China Miéville: King Rat

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.