King Rat (30 page)

The rats spread throughout London.

Saul was alone amidst the rubble and the scaffolding.

He stood in the centre of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen.

On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’

underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their facades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that spilt at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed.

This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Evens as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt irfj square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down.

He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city’s bonds; and he had known then that he had made off it an enemy. The windows which loomed over reminded him of that.

In the corner of the square lurked obscure building machines, piles of materials and pickaxes, bags of cement covered with blue plastic sheeting. The looked defensive and overwhelmed. Just in front them stood the remnants of the building that had been pulled down. All that remained was a section of its front, a veneer one brick deep, with gaping, glassless holes where windows had been. It seemed miraculous that it could stand. Saul walked over the broken ground towards it.

There were lights on in a few of the rooms that overlooked him and, as he walked silently, Saul even caught sight of movement here and there. He was not afraid. He did not believe that anyone would see him; he had rat blood in his veins. And if they did, they might be surprised to see a man striding by lamplight in the forbidden space of a nascent building, but who would they tell? And if someone were,
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unbelievably, to call the police, Saul could simply climb and be gone. He had rat blood in his veins. Tell the police to call Rentokil, he thought. They might have a better chance.

He stood under the free-standing facade. He stretched his arms up, prepared to scramble over the city himself, to join his emissaries in their search. He did not believe that he would find Fabian or Natasha or the Piper, but he could not fail to look for them. To acquiesce in the Piper’s plans would be to abrogate his own power, to become collaborator. If he were to meet the Piper on the ground the Piper had specified, he would be dragged there, he would be unwilling. He would be angry.

He heard a noise above him. A figure swung into view in one of the empty window-frames. Saul was still. It was King Rat.

Saul was not surprised. King Rat followed him often, waited until the rats had left, then poured scorn on his efforts, ridiculed him in agonized contumely, incoherent with rage at the behaviour of the rats who had once obeyed him.

King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand. He crouched, his left arm dangling down between his legs, his head lowered towards his knees. Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero Batman or Daredevil. Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of an epic graphic novel.

‘What do you want?’ Saul said finally.

In a sinewy sliding movement King Rat emerged, from the window and landed at Saul’s feet. He bent his knees on landing, then rose slowly just before him.

His face twisted.

‘So what silly buggers are you playing now, cove?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Saul and turned away.

King Rat grabbed him and swung him back to face him. Saul slapped the other’s hands down, his eyes wide and outraged. There was a horrible unea moment as Saul and King Rat stared at each other their shoulders wide, their fists ready to strike. Slow and deliberately, Saul reached up and pushed King on the chest, shoved him slightly back.

His anger boiled up in him and he shoved King Rat again, growled and tried to make him fall. He punched him suddenly, hard, and images of his father raced through his mind. He felt a desperate desire to kill King Rat. It shocked him how fast the hatred could overtake him.

King Rat was stumbling slightly on the uneven ground, and Saul reached down to snatch up a half brick.

He bore down on King Rat, flailing brutally with his weapon.

He swung it at King Rat’s head, connecting and sending his opponent sprawling, but King Rat hissed with rage as he fell. He rolled painfully across the shattered ground and swung his legs up at Saul, taking him down. The fight became a violent blur, a flurry of arms and legs, nails and fists. Saul did not aim, did not plan; he flailed in rage, feeling blows and scratches bruise him and rip his skin.

Blood exploded from a vicious strike below his eye and his head rocked. He slammed his brick down again but King Rat was not there, and the brick struck stone and burst into dust.

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The two rolled and grappled. King Rat slid from Saul’s grip and hovered like a gadfly, ripping him open with a hundred cruel scratches and dancing out of the range of retaliation.

Saul’s frustration overwhelmed him. He suddenly broke off his frenzied attack with a shouted curse. He stalked away across the rubble.

Another vicious half-fight. He could not kill him.

King Rat was too fast, too strong, and he would not engage Saul properly, he would not risk killing Saul, i) King Rat wanted Saul alive, for all that he was growing to hate him for his following among the rats, for his refusal to obey him.

King Rat shouted scornfully after him. Saul could not even hear what he said.

He felt blood well from the deep scratches on his face and he wiped himself as he began to run, surefooted despite the terrain. He threw himself at one of the walls which overlooked him, scrambled up its tender surface, slipping by those unadorned windows, leaving a long smear of blood and dirt on his way up the bricks.

He stared briefly behind him. King Rat sat forlornly on the hulking piles of cement. Saul turned away from him and set out over the top of London. He looked around him as he moved, and sometimes he stopped and was still.

On the top of a school, somewhere behind Paddington, he saw harsh security lights catching on billowing cobweb suspended below the railings topped the building. The fragile thing was empty an long deserted, but he lowered himself to the ground and stared around him. There were other, smaller webs below it, still inhabited, less visible without the accumulated dust of days.

He lowered his lips to these webs and spoke in a voice he knew sounded removed and intimate, like King Rat’s. The spiders were quite still.

‘I need you to do what I say, now,’ he whispered. ‘I need you to find Anansi, find your boss. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Tell him I need to see him.’

The little creatures were still for a long time. They seemed to hesitate. Saul lowered himself again.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘spread the word.’

There was another moment’s hesitation, then the spiders, six or seven of them, tiny and fierce, took off at the same moment. They left their webs together, on long threads, little abseiling special forces, disappearing down the side of the building.

