The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  In the sense of hoping for, I suppose. (Ormus is trying to be even-handed, trying not to take sides.) Maybe you’re seeing phantoms where none exist. Maybe she just has a more generous side than you’re willing to allow.

  Yeah. And maybe the moon is made of cheese, Standish surrenders to sarcasm. Hey, look. Up in the sky, above the Pheasantry. Wasn’t that a flying pig?

  Land, water, water, land. Time drips, floats, stretches, shrinks, passes. The story of the first record by Rhythm Center, its pirate provenance, Standish going from store to store around the country, begging, cajoling, threatening, begging some more: all this is well known. The song does well but not astoundingly well. Ormus’s nocturnal apostrophising of his lost love is catching on faster than his music. But Vina isn’t there. She lies over the ocean, she’s singing with Diana Ross at the Rainbow Room, she’s hanging out with Amos Voight and so on, and she hears nothing from her lovesick swain.

  There is the war and the protest against the war. A generation is learning how to march, how to riot, it is inventing the chants that turn groups of kids into armies that have the power to frighten the state. What do we want when do we want it. One two three four, two four six eight. Ho ho ho.

  The non-war news also feels high, spaced out, out of joint. In Spain a group of aristocrats has been unable to leave the grand salon of the urban mansion in which they recently enjoyed a sumptuous banquet. Nothing impedes them, yet they do not leave. At the gates of the compound in which the mansion stands, a similar invisible impediment prevents anyone from entering. Gawpers, the mansion’s domestic staff, the emergency services, press at the open gate but do not pass through. There is talk of a divine curse. Some claim to have heard the beating wings of the angel Azrael overhead. His dark shadow passes like a cloud.

  A Polish patriot, Zbigniew Cybulski, has been murdered in a back yard, amid sheets blowing from washing lines. Blood spread across a white sheet held against his midriff. A battered tin mug that fell from his hand has become a symbol of resistance. No: it is a holy relic, worthy of worship. Bow down.

  An American girl in Paris is becoming an object of reverence. There are those who call her the reincarnation of the armoured virgin, St. Joan. A cult is in the process of being born.

  These are not secular times. In the sphere of the secular all is bombs and death. Against which, it seems, sex and music may not be bulwarks enough.

  A great movie star has tragically died. She was in love with two friends, who told her that her face, her smile, put them in mind of an ancient carving. They quarrelled over her. At length, after lunch in a small café, she took one of the friends for a ride in her car and deliberately drove straight off the end of a washed-out bridge, into the water. Both of them were killed. The other man, still seated at the café table, watched his beloved and his friend vanish for ever.

  Not long before dying, the actress made a hit record, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Now the record is played constantly, the first French song to zoom up the British charts, paving the way for Françoise Hardy and others. Ormus, whose French is poor, strains to understand the lyrics.

  Everyone to his taste, turning, turning, in the whirlpool of life?

  Is that it?

  On board the Frederica, Ormus Cama notices that the sign on the wall in Eno’s cubicle has changed. Keep your distance. After that he makes a point of checking, and the changes continue. One week the sign says, Don’t get too close. Another, Mend no fences. Another, Love not that ye be not loved. Another, Fight that sweet tooth. Save more than your teeth. One message is long and in blank verse:

  May the gods save me from becoming

  a stateless refugee!

  Dragging out an intolerable life

  in desperate helplessness!

  That is the most pitiful of all griefs;

  death is better.

  Alis cracking up, Hawthorne Crossley says, Must be the sleep deprivation.

  Must be the hat, Waldo opines, Or is he, by any chance, illegal?

  If he was illegal they’d have closed us down by now, Hawthorne reasons.

  Ormus says nothing when he sees the long text. He understands that Eno is sending a message directly to him. He feels the hot sting of its criticism and tries to catch the engineer’s eye. But Eno seems far away.

  Many years will pass before Ormus Cama learns that the author of the long text is not Eno Barber but Euripides. The shorter texts, however, are Eno’s own.

  Mind your backs. Mind your heads. And these messages? Who are they for?

