The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Bouncey bouncey!

  It’s time to sing. But you’re not here to put it right, And you’re not here to hold me tight. It shouldn’t be this way.

  When it’s done, the mixer stands up and holds out a huge paw. I wish you all the best with your song, he says. I’ve had a good day today.

  Ormus stands toe-to-toe with Mull Standish. The rage is still on him.

  So, he asks, quietly, furiously. Am I ready or what?

  Standish nods. You’re ready.

  But this famous scene is the aftermath of a scene people don’t talk about:

  On the last night of Radio Freddie, at the emotional closing-down ceremony aboard the erstwhile ferryboat, Cap’n Pugwash and his fellow pirates are moved to tears on behalf of their beloved rusting tub. Listen, Pugwash keens, as if speaking by the bedside of a dying lover, you lot are only going off the air, but she’s going off the water, the poor old girl. Yes, it’s the knacker’s yard for the Frederica, and nothing to be done about it but drink.

  Much is imbibed. Eno Barber sits behind his glass window with a bottle of rum. The sign on the wall behind him reads, Go away. Hawthorne and Waldo sing schoolboy rugby songs. This amazing loss of cool passes unnoticed in the general stupor, and actually endears them to the Pugwash bunch, which joins in lustily. Dinah Dinah show us your leg, a yard above your knee. If I were the marrying kind which thank the Lord I’m not sir. Ugly, boastful, male, ultimately innocent songs.

  Ormus confronts Mull on deck. They’re both drunk. Mull steadies himself against the movement of the boat by putting a hand on Ormus’s shoulder. The singer pushes it away, and Mull staggers briefly, then gathers himself. You bastard, Ormus tells his friend, you’ve been holding me back. Two fucking years. What am I supposed to do? How long am I supposed to wait? Optimism is the fuel of art, and ecstasy, and elation, and the supply of these commodities is not endless. Maybe you don’t want me to make it. You want me to stay small-time, not even a has-been but a never-was, beholden to you, a hanger-on, a fly in your goddamn web.

  Mull Standish keeps his temper. It’s true, he says, mildly. I haven’t pushed you as I might. My small indie label, et cetera. You call that holding you back, then okay, I held you back. I’m holding you back because if I let you go now you’ll fail, you’ll fall to earth. You haven’t found the courage to fly. Maybe you won’t. The problem is not technical. You’re worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls. Maybe you’re just a no-balls eunuch and you’ll sleep on a mattress at The Witch for the rest of your eunuch life.

  The boat sways and so do they. Ormus Cama is being given a great gift. Words are being said which will oblige him to face the issue of himself.

  Whatever you want to say about yourself is fine with me, Standish says. You say you’ve got a dead twin in your head who’s listening to the chart-toppers of tomorrow, I could care less. You talk about visions, baby, I say follow that star all the way to Bethlehem and check out the kid in the manger. The trouble is you’re running away from it all, there’s too much of you missing from your music. You’re phoning it in. People notice. I tell you what, just fuck off, why don’t you. What I see is potential that is not being realized. This as an investor I do not care for. What I know is that music comes out of the self, the self as given, the self in itself. Le soi en soi. The silk in silk, as we used to say in my punning Francophone youth.

  Standish is breathing heavily now. His entire being is crackling at the edges of his body. St. Elmo’s fire; like that. Because he loves this man, he’s straining at his physical frontiers to show him the way. Is it Vina you need, he roars. Then find her. Don’t whine into a radio mike on a broken-down boat. Find her and sing her your songs. What’s the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where’s the nearest edge? Jump off it. Enough already! I’ve said my piece. When you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, give me a call.

  Loud singing explodes from the cabin. I’ll come again, you’ll come again, we’ll both come again together. We’ll be all right in the middle of the night, coming again together.

  A week passes and then Ormus calls.

  Set it up. I’m ready. Set it up.

  And later, at the end of the recording session, when they have the precious tape, they’re standing toe-to-toe, uncertain whether to fight or kiss.

