King Rat Part 24

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 s.p.a.ce 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 346.

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 lickle 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.'

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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 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.

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 f.u.c.ker's way.'

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

348.

m 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed food to fortify itself, had searched the attic s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sed 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.

349.

In the open s.p.a.ce 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 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 thej 350.

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.

351.

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 lost as its oscillations took it away again.

A low, very quiet ba.s.s thump pervaded the tiny s.p.a.ce.

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 352.

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 s.e.x, 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.

353.

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 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 pa.s.sing by on Albert Embankment; J 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 i in the water. The current pulled it slowly, tugging it , beyond Westminster, carrying the little cadaver way' out to the east.

PART SIX.

JUNGLIST TERROR.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

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 Ba.s.s, 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 ba.s.slines. 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.

357.

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