Jane flipped over the back of the sofa. No light. No boots. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred rats in the room. Rats that he’d watched get fat and get thin again over the years, once the carrion ran out. Rats who had lost their timidity; he’d watched hunger push that right out of the rat set-up. Shit.
He leaned over the back of the sofa and snatched his rucksack towards him. He held it to his chest, and yelled out when a warm, bony body scuttled out of it, over his arm and away. A different rat might have buried its jaws in his throat.
There were three glowsticks in their wrappers tucked into an inner pocket. He tore two open and shook them awake: sudden acid-green light reflected back at him from dozens of eyes. More rats were pouring through a hole in the door beneath the desk. Fear turned him sluggish; his bladder slackened and he leaked piss. The sudden whiff of released chemicals sent the rats into a frenzy, but defocused them. Jane slammed the butt of the rifle into the window. A fist of wind did the rest of the work for him.
He felt claws at his feet and looked down as a rat attacked him, bared stained incisors shredding the leg of his denims. Its glistening fur seemed to ripple with pleasure as it inhaled the stink of his fear-sweat. Jane couldn’t shake it off. Another rat got a piggyback off its mate and launched itself at his eyes. Jane twisted his face away so violently that he felt a muscle pull in his neck; blindly he swung an arm and batted the rat away. He beat at the rat on his foot with the butt of the rifle. The rat continued to gnash at the air even as it was stove in.
Jane got a leg out of the window and, straddling the frame, fired three shots into the room. A squeal suggested he’d hit something, enough time to get out while they fought over the remains. He stood on the windowsill, grateful it was too dark to see how far down he would fall if he lost his footing. To his left, below the edge of the sill, was a ledge that ran to the end of the building, a distance of less than ten feet. A drainpipe waited for him there: another twelve feet above that and he’d be on the roof.
He sat on the windowsill, hands on either side of him, and inched along, using his palms to lift his bottom and swing himself incrementally towards the end. The wind plucked at his clothes – it felt to Jane as though it were assessing his weight, gauging how much it would take to drag him off into the night. He paused at the end of the sill, thinking how best to make the drop. How far life could take you, he marvelled, how far away from what you deemed to be normal could you be transported. Cups of tea, the crossword, a phone call home, all of this seemed as bizarre in the same way as what he was doing now would have appeared to his old self.
He anchored his hands as best he could to the windowsill and lowered himself towards the ledge. Almost immediately his muscles began to tremble. The breath hammered out of him; he was going to fall. But then his foot found concrete and he leant his weight upon it. The surface felt about as solid as a pack of muscovado sugar. He sidestepped as quickly as he dared to the end of the building, his hands flat against the wall by his sides, creeping along, giving him the illusion of control.
There was a hiss; rats were pouring like oil onto the window sill, sinuous, jet, intent. He grappled with the drainpipe, feeling his hold on the rifle slipping. As he reached around to secure the strap on his shoulder he felt the drainpipe lurch towards him. A great chunk of stone containing the screws that attached the top section of pipe to the masonry had come free, weakened by the corrosive drizzle. Jane shrugged the backpack from his shoulder and let it fall. He looped the strap of the gun around his neck and scrambled up the pipe until he felt close enough to grab the edge of the roof, but his fingers were a couple of inches shy.
This is it, he thought. The moment of my death. And he was not afraid; he felt a little foolish, that he had dodged the hammer blow that marked the end of humankind only to be snuffed out by a pratfall. He closed his eyes. The rats could have him, but not while he was breathing.
A gust of wind caught him, fed him to the wall with a smack. He snatched at the parapet and was dismayed at how the coping stones shifted under his fingers. Thankful for the first time at how much weight he had lost, he managed to hoist himself onto the roof before the stones slipped free. He paused for breath and took off, scuttling onto the rooftops of Regent Street before descending at Piccadilly Circus. He circled back and picked up his rucksack; the ledge writhed with shadow. It put a chill through the girdle of bone around his groin to see how far up the window was.
He took a detour around to the front of the hotel and with a blue stick of chalk slashed the orange mark with shaking hands, thinking all the while that the open doorway would suddenly bloat with the slithering bodies of millions of rats. Then he began walking north-west.
Every morning was a different route, more or less, to the same destination. He must have trodden the streets around W9 to a point where he’d be able to see his own path worn out of the pavements. Hunger, exhaustion and a build-up of lactic acid in his muscles conspired to bring him to the point of collapse. That and the projected disappointment. But he could not give up on his son. He would never give up.
His fingers strayed to the pocket of his jeans. The letter was there; he could make out its edges. It had become so worn by his constant folding and unfolding over the years, the salt and oil from his skin, that he’d ended up sealing it in a plastic wallet that he’d found in the Cabinet War Rooms under Whitehall. He felt cheated somehow, as if the closeness to his son was reduced by these microns of polythene. His fingertips could no longer press against the ink that had been so close to Stanley’s own. They could no longer feel the faint pattern of words in the paper that had been shaped by his son’s brain. He felt as if he were being gradually detached from him, like the dovetail join in two pieces of wood that has begun to fail over time.
Each step he took was accompanied by a crunch of broken glass; the boots he’d found on a platform at Paddington station had become studded with splinters picked up as he crossed the basin and its density of office blocks that was now little more than a desert of glittering scimitars and framework skeletons. He hurried under the Marylebone Flyover, shadowing the water, so aware of the pools of darkness that he felt himself involuntarily shrink, as if he were trying to withdraw like something crushed on a beach, retreating into a shell that was no longer there.
The bodies crammed into the basin had turned it into a slurry of rotting clothes, hair and fat. It disguised his own smell. You had to grasp that wherever you could, despite the inevitable unpleasantness. He skirted Little Venice and its houseboats, all of them floating coffins with their blinds drawn on secrets he wanted no knowledge of. People at a café were tumbled over their empty plates as if drunk, dull bones and mirrored grins, everybody having a whale of a time.
Stanley wasn’t home. Jane waited outside the door, kidding himself that he could hear Stanley playing with his battery-powered trains and wooden track or pestering Cherry for a beaker of apple juice. He stood at the door, listening. He stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. He stopped at every landing and waited. The building was empty.
He pushed his way into his son’s bedroom. Plaster and glass on the floor. Part of the ceiling was bowed and cracked; water created stalactites at its lowest point. The posters on the walls had been bleached to white oblongs; he could not remember what had hung there.
What do you want to be when you grow up, Stanley?