King Rat

Chapter One

The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs. They pass between towers jutting into the sky like long-necked sea beasts and the great gas-cylinders wallowing in dirty scrub like whales. In the depths below are lines of small shops and obscure franchises, cafes with peeling paint and businesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. The colours and curves of graffiti mark every wall. Top floor windows pass by so close that passengers can peer inside, into small bare offices and store cupboards. They can make out the contours of trade calendars and pin-ups on the walls.

The rhythms of London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zone between suburbs and centre.

Gradually the streets widen and the names of the shops and cafes become more familiar; the main roads are more salubrious; the traffic is denser; and the city rises to meet the tracks.

At the end of a day in October a train made this journey towards King’s Cross. Flanked by air, it progressed over the outlands of North London, the city building up below it as it neared the Holloway Road. The people beneath ignored its passage. Only children looked up as it clattered overhead, and some of the very young pointed. As the train drew closer to the station, it slipped below the level of the roofs.

There were few people in the carriage to watch the bricks rise around them. The sky disappeared above the windows. A cloud of pigeons rose from a hiding place beside the tracks and wheeled off to the east.

The flurry of wings and bodies distracted a thickset young man at the rear of the compartment. He had been trying not to stare openly at the woman sitting opposite him. Thick with relaxer, her hair had been teased from its tight curls and was coiled like snakes on her head. The man broke off his furtive scrutiny as the birds passed by, and he ran his hands through his own cropped hair.

The train was now below the houses. It wound through a deep groove in the city, as if the years of passage had worn down the concrete under the tracks. Saul Garamond glanced again at the woman sitting in front of him, and turned his attention to the windows. The light in the carriage had made them mirrors, and he stared at himself, his heavy face. Beyond his face was a layer of brick, dimly visible, and beyond that the cellars of the houses that rose like cliffs on either side.

It was days since Saul had been in the city.

Every rattle of the tracks took him closer to his home. He closed his eyes.

Outside, the gash through which the tracks passed had widened as the station approached. The walls on either side were punctuated by dark alcoves, small caves full of rubbish a few feet from the track. The silhouettes of cranes arched over the skyline. The walls around the train parted. Tracks fanned away on either side as the train slowed and edged its way into King’s Cross.

The passengers rose. Saul swung his bag over his shoulder and shuffled out of the carriage. Freezing air stretched up to the great vaulted ceilings. The cold shocked him. Saul hurried through the buildings, through the crowds, threading his way between knots of people. He still had a way to go. He headed underground.

He could feel the presence of the population around him. After days in a tent on the Suffolk coast, the weight of ten million people so close to him seemed to make the air vibrate. The tube was full of garish colours and bare flesh, as people headed to clubs and parties.

His father would probably be waiting for him. He knew Saul was coming back, and he would surely make an effort to be welcoming, forfeiting his usual evening in the pub to greet his son. Saul already resented him for that. He felt gauche and uncharitable, but he despised his father’s faltering attempts to communicate. He was happier when the two of them avoided each other. Being surly was easy, and felt more honest.

By the time his tube train burst out of the tunnels of the Jubilee Line it was dark. Saul knew the route. The darkness transformed the rubble behind Finchley Road into a dimly glimpsed no-man’s-land, but he was able to fill in the details he could not see, even down to the tags and the graffiti. Burner. Nax. Coma. He knew the names of the intrepid little rebels clutching their magic markers, and he knew where they had been.

The grandiose tower of the Gaumont State cinema jutted into the sky on his left, a bizarre totalitarian monument among the budget groceries and hoardings of Kilburn High Road. Saul could feel the cold through the windows and he wrapped his coat around him as the train neared Willesden station. The passengers had thinned. Saul left only a very few behind him as he got out of the carriage.

Outside the station he huddled against the chill. The air smelt faintly of smoke from some local bonfire, someone clearing his allotment. Saul set off down the hill towards the library.

He stopped at a takeaway and ate as he walked, moving slowly to avoid spilling soy sauce and vegetables down himself. Saul was sorry the sun had gone down. Willesden lent itself to spectacular sunsets. On a day like today, when there were few clouds, its low skyline let the light flood the streets, pouring into the strangest crevices; the windows that faced each other bounced the rays endlessly back and forth between themselves and sent it hurtling in unpredictable directions; the rows and rows of brick glowed as if lit from within.

Saul turned into the backstreets. He wound through the cold until his father’s house rose before him. Terragon Mansions was an ugly Victorian block, squat and mean-looking for all its size. It was fronted by the garden: a strip of dirty vegetation frequented only by dogs. His father lived on the top floor. Saul looked up and saw that the lights were on. He climbed the steps and let himself in, glancing into the darkness of the bushes and scrub on either side.

He ignored the huge lift with its steel-mesh door, not wanting its groans to announce him. Instead he crept up the flights of stairs and gently unlocked his father’s door.

The flat was freezing.

Saul stood in the hall and listened. He could hear the sound of the television from behind the sitting room door. He waited, but his father was silent. Saul shivered and looked around him.

He knew he should go in, should rouse his father from slumber, and he even got as far as reaching for the door. But he stopped and looked at his own room.

He sneered at himself in disgust, but he crept towards it anyway.

He could apologize in the morning. I thought you were asleep, Dad. I heard you snoring. I came in drunk and fell into bed. I was so knackered I wouldn’t have been any kind of company anyway. He cocked an ear, heard only the voices of one of the late-night discussion programmes his father so loved, muffled and pompous. Saul turned away and slipped into his room.

