When The Aliens Show started coming in for stick from black radicals, they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as ‘Brown Uncle Tom’.

Apparently the political pressure on the show had increased in Chamcha's absence, orchestrated by a certain Dr Uhuru Simba. ‘Doctor of what, beats me,’ Valance deepthroated down the phone. ‘Our ah researchers haven't come up with anything yet.’ Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance on Right to Reply. ‘The guy's built like a fucking tank.’ Chamcha envisaged the pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another's antitheses. It seemed that the protests had succeeded: Valance was ‘de-politicizing’ the show, by firing Chamcha and putting a huge blond Teuton with pectorals and a quiff inside the prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery. A latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new show would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. ‘I sent word to Dr Simba: stick that up your fucking pee aitch dee. No reply has been received. He'll have to work harder than that if he's going to take over this little country. I,’ Hal Valance announced, ‘love this fucking country. That's why I'm going to sell it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina. I'm going to sell the arse off it. That's what I've been selling all my fucking life: the fucking nation. The flag.’ He didn't hear what he was saying. When he got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had done just that at the White Tower, that first time, while stuffing himself full of Greek food. The date came back to Chamcha now: just after the Falklands war. People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on the buses. So when Valance, over a large balloon of Armagnac, started up – ‘I'll tell you why I love this country’ – Chamcha, pro-Falklands himself, thought he knew what was coming next. But Valance began to describe the research programme of a British aerospace company, a client of his, which had just revolutionized the construction of missile guidance systems by studying the flight pattern of the common housefly. ‘Inflight course corrections,’ he whispered theatrically. ‘Traditionally done in the line of flight: adjust the angle up a bit, down a touch, left or right a nadge. Scientists studying high-speed film of the humble fly, however, have discovered that the little buggers always, but always, make corrections in right angles.’ He demonstrated with his hand stretched out, palm flat, fingers together. ‘Bzzt! Bzzt! The bastards actually fly vertically up, down or sideways. Much more accurate. Much more fuel efficient. Try to do it with an engine that depends on nose-to-tail airflow, and what happens? The sodding thing can't breathe, stalls, falls out of the sky, lands on your fucking allies. Bad karma. You follow. You follow what I'm saying. So these guys, they invent an engine with three-way airflow: nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side to side. And bingo: a missile that flies like a goddamn fly, and can hit a fifty p coin travelling at a ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of three miles. What I love about this country is that: its genius. Greatest inventors in the world. It's beautiful: am I right or am I right?’ He had been deadly serious. Chamcha answered: ‘You're right.’ ‘You're damn right I'm right,’ he confirmed.

They met for the last time just before Chamcha took off for Bombay: Sunday lunch at the flag-waving Highgate mansion. Rosewood panelling, a terrace with stone urns, a view down a wooded hill. Valance complaining about a new development that would louse up the scenery. Lunch was predictably jingoistic: rosbif, boudin Yorkshire, choux de bruxelles. Baby, the nymphet wife, didn't join them, but ate hot pastrami on rye while shooting pool in a nearby room. Servants, a thunderous Burgundy, more Armagnac, cigars. The self-made man's paradise, Chamcha reflected, and recognized the envy in the thought.

After lunch, a surprise. Valance led him into a room in which there stood two clavichords of great delicacy and lightness. ‘I make ‘em,’ his host confessed. To relax. Baby wants me to make her a fucking guitar.’ Hal Valance's talent as a cabinet-maker was undeniable, and somehow at odds with the rest of the man. ‘My father was in the trade,’ he admitted under Chamcha's probing, and Saladin understood that he had been granted a privileged glimpse into the only piece that remained of Valance's original self, the Harold that derived from history and blood and not from his own frenetic brain.

When they left the secret chamber of the clavichords, the familiar Hal Valance instantly reappeared. Leaning on the balustrade of his terrace, he confided: ‘The thing that's so amazing about her is the size of what she's trying to do.’ Her? Baby? Chamcha was confused. ‘I'm talking about you-know-who,’ Valance explained helpfully. ‘Torture. Maggie the Bitch.’ Oh. ‘She's radical all right. What she wants – what she actually thinks she can fucking achieve – is literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in this country. Get rid of the old woolly incompetent buggers from fucking Surrey and Hampshire, and bring in the new. People without background, without history. Hungry people. People who really want, and who know that with her, they can bloody well get. Nobody's ever tried to replace a whole fucking class before, and the amazing thing is she might just do it if they don't get her first. The old class. The dead men. You follow what I'm saying.’ ‘I think so,’ Chamcha lied. ‘And it's not just the businessmen,’ Valance said slurrily. ‘The intellectuals, too. Out with the whole faggoty crew. In with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New professors, new painters, the lot. It's a bloody revolution. Newness coming into this country that's stuffed full of fucking old corpses. It's going to be something to see. It already is.’

Baby wandered out to meet them, looking bored. ‘Time you were off, Chamcha,’ her husband commanded. ‘On Sunday afternoons we go to bed and watch pornography on video. It's a whole new world, Saladin. Everybody has to join sometime.’

No compromises. You're in or you're dead. It hadn't been Chamcha's way; not his, nor that of the England he had idolized and come to conquer. He should have understood then and there: he was being given, had been given, fair warning.

And now the coup de grace. ‘No hard feelings,’ Valance was murmuring into his ear. ‘See you around, eh? Okay, right.’

‘Hal,’ he made himself object, ‘I've got a contract.’

Like a goat to the slaughter. The voice in his ear was now openly amused. ‘Don't be silly,’ it told him. ‘Of course you haven't. Read the small print. Get a lawyer to read the small print. Take me to court. Do what you have to do. It's nothing to me. Don't you get it? You're history.’

Dialling tone.

Abandoned by one alien England, marooned within another, Mr. Saladin Chamcha in his great dejection received news of an old companion who was evidently enjoying better fortunes. The shriek of his landlady – ‘Tini bénché achén!’ – warned him that something was up. Hind was billowing along the corridors of the Shaandaar B and B, waving, it turned out, a current copy of the imported Indian fanzine Ciné-Blitz. Doors opened; temporary beings popped out, looking puzzled and alarmed. Mishal Sufyan emerged from her room with yards of midriff showing between shortie tank-top and 501s. From the office he maintained across the hall, Hanif Johnson emerged in the incongruity of a sharp three-piece suit, was hit by the midriff and covered his face. ‘Lord have mercy,’ he prayed. Mishal ignored him and yelled after her mother: ‘What's up? Who's alive?’