Ned Beauman - Glow

The reason this can work is that Fourpetal will give Lacebark a lot of false information. But he’ll believe it’s all true, because he learned it from Raf. And back then Raf believed it was true, too, because Cherish made sure that he did when he went to the flat in Camberwell. When she took him to the kitchen, it wasn’t an accident that he saw those pictures of Jesnik up on the fridge. Raf was meant to find out Jesnik was in a relationship with Win. And when she took him to the bathroom, it wasn’t an accident that the bin bag had fallen away from the window, or that they fucked in just the right place for Raf to see it. Raf was meant to think the location of the flat was a big secret so that he’d present it as such when he next talked to Fourpetal. He couldn’t have been more gullible.

This has got to be Zaya’s scheme, Raf decides, not Cherish’s. He can see how she might do nothing to prevent Lacebark from capturing Fourpetal. Maybe that has a sort of moral logic. And maybe that’s why she didn’t want to take glow with Raf last night. But there is just no way that she would be willing to see Jesnik go to his death in order to manipulate Win when as far as she knows the boy has nothing to do with any of this. Cherish must be following Zaya’s orders without understanding the whole picture. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Raf is trying to make up his mind whether to tell her all this when she says, ‘Are you zoning out already?’

‘Yeah, a bit.’

‘What time is it for you now?’

‘Only about midnight.’

‘I have to pee.’

She gets up, pulls on her high tops without bothering to lace them, and walks off towards the trees. Her phone is lying there on the ground. Raf picks it up, wondering if he’ll be able to find any clues in her text messages or her call log, but it turns out Cherish has a PIN lock on it.

There is one other thing he can do. But he has to decide right away, too fast to think about it, and there won’t really be any going back afterwards.

Raf slides the back of the case off the phone, takes out the SIM card, and bends it hard enough that it cracks down the middle without actually breaking in half. Then he replaces it exactly as it was, and puts the brain-dead phone back down. By the time Cherish comes back, he’s pulling on his trousers.

‘Are you going somewhere?’ There’s no concern in her voice. She’s a much better liar than Belasco, he thinks.

‘I just want to go back to the shop to pick up some water or some juice or something. We should’ve got some before.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, don’t bother, I’ll only be a minute.’

He thought maybe he could get away with this. But he can see it straight away: she’s guessed that he’s guessed.

The truth has been dragged out of the undergrowth and dumped there on the ground between them, flayed and steaming and membranous: the moment he leaves, Raf is going to do whatever he can to stop Zaya’s plan from going ahead, and Cherish is going to do whatever she can to stop him from stopping it. Each of them is going to fuck over the other, and it’s going to be irreparable, and each of them knows it, and neither of them wants to acknowledge it out loud. Since there’s no chance they’re going to change their minds, there’s nothing to be lost by talking about it. But he won’t until she does. And she won’t until he does. They’re locked together in an ouroboros of silence the same shape as the sex they just had, playing these underwritten roles like the extras in Lacebark’s training facility, and when he looks into her eyes it’s so frustrating he thinks his heart is going to pop like a light bulb in a microwave.

‘OK,’ Cherish says. He can tell that she’s trying not to cry now, which is contagious like a yawn. He takes a step forward to kiss her, and at first they’re both stiff with the awareness that if this kiss is any more passionate than the usual dutiful parting kiss you might give someone preparatory to a minor errand, it will spoil this pointless game they’re determined to play; but then it seems to occur to both of them at the same moment that if you’ve recently been entwined it’s customary to make your next kiss a small aftershock of what you just did to each other. By the time they reluctantly pull apart, they’re both too tearful to hide it any longer.

‘Do you ever feel like there’s. . you know. . a hole in things?’ Raf says softly.

‘No,’ Cherish says, shaking her head as if this is quite important. ‘No, Raf. There’s no hole in things. There’s just a hole in people.’

Raf steps back and gives her a small chest-level wave. Maybe every break-up is basically the same, he thinks, no matter how strange the circumstances. All that oxytocin is wonderful until you try to escape with it and somehow it’s transmuted into embittering agent, the same way that when you rob a bank the cashier hides a dye pack in your bag of money that will explode ten seconds after you pass the radio transmitter in the door frame. ‘See you in a bit,’ he says. Cherish looks at the ground. void void void void.

10.06 a.m.

When Isaac arrives at the playground opposite the Myth studio, his pupils are different sizes, but otherwise he seems lucid, which is a relief because Raf was worried that by now he’d be too far gone to be any help. Since the last time Raf was here someone has dumped one of those old-fashioned gumball machines in the bushes, its empty glass dome reflecting the sky like an astronaut’s helmet. ‘When did the rave finish?’ he says.

‘It hasn’t. You made me leave my own fucking party. What’s going on?’

Raf tells Isaac what he now knows.

‘And you worked all this out because Cherish seemed a bit shifty just now?’ Isaac says afterwards.

‘Seriously, Isaac, I’m sure of it. We have to warn everyone so they can go into hiding before the raids start.’ But it’s hopeless to carry the warning door to door like evangelists, Raf explains, even if they knew where to find Ko and the rest. There’s no way to be sure whom Zaya will decide to protect — maybe just himself and Win and Cherish, on the basis that the more bountiful the raids look to Lacebark, the longer it will take them to realise that the whole fox hunt has been deliberately allowed to happen. And even if Raf and Isaac could get to a few people in time, it wouldn’t be enough. When the captives from the first wave of raids begin to powderise under interrogation, they’ll implicate their contacts, and the danger will multiply out through all the dendrites of Lacebark’s ImPressure network. Raf still doesn’t know how many Burmese immigrants Zaya has spread across London in honeycomb cells, but it might be dozens, and the second and third wave of raids might snare nearly all of them.

‘So what are we going to do?’

What Raf really wants to do is organise an assault of about a hundred foxes on Lacebark’s training facility. But even if Win could arrange that, Raf can’t. Instead, he gestures at the council block opposite. ‘Get on the radio.’

‘During the Burmese show?’

‘We can’t wait for that. But a lot of the people who listen to the Burmese show listen to Myth the rest of the day as well. If we can warn some of them, they’ll spread the news to the others.’ His plan is to get inside the studio and either trick the DJ into handing over the microphone or just overpower him with Isaac’s help.

‘What are we going to say?’

They won’t have much time before they’re thrown out of the studio by Dickson or whomever else is managing the station this morning. ‘?“If you have anything to do with Burmese anti-Lacebark activity or the production and distribution of glow, go somewhere no one is going to be able to find you, and stay there. Otherwise Lacebark may capture and kill you.”?’ If they can accomplish that much, then maybe the last two weeks won’t have been a total failure.