Sleep came easily. Saul dreamed of being cold, and woke once in the night to pull his duvet closer. He dreamed of slamming, a heavy beating noise, so loud it pulled him out of sleep and he realized it was real, it was there. Adrenaline surged through him, making him tremble. His heart quivered and lurched as he swung out of bed.

It was icy in the flat. Someone was pounding on the front door.

The noise would not stop, it was frightening him. He was shaking, disorientated. It was not yet light. Saul glanced at his clock. It was a little after six. He stumbled into the hall. The horrible bang bang bang was incessant, and now he could hear shouting as well, distorted and unintelligible.

He fought into a shin and shouted: ‘Who is it?’

The slamming did not stop. He called out again, and this time a voice was raised above the din.

‘Police!’

Saul struggled to clear his head. With a sudden panic he thought of the small stash of dope in his drawer, but that was absurd. He was no drugs kingpin, no one would waste a dawn raid on him. He was reaching out to open the door, his heart still tearing, when he suddenly remembered to check that they were who they claimed, but it was too late now, the door flew back and knocked him down as a torrent of bodies streamed into the flat.

Blue trousers and big shoes all around him. Saul was yanked to his feet. He started to flail at the intruders. Anger waxed with his fear. He tried to yell but someone smacked him in the stomach and he doubled up. Voices were reverberating everywhere around him, making no sense.

‘… cold like a bastard…’

‘… cocky little cunt…’

‘… fucking glass, watch yourself…’

‘… his son, or what? High as a fucking kite, must be…’

And above all these voices he could hear a weather forecast, the cheery tones of a breakfast television presenter. Saul struggled to turn and face the men who were holding him so tight.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he gasped. Without speaking, the men propelled him into the sitting room.

The room was full of police, but Saul saw straight through them. He saw the television first: the woman in the bright suit was warning him it would be chilly again today. On the sofa was a plate of congealed pasta, and a half-drunk glass of beer sat on the floor. Cold gusts of air caught at him and he looked up at the window, out over houses. The curtains were billowing dramatically. He saw that jags of glass littered the floor. There was almost no glass left in the window-frame, only a few shards around the edges.

Saul sagged with terror and tried to pull himself to the window.

A thin man in civilian clothes turned and saw him.

‘Down the station now,’ he shouted at Saul’s captors.

Saul was spun on his heels. The room turned around him like a funfair ride, the rows of books and his father’s small pictures rushing past him. He struggled to turn back.

‘Dad!’ he shouted. ‘Dad!’

He was pulled effortlessly out of the flat. The dark of the corridor was pierced by slivers of light spilling out of doors. Saul saw uncomprehending faces and hands clutching at dressing-gowns, as he was hauled towards the lift. Neighbours in pyjamas were staring at him. He bellowed at them as he passed.

He still could not see the men holding him. He shouted at them, begging to know what was going on, pleading, threatening and railing.

‘Where’s my dad? What’s going on?’

‘Shut up.’

‘What’s going on?’

Something slammed into his kidneys, not hard but with the threat of greater force. ‘Shut up.’ The lift door closed behind them.

‘What’s happened to my fucking dad!’

As soon as he had seen the broken window a voice inside Saul had spoken quietly. He had not been able to hear it clearly until now. Inside the flat the brutal crunch of boots and the swearing had drowned it out. But here where he had been dragged, in the relative silence of the lift, he could hear it whispering.

Dead, it said. Dad’s dead.

Saul’s knees buckled. The men behind him held him upright, but he was utterly weak in their arms. He moaned.

‘Where’s my dad?’ he pleaded.

The light outside was the colour of the clouds. Blue strobes swirled on a mass of police cars, staining the drab buildings. The frozen air cleared Saul’s head. He tugged desperately at the arms holding him as he struggled to see over the hedges that ringed Terragon Mansions. He saw faces staring down from the hole that was his father’s window. He saw the glint of a million splinters of glass covering the dying grass. He saw a mass of uniformed police frozen in a threatening diorama. All their faces were turned to him. One held a roll of tape covered in crime scene warnings, a tape he was stretching around stakes in the ground, circumscribing a piece of the earth. Inside the chosen area he saw one man kneeling before a dark shape on the lawn. The man was staring at him like all the others. His body obscured the untidy thing. Saul was swept past before he could see any more.

He was pushed into one of the cars, lightheaded now, hardly able to feel a thing. His breath came very fast. Somewhere along the line handcuffs had been snapped onto his wrists. He shouted again at the men in front, but they ignored him.

The streets rolled by.

They put him in a cell, gave him a cup of tea and warmer clothes: a grey cardigan and corduroy trousers that stank of alcohol. Saul sat huddled in a stranger’s clothes. He waited for a long time.

He lay on the bed, draped the thin blanket around him.

Sometimes he heard the voice inside him. Suicide, it said. Dad’s committed suicide.

Sometimes he would argue with it. It was a ridiculous idea, something his father could never do. Then it would convince him and he might start to hyperventilate, to panic. He closed his ears to it. He kept it quiet.

He would not listen to rumours, even if they came from inside himself.

No one had told him why he was there. Whenever footsteps went by outside he would shout, sometimes swearing, demanding to know what was happening. Sometimes the footsteps would stop and the grille would be lifted on the door. ‘We’re sorry for the delay,’ a voice would say. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can,’ or ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘You can’t keep me here,’ he yelled at one point. ‘What’s going on?’ His voice echoed around empty corridors.

Saul sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

A fine network of cracks spread out from one corner. Saul followed them with his eyes, allowing himself to be mesmerized.

Why are you here? the voice inside whispered to him nervously. Why do they want you? Why won’t they speak to you?

Saul sat and stared at the cracks and ignored the voice.