  At The Witch, too, Ormus is receiving messages. She still sometimes comes to his bed when the whim takes her. Dialogue being over, they do not speak. They greet, fuck, part in silence: the copulation of ghosts. But sometimes she, too, leaves him notes. Some are melancholy, opaque. If music could cure sorrow it would be precious. But no one thought of using songs and stringed instruments to banish the bitterness and pain of life. Most of the notes, however, are about Antoinette, whose dominant personality seems entirely to have subjugated She’s. Antoinette’s hard life and times. Disowned by her wealthy family for marrying the club-footed Standish, and then abandoned by the bastard with two small children and no income, she dragged herself out of the gutter by her own talents and round-the-clock work. She is a frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy of her will carry off an easy victory.

  The notes are confused. Sometimes they are fearful of Antoinette’s rage, at other times they praise her generous love. Towards Tommy Gin, with his vain tousle of carefully teased red hair, his floral waistcoats, his preening, his bigotry, She’s scribblings are unreservedly hostile. He thinks he invented her, he thinks he invented everything, the clothes, the music, the attitude, the protest marches, the peace sign, the women’s movement, Black is Beautiful, the drugs, the books, the magazines, the whole generation. I guess none of us would have anything in our heads if not for him, but in fact he’s not important, just an evil little shit who knows how to get himself noticed, but she’s a real artist, she doesn’t go in for all that crap, she creates beauty from the depths of her wounded soul, and you wait and see, she’ll break off with him any day now, she’ll cut him out completely, the Witch doesn’t need a Wizard, and once she’s dumped him he’ll just shrivel and die like a vampire in the sun. It seems that silent She has a lot of words locked up inside her, after all. Apollo is in there. Behind the black Dionysiac clouds enveloping this young woman, the sun god is struggling to release his light. It doesn’t take Ormus long to understand that She is deeply in love with her boss. Men may come and men may go but the two dark ladies, the large flamboyant one upstairs and the small wasted one sitting in the purple dark below, are in it for the duration.

  Distracted by this realization, Ormus perhaps fails to grasp what he is being told, on land by She, at sea by Eno Barber. That there is danger here, coming steadily closer. That the earth is beginning to tremble. Like most protagonists he is deaf to the warnings of the chorus. Even when he dreams a terrible dream—the boys tumbling down the maisonette stairs with the tops of their heads exploded, standing open like burst cans of beans—he attaches no weight to the portent. He is trying to keep a lid on his visionary tendency, in this milieu of cabbalistic nonsense he is making an effort to shun omens and keep a grip on the actual, to concentrate on the music and stand firm upon the dailiness of English life.

  To hold on to the elation, the joy he brought with him, the idea of renewal.

  His thoughts turn more and more towards Vina. The Vina that exists only in his imagination, whom he knows more intimately than any living being, is being confronted on the stage of that same imagination by another Vina, her adult self, her unknown twin. Life has happened to her and turned her into a stranger. New life, and the eternal haunting of the past. The dead family, the slaughtered goats, the murdering mother hanged in the loafing shed. Piloo, Chickaboom, those too, but above all the dead, pendant mother, and Nissy sitting with her, calling nobody, fearing that this present foretells her futu
re. The dangling ankles, the long bare calves are the image of her own.

  Ormus’s old fears creep back; he imagines Vina looking him blankly in the eye, saying, No, that’s the past, and walking off into some alien sunset, leaving his life emptied of meaning. But such dark fancies fail to overpower him. He is filled with light, radiant with possibility. He hit bottom at the Cosmic Dancer and it showed him the way up. Now he is soaring towards the skies, none of his argosies shall fail, and at the appropriate moment he will find her, take her hand, and they will fly together over the bright glow of Metropolis at night. Like fairies, like long-tailed comets. Like stars. That’s his story, the one he’s written for himself, to which reality has no option but to conform.

  But at present he’s caught up in another story. They say another galaxy is presently invading the Milky Way, swirling its otherness into our familiar neighbourhood, bringing its story into ours. It’s small, we’re (relatively) big; we’ll pull it to pieces, destroy its suns, rip its atoms up. So long, small galaxy, goodbye baby and amen.

  Ormus’s story and the story of The Witch Flies High are swirled together now. Which will pull the other apart?

