King Rat Part 17

electric arc, and Saul hissed as he saw it move, jerked under the s.h.i.+ning thing with a rodent's nervous grace. The club tore great gouts of stuffing into the air as it eviscerated a seat with its ragged tip.

The Piper's strength was awesome and unstoppable, dwarfing the tight rat muscles that reclaimed food had awoken in Saul, his new power that he was so proud of. He rolled away from the club and scuttled backwards to the front end of the bus. He thought of Deborah and rage choked him. His rat side and his humanity oscillated violently, buffeted by the great storm of his anger. He wanted to bite out the Piper's throat and then he wanted to beat him, to smash his head, pummel him methodically with his fists and then he wanted to claw at his stomach, he wanted to gut him with his sharp claws. And he could do none of these things, because he was not strong enough, and the Piper would kill him.

The Piper straightened a little, paused and grinned at Saul. 'Enough,' he said and lunged straight forward, his weapon held like a spear. Saul screeched in fear and rage and frustration as his b.e.s.t.i.a.l reflexes carried him to the side of the brutal thrust.

There was no way past the Piper, that was clear as he jumped, and he pulled his legs up tight under him and brought them down on the seat beside him, and he drove them up again like pistons, kicking hard away from the seat, out to the side, punching at the gla.s.s next to him, stretching his body out like a diver, 251.

feeling the window fall around him in a million pieces, taking bits of his skin with it as it fell.

He flew through the air between the bus and its neighbour, another of the same route, that had preceded it into the maze. Saul's body pa.s.sed fifteen feet above the ground, and then another wall of gla.s.s disintegrated under his ferocious rat fists and his arms and shoulders disappeared into the next bus before his feet had even left the last one, and the explosive collapse of the first window, still loud in his ears, segued into the next, and he was through, rolling off the seat, gla.s.s shards showering him like confetti.

He could still hear a spattering sound from outside, as little nuggets of gla.s.s. .h.i.t the ground. He stood, shaking, ignored his ripped skin and deep bruises. He ran for the stairs at the back of the bus. From behind him he heard a strange sound, a roar of irritation, exasperation raised to the point of rage. There was a further loud cras.h.i.+ng, and in the curved mirror at the top of the stairs he saw another window shatter, saw the Piper burst the gla.s.s feet-first and land sitting on a seat, his head craned to watch Saul. He swung up immediately, no more talk, and raced after Saul.

Saul careened down the stairs and out of the rear of the bus, running through the dark alleys between the sides of the great red vehicles, losing himself in the maze. He stopped, crouching, and held his breath.

From a way away he heard feet running, and a voice shouting, 'What the f.u.c.k is going on?' Oh Christ, 252.

thought Saul. The f.u.c.king guard. Saul's heart was beating like a Jungle ba.s.sline.

He could hear the guard's leaden steps somewhere close by, and he could clearly hear the man's wheezing and panting. Saul stood quite still, tried to listen beyond the sounds of the guard, to hear any movement the Piper might make.

There was nothing.

An overweight, middle-aged man in a grey uniform emerged suddenly into the gap between buses in which Saul stood. The two men stood still for a moment, gazing stupidly at each other. They moved simultaneously. The guard approached with a truncheon raised, opened his mouth to shout, but Saul was on him, underneath the sluggish truncheon, pus.h.i.+ng it out of his opponent's hand. He pinned the man's arm behind him, held his mouth closed and hissed in his ear.

'There is a very bad man in here. He will kill you. Leave right now.'

The guard's eyes were blinking violently.

'Do you understand?' hissed Saul.

The guard nodded vehemently. He was looking around frantically for his truncheon, deeply scared by the ease with which he had been disarmed. Saul released him and the man bolted. But as he reached the end of the little bus-street, the sound of the flute pierced the air around them and he froze. Instantly Saul ran to him, slapped his face hard twice, 253.

pushed him, but the man's eyes were now ecstatic,, fixed with a quizzical, overjoyed look over Saul's, shoulder.

He moved suddenly, pus.h.i.+ng Saul aside with a strength he should not possess, and skipped like an excited child deep into the red maze.