After a long time he heard the key in the lock. Two uniformed policemen entered, followed by the thin man Saul had seen in his father’s flat. The man was dressed in the same brown suit and ugly tan raincoat. He stared at Saul, who returned his gaze from beneath the dirty blanket, forlorn and pathetic and aggressive. When the thin man spoke his voice was much softer than Saul would have imagined.

‘Mr Garamond,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.’

Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.

‘What’s going on?’ he croaked.

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us that, Saul,’ said the thin man. His voice remained quite impassive. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Crowley, Saul. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions…’

‘What happened to Dad?’ Saul interrupted. There was a pause.

‘He fell from the window, Saul,’ Crowley said. ‘It’s a long way up. I don’t think he suffered any.’ There was a pause. ‘Did you not realize what had happened to your dad, Saul?’

`I thought maybe something… I saw in the garden… Why am I here? Saul was shaking.

Crowley pursed his lips and moved a little closer. 'Well, Saul, first let me apologize for how long you’ve been waiting. It’s been very hectic out here. I had hoped someone might come and take care of you, but it seems no one has. I’m sorry about that. I’ll be having a few words.

‘As to why you’re here, well, it was all a bit confused back there. We get a call from a neighbour saying there’s someone lying out front of the building, we go in, there you are, we don’t know who you are… you can see how it all gets out of hand. Anyway, you’re here, long and short of it, in the hope that you can tell us your side of the story.’

Saul stared at Crowley. ‘My side?’ he shouted. ‘My side of what? I’ve got home and my dad’s…’

Crowley shushed him, his hands up, placating, nodding.

‘I know, I know, Saul. We’ve just got to understand what happened. I want you to come with me.’ He gave a sad little smile as he said this. He looked down at Saul sitting on the bed; dirty, smelly, in strange clothes, confused, pugnacious, tear-stained and orphaned. Crowley’s face creased with what looked like concern.

‘I want to ask you some questions.’

Chapter Two

Once, when he was three, Saul was sitting on his father’s shoulders, coming home from the park. They had passed a group of workmen repairing a road, and Saul had tangled his hands in his father’s hair and leaned over and gazed at the bubbling pot of tar his father pointed out: the pot heating on the van, and the big metal stick they used to stir it. His nose was filled with the thick smell of tar, and as Saul gazed into the simmering glop he remembered the witch’s cauldron in Hansel and Gretel and he was seized with the sudden terror that he would fall into the tar and be cooked alive. And Saul had squirmed backwards and his father had stopped and asked him what was the matter. When he understood he had taken Saul off his shoulders and walked with him over to the workmen, who had leaned on their shovels and grinned quizzically at the anxious child. Saul’s father had leaned down and whispered encouragement into his ear, and Saul had asked the men what the tar was. The men had told him about how they would spread it thin and put it on the road, and they had stirred it for him as his father held him. He did not fall in. And he was still afraid, but not as much as he had been, and he knew why his father had made him find out about the tar, and he had been brave.

A mug of milky tea coagulated slowly in front of him. A bored-looking constable stood by the door of the bare room. A rhythmic metallic wheeze issued from the tape-recorder on the table. Crowley sat opposite him, his arms folded, his face impassive. ‘Tell me about your father.’

Saul’s father had been racked with a desperate embarrassment whenever his son came home with girls. It was very important to him that he should not seem distant or old-fashioned, and in a ghastly miscalculation he had tried to put Saul’s guests at their ease. He was terrified that he would say the wrong thing. The struggle not to bolt for his own room stiffened him. He would stand uneasily in the doorway, a grim smile clamped to his face, his voice firm and serious as he asked the terrified fifteen-year-olds what they were doing at school and whether they enjoyed it. Saul would gaze at his father and will him to leave. He would stare furiously at the floor as his father stolidly discussed the weather and GCSE English.

‘I’ve heard that sometimes you argued. Is that true, Saul? Tell me about that.’

When Saul was ten, the time he liked most was in the mornings. Saul’s father left for work on the railways early, and Saul had half an hour to himself in the flat. He would wander around and stare at the titles of the books his father left lying on all the surfaces: books about money and politics and history. His father would always pay close attention to what Saul was doing in history at school, asking what the teachers had said. He would lean over his chair, urging Saul not to believe everything his history teacher told him. He would thrust books at his son, stare at them, become distracted, take them back, flick through the pages, murmur that Saul was perhaps too young. He would ask his son what he thought about the issues they discussed. He took Saul’s opinions very seriously. Sometimes these discussions bored Saul. More often they made him feel uneasy at the sudden welter of ideas, but inspired.

‘Did your father ever make you feel guilty, Saul?’

Something had been poisoned between the two of them when Saul was about sixteen. He had been sure this was an awkwardness that would pass, but once it had taken root the bitterness would not go. Saul’s father forgot how to talk to him. He had nothing more to teach and nothing more to say. Saul was angry with his father’s disappointment. His father was disappointed at his laziness and his lack of political fervour. Saul could not make his father feel at ease, and his father was disappointed at that. Saul had stopped going on the marches and the demonstrations, and his father had stopped asking him. Every once in a while there would be an argument. Doors would slam. More usually there was nothing.

Saul’s father was bad at accepting presents. He never took women to the flat when his son was there. Once when the twelve-year-old Saul was being bullied, his father came into the school unannounced and harangued the teachers, to Saul’s profound embarrassment.

‘Do you miss your mother, Saul? Are you sorry you never knew her?’

Saul’s father was a short man with powerful shoulders and a body like a thick pillar. He had thinning grey hair and grey eyes.

