Ned Beauman - Glow

‘You’re going to betray Cherish and Zaya?’ he says.

Win shrugs. ‘I don’t care about that Shining Path shit. I just want to get rich and live in a big house with Jesnik the rest of my life. “My laboratory story keep me flowing with glory.”?’

‘The rest of your life? Really?’

‘Sure.’

‘So, I mean, do you love him?’ says Raf, feeling like someone’s dad.

‘You think I could love a bitch who hates rap music?’ says Win, but he says it in a way that means ‘Yes.’

Raf thinks of those old men playing cards in the café. Win’s deluding himself, surely, if he thinks the Serbian mafia, of all people, are going to give him a fair deal. And although there’s real tenderness in the chemist’s voice when he talks about his boyfriend, Raf is certainly glad that none of his own inevitable break-ups took place when both parties were stranded on a rainy Balkan crime farm.

‘Win, you wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for Zaya,’ he says. ‘Lacebark would’ve caught you back in Gandayaw and tortured you until you told them how to make glow. Cherish and Zaya need you so they can keep fighting. And you owe them.’ Raf can see from Win’s expression that he’s not getting anywhere. And ever since he heard Win’s story about Gandayaw, there’s been a question he’s been longing to ask, even though he knows he should save it for another time. ‘So if Lacebark were planning to use glo to regulate polyphasic sleep schedules in the Concession, that means it must do something to your circadian rhythms, right? Make them easier to change?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘Does that mean. . Do you think there could ever be a derivative that. .’ Raf realises he’s going to have to explain from the beginning. ‘Listen, I have this condition—’

Then he hears footsteps in the corridor behind him. He turns to look.

A Lacebark soldier stands in the doorway.

He’s wearing full black ops gear, like a golem built out of the darkness inside a sensory-deprivation hood. There’s a pistol in his thigh holster and he looks as if he could pop kneecaps like bubble wrap between finger and thumb. Raf’s first instinct is to try to escape through the fridge, but he knows that will expose Win’s route out of the freight depot, and they’ll probably both end up dead. In any case, a feedback squeal of terror is drowning out any orders Raf could possibly send to his limbs.

The soldier stares at him. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he says. ‘The call sheet just says one ethnic high-value target, as usual. No Caucasians.’

The soldier thinks Raf is just another extra. But Raf has no idea how to reply. His heart is stamping out each beat like a factory die.

The soldier strides forward, picks up Raf’s mug of tea, and pours the lukewarm dregs out into his lap. ‘Do you speak English? Or are you another of the Polacks? When the simulation starts, you’d better be gone, you mompie cunt, or I promise you Bezant will stick his Taser right down your fucking throat. All right?’

Raf nods, feeling the surrogate piss soak into his underwear. The soldier gives him a final long look. And then he turns and marches back down the corridor.

12.49 a.m.

From the front, there’s no evidence that a coup has taken place here. The warehouse looks just as it did when Isaac showed it to him last week. But with Lacebark gone, those two million litres of empty space sing a new anthem. Patting people down for weapons around the back is a squat bouncer with pouches under his eyes that bulge like hospital blood bags, and Raf recognises him from several of Isaac’s previous raves, so they have a little chat. The soundproofing, apparently, has been more trouble than Isaac could have anticipated: almost everyone who turns up asks if the rave’s been cancelled, because they weren’t able to navigate down the street by the bass, and then they’re even more restless than usual in the queue, because usually it’s the heartbeat of the music inside that keeps you interested while you’re waiting. The steel door here reminds Raf of a particular gag in old cartoons: from total silence to loud noise as soon as it’s ajar and then back to total silence as soon as it’s shut. And when he pays his nine quid and gets inside, tears rush to his eyes just like they did when he was watching the fake rain in the freight depot, except this time there’s a grin on his face too.

Isaac’s done it. This is a genuine full-scale early nineties illegal warehouse rave of the type Raf thought he might never get a chance to experience, except that the music they’re playing is the same music you hear on Myth FM every day. As far as anyone knew, there were almost no gaps left in the surface of London, just an impermeable glossy sheath, but Lacebark bored some holes and now hundreds of people are crawling in after them. The bouncer told him that before long they’re probably going to reach ‘capacity’, which is Isaac’s semi-arbitrary estimate for the maximum number of people that can fit in here before it’s no fun to dance any more. As he feels the subwoofers licking his ribs with their rough Staffie tongues, Raf knows that after tonight he can never go back to that laundrette. All that’s nagging at him is the thought that the last time loud bass tones were played in this room, they were to tenderise someone for interrogation. But he decides this is just the most thorough possible reconsecration of this ground, chasing away the poison from every frequency.

On his way to the trestle-table bar for a beer, he brushes past a sweaty couple holding hands, and he realises delightedly that it’s the boy and the girl from the dryer the weekend before last — they’re rosy, seraphic, with pupils the size of howitzer barrels, and he wants to tell them that if they feel as if this is the best night of their lives, they might actually be right. Then he feels a touch on his arm. And he knows this. He’s been here before.

‘This is pretty awesome,’ Cherish says into his ear.

He never sees her arrive or leave anywhere, he thinks. She’s just there. Like Batman. One day he’d like to watch her untangling her headphones from her scarf from the strap of her bag as she comes into a pub. He kisses her straight away, just as if she was his girlfriend. ‘Yeah, it is,’ he says. Then he remembers the reason he’s not supposed to enjoy himself. ‘Hey, I really have to talk to you about Fourpetal.’

She puts a hand on his arm. ‘It’s fine. We’re watching him.’

‘You know where he is?’

She nods.

‘So he can’t do anything stupid and get himself interrogated?’

‘Raf, relax. It’s fine. I promise.’

There’s something a little bit slippery about Cherish’s casualness here. Just watching Fourpetal isn’t going to be enough, surely. That won’t stop Lacebark from getting him. Cherish should have snatched him up herself and locked him in a room somewhere. Coming to a rave with Raf should not be the priority tonight. Unless she already has a reason to be certain that Fourpetal isn’t a threat any more.

Is it possible, Raf thinks, that Fourpetal is already dead, and Cherish doesn’t want him to know? Zaya is a soldier, after all, and he probably wouldn’t think twice about killing someone who was about to wreck the whole operation. Of course, Zaya couldn’t have physically accomplished it himself. But Ko could have. Or Cherish. Raf looks at her, wondering if she would have been capable of a pragmatic murder. It doesn’t feel plausible. But maybe that’s just because she’s so pretty and he doesn’t have any imagination. After all, she’s a soldier too. Raf doesn’t know how he’d feel about the right and wrong of it all if he learned that Fourpetal really had been stubbed out. For the hundredth time, he runs through all the people Fourpetal could doom. Cherish and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself.