Part 15 (1/2)

'Shall I take this?' she said, and Saul shook his head.

'Just hide it. I'll bring you back here.'

Deborah gingerly clambered onto Saul's back, and he was struck once again by the fact that it was only her tenuous grip on reality that meant she would do as he suggested. Approach most people with the offer to piggyback them across the roofs and he would not have met with such a willing response.

The irony, of course, being that she was right to trust him.

He rose to his feet and she shrieked as if she was on a fairground ride.

'Gentle, gentlel' she yelled, and he hissed at her to keep her voice down.

He strode into the pa.s.sage, and all around him he heard the pattering of hundreds of rat feet. This is bow I changed worlds, he thought, carried to my new city on the back of a rat. What goes around comes around.

He stopped below a window, its sill nine feet above the pavement.

'See you up top,' he hissed at the rats, who disap 220.

peared in a flurry, as before. He heard the sc.r.a.pe of claws on brick.

Saul jumped up and grasped the window, and Deborah shouted, a yell which did not die away but ballooned in terror as her fingers fought for purchase on his back. His feet swung above the ground, the toes of his prison-issue shoes sc.r.a.ping the wall.

He called for her to shut up, but she would not, and words began to form in her protest.

'Stopstopstop,' she wailed and Saul, mindful of discovery, hauled himself at speed up into the s.p.a.ce by the window, flattened himself against the gla.s.s, reached up again, determined to pull Deborah out of earshot before she could order him down.

He scrambled up the building. Not yet as fast as King Rat, but so smooth, he thought to himself as he climbed. Terror had stopped Deborah's voice. / know that feeling, thought Saul, and smiled. He would bring this to a close as fast as he could.

Her weight on his back was only a minor irritation. This was not a hard wall to climb. It was festooned with windows and cracks and protuberances and drainpipes. But Saul knew that to Deborah it was just so much unbreachable brick. This building had a flat roof contained by rails, one of which he grasped now and tugged at, raising himself and his cargo up onto the skyline.

He deposited Deborah on the concrete. She clawed at it, her breath ragged.

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'Oh now, Deborah, I'm sorry to scare you,' he said hurriedly. 'I knew you wouldn't let me if I told you what I was going to do, but I swear to you, you were safe, always. I wouldn't put you in danger.'

She mumbled incoherently. He dropped to her side and gently put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and turned to him. He was surprised at her face. She was quivering, but she did not look horrified.

'How can you do that?' she breathed. All around them on the roof the concrete began to swarm with rats, struggling to prove their eager devotion. Saul picked Deborah off her side and put her on her feet. He tugged at her sleeve. She did not take her eyes from him but allowed herself to be pulled over to the railing around the roof. The light was entirely leached from the sky by now.

They were not so very high; all around them hotels and apartment blocks looked down on them, and they looked down on as many again. They stood at the midpoint of the undulations in the skyline. Black tangles of branches poked into their field of vision, over in Regent's Park. The graffiti were thinner up here, but not dissipated. Here and there extravagant tags marked the sides of buildings, badges pinned in the most inaccessible places. I'm not the first to be here, thought Saul, and the others weren't rats. He admired them hugely, their idiot territorial bravery. To scale that wall and spray boomboy!!! just there, where the bricks ran out, that was a courageous act.

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It's not brave of me, he thought. / know I can do it, I'm a rat.

Deborah was looking at him. From time to time her eyes flitted away towards the view, but it was him she was conscious of. She looked at him with amazement. He looked back at her. He was awash with grat.i.tude. It was so good, so nice to talk to someone who was not a rat, or a bird, or a spider.

'It must be amazing to be able to do what all the rats do,' she said, studying their ma.s.sed ranks. They stood a little way behind, quiet and attentive, fidgeting a little when un.o.bserved but hus.h.i.+ng when Saul turned to gaze at them.

Saul laughed at what she said.

