Ned Beauman - Glow

It’s not just that he’d rather live in south London than in a mudhole in the Serbian countryside. He’d rather live in south London than anywhere else in the world. All he needs to do is tape up some honeycomb over his door. Nothing is so bad that it can leave an indelible stain on this place, not break-ups, not Lacebark, not Theo’s death, not anything: however frightening the last couple of weeks may have been, they should have reminded him of that. Cherish was right. There is no hole in things. Right now, if he saw a fox sidling out from under a parked car, that would feel so appropriate, so fated, so perfect, that he almost can’t believe it won’t happen, and he’s looking around optimistically when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He sees an unfamiliar number on the screen and guesses straight away who it’s going to be. ‘Hi.’

‘Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?’ Cherish says. ‘Win’s gone. We think the Serbians have him. But maybe you know better than I do.’

‘He didn’t want to work for you any more.’

‘This wasn’t about what he wanted. This wasn’t about you or me or Win or Zaya. This wasn’t even about Lacebark. This was about revolution. We were going to take over northern Burma and turn it into a narco-state. Like Bolivia. Like Guinea-Bissau. The world’s first and only benign narco-state. We would’ve laundered our money through the same banks Lacebark use. Al Qaeda’s annual budget is twenty million dollars. Even Hezbollah’s is only four hundred million dollars. Do you know what we could have done with ten billion dollars a year from a monopoly on glow? Every man, woman, and child on this earth working as a slave to some corporation, we would have gone out and given them their freedom. First at the Concession, then everywhere else. Can you even begin to imagine the good we would’ve done? The lives we would’ve saved? And you stopped us, because now the Serbians have glow. You just made sure your friend Theo died for absolutely nothing.’

‘But you were going to let all those other people die too. They were on your side and you were going to give them up.’

‘Letting people die is something you have to do sometimes when you want to do good. Killing people is something you have to do sometimes when you want to do good. Do you really think whacking a snake against a tree was the worst initiation Zaya put me through when I went to visit him in Burma?’

Raf doesn’t even want to think about what she’s implying. He remembers Zaya’s pious claim about how he didn’t want any of the Burmese extras in the training facility to get into trouble as collateral damage. ‘You have to stop listening to Zaya. I don’t know how he convinced you to do this but—’

‘Convinced me? You’re just going to assume that it would have taken a man to come up with that stuff? Do you know how fucking condescending that is? Raf, it was my plan. Passing Fourpetal to Lacebark was my plan. Not Zaya’s.’

‘And feeding me all that false information about Win was your plan too.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So when we had sex in the bathroom, you weren’t even turned on, it was just business.’

‘I guess it would never occur to you that maybe the reason I was so turned on was exactly because it was meant to be just business.’

Graupels of crushed styrofoam packaging skitter across the pavement as the breeze picks up. Rose walks off to piss against a lamp-post. Raf felt pathetic asking that last question but somehow it seemed important. And maybe also it was a way of working up to the question he really wants to ask, which is whether it means anything that she tried to protect him. This morning, she must have thought that if he went back to his flat to fetch Rose without knowing what was about to happen, there was a chance he’d be there when Lacebark launched their raids. So she tried to make sure he didn’t go home. But he knows there are any number of reasons why she might have made that choice. ‘Cherish, you knew I was going to do this, right?’ he asks instead. ‘At the tennis court, I could tell that you knew. But you didn’t try to stop me.’

After a pause, Cherish says, ‘I didn’t know you were going to sabotage my fucking cellphone.’

But that isn’t really the point, Raf thinks. He wishes that somehow they could be face to face again for this. ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’

‘Seriously? You are seriously asking me that question? No, of course you are never going to see me again. And you’re never going to see London again, either. I hope you know that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lacebark are going to come looking for you soon.’

‘Are you going to give me up to them?’

‘No, Raf. I could, and maybe Zaya would say that I should, but I won’t. But when Lacebark realise Win’s not in London any more, they’ll start to wonder how things went so wrong here. And I know for sure that when they take another look at their ImPressure metadata, it’ll tell them to take you in. You have to go somewhere they won’t think to look for you.’

‘But I want to stay in London. I’ve only just decided I want to stay. Summer’s starting.’

‘No. Leave. And stay the fuck out of Burma, too.’ She hangs up.

Raf puts the phone back in his pocket and looks around. He doesn’t see a fox.

Isaac has been following the white van for nearly five hours. Because he already knows the route the van is taking — þjóðvegur 1 loops around Iceland like a giant M25 and there’s no other sensible route from Reykjavik to Dalvík — he hasn’t needed to stay within sight of it all the time, so it’s possible that the other driver won’t even have noticed him. While he’s been driving, the sun has hauled itself up to the parapet of the horizon, hung on there panting for a while, and then fallen away with a bronzy moan of resignation, leaving no trace but the last drag of its fingernails in the clouds to the south. Now it’s night again. During that long fermata of dusk, when the motorway was snaking alongside what he is reasonably confident in identifying as a fjord, he saw four ponies grazing on the hillside opposite, bearlike in their winter duffles, not far from a gingerbread farmhouse with a red roof; some of the time this place could pass for a kind of steroidal, mythic Yorkshire. In his wallet he has the phone number of a tall blonde he met at the airport whose genotype must be perfect in the same way that the circles and squares described in mathematical proofs are perfect. She told him four or five times how to pronounce þjóðvegur but he couldn’t even get the first syllable right.

Somehow even in the darkness you get a sense of the huge cliffs rising over Dalvík across the bay. On the approach to the harbour Isaac pulls closer to the white van, because for the first time he doesn’t know exactly where it’s going and he doesn’t want to lose it among the warehouses and containers and derelict fishmeal plants. This must be one of those Icelandic towns that over the course of the previous decade started to feel a bit embarrassed that it was good for nothing but fishing and now is learning to feel proud of that again. The van carries on all the way to the second-farthest jetty, where a boat is already waiting for its exceptionally precious cargo. Isaac parks not far away. For a little while he’s worried that there’ll be no one here to meet him but then there’s a knock on the window. He gets out of the car. When Raf gives him a hug they’re like sumo wrestlers in their jumpers and parkas. Out here it’s several degrees below zero and a razor-edged wind is blowing in off the water.