‘Don’t give me no more trouble, pickney, or me gwan mash you up.’
The voice was scratchy and sharp, vibrant with Caribbean intonation. It sounded close in his ear, as King Rat’s did.
The man moved in little bursts. He paced quickly forward a few feet, then stopped to investigate Saul, moved forward again. As he approached, he unwound the rope from his shoulder.
Saul shook violently to free himself from the tangles of rope, seemed only to pull them tighter around him. He began to screech.
The man was upon him, fetched him a vicious slap across the cheek that stopped Saul’s cry instantly. His head rocked. He was dizzy and his face throbbed.
‘He tell you to shut your mouth, bwoy!’ The man kissed his teeth.
Saul’s head wobbled forward and he blinked hard. The man was bending over him. Saul was deeply afraid. He put up his hands, tried to push them through the ropes to ward off the attack he was sure was coming. He thrashed in his bonds and opened his mouth to scream again.
The man reached down as fast as a snake and pushed his fingers into Saul’s mouth. Saul tried to bite down, but the man spread his fingers and with inhuman strength forced Saul’s mouth open. Saul’s captor tugged at the rope draped over his shoulder with his free hand. He wound it around Saul’s head once, twice, stuffed it into his mouth like a gag.
He muttered to himself in patois.
As he spoke, the man yanked the rope tight and wound it expertly around Saul’s head again, obscuring the lower half of his face. Saul mewed frantically from behind this mask as his eyes darted from side to side.
The man pulled at Saul’s arms, twisting the rope around them and pulling tight, securing them behind Saul’s back. He tugged Saul free of the little alley. Saul stumbled and ran forward till his feet were jerked out from under him and he fell. He had reached the end of the rope which bound him. He slid back across the concrete. The man was reeling him in.
Saul was pulled to his feet and turned to face his captor. With his mouth blocked, Saul breathed frantically through his nose, sputtering flecks of snot onto his bindings. Black eyes stared into his own, which were wet with fear.
‘You come with me fe see ratty. There some bad obeah loose now.’
He twirled the rope suddenly over Saul’s head like a film cowboy. The coils slid down through the air and wound around Saul’s body. The man spun him on the spot, tightening the bonds, letting out slack to constrict him like a top. He bent and ran the rope on down Saul’s legs, until his whole body was obscured in a shroud of grubby white cord.
Only Saul’s eyes could move. He could feel a hammering in his arms and legs as his heart struggled to push blood past the obstructions cutting into his flesh.
The man bit through the rope and tied the end at Saul’s feet. He stood before Saul and looked down at him, nodded.
‘No more nonsense and hollering now, innit?’
Saul began to pitch forward but the man caught him and, to Saul’s sudden horror, rolled him through the air and onto his back. He pulled Saul into position as effortlessly as King Rat had done. Saul felt like fluff. The man took more rope from his shoulder and wrapped it around his captive several times, attaching him more firmly. Saul was helpless on those broad flat muscles, his eyes facing backwards. His legs were twisted up into a tight bend. He was suspended from the man’s shoulders and waist, the rope cutting into his captor’s skin, seemingly painlessly. Saul bobbed in a terrifying and undignified fashion as his abductor raced suddenly through the darkness.
He rushed through the underworld below the Westway at a rate of knots, his route violent and oscillating. The hidden byways receded before Saul’s eyes. The man beneath him lurched suddenly and Saul saw the dark horizon drop around him. They were airborne. Saul’s eyes widened and he gave a muffled yell, spit slithering down his chin behind the ropes.
They flew through the air, paused and swung backwards, then around, a pendulum ten feet from the ground. They were suspended, clinging to a rope, Saul realized. The man began to climb.
He moved easily, the curve of his back suggesting that he was using both feet and hands. The pace was utterly smooth. The sports grounds disappeared below them and, as they swung from side to side, vistas of West London peeked in and out of Saul’s vision. The occasional roar of traffic was closer now.
They reached the top of the rope. Saul was facing away from the highway, out over badly lit sidestreets. The man clung to the barrier and scampered along the side of the Westway. Saul’s stomach drummed with fear. There was nothing below his feet. He saw the streets below curve a little closer to him, and he saw the dim light catch on a filament, a thread passing up from the chimney of a house fast approaching.
They were opposite the house now, and he caught another glimpse of the thin line of light. It was close by, twisting towards him.
Suddenly he was falling.
But the ground stopped rushing towards him, and he bobbed in the air. He was facing directly down, the Westway growling a few feet above and behind him. The filament he had seen was another rope, tied at one end to the roof and another to the railings of the great road above. The man was descending the rope now, headfirst, hand over hand, bouncing unnervingly as he slid fast towards the intricate darkness of the roofscape.
Saul prayed that the rope was strong.
And then they were down, and Saul was swung around. He heard a loud snap, and when the man turned again Saul saw that he had broken the rope behind them, obscured their passing.
They were off over the tops of houses, another raised race across London. The man swung himself around obstacles, scampering over the slates even faster than King Rat.
Blocks fleeted away below them. Behind them Saul saw the monolithic Westway shrinking.
The man leapt forward and bounced perilously over a road that blocked his path. Saul realized with terror that they were on another rope tied horizontally between buildings, but this time moving on top of it, tightrope-walking faster than Saul could run.
The air was buffeted out of him by the quick motion of his captor and the constricting ropes on his chest. Below them Saul saw a solitary walker moving nervously through the backstreets, oblivious to the mad funambulism above him.
With a jump the dark man left the rope, landed on the opposite roof, snapped the trail behind them.
They moved like this at a crazy speed over the streets, traversing a network of ropes already laid. They passed through grassland and into an estate, leaping along flat roofs and scampering insanely fast down sheer bricks. Saul was convulsed with terror, unable to see what his captor was doing.
They raced down a bank of scrub onto a railway line, and rushed along the wooden sleepers. Saul watched the tracks curve away behind them.
Again their passage was interrupted as the dark man climbed the side of a bridge that passed over the railway and the canal that skirted it. They swept through an industrial estate, a collection of low, shabby buildings and motionless forklift trucks. Saul was hypnotized by the breakneck progress over the houses. He had been caught, he did not know by whom, and he did not know what was to happen to him.
The noise of the city became oddly distant. They had entered a yard full of ruined cars crushed flat, piles of them like geological features: strata of old Volvos and Fords and Saabs. The cars teetered around them, leaving only narrow alleys through which to pass.
They wound through these walkways.
Suddenly the man stopped and Saul heard another’s voice: a strange, vain, musical voice coloured with a European accent he could not specify.
‘You did find him, then.’
‘Yeah, man. Caught the lickle bleeder down south from here, not far you know.’
There was no more speaking. Saul suddenly felt the ties that bound him slipping, and he fell in a heap to the dust. He was still wrapped tight in his own rope swaddling. The fat man picked him up and carried him in his arms like a bride.