PIPER

He kept the bus parked on the old airstrip, between the remains of a hangar and a couple of abandoned horse trailers. That way, he thought, if one of the tricky winds that sometimes came off the sea hurtled through, the old lady would be propped both sides. A double-decker is an unstable thing. A wonder really that Hyde Park Corner wasn’t heaped up with toppled red carcasses. Perhaps people in London drove very slow. He supposed they must. He couldn’t say. He’d never been.

The bus was his home, but for his daily back-and-forth he used the transit. Powder-blue, but then he’d got the kiddies to jazz it up for him. A spring day, and he’d gone into Franklin’s and the two girls were teetering about in those skirts that were more like socks really – knitted, tight – and he’d said, ‘What are you doing with that lot?’ A great pile of aerosols, gold and silver and red and green.

‘They won’t be needed again ’til next Christmas,’ said the one with the long black-painted nails. ‘We’ve got to put out the seed potatoes now, and the potted daffs.’

He said, ‘I’ll take them off your hands.’

She said, ‘What, all of them?’ and her friend sniggered. Or perhaps they weren’t friends. He thought about it sometimes. About what it must be like to do a job that kept you every day in the same place. Suppose there was someone there who drove you round the twist? A nightmare that would be, a real nightmare.

The girls let him have the spray-paint cheap because someone had come in on Christmas Eve, that’s what they said, and complained about how one of the nozzles was all gummed up. ‘It’s like aeons they’ve been here,’ said the other one, the smiler. ‘Anyway, when did you last see anyone spray-paint a teasel?’

‘My mum still does it, every year,’ said black-nails, but Piper was already shovelling the shiny cylinders into his big bag. ‘Fiver for the lot,’ he said, and they let him take them.

Come Sunday he had the whole of the junior school out at the airstrip. He made overalls for them out of cement bags and he told them he wanted the van to look like a birthday present, so when they’d painted every inch of it they got a roll of silver foil out of the bus (he kept his kitchen neat as could be – everything put away in the little drawers he’d fixed up) and they made a big silver bow and fixed it to the bonnet. He took off his shirt then (it was one of his good ones) and stood there in his old combats and gave the two littlest ones the last two cans of paint – green for the deaf boy who chirruped as he talked, red for that girl who was so tiny he wondered was she all right, or what. They each painted one leg, and half his bum, and then they started on his bare chest and he didn’t want to spoil the day by yelling at them. Took hours, it did, to get it off his chest hair and the scrubbing with white spirit gave him a rash.

The mothers complained about that too, and the next day Sylvia from Shortcuts called after him down the street, ‘Thanks for the business, Piper. I’ve been cutting sparkly hair non-stop since school came out.’ They went for a drink and he showed her his golden belly button. The chirruping boy was hers. All the mums were glad of a morning’s peace when he took the kiddies off their hands.

This time of year it was all rats. Late August, September, he’d be running all over the county with his wasp gear. Mice, of course, that was pretty constant, though he used to say to them all, ‘You don’t need me. Get a cat.’ He wasn’t a pushy salesman – didn’t need to be.

When he was only a squit of a thing he’d made his Ma a mouse out of half a hazelnut shell. He drew on eyes and whiskers with her eyeliner, and glued on a bit of string for a tail. Sweet, it was, with its pointy nose. Some of the mice he poisoned were that small. It bothered him, really, that people couldn’t live and let live, but you can’t be an exterminator if you’re going to get upset. People don’t like mouse pellets in their bread bins. They just don’t. You can’t blame them. He knew all about bubonic plague. Not that you’re likely to pick that up in Suffolk.

It was a substantial town. The market square was broad and entirely enclosed by buildings, not one of which was less than a hundred and sixty years old. A lych-gate opened on to the churchyard, which was rectangular and amply large enough to contain all the smug and boastful tombstones that had been erected there by generation upon generation of townsfolk, proud of their families’ long continuance in this place. Even the semis flanking the London road were, by modern standards anyway, solidly built.

Piper knew, though, on what an insecure and permeable base this handsome assemblage of shops and pubs and houses had been founded. It was not immediately evident to a visitor – because the river ran beneath the Thoroughfare through a subterranean channel, and because the bridges carrying walkers from one river bank to another traversed only the side-alleys – that this was a town suspended above water and air, above a system of tubular vessels as complex as those which conduct blood to the extremity of a limb. A town should rest on solid matter, if it is to be safe from alarums, but this one stood on a bed of liquid, dark river-water, and of gas, the dank air of underground.

Such tunnels are unattractive to human beings. The engineers who descended there periodically to dredge out the silt and to clear the points of ingress from the sewers, and the egress to the river downstream, went doggedly, and only because such work is well remunerated. For Piper’s antagonists, though, the vaults and undercrofts beneath the town constituted an entirely congenial habitat – moist, dark, rich in nutritional foodstuffs both animate and decayed. They liked the privacy, and the easy access, by drainpipe mostly, to the houses raised above them. Piper’s services would never cease to be required.

Sylvia always allowed plenty of time for breakfast because her little boy would get agitated, and then he couldn’t get his porridge down. She read aloud to him to keep everything calm, and he would gaze at her.

He was very intelligent. She knew that, even if nobody else did. But when he fixed his eyes on her as she read there was something a bit spooky about it. He sucked the words from her lips into his mind. She read the sort of stories children his age like, about furry animals, and sometimes he would move his hand very gently about three inches above the tabletop as though he was stroking a guinea pig.

Sometimes she thought she loved him so much she would explode. When there was a man, when you felt that strongly about a grown man, then you knew what to do about it, though he wouldn’t always be interested. But loving children didn’t have an outcome like that. All you could do was stare and stare at them and sometimes it made her want to cry. She would stop and mime eating and he would look bewildered but then slowly he would lift his spoon and she would carry on.

