King Rat (20 page)

The irony, of course, being that she was right to trust him.

He rose to his feet and she shrieked as if she was on a fairground ride.

‘Gentle, gentle!’ she yelled, and he hissed at her to keep her voice down.

He strode into the passage, and all around him he heard the pattering of hundreds of rat feet. This is bow I changed worlds, he thought, carried to my new city on the back of a rat. What goes around comes around.

He stopped below a window, its sill nine feet above the pavement.

‘See you up top,’ he hissed at the rats, who disappeared in a flurry, as before. He heard the scrape of claws on brick.

Saul jumped up and grasped the window, and Deborah shouted, a yell which did not die away but ballooned in terror as her fingers fought for purchase on his back. His feet swung above the ground, the toes of his prison-issue shoes scraping the wall.

He called for her to shut up, but she would not, and words began to form in her protest.

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‘Stopstopstop,’ she wailed and Saul, mindful of discovery, hauled himself at speed up into the space by the window, flattened himself against the glass, reached up again, determined to pull Deborah out of earshot before she could order him down.

He scrambled up the building. Not yet as fast as King Rat, but so smooth, he thought to himself as he climbed. Terror had stopped Deborah’s voice. I know that feeling, thought Saul, and smiled. He would bring this to a close as fast as he could.

Her weight on his back was only a minor irritation. This was not a hard wall to climb. It was festooned with windows and cracks and protuberances and drainpipes. But Saul knew that to Deborah it was just so much unbreachable brick. This building had a flat roof contained by rails, one of which he grasped now and tugged at, raising himself and his cargo up onto the skyline.

He deposited Deborah on the concrete. She clawed at it, her breath ragged.

‘Oh now, Deborah, I’m sorry to scare you,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me if I told you what I was going to do, but I swear to you, you were safe, always. I wouldn’t put you in danger.’

She mumbled incoherently. He dropped to her side and gently put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and turned to him. He was surprised at her face. She was quivering, but she did not look horrified.

‘How can you do that?’ she breathed. All around them on the roof the concrete began to swarm with rats, struggling to prove their eager devotion. Saul picked Deborah off her side and put her on her feet.

He tugged at her sleeve. She did not take her eyes from him but allowed herself to be pulled over to the railing around the roof. The light was entirely leached from the sky by now.

They were not so very high; all around them hotels and apartment blocks looked down on them, and they looked down on as many again. They stood at the midpoint of the undulations in the skyline. Black tangles of branches poked into their field of vision, over in Regent’s Park. The graffiti were thinner up here, but not dissipated. Here and there extravagant tags marked the sides of buildings, badges pinned in the most inaccessible places. I’m not the first to be here, thought Saul, and the others weren’t rats. He admired them hugely, their idiot territorial bravery. To scale that wall and spray boomboy!!! just there, where the bricks ran out, that was a courageous act.

It’s not brave of me, he thought. I know I can do it, I’m a rat.

Deborah was looking at him. From time to time her eyes flitted away towards the view, but it was him she was conscious of. She looked at him with amazement. He looked back at her. He was awash with gratitude. It was so good, so nice to talk to someone who was not a rat, or a bird, or a spider.

‘It must be amazing to be able to do what all the rats do,’ she said, studying their massed ranks. They stood a little way behind, quiet and attentive, fidgeting a little when unobserved but hushing when Saul turned to gaze at them.

Saul laughed at what she said.

‘Amazing? I don’t fucking think so.’ He could not resist bitching, even though she would not understand.

‘Let me tell you about rats,’ he said. ‘Rats do nothing. All day. They eat any old crap they can find, run around pissing against walls, they shag occasionally - or so I’m led to believe - and they fight over who gets to sleep in which patch of sewer. Sure, they think they’re the reason the world was invented. But
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they’re nothing.’

‘Sounds like people!’ said Deborah and laughed delightedly as if she had said something clever. She repeated it.

‘They’re nothing like people,’ Saul said quietly. ‘That’s a tired old myth.’