  What I want the music to say is that I don’t have to choose, Ormus finally speaks up. I need it to show that I don’t have to be this guy or that guy, the fellow from over there or the fellow from here, the person within me that I call my twin, or whoever’s out there in whatever it is I get flashes of beyond the sky; or just the man standing in front of you right now. I’ll be all of them, I can do that. Here comes everybody, right? That’s where it came from, the idea of playing all the instruments. It was to prove that point. You were wrong when you said the problem wasn’t technical. The solutions to the problems of art are always technical. Meaning is technical. So is heart.

  Technically, then, says Mull Standish, I shouldn’t lay a hand on you, because I promised, but now you’ve made me a happy man, would you allow me a hug?

  The release of this song will bring Vina Apsara back to him at last. It will mark the beginning of their almost frighteningly totemic celebrity. And it will not happen for over three years.

  The happiness of Mull Standish (with Ormus, with his sons) is what Antoinette has been waiting for. What she means by this, and whether she is to blame for what is soon to follow, the reader must presently judge.

  A few weeks go by. Then, in the maisonette above The Witch:

  It must be a Saturday, and it’s only around noon, so naturally nobody is up, and the shop’s shut. The doorbell—the maisonette’s bell, not the shop’s—rings for such a long time that, leaving She semi-conscious on the mattress, her face dusted lightly with ash, Ormus struggles into a pair of red crushed-velvet flares and staggers downstairs to the door.

  On the doorstep is an alien: a man in business suit and matching moustache, with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a copy of a glossy magazine open at the page on which a model is wearing one of The Witch’s latest offerings.

  Good afternoon, says the alien, in excellent English. I have a chain of shops in Yorkshire and Lancashire …

  She, naked beneath a hopelessly inadequate dressing gown, cigarette dripping from her lips, weaves down the stairs with a hand in her hair. The alien turns puce and his eyes start sliding around. Ormus retreats.

  Yeah? enquires She.

  Good afternoon, the alien tries again, although his English is giving him difficulty all of a sudden. I have a chain of shops in Yorkshire and Lancashire selling ladies’ fashions, and I am most interested in this particular garment as featured here. With whom would I speak with a view to placing a first order for six dozen items, with an option to repeat?

  It is the biggest order The Witch has ever had. Halfway up the stairs now, the imposing, black-and-gold-caftanned figure of Antoinette Corinth materialises. Impossible to know her thoughts. Ormus fancies he feels a tingle in the air, the sense of having arrived at a turning point. The alien waits patiently while She considers matters. Then, with great deliberation, the manageress nods a few times, slowly. Fashionably.

  We’re closed, man, she says, and shuts the door.

  Antoinette Corinth comes down and kisses She on the mouth. After which, still in Antoinette’s arms, She turns to Ormus and, most unusually, speaks further words.

  A fucking artist, she says. This beautiful woman.

  At this point the doorbell rings again. She turns and goes back upstairs, this time with Antoinette. She is plainly not planning to return to Ormus’s humble mattress. The cushions and silks, the exotic markings and draperies of Antoinette’s lair await her. Ormus stands and looks at the closed door.

  Again, the bell. He opens the door.

  On the doorstep, holding a wickerwork hamper that contains a selection of the finest leavened breads money can buy, is the overlo
rd of the Colchis label, the blind recording angel himself, Yul Singh; and behind him, a limousine half as long as the street.

  You see, Mr. Cama. You see before you. Now that you’re ready, which I have to say I congratulate you, I didn’t expect it, but I heard your tape from your man Mr. Standish who allow me to say you found yourself a good one there, and having ears to hear I have heard what I have heard, so as it turns out it was not required for you to seek me out, which as I remember I advised you on no account to do. As things transpire which I don’t mind saying it’s a funny old world, and so Mr. Cama with your permission it is I who have come to you.

  “Lorelei,” from the first VTO album, the self-titled VTO (Colchis, 1971):

  Certain shapes pursue me, I cannot shake them from my heel. Certain people haunt me, in their faces I will find the things I feel. Uncertain fate it daunts me, but I’m gonna have to live with that raw deal. No authority’s vested in me, on what’s good or bad or make-believe or even real. But I’m just saying what I see, because the truth can set you free, and even if it hasn’t done too much for me, well, I still hope it will.

