Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Imagine that most of your body was made of fingers,’ commands Isaac, ‘and those fingers could bend and twist and squeeze in any direction, and they had suckers at the ends, and they were full of sensory fibres. Then imagine the synaptic density you’d need to keep all that under control.’ The theory he’s testing, he explains, is that if you want to repair the damage from taking a lot of neurotoxic drugs like ketamine, you should eat a lot of synapse-dense food. ‘I’m talking to a Canadian guy on the internet who says he can sell me some star-nosed mole meat made into jerky.’ Raf looks puzzled. ‘Star-nosed moles are the only mammals with tentacles,’ Isaac adds. ‘They have face tentacles. They can smell underwater.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

‘Seriously!’

‘If you want synaptic density, shouldn’t you just eat poached lamb’s brains or something?’ says Raf. ‘I ordered that by accident in a Turkish place once.’

‘Too much cortisol. Cephalopods are healthier. Anyway, these won’t be ready for a while — do you want some ice cream?’

‘Are you allowed ice cream on the Tentacle Diet?’

‘Cows have udders — close enough, right? Anyway, Fumiko knows where to get octopus ice cream.’ Raf takes a step back from the tub on the counter. ‘But that one’s just green tea.’

Raf smiles and yawns. Last night he was about to put on his eyemask and earplugs and acoustic earmuffs as usual, but then he remembered Martin’s account of Lacebark’s prisons, a fear in a brain in a head in a hood in a cell in a warehouse in a city that doesn’t know that you’re there, seven Matryoshka dolls of impenetrable blackness, and it jarred him so badly that for the first time in months he had to try to sleep with bare sense organs. The Hittites, he once saw on a documentary, used to bury their dead wearing earplugs of beaten gold, although no one knows whether they were to keep something out or to keep something in. At the moment he’s at a conventionally nocturnal stage of his cycle, so he went to bed at midnight when the sun was down and the street was quiet, but he’s so used to his bulkheads that it still took him a couple of hours to doze off. Then this morning he awoke from a fluttery dream retaining such a definite sense of the jut of Cherish’s naked hip bone against his belly that when he looked down he almost expected to see a little indentation in the skin.

Raf goes back into the living room, and that’s when he realises to his surprise why the name Villepinte was familiar: because a fat paperback called Lacunosities by René Villepinte has been lying around here for weeks. But that doesn’t make sense, because surely there’s no way that any book that’s on the Japanese girls’ syllabus at fashion college could also be of interest to Lacebark’s ImPressure operators.

He waves at the girl winding her watch. ‘Hey, is this any good?’ She shrugs. He turns it over to look at the blurb. ‘The most consequential contribution to postmodern critical theory since Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus ,’ declares someone at Penn State University. He opens it at random but it looks like gibberish. So, instead, he sits down on the arm of the sofa with Isaac’s laptop to check his email, because he’s waiting for a contract extension from the Polish 3D modelling company, and he finds that it hasn’t arrived yet, but he does have a message from someone calling themselves ‘Horologium Florae’. The body of the message is empty apart from a link to a YouTube video which was posted last night and so far has only four views. Raf watches it twice and then calls Isaac over to watch it a third time.

There’s no audio track, and because the video is shot at night on a mobile phone camera it’s churning and cindery, but you can still recognise the grid of white blobs that trembles in the background as a five-storey council block with a fluorescent security light over every front door. Closer at hand, a van is parked beside one of those communal lawns that Raf has always found so pointless, and two men stand on the lawn dressed just like the Lacebark soldiers he saw on Wednesday near his flat, except that they both wear anti-pollution masks over their mouths and one of them has a small plastic tank strapped to his back with a hose leading from the bottom of the tank to a long nozzle. For a while he just walks back and forth to move the nozzle over different patches of grass, diligent as a stag beetle, presumably spraying a liquid that doesn’t show up on camera. The other man, who has no tank or nozzle, might be a lookout. Twice the whole screen goes black as the person with the mobile phone ducks out of sight behind a wall or maybe a car, but in all other respects it’s pretty boring to watch. Then, at seventy-two seconds, five foxes rip into view so fast they look like corrupted sectors in the video file. Raf has to pause it just to count them. And what happens after that is impossible to follow, a riffle shuffle of melty and almost abstract frames, but it ends with three foxes dead on the ground and both Lacebark men stumbling back towards the van, silenced pistols drawn, foreheads painted with blood, one clutching his leg and the other his throat.

‘Christ! Have you ever seen a fox attack like that?’ says Isaac.

‘No.’ To Raf there’s something especially creepy about silent amateur footage like this, when the camera becomes your own two lidless eyes forced up against a thick glass wall, so it’s all happening right there in front of you but you can’t hear and you can’t intervene and you can’t turn away.

‘I think foxes can get rabies, though.’

‘Yeah, but rabid foxes don’t run in packs.’

‘Normal foxes don’t either,’ says Raf. ‘I’ve never seen more than two at a time.’

‘We should send this to Animals Do the Funniest Things .’

‘What do you think the Lacebark guy is spraying?’

‘It’s got to be pesticide or herbicide.’

‘Lacebark didn’t come to London to do covert gardening. Except, oh, look up “Horologium Florae”.’

Isaac types and clicks. ‘ “The flower clock. .”?’ he reads. ‘?“Invention of the Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus. . A garden plan that can tell the time of day using plants that open or close their flowers at particular times. . From Tragopogon pratensis , the meadow salsify, also known as Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon or showy goat’s-beard” — showy goat’s-beard, that is brilliant! — “which flowers at 3 a.m., to Hemerocallis lilio . .” — um, sorry — “ lilioasphodelus , the lemon day lily, which flowers at nearly 9 p.m.” Anyway, Carl Linnaeus died in 1778. So I’m not sure how helpful this is.’ Isaac sniffs the air. ‘Dumplings!’ He rushes back to the kitchen.

Raf stays there on the sofa, a sudden darkness settling over him. He’s been delaying it since his conversation with Martin, but at some point tonight he has to tell Isaac that he’s almost sure Theo is dead.

11.08 a.m.

The five old men in the corner look as if their game of cards has been going on for so long that even if they’ve been playing for penny stakes their total wins and losses could bring down the international banking system. Like copper on rooftops, the tattoos on their forearms have discoloured with age, in this case black to dark blue. Raf and Fourpetal are the only other customers in the café, which is no surprise — there’s almost nothing this side of the main road but warehouses and car parks and other null zones. The problem is, Raf does not find this a good place to sit by the window staking out the freight depot Martin told them about, because it’s so much the sort of café he’d normally come to with a hangover or a serotonin deficit that all the departments of his brain capable of concentrating on anything serious even for a second automatically shut down for maintenance as soon as he got through the door half an hour ago and smelled the eggs scrambling. Still, he’s doing his best.