Fabian drifted on waves.

He was stuck very deep in his own head. His body made itself felt occasionally, with a fart or a pain or an itch, but for the most part he could forget it was even there. He was conscious of almost nothing except perpetual motion, a tireless pitch and yaw. He was not sure if it was his body or only his mind which was lulled by the liquid movement.

There was a Drum and Bass backdrop to the hypnagogic rolling. The soundtrack never stopped, the
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same bleak, washed-out track that he had heard from Natasha’s stairs.

Sometimes he saw her face. She would lean over him, nodding gently in time to the beat, her eyes unfocused. Sometimes it was Pete’s face. He felt soup trickle down his throat and around his mouth, and he swallowed obligingly.

Most of the time he lay back and surrendered to the rocking motion in his skull. He could see almost anything when he just lay back and listened to the Jungle filtering from somewhere close by, twisting around him in a tiny dark room, oppressive, stinking of rot.

He spent a lot of time looking at his artwork in progress. He was not always sure it was there, but when he thought of it and relaxed into the beat, it invariably appeared, and then he would make plans, scribble charcoal additions in each corner. Changing this canvas was so easy. He could never quite remember the moment when he drew, but the changes appeared, bright and perfect.

He became more and more ambitious in his changes, going over old ground, rewriting the text at the centre of his piece. In no time at all it was changed beyond recognition, as smooth and perfect as computer graphics, and he stared at the legend he could not quite remember choosing. Wind City, it said.

Fabian swallowed the food he found in his mouth and listened to the music.

Natasha spent most of her time with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to open them at all. Her fingers knew every inch of her keyboard, and she spent her time playing Wind City, tweaking it, changing it in slight and subtle ways, to fit the exigencies of her mood.

Occasionally she would open her eyes and see with surprise that she stood in unfamiliar environs, that she was in the centre of a dim, stinking space, that Fabian danced horizontally, lying down nearby, food drying on his face, and that her keyboard was not in front of her after all. But when she tweaked Wind City, it changed anyway, it did what she wanted, so she closed her eyes and continued, her fingers flying over the keys.

Sometimes Pete would come and feed her, and she would play him what she had done, still with her eyes closed.

The rats had given up in fear and confusion. The great cadres that had set out earlier in the night had dried up, had sliink home to the sewers, but here and there the braver souls continued the search, as Saul had hoped they would.

In the streets of Camberwell they searched the catacombs of old churches. On the Isle of Dogs they ran past Blackwall Basin and scoured the decrepit business park. The rats worked their way along the great slit of the Jubilee Line extension, past vast hulking machines that tunnelled through the earth.

Their numbers dwindled. As the night wound on, more and more gave in to hunger and fear and forgetfulness. They could not work out why they were running so hard. They could no longer remember what their quarries looked like. One by one they slipped back into the sewers. Some fell prey to dogs and cars.

Soon there were only a very few rats left searching.

‘Little bird tell me you want talk to me, bwoy.’

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Saul looked up.

Anansi descended from the bough of a tree above him. He moved elegantly, belying his size and weight, slipping smoothly down one of his ropes, utterly controlled.

Saul leaned back. He felt the cold weight of the gravestone behind him.

He was sitting quietly in a small cemetery in Acton. It was a tiny space that straddled the overland train line, tucked behind a small industrial estate. It was overlooked on all sides by ugly functionality, a set of grotesque flattened factories and suburban warehouses, uncomfortable in this residential zone.

Saul had wandered West London for a time and entered the graveyard to eat and rest, here amid the crammed urban dead.

The stones were nondescript, apologetic.

Anansi came to the ground silently a few feet from him, stalked past the low grey markers and crouched beside him.

Saul glanced at him, nodded in greeting. He did not offer Anansi any of the old fruit he had scavenged.

He knew he would not take it.

Saul sat and ate. ‘Now was it really a little bird, ‘Nansi?’ he asked mildly. ‘How is Loplop?’

Anansi jerked his head.

‘Him still screaming angry, bwoy. Him mad, too. Them can’t understand him, the birds dem. Him have lost a kingdom again, think you take it from him.’ Anansi shrugged. ‘So we no have no birds. Just my little spiders and the rats, and you and me.’

Saul bit into his bruised apple.

‘And Loplop?’ he asked, and paused. ‘And King Rat? They going to be there with us? They going to be there when we take him?’

Anansi shrugged again. ‘Loplop is nothing, whether him there or not. King Rat? You tell me, bwoy. He’s your daddy ...’

‘He’ll be there,’ said Saul quietly.

The two sat for a while. Anansi rose presently and walked to the railing in front of them, looked over at the train-line below.

‘I’ve sent the rats to find the Piper,’ said Saul, ‘but they’ll fail. They’re probably all sitting stuffing their bellies right now. They’ve probably forgotten what it is I wanted them to do ...’ He smiled humourlessly.

‘We’re going to face him on his terms.’

Anansi said nothing. Saul knew what he was thinking.

Anansi had to come to the Junglist Terror, because Saul would be there. Saul was the only chance he had to defeat the Piper, but he knew it was a tiny chance; he knew that he was walking into a trap, that
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by being there he was doing exactly what the Piper wanted. But he had no choice. Because if he were not there, Saul’s chances of defeating the Piper were even smaller, and if Saul failed, the Piper would have them all, the Piper would hunt Anansi down and kill him.