'Oh f.u.c.k, nol' breathed Saul, and overtook him,; shoved him back, but the man kept moving, simply pus.h.i.+ng past Saul without once looking at him. The flute was closer now, and Saul grabbed him in a bear hug, held him, tried to block his ears, but the man, impossibly strong, elbowed him in the groin and punched him expertly in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of Saul and doubling him over in a crippling reflex prison. He could only stare desperately, willing himself to breathe, as the man disappeared.

Saul pulled himself up and hobbled after him.

In the heart of the bus maze was an empty s.p.a.ce. It was a strange little room of red metal and gla.s.s, a monk's hole barely six feet square. Saul found his way towards the centre, rounded a corner and was there, at the outskirts of the square.

Before him stood the Piper, flute to his lips, staring at Saul over the shoulder of the guard, who pranced ridiculously to the shrillness of the flute.

Saul grabbed the man's shoulders from behind, and hauled him away from the Piper. But the guard spun around and Saul saw that a shard of gla.s.s was embedded deep in one of his eyes and thick blood had 254.

welled all over his face. Saul shrieked and the Piper's playing stopped dead. The guard's expression took on a puzzled cast; he shook his head, raised his hand experimentally towards his face. Before he could touch his eye, silver flashed behind him and he dropped like a stone. A pool as dark and thick as tar began to spread very quickly from his broken head.

Saul was quite still.

The Piper stood before him, wiping his flute clean.

'I had to let you know, Saul, what I can do.' He spoke quietly and did not look up, like a teacher who is very disappointed but is trying not to shout. 'You see, I feel that you don't really believe what I can do. I feel that you think because you won't listen to me, no one else will. I wanted to show you quite how hard they listen, see? I wanted you to know. Before you die.'

Saul leapt straight up.

Even the Piper stared, momentarily stupid with amazement, as Saul grabbed one of the surrounding buses' big wing-mirrors, pivoted in his flight, and swung his feet through the top front window. Then the Piper was there behind him, his flute thrust aggressively into his belt. No attempt to hide this time, Saul just hurled himself through windows again, leaping the gap to the next bus, bursting into its top deck. He picked himself up and leapt again, refusing 255.

to hear his screaming limbs and skin. Again and agaii always followed, always hearing the Piper behir him, the two of them pus.h.i.+ng through layer after layer* of gla.s.s, littering the ground below, a fantastically fasti and violent pa.s.sage through the air, Saul desperate reach the edge of the maze, eager to take this into opeej ground.

And then there it was. As he girded himself to leap^ through another window, he realized that what he? could see through it was not just a bus two feet,* beyond, that he was looking out at a window in the? garage wall itself, and through that at a house, a long way off. He smashed free of the last bus and leapt onto the window-ledge, halfway up the bricks. Between him and that house a gash was cut through London soil, a wide chasm filled with railway lines. And between Saul and those railway lines was nothing but a high fence of steel slats and a long drop.

Saul could hear the Piper still following him, great heavy crashes and vibrations rocking the ma.s.sed ranks of buses. Saul kicked out the final window. He braced himself, jumped out and clutched at the dull metal barrier below. He landed across it, his weight shaking it violently. He clung to it tight, let his balance adjust. Scuttled a little forward, looked back at the ripped out window. The Piper appeared, looked out. He had stopped grinning. Saul fled down the sheer metal, his 256.

descent something between an exercise in rat agility, a controlled slide, and a fall.

He looked up momentarily and saw the Piper trying to follow. But it was too far for him: he could not grasp that fence, he could not crawl like a rat can crawl.

'f.u.c.k it!' he screamed, and s.n.a.t.c.hed his flute to his lips. And as he played, all the birds began to return. They flocked once again to his shoulders.

The railway lines curved out of sight in both directions. Above him Saul could see buildings which seemed to jut out over the valley, seemed to loom over him. He ran, following the tracks to the east. He s.n.a.t.c.hed a glimpse behind him, and saw the birds settling on the dark figure who stood in the window frame. Saul lurched hopelessly on, and nearly sobbed with delight when he heard a tight metallic snap, a restrained rattling, and he knew that a train was approaching. He looked behind him and saw its lights.

He moved sideways a little, making room, running alongside the tracks. Come on! he willed it, as the two lights he could not help but think of as eyes slowly drew nearer. Above them he saw the scarecrow figure of the Piper approaching him.

