Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 3

  So Salman decides to save him. One evening at the time they would normally meet for cocktails on the veranda of their safe house, Salman emerges from his bulletproof room and announces he will be unable to join Tommy John at dinner. ‘Tell Cookie to bring it to my room, would you? Just lay the tray outside the door and knock softly once. I will be writing.’

  ‘But I thought you couldn’t write in this hellhole.’

  ‘I have found a need.’ He spins on his heel, his Hawaiian shirt flaring at its hem, and makes for his room, heavy purpose in his tread. Tommy John feels a thrill of excitement at Salman’s obvious resolve. He might be present at an important moment in literary history. He might be the only witness to a modern great penning a magnum opus. Or at least a minor classic. The way Salman strode to his room it couldn’t be less.

  He stays in his bulletproof room a week. Meals are delivered, scraps taken away. Tommy John creeps around the house not wanting to break Salman’s concentration. Not wanting to be a modern incarnation of the mysterious ‘person from Porlock’, so reviled by poetic types, who ruined Coleridge’s creative flow while he was writing Kubla Khan. He upbraids the bodyguards for the tolling of the dumbbells in the cellar. He shakes his fist silently at the sulphur-crested cockatoos screaming outside in the Norfolk Island pines. He wheels the rubbish bins up to the end of the lane that the rumbling truck need not drive in and destroy Salman’s invaluable solitude.

  On the eighth day Salman emerges from his room. Still in his Hawaiian shirt with his hair standing and his eyes rimmed darkly with fatigue, looking decidedly unwell, spent. A husk, with life’s vital juices ejaculated vainly at sprites and faeries, he resembles one of those desert rodents that fornicates right through ecstasy and on into cardiac arrest and untimely death. The writer in his glory.

  My God, Tommy John thinks, no wonder this guy rings the bell. Look what he puts himself through. He leads a shuffling Salman over to a chair, bids him sit and makes him a mojito. ‘You okay, man? Do we have, like, a doctor on call here in the old safe house?’

  ‘I’m fine. Here,’ Salman’s voice is thin. He hands Tommy John a yellow envelope. ‘Give this to my bodyguard. Tell him to get it to my agent. Tell him to tell her “Rolling Stone”. I think your enemies probably take Rolling Stone.’

  Thus the cover of next month’s Rolling Stone is taken up by a black silhouette of a fluffy-haired individual holding a book and a quill. Beneath it headlines explain: ‘From The Twilight Zone of Exile … Salman Rushdie Writes for Rolling Stone. His New Story: Night of the Eurobeaver. Salman, revitalised now, not having written for weeks, hands Tommy John the magazine at breakfast. ‘Your Eurobeaver turns out to be a bit of a cad.’ Tommy John takes the magazine down onto the beach with his toast and begins to read.

  To say that the Eurobeaver turns out to be a bit of a cad is tantamount to saying Hitler turns out to be a bit of a Nazi. In fact, Salman’s Eurobeaver resembles the Fuhrer because the story is an allegory of the rise of Nazism. In it Salman’s Eurobeaver is a vicious gangster. A malicious, greedy little arsehole brandishing a three-hundred-page treatise of its own species’ supremacy with additional chapters reproving the wickedness of the mink. The Eurobeaver uses the polar bear as muscle to round up, incarcerate and milk the mink, making a particularly fishy cheese from the milk which it uses to lure seals into steel-jawed traps, feeding them to the polar bears. Hence the hired muscle is paid off with the cadavers of the conquered.

  Salman works the narrative so that at one point it is written in the first-person voice of the Eurobeaver himself. A voice so full of insidious suggestion that the readers find their flesh puckering into goosebumps even on the beach on a summer’s day. ‘Minks is merely slinky skunks,’ the Eurobeaver says at one point. The Eurobeaver exterminates the mink before turning its evil eye to little girls with pigtails and long socks … until, in a flip of narrative, Tommy John steps into the story and debunks the Eurobeaver into non-existence and never-wasness and paints pop-drink slogans on those white-pelted thugs from the far north.

  A brilliant narrative trick. The Eurobeavers and their white bears, who were on the verge of total victory against the pigtailed girls, are defeated by Tommy John’s debunking of the one and his collaboration with the advertising industry in the branding of the other. The story ends with pigtailed girls linking hands with grinning mink and dancing the world’s biggest ever ‘Ring around the Rosie’ in Central Park. Delightful. And Tommy John is a kind of war hero.

