Ned Beauman - Glow

In the end, Isaac and Raf hand over twelve thousand kronur, partly just for the sheer novelty of buying phenylethylamines in Dalvík harbour. They say goodbye to the Icelanders — although the man from the boat still hasn’t spoken a word — and then get back into the hire car to warm up while they watch the ark set sail for Hrísey.

‘Six months ago no one outside London had heard of glow,’ Isaac says. ‘And now it’s here?’

‘The Serbians were never going to be able to keep it themselves. We knew that.’

‘MDMA took seventy years to get popular. And do they even have foxes around here?’

‘Arctic foxes are the only mammals that got to Iceland before people did. I’ve seen them a few times but it’s not as cool as seeing a fox in London. Do you still want to go and watch the northern lights tonight?’

‘Of course I fucking do. I brought a VLF receiver. We should take some glow, too.’

‘But glow only works with artificial light,’ says Raf. ‘That’s what everyone says.’

‘First of all, I never really believed that anyway, because how would that work, scientifically? Second, the aurora borealis is nitrogen and oxygen atoms giving off photons as they return from an excited state to a ground state. That’s just like fluorescent tubes, LEDs, cathode rays. The northern lights are a lot more similar to artificial light than they are to sunlight.’

‘OK, well, we can give it a go.’

They decide to drive back to Akureyri to have dinner first.

‘So what’s it actually like to live here?’ says Isaac on the way. He’s realised that the black ice on these roads is mostly harmless until it smells fear.

‘Nice. Boring. Cheaper than Reykjavik, which is useful — I’m doing more rendering work than I used to but the money’s still crap. And some English teaching.’

‘Are you going out with anyone?’

‘I was for a bit. But she broke up with me a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Shit, really? Do you avoid her?’ Isaac knows what Raf is like.

‘Are you joking? Akureyri is tiny. There are only four bars. And only one of them’s open after three in the morning. I see her all the time. It’s OK, though.’

‘And how’s your menstrual cycle?’

‘I don’t notice it so much,’ Raf says.

‘Like you were hoping?’

‘Yeah. In the middle of summer and the middle of winter everyone’s rhythms are erratic here. You get up. You go to sleep. It’s day. It’s night. The clock isn’t so important.’

‘Did you know that all moles — except Japanese and American shrew-moles — are equally active day and night? They just come out whenever they feel like it. You could find acceptance among the moles. You, the moles, the Martians, and the northern Icelanders.’

‘Thanks, mate. That means a lot.’

They eat bad hamburgers in Akureyri, fill up the car at a petrol station, and drive halfway back to Dalvík to get some distance from the town’s gentle light pollution before they pull off to the side of the road. Isaac reluctantly takes off his woollen gloves so he can make the two quarter-gram tortellini of glow that they’ll wash down with local beer.

‘I can’t believe after all this time I’m finally going to find out what this stuff is like,’ Raf says.

‘These are for Theo,’ Isaac says, clicking his beer can against Raf’s.

‘These, and all the rest.’

While they wait to come up, Isaac puts the batteries into his VLF receiver, which he ordered from one of the same websites from which Myth FM sometimes used to buy its spare parts. With the right equipment, the aurora borealis is not only visible but audible, a celestial radio station transmitting on the same marathon wavelengths that government time signals use to keep radio clocks synchronised with atomic clocks. And indeed before they see the lights they hear them, like dead leaves crunching under someone’s boots as birds whistle and peep in the background. Only much later does the sky begin its dim emerald churn.

They get out of the car for a clearer view, and while it’s probably not the most spectacular display in the history of the auroral zone, it’s still enough to make Isaac wish he could see it every night for the rest of his life. He thinks of the afternoon nine or ten years ago that he bunked off school with Raf to go to Nunhead Reservoir. They climbed in through a gap in the fence and sat down together on one of the graffiti-covered concrete hatches at the top of the mound, not so much to watch the sun go down as to watch the city light up afterwards. The two of them had only just started to become friends and when you’re a teenage boy it doesn’t feel quite right to admit that you’ve gone to a lot of trouble just for a nice view. But that afternoon it was fine. He’s missed Raf these last few months and he’s glad to be here with him now as the magnetosphere smoulders far above.

The ‘glow’, on the other hand, has done absolutely nothing. ‘Those guys ripped us off,’ he says, lurching from foot to foot to keep warm.

‘I don’t really care,’ says Raf.

‘No, me neither. They let you see Rose.’

‘Yeah. By the way, how are the Japanese girls?’

‘I’m sorry to say this but they’ve really let themselves go in the last few months.’

‘Seriously?’

‘No,’ says Isaac. ‘As always, they are magnificent.’

The signal on the VLF receiver is getting even stronger. Isaac imagines the neurons in his visual cortex sparking in patterns that mirror the ionisation in the sky, just smaller and with a bit of a lag, like a little girl dancing in front of a pop video on TV. ‘You know he said the lab was “nearby”? I bet it’s on that island somewhere. Can you think of a better place for it?’

So far tonight they’ve hardly spoken about what happened in May. Talking about the past with Raf isn’t always easy. He can be surprisingly bitter for someone so young. Nostalgia’s like an ImPressure network: most of the database is harmless but there are connections you don’t expect and you’re never more than a couple of clicks away from the high-value targets, the redacted entries. Isaac decides not to put it off any longer. ‘You know Lacebark are getting taken over byXujiabang Copper and Gold?’

‘Fuck, I didn’t know that.’

‘Announced this morning.’ But nothing has ever come out in the press about Lacebark’s activities in the Concession or in London. Isaac knows Raf sent anonymous tip-offs to a lot of journalists and bloggers. But it was hard to be sure how much to explain to them. If you tried to dump the whole story at once, there wasn’t much chance they’d believe it. And there was no real evidence to attach as ballast. The video with the foxes has disappeared from YouTube and Raf never had a copy of the original Pankhead email that got Fourpetal involved.

‘Do you know what’s going on at the farm now?’ Isaac says.

‘About a month ago I got a private message on Lotophage from Win. He said he’s still out there with Jesnik making glow. He sounded cheerful. But apparently Fourpetal’s gone. One night he stole the keys to one of the four-wheel drives. They have no idea where he went.’

‘Have you heard from anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘What about Cherish?’

Isaac feels as if it’s all right to ask the question because Raf seemed so equable about his ex in Akureyri. But his friend doesn’t answer and Isaac doesn’t want to press him on it. So for a time the silence between them is broken only by the chirruping of the lights in the sky.