Ned Beauman - Glow

Raf’s left shoulder begins to sting, and he sees that he has a few scratches there, as if from the claws of her songbirds. He thinks about posting an ad, like Morris. ‘Did you see me get spun upside down by a half-Burmese girl? Badly smitten, not at fault. Looking for witnesses. Please call Raf.’ Instead, on a hunch, he gets dressed and goes out to fetch Rose. On the way, he notices that a weed of some sort has started to spread across the lawn at the perimeter of her block, a lather of silky white blooms. When he comes back with the yawning animal and lets her into his flat, she does something she’s never done before. She skids inside, looks around, and starts barking like she’s trying to drive a devil out.

Someone has been here. Not Cherish, because Rose made friends with Cherish. Someone else. Not a friend.

10.23 a.m.

A pudgy electrician is up on a stepladder fiddling with a new CCTV camera that now hangs from the ceiling, so Raf has to squeeze past him to get to the chiller cabinet for a pint of milk. This is vexatious enough, because when you spend as much time in a place each week as he spends in this corner shop (or on the top deck of the 343) it becomes another room in your flat, an appendix stapled to the floor plan, and you don’t want to find a stranger in there rearranging your furniture. But then, handing fifty pence to one of the twins at the counter, he’s even more dismayed to see that they seem to be stocking only about half as many types of dog food as they did before. On that shelf instead are packets of something brown and flaky, with no English on the cardboard label, just some Arabic and a picture of a smiling prawn. Out of curiosity he picks one up, sniffs it, and asks what it is, expecting to learn that it’s some sort of Iranian snack product.

‘ Balachaung ,’ says the twin.

‘Sorry?’

‘ Ba-la-chaung .’

The last time Raf heard that word was the day before yesterday, because it was on the menu in the Burmese restaurant and he got Cherish to pronounce it for him. She said it was a prawn relish with peanut and chilli. When he takes a proper look at the label he realises that the writing on it isn’t Arabic, it’s Burmese, just like the note, but in a blocky typeface, and then when he digs through the other packets in the tray he does find a couple with English printed on the packets: BBQ dry snakehead fish and herbal seedless tamarind jam.

‘How long have you been stocking this stuff?’ he says, with a queasy sense that certain tendencies are propagating through his surroundings much too fast, as if someone has been editing the machine code on which the world runs.

‘Since last week. New supplier.’

‘Do you sell much of it?’

The twin shrugs. ‘Not yet.’

3.50 p.m.

Raf lied on the phone to the guy he met in McDonald’s, or half lied, and said he had new information about the white vans. But this time the guy didn’t want to go back to McDonald’s, or anywhere else public. And Raf, feeling a crackle of paranoia now, didn’t really want to be on his own with the guy, so he suggested that he come to Isaac’s flat. Today, the girl knitting at the table by the front door is wearing muddy skate shoes and a gabardine blazer with a lot of zips, and the girl dozing on the futon is wearing transparent stiletto heels and a dress that looks like a banana skin. As always, they are magnificent. When the guy arrives, he looks around and says to Raf, ‘Who are all these people?’ Raf notices that he still has that ketchup stain on his lapel, like a pin badge in support of a charitable foundation for gluttons. If he works for the British government, shouldn’t he own a spare suit?

‘Nothing to worry about,’ says Isaac, who is growing a beard at the moment. ‘Their English isn’t great, and I’m involved.’

‘Involved?’

‘I’m another mate of Theo’s. Who disappeared. Sit down.’

The guy looks around for a few seconds as if he’s expecting a chair to be wheeled out for him, but at least when he finally resigns himself to Isaac’s sagging sofa he flops right into it instead of perching on the edge. A folding plastic clothes airer hung with damp T-shirts blocks off one corner of the living room like some sort of ramshackle crowd-control barrier. ‘So what more do you know?’ he says.

‘I met this girl. .’ begins Raf.

‘I’m delighted for you.’

‘She — they tried to kidnap her, like Theo. I saw the van. They had guns. And I stopped them once, but some time last night I think they took her from my flat. When I woke up, she was gone.’ He describes Rose’s reaction. ‘So I know there was someone in my flat. And if they broke in and took her I might not have heard anything, because of how I have to sleep.’

‘Quite audacious to snatch her from right beside you, if it’s anyone but Nosferatu that we’re dealing with. Do you have any other evidence?’

‘She didn’t drink any water.’

‘What do you mean?’ says Isaac.

Raf didn’t mention this earlier, although Isaac did ask a lot about Cherish, excited that his best friend had finally got laid after seven weeks of dolorous chastity.

‘There is no way a human being could voluntarily leave a flat the morning after drinking as much whisky as we did without drinking a glass of water first. And there was no glass on the counter.’

‘Maybe she washed it up.’

‘There was nothing in the drying rack. All my glasses and mugs were where I left them.’

‘Maybe she drank straight from the tap.’

‘You can’t. The taps are too low.’

‘I’m really sorry, man, but that is the shittiest “clue” I’ve ever heard.’

Raf knows Isaac might be right, but at the same time he feels certain, as certain as he’s ever felt of anything, that right now Cherish is in the back of a white van, or somewhere even worse, with Theo. He thinks of her in a dark room, in front of a camera, motionless and naked and very clean.

‘Still, congratulations on finding a girl who will spend an evening just sitting in your flat getting wasted with you for fun,’ adds Isaac. ‘They are the best kind.’

‘Anything else whatsoever?’ says the guy in the suit. ‘So far this has been, once again, a total bloody waste of time. My fault, I suppose. Fool me once, and so on.’

‘She left this note.’ Raf passes it over.

‘Do you know what this means?’

‘No. But read the top. She must have needed me to keep it safe.’

The guy sighs. ‘So this piece of paper is the only concrete asset you have to show me? This is truly all you have?’

‘Yeah.’

He folds it up. ‘I’ll have to keep it, of course. I’ll get it translated by one of our analysts.’

‘No,’ says Raf. ‘I need it back.’

The guy looks at the note, looks at the front door, looks at Raf — then he jumps to his feet and tries to make a getaway.

‘Hey!’ shouts Isaac. And that’s when his flatmate, without even looking up from her knitting, sticks out her slender right leg, and the guy topples forward and smacks his nose on the brass rim of the peephole in the front door.

‘Oh, wow, Hiromi!’ says Isaac. ‘Wow! Cheers, darling!’ With help from Raf, who now feels guilty for assuming that Isaac didn’t know the names of his flatmates, he hauls the guy back to the sofa. ‘Let’s tie the cunt up.’

‘No, that absolutely, absolutely won’t be necessary,’ says the guy. He hands over the note and then finds a paper napkin in his pocket to wipe a trickle of blood from his upper lip. And he does look defeated, sitting there with a red postmark stamped on the bridge of his nose. So instead Raf and Isaac just stand over him.