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colour and motion. In the centre of the building one patch of shade remained still: someone leaning out of their flat window, looking over the hillocks and knolls of slate on which Saul and King Rat stood, brazen in their night-time camouflage.
    ‘Say goodbye to that now,’ King Rat said.
    Saul turned his head to face him, quizzical.
    ‘That geezer there, stopping and staring, that’s as close as you ever got to this before now. The place he’s looking at now - no, he’s not looking at it, he’s caught a glimpse, a hint, it’s teasing him out of the corner of his eye - that’s your gaff now, me old son.’ Emotion was disguised in King Rat’s bass snarl, but he seemed satisfied, as if with a job well done. ‘The rest of it, that’s just in-between for you now. All the main streets, the front rooms and the rest of it, that’s just filler, that’s just chaff, that ain’t the real city.
    You get to that by the back door. I seen you in the windows, at night, at the close of the lightmans.
    Staring out, playing look-but-don’t-touch. Well, you’ve touched it now. All the vacant lots and all - that’s your stomping ground now, your pad, your burrow, Saul. That’s London.
    ‘You can’t go back now, can you? You stick with me, boy. I’ll see you’re alright.’ ‘Why me?’ said Saul slowly. ‘What do you want from me?’ he stopped, remembering, for what seemed the first time in hours, why he had been in the police station. ‘What do you know about my father?’
    King Rat turned and stared at Saul, those features, already so obscured, now invisible in the moonlight.
    Without taking his eyes from Saul, he slowly sank until he sat straddling the roof ridge like a horseman.
    ‘Slide over here, cove, and I’ll tell you the story. You aren’t going to like it.’
    Saul lowered himself carefully, facing King Rat, and pulled himself forward until he was only a couple of feet away from him. If anyone could see them, Saul realized, they must look like two schoolboys, ungainly figures from a comic strip, sitting with their legs swinging. Saul’s exhilaration had dissipated with as little warning as it had arrived. He was swallowing with anxiety. He was remembering his father. This was the key to everything, he thought;
    this was the catalyst, the legend that would make sense of the surreality which had caught him up in its gusts.
    King Rat spoke, and just as it had in the police cell, his voice took on a rhythm, a dislocating monotony Page 21
     
    like a bagpipe drone. The sense and meaning of what he said crept into Saul’s head as much by insinuation as by conscious understanding.
    ‘This here Romevill, London, that’s my manor, but I been around wherever my little courtiers found grain and rubbish to Tea Leaf. And they did my bidding, because I’m their king. But I was never alone, Saul; that’s never how it was. Rats believe in their Godfers, chuck out broods, the more mouths to filch, the better.
    ‘What do you know about your mother, Saul?’
    The question took him by surprise. The ... her name was Eloise ... She was, uh, a health visitor ... She died when I was born, something went wrong ...’
    ‘Seen any Beechams?’
    Saul shook his head in confusion.
    ‘Beechams: pictures, photos ...’
    ‘Of course ... she’s short and dark, pretty ... What’s this about?
    Where are you going?’
    ‘Sometimes, me old China, sometimes there are black sheep, ne’er-do-wells, if you clock me. I’d lay good money you and your dad were snarling at each other’s throats sometimes, am I right? Didn’t get on like you might have hoped? Well, do you really think rats aren’t the same?
    ‘She was always the gentry mort, your ma. Took to your daddy a whole lot, and he to her. What a beauty she was, luscious, who’d have passed that up?’ King Rat finished his sentence with a flourish, twisted his head and looked at Saul from around the corner of his face.
    ‘Your ma made a choice, Saul. Health visitor! That