'Amazing? I don't f.u.c.king think so.' He could not resist b.i.t.c.hing, even though she would not understand. 'Let me tell you about rats,' he said. 'Rats do nothing. All day. They eat any old c.r.a.p they can find, run around p.i.s.sing against walls, they s.h.a.g occasionally - or so I'm led to believe - and they fight over who gets to sleep in which patch of sewer. Sure, they think they're the reason the world was invented. But they're nothing.'

'Sounds like people!' said Deborah and laughed delightedly as if she had said something clever. She repeated it.

'They're nothing like people,' Saul said quietly. 'That's a tired old myth.'

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He asked her about herself and she was vague about her situation. She would not explain her homelessness, muttering darkly about not being able to handle something. Saul felt guilty but he was not that interested. Not that he did not care: he did, he was appalled at her state and, even alienated from her city as he was, he felt the old fury against the government so a.s.siduously trained into him by his father. He cared deeply. But at that moment he wanted to talk to her not for herself particularly but because she was a person. Any person. As long as she kept talking and listening, he was not concerned about what she might say. And he asked her about herself because he was hungry for her company.

He heard a sudden sound of flapping, something like heavy cloth. He felt a brief gust of wind in his face. He looked up, but there was nothing.

'I tell you what,' he said. 'Never mind rats being amazing. Do you want to come back to my house?'

She wrinkled her nose again.

'The one that smells like that?'

'No. I was thinking of going back to my real place for a bit.' He sounded calm, but his breath came short and fast at the thought of returning. Something in her remarks about rats had reminded him of where he came from. Cut off from King Rat, he wanted to return, touch base.

He missed his dad.

Deborah was happy to visit his house. Saul put her 224.

on his back again and set off, with the rats in tow, across the face of London, across a terrain that had quickly become familiar to him.

Sometimes Deborah buried her face in his shoulder, sometimes she leaned back alarmingly and laughed. Saul s.h.i.+fted with her to maintain his balance.

His progress was not as rapid as King Rat's or Anansi's, but he moved fast. He stayed high, loath to touch the ground, a vague rule he remembered from a children's game. Sometimes the platform of roofs stopped short and he had no option but to plunge down the brick, by fire escape or drain or broken wall, and scurry across a short s.p.a.ce of pavement before scrambling up above the streets again.

Everywhere around him he heard the sound of the rats. They kept up with him, moving by their own routes, disappearing and reappearing, boiling in and out of his field of vision, antic.i.p.ating him and following him. There was something else, a presence he was vaguely aware of: the source of that flapping sound. Time and again he sensed it, a faint flurry of wind or wings brus.h.i.+ng his face. His momentum was up and he did not stop, but he nursed the vague sense that something kept up with him.

Periodically he would pause for breath and look around him. His pa.s.sage was quick. He followed a map of lights, keeping parallel to Edgware Road, shadowing it as it became Maida Vale. He followed the route of the 98 bus, pa.s.sed landmarks he knew 225.

well, like the tower with an integument of red girders which jutted out above its roof, making a cage.

The buildings around them began to level out; the s.p.a.ces between towers grew larger. Saul knew where they were: in the stretch of deceptively suburban housing just before Kilburn High Road. Terra cognita, thought Saul. Home ground.

He crossed to the other side of the road so fast that Deborah was hardly aware of it. Saul took off into the dark between main roads, bridging the gap between Kilburn and Willesden, eager to return home.

They stood before Terragon Mansions. Saul was afraid.

He felt fraught, short of breath. He listened to the stillness, realized that the escort of rats had evaporated soundlessly. He was alone with Deborah.

His eyes crawled up the dull brick, weaving between windows, many now dark, a few lit behind net curtains. There at the top, the hole through which his father had plummeted. Still not fixed, pending more police investigation, he supposed, though now the absence was disguised by transparent plastic sheets. The tiny fringe of ragged gla.s.s was still just visible in the window-frame.