King Rat (31 page)

It was paradoxical. Anansi, King Rat, they were animals. Preserve yourself, that was the whole of their law. And that law would compel them to go to Junglist Terror. To their almost certain death. Because Saul had to go, because of his human friends, because Saul was refusing to act as an animal.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.

They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father’s son.

Anansi looked back at Saul and shook his head slightly.

Saul returned his gaze.

‘Let’s talk about what we’re going to do, ‘Nansi,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a iew plans ... let’s not let everything go this fucker’s way.’

They had spiders, they had rats ... they had Saul.

The Piper would have to make a choice. One of the armies would be defeated as soon as they all entered the fray, but the Piper had to make a choice. Anansi and his troops had half a chance of remaining free from the Piper’s thrall. And so did the rats.

A handful of rats still scoured London for... something...

They could not remember exactly what.

These were the pride of the nation. These were the bravest, the fattest and strongest and sleekest, the leaders of the pack.

As smooth as seals through the water they roamed.

One raced like a chubby bullet along the Albert Embankment.

It had come up from the kitchens of St Thomas’s Hospital, next to Waterloo, there on the South Bank of the river. It had snatched food to fortify itself, had searched the attic spaces and cellars. It had run like a ghost through the hospital, leaving its footprints in thick dust, dirtying obscure and forgotten diagnostic machinery.

It had passed through others’ territories, but it was a great big animal, and it was on royal business. They did not challenge it.

It had found nothing. It made its way out of the building.

In the open space it scampered along the bank of the river towards the medical school.

The Thames glinted balefully beside it, oozing fatly through the city. On the opposite bank stood Westminster Palace, London’s absurdly crenellated seat of power. Its many lights flickered on the river’s
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skin.

The rat stopped.

Lambeth Bridge loomed up over the water before it, darkening the muck of the Thames.

An indistinct shape bobbed sullenly in the water beside it. An ancient barge, one of the various hulks that littered the river, untended and ignored. It heaved gently to and fro in the current, little waves slapping its greasy boards like petulant children. The corpse of a boat, its black wood leprous and decaying, a vast tarpaulin slung across it like a shroud.

The rat moved forward nervously, stopped, uncertain.

It strained its ears. It could hear something, faint and sinister.

Sounds emanating from under the heavy waterproof cloth.

The barge rocked back and forth. The water was digesting it. But in the meantime, before the wood splintered and dissolved into the Thames, someone I was on the vessel, desecrating it, interrupting its long death.

Two old ropes still tethered it to the bank. One dipped in an elegant curve below the surface of the water, but the other was nearly taut. Tentative, the rat stepped onto the mooring. Like a tightrope walker it scurried over the water.

It slowed as it approached the boat. Foreboding flooded its tiny brain, and it would have turned to run if it could, but the rope was too narrow. The rat was stuck with its choice, its impetuous courage.

The rope was strung like a necklace, with huge lumpy beads designed to impede a rat’s progress. But unable to turn back, and dreading the water, the rat was tenacious. It hauled itself over the impediments until only a few feet of rope remained.

Stealthy now, silent, the rat continued. The sound from the barge was clearer now, a low repeated thump, a thin, plaintive wailing, the creaking of wood under moving bodies. With the lightest of touches the rat set foot on the barge.

It crept around to the side, seeking a gap in the tarpaulin. It could feel vibrations in the wood that were nothing to do with the water.

Slinking below the boat’s lip, the rat found a place where the material was rucked up, where it could creep through tunnels left between folds in the heavy canvas.

It made its way through this maze until it could hear soft murmurings. It could feel the tarpaulin opening up around it.

With a nose twitching maniacally, the rat crept forward, peered furtively up into the barge.

There was an incredible stink. A mixture of decay, food, bodies and old, old tar. The tarpaulin was stretched out on a frame to make the barge a floating tent. The rat could see by the weak light of a torch suspended from the frame. It pointed directly down and its ambient light was poor, so everything in the room was glimpsed, half-seen, noticed briefly as the motion of the boat swung the torch one way, then
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lost as its oscillations took it away again.

A low, very quiet bass thump pervaded the tiny space.

In one corner a man lay on the floor. He looked feverish, moved his arms and legs as if he were dancing, his face thrashing uneasily from side to side.

A woman stood nearby, facing away from him. Her eyes were closed. She nodded her head and moved her hands in abstract, exact patterns in front of her, her fingers flying, tracing intricate motions.

Their clothes were dirty. Their faces were thin.

The rat stared at them briefly. Saul’s descriptions were muddled in its mind, but it knew that these two were important, it knew that it had to tell Saul what it had found. It turned to run.

A foot slammed down on its escape route, closing off the way through the cloth.

The rat bolted in terror.

It ran around and around the room, everything a dark blur, between the legs of the standing woman, under the arms of the lying man, scratching madly at the cloth all around in a frenzy of fear.

Then suddenly it heard a quick whistling, a jaunty marching tune, and it stopped running, filled with wonder and amazement. The whistling segued gently into the sounds of sex, and the slopping of rich, fatty food falling to the ground, and the rat turned and marched in the direction of the sound, eager to find all these good things.

Then the whistling stopped.

The rat was staring into a man’s eyes. Its body was held fast. Frantic, it bit down, drew blood, savaged the fingers which gripped it, but they did not relax.

The eyes gazed at it with a lunatic intensity. The rat began to scream in terror.

There was a brief and sudden motion.

The Piper slammed the rat’s head against the wooden floor again and again, until it had lost its definition, become just a flaccid, indistinct appendage.

He held the little corpse up to his face, pursed his lips.

He reached down for the small ghetto-blaster on the floor, and lowered the volume still further. Wind City could still be heard, but now it was almost subliminal.

