King Rat Read online

  “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. Neighbors in pajamas 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 color 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 gray 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 rumors, 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 neighbor 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.”

  T

  W

  O

  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 fervor. 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 gray hair and gray 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 cliché, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralyzed 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, molded, 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.
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br />   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 gray 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.”