  When he finishes reading the story Tommy John feels so uplifted, so free, so good about himself, sitting there in the sand of X beach, he lays down the magazine and grips his thighs in his hands and flexes them, left thigh, then right, then left thigh, then right. He bunches his calves and takes hold of them. Rock solid. ‘Yeah,’ he whispers. ‘Yeah. Good legs. Gooood legs.’

  After this first thrill of happiness he contemplates what Salman has done for him. The beauty of Salman’s act. And he begins to cry, the Bay of X blurring in his vision. He climbs the steps back to the house and finds Salman sitting in a deckchair overlooking the water. He goes to him. ‘Oh, Salman. Salman … man-oh-man, Salman,’ he says, picking up the magic hand that held the pen that wrote the story, squeezing it, kissing it.

  Shortly after Rolling Stone publishes ‘Night of the Eurobeaver’ the San Francisco headquarters of the Cult of the Eurobeaver is firebombed by peaceniks, and the cult members, fleeing in their rainbow-striped skivvies, are filmed by news crews and jeered at by drinkers in every bar across America.

  In India and Pakistan they burn the Eurobeaver in many various effigies, because many various subspecies of the animal have sprung up, each adhering to a different cartoonist’s likeness of the beast.

  In Germany support of the Eurobeaver is declared a hate crime, and though the neo-Nazis in that country have not been tempted to don the rainbow-striped skivvy in imitation of the beast, its wearing is outlawed alongside the flying of the swastika.

  In a warehouse in Punchbowl in Sydney’s west the Warbling Boyos of Punchbowl, a homosexual choir who had constructed a twenty-metre-high float resembling a smirking, limp-wristed Eurobeaver for the gay mardi gras, torch the beast. Being built of lacquer-infused particle-board it burns like stink and razes the shed and an adjoining house and the Warbling Boyos of Punchbowl are arrested and charged with arson, which, even given the gravity of their situation, makes them titter.

  Tommy John is standing by his suitcase looking at Salman and then looking away at the waves on the Bay of X and then looking back at Salman, his face jittering on the brink of some brotherly pronouncement.

  ‘I wish I could do the same for you, man. I wish I could write a story that would set you free. Goddamned Ayatollah.’

  ‘Don’t be sad for me, Tommy John. I’m happy knowing my pen is powerful enough to set you free. I hope one day yours might be similarly empowered.’

  Tommy John smiles at him. ‘You conceited old prick. You think you’re the only one can free a man with his pen? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’m gonna make you a hero in a big, fascinating story full of irony and twists.’ Salman laughs, suspecting he will resemble Don Quixote. Tommy John hugs him and whispers, ‘Thank you, man.’ They are sad to leave each other, for they know they will not meet again.

  Back at his old alma mater, Columbia University, Tommy John sits in his study trying to think up a story to end Salman’s fatwa. Finally, he writes a tale called ‘And Fatwa For All’ in which a university undergraduate friend of Salman starts up a website called And Fatwa For All and posts a statement on it claiming to be a co-author, unacknowledged until now, of The Satanic Verses. The university kid invites other co-authors to come forward. And millions of freedom-loving people log on to the website and sign the kid’s statement, all claiming to be co-authors of the offending novel. It starts in New York, then England catches on, then France; all the traditional homes of civil liberties. Until a billion people in the West have signed a statement claiming to be have helped write th
e book and denouncing Salman as a mean-spirited hoodlum for not giving them co-authorship credits.

  The kid in the story figures that the Ayatollah will have no choice now but to place a fatwa on the whole billion souls, the whole West, and then Salman will be in no more trouble than anyone else and the fatuousness of the fatwa will be exposed. This punitive priest pronouncing death on the West! A poodle snapping at a lion through a fence.

  Quite frankly, Tommy John has written ‘And Fatwa For All’ while wearing rose-coloured glasses. It is a hopelessly fantastical and optimistic piece. But as he is a Contributing Editor of Tablet, the Columbia University literary magazine, it gets published with front-page billing. And he is expelled forthwith from Columbia University because it is an institution with Tolerance writ into its charter and it fully supports a religion’s right not to be defamed and a university’s right not to be razed to the ground.

