Ned Beauman - Glow

Raf realises he was wrong before. If Nollic has a limit, he isn’t anywhere near it. Maybe it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to be scary with a Pomeranian nestled in the crook of his arm, but Nollic is scary, and mostly it’s because of his confidence: he doesn’t seem shaken in the least that the pathogenic reality behind his strategic calculations has invaded his life like this. That’s how certain he is that nothing can touch him. Raf and Fourpetal are no more of a threat than the foxes out in his garden.

‘You do need me,’ says Fourpetal. ‘Once you’ve heard what I know. . You do need me.’

‘No, Mr Fourpetal. I don’t. Are we finished here?’

Raf recognises the trout-eyed expression on Fourpetal’s face because he’s seen it once before, in Isaac’s flat. So he knows, a useless semiquaver before it actually happens, that Fourpetal is about to make a run for it.

This time, unfortunately, Hiromi isn’t here to trip him up. Leaving Nollic to his pancakes, Raf drops his basket and sets off after Fourpetal, who is going in the wrong direction, away from the supermarket entrance, and will at some point have to double back down another aisle if he wants to get out. The chase that follows is like a badly edited tap-dance routine in a second-rate old musical, as the two of them dodge past pushchairs, shopping trolleys, and yellow wet floor signs, swerving awkwardly every few seconds and never working up any real pace. Before long, Raf is growling in frustration, and he wants to grab a can of coconut milk from a shelf to hurl at Fourpetal’s head but he’s too afraid of hitting the wrong person. Still, his reactions are generally quicker, so that by the time their squeaky dash has circled back around to the fruit and vegetables at the front of the supermarket he’s almost close enough to reach out and hook Fourpetal by the neck.

Then he feels a hand on his upper arm. ‘Sir!’ A tubby security guard stands in his way, glaring at him from beneath a mucoid crest of gelled orange hair. ‘Would you mind emptying your pockets, sir?’

Raf points indignantly at Fourpetal, who is now at the automatic doors. ‘What about that guy? Stop him too!’

‘We can go into the office if you’d rather, sir.’

As fast as he can, Raf proves to the guard that he hasn’t stolen anything, and finally he’s sent off with a warning that there’s no running allowed ‘within the store’. So he hurries out to the busy car park, with its tall halide lamps like spindles twisting the last flax of gold out of the dusk. But Fourpetal is nowhere to be seen.

8.19 p.m.

The dentist’s surgery here has a window display consisting of two overgrown pot plants and about a dozen maxillary dentures scattered at random across the tiles like vermin lying there dead after a fumigation. Reflected in the glass, the traffic lights and box junctions of Camberwell Green are a parcel-sorting machine sending bus after bus off south or east or north or west according to the address written on the label. Raf stands at the entry door on the left-hand side of the dentist’s window, harassing the buzzer of the third-floor flat where he’s now determined that Zaya lives.

He’s not looking forward to explaining to Cherish why he didn’t tell her sooner about seeing Noodels City through the window. What excuse is he going to give her? ‘I didn’t want you to stop having sex with me.’ Not good enough. ‘I thought I might get in trouble with you, even though it wasn’t really my fault that it happened.’ Not good enough either. Whatever he says, she’ll probably be so angry that he’ll never get to see her naked again, so he might as well just unwrap the deeper truth: that despite all she revealed that evening, he still had an inchoate suspicion that she was holding something important back from him — a suspicion backed up the next day when he found out about Fitch/Win’s perfect English — and so, for reasons that were either strategic or merely childish, he felt as if he ought to hold something back from her too.

This is going to be an uncomfortable conversation. But he doesn’t have any choice. Raf doesn’t think Fourpetal would be such a moron that he’d try to make a deal with Lacebark a second time after having been turned down so humiliatingly the first time. But there are a lot of other ways he might be reckless enough to get himself caught. Today, even before he lost his only ally, he was talking about kidnapping an adult man in broad daylight; tomorrow, maybe he’ll strap on a water pistol and launch a commando raid on Lacebark’s offices. To an extent it’s Raf’s fault that Fourpetal is such an urgent liability now, since the cunt might never have made that destructive gamble if Raf hadn’t tugged him into the moonless gravity well of Nollic’s dominance, and it’s also Raf’s fault that Fourpetal is pregnant with data about the Burmese underground. He has to warn Cherish and Zaya.

But no one is answering the buzzer.

Raf isn’t sure if the intercom upstairs is even connected, and he can’t stay out here with his hood up for too long in case he attracts attention to the flats, which is the last thing he wants to do. The handwritten indicators next to each button are lit from behind with a weak electric amber like windowblinds hiding their own formic tenements. Hoping he can at least get into the building, Raf tries the second floor, but the button must be broken because it drops back with no resistance and no bleep. Next, he tries the first floor, and after a few seconds a woman says, ‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got a pizza delivery for the third floor but they’re not answering.’ Seven eighths of the sky is clouded over, which makes the sun setting in the west look even brighter by contrast, like someone pushing open the door of your darkened bedroom to let in the glare from out in the corridor.

‘I don’t let strangers in,’ she says, her Irish accent shredded by the speaker.

Just then, Raf is perplexed to see what looks like a small waffle taped up over the lintel of the door. But then he remembers Cherish explaining that her Uncle Chai used to keep honeycomb as a charm because for some reason the Danu believe that ghosts can understand only right angles and so are confused by hexagons. Zaya must be more superstitious than Raf realised. Then again, part of Cherish’s job is to supply Lacebark with information that won’t be any use to their ImPressure network: inputting hexagons when it’s compatible only with squares.

On the way home, Raf wonders what to do. He doesn’t have Cherish’s phone number, and she specifically told him not to go back to the Burmese restaurant, and he can’t just wait for her to get in touch with him. The only mode of contact he has left for anyone in Zaya’s network is Lotophage. Until tonight, it didn’t seem worthwhile to register for a second account, since Fitch/Win could block that one too, or even ask the forum administrators to ban Raf’s IP address. But this is too urgent for Win to ignore. The only trouble is, if Win passes on Raf’s warning, then Cherish will learn that the two of them have been communicating without her knowledge. Win might not want that. On the other hand, he might not care.

Sitting down at his computer when he gets home, Raf looks through Fitch’s last few posts to get a sense of whether Win is likely to check his messages soon. He’s discouraged to find that Fitch hasn’t shown himself on Lotophage for about a day: his last activity was a quarrel with two other users about the possible interactions of pramexipole and aminopropyl, which started at 6.11 p.m. BST and tailed off around 11 p.m. Raf isn’t sure what to do, and to put off deciding he switches over to the problem of how to find Fourpetal. He knows Fourpetal doesn’t have much money to spend, so he must be living in a cheap hotel or hostel somewhere in south London. If he was following the McDonald’s principle, he might have chosen a Premier Inn, because apparently the InterContinental Hotels Group has a market capitalisation of about four and a half billion dollars, which is much less than Lacebark and much, much less than McDonald’s but still more than Whitbread or Travelodge. The problem is, there are Premier Inns in both Greenwich and Southwark, and Raf can’t stake out two hotels at once. He’s still clicking around when he’s distracted by the thought that something is wrong with what he just read on Lotophage.