  Even worse: will they turn out to be the same story after all?

  I’ve been thinking about what you might call the Medea issue. A witchy lady, Ms. Corinth, undeniably; with sons, and a deserter father too. Can’t deny the similarities, especially as Antoinette has chosen to play them up, abandoning “Crossley” for “Corinth.” What is she trying to do, scare people? Or just Mull Standish? Is she genuinely capable of tragedy, of going so far beyond the frontiers of motherhood and sanity that her deeds acquire the stature of destiny? Is she fated? Ormus, who at first found her malevolent, has come to think of her as half posturing phoney, half lunatic-fringista, more insubstantial than shady, a designer witch, using numerology to help her pick her lovers, using occult signs not to conjure devils but only to decorate the busts of her nightmare-black baby-doll dresses. Unlike the no te-writers—She, Eno—he isn’t buying. And the two silent scribblers, after all, are individuals whose own dysfunctionality erodes their credibility as analysts. Ormus Cama, finally, cannot believe that he has walked on to the stage of some fearsome contemporary goat song. Antoinette Corinth cannot, will not, be responsible for his fate.

  We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They—we—are capable of being much more than we seem. Many of us are able to answer life’s darkest questions. We just don’t know if we can come up with the answers to the riddles until we’re asked.

  There will be a tragedy. Antoinette Corinth will not be held responsible.

  Mull Standish perseveres with his wooing of his children, and Hawthorne and Waldo slowly respond. As the cycles of their pirate world accumulate into a year, then two, his sons’ bantering treatment of him acquires a quality of genuine affection. There are loving gestures: an arm around a shoulder, a playful, filial punch to the cheek that opens out, at the last instant, into a brief stroking gesture of the fingertips. The needs of blood draw them close. The day comes when one of them—Waldo, inevitably, the less defended personality of the pair—accidentally calls Standish “Dad,” and even though Hawthorne subjects him to prolonged abuse for this gaffe, Standish is moved to tears. And Hawthorne isn’t really cross. “Dad” feels like the right word, even to him. After all these years.

  Adversity helps, of course. Laws are being passed that will close the pirates down. The weather, which once scattered and wrecked the Spanish Armada, has not dealt kindly with Standish’s pirate fleet. These are old tubs, and they leak. Batter them with storms and they threaten to break. There are growing problems of insurance, and the boats are, beyond a doubt, dangerous.

  There is a new terrestrial station, Radio 1. It steals many of Standish’s most talented broadcasters. His ships begin to shut up shop, one by one. Soon there is only Radio Freddie, the first to start broadcasting and the last to remain.

  The Frederica, rusting, knows her time of rest cannot be far removed.

  Rhythm Center, Ormus’s first band, has had a series of small successes, making the Fifty, seeming never to reach the modest plenty of the Forty. In part the failure to make a real breakthrough is because the band plays no live gigs, it being Standish’s view that the club audience wouldn’t “buy” them. His strategy is to keep it mysterious, build a cult, an underground groundswell. There are also the difficulties associated with recording on a small independent label, Standish’s own Mayflower franchise: the distribution problems, the limited promotional budgets. The death is reported of the American DJ Alan Freed, who has finally drunk himself into an early grave after giving currency to the word “payola,” that’s pay plus Victrola. Freed is dead but the practice of accepting bribes to play records is not, and Mull Standish may be rich but he can’t go up against the big boys in this bidding war. His pirates will play Rhythm Center’s 45s but the other pirates won’t. And the BBC, well, nobody ever proved a corruption charge against the BBC, but Ormus hasn’t made their playlist, either. In spite of his reasonable success. The BBC makes its own decisions, it isn’t led by the common herd. What, they should let the kids decide what they put on the air? Please.

  Outside England, forget it, no dice. No pay, no play. Vina is in America but Ormus’s voice is trapped on the other side of the Atlantic. She can’t hear his plea.