The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul’s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn — only loss. He understood what his father was trying to offer him.

His father was trying to resolve a paradox. He was trying to make sense of his bright, educated son letting life come to him rather than wresting what he wanted from it. He understood only that his son was dissatisfied. That much was true. In Saul’s teenage years he had been a living cliche, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralysed in the face of a terrifying and vast future, the whole of his life, the whole of the world. Saul had emerged, passed twenty unscathed, but his father and he would never really be able to talk together again.

That Christmas, Saul had sat on his bed and turned the little book over and over in his hands. It was a leather-bound edition illustrated with stark woodcuts of toiling workers, a beautiful little commodity. What Is To Be Done? demanded the title. What is to be done with you, Saul?

He read the book. He read Lenin’s exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, moulded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him, trying to help him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyses is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. This is tar, and this is what it does, and this is the world, and this is what it does, and this is what we can do to it.

There was a long time of gentle questions and monosyllabic answers. Almost imperceptibly, the pace of the interrogation built up. I was out of London, Saul tried to explain, I was camping. I got in late, about eleven, I went straight to bed, I didn’t see Dad.

Crowley was insistent. He ignored Saul’s plaintive evasions. He grew gradually more aggressive. He asked Saul about the previous night.

Crowley relentlessly reconstructed Saul’s route home. Saul felt as if he had been slapped. He was curt, struggling to control the adrenaline which rushed through him. Crowley piled meat on the skeletal answers Saul offered him, threading through Willesden with such detail that Saul once more stalked its dark streets.

‘What did you do when you saw your father?’ Crowley asked.

I did not see my father, Saul wanted to say, he died without me seeing him, but instead he heard himself whine something inaudible like a petulant child.

‘Did he make you angry when you found him waiting for you?’ Crowley said, and Saul felt fear spread through him from the groin outwards. He shook his head.

‘Did he make you angry, Saul? Did you argue?’

‘I didn’t see him!’

‘Did you fight, Saul?’ A shaken head, no. ‘Did you fight?’ No. ‘Did you?’

Crowley waited a long time for an answer. Eventually he pursed his lips and scribbled something in a notebook. He looked up and met Saul’s eyes, dared him to speak.

‘I didn’t see him! I don’t know what you want… I wasn’t there!’ Saul was afraid. When, he begged to know, would they let him go? But Crowley would not say.

Crowley and the constable led him back to the cell. There would be further interviews, they warned him. They offered him food which, in a fit of righteous petulance, he refused. He did not know if he was hungry. He felt as if he had forgotten how to tell. ‘I want to make a phone call!’ Saul called as the men’s footsteps died away, but they did not return and he did not shout again.

Saul lay on the bench and covered his eyes.

He was acutely aware of every sound. He could hear the tattoo of feet in the corridor long before they passed his door. Muffled conversations of men and women welled up and died as they walked by; laughter sounded suddenly from another part of the building; cars were moving some way off, their mutterings filtered by trees and walls.

For a long time Saul lay listening. Was he allowed a phone call? he wondered. Who would he call? Was he under arrest? But these thoughts seemed to take up very little of his mind. For the most part he just lay and listened.

A long time passed.

Saul opened his eyes with a start. For a moment he was uncertain what had happened.

The sounds were changing.

The depth seemed to be bleeding out of all the noises in the world.

Saul could still make out everything he had heard before, but it was ebbing away into two dimensions. The change was swift and inexorable. Like the curious echoes of shrieks which fill swimming pools, the sounds were clear and audible, but empty.

Saul sat up. A loud scratching startled him: the noise of his chest against the rough blanket. He could hear the thump of his heart. The sounds of his body were as full as ever, unaffected by the strange sonic vampirism. They seemed unnaturally clear. Saul felt like a cut-out pasted ineptly onto the world. He moved his head slowly from side to side, touched his ears.

A faint patter of boots sounded in the corridor, wan and ineffectual. A policeman walked past the cell, steps unconvincing. Saul stood tentatively and looked up at the ceiling. The network of cracks and lines in the paint seemed to shift uneasily, the shadows moving imperceptibly, as if a faint light were being moved about the room.

Saul’s breath came fast and shallow. The air felt stretched out taut and tasted of dust.

Saul moved, reeled, made dizzy by the cacophony of his own body.

Above the stripped-down murmurings, slow foot steps became audible. Like the sounds Saul made these steps cut through the surrounding whisper effortlessly, deliberately. Other steps passed them hurriedly in both directions, but the pace of these feet did not change. They moved steadily towards his door Saul could feel vibrations in the desiccated air.

Without thought, he backed into a corner of the room and stared at the door. The feet stopped. Saw heard no key in his lock, but the handle turned and the door swung open.

The motion seemed to take a long long time, the door fighting its way through air suddenly glutinous. The complaints of the hinges, emaciated with malaise stretched out long after the door had stopped moving.

The light in the corridor was bright. Saul could not make out the figure who stepped into his cell and gently closed the door.

The figure stood motionless, regarding Saul.

The light in the cell performed only a rudimentary job on the man.

Like moonlight it sketched out nothing but an edge. Two eyes full of dark, a sharp nose and pinched mouth.

Shadows were draped over the face like cobwebs. He was tall but not very tall; his shoulders were bunched up tight as if against the wind, a defensive posture. The vague face was thin and lined; the long dark hair was lank and uncombed, falling over those tight shoulders in untidy clots. A shapeless coat of indiscriminate grey was draped over dark clothes. The man plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was turned slightly down. He was looking at Saul from beneath his brows.

A smell of rubbish and wet animals filled the room. The man stood motionless, watching Saul from across the floor.

