Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Jesus, I can’t believe this is really where you live now,’ says Isaac.

‘I live down the road.’

Isaac saw a sign for Akureyri just before he turned off the motorway. ‘Yeah, but I mean, Iceland. The sixtieth parallel. This time of year it must be like living in one of those West African cities where they get only about ten minutes of electricity a day. Except instead of electricity it’s daylight.’

‘You should have been here in June.’

If he ever had to acclimatise himself to a new latitude, Isaac thinks he would do better than Linnaeus’s tea but not nearly so well as Win’s glo . Shivering, he looks over at the van. ‘Ready for this, then?’

By now the bearded driver has opened the back and a second man has come down the gangway of the ship to help him unload. From inside the van comes a mess of noises. As Isaac and Raf come near, the other two men turn to see what they want. ‘ Já? ’ says the driver.

Isaac watches Raf take a moment to decide how to put this. The harbour lights cast long shadows. ‘I’ve come to say hello to my dog.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I just want to say hello to her on the way from the van to the boat.’

The driver shakes his head. ‘The animals have to be taken directly to quarantine on the island.’

Driving here, it occurred to Isaac that if he were the government of Iceland he would quietly ensure that Hrísey were set up to receive people, too. Coronavirus was coming eventually and you couldn’t be too careful.

‘I don’t need to take her out of the transport kennel or anything,’ says Raf.

‘They’re not allowed any human contact. That’s the whole point. I hope you didn’t come all the way from Reykjavik for this?’

‘I did,’ Isaac says. ‘Listen, he hasn’t seen his dog in more than six months. He’s not going to see her again for another month after this. The dog doesn’t know where in fuck’s name she’s been taken and she also doesn’t know if she’s ever going to see this guy again in her life. Just let them say hello to each other through the little grille.’

This was the best plan that Raf and Isaac could come up with. If they understood more about how the Burmese got Win to London, or how the Serbians later got him to Majdanpek, then maybe they would have known how to smuggle Rose to Akureyri, perhaps using some sort of intermediate safehouse on the Faroe Islands. But they didn’t. For an animal to enter Iceland legally, it needs to obtain a sheaf of certificates and a microchip in its ear, and there wasn’t time for any of that before Raf fled London at the start of the summer. To be safe, Isaac couldn’t follow too soon, because they didn’t know who might still be watching. So he waited six months and then organised Rose’s emigration. When she passed all the blood tests, Isaac assumed it could only have been because veterinary science did not yet have the means to detect or even really conceptualise the pandemonium of spores and endoparasites surely languishing in her tissues after a lifetime on the streets of south London.

Then Raf could have gone down to Reykjavik this morning, but because of security there would have been no way for him to get into the section of the airport where the pet chaperones wait to get their certificates checked before their pets are taken into thirty-day quarantine. And they had discovered that, of the two competing accredited quarantine stations in Iceland, the cheaper one happened to be on an island less than thirty miles from the town where Raf was living. So it made sense, relatively speaking, for Raf to meet Isaac here at the harbour.

‘Please,’ Isaac says. He tried to get the blonde at the airport to teach him how to say ‘We would be eternally grateful’ but, again, it was too hard.

The driver looks at the other man and then back at Isaac and Raf. ‘If you are here when we take the dog out of the van. .’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Well, then you are here.’

When the Icelanders start loading the transport kennels on to the boat, they work much faster than Isaac was expecting, and he can’t ask them to slow down in case they change their minds. So for a while he’s worried that Rose might slip past them like a drum of sassafras oil past a customs check. But in fact when the seventh kennel comes out of the van, it starts shaking and barking as if it’s warming up for a thermonuclear fusion reaction. Rose has caught Raf’s scent. So the Icelanders lower the kennel to the ground and Raf gets down on his hands and knees for the prison visit. This reunion can’t be that satisfying for either of them, but at least it might give Rose a bit of hope for the future while she’s serving out her sentence so far from her friends.

Isaac’s going to miss Rose too, of course. He’s already thinking about getting a pet to replace her. For a while he wondered about a star-nosed mole, and did some research into moles in general, but he’s now more interested in naked mole-rats, which aren’t actually related to moles but are singular in various ways. First of all, a naked mole-rat looks like a wrinkly cock with fangs, and mole-rats are the only mammals that have queens and workers the same way bees and termites do, so a photo of a naked mole-rat nest reminds him of a nineteenth-century Toyokuni woodblock print that Hiromi once showed him, depicting the ‘penis god’ and his offspring. Second, naked mole-rats never get cancer, which is pretty weird. Third, the skins of naked mole-rats don’t have a neurotransmitter called substance P that administers pain in other animals. Because the lack of ventilation in their nests fugs the air down there with carbon dioxide, a lot of acid builds up in their tissues, and if they had substance P then they would be in constant discomfort.

To Isaac this is an example of evolution’s brusque mercy. Evolution hasn’t bothered to prevent human childbirth from being agonisingly painful, because the pain of childbirth doesn’t make a woman any less likely to reproduce. But it has gone to some lengths to soothe the pain of these mole-rats, like a boss who grudgingly lets you have a nap every three and a quarter hours because it might make you more productive. The more Isaac reads about the question of consciousness, the more persuaded he is that the shortest route to the answer will come from understanding the relationship between the functional roles of pain and pleasure and their phenomenology — between what purpose they serve in the brain and what they actually feel like. The subjective experiences of colour and pitch and temperature don’t seem to have any intrinsic meaning, any intrinsic push. But the subjective experiences of pleasure and pain have ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ built into them. How can that be? How can banal matter achieve that?

After a while Raf reluctantly gets back to his feet and waves goodbye to the kennel as it’s taken off down the gangway. The Icelanders seem to relax a bit now they’ve seen that Raf was sincere, and when they’ve finished with the kennels, the driver says, ‘Where are you two from?’

‘London,’ says Isaac.

‘But I live in Akureyri now,’ says Raf.

‘Oh, I went to London once! Great for clubs.’

‘Yeah, I put on some nights myself,’ says Isaac.

‘Have you been out in Reykjavik yet?’

‘We’re going to drive down there tomorrow night.’

‘Do you want to buy some glow?’

Isaac exchanges a bemused look with Raf. ‘There’s glow in Dalvík?’

‘A friend of mine has a lab nearby.’

‘How much?’ he says.

‘Fifteen thousand kronur for a gram.’

‘That’s a lot.’

The driver smiles. ‘This is Iceland.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not like your friend is paying VAT and import duty,’ Raf says. ‘Ten thousand.’