China Miéville - King Rat

She gazed at him in horror.

‘Did you?’ she squeaked, but his face silenced her.

He walked quietly to the front door. She stood behind him, hugging herself against the chill, looking nervously about. He caressed the door, effortlessly and silently slipping the lock. Saul wandered onto the stairs. His feet made no sound. He moved as if dazed. Behind him came Deborah, in fits and starts, her ebullience gone with his. She dragged her feet as if she were whining, but she made no sound.

The door to his apartment was criss-crossed with blue tape. Saul stared at it and considered how it made him feel. Not violated or outraged, as he would have supposed. He felt oddly reassured, as if this tape secured his house from outsiders, sealing it like a time capsule.

He tugged gently at it. It came away in his hand, airy and ineffectual, as if it had been waiting for him, eager to give itself up. He pushed the door open and stepped into the darkness where his father had died.

It was cold, as cold as the night when the police had arrived. He did not turn on the lights. What filtered up from the streets was enough for him. He did not waste time, pushed open the door of the sitting-room and entered.

The room was bare, had been stripped of possessions, but he noticed that only in passing. He stared at the jagged window full on. He dared it to unsettle him, to sap his strength. It was just a hole, he thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just a hole? The plastic billowed back and forth with a noise like whips cracking.

‘Saul, I’m scared…’

He realized belatedly that Deborah could hardly see. She stood at the threshold to the room, hesitant. He knew what she could see, his obscure form against the dark orange of the distant streetlamps. Saul shook himself in anger. He had been using her with such ease he had forgotten that she was real. He strode across the room and hugged her.

He wrapped himself around her with an affection she poured back into him. It was not sexual, though he sensed that she expected it to be, and might not have minded. But he would have felt manipulative and foul and he liked her and pitied her and was so, so grateful to her. They held each other and he realized that he was trembling as much as she. Not all rat yet, then, he thought ruefully. She’s afraid of the dark, he thought. What’s my excuse?

There was a book in the middle of the floor.

He saw it suddenly over her shoulder. She felt him stiffen and nearly shrieked in terror, twisting to see whatever had shocked him. He hurriedly hushed her, apologized. She could not see the book in the dark.

It was the only thing in the room. There was no furniture, no pictures, no telephone, no other books, only that.

It was not coincidence, Saul thought. They had not missed that when they cleared out the flat. Saul recognized it. An ancient, very fat red-bound A4 notebook, with snatches of paper bursting from its pages; it was his father’s scrapbook.

It had appeared regularly throughout Saul’s life. Every so often his father would drag it out from wherever he hid it and carefully cut some article from the paper, murmuring. He would glue it into the book, and as often as not write in red biro in the margin. At other times there was no article at all; he would just write. Often Saul knew these bouts were brought on by some political occurrence, something his father wanted to record his pontifications on, but at other times there was no spur that Saul could fathom.

When he was little the book had fascinated him, and he had wanted to read it. His father would let him see some things, articles on wars and strikes, and the neat red notes surrounding them. But it was a private book, he explained, and he would not let Saul examine it all. Some of it’s personal, he explained patiently. Some of it’s private. Some of it’s just for me.

Saul removed himself from Deborah and picked it up. He opened it from the back. Amazingly, there were still a very few pages not yet full. He flicked backwards slowly, coming to the last page that his father had filled. A light-hearted story from the local paper about a Conservative Party fundraising event which had suffered a catalogue of disaster: failing electricity, a double booking and food poisoning. Next to it, in his father’s carefully printed letters, Saul read, ‘There is a God after all!!!’

Before that, a story about the long-running strike at the Liverpool docks, and in his father’s hand: ‘A morsel of information breaches the carefully maintained Wall of Silence! Why the TUG so ineffectual?!’

Saul turned the page backwards, grinned delightedly as he realized that his father had been pondering his Desert Island Discs selection. At the top of the page was a list of old Jazz tunes, all with careful question-marks, and below was the tentative list. ‘One: Ella Fitzgerald. Which one??? Two: "Strange Fruit". Three: "All The Time In The World", Satchmo. Four: Sarah Vaughan, "Lullaby of Birdland". Five: Thelonius? Basic? Six: Bessie Smith. Seven: Armstrong again, "Mack the Knife". Eight: "Internationale". Why Not? Books: Shakespeare, don’t want the Bloody Bible! Capital? Com. Manifesto? Luxury: Telescope? Microscope?’

Deborah knelt beside Saul.

‘This was my dad’s notebook,’ he explained. ‘Look, it’s really sweet…’

‘How come it’s here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. He kept turning the pages as he spoke, past more cuttings, mostly political, but here and there simply something which had caught his father’s eye.

He saw small tales about Egyptian tomb-robbers, giant trees in New Zealand, the growth of the Internet.

Saul began to pull back clumps of pages now, going back years at a time. There was more writing in the earlier years.

7/7/88: Trade Unions. Must read old arguments! Had a long argument with David at work about Union today. He going on and on about ineffectual and etc. etc. and I rather letting myself down, just seemed to sit there saying Yes but solidarity vital! He wasn’t having any of it. Must reread Engels on Trade Unions. Have vague memories of being rather impressed but could be fooling myself. Saul still very sulky. Don’t know what’s going on there at all. Remember seeing book about Teenagers and Problems, though can’t remember where. Must track it down.

Saul felt awash with the same hopeless love he had felt when he had shown Fabian the book his father had bought him. He was going about it all wrong, the old man, but all he wanted to do was understand. Maybe there was no right way to do it. I was wrong too, he thought.

Back, back, he moved through the years. Deborah cuddled into him for warmth.

He read about the time his father had had an argument with one of his history teachers over the best way to present Cromwell.

No, fair enough, maybe can’t be talking about Bourgeoisie to group of ten-year-olds but shouldn’t be glossing over him! Terrible man, yes (Ireland, and etc. etc.) but must make clear nature of Revolution!

He read a reference to one of his father’s girlfriends — ‘M.’ He could not remember her at all. He knew his father had kept such affairs out of the house. He did not think his father had had any romantic involvement at all in the last six or seven years of his life.

He read about his own fifth birthday party. He remembered it: he had been given two Indian head-dresses, and in retrospect a thrill of worry had passed around the adults, concerned at his reaction, but he had been elated. To have not one but two of the beautiful feathered things… He remembered the joy. Saul was seeking the first reference to himself, maybe a mention of his dead mother, who had been carefully excised from his father’s ruminations. A date caught his eye: 8/2/72, the only entry from the year of his birth, the birth itself apparently not recorded. There was no cutting attached to the entry. Saul’s brow furrowed as he read the first few words.