Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Enough jokes, OK? Just shut up for a minute.’

With her left hand she reaches down past the waistband of his boxer shorts to cup his balls and with her right hand she doesn’t just cover his mouth to stop him talking but actually jams three fingers inside like dental instruments. This renders Raf both physically and intellectually incapable of speech. When she’s satisfied that he’s got the message, she drops to her knees and takes his cock in her own mouth for just long enough to light up all its nerve endings brighter than a maritime distress flare. She rises again and he turns her around to pull her against him so that he can lift the hem of her dress and slip a hand into her pants while he grazes on the back of her neck. After a while, Cherish moves over to the low tiled windowsill, clears off a couple of empty shampoo bottles, and perches on it with her thighs parted and her dress bunched up at her waist. Raf puts on a condom from his wallet and he’s about to do something about her underwear but she shakes her head impatiently so instead he just stretches the crotch to one side, which makes what follows awkward but not impossible. She’s been so much in control up until now that when Raf pushes inside her he almost expects her to show no reaction at all, but in fact she gives a lung-filling gasp and they look into each other’s wide eyes in that way people do in the first few seconds of sex as if the two of them have just uncovered something phenomenally surprising and important that no one else has ever suspected before. Then as he starts thrusting she bites her lip and lolls her head back against the covered window. And that’s when Raf first notices that, as a result of a strip of Sellotape peeling halfway off, the top right corner of the folded bin bag has flopped down on itself, revealing a small triangle of windowglass and a tight view of the street outside.

His consciousness is distilled instantly into two volumes, one melted and the other frozen: below, the hug of Cherish’s interior and the sting of her fingernails; above, the awareness that he really isn’t supposed to be seeing this and the question of whether to mention it. Fortunately, it isn’t that serious an oversight on Cherish’s part, because from this angle he can’t see a street sign or a pub or anything else that could lead Lacebark back to this flat if they interrogated him about it — this peep-show is just a bin and a tree and the awning of a noodle buffet. And at least he knows for sure now that he’s not back inside the freight depot.

Then, as Cherish locks her ankles across the backs of his calves, he realises it’s not a noodle buffet. It’s a noodel buffet. It’s Noodels City, the most conspicuous misspelling in all of south London. He sees the illuminated red sign with its two endoscopic ovals of chow mein every time he goes past Camberwell Green on the bus. Which means he now knows approximately where he is, and if he needed to locate this flat, he could just stand outside Noodels City and look around for the blacked-out windows on the third floor of a building opposite. Without even trying, he has found out precisely what he wasn’t supposed to find out. And somehow he already feels certain that it would have been a lot better if he hadn’t. Cherish murmurs to him to go faster. Caught between these two narrow apertures like the laser beam in the experiment proving that light is both a particle and a wave, interference patterns rippling across the goosebumps on his forearms, Raf wishes that for the last few minutes he could have been struck blind.

11.22 a.m.

Last night, before he fell into bed like a corpse into a gulch, Raf could just about whip his fingers into sending one more message to Fitch: ‘I know you’re not the chemist who’s making all the glow. So who are you?’ By this stage in his cycle the vanguard of his slumber has overrun most of morning, and when he wakes up he can see that it rained while he was still asleep — except he doesn’t feel as if he missed the rain, he feels as if he was there watching it, in the freight depot and then in Zaya’s story and then in a frenetic dream of which he can’t remember any other details — three unreal rains that coagulated into one real one.

Raf goes back to his computer. Fitch’s reply — ‘how you know I’m not him?’ — came in only seventeen minutes ago, which means he might still be online.

Raf writes, ‘Because I met the chemist yesterday. He didn’t speak English, and you do.’

As he was hoping, the next message arrives within a few minutes. ‘oh you that confused-looking white guy? early 20s, blue eyes? actually, my English is fine, you can see that, but it’s not like she gave us much of a chance to chat when she showed you around.’

Raf is so stunned that he doesn’t stop to think about his next question. ‘So it was you that I met in the kitchen when I was with Cherish?’

The final message comes back right away like a slap. ‘no names. fucking moron’

Raf tries to send another reply, but the Lotophage message system won’t allow it.

Fitch has blocked him.

When you’re having an anonymous conversation with no way to visualise the opposite end, the internet’s strange acoustics can give you the illusion that the other voice comes from some cluster of points very nearby, so that when it stops you feel disproportionately spooked and bereft, as if the birds outside your window have fallen silent all at once. Raf could just register for a new account and send Fitch/Win a message from that one, but it doesn’t seem as if he’d have any hope of getting a reply. So he’s left with a puzzle: why would Cherish want him to think that Win didn’t speak English? Whatever the reason, Win himself must be willing to go along with the lie, because he didn’t intervene to correct it back at the flat. Assuming he wasn’t just lockjawed with shyness, the best explanation Raf can think of is that, on the contrary, Cherish believes Win to be so dangerously indiscreet that he can’t be trusted to have even a casual conversation with an outsider in case classified information starts leaking out of him like yolk out of a poached egg. And, on one hand, maybe she’s right to be worried, since Win keeps showing off his expertise on the internet for no useful reason; Cherish probably doesn’t even know that Win posts about glow on Lotophage, otherwise it seems certain she would have stopped him by now. On the other hand, Win can’t really be that careless if he brought down the guillotine on this latest correspondence the moment Raf was stupid enough to mention Cherish’s name.

While he’s getting ready to take Rose for an overdue walk, hoping it will rinse his head clear, an ad comes on Myth FM for the rave that Isaac is putting on at the empty Lacebark warehouse in Walworth on Friday. There’s a mobile phone number for people to call on the day of the rave to find out the location, which the ad repeats about nine times. He sends Isaac a text message: ‘You’re still buying ads on Myth??’ Raf feels guilty enough just for listening, but the problem is there’s no other station that plays so much of the music he likes.

Isaac texts back: ‘Dickson keeps the cash. Anyway, if I don’t get a decent crowd, that means we’ve let Lacebark win!!!’

12.33 p.m.

Fourpetal passes across the table an article torn from last night’s Evening Standard . Most of the headline is missing so Raf reads from the first paragraph.

Rock singer Matty Wilton is due back in court today to face charges connected to his noisy parties.

The twenty-four-year-old Calmatives frontman, who was recently given a suspended sentence for cocaine possession, will appear at Southwark Magistrates’ Court charged with breaching a noise abatement order. Wilton was first served the order in March after neighbours complained to the police, but council officials claim the all-night parties have continued.