The porridge was delicious. She put honey in it, and apple stewed with cloves. It was their favourite food. When the boy’s father was still living with them they didn’t have it so often. So his leaving wasn’t all bad, she supposed.

One morning she looked up from the page and Billy’s eyes weren’t on her. That was unusual. He was looking at something near her elbow. She looked too, and there was a rat. Its teeth were yellow. She was terrified. She didn’t know how it could have got up on to the table and at once it seemed to her she could feel things climbing up her legs, scrambling over her shoulders, crossing her lap.

She stood up and the rat looked over its shoulder and was gone. She saw it whisk into the space under the kitchen sink. The boy began to cry, and so did she. He said ‘Ratty’, and she made herself smile at him, but she took away his porridge unfinished and got him into his coat and hurried him along to the school as fast as she could go without running.

All that morning Piper worked flat-out. He had to lug his stuff from one end of the Thoroughfare to another. He had a word with the woman in the estate agent who kept an eye on the parking when Mr Plod wasn’t in town and she said, ‘All right, just for once, but don’t block the view of my window display.’

He stopped up pipes. He re-fixed skirting boards. He put wire mesh over fireplaces and piled bricks on top of trapdoors. He gave instructions about the protection of family pets. In each house he left half a dozen saucers full of pretty powder-blue pellets. He said, ‘It’s unlikely you’ll find them dead. They take themselves off. And it’s more than unlikely you’ll find them alive now I’ve been through. That doesn’t happen.’ He was wearing his red and green trousers. The paint made them rather stiff, but waterproof, and he wore them all the time for work now. When the mothers noticed them they smiled at him.

The next day there were no rats to be seen, and Piper was able to get on with some maintenance around the bus. He reckoned he could. He’d done so well the day before. Not that everyone had paid up right away, but he’d go easy on the ones who were waiting for their benefits. Some of the men said he got paid a different way. He ignored the talk. Half of the women in town were collecting their pensions, for Christ’s sake. He kept it professional, always, but he did think a bit about Sylvia now that that fellow was gone. Her house smelled of something warm and sharp that reminded him of home.

Anyway he’d filled up on petrol and paid Mike at the garage what he owed him and closed his tab at the Bull. Rats were his enemies, but where, he thought, would he be without them? Up shit creek without a paddle.

On the third day the woman who came in from the county town to teach the big ones computer skills arrived early, as she always did because it took her a while to set up. She went into the larger of the two classrooms, and put on the light and the floor reared up and came towards her and flowed across her feet and on into the corridor. She screamed until she had no more breath and then she fainted and when she came to she was on the ground and there were things tangled in her hair, things scrabbling and tugging at it, and a sour, repulsive smell.

The parents waiting outside could hear her. Some of them made calls on their mobiles. They couldn’t guess what was going on. Then they saw the double doors open, as they always did around this time of the morning. The terracotta plaques said G for girls on the left, B for boys on the right, though of course the children all went in together nowadays. Miss Ellie had a theatrical way of flinging the doors wide to announce the start of the morning. This time, though, they seemed to bulge, and then yield. It was like a birth, and what was born was legion, horrible, and very fast.

Parents picked up their littlest ones and ran with them, shouting to the bigger boys and girls to follow. They slammed their doors shut behind them, those who lived in town, and ran upstairs. The farming families got in their cars and sat – adults quivering, children sobbing – like sailors on an eel-infested sea. The tarmac was seething. There was a high-pitched chattering, and always that smell.

The ones with phones stopped dialling 999. They weren’t getting through anyway. They all called Piper.

He was clearing the brambles round the back of the hangar. He fancied setting up a sort of workshop there. He’d been thinking about that hazelnut mouse and it had got some ideas flowing. The holidaymakers who rented cottages nearer the coast in August, they were always looking for little somethings to take home. He could rent one of the tar-paper shacks the fishermen didn’t use any more – might get one for free actually. The Mouse House, he’d call it. He could get a whole load of those sugar mice his mother used to put in his stocking. Cards. He’d make biscuits. Gingerbread mice. Mice made out of seashells. He’d always fancied himself as a woodcarver. He could make whole families of them. He imagined a mother mouse in an apron and father with a beret. Soft toys too. Sylvia – she made her own clothes. Must have lots of scraps. It’s a pretty easy shape to cut out. A kind of partnership.

Hold on there. Keep it professional.

In the bus, while he hummed to himself over the racket of the strimmer, his phone rang and rang and rang.

The streets were deserted. All the shops had closed, those that had opened at all. At least twice a year, when there’d been heavy rain upriver, water seeped up through the cobbles of the Thoroughfare, turning back gardens into bogs, and making the lino on kitchen floors squelch underfoot. Most of the families had sandbags about, just in case. Now people had jammed them against the inside of their front doors – not the right way to do it, but no one wanted to let anything in. No one opened a window. If the rats could climb up the slick slippery interiors of the drainage pipes it would be no trouble for them to hoist themselves up a perpendicular brick wall. People heard scurrying on the roof tiles, and rammed chests of drawers across chimney breasts. A child came screaming out of a bathroom and her mother slammed the toilet seat down, just in time, on a wet dark thing.

Piper drove into town at last. He took his gaudy van, all decked out in the colours of fire and fir-trees, right into the Thoroughfare again, weaving sedately between the bollards designed to exclude cars. He switched off the engine, and sat watching. He knew how many human eyes must be on him. His phone kept buzzing as the messages stacked up. He took no notice. He watched the rats. He’d heard about this sort of infestation but never thought he’d see it.

In normal circumstances rats are selfish, non-cooperative creatures. They are hangers-on of the human race, but by humans they are detested and shunned and chased with pitchforks. The emotional atmosphere in which they have evolved has not favoured the development of altruism. They look for food and when they find it they eat it fast and furtively, always on the lookout for competitors of their own kind. They have no partners. They don’t care for the pack. They don’t even care for their families. In certain circumstances, though, they band together, and when they do so their unanimity is absolute.

