Ned Beauman - Glow

But then he thinks about the reason he’s given himself for going away, his sense that he had to make a physical escape from the site of his heartbreak because this cold termite hollow wasn’t just in him, it was out there, objectively, in things, in all of them, down to the waltzing fall of a cigarette paper when it slips from your fingers, down to the void void void void that the ticket machine at an overground station prints on the orange chit when it cancels a sale. Now Lacebark are in south London, infiltrating it, altering it, coughing this mist of dread over the streets that once meant so much to him. When his girlfriend left, everything here went to shit for a while, and all he could do was sit there and suffer. Seven weeks later, everything is going to shit again, but this time he has a chance to try to stop it.

11.58 a.m.

While he’s waiting at the gate of the depot, Raf happens to reach into his left trouser pocket and discovers for the first time a sheet of paper crumpled up in there. He takes it out, uncrumples it, and realises that it’s the order of service sheet from his grandmother’s funeral in 2007, which was the last time he took this suit off its hanger.

‘Mr Rose?’

Raf looks up. A woman in wireframe glasses is striding towards him across the concrete. He stuffs the sheet back in his pocket as fast as he can. ‘Yes,’ he says, pronouncing it ‘Yiss,’ because yesterday he watched a lot of South African accent tutorial videos on YouTube, and now he’s trying to keep his premolars pressed against the thighs of his tongue.

This woman’s accent, on the other hand, is American. ‘Great to meet you. I’m Denise Belasco. We spoke on the phone.’ They shake hands. ‘How much did Mr Jacobs tell you about the facility?’

‘We didn’t have a chance to speak for very long. But he told me he found it very impressive.’ Raf reminds himself he needs to ride like Fourpetal, high in the saddle of his lies. Two Lacebark security guards stand like bouncers outside the side door of the depot and as he passes them he thinks of how he felt the first time he brought pills into a club in the toe of his shoe. Inside there’s a windowless ante-room where a third guard sits at a desk behind a bank of screens. A fridge in the corner is filled with mineral water and energy drinks. There are no clues here. For all he knows it could be a gate to the underworld.

‘We’ll just need a scan of your passport,’ says Belasco. ‘Sorry for the hassle but as you can imagine we take a lot of precautions at a facility like this.’

‘I’m afraid my passport’s in the safe at my hotel. But I’ve got my driver’s licence.’ Raf takes it out of his wallet. Fourpetal had warned him this might happen so last night he went over to Jonk’s flat with Isaac and the three of them spent the evening forging this card. Because Jonk once tried to start a side business selling fake IDs, he already had a pirate copy of Photoshop, a second-hand inkjet printer, and a box of those butterfly laminate pouches that you can seal with a clothes iron. The only problem was, Jonk had ordered the pouches from a website that specialised in supplying the ‘novelty’ ID market, so they were all printed in advance with generic foil holograms, but South African driver’s licences don’t actually have holograms on them, just pink watermarks, with the result that Raf’s fake licence has more ‘security features’ than a real one. In most circumstances this wouldn’t matter, but Fourpetal also warned him that quite a lot of Lacebark’s goons are hired from South Africa.

So Raf’s as nervous now watching the guard run his card through the scanner as he was earlier when a security camera first swivelled its head towards him like a carrion bird as he waited outside the gate of the depot. Then he realises that if he just stares across the desk in silence it’s going to make him look even more unnatural, so he turns back to Belasco and tries to think of something to say, but his mind is suddenly an empty trough. To his enormous relief, it’s Belasco who asks, ‘And you work with Mr Jacobs in Tanzania?’

‘That’s right.’ (‘Thitt’s hroitte.’)

‘He told me he was in the Nostrand office in Fehedou at the time of the truck bombing. That must have been a really nasty thing to experience.’

‘Yes, it really was.’

On the heavy steel door that presumably leads through into the main section of the depot, there is a sign that says authorised personnel only, which to Raf seems hilariously mundane and redundant in this context. (He’s relieved that the security measures here don’t extend to a fingerprint or iris scanner, and he remembers Isaac’s proposal for a biometric identification system which required the user to perform thirty seconds of oral sex on an androgynous piezo-electric tubercle, on the basis that any given individual’s precise oral sex technique is both unique and impossible to teach or imitate.) The guard at the desk hands back Raf’s driver’s licence without meeting his eye. Since he seems to be safe for the moment, he scrapes together his courage to take a small risk. ‘I must say, Ms Belasco—’

‘Denise.’

‘I must say, Denise, until recently I only really thought of Lacebark as a mining company.’ This remark will make sense as long as Raf is about to get a tour of something that is not a mine, and that seems like a good bet, unless Isaac is correct in his speculation that Lacebark’s big secret is the diamond mine they have dug under the streets of London with its entrance hidden in this depot. (Isaac has never believed that the true explanation for why south London doesn’t have a proper Tube network is that its subsurface geology makes tunnelling impossible — he has a selection of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories to propose instead — and in a sense an urban mine would prove him correct.)

‘Oh, sure,’ says Belasco. ‘You’re by no means alone there. The vast majority of Lacebark’s business is and always has been resource extraction. That’s what we’re known for. But over the last twenty years we’ve faced a lot of the same problems in Myanmar that you and your colleagues at Nostrand are now facing in Tanzania. One of Lacebark’s basic corporate values is that we never outsource when we can insource. So we’ve pumped major resources into developing skills that lie quite a long way outside our core competencies. And the best way to begin to defray an investment like that is to offer some of those skills on the open market. It’s much the same approach that San Miguel took with Sentinel back in the 1960s, for instance, if you’re familiar with Sentinel. If we build you a facility like this in Tanzania, you can be confident it will do the job, because we rely on facilities of exactly the same kind. We are our own most demanding customers.’

Raf tries to translate all this in his head. He knows from the Pankhead email that Lacebark are in financial trouble. By now they must be aching for cash so badly that they’ll accept contracts from other companies for services that have nothing to do with mining. Nostrand Discovery is a potential client. In that case ‘Mr Rose’ can probably afford to play it a bit more aloof.

‘Shall we head on through?’ says Belasco.

After the security guard presses a button on a panel, the steel door in front of them emits a buzz and then a clunk. Belasco holds it open for Raf. And Raf steps out, somehow, into the open air.

Many times in his life, Raf has carelessly said, ‘I thought I was dreaming’ or ‘I had to pinch myself’ or ‘It was a total nightmare’. But he won’t say those things again after this. Because never, ever before has he had any experience which made him feel so much like a drowsy and gullible consciousness floating through its own depthless improvisation.