Above the black bags and deserted streets rose the walls of North London; above the walls the slate roofs; and, above the slates, two figures: one standing astride the apex of the police station roof like a mountain climber, the other crouching in the shadow of the aerials.
Saul wrapped his arms tightly around himself. The unlikely figure of his saviour loomed above him. He was sore. His borrowed clothes had rubbed against concrete many times during his escape, till his skin was scraped raw and bleeding, imprinted with a has relief of cotton weave.
Somewhere in the guts of the building under his feet was the cell he had recently vacated. He supposed that the police had discovered him missing by now.
He imagined them scurrying about frantically, searching for him, looking out of windows and filling the area with cars.
Back in that cell, the grotesque figure calling itself King Rat had impaled Saul with his grandiloquent and preposterous declamations, taking his breath away and rendering him dumb. Then he had paused again, and hunched those bony shoulders defensively. And again that invitation, as casual as from a bored lover at a party.
‘Shall we go?’
Saul had hovered, his heart shaking his body, eager to follow instructions. King Rat had sidled up to the door and gently tugged it open, silent this time. In a sudden movement he had poked his head into the tight crack between door and frame, and twisted his head exaggeratedly in both directions, then reached hand behind him without looking back and beckoned to Saul. Something magic had come to take him away and Saul had crept forward with guilt and hope and excitement.
King Rat had briefly turned as he approached and without warning, swept him up over his shoulder in fireman’s lift. Saul had let out a bark of surprise befor King Rat crushed his body against him, driving the from him and hissing: ‘Shut it.’
Saul lay still as King Rat stalked forward with easel He jounced up and down as the stinking figure pace out of the room. Saul listened.
His head was flat against the other’s back. The smell of dirt and animal suffused him. He heard a very faint whine as the door was pushed further open. He closed his eyes. The light of the police-station corridor shone red through his eyelids.
King Rat’s thin shoulder dug into Saul’s stomach.
Through the flesh of his belly he felt King Rat pause, then pad forward without the slightest sound. Saul kept his eyes shut tight. His breath came in starts. He could hear the low hubbub of people nearby. He felt the wall press into him. King Rat was hugging the shadows.
From somewhere in front of them came footsteps, brisk and inexorable. The wall scraped along Saul’s
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side as King Rat swiftly sank into a crouch and froze. Saul held his breath. The footsteps came closer and closer. Saul wanted to shriek his guilt, his presence, anything to break the unbearable tension.
With a tiny breeze and a moment of warmth, the footsteps passed by.
The grey shape moved on, one arm coiled tight around Saul’s legs. King Rat was weighed down under Saul’s motionless body like a grave-robber.
King Rat and his cargo passed silently through the halls. Again and again footsteps approached, voices, laughing. Each time Saul held his breath, King Rat was still, as people passed by impossibly close, near enough to touch, without seeing him or his burden.
Saul kept his eyes closed. Through his lids he could see changes in darkness and light. Unbidden, his mir drew a map of the station, rendering it a land of the stark and sudden oppositions. Here be monsters, thought, and felt ridiculously close to giggling. He became acutely aware of sounds. The echoes he hea aided his helpless cartography, waxing and waning the rooms and corridors through which he was carrie grew and shrank. Another door creaked open, and Saul was held still.
The echoes hollowed out, changed direction. The bobbing of his body increased. He felt himself born upwards.
Saul opened his eyes. They were on a narrow flight of grey stairs, musty and sterile and badly lit.
Muffled sounds came from above and below. His rescue carried him up several flights, past floor after floor filthy windows and doors, eventually coming to res and ducking his body for Saul to dismount. Saw struggled off the bony shoulder and looked about him.
They had reached the top of the building. On his left was a white door through which the tapping of keyboard could be heard. There was nowhere else to go. On all other sides was dirty wall.
Saul turned to his companion. ‘What now?’ he whispered.
King Rat turned back to face the stairs. Directly in front of him was a big greasy window, high above the little entresol where the stairs had changed direction.
