King Rat (25 page)

So, why was Saul no longer into Dance music? Why had he started playing what most of those who had heard it described as Folk music? None of this was airtight, of course, of course ...

But Crowley could not help thinking it might be another who had played the music in the bus station.

Why not? Why must it be Saul? What if it was another who mocked him with this music so utterly different to Saul’s own taste?

Crowley straightened up suddenly. A long, thin, light club. Made of metal: the impact was clear about that. Something the murderer hung on to, used more than once. Took from crime to crime. Where he played music, it seemed.

‘Bailey!’ Crowley yelled.

The big man appeared, still impatient, still exasperated with his boss.

He all but rolled his eyes at Crowley’s new question.

‘Bailey, do any of Saul’s mates play the flute?’

Deep underneath London, King Rat skulked and ferreted in the darkness.

He clutched a stash of food, carried it slung over one shoulder like a swag bag. His strides were long A and left no sign. He stalked silently through the water of the sewers.

The rats ran as he approached. The braver souls stayed a little to spit at him and provoke him. His smell was deeply ingrained in their nervous system, and they had been taught to despise it. King Rat ignored them. Walked on. His eyes were dark.

He passed like a thief in the night. Unclear. Minimal. Dirty.

Subaltern. His motives were opaque.

He reached under the dirty stream to dislodge the plug to his throne-room, slid through the murk into the great teardrop chamber. He shook the water from him, and stamped into the room.

Saul came from behind him. He clutched a broken chair leg which he swung at an incredible speed and cracked against the back of King Rat’s skull.

King Rat flew forward and flung his arms out with a sudden shrill bark of pain. He sprawled, rolled, clutching his head, regained his footing.

Food spread across the sodden floor.

Saul was upon him, quivering, his jaw set hard and tight. He swung the chair leg again and again.

King Rat was as pliable as quicksilver. He slid impossibly out of Saul’s flurry of blows and scampered away, hissing, clutching his bleeding head.

He spun to face Saul.

Saul’s face was a mosaic of bruises and blood and puffy flesh. King Rat was quite still. He eyed Saul with his hidden eyes. His teeth were bared and glinted with dirty yellow light. His breath came hard. His hands were crooked into eager claws.

But Saul hit him again, before those claws could move. Saul’s hands and club came at him hard, but King Rat ripped up with his clawed hands and drew lines on Saul’s stomach, below his ruined shirt.

Saul spoke, muttering in time to the blows he attempted to land.

‘So what the fuck was Loplop doing there, unh?’ Slam.

King Rat slipped outside the club’s arc. It hit the floor loudly.

‘Tell him to follow me, unh?’ Slam. ‘What was he going to do - report back?’ Slam. This time the wood connected and King Rat yelled in rage.

King Rat growled and slashed at Saul with those claws, and Saul bellowed and swung the club wit
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renewed venom. The two of them skittered around the dark room, slipping on mould and food, moving now on two limbs, now on four. Saul and King Rat moved like liminal figures, hovering between evolutionary strata, bestial and knowing.

‘So was Loplop going to send a message, unh? bird? Little bird going to let slip where I was, then?’

Again the attacks came, again King Rat moved, refusing to engage in battle, content to draw blood and slip away, his teeth still visible and wicked.

‘What if Loplop had accidentally told someone else where I was, unh? Was I fucking bait?’ King Rat caught the club with his right hand and bit at it suddenly and savagely, and it dissolved in a burst of splinters. Saul did not pause, but grasped King Rat’s filthy lapels and carried him down into the muck, straddling him.

‘Well you needn’t have bothered, you fucking shit because the Piper was there and look what he did to me, you shit. You just weren’t ready, you and Nans so poor old Loplop had to take him on his own.’

Saul pinioned King Rat’s arms to the brick floor and began systematically to punch his face. But even trapped lit that King Rat writhed and slipped under him, many of the heavy blows did not land.

Saul thrust his face right up to King Rat, and stare through the shadows on his eyes.

‘I know you wouldn’t give a fuck if I’d died, as long as I took Piperman with me,’ he hissed. ‘And I know you killed my dad, you fucking shithead rapist, you piece of crud - not the fucking Piper

...”

