Ned Beauman - Glow

4.56 p.m.

Does it still count as a surveillance operation if, instead of planting a bug, you just tune your radio to the FM frequency on which your targets are voluntarily broadcasting? Raf wonders this as he sits in Isaac’s car listening to the Burmese DJs come to the end of their show. Isaac isn’t here, but Fourpetal is in the driver’s seat beside him, and they’re parked by the playground across the road from the council block where the Myth FM studio is hidden. At 17.09 by the clock on the car radio the two men come out of the exit doors and Fourpetal puts the car into gear, ready to follow.

‘I think they’re going on foot,’ says Raf.

‘So?’

‘We can’t just drive along slowly behind them. We’ll look like we’re trying to pick them up for a sex act.’

‘If we get out of the car, and then they get in one, we’ll lose them right away.’

‘If that happens we can just try again tomorrow. They’re on five days a week.’

Even on foot they have to dawdle a long way back so they don’t get noticed. Raf, having never stalked anyone like this before, doesn’t know any tricks; these streets are his home terrain, which ought to give him a sort of supernatural guerrilla advantage, and he feels cheated to realise that apparently it doesn’t at all. (A fox would be great at this.) As the road winds up past a church, there’s a box junction and a traffic island and a pelican crossing and a speed bump and a bus lane almost on top of one another as if one night the council had to dump a lot of spare infrastructure in a hurry, and that’s where the Burmese DJs turn off between two squat detached houses down a path that Raf, despite all his walks with Rose, has never noticed before.

This is dangerous, because there’s no visible pretext to be walking in that direction, so if they’re spotted it will be obvious at once what they’re doing. But they carry on anyway. The path slopes gently down, with trees and tangled undergrowth on either side; the continual yap of a dog seems to have no material point of origin but instead is immanent in the air like a rainbow. Then, as if all this weren’t already enough to make Raf wonder if somehow they’ve been transported into the countryside, they arrive at a field of tall wild grass and flowering brambles. How can this possibly abide so close to a main road in south London? But beyond the trees three football pitches come into view, stretching off blankly towards a shed and a mobile phone mast and another row of houses bearing mullets of dead ivy on their back walls. These must be school playing fields; perhaps some administrator made a mistake annotating a map of the park, so that the ground is maintained up until a certain arbitrary border, a final touchline, but after that it’s the responsibility of no one in particular, and hence this colony of wilderness. At his feet are a few chocolate wrappers that look as if they know deep down that they can’t biodegrade but are doing their best anyway just to fit in. He realises it’s been far too long since he last caught sight of the Burmese DJs. ‘Where are they?’ he says.

‘They must have gone this way,’ says Fourpetal, pointing into the tall grass.

This is even more dangerous, because they don’t have their bearings and for all they know their quarry might still be only a few yards away, but they’ve gone too far to turn back. Thorns keep nipping at Raf’s jeans as the two of them press cautiously on. Then they come to a tall chain-link fence so overgrown with tough vines that the woven metal of the fence itself is not much more than a vestigial splint — and beyond the fence is a derelict tennis court. There’s no net any more, although you can still see the vague white lines between which weeds are now drilling up through the asphalt, and there’s even a rusty umpire’s chair with broken bottles and charred wood strewn around its base like tributes before a throne. On the opposite side, several sections of the fence have been wrestled down by shrubs, leaving only the steel supports between them. There are stains on the ground, mostly black but in one corner an inexplicable violet. The yapping dog sounds no closer and no farther away. This place is sepulchral, post-apocalyptic, a memento mori for those complacent football pitches about the fate they too will one day face, and Raf would already be planning a birthday party here if it weren’t for the four people he can see standing there in the middle of the court.

The two Burmese DJs. A balding guy who carries a sports bag. And Cherish.

Raf and Fourpetal both drop to a crouch. ‘Fuck! Fuck, that’s her!’ Raf whispers. ‘That’s Cherish!’ He wants to bring her a bunch of flowers. He wants to bring her a flower market.

‘Not bad at all,’ says Fourpetal in an appraisive tone.

Raf realises that their theory about Dickson and the ‘community programme’ must have been completely wrong, that somehow all these people are working together against Lacebark. They’re too far away to make out any conversation, but it’s obvious. He is about to shout to Cherish when Fourpetal adds, ‘So the two of you have only actually met a couple of times — that’s right, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘I only ask because, if it should happen that she and I. .’

‘What?’

‘Would you object?’

‘Are you saying, would I mind if you fucked her?’

‘It’s just a question.’

‘When would that ever happen?’

‘It’s just an eventuality.’

Before Raf can make any retort, he sees Cherish take two envelopes out of her bag and pass one to each of the Burmese men. When Raf was a child he used to find it unsettling to overhear his dad make work-related calls on the phone, and that’s what this is like: her demeanour here seems totally estranged from the demeanour of the girl he kissed. And it’s not as if he’s really any expert on body language, but when Fourpetal says, ‘What are we watching? Is this a drug deal?’ Raf shakes his head, because he does know the body language of drug deals, and this doesn’t look to him like a drug deal. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she’s handing over some sort of wage or stipend, like when he gets paid for walking the dog. Why would she be doing that? There is something wrong about this scene that hasn’t crystallised yet, and for reasons that aren’t quite conscious, he finds himself thinking back to Wednesday afternoon. Cherish with one foot on the wet tarmac and one foot in the back of the white van. Those two soldiers, each with a gloved hand on her.

The understanding hits him like two darts from a Taser. They weren’t dragging her inside.

They were helping her up.

Raf finds that the only way he can calmly process the knowledge that Cherish might be working for Lacebark is by pretending he’s talking it over with Isaac.

So if it seems so obvious now, Isaac would say, why didn’t you notice at the time?

Because Fourpetal made me afraid of the white vans, Raf would say. But why would they have been helping her into the van?

Chivalry?

No. They were in a hurry.

You’d doubled back to get your umbrella and they didn’t want you to see them.

But they were too slow, Raf would say. And then Cherish realised that there was an ambiguity in what I’d seen that she could exploit. She did a really good job of seeming shaken after I ‘rescued’ her.

So she wasn’t kidnapped from your bed after all.

But in that case, Raf would say, why did Rose insist that someone nasty had been through my front door? When could that have happened, if not that night?

When you were both at the restaurant. The meal was her suggestion, right?

Fuck, yes, and we didn’t leave until she got that text message!