‘You’re safe.’

Saul started. He had only dimly seen the man’s mouth move, but the harsh whisper echoed in his head as if those lips were an inch from his ear. It took a moment for him to understand what had been said.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘You’re safe now. No one can get to you now.’ A strong London accent, an aggressive, secretive snarl whispered right in Saul’s ear. ‘I want you to know why you’re here.’

Saul felt dizzy, swallowed spit made thick with phlegm by the atmosphere. He did not, he did not understand what was happening.

‘Who are you?’ Saul hissed. ‘Are you police? Where’s Crowley?’

The man jerked his head in what might have been dismissal, shock, or a laugh.

‘How did you get in?’ demanded Saul.

‘I crept past all the little boys in blue on tippy-toe slid hugger-mugger under the counter and I sneaked my way to your little queer ken. Do you know where you’re here?’

Saul nodded dumbly.

‘They think…’

‘The constables think you killed your daddy, but you didn’t, I know that. Granted, you’ll have a fine time getting them to Adam and Eve that… but I do.’

Saul was shaking. He sank onto the bunk. The stench which had entered with the man was over powering. The voice continued, relentless. ‘I’ve been watching you carefully, you know. Keeping tabs. We’ve a lot to talk about, you know. I can… do you a favour.’

Saul was utterly bewildered. Was this some casualty off the streets? Someone ill in his head, too full alcohol or voices to make any sense? The air was still taut like a bowstring. What did this man know about his father?

‘I don’t know who the fuck you are,’ he star slowly. ‘And I don’t know how you got in…’

‘You don’t understand.’ The whisper became a little harsher. ‘Listen, matey. We’re out of that world now. Two more people and no more people things, get it? look at you,’ the voice harsh with disgust. ‘Sitting there in your borrowed duds like a fool, waiting patiently to get took before the Barnaby. Think they’ll take kindly to your whids? They’ll bang you up till you rot, foolish boy.’ There was a long pause. ‘And then I appear, like a bloody angel of mercy. I spring your jigger, no problem. This is where I live, get it? This is the city where I live. It shares all the points of yours and theirs, but none of its properties. I go where I want. And I’m here to tell you how it is with you. Welcome to my home.’

The voice filled the small room, it would not give Saul space or time to think.

The shadowy face bore down on Saul. The man was coming nearer. He moved in little spurts, his chest and shoulders still tight, he approached from the side, zigzagged a little, came a little closer from another direction, his demeanour at once furtive and aggressive.

Saul swallowed. His head was light, his mouth dry. He fought for spit. The air was arid and so full of tension he could almost hear it, a faint keening as if the sound of the door hinge had never died away. He could not think, he could only listen.

The stinking apparition before him moved a little out of the shadows. The filthy trenchcoat was open, and Saul caught sudden sight of a lighter grey shirt underneath, decorated with rows of black arrows pointing up, convict chic.

The angle of the man’s head was proud, the shoulders skulking.

‘There’s nothing I don’t know about Romeville you see. Nor Gay Paree, nor Cairo, nor Berlin, nor no city, but London’s special to me, has been for a long time. Stop looking at me and wondering, boy. You’re not going to get it. I’ve crept through these brick when they were barns, then mills, then factories and banks. You’re not looking at people, boy. You should count yourself lucky I’m interested in you. Because I’m doing you a big favour.’ The man’s snarling monologue paused theatrically.

This was madness, Saul knew. His head spun. None of this meant anything; it was meaningless words, ludicrous, he should laugh, but something in the curdled air held his tongue. He could not speak, he could not mock. He realized he was crying, or perhaps his eyes were just watering in the stagnant atmosphere of the room.

His tears seemed to annoy the intruder.

‘Stop moaning on about your fat dad,’ he spat ‘That’s all over, and you’ve more important things to worry about.’

He paused again.

‘Shall we go?’

Saul looked up sharply. He reached his voice at last.

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’ He was whispering.

‘Shall we go? I said. It’s time to scarper, it’s time to split, to quit, to take our leave.’ The man looked about him conspiratorially, and hid his mouth behind the back of his hand in a melodramatic stage whisper. ‘I’m Breaking you out.’ He straightened up a little and nodded his head, that indistinct face bobbing enthusiastically. ‘Let’s just say your path and mine cross at this point. It’s darkmans outside already, I can smell it, and it looks like they’ve forgot about you. No Tommy Tucker for you, it seems, so let’s bow out gracefully. You and I’ve got business together, and this is no place to conduct it. And if we wait much longer they’ll have banged you up as a member of the parenticide club and eaten the key. There’s no justice there, I know. So let me ask you one more time… shall we go?’

He could do it, Saul realized. With a terrified amazement he realized he was going to go with this creature, was going to follow this man whose face he could not see into the police station, and the two of them would escape.

‘Who… what… are you?’

‘I’ll tell you that.’

The voice filled Saul up and made him faint. The thin face was inches from his, silhouetted by the bare bulb. He tried to see through the obfuscating darkness and discern clear features, but the shadows were stubborn and subtle. The words mesmerized him like a spell, as hypnotic as dance music.

‘You’re in the presence of royalty, mate. I go where my subjects go, and my subjects are everywhere. And here in the cities there’re a million crevices for irrjH kingdom. I fill all the spaces in-between.’

‘Let me tell you about me.’

‘I can hear the things left unsaid.’

‘I know the secret life of houses and the social life of things. I can read the writing on the wall.’

‘I live in old London town.’

‘Let me tell you who I am.’

‘I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief, I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my piss. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king.’

