Ned Beauman - Glow

She gave the Lacebark guys time to break into your flat like they broke into Fourpetal’s.

So Cherish was helping Lacebark to investigate me all along?

Well, what’s the alternative? Isaac would ask. That it was just a weird coincidence you ran into this girl again, right outside your flat, four days after the rave in the laundrette?

OK, yeah, that sounds stupid now. But I wanted to marry Cherish before I’d even talked to her. Wouldn’t it be another weird coincidence if the girl who was helping Lacebark to investigate me was also this beauty whom I developed a big crush on as soon as I saw her?

In your whole life, how many girls have you seen at raves that you’ve immediately developed a big crush on?

I don’t know, Raf would say.

Conservatively?

Ten to fifteen thousand. More if it weren’t for the MDMA drought.

So it’s statistically almost inevitable that at least one of them was going to turn out to be working undercover for an American mining company.

Fine, but I still don’t understand why Lacebark would want to investigate me in the first place. I’m nobody.

We were trying to find out what happened to Theo.

But we hadn’t got anywhere. We’d barely even tried. We were no threat to Lacebark. It doesn’t make sense. And I really thought Cherish liked me. .

That’s as far as Raf can get with imaginary Isaac. He feels as desolate as the tennis court. But now the four figures look as if their business is concluded.

‘What do we do?’ says Fourpetal.

‘Follow Cherish,’ suggests Raf.

But the problem is that she seems to be heading off towards the football pitches. If she cuts across diagonally in the approximate direction of the mobile phone mast, they won’t be able to follow her because they’d be right out in the open. They could hurry around the perimeter of the park where there’s some cover, racing two sides of the triangle against a hypotenuse, but that way Cherish could lose them at the other end without even trying.

The Burmese DJs, meanwhile, are just standing there rolling a spliff. Which leaves the guy with the sports bag, who now for the first time turns far enough in their direction that they can see his face. Fourpetal jerks his head. ‘Christ on a bloody cross, you have got to be joking.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Raf tells him. ‘What is it?’

The guy with the sports bag is going to take the same path between the street and the tennis court that they just took, in which case he’ll catch them if they don’t move on fast.

‘It’s him! It actually is.’

‘Who?’

A dragonfly lunges past. ‘I’ve seen that man’s cock,’ says Fourpetal.

‘We really have to get going,’ Raf tells him. Keeping low, they tunnel back through the wild grass, and then break into a sprint when they get to the path between the trees. There’s no hope now of circling back to follow Cherish. Instead, at the other end of the path, they look around for somewhere to hide. After they’ve crossed the road and dropped down panting behind the wall of the churchyard, Raf finally has the chance to ask, ‘What do you mean you’ve seen his cock?’

‘Just what I said. I don’t know him very well but I’ve seen his cock. A few months after I started at Lacebark, long before the email farrago, they put on a big staff Christmas party at a restaurant in Holborn. Afterwards a few of us carried on to a brothel. He was so drunk that at one point he came stumbling out of one of the rooms without his trousers on. He wasn’t in communications so I hadn’t met him before that night.’

‘Is he something to do with Lacebark security?’

‘If he is, he lied about it. I don’t remember exactly what he said he did but I do remember it sounded tedious. Something to do with lithium? And he might have mentioned Pakistan. Not Burma, though.’

The guy whose cock Fourpetal has seen now emerges from between the detached houses and turns left up the rise in the direction of Herne Hill, so Raf and Fourpetal follow him like they followed the Burmese men and Raf explains what he now knows about Cherish.

‘Well, it’s very touching that it’s taken you this long to realise that you can never trust women,’ says Fourpetal when he’s finished.

Raf thinks about his ex-girlfriend and the Brazilian techno DJ. ‘I think I’ve just had bad luck recently.’

After about fifteen minutes’ pursuit they come to a builders’ merchant with a big yard at the front full of pallets of flesh-coloured bricks wrapped in a thick plastic that makes them look to Raf like stacks of human biceps. Beyond that, past a steel fence, there’s a warehouse almost identical to the one that Isaac showed Raf last weekend, and when the guy they’re following goes inside, he remembers that bloodstain he saw on the concrete floor. ‘This must be a Lacebark building,’ he says as they wait half hidden behind a bus shelter. ‘Maybe they have them all over London. Fuck, I wonder what goes on in there.’

An old woman trundles by in a motorised wheelchair, Maltese between her knees, Union Jack pennant fluttering behind her, and they try not to look so furtive. Behind them, in the window of an empty shop, there are photocopied signs that read bill posters will be, four words only, as if the caretaker became resigned to the futility of his job in the process of composing the warning.

‘Should we wait and see who comes in and out?’ says Fourpetal.

‘I want a closer look,’ says Raf.

‘Have you forgotten that they’re hunting me? I’m not going to walk in their front door.’

‘Come on, we don’t have to go inside.’

Reluctantly Fourpetal follows Raf past the builders’ merchant to the warehouse. Here, Raf is braced to turn and flee, but he’s confused by the sight of about a dozen bicycles locked to a rack by the wall, and even more so to find that the door through which the cock/sports bag guy went is made of glass and covered in stickers.

Fourpetal chuckles. ‘Oh. I see. This is worse than the curry recipe.’

‘What do you mean?’

Fourpetal strides forward to pull open the door, and Raf sees that this isn’t a prison or a barracks or an armoury. This isn’t anything to do with Lacebark. This is a climbing gym.

Inside, colourful knobbly handholds bolted to fibreglass crags simulate a mountain turned inside out. Mid-nineties jungle plays from a cheap PA system and the smell of chalk is so thick in the air that it reminds Raf of dry ice in a club; the climbers are like the couriers he saw in that pub with Morris, lots of dreadlocks and blisters and robust specialised footwear and a general perverse infatuation with egregiously hostile man-made topologies. The two of them look around for Fourpetal’s former colleague, and they can’t see him up on any of the walls, but then he comes out from behind a bank of lockers, still looking a bit out of place even in a T-shirt and jogging shorts. He’s just started limbering up his hands on his way across the crash mats, cracking knuckles and wiggling fingers in a routine so complicated that it looks as if he’s casting some sort of necromantic enchantment, when he notices Fourpetal and stops dead. Fourpetal walks over and extends a hand of his own.

But the other guy’s are now paralysed in front of him so Fourpetal just grabs one and rattles it like a broken doorknob. ‘Mark Fourpetal. I used to work at Lacebark. We met at the Christmas party last year. Isn’t this a coincidence?’

From the guy’s expression it’s clear he knows exactly who Fourpetal is. ‘I can’t talk to you.’

‘Why not? Because if you see me you’re supposed to kidnap me?’

The guy looks around as if Lacebark mercenaries might suddenly come rappelling down an artificial cliff face. ‘I can’t talk to you.’