King Rat

by China Miéville

  There was a long moment of silence as the two stared at each other.

  King Rat continued.

  “And there’s more. There’s no grub you don’t want. Said you were starving. I should coco; it’s been a while. Well here we go. Sitting comfortably? I’m going to teach you what it is to be rat. Look at all this scran your uncle sorted you out with. Said you were starving. Here’s breakfast.”

  King Rat picked up the fruitcake without taking his eyes from Saul. He raised it slowly to his mouth. Moist chunks dropped from his hand, sultanas made juicy from their long marinating in black plastic. He bit into it, crumbs bursting out of his mouth as he exhaled in satisfaction.

  He was right. Saul could not remember a time when he had thrown up. He had always eaten a lot, even for his frame, and had never been able to sympathize with people put off their food. Stories about maggots told over risotto left him unmoved. He had never suffered after too much sugar or fat or alcohol. This had never occurred to him before; he sympathized with others when they complained that something made them feel sick, never stopping to ask what it meant or if it was true.

  Now he was sloughing off those layers of habit. He stood watching King Rat eat. The wiry figure would not take his eyes from him.

  It had been hours and hours since Saul had last had food. He investigated his own hunger.

  King Rat continued chewing. The stench of slowly collapsing food was overwhelming. Saul gazed at the leftovers and remnants heaped in front of the bags, the flecks of mold, the bite marks, and the dirt.

  He began to salivate.

  King Rat kept eating.

  When he opened his mouth wet chunks of cake were visible. “You can eat pigeon-meat scraped off a car-wheel,” he said. “This here’s good scran.”

  Saul’s stomach growled. He squatted before the pile of food. Gingerly, he picked out the unfinished burger. He sniffed it. It was long cold. He could see where teeth had torn through the bun. He brushed at it, cleared it of grime as best he could.

  It was damp and clammy, still shiny with spit where it had been bitten.

  Saul put it near his mouth. He let his mind play over the filth of the dustbin, waited for his stomach to turn. But it did not.

  His mind still rang with admonishments heard long ago—don’t touch, it’s dirty, take it out of your mouth—but his stomach, his stomach remained firm. The smell of the meat was enticing.

  He willed himself to feel ill. He strove for nausea.

  He took a bite. He wriggled his tongue into the meat, pushed apart the fibers. He probed, tasting the dirt and decay. Lumps of gristle and fat split open in his mouth, mixed with his saliva.

  The burger was delicious.

  Saul swallowed and did not feel ill. His hunger, piqued, demanded more. He took another bite, and another, eating faster and faster all the time.

  He felt something slipping away from him. He drew his strength from the old cold meat, food that had surrendered to people and decay, and now to him. His world changed.

  King Rat nodded and ate on, grabbed handfuls and shoved them into his mouth without looking at them.

  Saul reached for a slimy chicken wing.

  In the street, only twenty feet away, children were appearing in outsized school uniforms. The bricks and the bags kept Saul and King Rat hidden. They looked up as the children passed, paused briefly in their breakfast.

  They were silent while they ate. When they had finished, Saul licked his lips. The taste of filth and carrion was very strong in his mouth, and he investigated it, still wondering that it did not turn his stomach.

  King Rat nestled into the bags and pulled his coat about him. “Feeling better now?” he asked.

  Saul nodded. For the first time since his sudden release, he felt calm. He could feel the acids of his stomach getting to work inside him, breaking down the old food he had eaten. He felt molecules scurrying out of his gut, carrying strange energy from the ruins of other people’s suppers and breakfasts. He was changing from the inside out.

  My mother was like this creature, he said to himself, this skulking thing. My mother was like this thin-faced vagrant with magical powers. My mother was a spirit, it seems, a dirty spirit. My mother was a rat.

  “You can’t go back, you know.” King Rat looked at Saul from under his eyelids. Saul had long given up trying to make sense of his features. The light would not fall full on King Rat’s face, no matter where he stood or lay. Saul glanced at him again, but his eyes found no purchase.

  “I know it,” he said.

  “They think you did your pa, and they’ll do you for that. And now you’ve slung your hook from their old Bucket, they’ll have your guts for garters.”

  The city had been made unsafe. Saul felt it yawn before him, infinitely vaster than he had imagined, unknowable and furtive.

  “So, so…” said Saul slowly. So what is London? he thought. If you can be what you are, what’s London? What’s the world? I’ve had it all wrong. Do werewolves and trolls lurk under bridges in the parks? What are the boundaries of the world?

  “So…what do I do now?”

  “Well, you aren’t going back, so you got to bing a waste forward. I’ve to teach you how to be rat. You got a lot going for you, sonny. Hold your breath and squeeze in tight, freeze like a statue…you’re invisible. Move just right, dainty on your toes, you’ll make nary a sound. You can be like me. As far as you’re concerned, up’s no longer out of bounds, and down’s nothing to fear.”

  It didn’t matter any more that he didn’t understand. Unbelievably, King Rat’s words took away Saul’s trepidation. He felt himself grow strong. He stretched out his arms. He felt like laughing.

  “I feel like I can do anything,” he said. He was overwhelmed.

  “You can, my old son. You’re a ratling boy. Just got to learn the tricks. We’ll cut your teeth. You and me together, dynamite. We’ve a kingdom to win back.”

  Saul had risen to his feet, was staring out into the street beyond. At King Rat’s words he turned slowly and looked down at the thin figure cocooned in black plastic.