In one sudden movement he turned to face the door and sloughed the coat from his shoulders, unveiling the name stencilled crudely in black on the back of 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 scraped 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.

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 away and rendering him dumb. Then he had paused again, and hunched those bony shoulders defensively. And again that invitation, as casual as from a bored lover at 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 and without warning, swept him up over his shoulder in fireman’s lift. Saul had let out a bark of surprise before King Rat crushed his body against him, driving the from him and hissing: ‘Shut it.’

Saul lay still as King Rat stalked forward with ease. He jounced up and down as the stinking figure pace out of the room. Saul listened.

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 scraped 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 passed 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 passed silently through the halls. Again and again footsteps approached, voices, laughing. Each time Saul held his breath, King Rat was still, as people passed by impossibly close, near enough to touch, without seeing him or his burden.

Saul kept his eyes closed. Through his lids he could see changes in darkness and light. Unbidden, his mind drew a map of the station, rendering it a land of the stark and sudden oppositions. Here be monsters, thought, and felt ridiculously close to giggling. He became acutely aware of sounds. The echoes he head aided his helpless cartography, waxing and waning the rooms and corridors through which he was carried grew and shrank. Another door creaked open, and Saul was held still.

The echoes hollowed out, changed direction. The bobbing of his body increased. He felt himself born upwards.

Saul opened his eyes. They were on a narrow flight of grey stairs, musty and sterile and badly lit. Muffled sounds came from above and below. His rescue carried him up several flights, past floor after floor, filthy windows and doors, eventually coming to rest 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 in front of him was a big greasy window, high above the little entresol where the stairs had changed direction.

As Saul stared, the grey figure cocked his head, sniffed the expanse of air between himself and the window ten feet away. In a burst of feverish motion he locked his 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 glass. 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 passage 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 five stories above the earth, until those unclear eyes were staring at Saul from beyond the filthy glass.

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 glass 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 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 space. Hands slid over his body, finding purchase, easing his passage 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 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 scraped 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 muffle 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 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 passed, the threat receded.

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

‘It’s unbelievable! What the fuck 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 snatch 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 bass 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 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. Without taking his eyes from Saul, he slowly sank 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 surreality which had caught him up in its gusts.

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 Godfers, 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 she was, luscious, who’d have passed 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 bumped 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 arse and fell silent.

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

‘She was… what?’

‘A… fucking… 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 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 glass 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 fucking rest?’

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

‘Hey. Hey. Fucking enough.’

‘Fuck off!’ Saul found a voice between sniffing, weeping and wiping his nose on the sleeve of the police-issue jumper. ‘Just stop for a minute. Just leave me alone…’

Saul relapsed into tears for his father. He beat himself on the head in his loneliness, screwed up his eyes as if he were being tortured, moaned rhythmically as he pummelled his forehead.

‘I’m sorry Dad I’m sorry I’m sorry…’ he crooned between his quiet cries. His words were garbled and confused in isolation and terrible inchoate anger. He wrapped his arms around his head, desperate and alone up on the roof.

Through the gap between his arms, he saw that King Rat was no longer sitting before him, that he had risen without a sound and had somehow reached the other end of the roof, where he stood looking out over London, facing away from Saul whose sadness angered him so much. Saul’s body moved with sobs, as he stared from behind his hands at the strange figure perched between two outcroppings of brick, King Rat. His uncle.

Saul wriggled backwards, still weeping, until he felt the damp pressure of the chimney on his back. He looked over his shoulder and saw a place where two chimney stacks met near the roof edge, leaving a space between them, a rooftop cubby-hole into which he crept with a quick contortion. He curled up in this little space, insulated from the sky and the sickening drop on all sides, out of the sight of King Rat. He was so tired, exhaustion had soaked into his bones. He lay on his side in the cramped, sloping chamber he had found and covered his head with his hands. He cried some more until his tears became mechanical, like a child who has forgotten what he is weeping for. Saul lay there on the slate slope under the chimneys, without food inside him, in someone else’s ruined clothes, lonely and utterly confused, until, amazingly, he slept.

When he woke, the sky was still dark, with only a faint fringe of dun in the east. There was no time for a luxurious morning state for Saul, no slow stretches or confusion, no slow remembrance of where he was and why. He opened his eyes onto red brick, and realized with a shudder of claustrophobia that he was surrounded, that curled up around him was King Rat. He started, pulled himself upright out of that passionless, utilitarian embrace. King Rat’s eyes were open.

‘Morning, boy. Bit parky in the small hours. Thought we’d share a bit of warmth to help you kip.’

King Rat uncoiled and rose, stretching each limb individually. He grabbed the top of the high chimney and hauled himself up with his arms, his legs dangling. He looked slowly from one side to the other, surveying the dim urban sprawl, before hawking noisily and spitting a gob of phlegm down the chimney. Only then did he relax his arms and lower himself to the roof again. Saul struggled to his feet, slipping on the slope. He wiped rheum and rubbish from his face.

King Rat turned to him. ‘We never finished our little chat. We was… interrupted last night. You’ve an awful lot to learn, matey, and you’re looking at teacher, like it or not. But first off, let’s make ourselves scarce.’ He laughed: a filthy, throaty bark that tickled Saul’s ear. ‘They were going hell for leather for you last night. No sirens, mind — didn’t want to warn you off, I reckon, but they were frantic: cars and constables running around like the blue-arsed proverbials, in a right old state, and all the time there I am playing at peek-a-boo over their gables.’ He laughed again, the noise of it, like all he issued, sounding as if it were just inches from Saul’s ear. ‘Oh yes, I am a most accomplished thief.’ He said this final line with stilted gusto, as if delivering lines in a play.

