King Rat Part 4

The child of House, the child of Raggam.u.f.fin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Ba.s.s soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.

The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the ba.s.sline you followed with your feet, the ba.s.sline that gave Jungle its soul.

And above the ba.s.sline was the high end of Jungle: the treble. Stolen chords and shouts that rode the waves of ba.s.s like surfers. They were fleeting and teasing, s.n.a.t.c.hes of sound winking into existence and sliding over the beat, tracing it, then winking away.

Natasha nodded her satisfaction.

She could feel the ba.s.s. She knew it intimately. She 67.searched instead for the sounds at the top, she wanted something perfect, a leitmotif to weave in and out of the drums.

She knew the people who ran the clubs, and they would always play her music. People liked her tracks a lot, gave her respect and bookings. But she felt a vague dissatisfaction with everything she wrote, even when the sensation was shot through with pride. When she finished a track she did not feel any purgation of relief, only a slight unease. Natasha would cast around, ransacking her friends' record collections in an attempt to find the sounds she wanted to steal, or would make her own on her keyboard, but they never touched her like the ba.s.s. The ba.s.s never evaded her; she needed only to reach out for it, and it would drop out of her speakers complete and perfect.

The track was nearing a crescendo now: Gwan, exhorted a sampled voice, Gwan gyal. Natasha broke the beat, teasing the rhythm out, paring it down. She stripped flesh from the tune's bones and the samples echoed in the cavernous ribcage, in the belly of the beat. Come now... we rolltn' this way, mdebwoy.. . She pulled her sounds our one by one, until only the ba.s.s was left. It had ushered the song in; it ushered it out again.

The room was silent.

Natasha waited a while until the city silence of children and cars crept into her ears again. She looked around at her room. Her flat contained a tiny kitchen, 68.a tiny bathroom and the beautiful big bedroom she was in now. She had put her meagre collection of prints and posters in the other rooms and the hall; the walls here were quite bare. The room itself was empty except for a mattress on the floor, the hulking black stand which housed her stereo, and her keyboard. The wooden floor was criss-crossed with black leads.

She reached down and put the receiver back on the phone. She was about to wander into the kitchen, when the doorbell sounded. Natasha crossed the room to the open window and leaned out.

A man was standing in front of her door, looking straight up at her eyes. She had a brief impression of a thin face, bright eyes and long blond hair, before she ducked back into the room and headed down the stairs. He had not looked like a Jehovah's witness or a troublemaker.

She walked through the dingy communal hall. Through the rippled gla.s.s of the front door she could see that the man was very tall. She pulled the door open, admitting voices from the next house and the daylight that was flooding the street.

Natasha looked up into his narrow face. The man was about six feet four, dwarfing her by nearly a foot, but he was so slim he looked as if he might snap in half at the waist any moment. He was probably in his early thirties, but he was so pale it was difficult to tell. His hair was a sickly yellow. The pallor of his face was exaggerated by his black leather jacket. He would 69.have looked quite ill were it not for his bright blue eyes and his air of fidgety animation. He started to grin even before the door was fully open.

Natasha and her visitor stared at each other, he smiling, she with a guarded, quizzical expression.

'Brilliant,' he said suddenly.

Natasha stared at him.

'Your music,' he said. 'Brilliant.'

The man's voice was deeper and richer than she would have thought possible from such a slender frame. It was slightly breathless, as if he were rus.h.i.+ng to get his words out. She stared up at him and her eyes narrowed. This was much too weird a way of starting a conversation. She was not having it.

'What do you mean?' she said levelly.

He smiled apologetically. His words slowed down a little.

'I've been listening to your music,' he said. 'I came past here last week and I heard you playing up there. I tell you, I was just standing there with my mouth open.'

Natasha was embarra.s.sed and amazed. She opened her mouth to interrupt but he continued.

'I came back and I heard it again. It made me want to stan. dancing in the street!' He laughed. 'The next time I heard you stop halfway through, and I realized someone was actually playing while I listened. I'd 70.thought it was a record. It was such an exciting thought that you were actually up there making it.'