  “Back?” he said levelly. “Back from who?”

  King Rat nodded. “Time,” he said, “for a word in your shell-like. Much as I hate to piss on your chips, you’re forgetting something. You’re in another country now because your old man did the six-storey swan-dive”—King Rat blithely ignored Saul’s aghast stare—“and he did that, the old codger, in lieu of you. There’s something out there wants your head, chal, and you’d be wise not to forget it.”

  Saul wobbled to his knees. “Who?” he whispered.

  “Well now, that’s the biggy, isn’t it? That’s the question. And therein lies a story, a twisting rat-tale.”

  P

  A

  R

  T

  T

  W

  O

  THE

  NEW CITY

  F

  I

  V

  E

  Fabian was trying to call Natasha but he could not reach her. She had taken her phone off the hook. The news about Saul’s father was spreading among his friends like a virus, but Natasha had immunized herself for a little while longer.

  It was just after midday. The sun was bright but as cold as snow. The sounds of Ladbroke Grove filtered along the backstreets to the first floor of a flat on Bassett Road. They slid through the windows and filled the front room, a susurrus of dogs and paper sellers and cars. The sounds were faint; they were what passed for silence in the city.

  In the flat a woman stood motionless in front of a keyboard. She was short and her face was severe, with dark eyebrows that met above a scimitar nose. Her long hair was dark, her skin sallow. Her name was Natasha Karadjian.

  Natasha stood with her eyes closed and listened to the streets outside. She reached out and pressed the power button on her sampler. There was a static thud as her speakers clicked into life.

  She ran her hands over the keys and the cursor. She had st
ood motionless for a minute or two now. Even alone she felt self-conscious. Natasha rarely let people watch when she created her music. She was afraid they would think her precious, with her silent preparations and her closed eyes.

  She tapped out a message on a clutch of small buttons, twisted her cursor, displayed her musical spoils on the LCD display. She scrolled through the selection and plucked a favorite bassline from her digital killing jar. She had snatched it from a forgotten Reggae track, sampled it, preserved it, and now she pulled it out and looped it and gave it another life. The zombie sound travelled the innards of the machine and out through wires, through the vast black stereo against her wall, and burst out of those great speakers.

  The sound filled her room.

  The bass was trapped. The sample ended just as the bass-player had been about to reach a crescendo, and expectation was audible in the thudding strings as they reached out for something, for a flourish…then a break, and the cycle started again.

  This bassline was in purgatory. It burst into existence with a recurring surge of excitement, waiting for a release that never came.

  Natasha nodded her head slowly. This was the breakbeat, the rhythm of tortured music. She loved it.

  Again her hands moved. A pounding beat joined the bass, cymbals clattering like insects. And the sound looped.

  Natasha moved her shoulders to the rhythm. Her eyes were wide as she scanned her kills, her pickled sounds, and she found what she wanted: a snatch of trumpet from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a wail from Tony Rebel, a cry of invitation from Al Green. She dropped them into her tune. They segued smoothly into the rolling bass, the slamming drums.

  This was Jungle.

  The child of House, the child of Raggamuffin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Bass soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.

  The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the bassline you followed with your feet, the bassline that gave Jungle its soul.

  And above the bassline was the high end of Jungle: the treble. Stolen chords and shouts that rode the waves of bass like surfers. They were fleeting and teasing, snatches of sound winking into existence and sliding over the beat, tracing it, then winking away.

  Natasha nodded her satisfaction.

  She could feel the bass. She knew it intimately. She searched instead for the sounds at the top, she wanted something perfect, a leitmotif to weave in and out of the drums.

  She knew the people who ran the clubs, and they would always play her music. People liked her tracks a lot, gave her respect and bookings. But she felt a vague dissatisfaction with everything she wrote, even when the sensation was shot through with pride. When she finished a track she did not feel any purgation of relief, only a slight unease. Natasha would cast around, ransacking her friends’ record collections in an attempt to find the sounds she wanted to steal, or would make her own on her keyboard, but they never touched her like the bass. The bass never evaded her; she needed only to reach out for it, and it would drop out of her speakers complete and perfect.

  The track was nearing a crescendo now: Gwan, exhorted a sampled voice, Gwan gyal. Natasha broke the beat, teasing the rhythm out, paring it down. She stripped flesh from the tune’s bones and the samples echoed in the cavernous ribcage, in the belly of the beat. Come now…we rollin’ this way, rudebwoy… She pulled her sounds our one by one, until only the bass was left. It had ushered the song in; it ushered it out again.

  The room was silent.

  Natasha waited a while until the city silence of children and cars crept into her ears again. She looked around at her room. Her flat contained a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom and the beautiful big bedroom she was in now. She had put her meager collection of prints and posters in the other rooms and the hall; the walls here were quite bare. The room itself was empty except for a mattress on the floor, the hulking black stand which housed her stereo, and her keyboard. The wooden floor was criss-crossed with black leads.

  She reached down and put the receiver back on the phone. She was about to wander into the kitchen, when the doorbell sounded. Natasha crossed the room to the open window and leaned out.

  A man was standing in front of her door, looking straight up at her eyes. She had a brief impression of a thin face, bright eyes and long blond hair, before she ducked back into the room and headed down the stairs. He had not looked like a Jehovah’s witness or a troublemaker.

  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.

  “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 stand 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 th
reatened. 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 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 pre-empted 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 déjà 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.