King Rat (7 page)

She walked through the dingy communal hall. Through the rippled glass of the front door she could see that the man was very tall. She pulled the door open, admitting voices from the next house and the daylight that was flooding the street.

Natasha looked up into his narrow face. The man was about six feet four, dwarfing her by nearly a foot, but he was so slim he looked as if he might snap in half at the waist any moment. He was probably in his early thirties, but he was so pale it was difficult to tell. His hair was a sickly yellow. The pallor of his face was exaggerated by his black leather jacket. He would have looked quite ill were it not for his bright blue eyes and his air of fidgety animation. He started to grin even before the door was fully open.

Natasha and her visitor stared at each other, he smiling, she with a guarded, quizzical expression.

‘Brilliant,’ he said suddenly.

Natasha stared at him.

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‘Your music,’ he said. ‘Brilliant.’

The man’s voice was deeper and richer than she would have thought possible from such a slender frame.

It was slightly breathless, as if he were rushing to get his words out. She stared up at him and her eyes narrowed. This was much too weird a way of starting a conversation. She was not having it.

‘What do you mean?’ she said levelly.

He smiled apologetically. His words slowed down a little.

‘I’ve been listening to your music,’ he said. ‘I came past here last week and I heard you playing up there. I tell you, I was just standing there with my mouth open.’

Natasha was embarrassed and amazed. She opened her mouth to interrupt but he continued.

‘I came back and I heard it again. It made me want to stan. dancing in the street!’ He laughed. ‘The next time I heard you stop halfway through, and I realized someone was actually playing while I listened. I’d thought it was a record. It was such an exciting thought that you were actually up there making it.’

Natasha finally spoke.

‘This is really ... flattering. But did you knock on my door just to tell me that?’ This man unnerved her with his excited grin and breathy voice. It was only curiosity that stopped her shutting the door. ‘I’ve not got a fan club yet.’

He stared at her and the nature of his smile changed. Until that moment it had been sincere, almost childish in its excitement. Slowly his lips closed a fraction and hid his teeth. He straightened his long back and his eyelids slid halfway down over his eyes. He leaned his head slightly to one side, without taking his eyes off her.

Natasha felt a wave of adrenaline. She looked back at him in shock. The change which had come over him was extraordinary. He stared at her now with a look so sexual, so casually knowing, that she felt vertiginous.

She was furious with him. She shook her head a little and prepared to slam the door. He held it open.

Before she could say anything, his arrogance had gone and the old look was back.

‘Please,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself. I’m flustered because I’ve ... been plucking up courage to talk to you.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what you’re playing is beautiful, but sometimes it feels a little bit - don’t get angry - a bit unfinished. I sort of feel like the treble isn’t quite... working. And I wouldn’t say that to you except I play a little bit myself and I thought maybe we could help each other out.’

Natasha stepped backwards. She felt intrigued and threatened. She always stonewalled about her music, refusing to discuss her feelings about it with any except her very closest friends. The intense but inchoate frustrations she felt were rarely verbalized, as if to do so would give them form. She chose to keep them at bay with obfuscation, from herself as much as from others, and now this man seemed to be unwrapping them with an unnerving casualness.

‘Do you have a suggestion?’ she said as acidly as she could. He reached behind him and picked up a
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black case. He shook it in front of her.

‘This might sound a bit cocky,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want you to think I reckon I can do better than you.

But, when I heard your playing, I just knew I could complement it.’ He undid the clasp of the case and opened it in front of her. She saw a disassembled flute.

‘I know you might think I’m crazy,’ he preempted hurriedly. ‘You think what you play is totally different to what I play. But... I’ve been looking for bass like yours for longer than you could believe.’

He spoke earnestly now, his eyebrows furrowed as he held her gaze. She stubbornly stared back, refusing to be overawed by this apparition on her doorstep.

‘I want to play with you,’ he said.

This was stupid, Natasha told herself: even if this man was not arrogant beyond belief, you could not play the flute to Jungle. It was so long since she had stared at a traditional instrument she felt a gust of deja vu: images of her nine-year-old self banging the xylophone in the school orchestra. Flutes meant enthusiastic cacophonies at the hands of children or the alien landscape of classical music, an intimidating world of great beauty but vicious social exclusivity, to which she had never known the passwords.

But to her amazement, this lanky stranger had impressed her. She wanted to let him in and hear him play his flute in her room. She wanted to hear him play over some of her basslines. Discordant indie bands had done it, she knew: My Bloody Valentine had used flutes. And while the result had left her as dead cold as the rest of that genre, surely the alliance itself was no more unlikely than this one. She realized that she was intrigued.

But she was not simply going to stand aside. She had a reputation for being intimidating. She was not used to feeling so disarmed, and her defences flared.

‘Listen,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t know what you think qualifies you to speak about my tracks. Why should I play with you?’

‘Try it once,’ he said, and again that sudden change flooded his features, the same curled smile on the edge of the lips, the same heavy-lidded nonchalance about the eyes.

And Natasha was suddenly furious with this pretentious little art-school wanker, livid where a moment ago she had been captivated, and she leaned forward and up on tiptoes, until her face was as close to his as it would go, and she raised one eyebrow, and she said: ‘I don’t think so.’

She closed the door in his face.

Natasha stalked back up her stairs. The window was open. She stood next to it, close to the wall, looking down at the street without putting herself in view. She could see no sign of the man. She walked slowly to her keyboard. She smiled.