Natasha finally spoke.

'This is really ... flattering. But did you knock on my door just to tell me that?' This man unnerved her with his excited grin and breathy voice. It was only curiosity that stopped her shutting the door. 'I've not got a fan club yet.'

He stared at her and the nature of his smile changed. Until that moment it had been sincere, almost childish in its excitement. Slowly his lips closed a fraction and hid his teeth. He straightened his long back and his eyelids slid halfway down over his eyes. He leaned his head slightly to one side, without taking his eyes off her.

Natasha felt a wave of adrenaline. She looked back at him in shock. The change which had come over him was extraordinary. He stared at her now with a look so s.e.xual, so casually knowing, that she felt vertiginous.

She was furious with him. She shook her head a little and prepared to slam the door. He held it open. Before she could say anything, his arrogance had gone and the old look was back.

'Please,' he said quickly. 'I'm sorry. I'm not explaining myself. I'm fl.u.s.tered because I've ... been plucking up courage to talk to you.

'You see,' he continued, 'what you're playing is beautiful, but sometimes it feels a little bit - don't get 71.angry - a bit unfinished. I sort of feel like the treble isn't quite... working. And I wouldn't say that to you except I play a little bit myself and I thought maybe we could help each other out.'

Natasha stepped backwards. She felt intrigued and threatened. She always stonewalled about her music, refusing to discuss her feelings about it with any except her very closest friends. The intense but inchoate frustrations she felt were rarely verbalized, as if to do so would give them form. She chose to keep them at bay with obfuscation, from herself as much as from others, and now this man seemed to be unwrapping them with an unnerving casualness.

'Do you have a suggestion?' she said as acidly as she could. He reached behind him and picked up a black case. He shook it in front of her.

'This might sound a bit c.o.c.ky,' he said, 'and I don't want you to think I reckon I can do better than you. But, when I heard your playing, I just knew I could complement it.' He undid the clasp of the case and opened it in front of her. She saw a disa.s.sembled flute.

'I know you might think I'm crazy,' he preempted hurriedly. 'You think what you play is totally different to what I play. But... I've been looking for ba.s.s like yours for longer than you could believe.'

He spoke earnestly now, his eyebrows furrowed as he held her gaze. She stubbornly stared back, refusing to be overawed by this apparition on her doorstep.

'I want to play with you,' he said.

72.This was stupid, Natasha told herself: even if this man was not arrogant beyond belief, you could not play the flute to Jungle. It was so long since she had stared at a traditional instrument she felt a gust of deja vu: images of her nine-year-old self banging the xylophone in the school orchestra. Flutes meant enthusiastic cacophonies at the hands of children or the alien landscape of cla.s.sical music, an intimidating world of great beauty but vicious social exclusivity, to which she had never known the pa.s.swords.

But to her amazement, this lanky stranger had impressed her. She wanted to let him in and hear him play his flute in her room. She wanted to hear him play over some of her ba.s.slines. Discordant indie bands had done it, she knew: My b.l.o.o.d.y Valentine had used flutes. And while the result had left her as dead cold as the rest of that genre, surely the alliance itself was no more unlikely than this one. She realized that she was intrigued.

But she was not simply going to stand aside. She had a reputation for being intimidating. She was not used to feeling so disarmed, and her defences flared.

'Listen,' she said slowly. 'I don't know what you think qualifies you to speak about my tracks. Why should I play with you?'

'Try it once,' he said, and again that sudden change flooded his features, the same curled smile on the edge of the lips, the same heavy-lidded nonchalance about the eyes.

73.And Natasha was suddenly furious with this pretentious little art-school w.a.n.ker, livid where a moment ago she had been captivated, and she leaned forward and up on tiptoes, until her face was as close to his as it would go, and she raised one eyebrow, and she said: 'I don't think so.'

She closed the door in his face.

Natasha stalked back up her stairs. The window was open. She stood next to it, close to the wall, looking down at the street without putting herself in view. She could see no sign of the man. She walked slowly to her keyboard. She smiled.