He asked her about herself and she was vague about her situation. She would not explain her homelessness, muttering darkly about not being able to handle something. Saul felt guilty but he was not that interested. Not that he did not care: he did, he was appalled at her state and, even alienated from her city as he was, he felt the old fury against the government so assiduously trained into him by his father. He cared deeply. But at that moment he wanted to talk to her not for herself particularly but because she was a person. Any person. As long as she kept talking and listening, he was not concerned about what she might say. And he asked her about herself because he was hungry for her company.

He heard a sudden sound of flapping, something like heavy cloth. He felt a brief gust of wind in his face.

He looked up, but there was nothing.

‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Never mind rats being amazing. Do you want to come back to my house?’

She wrinkled her nose again.

‘The one that smells like that?’

‘No. I was thinking of going back to my real place for a bit.’ He sounded calm, but his breath came short and fast at the thought of returning. Something in her remarks about rats had reminded him of where he came from. Cut off from King Rat, he wanted to return, touch base.

He missed his dad.

Deborah was happy to visit his house. Saul put her on his back again and set off, with the rats in tow, across the face of London, across a terrain that had quickly become familiar to him.

Sometimes Deborah buried her face in his shoulder, sometimes she leaned back alarmingly and laughed.

Saul shifted with her to maintain his balance.

His progress was not as rapid as King Rat’s or Anansi’s, but he moved fast. He stayed high, loath to touch the ground, a vague rule he remembered from a children’s game. Sometimes the platform of roofs stopped short and he had no option but to plunge down the brick, by fire escape or drain or broken wall, and scurry across a short space of pavement before scrambling up above the streets again.

Everywhere around him he heard the sound of the rats. They kept up with him, moving by their own routes, disappearing and reappearing, boiling in and out of his field of vision, anticipating him and following him. There was something else, a presence he was vaguely aware of: the source of that flapping sound. Time and again he sensed it, a faint flurry of wind or wings brushing his face. His momentum was up and he did not stop, but he nursed the vague sense that something kept up with him.

Periodically he would pause for breath and look around him. His passage was quick. He followed a map of lights, keeping parallel to Edgware Road, shadowing it as it became Maida Vale. He followed the route of the 98 bus, passed landmarks he knew well, like the tower with an integument of red girders which jutted out above its roof, making a cage.

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The buildings around them began to level out; the spaces between towers grew larger. Saul knew where they were: in the stretch of deceptively suburban housing just before Kilburn High Road. Terra cognita, thought Saul. Home ground.

He crossed to the other side of the road so fast that Deborah was hardly aware of it. Saul took off into the dark between main roads, bridging the gap between Kilburn and Willesden, eager to return home.

They stood before Terragon Mansions. Saul was afraid.

He felt fraught, short of breath. He listened to the stillness, realized that the escort of rats had evaporated soundlessly. He was alone with Deborah.

His eyes crawled up the dull brick, weaving between windows, many now dark, a few lit behind net curtains. There at the top, the hole through which his father had plummeted. Still not fixed, pending more police investigation, he supposed, though now the absence was disguised by transparent plastic sheets.

The tiny fringe of ragged glass was still just visible in the window-frame.

‘I had to leave here in a hurry,’ he whispered to Deborah. ‘My dad fell out of that window and they reckon I pushed him.’

She gazed at him in horror.

‘Did you?’ she squeaked, but his face silenced her.

He walked quietly to the front door. She stood behind him, hugging herself against the chill, looking nervously about. He caressed the door, effortlessly and silently slipping the lock. Saul wandered onto the stairs. His feet made no sound. He moved as if dazed. Behind him came Deborah, in fits and starts, her ebullience gone with his. She dragged her feet as if she were whining, but she made no sound.

The door to his apartment was crisscrossed with blue tape. Saul stared at it and considered how it made him feel. Not violated or outraged, as he would have supposed. He felt oddly reassured, as if this tape secured his house from outsiders, sealing it like a time capsule.

