The coding was Vik’s idea, all the way. Luke had only gone along with it in the first place because he sensed there was more swag where those vintage, rust-red Valkyries had come from, and he wanted in on it if and when the opportunity arose.

            They had been talking about records, or rather he had, enjoying the confused look on the older man’s face while he broke it down for him. Dubplates, acetates, “special” pressings, and an illustrious lineage of industry names. Tubby, Jammy, Perry, Mad Prof, Scientist, and of course the local London heavyweights too, Dennis Rowe and Saxon; to say nothing of Coxsone.

            Vik wasn’t the first older soul he’d encountered who was amazed that a younger actually possessed knowledge of a world that predated them. “Before my time” was the standard signoff they were more used to hearing from youth when asked their opinion on anything which had occurred outside of their actual lifetime. It was an infuriating trait which had only seemed to gather speed the more everyone’s eyes were glued to their phones.

            Luke was sporting the Valkyries (an earlier peace offering from Vik, for doing him a solid on another matter), shuffling from foot to foot just outside the local library.

            “When’s fight night then?” asked Vik, amused by Luke’s inability to stand still.

            “Eh?”

            “You look like you’re doing the Ali shuffle, fella.”

            Luke seemed nonplussed.

            “You know? The Rumble In The Jungle, all that Mobutu madness?”

            “Oh yeah, right,” replied Luke, sensing an opening. “That. The fight that got postponed while Foreman had stitches. Bit they couldn’t put off though was the music festival they’d set up as part of the promotion. B.B.King, Manu Dibango, Bill Withers and James Brown. Celia Cruz too. But you knew all that anyway, didn’t you, Vik?”

            It was rare for Vik to be at a loss for words, but this was one such moment. Ali v Foreman. 1974. The Jurassic period for most youngers. What he didn’t know was that for this particular youth, raised around the nostalgic stories of his uncle, that was in fact a year of great significance. Trouble and strife on the streets of the UK. IRA bombs, power cuts and General Election nailbiters. But more than that, the Dutch “total football” near-miss at that year’s World Cup, and the cosmic stirrings of Augustus Pablo as he prepared to deliver his musical masterpiece just a couple of years later.

            “Well hark at him with the history channel in his head!”

            It was praise, no question, and Luke, unlike his rodent forebears, found himself basking in it. Deeper instinct should have told him there and then that this was in fact a moment of great peril, brought on by allowing himself to enjoy what looked suspiciously like the limelight in lieu of the shadows. But it was the gallimaufry of their exchange which held court instead.

            History, beak, wing, tail, claw, fur, and of course whiskers attuned to the tiniest of recalibrations. With the pleasing upshot that Vik was suddenly apprised of Luke’s multiples.

            Rat, youth, retro and future shock, all in one.

            And if there had ever been a time when his own aerial coordinates might have zeroed in on the rodent element, as prey, then that ship had long since sailed. They were, if not necessarily equals (birds flew higher, though it was also true that rats dug deeper), then certainly contemporaries.

            “You’re a dark horse, Luke. What else you been hiding under that furry barnet?”

            Luke smiled, pleased to have registered in Vik’s consciousness as something more than just a local seller, or buyer, or whatever he was.

♤

Now this youth on the other hand, well he was full of surprises. Just for starters a multiple, like himself, though in his case those fractions literally tailed off and were entombed in fur. But it was true, there was a lot more to him than met the eye, even an avian one used to spying worms in topsoil. And where Vik was accustomed to gaining valuable perspective from high above, from the skies, he began to appreciate the youth’s alternative viewpoint, headed in the opposite direction, underground, towards the shadows. His insight was every bit as unique, albeit forged from below, from the haunches.

            Actually that wasn’t quite right either.

            Vik felt a brief flutter of shame at the casteism of his view, its hierarchical certainties. He’d never really explored what existed beyond the topsoil. Never felt the need to since all the nutrients he required were readily enough accessible above ground. But this youth’s lowlier origins must also have furnished him with a particular view of the world: off limits to those with hifalutin’ tendencies, and even to those without, this was a rare type of knowledge, only available to the most indefatigable chewers. The sole province of those who really possessed the gnawing instinct, no matter what the cost, to themselves or others: chomping at cables, at waste, at the discarded remnants of a city which looked upwards but rarely down. Fast food, fast lives, and on rainy days, of which there were quite a few in this town, the whole remaindered larder served up with a generous dollop of mud. Such a perspective was literally earthy in a way that Vik’s could never be. Luke didn’t claim flighty grandiloquence in his every pronouncement because he didn’t need to. All he needed to know was right there, on his person, in the dirt under claws or the scurf displaced by fur. It was at one and the same time tangible, cute and full of horror. The mark of the beast, of the plague, superseded only by the mythos of survival.

            Rodere.

            I gnaw, therefore I am.

            Luke’s crowd.

            Getting their teeth into the vile equation, gnawing their way to freedom.

