King Rat Part 2

In one sudden movement he turned to face the doori and sloughed the coat from his shoulders, unveiling the name stencilled crudely in black on the back of 1 shirt, between the rows of arrows.

'I'm King Rat.'

CHAPTER THREE.

A long way off to the south, somewhere in the heart of the city, a siren sounded mournfully. The smell of smoke still clung faintly to the air. It mingled with exhaust fumes and the whiff of rubbish, all made chill and even refreshing by the night.

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 sc.r.a.ped 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.

35.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 awayl and rendering him dumb. Then he had paused again,Jj and hunched those bony shoulders defensively. And/ again that invitation, as casual as from a bored lover at jj 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 anc without warning, swept him up over his shoulder in i 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.

36.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 sc.r.a.ped along Saul's 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed silently through the halls. Again and again footsteps approached, voices, laughing. Each time Saul held his breath, King Rat was still, as people pa.s.sed by impossibly close, near enough to touch, without seeing him or his burden.

Saul kept his eyes closed. Through his lids he could 37.see changes in darkness and light. Unbidden, his mir drew a map of the station, rendering it a land of thes stark and sudden oppositions. Here be monsters, thought, and felt ridiculously close to giggling. Hf 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. Th bobbing of his body increased. He felt himself born! upwards.

Saul opened his eyes. They were on a narrow flighl of grey stairs, musty and sterile and badly lit. m.u.f.fled* sounds came from above and below. His rescue carried him up several flights, past floor after floor i 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 ir front of him was a big greasy window, high above the little entresol where the stairs had changed direction.1 38.As Saul stared, the grey figure c.o.c.ked his head, sniffed the expanse of air between himself and the window ten feet away. In a burst of feverish motion he locked nis 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 gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.sage was as enchanted as that of a genie from a lamp, clinging as tight to the outside frame as he had within, poised on a few centimetres of wood 39.five stories above the earth, until those unclear eyes were staring at Saul from beyond the filthy gla.s.s.

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 gla.s.s 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 40.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 s.p.a.ce. Hands slid over his body, finding purchase, easing his pa.s.sage 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 41.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 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 42.sc.r.a.ped 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 m.u.f.fle 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 43.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 pa.s.sed., the threat receded.

Something in the insanity of the night calmed him. What was the point of being afraid? he wondered. He J had suspended all common sense half an hour before ^B 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 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 44.of euphoria gathered in him and crescendoed, he swayed and yelped with incredulous laughter.

'It's unbelievahlel What the f.u.c.k 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 ba.s.s 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. You get to 45.that by the back door. I seen you in the windows, at night, at the close of the lightmans. Staring out, playing look-but-don't-touch. Well, you've touched it now. All the vacant lots and all - that's your stomping ground now, your pad, your burrow, Saul. That's London.

'You can't go back now, can you? You stick with me, boy. I'll see you're alright.' 'Why me?' said Saul slowly. 'What do you want from me?' he stopped, remembering, for what seemed the first time in hours, why he had been in the police station. 'What do you know about my father?'

King Rat turned and stared at Saul, those features, already so obscured, now invisible in the moonlight. jjt Without taking his eyes from Saul, he slowly sank HH until he sat straddling the roof ridge like a horseman.

'Slide over here, cove, and I'll tell you the story. You aren't going to like it.'

Saul lowered himself carefully, facing King Rat, and pulled himself forward until he was only a couple of feet away from him. If anyone could see them, Saul realized, they must look like two schoolboys, ungainly figures from a comic strip, sitting with their legs swinging. Saul's exhilaration had dissipated with as little warning as it had arrived. He was swallowing with anxiety. He was remembering his father. This was the key to everything, he thought; this was the catalyst, the legend that would make sense of the sur reality which had caught him up in its gusts.

46.King Rat spoke, and just as it had in the police cell, his voice took on a rhythm, a dislocating monotony like a bagpipe drone. The sense and meaning of what he said crept into Saul's head as much by insinuation as by conscious understanding.