OK, you cocky fucker, she thought. Let’s see how good you are.

She turned the volume down slightly, and pulled another rhythm out of her collection. This time the drums came crashing out of nowhere. The bass came chasing after, filling out the snare and framing the sound with a funky backdrop. She threw in a few minimal shouts and snatches of brass, looped a moment of trumpet, but the treble was subdued; this was an offering to the man outside, and it was all
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about rhythm.

The beats looped once, twice. Then, sailing up from the street came a thin snatch of music, a trill of flute that mimicked the looping repetition of her own music, but elaborated on itself, changed a little with every cycle. He was standing below her window, his hastily assembled instrument to his lips.

Natasha smiled. He had made good on his arrogance. She would have been disappointed if he had not.

She stripped the beat down and left it to loop. She stood back and listened.

The flute skittered over the drums, teasing the beat, touching just enough to stay anchored, then transporting itself. It suddenly became a series of staccato flutterings. It lilted between drum and bass, now wailing like a siren, now stuttering like Morse code.

Natasha was ... not transfixed, perhaps, but impressed.

She closed her eyes. The flute soared and dived; it fleshed out her skeletal tune in a way she could never achieve. The life in the live music was exuberant and neurotic and it sparked off the revivified bass, the very alive dancing with the dead. There was a promise to this tension.

Natasha nodded. She was eager to hear more, to feed that flute into her music. She smiled sardonically.

She would admit defeat. So long as he behaved, so long as there were not too many of those knowing looks, she would admit that she wanted to hear more.

Natasha paced silently back down the stairs. She opened the door. He was standing a few feet back, his flute to his lips, staring up at her window. He stopped as he saw her, and lowered his hands. No trace of a smile now. He looked anxious for approval.

She inclined her head and gave him a sideways look. He hovered.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it.’ He finally smiled. ‘It’s Natasha.’

She jerked her thumb at herself.

‘Pete,’ the tall man said.

Natasha stood aside, and Pete passed into her house.

Again Fabian tried Natasha’s number, and again she was engaged. He swore and slammed his receiver down. He turned on his heel, paced pointlessly. He had spoken to everyone who knew Saul except for Natasha, and she was the one who mattered most.

Fabian was not gossiping. As soon as he had heard about Saul’s father he had got on the phone, almost
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before he was aware of what he was doing, and begun to spread the news. At some point he had rushed out to buy a paper, before starting again on the phone. But this was not gossip. He felt a powerful sense of duty. This, he believed, was what was needed of him.

He pulled on his jacket, tugged his thin dreadlocks into a ponytail. Enough, he decided. He would go to Natasha, tell her in person. It was a fair journey from Brixton to Ladbroke Grove, but the thought of the cold air in his face and lungs was beguiling. His house felt oppressive. He had spent hours on the phone that morning, the same phrases again and again - Six floors straight down... The filth won’t let me talk to him and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man’s death. Fabian wanted space. He wanted to clean out his head.

He shoved a page of newspaper into his pocket. He could recite the relevant story by heart: News in brief. A man died in Willesden, North London, yesterday,’ after falling through a sixth-floor window.

Police will not say if they are treating the death as suspicious. The man’s son is helping them with their enquiries. The screaming accusation of the last sentence stung him.

He left his room for the filthy hall of the shared house. Someone was shouting upstairs. The dirty, ill fitting carpets irritated him always; now they made him feel violent. As he struggled with his bike, he glanced at the unwashed walls, the broken banisters. The presence of the house weighed down on him. He burst out of the front door with a sigh of relief.

Fabian treated his bike carelessly, letting it fall when he dismounted, chucking it against walls. He was rough with it. He yanked himself onto it now with unthinking brutality, and swung out into the road.

The streets were full. It was a Saturday and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colourful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian cafe. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape.

Impassive, the people watched them pass by.

Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, sparse and low.

The sky was always very big over Acre Lane.

Fabian jumped back onto his bike and took off up the slight incline towards Clapham. From there he would twist across into Clapham Manor Street, wind a little through backstreets to join Silverthorne Road, a steep sine-wave of minor industrial estates and peculiarly suburban houses tucked between Battersea and Clapham, a conduit feeding directly into Queenstown Road, across Chelsea Bridge.

For the first time that day Fabian felt his head clear.

Early that morning a suspicious policeman had answered Saul’s phone, had demanded Fabian’s name.

Outraged, Fabian had hung up. He had rung up Willesden police station, again refusing to give his name,
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but demanding to know why policemen were answering his friend’s phone. Only when he acquiesced and told them who he was would they tell him that Saul’s father had died, and that Saul was with them -

again that disingenuous phrase - helping with enquiries.

First he felt nothing but shock; then quickly a sense of a monstrous error.

And a great fear. Because Fabian understood immediately that it would be easy for them to believe that Saul had killed his father. And, as immediately, he knew without any equivocation or doubt that Saul had not. But he was terribly afraid, because only he knew that, because he knew Saul. And there was nothing he could tell others to help them understand.

He wanted to see Saul; he did not understand why the officer’s voice changed when he demanded this.

He was told it would be some time before he could speak to Saul, Saul was deep in conversation, his attention wholly grabbed, and Fabian would just have to wait. There was something the man was not telling him, Fabian knew, and he was scared. He left his phone number, was reassured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.