Piper ate a cheese sandwich he’d made for himself before setting out. He didn’t think he was going to get much of a break once his day’s work had begun. By the time he’d finished, and licked the chutney off his fingers, his van had grown a thick carapace of furred bodies.

He heard the scuffling and scuttling all around him. He heard the tiny screech of clawed feet skidding down the van’s sides. Pale bellies pressed themselves against the windscreen. Bent-pin claws fixed themselves to the wipers. When he saw them beginning to gnaw at the edges of the bonnet – they wanted to have a go at the rubber seal – he started up the engine. They froze. He reversed, and they began to drop off. He jerked into first gear and gunned the engine. As he drove away rats flew out behind him.

‘Where’s he going, Mummy?’ chirped Sylvia’s little boy, huddled next to her in the loft and peeping through an air-vent. ‘Isn’t he going to save us? If Piper can’t save us, what will we do?’

The river that crept beneath the town surfaced beyond it. For the last part of its course it meandered, as rivers should, open to the sky. Ponderous ginger-haired cattle grazed the water-meadows to each side of it. At this season the bulrushes were last year’s – black and rebarbative – but the wild garlic was up, stinking fresh, and there were tiny blue and white anemones starring the grass under the willow trees.

Piper took the old road that ran along the river valley, the one with grass growing along the spine of the tarmac like the coarse black hairline on a donkey’s back. He hummed as he drove. His eyes were narrowed to slits. He was planning his route. He had to have a clear run to the sea. The tide was propitious. He talked to himself silently, in the way he often did, soundlessly but with his lips moving, and he looked extremely pleased with what he had to say.

At the airstrip he moved fast and methodically. He’d made the bus’s top deck cosy, with a proper bed spanning the entire width at the back, and benches built in. He kept it neat. The lower deck was where he stacked his gear. He trundled out the great black coffin-sized boxes, the coils of rubber-coated cable, the silvery metal containers that rattled as he loaded them up.

He was a long time inside the transit, clipping this to that and stapling that to the other thing. He checked his tyres and topped up the radiator and the reservoir of windscreen-washing fluid. He climbed up onto the roof of the van and secured the superstructure he needed, the gangling metal assemblage of bars and saucers and needle-thin antennae. He changed into his black biking clobber (it still fitted, even though it was seven years since he’d got rid of the Harley). The boots rang against the metal floor of the bus. He put his particoloured trousers back on over the leathers. He gelled his hair and shaved his face, carrying the enamel basin of boiled water out into the sunshine and using his old ivory-handled brush and the wooden dish of cedarwood soap.

On going into battle, he’d been told, the Spartan warriors made themselves as sleek as oiled blades. It was a practice he approved of.

He made sure that the transit’s every door and window was closed up tight, and he set off back into town.

Sylvia and her boy were in the bathroom. She had a vague idea that rats couldn’t swim so they might be safest there, although the old thing about sinking ships bothered her. Anyway bathtime was always soothing, and Billy was content. His fingertips were dead-white and wrinkled as walnut kernels, and normally she would have got him out hours ago, but today wasn’t normal and it was a relief when he stopped fretting and started on a long story about his shoal of rubber fishes, muttering sometimes to her but mostly to himself. She sat on the wicker chair and let her mind go blank.

There were dark shapes swinging and bumping against the windows, but thank goodness it was impossible to distinguish, through the frosted glass, whether they were moving leaves (as though there were leaves that size this early) or something else. After all, she’d never, she thought, heard of anyone actually being killed by rats.

The tiny girl, who never seemed to grow, was with her dad, who saw to her on a Thursday when his wife had to go for her treatment. The girl wasn’t afraid, though he was. She clambered onto the back of the sofa that was pushed up against the front window so that she could watch the way the rat horde surged over the cobbles, or mounted the raised flower beds like cresting waves, ebbing back down again to leave nothing but scrabbled grey earth where the tulips and forget-me-nots had been.

She was very attentive and curious. Are they hungry? she asked. Do they have homes? Will they get tired soon? Are mice baby rats or are they different? Why have they come? I don’t know said her father. I expect so. I’m not sure. No – mice are different. I wish they never bloody well had.

Piper parked at the point where the Thoroughfare debouched into the market square. He sat still for a bit, calculating angles.

He’d had a disco when he was still at school. He’d built the rig himself, and made a packet going around the big houses where the kids who went to day-schools in London had their eighteenths. The bigger the house, the less time the owners spent in it. It didn’t make him indignant, the way it did some of the men who drank in the pub. People interested him, the illogical ways they did things. He didn’t get angry with them, any more than he got angry with rats.

The disco gave him power. If he spotted a lad with that yearning look that made a face lose definition and go kind of mushy, he’d lend a hand by putting on the Walker Brothers and next time the boy shuffled past him he’d have his cheek sweatily clamped to his girl’s and his hand in her hair.

Piper could swivel the speakers from inside the van. He did a neat five-point turn, minutely adjusting the direction of his front wheels so he was ready for the off. He was hesitating between the Ode to Joy and The Blue Danube. Rats, he’d found, responded to pretty much the same repertoire as the middle-brow, middle-aged human. Then he thought, no, let’s sock it to them, and he put on the march from The Pirates of Penzance.

Baah Baah Bababa Baah. The masses of grey bodies that had twitched and undulated ceaselessly all morning across the paving of the market square stilled. Innumerable torpedo-pointed heads turned in the direction of the van.

Bah bababa baba. Bah bababa baba. The roofs shed their loads. Tiny clawed feet skittered and scrabbled their way down sheer concrete, down usefully cratered terracotta brick, down lumpen pebble-dash with its helpful protuberances. As the upper levels of the town cleared, the ground became ever more densely packed with shuffling bodies.

