Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Well, isn’t there anything I can do to help?’

‘We may have a job for you soon. Until then, we just wanted you to understand what’s going on.’ She gets up. ‘Also, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

As Raf is following her down the corridor, it’s as if the refractive index of the air fluctuates just for an instant, and he finds himself looking around and wondering if any of this is real. When Ko let him out of the van he heard that dog bark and he felt a breeze tickle the back of his neck but a sound-effect tape and an electric fan could have done just the same job. For all he knows, he might be back in the freight depot and Cherish might be loyal to Lacebark and Zaya might be an actor and the bin bags over the windows might conceal a steel partition all the way around the flat. The depot was only two storeys tall, and he climbed three flights of stairs to get here, but he’s suddenly so antsy now that he asks himself if the ‘ground floor’ could have been sunk two storeys underground or if they could have put him on some sort of imperceptible treadmill. So he forces himself to look hard at the old goitres of Blu-tack on the walls and the dead wasps sunbathing around the bottom rim of the paper lampshade, all this fractal detail of reality like the foil threads in a banknote, far beyond Lacebark’s power to forge.

They get to the kitchen. ‘Raf, this is Win,’ says Cherish.

And as if Raf weren’t feeling unstable enough, he sees that he’s already rehearsed this scene. Once again, a Burmese guy is standing there by the sink, and once again, the worktops are overcrowded with laboratory instruments, except that this time the laboratory instruments are presumably functional and the Burmese guy presumably knows something about drug chemistry. What it does prove is that Lacebark did quite a good job with their imitation. The feel of the room is almost the same. But, if anything, the equipment here looks even more shabby and mismatched, and there isn’t that inexplicable stink, and there’s no ultrasonic trill of tension when he looks the Burmese guy in the eye.

‘Win developed the process for refining glo into glow when he was still in Gandayaw,’ says Cherish. ‘Every gram of glow that anyone’s ever taken, Win has made. He doesn’t speak much English, though.’

This proves that Win can’t be Fitch from Lotophage, which makes Raf glad that he didn’t bring up Fitch earlier, because he would have felt stupid for getting so excited about some anonymous messageboard user who probably has nothing to do with any of this. Although there is a laptop here, it sits unplugged next to the stove with the screen shut and the power cable wrapped a couple of times around the AC adaptor. Raf raises his hand in greeting and Win raises a hand back. That’s when Raf notices the incense burner on the windowsill, and a shiver beetles down his spine. It’s exactly like the one he saw in Lacebark’s core scenario installation, except that instead of two pink cans of guava juice this one is built out of two purple cans of passionfruit juice. He tells Cherish.

‘And?’ she says.

‘I can understand that Lacebark could work out for themselves what a kitchen drug lab might basically look like, but how could they know that exact detail unless they’d seen inside this flat? Doesn’t that mean you might already be under surveillance?’

‘If we were they would’ve snatched us days ago.’ She says something in Burmese and Win says something back. ‘Win used to make those same incense burners when he was back in Gandayaw,’ she says. ‘He didn’t invent them in this apartment.’

Raf doesn’t understand why Cherish isn’t more concerned about this. ‘Yeah, but it’s the same brand of juice.’

‘It’s a coincidence, Raf. Chill out.’

Raf is reminded of Isaac’s reaction when he insisted that Cherish must have been abducted by Lacebark because he couldn’t find a used glass of water on his kitchen counter. So he asks her about it.

‘You had some OJ in your refrigerator,’ she tells him. ‘I drank some straight from the carton and then I put it back.’

‘Oh.’ Raf realises Isaac was right — it was an idiotic ‘clue’. Now he doesn’t feel so sure about the incense burner. The lesson here seems to be that fruit juice is always a bit of a rogue element.

Cherish cocks her head. ‘Why do you look disappointed all of a sudden? Are you worried about getting my germs?’

One of the unrealistic qualities of Lacebark’s simulation was that their ‘chemist’ showed no signs of personalising the space in which his character was supposedly toiling for at least two hours of every three-hour day. But Raf notices there are two pictures of a smiling, shirtless guy up on the fridge here, and although they’re even more sallow and grainy than the average print from a cheap disposable camera with the flash on, there’s something unmistakably intimate about them. In one, the guy’s been lipsticked with red marker.

‘Hey,’ says Raf. ‘I recognise him from somewhere.’

And then he remembers. It’s that young waiter from the Serbian café opposite the freight depot. Which doesn’t make any sense.

‘That’s Win’s boyfriend Jesnik,’ says Cherish.

‘Boyfriend?’

‘We wanted to keep the depot under surveillance, but we all had other things to do, and also it seemed kind of risky to hang around the neighbourhood that much. We started paying Jesnik to do it instead. He came over here a few times to talk to us about what he saw, and the first time we happened to leave him alone in the flat with Win. . They don’t have a language in common, so I don’t know how it happened, but, I mean, good for Win — Jesnik’s a cutie, right? OK, “boyfriend” might be a little bit of a stretch but I think they really like each other.’

‘If you don’t want Lacebark to bring down the hammer, couldn’t you just move Win out of London? Make sure Lacebark know he’s a long way away, so they have to start the hunt from the beginning again?’

‘Yeah. That’s what we want to do in the long run. But it’s too dangerous to move him at the moment. Lacebark have too many eyes. Until we can find some way of making them blink. . Anyway, there’s one last thing we have to deal with before you go.’

He follows her back down the corridor and off to the left into what turns out to be a bathroom. Even here there’s a bin bag over the window opposite the toilet. The bath’s enamel is so stained that it looks as if it’s been dredged up out of a lagoon, an old rubber non-slip bathmat lying damply on the bottom like two and a half feet of tripe. ‘We only have, like, ten minutes,’ she says. ‘Ko has to drive you home.’

Raf looks at his digital watch: 9.51. He’s been here for nearly two hours. ‘Ten minutes for what?’

She wets her lips with her tongue and pushes him up against the wall.

‘Now?’ This is the kind of amazing thing that normally only happens to Isaac.

She nods. ‘Why should Win be the only one to get laid in this apartment?’

‘You brought me here in handcuffs and a hood,’ he says.

‘Yeah, and it’ll be the same when you leave. You can’t know where we are right now.’

‘But last week you told me you weren’t into bondage.’ She laughs and puts a hand in his hair to force his mouth down to hers. He can taste mango on her upper lip like joy itself. Between kisses, he adds, ‘For a few days I really thought you were working for Lacebark. I really thought you were on the other side.’

‘There’s still a little bit you don’t know about me.’ She starts efficiently unbuttoning his jeans.

‘Wait, just promise me. .’

‘Promise you what?’

He looks down. ‘Promise me you’re not going to shoot at it with a catapult and then whack it against a tree.’