We.’ King Rat shouted the word out and convulsed, throwing Saul from him and sliding in a single movement until he stood in characteristic pose by the throne, skulking and aggrandizing, but this time with his claws bared and his teeth dangerous, coated in slaver like a wild animal. Saul moved backwards in the dirt, fought to right himself.

King Rat spoke again. ‘I never bumped off your dad, stupid. I killed the Usurper.’

The word stayed in the air after he had spoken it.

King Rat spoke again.

‘I’m your dad ...’

‘No you fucking aren’t, you weird old fucked-up spiritual degenerate,’ replied Saul instantly. ‘I might have your blood in my veins, you fucking rapist bastard, but you aren’t shit to me.’

Saul smacked himself on the forehead, laughing bitterly.

‘I mean, hello? “Your mother was a rat, and I’m your uncle.” Jesus, nice one - playing me like a fucking idiot! And...’ Saul paused and jerked his finger viciously at King Rat, ‘and, that goddamn fucking lunatic
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Piper who wants me dead only knows about me because of you.’

Saul sat down hard and held his head in his hands. King Rat watched him.

‘I mean, I keep saying I’ve sorted it out, right?’ Saul murmured. ‘And I just can’t stop thinking about it.

You killed my father, you rapist shit, and when you did that you let some fucking spirit of darkness out after me, you gave him my fucking address, and, what,, I’m supposed to go “Daddy!”?’ Saul shook his head in disgust. He felt his gut twist with contempt and hatred. ‘You can fuck off. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘So what’re you after, an apology?’

King Rat was scornful. He moved towards Saul.

‘What do you want? We’re blood. It was half an age since I left, since you were a little Godfer in the fat man’s arms. I could clock you getting flabby. It was time to join your old dad, the cutpurse king. We’re blood.’

Saul stared up at him.

‘No, fucker, I don’t want shit from you.’ Saul stood. ‘What I want is out.’ He moved off behind the throne, turned to face King Rat. ‘You can deal with the Piper on your own. He only wants me because of you, you know? You’ve been bragging about me, you stupid shit. You don’t give a fuck about family.

You raped my mum so you could have your weapon. The Piper knows it; he called me the secret weapon. know what I mean to you. I know I’m a good way on getting at him, because he can’t control me.

‘But he only wants me dead because of you. So, tell you what.’

Saul moved backwards as he spoke, towards the room’s peculiar exit.

‘Tell you what. You deal with the Piper as best you can, and I’ll look after myself. Agreed?’

And Saul looked King Rat in the eye, those eyes he could still not see, and he left the room.

Up above the sewers: in the sky, over the slate. Out in the air. Saul fingered the skin over his bruises and felt it stretched out taut and split. He gazed at London, spread out before him, unfolding, the underworld threatening to burst through, to rupture its surface tension. It was dark; his life was always dark now. He was becoming a night creature.

His body hurt. His head ached, his arms were scratched and stretched, his muscles burned with deep bruises. But he could not stay still. He felt a desperate eagerness to work through it, to burn the pain out of his body. He swung meaninglessly around girders and antennae, loose-limbed and elegant like a gibbon. He was suddenly very hungry, but he remained on the roofs for a while, running and jumping over low walls and skylights. He straddled the intricacies of St Pancras station, and sped along the spine of roofs which jutted out behind it like a dinosaur’s tail.

This was the realm of the arches. Weird little businesses waged a battle against empty space, cramming into the unlikely hollows below the railway lines. They proclaimed themselves with crude signs.

OFFICE EQUIPMENT CHEAP.

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WE DELIVER.

Saul descended to street level. He was fighting to channel the force of elation which had flooded through him at his renunciation of King Rat. He was fragile, ready to burst into tears or hysterics. He was captivated by London.

Someone approached him from around a corner: a woman in heels, he could hear, a brave soul walking this area alone at night. He did not want to scare her; so he slumped against a wall and slid down to the floor, just a comatose drunk.

The associations of homelessness struck him and, as the heels clicked by him unseen, he thought of Deborah and he felt his throat catch. And then it was easy to think of his father.