As Saul stared, the grey figure cocked his head, sniffed the expanse of air between himself and the window ten feet away. In a burst of feverish motion he locked his hands onto the banister and sprang astride it, right foot planted below the left, perfectly still and poised on the sloping plastic. He seemed to bunch up his shoulders, contracting muscles and sinews relentlessly one by one. He paused for a moment, the sharp, obscure face contorted in a grin or a grimace, then he burst forward in a silent flurry of limbs, for a moment filling the gap between mezzanine and ceiling. He flew through the air, grasped the handles of the window and set his feet on the edge of the tiny sill. And as suddenly as he had moved he was quite still, a bizarre shape spreadeagled on the glass. His trenchcoat was the only thing in motion, swinging gently.
Saul gasped, clapped his hand over his mouth, glanced fearfully over his shoulder at the nearby door.
King Rat was sinuously unwinding. His long limbs disentangled and his left hand scrabbled quietly at the window lock. With a click and a gust of cold, the window opened. His right hand still poised on the sill, the weird apparition twisted his body, pulling it bit by bit out of the narrow opening. He made himself impossibly thin as he squeezed through the vertical strip of darkness that was all the window was built to admit. His passage was as enchanted as that of a genie from a lamp, clinging as tight to the outside frame
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as he had within, poised on a few centimetres of wood five stories above the earth, until those unclear eyes were staring at Saul from beyond the filthy glass.
Only King Rat’s right hand remained inside the police station. It beckoned to Saul. Outside the dark figure breathed mist onto the pane, then wrote with the index finger of his left hand. He wrote in looking glass script so the words appeared the right way round to Saul.
now you he wrote, and waited.
Saul tried to clamber onto the banister. He scrabbled ineffectually as his legs slid towards the floor. He clung desperately and started to haul himself up again, but the weight of his body tugged at him. He was beginning to pant.
He stared up at the thin figure in the window. That bony hand still stretched out towards him. Saul descended to the mezzanine. Flattening his body as low as it would go on the window-ledge, the other swung his hand down, following Saul, reaching towards the floor. Saul looked up at the tiny opening under the window-frame: it was no more than nine inches wide. He looked down at himself. He was broad, a little fleshy. He spread his hands about his girth, looked up at the window again, looked at the thing waiting for him outside, shook his head.
The hand stretched towards him clawed the air impatiently, clutched fitfully at nothing. It would not take no for an answer. Somewhere below them in the building, a door slammed and two voices entered the stairwell. Saul stared over the banister, saw feet and the tops of heads two floors below. He jumped back out of sight. The men were rising towards him. The hand still clutched at him; outside, that shady face was twisted.
Saul positioned himself underneath the hand, stretched his arms up and leapt.
Strong fingers caught him around his left wrist, locked tight, dug into his flesh. He opened his mouth to cry out, caught himself, hissed. He was hauled silently through the air, all thirteen stone of blood and flesh and clothes. Another hand slid around his body, a booted foot locked efficiently underneath him. How was his sinewy benefactor holding on? Saul twisted through the air, saw the window approach him. He turned his head to one side, felt his shoulders and chest lock in the tight space. Hands slid over his body, finding purchase, easing his passage into the outside world. He was slipping through the window now, his stomach pressing painfully against the lock fixed on the frame, but moving much too smoothly through that narrow gash and out into the shock of cold air.
Impossibly, he was delivered.
Wind buffeted him. Warm breath tickled his neck.
‘Cling on,’ came the hissed order, as Saul was pulled into the air. Saul clung. He wrapped his legs around King Rat’s thin waist and threw his arms over those bony shoulders.
King Rat stood on the tiny ledge, his boots clinging precariously to the paint. Saul, who was much the bigger, perched on his back, frosty with terror. King Rat’s right hand held the window-frame; his left hand was locked into an absurdly tiny crack above his head. Over them rose an expanse of sheer brickwork four or five feet high crowned with a strip of plastic guttering. Above that the roof, its slates too steep to be seen.
Saul turned his head. His stomach pitched like an anchor. Five floors below him was the rubbish-strewn
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concrete of a freezing alley. The shock of vertigo made Saul feel sick. His mind shrieked at him to put his feet on ground. He can’t possibly bold on! he thought. He can’t possibly hold on! He felt the lithe body shift under him and he nearly screamed.
Dimly Saul heard the voices from the stairwell approach the window, but they suddenly receded as he felt himself moving again.
