Ned Beauman - Glow

Raf can’t help dividing the world into the people and institutions that are friendly to his disorder and the ones that are hostile to it — like a fox nesting behind a bus depot, he’s a creature making the best of an environment to which he is in some respects maladapted. So he feels an extra gratitude to his omelette-gobbling boss, maybe a unique one, on top of the friendship that’s developed between them over the past year. Should he believe the worst about what’s happened to Theo? He doesn’t know. But he won’t if he can possibly help it.

1.51 p.m.

The next-of-kin information you see on signs under railway bridges — ‘in case of emergency: if you witness a vehicle striking this railway bridge please contact railtrack’ — has for a long time made Raf hope very dearly that before he dies he will witness a vehicle striking a railway bridge just so he can finally call one of those engraved telephone numbers. On this rainy afternoon, walking Rose not far from his flat, the dirty ground under one of those bridges is a tintype of the dark belly above: from the square of dry asphalt you can make out its girth and from the inner grid of pigeon shit you can make out its iron ribs. Past the bridge is a basketball court, and from the way Rose strains forward Raf knows straight away that she’s scented something. Then he sees the fox sitting on the waist-high wall at the edge of the court, and just like when he got on that bus on Saturday, he’s so startled that he forgets his grip and the leash slips out of his hand as Rose shoots forward, snarling. She jumps against the wall, claws rasping at the brick, and what’s strange is that the fox is only a few inches out of her reach and yet it doesn’t even flinch as it looks down at her. It’s as if the fox has calculated that it’s safe and therefore has no reason to be alarmed, even though Raf knows that’s not how animals operate. The fox lets the wave crash against the wharf for a bit longer and then turns round, jumps down, and canters off across the court into some bushes. Rose keeps on barking loud enough to snap a glottis until Raf picks up the lead again and hauls her away. ‘Good job, girl,’ he says. ‘You definitely scared it off.’ He turns right at the end of the road, intending to go back to his flat to pick up an umbrella before he carries on the walk, and what he sees then is a lot more surprising than any sanguine fox.

A white van. Two men dressed all in black. And that same girl from the laundrette who said her name was Cherish. The rear doors of the van are open and they are pulling her inside.

Without even thinking, Raf runs forward. Rose is still riled so of course she keeps pace. When they’re just a leash’s distance from the men, she goes for them like she went for the fox. And the guy on the left pulls from a thigh holster what Raf recognises from many hours on Isaac’s Xbox as a semi-automatic pistol with a silencer, maybe an M9. He takes aim at Rose. ‘No!’ shouts Raf. Then the guy on the right puts a hand on the other guy’s arm, shakes his head, and says something Raf can’t hear.

As Raf tries to reel Rose back, both men get into the van and slam the rear doors behind them. The van accelerates away, silent if it weren’t for the squeak of its tyres on the wet road, and Raf watches as it turns left by the primary school on the corner and is lost from sight.

He looks back at the girl. Like the butt of a torch on a warehouse door, his heart is banging in his chest so hard that he can hardly believe it’s not audible. ‘Cherish, right?’ he says.

She’s wearing the same black hoodie but the hood isn’t up so her hair is straggly from the rain. ‘Yeah.’ Rose jigs around Cherish’s legs, all her violent energy transduced, until this new friend bends down and starts scratching her under the chin.

‘Do you have any idea who those guys were?’

‘No.’ She takes a long breath and puts a palm to her own chest. ‘That was. . Fuck! I feel like I just ran a race or something.’

So the guy in McDonald’s was telling the truth after all, Raf thinks. He wonders again where Theo is now. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ he says.

‘Yeah, but I think I might cry in a second.’

Raf shrugs. ‘OK.’

2.16 p.m.

Raf doesn’t clean his kitchen very often, so the floor is sown with sesame seeds and there’s a grouting of cumin power in almost every cranny. All the cupboard doors are made of that cheap painted chipboard that’s so lightweight they never quite feel as if they’re wholeheartedly shut. He turns up Myth FM on the radio and brings the two mugs of milky tea over to the table. ‘I just remembered. .’

‘What?’

‘The fake glow I gave you. Did you throw up? I’m really sorry.’

‘I never took it,’ says Cherish. Her hoodie is drying on the radiator. ‘I had to leave right after I met you. Lucky escape, I guess.’

Raf blows on his tea. ‘Have you ever had real glow?’

‘A few times.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘A lot like MDMA. But it lasts longer and it’s a lot more. . Don’t ask me what the word is. And it does things to the light. That’s where the name comes from.’

‘Like magic mushrooms?’

‘No, not really. Any electric light you look at, you see this. . I don’t know. But you can’t look away. Once I saw a guy in the street outside a party just standing there watching the traffic lights change like it was the most spectacular thing he’d ever seen.’

‘Only electric lights?’

‘Yeah.’

The contrarian hypothalamus won’t necessarily accept that you’re seeing what the visual cortex has decided you’re seeing, but instead insists on making its own private analysis of the heliometric data it gets from the optic nerve: that’s one possible explanation for Raf’s syndrome, but it might also mean that sometimes the hypothalamus knows the truth about light when all the rest of the brain is fooled by a hallucinogen. Out in the corridor Rose is dozing with the side of her face squashed against the skirting board. Raf knows that every minute he lets the dog idle in his flat is another minute that Myth’s transmitter is unguarded, and he already feels guilty. But for all anyone knows he could still be out walking her.

‘It’s weird that I saw you again,’ he says.

‘Yeah.’

On Myth they’re playing an ad for some club in Brixton: ‘Remember, dress to impress: no hats, jeans or trainers.’

He hesitates. ‘I was really, really, really hoping I would,’ he says.

‘Yeah?’

Raf feels as if their adrenaline is still here with them in the room but it’s started to expand, thin out, condense on the window like the steam from the electric kettle. She’s clasping her mug with both hands and he can see the veins that wind their pale green up between her knuckles and then drain it into skin a few shades more melanous than his own. He has never before had in his flat, he reminds himself, a girl whose life he might just have saved. He leans forward to kiss her.

Her tongue is warm from the tea, and then so are her fingers on the back of his neck. In this position they have to lean awkwardly into each other, as if the kiss is something heavy they’re hoisting through a broken window, so he pulls his chair closer to hers in two little hops. She pivots her left leg up to rest across his knees, and when he touches the bare ankle of her dangling foot her whole body shrugs. Normally the radio by the sink is tinny, but now the bass has crawled after them into this vault they’ve built with their lips and eyelids, and in the limitless darkness there it seems to find room to swell until Raf feels as if he could be back at the laundrette right next to a subwoofer. Their hands squirrel up under each other’s T-shirts, his fingers counting the bumps of her spine, and without thinking he starts to unhook her bra. She pulls away. ‘Hey. .’ she says, not angrily.