offices, an accusation that’s finally proved true, in a wildly implausible twist, when it turns out that Nixon also bugged himself, ha ha ha, the things these guys think of to make us laugh.

  But every time he picks up one of these books his brain swirls and thumps, and he is forced to put them down unread. His head bursts with confusions and when he closes his eyes he finds that behind his eyelids his dead twin Gayo has changed his behaviour. Gayomart no longer runs away but comes towards, stands up close, staring at Ormus like a man gazing into a mirror. You’re a changed man, Gayomart Cama grins. Maybe that’s Gayomart out there and you’re in here now, trapped in unreality. Maybe now I’m dreaming you. Ormus is appalled by the hostility in Gayomart’s glittering grin. Why do you hate me, he asks. Why do you think, his brother replies. I’m the one who died.

  To keep Gayo away he must keep his eyes open. He is so tired that he has to use his fingers to push the heavy lids apart. He switches on the monitor in his tiny cabin and tries to concentrate on the brothers Crossley doing their shift.

  If you’re listening, Antoinette Corinth, you witchy insomniac, and I know you’re listening because you always are, then this one’s for you. This one comes to you from Hawthorne with love. And Waldo would add his personal salutations but alas at present he’s being somewhat indisposed in the bin. This one is to honour your genius, O queen of the black arts, princess of the pentangle, Baroness Samedi, priestess of Wicca, adept of the secrets of the Great Pyramid, dispenser of all good things, dressmaker extraordinaire, O Mother who gave us suck. We took your name and you at once let it go, espousing, instead, the noble Corinthian tradition. Mother forgive us for we are royally arseholed. Forgive us Mother for we have taken the shilling of him what done you wrong. As you have surmounted your bitterness towards him, as you have found it in your mighty soul to transcend your most righteous anger, so also let us not come into your bad books, if that’s at all possible, because we really needed the spondulicks the cash the moolah the bread the bread. Forgive us Mother for we are soldiers of the Queen our Father and this is wonderful 199, Radio Freddie, and for all you night owls and our own dear Mum here’s Manfred Mann to promise us that god is on our side.

  Listening to Hawthorne’s tirade, Ormus Cama is reminded of Sanjay Gandhi’s legendary resentment of his mother Indira for abandoning his father Feroze. Mull Standish is Indira metamorphosed, he thinks, Indira who was powerless against her savage son, who endowed Sanjay with a lifetime’s supply of rage.

  Is there a god? wonders Waldo Crossley between Manfred Mann and the Searchers. Biggish question. Take your time.

  If there’s no god, why do men have nipples, Hawthorne ripostes between the Searchers and the Temptations.

  On the other hand, if there’s no god, it does explain why we have to have Peter, Paul and Mary, reasons Waldo persuasively, between the Temptations and the Righteous Brothers.

  If there’s no god, who left the tap running up there? Hawthorne roars at the end of “Unchained Melody,” thumping the studio table. Checkmate, I think.

  The Miracles begin to sing. It goes on raining.

  At the end of the first fortnight, the Crossley brothers bring Ormus Cama home to mother, where he is to take up residence in the spare room. Home is a maisonette above their mother’s clothes shop in a red-brick row-house backwater at the wrong end of Chelsea, past too many kinks in the King’s Road, tucked away between the gasworks and Wandsworth Bridge Road; yet time seems to eddy and swirl around this spot, it knows the difference between size and mass. Only the truly massive can push it around. Here, in limbo, time has located a mighty gravitational force, an omnivorous black hole.

  Vina once came here. She bought a flimsy frock.

  The boutique—a new word that will not last—is called The Witch Flies High and it is already legendary: that is, the arbiters of these matters have agreed that it is one of the enclaves by which the Zeitgeist—another fashionable word that will fall from favour—will come in time to be defined. The kiss of posterity is deemed to have blessed The Witch already. She pulls the city into her gravitational field, shapes the moment to her will. Within its event horizon, the laws of the universe cease to apply. Darkness reigns. Antoinette Corinth is the only law.

  Mick Jagger is rumoured to wear the dresses, those brief concoctions of velvet and lace. John Lennon’s white limo stops outside once a week and a chauffeur takes away whole racks of clothes for the great man and his wife to try on. German photographers with stone-faced models arrive to use The Witch’s windows as backdrops for their fashion spreads. The boutique has famous painted windows, featuring the Wicked Witch of the West from the land of Oz. She flies over Emerald City, cackling. Her smoking broom does sign writing in the sky. Surrender Dorothy. (The ignorant and unfashionable mistake this for the name of the shop. Such persons are invariably refused admission. Antoinette Corinth loathes Dorothy Gale, her dog and all inhabitants of Kansas, Kansas-as-metaphor, flat, empty, uncool. Antoinette Corinth is Miss Gulch.)

  Antoinette lounges in the boutique’s doorway, illuminated by a yellow tungsten street lamp, an ample woman wearing a groin-length black lace mini-dress with matching shawl and talking to a waistcoated dandy who turns out to be a celebrated society couturier, and her first backer, Tommy Gin. She permits her sons to peck her on the cheek, ignores Ormus’s polite greeting. Gin, too, cuts him dead. Ormus follows Hawthorne and Waldo into The Witch.

  Inside, it’s pitch dark. You go through a heavy bead curtain and are instantly blinded. The air is heavy with incense and patchouli oil and with, too, the aroma of substances forbidden aboard Radio Freddie. Psychedelic music terrorizes your eardrums. After a time you become aware of a low purple glow, in which you can make out a few motionless shapes. These are probably clothes, probably for sale. You don’t like to ask. The Witch is a scary place.

  In the depths of the boutique is a dimly discernible presence. This is She. She runs the shop, and makes Twiggy look like a teenager with a puppy-fat problem. She is very pale, probably because she spends her life sitting in the dark. Her lips are shiny black. She also wears a black mini-dress, but hers is velvet, not lace. This is her urban vampire look. (Her other style, black smocks worn with smudged black eyes, is described by Antoinette Corinth as “dead baby”) She stands knock-kneed and pigeon-toed after the fashion of the period, her feet forming a tiny ferocious T. She wears immense silver knuckle-duster rings and a black flower in her hair. Half love child, half zombie, She is a sign of the times.

  Ormus attempts charm, introduces himself, mentions his recent arrival in England, says some words about his first stint aboard Radio Freddie, and at this point, faced with the glint of her basilisk eyes in the purple haze, runs out of
words and sputters to a halt.

  Talk radio’s over, she says, Dialogue’s dead.

  This is stunning information. In five words the neo-Kantian, Bakhtinian definition of human nature—that we change each other constantly through dialogue, through intersubjectivity, the creative interplay of our several incompletenesses—is laid to rest. The essentially Apollonian universe of communication shrivels beneath the contemptuous force of She’s Dionysiac post-verbalism. Before Ormus can absorb so revolutionary a change, however, Tommy Gin comes into the store at speed, pursued by a hooting Antoinette Corinth. Listen, man, I’m sorry, man, Gin expostulates, clasping both of Ormus Cama’s hands, It’s the Witch, man, she likes her joke. I mean, you’re Indian, I love India. The Maharishi, man. And the Buddha, and Lord Krishna. Beautiful.

  And Ravi Shankar, offers Ormus, trying to be friendly. But Tommy Gin has run out of Indians and can only nod furiously. Right, right, he nods, beaming.

  Right, Ormus Cama concurs.

  But what I’m saying—Gin returns to his embarrassed apology—is, back there, man, I laid a heavy trip on you, but it’s only because she’s always shitting with people’s heads, I mean, if you can believe it, she told me you were Jewish. You can dig that, man, you can see how that would, yeah. But you’re not, man, you’re just not. Oh, wow.

  Hey, Indian guy, shouts Antoinette Corinth, waving a joint in a long cigarette holder. Perhaps you should teach me a few of your whatchoumacallit rope tricks. You seem to have tied the Queen up in knots, unless I’m very much mistaken.

  Ormus Cama faced with Gin and Antoinette has the sense of having come into the presence of malignity. Gin doesn’t count: he’s a nasty pinprick, a squib. But from Antoinette Corinth there pours a barely disguised and vengeful malevolence. This is not that wise woman free of all bitterness eulogized by her sons over the pirate airwaves. This is a woman of such palpable vindictiveness that, even though he has no reason to believe he is the target of her venom, Ormus feels physically endangered. He begins, involuntarily, to back away, and bumps into something hard in the dark. A rack of dresses falls to the floor, hangers clattering.