OK, you c.o.c.ky f.u.c.ker, she thought. Let's see how good you are.

She turned the volume down slightly, and pulled another rhythm out of her collection. This time the drums came cras.h.i.+ng out of nowhere. The ba.s.s came chasing after, filling out the snare and framing the sound with a funky backdrop. She threw in a few minimal shouts and s.n.a.t.c.hes of bra.s.s, looped a moment of trumpet, but the treble was subdued; this was an offering to the man outside, and it was all about rhythm.

The beats looped once, twice. Then, sailing up from the street came a thin s.n.a.t.c.h of music, a trill of flute that mimicked the looping repet.i.tion of her own music, but elaborated on itself, changed a little with 74.every cycle. He was standing below her window, his hastily a.s.sembled instrument to his lips.

Natasha smiled. He had made good on his arrogance. She would have been disappointed if he had not.

She stripped the beat down and left it to loop. She stood back and listened.

The flute skittered over the drums, teasing the beat, touching just enough to stay anch.o.r.ed, then transporting itself. It suddenly became a series of staccato flutterings. It lilted between drum and ba.s.s, now wailing like a siren, now stuttering like Morse code.

Natasha was ... not transfixed, perhaps, but impressed.

She closed her eyes. The flute soared and dived; it fleshed out her skeletal tune in a way she could never achieve. The life in the live music was exuberant and neurotic and it sparked off the revivified ba.s.s, the very alive dancing with the dead. There was a promise to this tension.

Natasha nodded. She was eager to hear more, to feed that flute into her music. She smiled sardonically. She would admit defeat. So long as he behaved, so long as there were not too many of those knowing looks, she would admit that she wanted to hear more.

Natasha paced silently back down the stairs. She opened the door. He was standing a few feet back, his flute to his lips, staring up at her window. He stopped 75.as he saw her, and lowered his hands. No trace of a smile now. He looked anxious for approval.

She inclined her head and gave him a sideways look. He hovered.

'OK,' she said. 'I'll buy it.' He finally smiled. 'It's Natasha.' She jerked her thumb at herself.

'Pete,' the tall man said.

Natasha stood aside, and Pete pa.s.sed into her house.

CHAPTER SIX.

Again Fabian tried Natasha's number, and again she was engaged. He swore and slammed his receiver down. He turned on his heel, paced pointlessly. He had spoken to everyone who knew Saul except for Natasha, and she was the one who mattered most.

Fabian was not gossiping. As soon as he had heard about Saul's father he had got on the phone, almost before he was aware of what he was doing, and begun to spread the news. At some point he had rushed out to buy a paper, before starting again on the phone. But this was not gossip. He felt a powerful sense of duty. This, he believed, was what was needed of him.

He pulled on his jacket, tugged his thin dreadlocks into a ponytail. Enough, he decided. He would go to Natasha, tell her in person. It was a fair journey from Brixton to Ladbroke Grove, but the thought of the cold air in his face and lungs was beguiling. His house felt oppressive. He had spent hours on the phone that morning, the same phrases again and again - Six floors straight down... The filth won't let me talk to him 77 and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man's death. Fabian wanted s.p.a.ce. He wanted to clean out his head.

He shoved a page of newspaper into his pocket. He could recite the relevant story by heart: News in brief. A man died in Willesden, North London, yesterday,' after falling through a sixth-floor window. Police will not say if they are treating the death as suspicious. The man's son is helping them with their enquiries. The screaming accusation of the last sentence stung him.

He left his room for the filthy hall of the shared house. Someone was shouting upstairs. The dirty, ill fitting carpets irritated him always; now they made him feel violent. As he struggled with his bike, he glanced at the unwashed walls, the broken banisters. The presence of the house weighed down on him. He burst out of the front door with a sigh of relief.

Fabian treated his bike carelessly, letting it fall when he dismounted, chucking it against walls. He was rough with it. He yanked himself onto it now with unthinking brutality, and swung out into the road.