Fabian and Natasha turned simultaneously, looked at him in confusion and surprise.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, mollifying. ‘You’ll have to listen really hard. I have to turn it down a bit.

We’re attracting attention. We don’t want to do that yet, right?’ He smiled. ‘Save that for the club.

Right?’

He moved the ghetto-blaster closer with his foot. Spent batteries lay all around it, moving uneasily with
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the current.

Natasha and Fabian subsided into their previous poses.

Fabian sank back and began to paint.

Natasha continued to play Wind City. They both strained their ears a little, and heard what they were looking for.

Warily, the Piper lifted a corner of the cloth. His pale eyes scanned the darkness around the boat.

No one was passing by on Albert Embankment; Pete saw by the lights of the Houses of Parliament.

He reached out and dropped the rat’s body into the Thames.

It circled, one speck of dirty darkness among many in the water. The current pulled it slowly, tugging it beyond Westminster, carrying the little cadaver way’ out to the east.

Jungle night.

It was in the air. The sharp-dressed youth who congregated on the Elephant and Castle could taste it.

The clouds were low and moving very fast, ruddy with street lamp light, billowing up from behind the skyline. London looked like a city on fire.

Police cars swirled ephemeral through the streets, streaking past those other cars that prowled towards Lambeth, stereos pumping. The strains of Dancehall and Rap, blunted and languorous, and everywhere Drum and Bass, febrile and poised, savage and impenetrable.

The drivers leaned their arms out of open windows, nodded lazily in time to the music. These cars were full, bursting with designer clothes and basslines. For the cruisers, the evening kicked in at the zebra crossings and red lights, when they could stop, engine idling, beats pounding, visible in all their finery.

They drove from junction to junction, searching for places to be still.

A hundred slogans boomed out of a hundred car windows, the samples and shouted declarations of the
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classic tracks being played, a hundred preludes to the evening.

Mr Loverman, came the shouts, and Check yo’self. Gangsta.Jump.

Fight the Power. There is a Darkside.

I could just kill a man.

Six million ways to die.

They only had eyes for each other that night. They drove and walked the streets like conquistadors in Karl Kani, Calvin Klein and Kangols. In wafts of cologne the homeboys and rudegirls, the posses and massives claimed the streets south of Waterloo, striding past the intimidated natives as though they were shades.

Touching fists and kissing their teeth, the massed ranks moved in on the venue. Irish boys and Caribbean girls, smooth Pakistani kids, gangstas in huge coats muttering into mobile phones, DJs with record bags, precocious kids aping the studied nonchalance of the elders

...

They made their way into the Jungle.

Here and there the police lurked in corners. Sometimes they were judged worthy of a contemptuous glance, a sneer, before the lights changed and the drivers moved on. The police watched them, whispered to their radios in garbled code. The air teemed with their electronic hisses, warnings and prophecies, unheard by the gathering, swamped by urban breakbeats.

The night was fraught, full of looks held too long.

In the dark streets the warehouse shone. Light spilled from its crevices as if it were a church.

Lines stretched out before the entrance. The bouncers, vast men in bomber jackets, stood with arms folded like grotesque gargoyles. Feudal hierarchies asserted themselves: the serfs in line, clamouring at the gates, staring enviously at the DJs and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers of the Drum and Bass scene, who sauntered casually past them and murmured to the guards. For the noblest of them, even checking the guest list was unnecessary.

Roy Kray and DJ Boom, Nuttah and Deep Cover, familiar from a hundred CD covers and posters, were waved in without demur. Even the preposterously proportioned bouncers showed their obeisance, as their impassivity became momentarily more studied. Droit de seigneur was alive and kicking in the Elephant and Castle that night.

If any of the assembled had looked up they might have caught a glimpse of something lurching across the sky, seemingly out of control. A bundle of rags as big as a man, buffeted through the air. It was not at the
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mercy of the wind: no wind changed direction as violently or as fast as the shapeless mass, no wind could carry such bulk.

Loplop, the Bird Superior, arced and wheeled above the streets, staring down at the dirty map below him, staring up into the night stained orange by diffuse light, falling, rising, his ears filled with ringing.

He could not hear the city. He could not hear the predatory grunting of the cars. He could not hear the thud thud thud emanating from the warehouse. The intricate hairs and bones in his ears had burst, and the canals were blocked with dry blood.

Loplop had only his eyes, and he searched as best he could, weaving silently between buildings, perching on weathervanes and springing into the sky.

The air was slowly thickening with birds. The few that had been awake as Loplop sped by had cried out, pledged their fealty, but he had not heard them. Confused, they had risen from the eaves and the branches of trees, had followed him, screaming out to him, frightened by his wild flight and his ignoring of them. Huge ponderous crows circled him. Loplop saw them and shouted wordlessly, clutching at the authority he had lost.

The birds wove elegantly around each other, their numbers growing. Their eyes darted from side to side in confusion. In the midst of their slow wheeling, Loplop rose and sped and zigzagged and fell - a wild card.

The birds could not obey their general.

Elsewhere in London, other armies were also massing.

The walls and corners of houses were emptying out. From crevices and holes all over the city, the spiders streamed. They scuttled in their millions, little smudges racing across dirty floors and through gardens, descending on threads from building tops. They crawled over each other, a sudden, nervous mass of blacks and browns.

Here and there their squadrons were seen. In children’s bedrooms and backstreets, the night was punctuated by sudden screams.

Many died. Crushed, eaten, lost. Ruined chitin and smeared bodies marked their passing.

Something sparked deep in the spiders’ tiny brains. A sensation that was not the hunger or fear or nothingness that were previously their lot. Trepidation? Excitement? Vindication?

The city lights glinted minutely on the spiders’ multiple eyes. Close set and impenetrable, as cold and disinterested as a shark’s ... except tonight...

The spiders trembled.