  Tommy John flips the bird to Columbia U while walking backward out the gate. He so doesn’t need a tertiary education. As the hero in a famous allegorical story, in which he defeated fascism, he is seen as a pivotal intellect in the fight against absolutisms of every kind and is in demand as a keynote speaker on campuses and at conventions across the USA. He refuses, on principle, to speak at Columbia.

  Salman lives, still, in the twilight zone of fatwa. It is, at least, a wonderful silence in which to write. He is sometimes visited by friends. And is happy to read in the newspapers they bring him that Tommy John is working double bills with Clinton and Gorbachev and Mandela. He is happy Tommy John defeated the Eurobeaver. Not so happy about the polar bear.

  Lick it, lizard bitch.

  ‘Of course, one wishes to visit every type of indignity on a fat man. Not a sane inhabitant of London but wouldn’t rather bait a fat man than a bear.’

  Lord Byron

  Here he is now. On the beach. A fat man in Speedos slumbering in a deckchair. Not to be unkind – a pale hillock of blubber rising from the striped canvas, corrugated with waves of snore, grunt and belch. His hands dangle in the sand, twitching like those of a gunfighter.

  This fat man is smiling and he calls out in his dreams periodically, which causes the people around him on their towels to laugh silently through their noses and look away from each other. ‘Oh, you will, will you?’ he shouts. ‘I said let her go …’ he shouts. ‘Say what, bro?’ he shouts. Evidently he is a heroic figure in this dream, saving a blonde with a boob-job from heavy dudes who have mistaken her for a slut. Surely he is slimmer, probably chiselled. The slight smile on his sleeping face shows he is happy cast as the nemesis of turds and felons. The Lebanese have been much in the news lately as potential terrorists and ungrateful Australians, so probably a Leb or two will be trounced. Then perhaps a small chapter of Hells Angel, before a palate-cleanser of punks and skinheads. ‘Eight of you? I will stand, then,’ he shouts. The surrounding sunbathers, who have followed the general narrative of this dream, clamp down on their laughter and stare into the weave of their towels.

  Then a dog. For the dog has revealed man a buffoon and been happily apprenticed to him even more often than has the horse or the woman. This dog, a short-legged, brown, whiskery-snouted opportunist, comes wandering, sniffing along the beach. Our fat man has, an hour before, choked a souvlaki in each hand until his knuckles have run with their lifeblood, and those hands now dangle aromatically in the sand. The dog, nose ratcheting him onward, circles the fat man twice before moving in and giving his hand a tentative lick, which causes the fat man to laugh and thus the people around him to laugh. The dog jumps back when the fat man laughs. He tilts his head and watches awhile, but the aroma draws him in once more to lick the fat man’s hand. This time the fat man grins and says, ‘Aha …’ as if he knew it would get to this.

  It always does get to this. This is a warrior’s reward. Having trounced the heavy dudes of his dreams and won the heart and affiliated organs of the boob-job blonde, the fat man is entering a more erotic dreamscape now. He is about to be basted with the gratitude of the maiden he has saved, and the dog licking his hand adds a thrilling reality to the dream. The blonde is suddenly harrying him with a tongue as fast as a gecko’s.

  ‘Lick it, lizard bitch,’ the fat man shouts. The dog leaps back and stands watching. People drop their faces into their towels and heave with stifled laughter.

  Sadly for the fat man a muscled-up dude in tight shorts and extravagant tattoos is walking past along the beach as he yells this. The centrepiece of this dude’s ink is a scaly green dragon writhing up out of his shorts across his six-pack and his pecs breathing yellow-and-red fire through enormous white fangs onto his shoulder. The muscled-up dude has a double-header ice cream to his lips. One scoop is pistachio/rosewater and one scoop caramelised pear. When he hears the fat man shout, ‘Lick it, lizard bitch,’ the muscled-up dude stops and takes the double-header from his mouth. He stares down at his dragon. Then stares at the ice cream he has been enjoying.

  He looks over at the guy who said this. A full-on disgusting arsehole with his eyes sunk in fat and a humungous white belly and his mouth all deranged and lop-sided by a smile like you see on dudes front row at a strip club. Man, an overall gross sight. And this arsehole just got a laugh from the beach mums by calling me ‘Lizard Bitch’.