  And I can feel your love, Lorelei. Yes, I can feel your love pour on me. Oh I can feel your love, Lorelei.

  • • •

  In the summer of 1967, Ormus takes a drive in the country one weekend afternoon with his good friends Hawthorne and Waldo Crossley, in Hawthorne’s Mini Cooper S (with Radford conversion), to celebrate his recording contract with Colchis Records. Antoinette Corinth, in an unusual display of maternal affection, insists on packing them a picnic lunch. A thermos of tea, and sandwiches.

  I’m so delighted for you, she says to Ormus, magnanimously. And what with your success and the boys taking to him at last, I’m glad for Mull as well. I can’t imagine he’s ever been happier. Not a cloud on his horizon. Blue skies ahead as far as the eye can see. Bye, darlings, darlings. Have a lovely day.

  At first things go swimmingly. They pass a troupe of white-faced mimes in a park playing slow-motion tennis without a ball, and they stop for a while, sipping tea from the hot thermos, to watch the intensely contested game. Their topics of conversation are diverse. They touch on the suicide of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein; and the American race riots; and Cassius Clay’s refusal to fight in Indochina, the stripping of his title and his transformation into Muhammad Ali; and even the musique concrète of Stockhausen. But mostly they talk about driving down to the anti-war music festival taking place at Woburn Abbey, in spite of the widespread fear of violence. Troops as well as armed and mounted police have massed on the outskirts of the Woburn estate, and government spokesmen are warning the musicians and the crowd to avoid inflammatory or seditious behaviour. In response, many musicians have vowed to be as seditious as possible. There are rumours of possible gas attacks, even of the use of automatic weapons.

  (The national mood is so ugly that when a daily newspaper, reacting to the growing hippie phenomenon but failing to connect its message of peace to the overwhelming fact of the war, describes the season as a “summer of love,” it comes across as a risible piece of government propaganda.)

  However, the catastrophe, when it comes, has nothing to do with the protest movement or the forces ranged against it. Ormus Cama is a known opponent of the Wilson government’s decision to involve British troops in Indochina—why do Labour leaders always have to prove they have the balls for war?—but he is not stopped at any army barricade, nor is he the subject of a charge of mounties.

  What happens is apolitical: a traffic accident.

  Hawthorne Crossley is behind the wheel, perhaps driving too fast, certainly losing concentration and seemingly overtired and erratic; and in a sleepy English village off the Ml the Mini Cooper collides with a large heavy-goods vehicle carrying a weighty and odorous cargo of agricultural fertiliser. Hawthorne Crossley is killed outright, Waldo suffers head injuries which cause irreparable damage to his brain, while Ormus, in the back of the car, is also gravely injured. Ordure covers everything. The emergency services have to dig down to them through a little hill of excrement. A rendezvous with a truckload of shit: it would be funny, if it were not so unfunny.

  Ormus is in the back seat of the car. He closes his eyes for an instant because alternative universes have begun to spiral out from his eyeballs in rainbow-coloured corkscrews of otherness that fill him with terror, and because he does not know about the impurities in the thermos of tea he thinks he’s producing the hallucination all by himself. So he clenches his lids against the twin exfoliating beanstalks of the vision and when he opens them again all the world is truck. The improbably loud drag of metal against metal. The ticking of the seconds slowed down until they sound like the doomy muffled beats of a funeral drum. When you hit a big truck in a small vehicle, he remembers from somewhere, the greatest danger is that you will be sucked underneath it and decapitated or at least crushed. Heavy metal with its wall of sound goes on sliding past. They bounce off the truck’s rear wheel arch, spin, hit something else, a house or a tree, and stop. Nobody’s wearing a seat belt. Ormus, tumbling dreadfully in the confined space of the car, glimpses rag-doll Waldo lolling in the front passenger seat with his mouth open; and then the driver, Hawthorne Crossley, floats into view, heading wide-eyed for the windscreen. Hawthorne exhales violently, like a madman’s laugh, hahaaa, and Ormus sees a little white cloud fly out of his mouth and hang there for a moment, like a speech bubble; and disperse. Then like an underwater swimmer reaching the surface Hawthorne’s head breaks the windscreen and passes through it and that’s that. When Ormus is able to remember things he will remember this as the moment he saw Hawthorne’s life leave his body, and what does that mean, does it mean there is a spirit after all, a soul that’s in the flesh but not of it, a ghost in the soft machine. That will be a thing for him to wrestle with at another time, but right now all wrestling has to stop, because something hard has punched him, like a fist, in the left eye.