He tugged gently at it. It came away in his hand, airy and ineffectual, as if it had been waiting for him, eager to give itself up. He pushed the door open and stepped into the darkness where his father had died.

It was cold, as cold as the night when the police had arrived. He did not turn on the lights. What filtered up from the streets was enough for him. He did not waste time, pushed open the door of the sitting-room and entered.

The room was bare, had been stripped of possessions, but he noticed that only in passing. He stared at
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the jagged window full on. He dared it to unsettle him, to sap his strength. It was just a hole, he thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just a hole? The plastic billowed back and forth with a noise like whips cracking.

‘Saul, I’m scared...’

He realized belatedly that Deborah could hardly see. She stood at the threshold to the room, hesitant.

He knew what she could see, his obscure form against the dark orange of the distant streetlamps. Saul shook himself in anger. He had been using her with such ease he had forgotten that she was real. He strode across the room and hugged her.

He wrapped himself around her with an affection she poured back into him. It was not sexual, though he sensed that she expected it to be, and might not have minded. But he would have felt manipulative and foul and he liked her and pitied her and was so, so grateful to her. They held each other and he realized that he was trembling as much as she. Not all rat yet, then, he thought ruefully. She’s afraid of the dark, he thought. What’s my excuse?

There was a book in the middle of the floor.

He saw it suddenly over her shoulder. She felt him stiffen and nearly shrieked in terror, twisting to see whatever had shocked him. He hurriedly hushed her, apologized. She could not see the book in the dark.

It was the only thing in the room. There was no furniture, no pictures, no telephone, no other books, only that.

It was not coincidence, Saul thought. They had not missed that when they cleared out the flat. Saul recognized it. An ancient, very fat red-bound A4 notebook, with snatches of paper bursting from its pages; it was his father’s scrapbook.

It had appeared regularly throughout Saul’s life. Every so often his father would drag it out from wherever he hid it and carefully cut some article from the paper, murmuring. He would glue it into the book, and as often as not write in red biro in the margin. At other times there was no article at all; he would just write. Often Saul knew these bouts were brought on by some political occurrence, something his father wanted to record his pontifications on, but at other times there was no spur that Saul could fathom.

When he was little the book had fascinated him, and he had wanted to read it. His father would let him see some things, articles on wars and strikes, and the neat red notes surrounding them. But it was a private book, he explained, and he would not let Saul examine it all. Some of it’s personal, he explained patiently. Some of it’s private. Some of it’s just for me.

Saul removed himself from Deborah and picked it up. He opened it from the back. Amazingly, there were still a very few pages not yet full. He flicked backwards slowly, coming to the last page that his father had filled. A lighthearted story from the local paper about a Conservative Party fundraising event which had suffered a catalogue of disaster: failing electricity, a double booking and food poisoning. Next to it, in his father’s carefully printed letters, Saul read, ‘There is a God after all!!!’

Before that, a story about the long-running strike at the Liverpool docks, and in his father’s hand: ‘A morsel of information breaches the carefully maintained Wall of Silence! Why the TUG so ineffectual?!’

Saul turned the page backwards, grinned delightedly as he realized that his father had been pondering his Desert Island Discs selection. At the top of the page was a list of old Jazz tunes, all with careful
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question-marks, and below was the tentative list. ‘One: Ella Fitzgerald. Which one??? Two: “Strange Fruit”. Three: “All The Time In The World”, Satchmo. Four: Sarah Vaughan, “Lullaby of Birdland”. Five: Thelonius? Basic? Six: Bessie Smith. Seven: Armstrong again, “Mack the Knife”. Eight: “Internationale”.

Why Not? Books:

Shakespeare, don’t want the Bloody Bible! Capital? Com. Manifesto?

Luxury: Telescope? Microscope?’

Deborah knelt beside Saul.

‘This was my dad’s notebook,’ he explained. ‘Look, it’s really sweet...’

‘How come it’s here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. He kept turning the pages as he spoke, past more cuttings, mostly political, but here and there simply something which had caught his father’s eye.