  The muscled-up dude walks up to the fat man and blinks with his lips snarled. He is confused. The gross dude dissed him, no contest there. But he looks to be out to it. Maybe he’s one of those loonies they let roam around now. A dangerous mental case who can’t be reached with violence. You start doing your thing and find out you’re tangling with a drooling retard and then how do you look? No dignity in that. And no easy way out. There are a shitload of such idiots around these days. He could be one, because, I mean, look how fat he is, nobody sane would look like that. Just lying there. Eyes shut. Blasting that sicko smile at me.

  ‘You say what?’ he reluctantly asks the fat man. The fat man doesn’t reply beyond clearing his throat, flexing his lips and relaxing back into the same lewd smile. ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ The muscled-up dude nods. ‘Stay cool, fatty.’

  He turns and begins to walk away, paying close attention to his ice cream to let the people know he is preoccupied with everyday matters and not fazed by the rantings of a blimped-out sicko. He licks his ice cream. But the fat man’s liaison with the boob-job girl is going well, kicked along as it has been by the hot sun and the tongue of the brown dog who has begun licking his hand again. In his dream the boob-job girl has begun to perpetrate slow, ruinous mouthings on him. He shouts, ‘Tongue it, Lizard Girl.’

  The muscled-up dude wishes he could keep walking. I mean, how can you look good smacking an obese retard? You can only come off like some sort of Nazi eliminating the lame and infirm. But, hell. Lizard Girl?! The dragon on his torso cost five thousand dollars and almost a year to complete. He stops and moves back to the fat man. Where do you even start hitting someone this round? You smack a fat guy with the brain of a ten-year-old and people will be hooting at you. Then he notices … oh, ohh no … this is gross … this is mega-grossness right here on the beach. The fat guy’s got wood. Jesus. There’s simply no way you can rumble with a fat guy who has a hard-on. He raises his hand above his head and points down at the fat man and shouts, ‘Hey, check it. Fat dude here’s got wood, people. Fat dude’s sporting one.’

  Hearing this shout the fat man wakes and his blonde vanishes. The fat man’s name is Brian Perry and he writes blurbs for a real estate website. He does this from home, but dresses in a bespoke Darryl Gravitas suit to do so because he thinks it makes him look like a billionaire who owns an English soccer club. His brother, who is not fat, comes around on Saturdays while jogging and gazes in despair around Brian’s flat at the clothes on the floor and the food scraps lying around and he tells him, ‘Jesus, Brian.’ But this is the worst admonition that Brian ever receives from anyone he knows, for his blurbs are good, and he lets no one else into his home or heart.

  Brian cracks an eye open no
w, and in that tremulous and warped skerrick of vision he makes out a muscular tattooed figure standing over him blocking the sun and so eases that eye closed again. Seen enough, the fat man becomes turtle. For a fat man knows the value of inaction. A fat man knows how to hunker down inside fortress self until the indignity has waned. The fat man has been schooled in public ridicule since a pudgy boyhood. Brian Perry will not emerge from his carapace of feigned unconsciousness until his prospects have improved. This dude may as well taunt a bloated cadaver. Brian Perry knows from experience he is safe from physical harm. Knows not a thing in nature will touch a fat man with a hard-on except a crack-whore or a likewise obese lady who has drunk two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc.

  Pity the dude standing above the fat man. He spends thirty hours a week in the gym watching himself pump iron in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. He makes little money because his life is devoted to this warrior’s vanity. The gym, the tattoo parlour, the solarium, the waxing salon. Then to the Fitzroy Fight Club where he fights and feints the many hours needed to max his ego. And his payoff is this strut down the beach, where the world ogles his pecs, quads, lats, delts, traps and biceps all adorned with a bestiary of gothic critters. At great cost, both financially and to his personal life, he has made himself a stone-hard soldier. This poor fellow is as tangled in self-regard as a supermodel.

  And now the fat man lies before him, victorious in his recumbency. The muscled-up dude is stymied … trapped. He has been called Lizard Girl. To walk away is defeat. To stand here is horrific. To touch this excited fat man is unthinkable. His ice cream is dripping down his knuckles. The twenty thousand hours he has spent turning himself into a warrior have come to this. He feels his stomach tightening in a way that brings with it a memory of the day when he was nine years old and his papa pushed out through the swing doors of an operating theatre and came to him and put an arm around him. His papa was crying and nodding, and he told him, ‘Is good, Rino. Is best. Madre is with God now.’ God? Rino only knew life’s most beloved being had vanished forever and left a vast part of his world empty.