            Galley holds, roof beams, the perpendicular nightmares of the melanin deficient devils, none of them the equal to the rat’s tenacity. A natural scavenger and a strong swimmer, an object lesson in versatility and adaptability. Domiciled in sewers, the true pulse of the urban underground. Literally from the ground up. Seers full of grit, while his, Vik’s, visions came with particles of cloud dust. Malcolm to his Martin. No matter. All visions came second hand these days. His were no exception, mostly lifted wholesale from American crime drama. Time was he'd have drawn sustenance and clarity from the worms in his beak. Now, he found himself increasingly reliant on “The Wire” for both. And considering the fur/feather rapprochement that seemed to be taking place right there and then, it was hard to argue too much with the wisdom of Detective Lester Freamon, sagely advising his younger, more callow associates: “All the pieces matter.”

            Indeed they do, Brother Freamon, indeed they do, Brother Rat.

♤

Luke was enjoying this, the prissy haut-bourgeois mannerism evidently borrowed from his own genealogy. “Havendale, Luke. We were island royalty.”

            Jamaica. Jamdown, not jam donuts on this colder island where they now found themselves.

            How many times had his uncle told him the same thing? Usually after they’d been listening to the neighbourhood’s (Havendale’s) finest (Augustus Pablo) on pristine vinyl, but sometimes just to cheer him up if he saw a look of sadness on his nephew’s face. Or if his nephew relayed back to him some of the foolishness that he himself had heard every so often from random souls in the city above ground. About how they were “all the same,” or some other aspersion to do with “your lot.” On those occasions his uncle would place reassuring mitts on his nephew’s shoulders and recite a careworn mantra describing ships and cargo holds and the tropical miseries of sugar sweat and cane cutters. But then his tone would change again, the story too, reverb in the antechamber. His nephew, rapt, would listen to this tale of how, unshackled and limitless, the progeny of cane cutters devoted all that labour, and the guile brought from the shadows, to establishing themselves as tropical royalty. Dougla and doubly conscious of the fact on an island where the fiction of “singularity” ruled the roost.

            Whose ancestors contained piratical blood. Whose did not. Whose lineage remained uncorrupted. (Answer, no one’s. But at a time when feelings ran high, and pan-African ones the highest of all, nobody really wanted to hear about dougla hybrids. In spite of the melanin theft, Creolisation might just about have been ok, perversely aspirational even with all that it said about the inheritance of colonial blood, of master’s genes. But the dougla, no sah. The heresy of debt peons and former slaves. Brown and Black, though in the end, under a pitiless sky, the heresy, like aubergine, like Miles, was “kind of blue.”) Point being, everyone had the potential for snobbery, no matter where they’d started out in the food chain.

            “My uncle’s a flyer. So was my dad, but I never knew him.”

            Taking in the look that Vik gave him, the one rat boys like him were all-too-wearily-accustomed to seeing, frequently from total strangers, Luke continued.

            “It ain’t like that. He’s not banged up or anything. He passed before I was born, so my uncle raised me. But he’s told me all about my Pops. Anyway, he was like you, cloudcapped. Him and my uncle both, apparently they used to just chill up there, taking it all in, when down below no one had a clue where they’d gone, or even that they had gone. But long before they could do aerial flits, when things were trickier on the ships, or in the cane fields, they hadn’t been flyers then. That all came later once they’d got a foothold on terra firma, and so could start to entertain loftier thoughts. Higher ones if you like for which, yeah, wings were always going to be quite useful. Before all that they’d been rats, though. Down in the dirt, in the dark. No space down there to flap about. No point squawking about it either, as who the hell was listening anyway?”

            Vik stayed quiet. In the whole time he’d known Luke, and been encouraging his entrepreneurial sideline in aspirational lifestyle accessories (no need to tell anyone, least of all Luke, that they were also freebies from work, and castoffs), this was the most information the youth had ever volunteered.

            “Thing is, it’s all up there anyway,” said Luke, tapping his temple. “Always has been. Otherwise I wouldn’t even be here. Only the smartest and the toughest survived what my ancestors been through.”

            Vik suddenly looked bored, so Luke decided to change tack.

            “What I’m trying to say is…I’ve got all these different versions of my brain working overtime, so keeping things up there ain’t a problem. My head, it’s like Sleng Teng, man. Hundreds of versions and counting, so no one really knows any more where it all began or where it will end.”

            “Sounds like Borges,” was Vik’s response, eliciting a puzzled look from the recently-emboldened youth. Sleng Teng, that bloody dancehall riddim! He didn’t even like it.

            “Eh?”

            “Never mind. It can wait. You were saying?”

            “Yeah, where was I again?”

            “Sleng Teng,” added Vik, helpfully.

            “Oh yeah, right. It’s definitely a version excursion up there. I been all these things, all these different people, and each one’s picked up a little something along the way. How to scuffle, how to think, the best way to curry favour, or score some tunes, or weed, or chirpse some fine gyal. You get me?”

            “Kind of,” said Vik. “Though be honest, when have you ever chirpsed some fine gyal? Far as I can tell, it’s just you and your boys. Never even seen gyal of any description kotch with you, let alone chirpsed by you. But anyway, I digress. You were saying?”