'This here Rome-vill, London, that's my manor, but I been around wherever my little courtiers found grain and rubbish to Tea Leaf. And they did my bidding, because I'm their king. But I was never alone, Saul; that's never how it was. Rats believe in their G.o.dfers, chuck out broods, the more mouths to filch, the better.

'What do you know about your mother, Saul?'

The question took him by surprise. The ... her name was Eloise ... She was, uh, a health visitor ... She died when I was born, something went wrong ...'

'Seen any Beechams?'

Saul shook his head in confusion.

'Beechams: pictures, photos ...'

'Of course ... she's short and dark, pretty ... What's this about? Where are you going?'

'Sometimes, me old China, sometimes there are black sheep, ne'er-do-wells, if you clock me. I'd lay good money you and your dad were snarling at each other's throats sometimes, am I right? Didn't get on like you might have hoped? Well, do you really think rats aren't the same?

'She was always the gentry mort, your ma. Took to your daddy a whole lot, and he to her. What a beauty 47.she was, luscious, who'd have pa.s.sed that up?' King Rat finished his sentence with a flourish, twisted his head and looked at Saul from around the corner of his face.

'Your ma made a choice, Saul. Health visitor! That was a cheeky little joke. Set a thief to catch a thief, they say, isn't it, and so, likewise, with her. Walk into a place, one sniff of the I Suppose, and your ma knew exactly how many rats was in there, and where. Recidivist, traitor, they called her, but I suppose that's the power of love ...'

Saul was incredulous, staring and staring at King Rat.

'She wasn't built for the likes of you. You b.u.mped her off on arrival. You're a big strong lad, sonny, stronger than you probably think. There's a lot you can do you don't know about. I bet you gawped out of all those night-time windows longer and harder than any of your mates. I think you've been scrabbling to get into this city for real for a long time.

'You want to know who did the deed on your old man, I know. That's what you call petulance, that is, that bod smashed out front, in the garden.

'The one who did that... he was after you. Your old dad just got in the way.

'You're a special boy, Saul, got special blood in your veins, and there's one in the city who'd like to see it spilled. Your mum was my sister, Saul.

'Your mum was a rat.'

CHAPTER FOUR.

With that insane allegation hanging in the air, King Rat rocked back onto the flesh of his a.r.s.e and fell silent.

Saul shook his head and struggled between incredulity and excitement and disgust.

'She was ... what?'

'A ... f.u.c.king ... rat.' King Rat spoke slowly. 'She crept out of the sewers because she fell for your dad. More tragic than Romeo and Juliet. And her of royal blood, too, but still she went. Couldn't get shot of me, though. I used to come see her on the nows and thens; she'd tell me to sling my hook. Wanted all that behind her, but with her new nose she stank to herself. Couldn't shake birthright, you know. Blood's thicker than water, and rat blood's the thickest of all.'

Somewhere in the tar-black below, a patrol car lurched out of the pound spewing blue light.

'And since your mum got put in the ground, I've been keeping a little eye out for you: trying to keep you out of trouble. What's family for, Saul? But it 49.looks like things have caught up. Can't outrun your blood, Saul. Looks like you've been rumbled, and your dad had to take a fall.'

Saul sat still and gazed over King Rat's shoulder. The words, the deadly understatement delivered with something like a flourish, unlocked a door inside him. He could see his father in a hundred images. And, like a backdrop to all the frozen moments he recalled, Saul could see a powerful fat body pitching in slow motion through the night air, the mouth a distended yawn of shock and terror, eyes rolling in frantic search for safety, thinning hair flickering like candlelight, jowls trembling with gravity's sudden shift, paddling ineffectually with those thick limbs, jagged scintillas of gla.s.s whirling around him as he flew towards the dark lawn, its soil frost-hardened like tundra.

Saul's throat caught, and he let out a tiny sound of grief. His tears amazed him with their speed, flooding his vision instantly.

'Oh Dad ..." he sobbed.

King Rat was incensed.

'Leave it out now, leave it out, will you give it a f.u.c.king rest?'

His hand snapped out and he slapped Saul lightly across the face.

'Hey. Hey. f.u.c.king enough.'