He scampered to the edge of the roof, impossibly sure-footed on its steep angle. Clinging on to the guttering, he scouted some distance round the edge, until he found what he was looking for. He turned and gestured for Saul to follow him. Saul edged along the roof ridge on all fours, afraid to expose himself to the wicked-looking grey slate. He reached the spot directly above King Rat, and there he waited.

King Rat bared his teeth at him. ‘Slide down,’ he whispered.

With both hands, Saul gripped the little concrete ridge he was straddling, and slowly swung his leg over until his whole body was spreadeagled on the slope above King Rat. At this point his arms rebelled and would not release him. He swiftly changed his mind about his actions, and attempted to haul himself back across the roof ridge, but his muscles were stiff with terror. Trapped on the slippery surface, he panicked. His brittle ringers lost their grip.

For a long, sick-making moment he was sliding towards his death, until he met King Rat’s strong hand. He was halted sharply, plucked from the roof and swung up and over in a terrifying hauling motion before being dropped hard onto a steel fire escape below.

The noise of his landing was muffled and insubstantial. Above him grinned King Rat. He still hung on to the edge of the roof with his left hand, his right extended over the stairs where he had deposited Saul. As Saul watched, he released himself, and fell the short distance to the iron mesh of the platform, his big rough boots landing without a sound.

Saul’s heart was still racing with fear, but his recent undignified precipitation galled him.

‘I… I’m not a fucking sack of potatoes,’ he hissed with spurious bravado.

King Rat grinned. ‘You don’t even know which way’s up, you little terror. And until you’ve a bit of learning in your Loaf, that’s exactly what you are.’

The two crept down the steps, past door after door, descending to the alley.

Dawn came fast. King Rat and Saul made their way through the crepuscular streets. Afraid and excited, Saul half expected his companion to repeat his escapades of last night, and he glanced from side to side at drainpipes and garage roofs, the entrances to rooftop passageways. But this time they remained earthbound. King Rat led Saul through deserted building sites and car parks, down narrow passages masquerading as culs-de-sac. Their route was chosen with an instinct Saul did not understand, and they did not pass any early morning walkers.

The dark dwindled. Daylight, wan and anaemic, had done what it could by seven o’clock.

Saul leaned against the wall of an alley. King Rat stood framed by its entrance, his right arm outstretched, just touching the bricks, the daylight beyond silhouetting him like the lead in a film noir.

‘I’m starving,’ said Saul.

‘Me too, sonny, me too. I’ve been starving for a long time.’ King Rat leaned out of the alley. He was peering at a nondescript terraced row of red brick. Each roof was topped with a dragon rampant: little flurries of clay enthusiasm now broken and crumbled. Their features were washed out by acid rain.

That morning the city seemed made up of back streets.

‘Alright then,’ murmured King Rat. ‘Time for tucker.’

King Rat, a figure skulking like a Victorian villain, stepped carefully from his point of concealment. He lifted his face to the air. As Saul watched, he sniffed loudly twice, twitched his nose, turned his face a little to one side. Gesturing for Saul to follow him, King Rat scampered down the deserted street and ducked into a gash between two houses. At the far end was a wall of black rubbish bags.

‘Always follow your I Suppose.’ King Rat grinned briefly. He was crouched at the end of the narrow alleyway, a hunched shape at the bottom of a brickwork chasm. The surrounding walls were inscrutable, unbroken by windows.

Saul approached.

King Rat was tearing at a plastic sack. The rich smell of rot was released. King Rat plunged his arm into the hole, and fumbled inside in an unsettling parody of surgery. He pulled a polystyrene box from the wound. It dripped with tea-leaves and egg yolk, but the hamburger logo was still evident. King Rat placed it on the ground, reached inside the bag again, and pulled out a damp crust of bread.

He thrust the sack aside and reached for another, ripped it open. This time his reward was half a fruitcake, flattened and embedded with sawdust. Chicken bones and crushed chocolate, the remnants of sweet corn and rice, fish-heads and stale crisps, the bags yielded them all, disgorged them into a stinking pile on the concrete.

Saul watched the mound of ruined food grow. He put his hand over his mouth.

‘You have got to be joking,’ he said, and swallowed.

King Rat looked up at him.

‘Thought you was peckish.’

Saul shook his head in horror, his hand still clamped firmly over his mouth.

‘When was the last time you puked?’

Saul furrowed his brow at the question. King Rat wiped his wet hand on his trenchcoat, adding to the camouflage-pattern of stains hidden in its dark grey. He poked at the food.

‘You can’t recall,’ he said, without looking at Saul. ‘You can’t recall because you’ve never done it. Never spewed nothing. You’ve been ill, I’ll bet, but not like other Godfers. No colds or sneezing; only some queer sickness making you shiver for days, once or twice. But even then, not a sign of puke.’ He finally met Saul’s eye, and his voice dropped. He hissed at him, something like victory in his voice. ‘Got the notion? Your belly won’t rebel. No sicking up Pig’s, no matter how plastered, no sweet sticky chocolate bile on your pillow the night after Easter, no hurling seafood across the tiles, no matter bow dodgy the take-away. You’ve got rat blood in your veins. There’s nothing you can’t stomach.’

There was a long moment of silence as the two stared at each other.

King Rat continued.

‘And there’s more. There’s no grub you don’t want. Said you were starving. I should coco; it’s been a while. Well here we go. Sitting comfortably? I’m going to teach you what it is to be rat. Look at all this scran your uncle sorted you out with. Said you were starving. Here’s breakfast.’