            He breathed a little easier, having punctured the youth’s swelling, and increasingly insufferable, sense of occasion. Fuck’s sake, he’d only wanted to explore the possibility that Luke might be able to give him some useful dispatches from the youthful front line, and whatever passed nowadays as its fashion index. It was more or less Vik’s job description, a “trendspotter” with his finger on the pulse even before the pulse knew it was there. But of late he’d been feeling a little jaded, and though he’d hardly dare contemplate it, too old even to be in this line of work. And it was largely for that reason that he’d settled upon the idea that Luke might act as a de facto proxy for him on the ground. He’d of course generously compensate him for his time and knowledge, but there was no getting away from it: this was a young man’s game, and he, Vik, was no longer that. His visions were too airy. Which was why he wanted to know how, and how well, Luke could store information in his head. If he’d wanted the whole Studs Terkel, he’d have said so. This was what happened to birds if you put them underground. Like that canary in the coalmine, once they started they couldn’t fucking stop singing.

♤

Anyway, that was how Vik found out that the key to picking up and storing knowledge, especially in a subterranean setting, lay in the rat’s fabled sense of hearing, smell and touch. Vision, of the lofty kind that Vik was more used to, was the least important of the rat’s senses as it started to build up a detailed picture of its physical environment. Mostly, Luke admitted, he could only really see in ultraviolet colours down there. Blues and greens, with visibility blurred for everything beyond a few feet away. But that was ok, as his hearing more than made up for this shortfall.

            “Seriously, bruv, I’m telling you. I can pick up sound a mile off. And not just low-fi rumble, you get me? I’m talking soft sound and high frequencies, going into the range of ultrasound. Trust me, that fine gyal you never see me with, I’m willing to bet my house, or at least these Valkyries, on being able to hear whether she’s up the stick.”

            Vik was unimpressed by the bold claim, just the kind of foolishness he’d expect from a younger, but kept his opinion to himself as he was keen to hear more about the rodent method.

            “And trust me, blud, there’s nothing getting past this snout,” continued Luke, wrinkling what on the surface (and to anyone else who might have been looking their way just then) would have appeared just like any other konk. Subterfuge, as ever, was the crucial detail in remaining undetected, hiding in plain sight.

            “You see when it comes to making maps, Vik, there’s no better compass than this little bit of kit,” bragged Luke, tapping his bugle. “Because that’s what it’s all about, bruv. Making a mental map.”

            “Too many emms,” added Vik, still slightly annoyed by the disruption of the standard hierarchy. “Drawing up a mental map, not making one. Too alliterative,” he carried on, disheartened that this nitpicking was the only way he could think of to gently undermine the youth. There was no denying the value of what he was being told though.

            “Whatever,” said Luke, himself irritated by Vik’s constant interruptions and so pretending he had somewhere else to be by starting to put his jacket back on. It had the desired effect.

            “Alright, alright, I’m sorry. Can’t help myself sometimes, you know how it is? All those books have turned me into a pedant.”

            “Seriously, bruv, that ain’t good. You don’t want to let on about that. No wonder people don’t read no more. Not if that’s what happens.”

            They both laughed, equilibrium restored, and Luke got back to telling Vik how his snout was expert at detecting not just the sources of food, or danger, but in communicating with his fellow sewer rats. Scent marking a particular spot acted like breadcrumbs in that fairy tale. A route all the way back to whether the graffito belonged to a buck or a doe. And if a doe, then just from individual drops he would be able to tell whether she was receptive to being chirpsed. Even whether her bedroom status would be subordinate or dominant. (Vik’s eyebrows arched upwards at that one.) He could also tell just from those few drops the stress level of the artist in question. For make no mistake, they were artists down in the depths.

            This quatriême arrondissement might have been festooned with waste, but theirs was an artistic calling, scything beauty from darkness, romance too. Whiskers brushing over floors, walls, obstacles, food, and rivals, sending detailed messages to the brain. The many beats per second of those whiskers, finetuned to even the tiniest recalibrations of sound, well those were the impulses of a true seeker. Snouting, burrowing, scampering around the perimeter consciousness of the more easily cowed. And all that movement, data, versatility and strength, those were the very virtues that came easily, and effortlessly, to the rat. Gigabytes of wisdom stored in each quivering vibrissa. A cartographer of the remaindered imagination, splicing together the most intricate of maps from shadows.

            Just then a voice of malted gravel broke the shadowline. Another rat, like Luke, and a visionary too. In his mind, which had begun to wander, Vik was startled by the sudden appearance of Tom Waits. A double malted croak, from back in the day and Frank’s Wild Years. More bourbon, then “Bodymore” again, the long form “Wire” import, and the Waits’ classic reborn as harbinger of grim, urban collapse. Way Down In The Hole.

            Hello, Brother Waits, greetings Brother Rat.

            Agouti, Cinnamon, Topaz, sometimes even Roan. Gnawing at cables, and most of the time beating the odds. The city’s electrical currents a known, if perilous, taste. Shadows lengthening, the odds shortening, but throughout, these stealthy little warriors undeterred. Sensory engineers with a lineage as old as the darkness.

            Hello, Mr Rat. A natural-born coder.

♤

October 7th. 2024