But now the train was nearby and Saul was smiling as he ran, as his sores and his ripped skin pulled against each other. Even as the Piper swung close enough for Saul to see his face, the tube train hurtled past Saul and he accelerated as it slowed for a bend, 257.

and as it pa.s.sed him he threw himself at the back the final carriage, grappling with it like a judo wrestle jostling for position, thrusting his fingers deep int crevices and under extrusions of metal.

He pulled himself to the top and spread his ar wide, clinging tight to the edges of the roof as train began to increase its speed. Saul swivelled on ] stomach until he faced backwards, stretched his nec^ and looked up into the Piper's enraged face, bobbir up and down in the air, contorted even as he continue to play, borne aloft by a canopy of dying birds in 1 slit through the city, this roofless tunnel - but ther was nothing the Piper could do to catch Saul now.

And as the train pulled away even faster, Saul saw him become a flying ragdoll, and then a speck, and then he couldn't see him any more, and he looked instead at the buildings around him.

He saw light and motion inside them, and he; realized that people were alive that night, making tea; and writing reports and having s.e.x and reading books and watching TV and fighting and expiring quietly in; bed, and that the city had not cared that he had been ; about to die, that he had discovered the secret of his ancestry, that a murderous force armed with a flute was preparing to kill the King of the Rats.

The buildings above him were beautiful and impa.s.sive. Saul realized that he was very tired and bleeding and in shock, and that he had seen two people die that night, killed by a power that didn't 258.

care if they lived or died. And he felt a disturbance in the air behind him, and he put his head down and let his breath out in a great sob as the approaching tunnel swept up rubbish and sucked it in behind the train, as a sudden warm wind hit him like a boxer's glove, and all the diffuse city light went out and he disappeared into the earth.

PART FIVE.

SPIRITS.

CHAPTERTWENTY.

Fabian shook his head, scrunched up his dreadlocks into vicious little bunches. His head ached terribly. He lay on his bed and pulled faces at the mirror just visible on his desk.

Lying some way off was his 'work in progress', as his tutor insisted on calling it. The left two-thirds of the huge canvas were a garish panoply of metallic spray-paints and bright, flat acrylic; the right third was covered in ghost letters, faint pencil lines and charcoal. He had lost motivation for the project, though he still felt a certain pride in it as he stared at it again.

It was an illuminated ma.n.u.script for the 1990s, the letters a careful synthesis of mediaeval calligraphy and graffiti lettering. The whole screen, six feet by eight, consisted of just three lines: Sometimes I want to lose myself in faith/and Jungle is the only thing I can turn to,/because in Drum an' Ba.s.s I know my place...

He had thought of a phrase which started with an 'S' because it was such a pleasing letter to illuminate.

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It was very large, contained in a box, and surrounded by ganja leaves and sound-system speakers and modern serfs, rudebwoys and gyals, an intricate parody, the expressionless zombies of monastic art executed by Keith Haring or one of the New York Subway Artists. The rest of the writing was mostly dark, but not matt-black, shot through with neon strips and encased in gaudy integuments. In the corner below the writing lurked the police, like devils: The Man. But these days the sloganeering had to be ironic. Fabian knew the rules and couldn't be bothered to disobey them, so the devils coming up from the pit were ridiculous, the worst nightmares of St Anthony and Sweet Sweetback combined.

And up in the top right, though not yet drawn, would be the dancers, the wors.h.i.+ppers who've found their way out of the slough of urban despond, a drab maze of greys in the centre of the piece, to Drum and Ba.s.s heaven. The dancing was fierce, but he had been careful to make these faces more than ever like those in the old pictures he was mimicking: placid, stupid, expressionless. Because individualism, he remembered explaining earnestly to his lecturer, had no more place in a Jungle club than in a thirteenth-century church. That was why he loved it and why it frustrated him and sometimes frightened him. That was why the ambiguous text as well.

He was always on at Natasha to cut a really political track, and she demurred, claiming not to be interested, 264.

which irritated him. So until someone would do it, he would keep on with his loving chiding. Hence the Middle Ages, he had explained. The necessary displays of opulence and style at the clubs were as grandiose and vapid as any display of courtly etiquette, and the awe in which DJs were held was positively feudal.