Baah Baah. Piper turned his key in the ignition. Bababa Baah. As the speakers picked up the power generated by the engine the volume surged mightily. Bah bababa baba. The pilastered front of the neo-Grecian town hall, the blackened timbers of the Corn Exchange, the symmetrical sash windows of the row of Georgian merchant’s houses, all gave back the sound, superbly resonant.

Tiny Elsa got down from the sofa-back, crying, and her father picked her up and snuggled her under his armpit so that her ears were comfortingly blocked by T-shirted flesh. Sylvia and her boy thumped down the stairs on their bottoms, which was Billy’s favourite way of descending, and felt to her, in this time of weird menaces, like a sensible precaution against God-knows-what.

The Venetian blinds rattled against the glass at the front of the house. At the back there was a sound of incessant soft thumping on the flat roof of the kitchen, as though it was hailing slippers.

Piper took it slow. His followers’ legs averaged less than a centimetre in length. They could scurry pretty quick considering, but still. To maintain the momentum he had to keep them in his force field. In first gear the transit groaned and bunny-hopped. In second, at that pace, it repeatedly stalled. Each time it did, the music stuttered and the volume level dropped, but the rats, it turned out, weren’t bothered. The D’Oyly Carte company’s performance, as transmitted by Piper’s makeshift sound-system, might jerk and hiccup, but the river of rat-flesh flowed, smooth and collected as a spill of mercury, down the Thoroughfare and across the mini-roundabout. (Piper’s van went around it but his mud-grey velvet train swirled straight across, devouring somehow, without pausing or deviating, all the pansies forming the floral clock.) Slowly, slowly, out along Quay Street with more rats dropping silently from window ledges or pouring like slurry down the embankment beneath the railway line to join the flood.

The windows were full of faces. Piper didn’t look up at them. He’d be the hero of the hour, but he didn’t kid himself that he would be liked for it. He looked odd, with his beaky nose and his flaming hair. His arms were unusually long and he’d heard some of the kids call him monkey-man. But it’s not as though all the men who walked into the pub to cries of ‘what are you having’ and ‘over here’ were that easy on the eye either. It wasn’t any deficiency in the looks department that made Piper an object of suspicion – other way round, if anything. The men had a nasty feeling he was attractive to women, though they themselves couldn’t see it. It was more to do with his not living in a house, not working alongside anyone else, not being from thereabouts.

On the way out of town there was a house that looked like a castle. The brewer who built it, some hundred years earlier, had had a fanciful side. He liked his wife to wear velvet and do up her hair in a snood dotted with artificial pearls. His daughters were called Deirdre and Genevieve. He liked the words ‘bosky’, ‘crenellation’, and ‘casement’. The river ran along the bottom of his garden. He had an engraving of the drowning Ophelia above the big black sideboard where three different types of sherry sat, in decanters heavy enough to brain a burglar with, on an elaborately scrolled silver tray.

By the time Deirdre died there, after seventy-five years of scatter-brained spinsterhood (Genevieve had married and gone to live in Canada), the garden had become very pretty. Willows grew aslant. Tiny pink and white roses rambled through the old apple trees. No one cut the asparagus any more – Deirdre didn’t like getting her fingers buttery – but in June its pale green plumes waved, feeble and lovely, over the flagged paths.

Once she was gone, though, the new proprietor got the place sorted out.

Humphrey Leach was a realist. His words were ‘tidy’, ‘low-maintenance’ and ‘cost-effective’. Now the castle rose from an expanse of grey gravel and there were spiky succulents in square concrete containers by the bolted door. The willows had been pollarded and the river embanked, and there was a long fibreglass thing, halfway between a surfboard and canoe, on which Humphrey Leach liked to skim up and down the river, wearing tight clothes purpose-made for practitioners of his preferred mode of high-speed punting. His girlfriend was extremely thin.

Piper’s van crawled by. His entourage now trailed behind him for nearly quarter of a mile, a squeaking mass of entranced rodents. They jostled and snapped at each other. Baaah Baaah baba bah bah. Outliers trampled the crocuses on the verges alongside the new-built semis. Breakaway parties mounted walls garlanded with aubretia and ran along their crests, barging each other aside.

Baah baba ba baba. Piper was singing along. In his wing mirror he could see Jenny Leach from year five scrambling over the castle’s electronic gates. She was a nice kid. He hadn’t realised she was Humphrey’s daughter. Hadn’t put the names together in his head. That scraggy woman was surely never her mother. He’d seen to a wasps’ nest for them once. He was there for a good three quarters of an hour and all that while Humphrey and the woman were doing press-ups on the lawn. They had earphones in. No conversation. Just grunting. Can’t be much fun for the girl. He’d take her along with the other big ones when it came to blackberrying time.

The stretch of coastline to the east of the town was curiously formed. The sea was only five miles away, as the crow flies, but the river travelled closer to twelve to reach it. It ambled from side to side of the broad water-meadows, filling the whole shallow valley with its silt. Cows stood knee-deep on its verges and swans drifted above its mud. It had its own landscape of kingcups and dragonflies, willows and bog-grass. It wasn’t in a hurry to be swallowed up in the brown undifferentiating sea.

When the meadows gave way to salty marshland where samphire grew and little birds with long legs and beaks strutted, the river did a sudden swerve. A shingle bank had arisen over the centuries to protect it, a miles-long finger of shifting stony ground wide enough for a road of sorts, and fishermen’s tarred shacks, and the forbidding rubble of past wars.

You could drive out along that bank. Lots of people did. You could tell that by the numbers of bottles scattered about the Martello tower and the stench of urine in the Second World War pillboxes. On one side lay the sea, heaving. On the other side, considerably lower at this phase of the tide, ran the river. Along that road going nowhere, Piper went, and the rats followed him. Me too, I’m coming, they might have been chattering. Keep up keep up keep up keep up. They were exhausted, and hungry.