  Time accelerates as they decelerate. Fertiliser pours down. He nothing knows.

  This is what is reported. The casualties are taken to a nearby cottage hospital. Ormus’s American manager, a “hobbling, Svengali-like figure,” Mr. Mull Standish, arrives soon afterwards, together with the record company boss Yul Singh, expensively accoutred in a navy-blue suit, Ray Charles shades and black leather gloves, and accompanied, Piloo Doodhwala fashion, by an entourage of aides and bodyguards. Standish, utterly demolished by the fate of his sons, sobs helplessly by their hospital beds; it’s reportedly Yul Singh’s team of Sikhs who spirit the singer away through a back exit, in spite of his serious wounds and fractures, and remove him to a secret location where he will be given private care. Ormus is reported to be holed up in a village in the Welsh borders, or in the Scottish highlands, or suburban Essex. There are sightings in Paris and Switzerland; in Venice (the masked carnival) and Rio de Janeiro (where he dances, again in the carnival, amid the small-breasted and ample-buttocked women beloved of Brazilian men); in Flagstaff, Arizona, and don’t forget Winona—he’s getting his kicks on Route 66. He is said to be horribly disfigured; it is rumoured that his vocal cords have been severed; a “definitive” investigation in a Sunday newspaper reveals that he has given up his life as a musician for ever, converted to Islam and joined an obscure sect of devotees—the “Cats of Allah”—based, improbably, in the heart of the Jewish community of Hampstead Garden Suburb. The most persistent rumour is that he is lying, deeply comatose, in a top-secret intensive care unit, isolated in a glass case like Snow White asleep in her coffin.

  For three and a quarter years, Ormus will remain in sequestration, far from the public eye. Neither his record label, Colchis, nor his personal representatives at Mull Standish’s Mayflower Management offices, will issue any statements.

  Stories circulate, and there’s no point in arguing with them. Parts of them are accurate enough, except for the bizarre worldwide sightings of the suddenly invisible man, whose disappearance—there is no escape from these bitter ironies—pro
pels him from third-rate popster status to a condition of considerable renown. The longer he stays invisible, the greater grows his fame. A cult develops, whose adherents believe that Ormus Cama will awake to lead them out of these troubled times, beyond our vale of tears to redemption. Reissues of his Mayflower records, as well as bootleg recordings of his early Bombay performances, begin to circulate and sell; a legend grows. People, being people, begin to speak cynically of a publicity stunt. Yul Singh is well known as a wily bird, and Standish, though less known, is no less wily.

  The coma story, however, is true. Ormus is not dead but sleeping.

  The speculation grows so intense that the human dimension of the tragedy is almost completely obliterated. The people involved cease to be thought of as living, feeling beings; they become abstract, pieces in a riddle, a heartless game. They become empty vessels into which public speculation can be poured.

  Certain facts do not come to light. Yul Singh and his inner circle at Colchis work to suppress them, and ironically the cloud of conjectures actually helps.

  In the bloodstream of the Crossley brothers, and that of Ormus Cama too, doctors have found dangerously high levels of the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide 25. These medical reports do not become public knowledge, however. Nor does any police action follow from them.

  In the wreckage of the Mini Cooper, a thermos flask has been found. Somehow, this flask is not retained in police possession, or subjected to any kind of examination by the authorities. For some reason it is given into the hands of a “family friend.” The friend never resurfaces. Nor does the flask.

  There is therefore no proof that there was any sugar in the tea.

  • • •

  A man’s worth reveals itself in the hour of his greatest adversity. What is our value when the chips are down? Do we merely flatter to deceive, or are we the real thing, the stuff of alchemists’ dreams? These, too, are questions to which most of us, mercifully, are never required to supply answers.