But Saul did not have time for this, he decided. He leapt up and followed his nose to the dustbins of this odd realm, a world where the streets were empty off houses, where the only things that surrounded him were the peculiar businesses, Victorian throwbacks.

The bins were not rich in pickings. Without domestic rubbish there was little to them. Saul crept back towards King’s Cross. He found his way to the dumping grounds of the all-night eateries, and amassed a huge pile of food. He played games with himself, refusing to allow himself to eat a mouthful until he had collected everything he wanted.

He sat in the shade of a skip in a cul-de-sac by a Chinese takeaway and fondled the food he had collected, chunks of greasy meat and noodles.

Saul gorged himself. He ate as he had not for days. He ate to fill all the cavities inside him, to drive out anything that had been left behind.

King Rat had used him as bait, but the plan had gone wrong. The Piper had preempted his plan.

As Saul stuffed himself, he felt an echo of that surge of strength that had coursed through him the first time he ate reclaimed food, found food, rat food.

The Piper still wanted him dead, of course, now more than ever. He did not think he would have to wait too long before the Piper came for him.

It was a new chapter, he reflected. Away from King Rat. Out of the sewer. He ate until his belly felt dangerously taut, and then resumed his position in the skyline.

Saul felt as if he would burst, not from food but from something that had been released inside him. I should be mad, he thought suddenly, and I’m not. I haven’t gone mad.

He could hear sounds from all over London, a murmuring. And as he listened, it resolved itself into its components, cars and arguments and music. He felt as if the music was everywhere, all around him, a hundred different rhythms in counterpoint, a tapestry being woven underneath him. The towers of the city were needles, and they caught at the threads of music and wound them together, tightened them around Saul. He was a still point, a peg, a hook on which to wind the music. It grew louder and louder, Rap and Classical and Soul and House and Techno and Opera and Folk and Jazz and Jungle, always Jungle, all the music built on drum and bass, ultimately.

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He had not listened to music for weeks, not since King Rat had come for him, and he had forgotten it.

Saul stretched as if waking from a sleep. He heard the music with new ears.

He realized that he had defeated the city. He crouched on the roof (of what building he did not know) and looked out over London at an angle from which the city was never meant to be seen. He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements. These monolithic products of human hands had turned on their creators, and defeated them with common sense, quietly installed themselves as rulers. They were as insubordinate as Frankenstein’s monster, but they had waged a more subtle campaign, a war of position more effective by far.

Saul kicked carelessly off and stalked across the roofs and walls of London.

He could not put off thinking for ever.

Tentatively, he considered his position.

King Rat was no longer with him. Anansi was his own man, would do whatever made him and his kingdom safest. Loplop was mad and deaf and maybe dead.

The Piper wanted to kill them all.

Saul was on his own. He realized that he had no plan, and felt a curious peace. There was nothing he could do. He was waiting for the Piper to come to him. Until then he could go underground, could investigate London, could find his friends ...

He was afraid of them now. When he let himself think of them, he missed them so much it made him ache, but he was not made of the same stuff as them any more, and he was afraid that he did not know how to be their friend. What could he say to them, now that he lived in a different world?

But perhaps he didn’t live in a different world. He lived where he wanted, he thought suddenly, furiously.

Wasn’t that what King Rat had told him, all that time ago? He lived wherever he wanted, and even if he didn’t live in the same world as them any more, he could visit, couldn’t he?

Saul realized how much he wanted to see Fabian.

And he remembered as well that the Piper wanted to kill him precisely because he could move between the worlds. He felt a fleeting sense of loneliness as he thought about the Piper, and then he realized that the smell of rat was all around him, was always all around him. He stood slowly.

He realized that the smell of London was the smell of rat.

He began to hiss for attention, and lithe heads poked out of piles of rubbish. He barked a quick order and the ranks began to approach him, tentatively at first and then with eagerness. He shouted for reinforcements and seething waves of filthy brown bodies boiled over the lip of the roof, and from chimneys and fire escapes and hidden corners, like a film of spilt liquid running backwards, they congealed around him, tightly wound, an explosion frozen at the flashpoint, hovering with suppressed violence, hanging on his words.