King Rat picked up the fruitcake without taking his eyes from Saul. He raised it slowly to his mouth. Moist chunks dropped from his hand, sultanas made juicy from their long marinating in black plastic. He bit into it, crumbs bursting out of his mouth as he exhaled in satisfaction.

He was right. Saul could not remember a time when he had thrown up. He had always eaten a lot, even for his frame, and had never been able to sympathize with people put off their food. Stories about maggots told over risotto left him unmoved. He had never suffered after too much sugar or fat or alcohol. This had never occurred to him before; he sympathized with others when they complained that something made them feel sick, never stopping to ask what it meant or if it was true.

Now he was sloughing off those layers of habit. He stood watching King Rat eat. The wiry figure would not take his eyes from him.

It had been hours and hours since Saul had last had food. He investigated his own hunger.

King Rat continued chewing. The stench of slowly collapsing food was overwhelming- Saul gazed at the leftovers and remnants heaped in front of the bags, the flecks of mould, the bite marks, and the dirt.

He began to salivate.

King Rat kept eating.

When he opened his mouth wet chunks of cake were visible. ‘You can eat pigeon-meat scraped off a car-wheel,’ he said. ‘This here’s good scran.’

Saul’s stomach growled. He squatted before the pile of food. Gingerly, he picked out the unfinished burger. He sniffed it. It was long cold. He could see where teeth had torn through the bun. He brushed at it, cleared it of grime as best he could.

It was damp and clammy, still shiny with spit where it had been bitten.

Saul put it near his mouth. He let his mind play over the filth of the dustbin, waited for his stomach to turn. But it did not.

His mind still rang with admonishments heard long ago — don’t touch, it’s dirty, take it out of your mouth but his stomach, his stomach remained firm. The smell of the meat was enticing.

He willed himself to feel ill. He strove for nausea.

He took a bite. He wriggled his tongue into the meat, pushed apart the fibres. He probed, tasting the dirt and decay. Lumps of gristle and fat split open in his mouth, mixed with his saliva.

The burger was delicious.

Saul swallowed and did not feel ill. His hunger, piqued, demanded more. He took another bite, and another, eating faster and faster all the time.

He felt something slipping away from him. He drew his strength from the old cold meat, food that had surrendered to people and decay, and now to him. His world changed.

King Rat nodded and ate on, grabbed handfuls and shoved them into his mouth without looking at them.

Saul reached for a slimy chicken wing.

In the street, only twenty feet away, children were appearing in outsized school uniforms. The bricks and the bags kept Saul and King Rat hidden. They looked up as the children passed, paused briefly in their breakfast.

They were silent while they ate. When they had finished, Saul licked his lips. The taste of filth and carrion was very strong in his mouth, and he investigated it, still wondering that it did not turn his stomach.

King Rat nestled into the bags and pulled his coat about him. ‘Feeling better now?’ he asked.

Saul nodded. For the first time since his sudden release, he felt calm. He could feel the acids of his stomach getting to work inside him, breaking down the old food he had eaten. He felt molecules scurrying out of his gut, carrying strange energy from the ruins of other people’s suppers and breakfasts. He was changing from the inside out.

My mother was like this creature, he said to himself, this skulking thing. My mother was like this thin-faced vagrant with magical powers. My mother was a spirit, it seems, a dirty spirit. My mother was a rat.

‘You can’t go back, you know.’ King Rat looked at Saul from under his eyelids. Saul had long given up trying to make sense of his features. The light would not fall full on King Rat’s face, no matter where he stood or lay. Saul glanced at him again, but his eyes found no purchase.

‘I know it,’ he said.

‘They think you did your pa, and they’ll do you for that. And now you’ve slung your hook from their old Bucket, they’ll have your guts for garters.’

The city had been made unsafe. Saul felt it yawn before him, infinitely vaster than he had imagined, unknowable and furtive.

‘So, so…’ said Saul slowly. So what is London? he thought. If you can be what you are, what’s London? What’s the world? I’ve had it all wrong. Do werewolves and trolls lurk under bridges in the parks? What are the boundaries of the world?

‘So… what do I do now?’

‘Well, you aren’t going back, so you got to bing a waste forward. I’ve to teach you how to be rat. You got a lot going for you, sonny. Hold your breath and squeeze in tight, freeze like a statue… you’re invisible. Move just right, dainty on your toes, you’ll make nary a sound. You can be like me. As far as you’re concerned, up’s no longer out of bounds, and down’s nothing to fear.’

It didn’t matter any more that he didn’t understand. Unbelievably, King Rat’s words took away Saul’s trepidation. He felt himself grow strong. He stretched out his arms. He felt like laughing.

‘I feel like I can do anything,’ he said. He was overwhelmed.

‘You can, my old son. You’re a ratling boy. Just got to learn the tricks. We’ll cut your teeth. You and me together, dynamite. We’ve a kingdom to win back.’

Saul had risen to his feet, was staring out into the street beyond. At King Rat’s words he turned slowly and looked down at the thin figure cocooned in black plastic.

‘Back?’ he said levelly. ‘Back from who?’

King Rat nodded. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘for a word in your shell-like. Much as I hate to piss on your chips, you’re forgetting something. You’re in another country now because your old man did the six-storey swan-dive’ — King Rat blithely ignored Saul’s aghast stare — ‘and he did that, the old codger, in lieu of you. There’s something out there wants your head, chal, and you’d be wise not to forget it.’

Saul wobbled to his knees. ‘Who?’ he whispered.

‘Well now, that’s the biggy, isn’t it? That’s the question. And therein lies a story, a twisting rat-tale.’