Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

resolve. He might be present at an important moment in literaryhistory. 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?’
    â€˜I’m fine. Here,’ Salman’s voice is thin. He handsTommy 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 Eurobeaverhimself. 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