Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,91

Jocasta, eyes red-rimmed, went down to the front door. Peckenpaw stood as she opened it.

—The House of the Rising Son is open for business, said Madame Jocasta.

It was morning.

LII

NICHOLAS DEGGLE WAS sitting in the rocking-chair among the early chickens, as he had become accustomed to doing. He was thinking about the blinks.

Mrs O’Toole had apparently been entirely unaware of them. Perhaps her wayward mind simply denied their existence, as it denied the evidence of her eyes and enabled her to see and hear him as Virgil Jones. Nothing changes.

But, thought Deggle with a tinge of fear, there was another explanation. Grimus. Grimus had acquired this new, devastating power and was trying to get rid of him. Perhaps Deggle had been the only one affected.

Nicholas Deggle rocked between impotence and paranoia, back and forth. Dolores O’Toole came out of the hut holding a knife. Time to assassinate another chicken.

Dolores sat down on the ground. With the knife in her right hand, and with intense concentration, she slit the vein in her left wrist. Then she transferred the knife to that hand and set about slashing the right wrist, equally methodically. Only now did Deggle emerge from his shock and lunge at the knife. She avoided his grasp and held the blade against her neck.

—What do you think you’re doing, for godsake? he cried.

—Every night since we made love, she said. Every night you have refused me. It is obvious, Virgil, that you despise my body. I can’t live with you hating me so.

Blood spurted on to the ground, creating small specks of red mud.

What does one do to stop a vein bleeding? Deggle looked around him helplessly. —Bandages, he said aloud.

—Leave me alone, she said, and began to sing, weakly.

Whitebeard is all my joy

and whitebeard is my desire, she sang.

Nicholas Deggle pulled his shirt off, over his head. When he could see again, Dolores lay prone on the ground, a second, red mouth grinning bloodily from ear to ear, beneath her chin. She had finished what she set out to do.

Deggle, bare-chested, shirt in hand, watched the blood until it ceased to flow. This thought crossed his mind:

—It is I who will be alone.

The rocking-chair rocked in the early morning breeze.

LIII

THE GORF, BEING determined to see Calf Island through to the end, had taken refuge from Virgil Jones’ successful accusations in the ever stimulating spectator sport of observing other people’s lives.

Gorfs, though their bodies move only with great difficulty, can transport themselves instantly from place to place by a process of physical disintegration and reintegration, supervised by their disembodied Selves. Thus the Gorf had eavesdropped with Elfrida at the Elbaroom and sat in her garden watching as she and Irina and Flapping Eagle took turns upon the swing. He had peered through the windows of the Rising Son and watched the travellers depart. He had been intrigued by the blinks and a dispassionate witness to the suicide of Dolores O’Toole.

Now, awaiting the Final Ordering, he returned constantly to the contemplation of the basic anagram which had given rise to so much of the essence of Calf Island— the Re-Ordering which could be made of the name Grimus.

This anagram was Simurg.

The Gorf looked forward to the imminent clash of the Eagle, prince of earthly birds, and the Simurg, bird of paradise, wielder of the Stone Rose. He found it very pleasing that the names should contain these primordial symbols. It added spice.

PART THREE

GRIMUS

LIV

IT WAS DARK inside the small blackwashed house, a dark chill quiet. Shadows stood everywhere, insubstantial guards over the unseen ugliness. Outside, the shrouds of Calf Mountain’s summit hung over the house like a second, thundery ceiling, shielding it from the pale, mist-weak sunlight lying over the plains beneath. Liv’s home, blind and without foundation, stood blankly on the cheerless outcrop, its door firmly shut, the only sign of life a single donkey, tethered to the last tree of the climbing forest, munching at the forest’s long grass. A bird shrieked.

The unseen ugliness. Behind the shuttered windows lay a scene of cosmic chaos, the debris of a life wrestling and vying for floor-space. Dust lay thickly over the scattered books and plates. A piece of bread, invisible behind its crust of mould, lay on a broken hand-mirror and a spider etched its web between the two. Cloth, paper and crumb alike succumbed to the encasing envelope of dirt. And above the strewn floor, the carvings glared. Carvings which made their ancestors at the Rising Son seem, by comparison, effusions of