King Rat lifted his right hand from the window frame, and reached up to wrap his fingers around a nail rusted into the wall, its purpose long forgotten. His left hand moved now, creeping swiftly along invisible paths in the brick and mortar to stop suddenly and grip at a seemingly arbitrary spot in the surface. Those fingers were acute to unseen clues and potentials in the architecture.
The booted feet stepped free of the ledge. Saul was twisted to one side as King Rat swung his right foot up above his shoulder, suspending himself and his burden from only clenched white knuckles. His feet scraped at the wall, investigating like octopus tentacles, till they found purchase and locked on some minor aberration, some imperfection of the brick.
King Rat reached up with his right hand, grasping; then his left, then his right, this time gripping the rim of the black plastic gutter that marked the border between brick and slate. It creaked dolefully but, unperturbed, he tugged at it with both hands. He pulled his knees up into his stomach, his feet planted firmly against the brick, hung poised for a moment, then pushed out with his thighs like a swimmer.
Saul and King Rat somersaulted through the air. Saul heard himself wail as the wall, the alley below, the lights of buildings, streetlamps and stars spun around his head. The guttering cracked as King Rat clung to it, his hands the centre of the circle his body described. He released his grip, his feet met the sloping roof slates, he bent low to muffle the sound and, twisting his body, flung himself flat on the roof itself.
Hardly pausing, he scrambled on up the tiles like a spider, with Saul holding so tight to him it felt as if he would never come loose.
King Rat scampered on all fours up the slate incline, his heavy boots making no sound. Like a tightrope walker the surreal figure then crept swiftly along the apex of the roof towards the chimneys, and a looming tower block beyond. Terror had cemented Saul to his body, his fingers twisted into the fabric of the stinking trenchcoat with the tenacity of rigor mortis. But King Rat prised him loose with ease and swung him off his shoulders, depositing him shivering in the shadow of the chimney.
And there Saul lay.
He shivered there for several minutes, with the unclear shape of the thin man who did impossible things standing above him, ignoring him. Saul could feel a part of himself going into shock, shaking with a terrible cold out of all proportion to the night wind.
But the spasm passed., the threat receded.
Something in the insanity of the night calmed him. What was the point of being afraid? he wondered. He had suspended all common sense half an hour before and, with that gone, he was free simply to immerse himself in the charged night.
Gradually Saul stopped gasping. He unfolded. He looked up at King Rat, who stood staring at the vast tower block above them.
Saul braced himself with his hands, then, holding his breath, he rose to his feet, one planted each side of
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the building’s vertex, wobbling with gusts of vertigo. He steadied himself with his left hand against the chimney stack and relaxed a little. King Rat twitched his eyes over him momentarily, then sauntered a few feet further away, balancing on the apex of the roof.
Saul looked out over the London skyline. A swell of euphoria gathered in him and crescendoed, he swayed and yelped with incredulous laughter.
‘It’s unbelievable! What the fuck am I doing up here?’ He swivelled his head to stare at King Rat, who again stood regarding him with those imprecise eyes. King Rat gestured briefly over the chimney’s bulk, and Saul turned, realizing that those eyes had not been fixed on him at all. The side of the tower block beyond was studded with lights.
‘Look at them,’ King Rat said. ‘In the windows.’
Saul looked and saw, here and there, minuscule figures bustling past, each reduced to a snatch of colour and motion. In the centre of the building one patch of shade remained still: someone leaning out of their flat window, looking over the hillocks and knolls of slate on which Saul and King Rat stood, brazen in their night-time camouflage.
‘Say goodbye to that now,’ King Rat said.
Saul turned his head to face him, quizzical.
‘That geezer there, stopping and staring, that’s as close as you ever got to this before now. The place he’s looking at now - no, he’s not looking at it, he’s caught a glimpse, a hint, it’s teasing him out of the corner of his eye - that’s your gaff now, me old son.’ Emotion was disguised in King Rat’s bass snarl, but he seemed satisfied, as if with a job well done. ‘The rest of it, that’s just in-between for you now. All the main streets, the front rooms and the rest of it, that’s just filler, that’s just chaff, that ain’t the real city.