Baah baah baba ba bah. Piper kept an eye on the flow. He’d known this river since he was a boy chucking flat stones at it. He could see, by the way it dimpled, in which direction the current was running. He was satisfied. When he got to the steep dip where last year’s spring tides had burst through the shingle, he left the track and took the van very slowly down the landward side on to the marshy expanse alongside the river. He drove in a big circle so that the rats following him swirled together. The music never let up. He wouldn’t be wanting to listen to that tune again any time soon. He was watching the break in the sea wall, that notch. He could see spray beyond it. There was an alteration in the light, an increase in the volume of sound coming from the sea. He turned the van carefully. He knew exactly the course he’d have to take, and he knew he’d have to go like the clappers.

When the tide broke roaring through, he was ready. The Pirates’ chorus snapped off, and he was racing along the overgrown causeway, kicking up spray, feeling his wheels skidding under the pressure of water weighted and solidified by the bodies of a million drowning rodents. On the further side of the breach, when he reckoned he was high enough, he switched off the engine and got out his second cheese sandwich. There was no way he’d get the transit back over the marshes until the tide had receded. He watched the mass of struggling rats being carried upriver a way, and there being whirled around by the tricky currents where the incoming tide met the outgoing flood of the river, and then being tossed and churned again as they were tumbled back past him and on out to sea. Will the seagulls eat them, he wondered? Or do they think rats are dirty too?

The following morning, once he’d shaved, and once he’d hosed down the transit, he drove into town and went to the estate agents’ office, where he knew he’d find Humphrey Leach, and he presented his bill.

It was a surprising fact about the town that it was a communist enclave. There’d been a long shop there once, where they made engines and farm machinery. And there was a charismatic journeyman who’d drifted there from the Welsh valleys a hundred years ago – he was Silvia’s great-grandfather – and made himself quite a reputation by singing nightly in the pub before he signed up at the shop, and began making trouble there, as the proprietor put it, or rather, as the other workmen saw it, teaching them to stand up for their rights. The pity of it was that, whether or not a decent wage was a human right, the proprietor couldn’t pay it and keep the business in profit, so the agitation ended with the closing of the works, and the men drifting off to Lowestoft and Folkestone, looking to make their livings on the docks there. But the Welshman stayed, and became the town’s barber, and made a go of it because men loved the way he sang as he soaped their cheeks, and it was under his influence that the town council veered leftward. They stopped calling themselves the Soviet of East Suffolk after the invasion of Hungary, but they still sang the ‘Internationale’ and the ‘Marseillaise’ and they kept on conducting their meetings on the Leninist model.

By the time Piper came to town their revolutionary rhetoric had become a quaint tradition. They addressed each other as ‘comrade’, rather as the old codger who kept the key of the Dissenters’ Chapel made a point of calling visitors ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’. Funny how conservatism can be a preserver of the revolution. The Chapel was their meeting place. Its layout was supposed to undermine the oppressive authority of Almighty God. No altar. But where the altar might have been there was a lofty pulpit, or crow’s nest (the roof timbers all came from wrecked ships) from which a preacher could survey and dominate the gathering.

Sylvia didn’t usually go along, but she’d heard her customers chattering all morning about Piper’s demands. Outrageous, they said. Who does he think he is? Well, who is he, actually? It’s a bit weird, isn’t it, the way he hangs around the school. Has he ever had a girlfriend here, do you know? Sylvia buttoned her lip, but after tea she dropped Billy round at Little Elsa’s place. Elsa’s mum was lying down but the two children didn’t need entertaining when they had their Sylvanian Families to play with.

Down at the chapel they were at it full tilt.

Man 1 (pedantic, soft-spoken, keeps making notes in a little black book) – What we need to ascertain is precisely who took it upon themselves to employ Mr Piper.

Woman 1 (she was the one who always brought the yappy little dog into the café at elevenses time, however often the waitress asked her not to) – You’re not going to be able to pin that on anyone in particular. There wasn’t a phone in town that wasn’t ringing his number.

Woman 2 (Miss Ellie from the school) – I think we have to accept collective responsibility, don’t we?

Woman 3 – I mean really we were all begging him, weren’t we? We’d have paid anything. I had such nightmares last night you wouldn’t believe. Slugs it was, slugs all over.

Man 2 (he had a JCB digger, and he’d been the first man in town to wear an earring) – Remember the frogs, Gina? You dreamt a lot about them, too, didn’t you?

Woman 3 blushes. People look at her curiously. They hadn’t known those two had had a thing. Or was Man 2 just having them on? He was such a cocksure bastard. He’d have liked to have been the one who saw off the rats. He was jealous. You could tell.

The door opened and Humphrey Leach came in. He climbed straight up into the pulpit. No one had ever sat there before. He said ‘Let’s get started’ as though nothing said before he graced them with his presence could possibly be of any account. His thin woman sat down on one of the benches, with the girl beside her. Humphrey had called his daughter Jennifer – a name he considered unexceptionable and fit-for-purpose. She thought of herself as Jasmine. Her friends called her Jazz.

Sylvia was on the bench opposite. She gave Jazz a smile. She’d promised the girl Saturday work shampooing, once exams were over.

Humphrey Leach read out the invoice from top to bottom. He managed to convey incredulity at every word, from the sender’s address ‘The Bus, Elmswood Airfield’ to the directions for payment ‘Cash only’. The bill was meticulously detailed. So much for use of equipment. So much for petrol consumed. So much for subsistence (the two cheese sandwiches). So much (and yes – it was so, so, so very much) for services of expert pest-controller, as charged by the hour @ a rate that made most of those present assume they must have misheard.

