King Rat

  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 basslines. Discordant indie bands had done it, she knew: My Bloody 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 defenses 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.

  And Natasha was suddenly furious with this pretentious little art-school wanker, 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 cocky fucker, 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 crashing out of nowhere. The bass came chasing after, filling out the snare and framing the sound with a funky backdrop. She threw in a few minimal shouts and snatches of brass, 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 snatch of music, a trill of flute that mimicked the looping repetition of her own music, but elaborated on itself, changed a little with every cycle. He was standing below her window, his hastily assembled 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 anchored, then transporting itself. It suddenly became a series of staccato flutterings. It lilted between drum and bass, 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 bass, 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 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 passed into her house.

  S

  I

  X

  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—and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man’s death. Fabian wanted space. 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 Saturday 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, colorful 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 rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian café. 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. Impassive, the people watched them pass by.

  Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed 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, sparse 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.

  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 Fabia
n 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 reassured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.

  Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he passed an extraordinary white building, a mass 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. I’ll 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.

  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 Bassett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Bass. 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 reconstituting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word titles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.

  Fabian believed it was Natasha’s concentration which made her so asexual to him. She was attractive 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 sexual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was assured 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 embarrassed. 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.

  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 down Elgin Crescent and then right, bearing down on the Bassett 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 Bass 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 gray with plump, stirring bodies. A few were in the air, hovering nervously around the windows and gables, settling, dislodging their peers. They shifted 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 bass. 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 bass stopped cold. The flute faltered on for a second or two. As silence fell, the company of pigeons rose en masse into the air with the abruptness of panic, circled 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.

  “No no,” he said hurriedly. “Saul’s fine. Well, I guess… He’s in with the pigs.”

  She shook her head in confusion. br />
  “Listen, Tash… Saul’s dad…he died.” He rushed on before she could misunderstand. “He was killed. He was lobbed out of a window two nights back. I think… I think the police reckon Saul did it.” He reached into his pocket and brought out the scrunched-up news story. Natasha read it.

  “No,” she said.

  “I know, I know. But I suppose they heard about him and the old man having arguments and that, and… I dunno.”

  “No,” said Natasha again. The two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Eventually Natasha moved. “Look,” she said, “come in. We’d better talk. There’s this bloke here…”

  “The one playing the flute?”

  She smiled slightly. “Yeah. He’s good, isn’t he? I’ll get rid of him.”

  Fabian closed the door behind him and followed her up the stairs. She was some way ahead of him and, as he approached her inner door, he heard voices.

  “What’s happening?” It was a man’s voice, muffled and anxious.

  “A friend’s in a bit of bother,” Natasha was saying. Fabian entered the sparse bedroom, nodded in greeting at the tall blond man he saw over Natasha’s shoulder. The man had his mouth slightly open, was fingering his ponytail nervously. In his right hand was a silver flute. He looked up and down at the two in the doorway.

  “Pete, Fabian.” Natasha waved her hand vaguely between the two in a cursory introduction. “Sorry, Pete, but you’re going to have to split. I have to talk to Fabe. Something’s come up.”

  The blond man nodded and hurriedly gathered his things together. As he did so, he spoke rapidly.

  “Natasha, do you want to do this again? I felt like we were…really getting into it.”

  Fabian raised his eyebrows.

  The tall man squeezed past Fabian without taking his eyes off Natasha. She was clearly distracted, but she smiled and nodded.