Ned Beauman - Glow

It hadn’t occurred to Raf that there was more than one. ‘A friend of mine’s gone missing. Someone supposedly saw him getting pulled into a white van that didn’t make any noise.’

The guy waves him on. ‘Right. And?’

‘That’s all I know.’

‘That’s all you know? You didn’t even see it yourself?’

‘No.’

The guy leans back in his seat. ‘Well, this was a waste of time. On the phone you made it sound like you could actually give me something.’ Only now does Raf notice what looks like a dried ketchup stain on the lapel of his jacket. The guy sees him staring and looks down, then brushes at it pointlessly with two fingers. ‘From lunch. Bloody annoying. I only picked this up from the cleaners on Friday.’

‘What are the white vans?’ says Raf.

‘Stay away from them.’

‘Why? They’re just vans.’

The guy looks around and then leans forward again to answer almost in a whisper, even though a nearby table of teenagers are cackling loudly enough over a mobile phone video to cover anything he might say. ‘They’re not just vans, actually. They’re camouflaged military vehicles. They have hybrid engines so when they’re running off batteries they don’t make a sound.’

‘What? Military?’

‘Yes. Not British Army, though.’

‘Who, then?’

‘I can’t tell you that. But they’re kidnapping people. Mostly Burmese men, but some others. Such is the general reputation of white-van drivers, of course, that to most Londoners it couldn’t be less surprising to learn that they might have someone tied up in the back, although we’d be more likely to expect a weeping schoolgirl.’

Raf is baffled. ‘Burmese men? Why?’ He thinks of the newcomers at Myth.

‘I can’t say any more.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I work for the British government.’

‘What, like, MI6 or something?’

The guy shakes his head. ‘Not MI6,’ he says, his tone suggesting that somehow his job is even more secret than that. ‘The important thing is, if you hear any more about any of this, then call me straight away. And if you want to give your friend the best possible chance of coming back alive, don’t talk to anyone else about any of it.’ He grabs a last couple of chips as he gets up, his unbuttoned jacket revealing a stowaway paunch, and when Raf follows him back outside he sees that the clouds have cleared. ‘My God, that place is awful,’ the guy says. He’s about to cross the street when he halts abruptly and Raf turns to see why.

A white van is coming towards them, sun reflecting in the windscreen so Raf can’t make out the driver’s face.

The guy hurls himself back into the restaurant, almost knocking over a boy in a tracksuit, but Raf doesn’t react as fast, so he’s still standing there when the van brakes right beside him. The rear doors don’t open, though, and when the lights at the crossing change and the van drives on, Raf can hear the tired growl of an ageing diesel engine just like any other. On the back, in the grime, with index fingers, someone has written ‘i wish my wife was as dirty as this’ and someone else ‘she is with me’ and someone else ‘were as dirty’.

2.27 p.m.

Raf is at Isaac’s flat playing an Xbox game in which the virtual New York has its own diurnal cycle that lasts only forty-eight minutes, with light-modelling a hundred times more sophisticated than anything he’s ever worked on. He tells Isaac what he heard the day before, but he has to admit for all he knows the guy in McDonald’s also responds to every lost dog notice he sees with a story about ethnically specific kidnappings. After Isaac insists on switching the television over to the cricket, Raf starts leafing through a stack of the Japanese girls’ quasi-pornographic fashion magazines.

Raf and Isaac have been best friends since they were at comprehensive school together when they were fourteen. Isaac’s biological parents were alcoholics and he’d been taken into foster care when he was younger, but his new family were a gas giant of warmth and tolerance, and he always stayed out of trouble — except in the sense that he used to deal a lot of weed and pills, but nothing nasty ever came of that, and Isaac would probably disagree with the Southwark Council Family Support and Child Protection Office on whether it constituted ‘trouble’. He started DJing on Myth when he was nineteen in slots that weren’t so much graveyard as necropolis, but he didn’t really get to know Theo, or introduce Theo to Raf, until last year.