The streets were full. It was a Sat.u.r.day and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colourful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market 78.rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers cl.u.s.tered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian cafe. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape. Impa.s.sive, the people watched them pa.s.s by.

Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge pa.s.sed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, spa.r.s.e and low. The sky was always very big over Acre Lane.

Fabian jumped back onto his bike and took off up the slight incline towards Clapham. From there he would twist across into Clapham Manor Street, wind a little through backstreets to join Silverthorne Road, a steep sine-wave of minor industrial estates and peculiarly suburban houses tucked between Battersea and Clapham, a conduit feeding directly into Queenstown Road, across Chelsea Bridge.

For the first time that day Fabian felt his head clear.

79.Early that morning a suspicious policeman had answered Saul's phone, had demanded Fabian's name. Outraged, Fabian had hung up. He had rung up Willesden police station, again refusing to give his name, but demanding to know why policemen were answering his friend's phone. Only when he acquiesced and told them who he was would they tell him that Saul's father had died, and that Saul was with them - again that disingenuous phrase - helping with enquiries.

First he felt nothing but shock; then quickly a sense of a monstrous error.

And a great fear. Because Fabian understood immediately that it would be easy for them to believe that Saul had killed his father. And, as immediately, he knew without any equivocation or doubt that Saul had not. But he was terribly afraid, because only he knew that, because he knew Saul. And there was nothing he could tell others to help them understand.

He wanted to see Saul; he did not understand why the officer's voice changed when he demanded this. He was told it would be some time before he could speak to Saul, Saul was deep in conversation, his attention wholly grabbed, and Fabian would just have to wait. There was something the man was not telling him, Fabian knew, and he was scared. He left his phone number, was rea.s.sured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.

Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he pa.s.sed 80.an extraordinary white building, a ma.s.s of grubby turrets and shabby Art Deco windows. It looked long deserted. On the step sat two boys, dwarfed by jackets declaring allegiance to American Football teams neither had ever seen play. They were oblivious to the faded grandeur of their bench. One had his eyes closed, was leaning back against the door like Mexican cannon-fodder in a spaghetti Western. His friend spoke animatedly into his hand, his tiny mobile phone hidden within the voluminous folds of his sleeve, Fabian felt the thrill of materialist envy, but battened it down. This was one impulse he resisted.

Not me, he thought, as he always did. /'// hold out a bit longer. I won't be another black man with a mobile, another troublemaker with 'Drug Dealer' written on his forehead in script only the police can read.

He stood up out of his seat, kicked down and sped off towards Clapham.

Fabian knew Saul hated his father's disappointment. Fabian knew Saul and his father could not speak together. Fabian had been the only one of Saul's friends who had seen him turn that volume by Lenin over and over in his hands, open it and close it, read the inscription again and again. His father's writing was tight and controlled, as if trying not to break the pen. Saul had put the book in Fabian's lap, had waited while his friend read.

81.To Saul, This always made sense to me. Love from the Old Leftie.

Fabian remembered looking up into Saul's face. His mouth was sealed, his eyes looked tired. He took the book off Fabian's lap and closed it, stroked the cover, put it on his shelf. Fabian knew Saul had not killed his father.

He crossed Clapham High Street, a concourse of restaurants and charity shops, and slid into the back streets, wiggling through the parked cars to emerge on Silverthorne Road. He started down the long incline towards the river.

He knew that Natasha would be working. He knew he would turn into Ba.s.sett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Ba.s.s. She would be hunched over her keyboard, twiddling dials and pressing keys with the concentration of an alchemist, juggling long sequences of zeros and ones and transforming them into music. Listening and creating. That was what Natasha spent all her time doing. When she was not concentrating on source material behind the till of friends' record shops, serving customers in an efficient autopilot mode, she was reconst.i.tuting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word t.i.tles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.

