Ned Beauman - Glow

In other words, it’s possible that Lacebark started chasing Win for corporate security reasons long before they realised that he was the only person in the world who knew how to synthesise the substance in Craig’s blood. And in fact none of this is enough to explain why Lacebark turned their attention to glow with such urgency. Even if a few young executives were open-minded and entrepreneurial enough to contemplate the possibility that an extraordinary new drug might one day be of more value than an underperforming copper and ruby mine, a handwritten note and a toxicological analysis and a few rumours about a flower in the forest would not have been sufficient to explain diversification. All that stuff is just fruit juice. Which is why Zaya is convinced that Craig, like an idiot, must also have been keeping a diary.

‘After Gandayaw, Sam took me to this camp in the forest,’ Win continues. ‘You ever read that Che Guevara Bolivian Diary ? I thought it would be pretty gangster, but it’s the most boring book ever. “Today it rained and we had to move camp.” “Today it rained and we had to move camp.” That’s what it was like. And they made me eat roasted bats! Zaya wanted to get me out of Burma, but Lacebark were watching too close. Then Nargis happened. That was our chance. They smuggled me out of the country with a condom full of glo seeds while everything was still fucked up.’

Raf takes a sip of his tea. ‘So why London?’

‘Foxes,’ says Win. ‘Foxes everywhere here. Plus people take a lot of pills. We need both of those to operate. That don’t leave a lot of cities.’

‘Does it really have to be foxes? It can’t be another animal?’

‘I don’t know. I heard Berlin has wild boar right in the middle of the city. And they take a lot of pills there too. So that might have worked. But we didn’t want to take the risk.’

‘So how did you end up in a Lacebark training facility?’ Raf says, suppressing a small yawn, because it’s now dandelion on the flower clock, a couple of hours past tonight’s bedtime. Darkness has settled on the fictive transect of south London outside the window, the notional sun beginning another three-hour whirl around this classroom globe, even as the weeks skipping past in Win’s memoir superimposed yet another chronometry on the short span that’s elapsed since Raf came into this kitchen. Isaac once told him about the two competing theories of time: according to the A theory, tenses are real, and the present is a meat-grinder that converts the future irrevocably into the past, but according to the B theory, tenses are a subjective illusion, with all the different instants bound like pages into a book, sequential but static, or maybe not even sequential. Here in the training facility, Lacebark could make the B theory real, swapping one of the three dimensions of space for a dimension of time: a single upright plane would be extended into an infinite smear, like one of those multiple exposures of a golf swing or a tennis serve in a magazine, so that as you walked forward, you’d never travel even an inch farther down the street, but instead you’d slide from dawn to dusk, an army of extras brought in to represent a single individual existing at many different times in the same spot.

‘You know why all animals got a blind spot, right?’ says Win. ‘Because the gap where the optic nerve attaches to the retina is the only place you can’t fit photoreceptor cells. That’s what this place is. They running surveillance all over London. Except here.’

‘But there are cameras all around us.’

‘Those cameras on a separate, closed system. The footage don’t get processed by they facial-recognition algorithms.’

‘So you’re just hiding here inside the blind spot?’

‘Yeah. Been here since they set this place up. Half the extras, they really working for Zaya. They bring in glo . I feed it to the foxes. The foxes shit in my bathtub. I filter out the precursor and do the hard chemistry. What I end up with is, like, one reductive amination away from pure glow. I give that to the extras and they take it back to Zaya. Then his guys finish off the process. If that was happening anywhere but here, Lacebark would’ve traced the supply line to me months back, but they don’t have the imagination to see, right? That the centre of Zaya’s network could be. . fuck, what’s the word?’ — he snaps his fingers — ‘could be homotopic with the centre of they own network. The journeys they extras make between they cribs and the facility, the interactions between the extras while they here together — the hilarious thing, Lacebark take care to cut all that stuff from they ImPressure mapping, because they don’t want any artificial distortions in the data. But we live in those distortions. “The calls are coming from inside the house!” You ever see that movie? Anyway, we couldn’t have done it without help. Right now, most of the money we make from slinging glow goes to paying off the guys in the control room above the “pub”. They make sure everything tilts our way.’

‘Lacebark have completely lost control of their own training facility, and they don’t even realise?’

‘They starting to. They don’t understand what’s happening yet, but they starting to realise something fucked up here. Nobody wants to admit it, though. Nobody wants to get fired. That’s why they so slow to catch up. You know, they run simulations in here every day? They bust in and put a hood over my head and drag me into a van. They already caught me a hundred times. They just don’t know it. Wish I could see Bezant’s face when he finds out.’

For Lacebark, Raf thinks, it must feel like a locked room mystery, with south London as the locked room. ‘So what are you going to do? You can’t leave the blind spot or they’ll catch you for real.’

Win smirks. ‘Of course I leave. I got to get laid like everybody else.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I go see my boy Jesnik at the café. It’s easy. I get out like you came in. And I know where the cameras are pointed.’ Every time he tunnels through that beach of rubbish in the yard, he admits, it reminds him of Hseng’s body on the dump in Gandayaw.

‘Does Cherish know?’

‘She knows I have a thing going with Jesnik. But she don’t know I leave this place to see him. She thinks we just jerk each other off when he comes in to deliver coffee and baklava for Belasco and the others.’

‘They let him in here?’

‘Yeah. He gets paid to keep his mouth shut same as the rest.’

Raf wonders about the photos on the fridge in the flat in Camberwell. He realises that although they looked like disposable camera pictures, they could just as easily have been webcam pictures printed off some cruising site. ‘Why haven’t you told Cherish there’s a way out of the facility?’

‘I have to keep my options open. Here’s the thing: Jesnik’s uncle’s a gangster. Like, a real live one.’ And he’s famous in the Serbian mafia, Win explains, partly because in the toilets of a puppet theatre he once took down three big men who’d come to kill him using only a broken fluorescent tube lamp. When Win finally leaves the facility for good, the plan is to smuggle him to a farm outside Majdanpek — the countryside there is full of foxes — where they’ll start a glo plantation and a glow factory big enough to export hundreds of kilograms of the drug a year. Jesnik’s uncle was sceptical at first, since he’d never managed to make any real money from ecstasy, but now he’s starting to negotiate terms. Of course, he doesn’t realise his nephew is gay — as far as he knows, Jesnik is just Win’s business partner.

Matryoshka dolls again, Raf thinks, except this time each doll is kept a secret from the one that contains it: the depot is disloyal to the city and the laboratory is disloyal to the depot and the chemist is disloyal to the laboratory, as if inside the Hopi reservation inside the Navajo reservation inside the state of Arizona there was yet another reservation which had a population of only one.