Raf thinks back to a night in January when he and Theo stopped at Isaac’s flat to pick up a spare CD deck on the way to a house party. A few weeks earlier, Isaac had been looking around on the internet for a site that would sell him dried psilocybin mushrooms by post when he’d come across one that instead sold fresh Gyromitra esculenta , a type of false morel used in Finnish cookery. Isaac is fascinated by these false morels, firstly because they are pinkish, bilobed and furrowy like a human brain, and secondly because they contain a precursor chemical called gyromitrin, which breaks down in the liver to a toxin called monomethylhydrazine, which was a component of the hypergolic propellant used in the Apollo Lunar Modules. Monomethylhydrazine is a toxin because it blocks the production of γ-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, an important neurotransmitter that you can buy in tablets as a treatment both for social anxiety disorders and for sleep disorders. But Isaac has spent his entire life swallowing pills without asking what’s in them — all kids do that, and a certain set of adults — so naturally he is cocky around fungus.

When Raf and Theo arrived in Isaac’s kitchen, he took three cans of beer out of the fridge and explained that he was cooking a traditional Finnish false morel omelette, but he wasn’t going to offer any to his guests because with gyromitrin there was some risk of headache, vomiting, diarrhoea, jaundice, delirium, coma and/or death, although many tough old Scandinavians did eat the mushrooms raw without reporting any sickness whatsoever and in this case he’d parboiled them for so long that he was pretty sure he’d ingest only the very minimum amount of gyromitrin necessary to meet the goal of the experiment, which for the historical record was to show that he had metabolised rocket fuel in his own body. He sang part of the ‘GABBA GABBA hey! GABBA GABBA hey!’ verse from ‘Pinhead’ by the Ramones. But then Theo snatched up the frying pan and said he wasn’t going to let any idiot eat poisonous mushrooms in his presence, and somehow the scuffle ended with him scraping the entire omelette into his mouth, choking down about half, and then vomiting into the sink. When it was over, Raf asked Theo why he didn’t just tip the omelette on to the floor. Theo shrugged and said he’d panicked. (A few weeks after that, Isaac learned from a messageboard that, like a confused ecstasy dealer, the site from which he’d ordered the false morels wasn’t selling real false morels but instead real morels falsely advertised as false morels. Real morels, which are harmless ascocarps used in Provençal cuisine, do contain hydrazine, which was a rocket fuel in the Nazis’ experimental Messerschmitt 163, but the problem is that they contain it from the very beginning, without the intervention of human biochemistry, which doesn’t excite Isaac.)

Even if the expedient was impulsive, the impulse itself was characteristic for Theo, who is a born rescuer. There was the time Barky got in trouble with an ecstasy wholesaler who supposedly had ties to the Serbian mafia, and Theo not only let him hide in his flat for a couple of weeks but also redeemed half of his debt by bartering away a block of daytime radio ads for the dealer’s brother-in-law’s motorcycle workshop. There was the time Theo needed a sentry for Myth FM’s single most valuable asset, and instead of just training up one of the Staffie puppies that are always oversupplied around here, he bought Rose, in effect a slightly faulty adoption dog. And there was the time he rescued Raf, too. Raf had begun to give up hope of ever finding any ongoing employment that didn’t involve just sitting alone in his flat doing piecework and wondering why he was alive. He didn’t want to be one of those sleep disorder patients who become nothing but vassals of their illness, but he could see himself going that way, and he had no idea what to do about it. Until this recent break-up it was the lowest point of his adult life. But then Theo heard about this from Isaac, and gave Raf a job that not only let him roam the streets but even exploited his peculiarity as a minor asset: if Rose was walked according to any regular timetable, then it would be easy to work out when the Myth FM transmitter was next going to be vulnerable for half an hour, but no one without a copy of Raf’s own home-made calendar application could predict his pseudo-random arrivals.