At first, his tutor had hummed and hawed, and sounded unconvinced at the project, until Fabian had hinted that he did not appreciate the importance of Jungle in modern pop culture, and that had given it the seal of approval. All the lecturers at his art college would rather have died than admit that there were any gaps in their knowledge of youth.

But he was unable to concentrate on 'Jungle Liturgy', even though he was quite proud of it.

He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circ.u.mstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.

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And now it seemed as if he might be losings Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned 1 over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. j She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She I was excited about the music she was making with"! Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. 1 Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.

It was Saul's departure, he thought, which had pre- cipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social 1 phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian's friends.h.i.+ps together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.

He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her f.u.c.king sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.

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And Saul - Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul's life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge - vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian's mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and G.o.d-knew-what - and that he had been routinely eliminated.

Often that seemed the likeliest explanation, the only thing that could explain the deaths of the police and Saul's escape, but Fabian could not believe he would have known nothing about his friend's involvement. It seemed unbelievable. And then he was forced to consider the possibility that Saul had killed those men - and his father, which he did not believe, definitely - but then ... what was happening?

Fabian stared around him at his room, a tip of paint and record covers and clothes and CDs and posters and cups and wrappers and dirt and paper and books and pads and pens and canvas and bits of gla.s.s for sculptures and plates and postcards and peeling wallpaper. He was lonely and p.i.s.sed off.

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The view was so familiar Natasha did not see it. It was a tabula rasa to her, a white s.p.a.ce on which she could impose her tunes. She had gazed out at it for so many hours and days, especially since Saul disappeared and Pete appeared, that she had achieved a Zen-like transcendence of it. She transcribed its features into her mind as nothingness.

First the net curtains, a tawdry throwback to the previous occupant that she had never bothered to get rid of. They moved slightly, a constant whiteness with flickering edges. Through this veil the trees, just at the level where the boughs thrust outward from the body. Stripped by winter, black branches clutching. So a film of curtain, then the twisted knots of wood, dark and intricate, a random lattice of twigs and thick limbs. Beyond that a street lamp .

After dark when it had rained, she would sit at her window and poke her head out from under the net curtains and stare at that lamp through the tree outside. Its rays would pa.s.s through the thicket, lighting up the inside of each branch, surrounding the streetlight with thin circles of illuminated wood, composites of a thousand tiny wet sections reflecting the light. As Natasha moved her head, the streetlight's halo moved with it behind the tree. The lamp sat like a fat spider in the centre of a wooden web.

Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it 268.

the houses on the other side of the street. The child's bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a s.h.i.+fting scudding ma.s.s whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.

Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.

She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.

She did not feel tethered at all.

She thought about Saul but she thought about ba.s.slines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.

Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted 269.

to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.

A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the t.i.tle: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how f.u.c.king stupid and cra.s.s he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispa.s.sionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.

He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?

To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, 270.

the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can't recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.

She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes of sound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until she found and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here she hinted at it.

The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came around several times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in the music. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and a sound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronic orchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.

And then the ba.s.sline.

A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause, another, longer pause ... double thud and back to the beginning. And underneath it all she began to make those s.n.a.t.c.hes of radio static a little longer, and longer still, and looping them more and more randomly, until it was a constant, s.h.i.+fting refrain 271.

under the beat. A chunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break out of white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it by finding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that the peaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager to make contact, and failing ... or they could have just been static.

The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it had gone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and the people could not reclaim the city.

Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She sped through the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings, everything grey, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into the track, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.

And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone, Natasha brought on the Wind.

A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost speaking of the static, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich alb.u.m - G.o.d knew where she had heard that - where he made violins mimic human voices. The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless piano rolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudder into existence behind it for a 272.

moment, a shrill echo, and then it would disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Then again. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear, overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophony of simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral, artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped it contemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up from behind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing the effect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks and troughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The piano goes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a single note like a slow metronome pa.s.sing time. Then that, too, disappears. The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great single wind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and ba.s.sline, stretching off for a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.

This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the pa.s.sing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. The boulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken, 273.

expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.

This was Wind City, the t.i.tle that made Fabian laugh.