Sylvia (silently to herself) – He’ll never get that. What’s he playing at?

Man 1 – We have been debating, Mr Leach, should this be viewed as a charge on the town as a collective entity?

Humphrey Leach – You bet your life it should. You’re not suggesting I should pay it, are you?

Nobody had been suggesting that, not for one moment. But now they thought, Well you could, couldn’t you? And none of the rest of us can.

They liked Piper on the whole. They thought he was good with the kiddies, and no, no one thought there was anything weird about the way a single man in his thirties liked having them around. Or if anyone did wonder about it they weren’t saying so yet.

Man 3 – There’s a lot of damage to be made good. And I’d say we ought to get the sewers sluiced through with DDT.

More voices –

Every single car-tyre. Every car parked in town. They ate the lot.

Those trees. We planted them for the Jubilee. My mum … she was ninety then … she dug the first hole.

She was a fine lady, your mum. Used to make the best lemon curd.

I’ve always liked the Mikado.

It wasn’t the Mikado, Dad, it was that other one.

Did you see how they went at the veg outside Mr Bailey’s? Not a leaf left. Not a stalk.

There’s going to be quite a few have to shut up shop.

And no one to pay compensation.

Did he say conversation.

No, darling. Compensation.

Woman 3 (she has recovered her composure) – I thought he was doing it as a favour. I mean being neighbourly. You know. Because he was the one who knew what to do. Like you’d do, you know, if there was a fire or something. You wouldn’t ask for money after, would you.

Man 2 (he drinks with Piper sometimes – not that Piper comes to the pub much) – That’s a hell of a lot of equipment he’s got. I mean it’s not just turning on a hose, is it?

Man 3 (he’s a reliable brickie. There’s contractors from Woodbridge to Beccles who call on him when they’ve got a lot of work on) – And it’s not like he is a neighbour, really, is it? I mean he’s not from here.

Medley of voices –

Not far off. His dad had the garage in Wangford.

No, that was Porter, wasn’t it?

Bob Porter. That man could whistle any tune in the hymnbook.

Never went to church though, did he?

Wouldn’t have wanted God looking into his conscience, I reckon. He was never short of a pheasant or two for his dinner, was he?

Could fix a trap as neat as he could fix a carburettor.

Anyway …

But Piper, he wasn’t anything to do with old Bob Porter.

Where’s he from then?

Been around for years, hasn’t he? I remember him with all the other lads kicking a ball about down the water-meadows.

He wasn’t at the school though, was he?

Would have been about my age. No, he wasn’t there.

He doesn’t come to the pub much.

It’d give you the shivers a bit, wouldn’t it, thinking of all that poison he handles.

Was he evacuated or something? Like in the war.

I don’t know any Pipers. It’s not a Suffolk-sounding name.

Not sure it’s his surname even. It could be, like, a nickname sort of thing.

I mean. He can’t have just dropped from the sky,

And yet, for all anybody knew, it seemed as though he had.

There were eight of the littleys from year two sitting on the top deck of Piper’s bus. They liked to pretend the bus was going somewhere. As they sat down, their jelly-shoes swinging and the prickly stuff of the seats chafing their dimpled thighs, Piper said, ‘So where are we off to today?’

Often they said ‘Seaside!’ Sometimes they said ‘Timbuctoo’. Sometimes they said ‘Fairyland!’ This time they said, ‘Into the mountain.’ ‘Not yet,’ said Piper, ‘We’ll only go there if the worst comes to the worst. Would Over-the-Rainbow do you?’ and he got out his rainbow banner and hung it from the ceiling and they all squealed and giggled and when he’d given out the pink wafer biscuits they settled down to cutting mouse shapes out of fuzzy felt.

Piper sat on his bed and started to clean his saxophone.

‘Piper,’ said tiny Elsa. ‘Will you be playing with my daddy at the Big Gig?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘That depends.’

Miss Ellie asked Jennifer Leach to come along with her to pick up the littleys. She wanted to have a word with the girl but she didn’t want to make it sound too important so she just said, ‘I’m going Wenhaston way. Anyone want a lift home?’ She knew Jazz was the only one in the class who lived in that direction.

In the minibus she was trying out openings in her head … ‘So, Jennifer, how do you feel about boarding school? … Jennifer, if you’d like me to have a word with your father … Jennifer, it’s not really for me to say, but I wondered … Jennifer, I know you’re fully capable of passing the entrance exam, but …’

She couldn’t seem to get started on it. She was feeling too angry with the girl’s father to be tactful. She decided she’d better leave it for now. They got to the castle gate and she turned to her, and said, ‘Here you are then,’ but Jennifer looked upset, and said, ‘Can’t I come to the airfield with you?’ and Miss Ellie said, ‘Sure. Of course. If you’re not expected at home yet. Why not.’ And then they did have a talk, but it wasn’t about Jennifer’s secondary school choices. It was about Piper.

When they got to the bus Piper had got the babies lined up with their backs turned. They each had a long tail made of string, and cardboard ears fixed to their heads with stretchy hairbands. They looked weird. When the minibus came to a halt they all turned round – they had whiskers painted onto their cheeks – and they began to sing.

‘run after the farmer’s wife …’

Shrill little voices. Miss Ellie was still clambering down from the driver’s seat – she had a touch of sciatica – when Jazz blurted out, ‘My dad says the town can’t pay you.’

‘… carving knife …’

‘He says you’ve got no sense of civic responsibility. He says you’re creepy.’

‘… see such a thing in your life …’

Miss Ellie said, ‘Hush, Jennifer, we agreed didn’t we …’ but Jazz, who’d been so grown up and self-possessed in the minibus, was sobbing and sobbing and Piper knelt down and held his arms out and she ran and hugged him, and all the little mice came and clung on around her so that it looked as though Piper’s head was sticking out of the top of a child-mountain, and he patted Jazz’s back, and said, ‘That’s what your dad, says, is it? And I guess no one put a hand up to contradict?’

