King Rat

by China Miéville

  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 gratitude. 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 massed ranks. They stood a little way behind, quiet and attentive, fidgeting a little when unobserved but hushing when Saul turned to gaze at them.

  Saul laughed at what she said.

  “Amazing? I don’t fucking think so.” He could not resist bitching, even though she would not understand. “Let me tell you about rats,” he said. “Rats do nothing. All day. They eat any old crap they can find, run around pissing against walls, they shag 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.”

  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 assiduously 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 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 shifted 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 space 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, anticipating 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 brushing 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 passage 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, passed landmarks he knew 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 spaces 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 glass was still just visible in the window-frame.

  “I had to leave here in a hurry,” he whispered to Deborah. “My dad fell out of that window and they reckon I pushed him.”

  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.

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  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 recogn
ized 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.

  We are a few weeks on now from the attack, which I don’t really want to talk about. E. is very strong, Thank God. Many fears, of course, alleys and etc. etc., but overall she is getting better daily. Kept asking her was she sure, I thought we should go to the Police. Don’t you want him caught? I asked her and she said No I just don’t want to see him again. Can’t help thinking this is a mistake but it must be her decision of course. Am trying to be what she needs but God Knows it is hard. Worst at night, of course. Don’t know whether better to comfort/cuddle or not touch and she doesn’t seem to know either. Definitely the worst times, tears etc. Am beating about the bush. Fact is, E. had test and is pregnant. Can’t be sure of course but have looked at timing carefully and looks very likely that it is his. Discussed abortion but E. can’t face it. So after long hard talks have decided to go ahead. No record, so no one need know. Hope everything turns out alright. I’ll admit, I’m afraid for child. Haven’t yet worked out my own reaction. Must be strong for E.’s sake.

  Saul’s chest had gone quite hollow.

  Somewhere Deborah was saying something to him.

  Oh, he felt stupid.

  He saw what he had lost.

  Stupid, stupid boy, he thought, and at the same time he was thinking: You needn’t have worried, Dad. You were strong as fuck.

  Tears came cold to his eyes and he heard Deborah again.

  Look at what you lost, he thought. She died! he thought suddenly. She died, and still he did right by me. How could he? I killed her, I killed his wife! Every time he looked at me, wasn’t he looking at the rape? Wasn’t he looking at the thing that killed his wife?

  Stupid boy, he thought. Uncle Rat? When were you going to think that one through? he thought.

  But more than anything he could not stop wondering at the man who had raised him, had tried to understand him, and had given him books to help him understand the world. Because when he had looked at Saul, somehow he did not see murder, or his lost wife, or the brutality in the alley (and Saul knew just how that attacker had appeared, as if from nowhere, out of the bricks, as he himself moved). Somehow, when he looked at Saul he looked at his son, and even when the air between them had poisoned and Saul had exercised all his studied teenage insouciance not to care, the fat man had still looked at him and seen his son, and had tried to understand what was wrong between them. He had had no truck with the awful, bloody vulgarity of genes. He had built fatherhood with his actions.

  Saul did not sob, but his cheeks were wet. Wasn’t it odd and sad, he thought a little hysterically, that it was only on learning that his father was not his father, that he realized how completely his father he had been?

  There’s a dialectic for you, Dad, he thought, and grinned fleetingly.

  It was only in losing him that he regained him, finally, after so many dry years.

  He remembered being carried on those broad shoulders to see his mother’s stone. He had killed her, he had killed his father’s wife, and his father had set him down gently and given him flowers to put on her grave. He wept for his father, who had been given hi
s wife’s murderer, the child of her rapist, and who had decided to love him dearly, and had set out to do it, and had succeeded.

  And somewhere he kept telling himself how stupid a boy he was. A new thought was occurring to him. If King Rat lied about this, he reflected, and the thought trailed off like a sequence of dots…

  If he lied about this, the thought said, what else did he lie about?

  Who killed Dad?

  He remembered something King Rat had said, a long time ago, at the end of Saul’s first life. “I’m the intruder,” he had said. “I killed the usurper.”

  In the succession of words the sense had been drowned, had been another surreal boast, a crowing, bullish aggrandizement without meaning. But Saul could see differently now. A cold stone of fury settled in his gut and he realized how much he hated King Rat.

  His father, King Rat.

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  The door to the flat opened.

  Saul and Deborah had been huddled together on the floor, she murmuring nervous words of support. They looked up at the same moment, at the gentle creak of hinges.

  Saul scrambled silently to his feet. He was still clutching the book. Deborah rocked herself, tried to rise. A face peered around the rim of the door.

  Deborah clung to Saul and gave a tiny whimper of fear. Saul was primed like an explosive, but as his eyes made light of the darkness his tension ebbed a little, and he stood confused.

  The face in the doorway was beaming delightedly, long blond hair falling in untidy clumps around a mouth stretched wide in childish joy. The man stepped forward into the room. He looked like a buffoon.