Fabian believed it was Natasha's concentration which made her so as.e.xual to him. She was attractive 82.in a fierce way, and was never short of offers, especially at clubs, especially when word got around that the music playing was hers; but Fabian had never known her seem very interested, even when she took someone home. He felt blasphemous even thinking of her in a s.e.xual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was a.s.sured by his friend Kay, a cheerful dope-raddled clown who drooled lasciviously after Natasha whenever he saw her. The music was the thing, Kay said, and the intensity was the thing, and the carelessness was the thing. Just like a nun, it was the promise of what was under the habit.

But Fabian could only grin sheepishly at Kay, absurdly embarra.s.sed. Amateur psychologists around London, Saul included, had wasted no time deciding he was in love with Natasha; but Fabian did not think that was the case. She infuriated him with her style fascism and her solipsism, but he supposed he loved her. Just not in the way Saul meant it.

He twisted under the filthy railway bridge on Queenstown Road now, fast approaching Battersea Park. He was riding an incline, racing towards Chelsea Bridge. He took the roundabout with casual arrogance, put his head down and climbed towards the river. On Fabian's right, the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station loomed into view. Its roof was long gone, it looked like a bombed-out relic, a blitz survivor. It was a great upturned plug straining to suck voltage out of the clouds, a monument to energy.

83.Fabian burst free of South London. He slowed and looked into the Thames, past the towers and railings of steel that surrounded him, keeping him snug on Chelsea Bridge. The river sent shards of cold sunlight in all directions.

He scudded over the face of the water like a pond skater, dwarfed by the girders and bolts ostentatiously holding the bridge together. He hung poised for a moment between the South Bank and the North Bank, his head high to see over the sides into the water, to see the black barges that never moved, waiting to ferry cargo long forgotten, his legs still, freewheeling his way towards Ladbroke Grove.

The route to Natasha's house took Fabian past the Albert Hall and through Kensington, which he hated. It was a soulless place, a purgatory filled only with rich transients drifting pointlessly through Nicole Farhi and Red or Dead. He sped up Kensington Church Street towards Netting Hill and on through to Portobello Road.

It was a market day, the second in the week, designed to wrest money from tourists. Merchandise that had cost five pounds on Friday was now offered for ten. The air was thick with garish cagoules and backpacks and French and Italian. Fabian cussed quietly and inched through the throng. He ducked left 84.down Elgin Crescent and then right, bearing down on the Ba.s.sett Road flat.

A gust of wind stained the air brown with leaves. Fabian swung into the street. The leaves boiled around him, stuck to his jacket. Pared-down trees lined the tarmac. Fabian dismounted while still in motion, walked towards Natasha's flat.

He could hear her working. The faint thumping of Drum and Ba.s.s was audible from the end of the street. As he walked, wheeling his bike beside him, Fabian heard the sound of wings. Natasha's house teemed with pigeons. Every protuberance and ledge was grey with plump, stirring bodies. A few were in the air, hovering nervously around the windows and gables, settling, dislodging their peers. They s.h.i.+fted and shat a little as Fabian stopped at the door directly below them.

Natasha's rhythm was loud now, and Fabian could hear something unusual, a clear sound like pipes, a recorder or a flute, bursting with energy and exuberance, shadowing the ba.s.s. He stood still and listened. The quality of this sound was different from that of samples, and it was not trapped in any loops. Fabian suspected it was being played live. And by something of a virtuoso.

He rang the bell. The electronic boom of the ba.s.s stopped cold. The flute faltered on for a second or two. As silence fell, the company of pigeons rose en ma.s.se into the air with the abruptness of panic, circled 85.once like a school of fish and disappeared into the north. Fabian heard footsteps on the stairs. ;, Natasha opened the door to him and smiled.

'Alright, Fabe,' she said, reaching up to touch her clenched right fist to his. He did so, at the same time bending down to put an arm around her and kiss her cheek. She responded, though her surprise was evident.

'Tash,' he whispered, in greeting and in warning. She heard it in his voice, pulled back holding his shoulders in her hands. Her face sharpened in concern.

'What? What's happened?'

'Tash, it's Saul.' He'd told the story so often today he'd become an automaton, just mouthing the words, but this time it was difficult all over again. He licked his lips.

Natasha started. 'What is it, Fabe?' Her voice cracked.