Ned Beauman - Glow

The old depot, a long building of weathered brown brick, is tall enough for about two storeys, but Raf assumes it’s just one giant open space inside, and around it is a high fence topped with barbed wire and a lot of conspicuous security cameras. On the other side it rubs up against a stretch of railway viaduct that now only carries overground passenger trains but must once have been connected to some sidings here. So far, the most dramatic thing that has happened is that two white vans have driven inside and three white vans have driven out.

The waiter comes over and asks if they want anything else. He’s a startlingly pretty boy of nineteen or twenty with a black quiff and eyes so big and liquid that in his irises you can see the same subtle rainbows that swim in the film of grease on a puddle.

‘Another coffee,’ says Fourpetal.

‘What’s salep ?’ says Raf, looking at the laminated menu.

‘Orchid tea,’ says the waiter. ‘It’s really sweet.’

‘Has it got any caffeine?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll have one of those.’

‘Are you Turkish?’ says Fourpetal.

‘We’re Serbian.’

As the waiter goes back to the counter, Raf passes Lacunosities to Fourpetal. ‘Apparently Lacebark are really into this book but I don’t understand how that can be.’

Fourpetal flips through it. ‘Well, the IDF read Tschumi on deconstruction. All the young generals are mad for this kind of thing now — supplementing their tactical manuals with postmodern conceptual schemes.’

‘We should read it to see if there are any clues about how Lacebark operate.’

‘Yes, perhaps one of us should, but why me?’

‘You went to university.’

Fourpetal harrumphs. At that moment a man in a black suit walks out of the depot’s side entrance and carries on past the gate. ‘Do you recognise him?’ says Raf.

‘I haven’t seen his cock yet, if that’s what you mean. But he could still be with Lacebark.’

Fourpetal throws down a tenner for the drinks and they hurry out of the café. It’s one of those May mornings when you can stand in the sun and it might already be summer but the slightest breeze will peel all the warmth from your skin. Hanging back at a cautious distance like they did with the Burmese DJs, they follow the man as he turns left at the self-storage facility on the corner. Doing this kind of thing with Fourpetal has started to feel surprisingly normal.

‘He must be walking up to the Tube,’ says Raf. ‘Otherwise why wouldn’t he have taken a car?’

‘You know my flat’s about ten minutes from here?’

‘He’s not going to your flat.’

Even though there’s not much traffic at the next junction the man still pauses at the crossing and presses the button on the panel. The traffic lights around here wear tiaras of spikes to stop kids from climbing them. While the man waits for the green hieroglyph to appear he takes his BlackBerry out of his pocket and starts thumbing through his messages.

Without permitting himself the chance to think it through, Raf flips his hood up and breaks into a sprint.

The man doesn’t look up until Raf’s almost upon him, and Raf doesn’t slow down, he just snatches for the BlackBerry and drops his head and charges on up the road before he’s even certain that the thing itself is there in his hand instead of just the anticipation of its weight. Veering off behind a row of semi-detached houses, he can’t hear feet behind him, and he hopes the man was too surprised to react in time, but he can’t be sure, so he carries on running until his lungs are crumbling into powdery white ash and then finally stops to catch his breath. Behind him an old dub track lollops out of someone’s open bedroom window. He pulls off his hoodie to stuff it underneath a hedge just in case it might be recognised, and down there already is a child’s discarded glove, damp and blotchy like the carcass of a small blind mammal with a body made mostly of fingers.

1.06 p.m.

‘Just to confirm your appointment to tour the south London facility at 9.30 a.m. on Monday. Looking forward to showing you round — I think you’ll be very impressed. Best wishes, Denise.’

That’s the only email of any relevance that Raf and Fourpetal can find on the BlackBerry when they meet at a McDonald’s to look through its folders. They do discover, at least, that the man in the black suit works for a South African company called Nostrand Discovery, and he’s visiting London specifically to take this tour, but there are no hints about what might actually be inside the freight depot. When Raf was fifteen he wanted so much to know what sex felt like that he thought his brain was going to pop with the frustration, but he still didn’t want to know that as much as he now wants to know what Lacebark are doing in there.

‘How are we going to get in without getting caught?’ he says.

‘Well, if you’re really that eager, there is a means.’

‘What?’

Fourpetal drafts an email on the BlackBerry and shows it to Raf. ‘Hi Denise. One of my colleagues has just had to change his travel plans and he’s going be in London for a couple of days this week. I’d love him to be able to see what you showed me this morning. Sorry for the short notice but is there any way we could set up another tour? I’m going to be out of contact for a while, so if this does turn out to be practical, please call my colleague directly on the UK number below.’

‘Do you think that will work?’ says Raf.

‘Yes. After we send it we delete the sent message from the email server. The Nostrand chap may never find out he’s been impersonated.’

‘So I’m just going to walk in there pretending to be South African?’

‘All you really have to worry about is ImPressure.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember that presentation video we enjoyed so much? ImPressure has a facial-recognition system built into it. If you’re in their database — and you presumably are if they’ve been in your flat — it won’t matter how well we disguise you. The system will notice the match.’

‘And then I’m fucked?’

‘Not necessarily. All those facial-recognition systems spit out plenty of false positives. Someone will look at their screen and say, “ImPressure is telling us that this important executive from Nostrand Discovery is actually a carefree young Londoner called Raf whom we already happen to have on our watch list. But that’s absurd. ImPressure• must have made another blunder. Cancel the alert.” Have you ever bumped into a close friend but the context was wrong and you had no idea who they were?’

Nearby a teenage boy in a uniform is trying to mop up a spilled strawberry milkshake but the milkshake is trying to ooze away to safety. ‘So the only thing that’s going to keep me from getting handcuffed is that they don’t trust their own computer systems?’

‘I know you’ve never had a real job, so take it from me: it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in — nobody trusts their own computer systems. Anyway, you’d better make your mind up. We don’t know how soon your mugging victim will remember to change the password on his email account.’

‘Would you do this?’

‘Honestly?’ says Fourpetal. ‘No.’

Would Raf do it? Would he risk his life against Lacebark like those foxes did? It horrifies him to think that Theo, the born rescuer, might be beyond rescue. But if that’s true, he wouldn’t want Raf to hurl himself down the same bottomless hole. There’s nothing left to do for his friend now but mourn. He also has no reason to think he can even do anything useful for any of the Burmese people who’ve been snatched by the vans, and he certainly can’t ‘save’ Cherish. In any case, whatever quiet war Lacebark is waging here, whatever toxin may be gushing from their nozzles, he’s supposed to be leaving for good in a fortnight. The city isn’t his problem any more. None of this is.