He looked very hard at Miss Ellie as he said it and she looked away and began plaiting the woollen strings of her cardigan.

Piper was quiet for a while. Then he pulled his mouth into a blowing shape, as though he was whistling without sound, and he said to the musical mice, ‘Come on, kiddywinks, let’s see if we can make Jennifer laugh,’ and they all began to run around her on all fours, with their bottoms in the air and their string tails switching, and they wrinkled up their noses and showed their little teeth and went squeak squeak squeak until Jazz let go of Piper. Then he said, to her and to Elsa and to all of them, ‘I think … perhaps … in view of what Jennifer’s father says … in that case … after all … I will play tomorrow,’ and they all shouted out ‘Hooray!’

The town’s main car park was an amorphous space between the Thoroughfare and the river. There were lines on the tarmac to show you how to park in neat rows, but no one paid attention to them. It was a place of dustbins and abandoned bicycles, and when the wind blew the plastic bottles rolled back and forth, as though searching for an exit. When the bright red double-decker bus trundled in it was as though a light had been switched on on a dreary evening, or as though some enormous gaudy beast had slunk into town.

‘I didn’t know that thing could still move,’ said Elsa’s dad, as he dropped her off at her mum’s house. Elsa’s mum was terribly thin now, with raw red patches on her face and hands, but she still kept saying she could cope. He didn’t know how he was ever going to persuade her to let him have the girly more often. She looked vague. She said, ‘Piper’s a pretty good mechanic. Everyone says.’

They stood together and stared as the bus reversed neatly into a space by the entrance. They both thought about the row they’d had the summer before last when their house and garden were full of ants, and when he thought she was seeing too much of the exterminator. They’d said awful words. And afterwards, although it had been a ridiculous fuss about nothing, they couldn’t settle back down together again, not with those words clawing at their minds. Now she knew he’d like to help more, he was a good man, but she couldn’t risk letting him see her when she was all undone by pain and terror, not now she couldn’t trust his love.

Piper was wearing his funny trousers. They’d become his trademark. He crossed the road and walked into the gardens by the river, with his saxophone slung over his shoulder. His hair was glossy and slicked up in a quiff, and the toes of his pony-hide boots were pointed and long. He didn’t stare about at the stripy tents where beaded headbands and dream-catchers were sold, at the food-stalls, or at the crowds of townspeople. He bought a pint and settled down at a little metal table outside the beer tent. When people he knew walked past – and he knew most people – he greeted them by lifting his eyebrows and giving a slight nod. No one sat down beside him, although there was an extra plastic chair.

When the Blondie cover band started playing, all the women crammed into the big tent and put their arms up and rocked from side to side like wobbly-men. There were a lot of children about, and the fathers sat with them on their laps, or bought them hot dogs. The small ones darted in and out of the light like midges, tiny Elsa tagging along. Grandparents brought out their folding chairs and thermoses and sat with their backs to the bands.

Jazz came in with some other big girls, all of them dressed alike in sequined vests and tight white jeans. She was wearing lipstick. She looked at Piper shyly, and walked on by.

Sylvia would have sat with Piper. She’d been wanting to see him, but Billy had a really high temperature. She kept dialling the locum but the woman just said Paracetamol, keep him warm, plenty of fluids, as though Sylvia didn’t already know all that. It was insulting. She wasn’t going to get any help. All she could do was be with him.

She lay on the big bed – Billy’d begged to sleep with her – and stared at the ceiling listening to the odd inhuman sound of his snoring and smelling the illness on his breath. It wasn’t that the music was particularly good, but the sound of a party from which one has been excluded is desolating. Sylvia began to cry quietly, because she was frightened for Billy, and because she thought, That’s it. Nothing new is ever going to happen to me again. She went to sleep, and snored too. She missed the whole drama. When she woke the next morning with her clothes still on, she thought – for the first and only time – How lucky I am that my precious baby’s deaf.

Afterwards no one could quite remember how it happened that Piper, who wasn’t listed on the programme, got to be playing on the main stage. He was just suddenly there, flapping his left hand imperiously at the sound-man. That was Johnny from the garage: when he didn’t get enough GCSEs for college, Piper had taught him all about music tech in exchange for a summer’s worth of fuel and maintenance. The women tugged their tops down and their trousers up and laughed at each other for no reason but that dancing made them feel like giddy girls again, and when Piper launched into the riff, some of the men came out of the beer tent, and put their bottles down, and paired off and began to jive.

The band whose set had been interrupted looked nonplussed for a bar or two and then the drummer picked up the beat and the lead guitarist began to do the duck-walk. (How many hours, how many hundreds and hundreds of hours, it seemed like, had he spent practising it in front of his mother’s floor-length mirror.)

The girl in the song had inordinate appetites and seven-league boots. Her allure was irresistible. She was a juvenile, sweet silly sixteen, but she had the adults gyrating around her like hungry rodents. Everybody had heard about Chuck Berry’s transgressions. But everybody, for now at least, was swaying to his fable of the greedy teenaged nymphet.

Piper was rocking forth and back like the figurehead of a ship in a deeply furrowed sea. His hair was a plumed copper helmet. His boot-heels rapped on the flimsy staging. His sax glittered and so did his sharp pale eyes. By the end of ‘Maybellene’ the beer tent was empty. He swung the sexes in together with a medley of the songs they’d courted to. He’d laid the sax down gently and taken the mike. The singer stripped his vest off, revealing a chest all over mapped in blue, and began to do back-flips.

