Ned Beauman - Glow

‘But after they searched your flat, and watched you for another day or so, they gave up and moved on.’

‘Did you tell them we had sex?’ he says.

There’s something especially creepy about the thought of Lacebark mapping sexual commerce in their ImPressure network like a village gossip. If Fourpetal did tell Lacebark that Jesnik was in a prelingual relationship with Win, they’d note it down eagerly (even if they still had the wrong referent in mind for that name). Maybe the real Win is safe for a while, but Lacebark could still take Jesnik from him. Raf tries to imagine how he’d feel if those mercenaries did something to Cherish. With Jesnik gone, Win would presumably lose interest in defecting to the Serbians. In fact, he might be so furious with Lacebark that he’d pledge allegiance to Zaya and what he called ‘that Shining Path shit’ for the rest of his life.

‘I didn’t tell them everything,’ says Cherish. ‘I just told them I made out with you, so you wouldn’t be suspicious.’

He remembers that afternoon, and looks down at the pack of miracle berries. ‘Hey, did I say something to make you think I don’t like the way you taste? Because—’

‘No! I just want to know what this is like. Take off your pants and get on your back.’

She settles herself over him on all fours so that she can suck his cock at the same time as he licks her from underneath. He can feel when his tongue is in the right place because it makes her bobbing mouth falter and purse for a second before it hurries up again. After a while she pauses and says, ‘OK, what do I taste like?’

They’re both out of breath. ‘Pretty good but not as sweet as the lemons.’

She runs a fingernail down the dorsal vein of his penis and he shivers. ‘Are you disappointed? Were you expecting, like, cookie-dough ice cream?’

‘Kind of, yeah.’ He remembers Isaac telling him about a photographer’s assistant he went out with for a while whose prescription mood stabilisers not only diminished her secretions but also left them disconcertingly odourless and flavourless. Isaac, who is devoted to cunnilingus, said it was like having sex with a Scandinavian welfare system. To Raf there’s something persuasive about the finding that a person’s capacity for joy might percolate into their glands and follicles. If you wanted, you could say that the sweetness of Cherish’s clitoris on his kinked chemoreceptors is just a sort of oral hallucination. But the taste of her seems more truthful to Raf now than it ever did before. Take these miracle berry tablets often enough and you’d begin to believe that they revealed the real sweetness hidden in external objects in just the same way that MDMA sometimes seems to reveal the real joy, a coy pith of luminance like the alkaloids Win had such trouble refining from glo petals. After all, sweetness isn’t just a taste, it’s also the pleasure stitched inextricably into that taste. And you can’t be mistaken about pleasure: like pain, if you think you feel it, then you feel it. Then again, there’s not much that’s sweeter than antifreeze; he’s read that they discourage people from drinking ethylene glycol by accident by mixing it with something called an ‘embittering agent’, which is presumably distilled from pillowcase tears.

‘What do I taste like?’ he says.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she says, and puts him back in her mouth. He moves his hands over her body, mapping her vectors of influence. From this angle the sun reflects so brightly off the edge of her hip that it could be a coin or the face of a watch, and when he comes he feels as if he’s siphoning the light back into her mouth like a periscope. Afterwards, she spits a couple of times on the ground and then reaches for an open can of Guinness.

‘How was it?’ he says.

‘Worse,’ she says hoarsely. ‘Way worse than usual.’

‘How could it be worse?’

‘I don’t know but that was a terrible idea. Oh my god.’ She starts laughing.

Starlings are hassling one another in the trees. ‘I wish Rose were here,’ Raf says.

‘Because she loves sperm so much?’

‘No! Because I haven’t been walking her enough recently and she’d like it out here.’

‘We could totally go get her from the roof if you want.’

‘She’s not on the roof. I’ve been keeping her at home the last few days — I don’t give a shit about guarding the transmitter if Lacebark are running Myth now. But, yeah, let’s go and get her, that would be nice.’ He gets to his feet and starts collecting up the picnic rubbish, still naked from the waist down, the backs of his thighs patterned by the gravel.

‘She’s in your apartment?’ Cherish says. Something behind her expression has reconfigured.

‘Yeah. Maybe we could have a nap while we’re there. I don’t think I could sleep out here with the sun coming up.’

‘Let’s not go to your apartment.’

‘Why not?’

‘I told you, I don’t want to go back indoors.’

‘Well, we don’t have to stay for a nap. You can just wait outside while I pick her up.’

‘Let’s stay here for a while,’ she says. ‘We can get her later.’ She leans her head against his leg in a gesture that feels not quite natural. One of the weird double qualities of bodily intimacy in relationships is that it gives you an excuse for those times when you’re so exasperated that in some trivial but not entirely symbolic way you find yourself trying to physically coerce someone, tugging at their wrist or sitting on their lap like a child, and that’s what Raf is reminded of here.

‘OK,’ he says cheerfully, and sits down again, because although he’s suspicious now, he wants to give himself time to think.

Does Cherish think Raf might be in danger somehow if he goes back to his flat? In danger from Lacebark? She said earlier that Lacebark quickly dismissed him as a false lead. Yes, they’d turn their attention back to him right away if they found out from Fourpetal how deeply he’s involved in all this. But that can’t happen if Fourpetal is already dead. And it certainly seems as if Fourpetal is already dead, since that’s the only explanation Raf can think of for Cherish’s nonchalance about the whole issue.

Unless for some reason Cherish wouldn’t care if Fourpetal was captured today. But of course she would care, because then she and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself would all be under threat.

He stops to revise that. Not Cherish or Raf, because they’re here at the tennis court. And not Win, because Lacebark don’t know about the real Win, only the fake one. And not necessarily Zaya or Ko, because if they really are watching Fourpetal, they’d have plenty of notice if Lacebark snatched him.

In fact, the only people in real jeopardy would be Jesnik, the fake Win, and any other Burmese guys from Zaya’s organisation who weren’t warned in time. If Fourpetal told Lacebark everything he knew, they wouldn’t have to wait for the first of June to start trampling. They’d launch immediate raids all over London, expecting to declare victory by morning. But they wouldn’t catch anyone very important. They’d just waste a day in a pointless convulsion. Which makes Raf recall what Cherish told him about her plan to get Win out of the city: ‘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. .’

Just like when he adjusted that line graph and realised the truth about Win, the understanding surges through him all at once as if administered intravenously, except this time there’s a colloid of venom suspended in the mixture.

Zaya wants Lacebark to catch Fourpetal. Zaya wants the raids to happen.

By the end of today, Lacebark will have only Jesnik, the fake Win, and a handful of other expendable Burmese guys. And Zaya will have all he really needs, which is a heartbroken, angry, loyal chemist, ready to leave London.