  The songs themselves are the real problem. Something unreconciled in the writing. There are too many people inside Ormus, a whole band is gathered within his frontiers, playing different instruments, creating different music, and he hasn’t yet discovered how to bring them under control: the lover yearning for his vanished love, swooning for Vina into the North Sea night; and the dreaming eavesdropper following his dead twin brother who sings him the songs of the future; and the simple rock ’n’ roller in love with a banging-heartbeat beat; and the impish comic penning ironic faux-country odes to bread; and the angry moralist railing against the addle-brained age, its fakeola, its fuddled death wish; and finally, the reluctant visionary who is given glimpses of another possible universe, glimpses he would prefer not to see.

  He hasn’t fully grasped how to make of multiplicity an accumulating strength rather than a frittery weakness. How the many selves can be, in song, a single multitude. Not a cacophony but an orchestra, a choir, a dazzling plural voice. He worries, as Standish does, about being too old; hasn’t understood that this can be set aside, rendered irrelevant. In short, he is still trying to settle on the one true line to follow. Still looking for ground to stand on, for the hard centre of his art.

  The crucial change comes, as all true Ormus fans will readily know, in mid-1967, in a recording studio in a Bayswater backwater, behind the Whiteleys department store. The story of the recording of Ormus Cama’s song “It Shouldn’t Be This Way,” and of the subsequent three-year delay in its commercial release, has been told so often that it barely needs repeating. The popularly known version of the event is broadly true, and even if it weren’t, the advice of the Wild West newspaper editor is well worth taking.

  If the facts don’t fit the legend, print the legend.

  Mull Standish is waiting by the mixing desk when Ormus arrives, looking grim. Okay, I’m ready, he says. Get rid of the musicians.

  Standish stiffens, grows very still. All of them? he asks.

  Every last one, assents Ormus, flopping down on a squashy corner seating unit and closing his eyes. And wake me when they’ve gone, he adds.

  Now Rhythm Center is Ormus and only Ormus. He’s alone in the studio with guitars, keyboards, drums, horns, woodwinds, a big bass, an early Moog synthesizer. He sits down behind the drums and starts to play.

  What, you’re going to play them all, the sound mixer wants to know. What am I supposed to do, I’m on four-track here.

  (Who is this guy, he means. This is the real world here, feller; sixteen-track, thirty-two-track, forty-eight-track recording tape, that’s fantasy-land, it’s the future, and this in front
of me it’s just a mixing desk, ain’t got no time machine.)

  We’ll just have to bounce the tracks down as we go, Ormus snarls. Something’s got into him today It’s not a good idea to argue.

  Bounce them down, the engineer says. Sure, why not.

  Bouncing down is what you do when you need to keep tracks free. You mix together two tracks and transfer the mixed sound to a third track. Then you can re-use the first two tracks to record two more parts of the music and you bounce these down to the free fourth track. Now you’ve got two tracks containing mixes of two tracks each. If you’ve still got a lot of parts to record, you can bounce these two tracks down into one, giving you a single track with four parts on it and three free tracks.

  And so on.

  The problem is that once you’ve done this you can never separate the tracks again. The mix you make is what you’re stuck with. You can’t pull the music apart and play with it any more. You’re making final, irrevocable decisions as you go. It’s a recipe for disaster, unless the person doing it is a genius.

  Ormus Cama is a genius.

  Each time he lays down a track—he can play every instrument in the studio better than the sessions guys he’s just fired—he comes into the booth, lies down on the seating unit, closes his eyes. The sound mixer moves his slides, turns his dials, and Ormus directs him until the music coming out of the speakers is the secret music in his head. Pull these up, push those back, he says. Bring this in here, fade that away there. Okay, it’s okay. That’s it. Don’t change a thing. Go.

  You’re sure, now, the mixer says. Because this is it. No turning back.

  Bouncey bouncey, Ormus grins, and the mixer laughs and sings back at him.

  And like a rubber ball I come bouncing back to you.

  The sound grows, becomes fat, exciting. The mixer’s a big unfazeable guy, he’s getting paid, what’s to worry. He’s good at what he does, he’s worked with everyone, he doesn’t get impressed. But look at this, his shoulders are going, boom, to the music, dip, to the beat. This Indian bloke running in and out of the studio, blowing a horn, mixing it in, bouncing it down, then strings, then a bubbling electro beat, he’s got the ear, he’s got the chops.