Big men were finding frail little wives, and tremendously breasted women were laying hands on whippety-thin husbands, and couples who hadn’t really given each other a thought in years were mouthing declarations of passion along with Piper’s wheedling baritone. They wanted, they crooned, to hold each other’s hands. They yearned for each other eight days a week. The women put their forearms on the men’s shoulders and let hands coarsened by washing-up and potato-scrubbing dangle while they pressed their soft well-used bellies to their husbands’ belt-buckles.

The two young women from Franklin’s were up on the stage harmonising with Piper. They both sang in the choir, Sundays, but, Saturday nights, they sang folk-songs a cappella, their high voices uncanny and penetrating.

Down on the trampled turf of the dance-floor the men looked sheepish, and then lascivious, and buried their faces in their women’s necks and the women let their eyelids droop, so that they didn’t see how the children had come creeping out of shrubberies where bushes formed caves, and from dens behind log-piles and from secret places down by the river where the bank did a jink and left exposed a pebbled beach big enough for two boys to lie smoking or, on this night, slyly, shyly running their fingers through each other’s hair because there was something narcotic and bewitching about the way Piper sang.

The children crept together. They didn’t approach the stage, where their parents were leaning propped against each other, sustained by sentimentality and lust and a rapturous feeling that this Piper, for all that preposterous demand he’d made, was … well, what was he … a man who could make a party go, a pretty decent singer when all’s said and done, a bit special.

The Polish builders (or were they Romanian? Nobody knew) who lived in the mildewed caravan on the airfield, next to Piper, were up on stage too now, one with a harmonica, the other with a keyboard so tiny he could tuck it under his arm. Black-nails stepped forward to take the mike. Piper let her. He picked up the sax again and made it hum softly as she belted out ‘White Rabbit’.

The children formed a phalanx, well back in the gloaming, quite a distance from where their parents smooched and swayed. Black-nails’s voice was tremendous. As she let it blare out (Smiler weaving treble harmonies around it) Piper sidled offstage. His saxophone still sang softly, but no one could see where he’d got to. No one was really looking. There was a shuffling and a rustling and a quiet and swift evacuation.

The adult couples let their heads drop back and their eyes close as they chanted at the canvas roof. They were young again and high and totally irresponsible. They’d forgotten that once you’re a parent you must never ever forget the fact, not even for a second, not even for the winking of an eye or a shake of a mouse’s tail.

The bus went by along the riverside road towards the sea. All its interior lights were on. It was a mirage. It had to be. It wasn’t Piper’s beat-up old wreck, with all the seats out. It was a proper double-decker bus, with a powerful if air-polluting diesel engine, and a pair of animated children waving from each window – upstairs and down.

Humphrey Leach was standing by the gate into the gardens. He had come looking for Jennifer to remind her that he’d be leaving at 6 a.m. prompt for an executive-level brainstorming away-day and if she really wanted a lift to Ipswich, as she’d said, then she’d be better be home in bed spit-spot. He saw his daughter standing up in the brilliantly illuminated bus next to the copper-haired driver. She wore a gold-braided cap and leather cross-belts, a satchel on one hip, a ticket puncher on the other. She caught his eye and waved as the bus swept by. It never came back.

‘People-trafficking,’ said someone later that night. But the word didn’t quite seem to fit.

Abduction. Kidnapping. Those words weren’t right either. They jarred with the picture they all had in their heads, that of the children’s faces, lit up with happiness as they waved from the bus.

They’d jumped in their cars and raced after, of course they had. The police had been on to it right away. But the bus seemed to have dematerialised. There was not a trace of it, not a tyre track, not a broken twig. Several of the men went down to the Ness with torches, but the tide was high and there was nothing to be seen but smooth flowing water. ‘That bus is like fifteen feet tall,’ said Elsa’s father. His voice was muffled and cracked. ‘You can drown a rat here, but you can’t lose a London bus.’ They knew he was right, but they stayed with him until dawn. When one or other of them began to sob, awful wracking man-sobs – the others would pass him cigarettes, or sucky sweets. When the sea had drained right out, and the river dwindled back to a liquid snake writhing through its narrow channel, there was nothing to be seen there, not a jelly-shoe or a scrunchie or a flossy-maned pink plastic pony – just the long-legged birds poking around in the weeds and bubbles burping their way to the surface of the smooth grey mud.

Elsa’s mother stopped the treatment. She said she didn’t see the point of doing herself in for the sake of a few more months of life, not when life was so futile and sad. No one could blame her. Her husband got together with Sylvia after a while, and they took Billy away to a bigger place, where there were other children. He never really played with the others much, though. Eventually his mother gave in and let him have a pet rat. He called it Elsa, and every time he murmured to it his stepfather looked around sharply, and then looked away. They seldom had music in the house.

Humphrey Leach moved on too. He was promoted to senior area manager and had to give up the castle and move into the county town. He and his thin girlfriend lived on the eighth floor of a converted warehouse overlooking the old docks. There was a gym in the basement, and that was a plus, but neither of them slept well there, and neither ever told the other that all night long they heard scuffling and chattering as a hidden horde of creatures went about their business within the cavity wall. Humphrey’s career stalled. ‘You’re a safe pair of hands, Leach,’ said the CEO, ‘and we all value that, but we’re looking for more of a people-person.’ It was a woman who got the next promotion. ‘She’s kind, isn’t she?’ said one junior executive to another (they weren’t called secretaries any more). Humphrey, overhearing, was nonplussed. No one on his business diploma course had ever mentioned kindness as being a useful character trait.

After a few years rumours began to reach the town of a bus that turned up at festivals, or on Cornish beaches. There were a load of young people who lived on it. They dressed up and performed puppet shows and made wood-carvings of small animals. They cooked curries and paellas in enormous tureens and sold them to hungry dancers. Whatever was left over at the end of the night they gave away. They were musicians – folkies mainly, but there was an old jazzer with them. The bus was called Ratty – nobody knew why.