He moved sideways a little, making room, running alongside the tracks. Come on! he willed it, as the two lights he could not help but think of as eyes slowly drew nearer. Above them he saw the scarecrow figure of the Piper approaching him.
But now the train was nearby and Saul was smiling as he ran, as his sores and his ripped skin pulled against each other. Even as the Piper swung close enough for Saul to see his face, the tube train hurtled past Saul and he accelerated as it slowed for a bend, and as it passed him he threw himself at the back the final carriage, grappling with it like a judo wrestle jostling for position, thrusting his fingers deep into crevices and under extrusions of metal.
He pulled himself to the top and spread his arm wide, clinging tight to the edges of the roof as train began to increase its speed. Saul swivelled on stomach until he faced backwards, stretched his neck and looked up into the Piper’s enraged face, bobbed up and down in the air, contorted even as he continue to play, borne aloft by a canopy of dying birds in slit through the city, this roofless tunnel — but there was nothing the Piper could do to catch Saul now.
And as the train pulled away even faster, Saul saw him become a flying ragdoll, and then a speck, and then he couldn’t see him any more, and he looked instead at the buildings around him.
He saw light and motion inside them, and he realized that people were alive that night, making tea and writing reports and having sex and reading books and watching TV and fighting and expiring quietly in bed, and that the city had not cared that he had been about to die, that he had discovered the secret of his ancestry, that a murderous force armed with a flute was preparing to kill the King of the Rats.
The buildings above him were beautiful and impassive. Saul realized that he was very tired and bleeding and in shock, and that he had seen two people die that night, killed by a power that didn’t care if they lived or died. And he felt a disturbance in the air behind him, and he put his head down and let his breath out in a great sob as the approaching tunnel swept up rubbish and sucked it in behind the train, as a sudden warm wind hit him like a boxer’s glove, and all the diffuse city light went out and he disappeared into the earth.
Part Five. Spirits
Chapter Twenty
Fabian shook his head, scrunched up his dreadlocks into vicious little bunches. His head ached terribly. He lay on his bed and pulled faces at the mirror just visible on his desk.
Lying some way off was his ‘work in progress’, as his tutor insisted on calling it. The left two-thirds of the huge canvas were a garish panoply of metallic spray-paints and bright, flat acrylic; the right third was covered in ghost letters, faint pencil lines and charcoal. He had lost motivation for the project, though he still felt a certain pride in it as he stared at it again.
It was an illuminated manuscript for the 1990s, the letters a careful synthesis of mediaeval calligraphy and graffiti lettering. The whole screen, six feet by eight, consisted of just three lines: Sometimes I want to lose myself in faith and Jungle is the only thing I can turn to, because in Drum an’ Bass I know my place…
He had thought of a phrase which started with an ‘S’ because it was such a pleasing letter to illuminate.
It was very large, contained in a box, and surrounded by ganja leaves and sound-system speakers and modern serfs, rudebwoys and gyals, an intricate parody, the expressionless zombies of monastic art executed by Keith Haring or one of the New York Subway Artists. The rest of the writing was mostly dark, but not matt-black, shot through with neon strips and encased in gaudy integuments. In the corner below the writing lurked the police, like devils: The Man. But these days the sloganeering had to be ironic. Fabian knew the rules and couldn’t be bothered to disobey them, so the devils coming up from the pit were ridiculous, the worst nightmares of St Anthony and Sweet Sweetback combined.
And up in the top right, though not yet drawn, would be the dancers, the worshippers who’ve found their way out of the slough of urban despond, a drab maze of greys in the centre of the piece, to Drum and Bass heaven. The dancing was fierce, but he had been careful to make these faces more than ever like those in the old pictures he was mimicking: placid, stupid, expressionless. Because individualism, he remembered explaining earnestly to his lecturer, had no more place in a Jungle club than in a thirteenth-century church. That was why he loved it and why it frustrated him and sometimes frightened him. That was why the ambiguous text as well.
He was always on at Natasha to cut a really political track, and she demurred, claiming not to be interested, which irritated him. So until someone would do it, he would keep on with his loving chiding. Hence the Middle Ages, he had explained. The necessary displays of opulence and style at the clubs were as grandiose and vapid as any display of courtly etiquette, and the awe in which DJs were held was positively feudal.
At first, his tutor had hummed and hawed, and sounded unconvinced at the project, until Fabian had hinted that he did not appreciate the importance of Jungle in modern pop culture, and that had given it the seal of approval. All the lecturers at his art college would rather have died than admit that there were any gaps in their knowledge of youth.
But he was unable to concentrate on ‘Jungle Liturgy’, even though he was quite proud of it.
He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circumstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.
And now it seemed as if he might be losings Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She was excited about the music she was making with Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.
It was Saul’s departure, he thought, which had precipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian’s friendships together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.
He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her fucking sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.
And Saul — Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul’s life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge — vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian’s mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and God-knew-what — and that he had been routinely eliminated.