Glow (30 page)

‘How was it?’ he says.

‘Worse,’ she says hoarsely. ‘Way worse than usual.’

‘How could it be worse?’

‘I don’t know but that was a terrible idea. Oh my god.’ She starts laughing.

Starlings are hassling one another in the trees. ‘I wish Rose were here,’ Raf says.

‘Because she loves sperm so much?’

‘No! Because I haven’t been walking her enough recently and she’d like it out here.’

‘We could totally go get her from the roof if you want.’

‘She’s not on the roof. I’ve been keeping her at home the last few days – I don’t give a shit about guarding the transmitter if Lacebark are running Myth now. But, yeah, let’s go and get her, that would be nice.’ He gets to his feet and starts collecting up the picnic rubbish, still naked from the waist down, the backs of his thighs patterned by the gravel.

‘She’s in your apartment?’ Cherish says. Something behind her expression has reconfigured.

‘Yeah. Maybe we could have a nap while we’re there. I don’t think I could sleep out here with the sun coming up.’

‘Let’s not go to your apartment.’

‘Why not?’

‘I told you, I don’t want to go back indoors.’

‘Well, we don’t have to stay for a nap. You can just wait outside while I pick her up.’

‘Let’s stay here for a while,’ she says. ‘We can get her later.’ She leans her head against his leg in a gesture that feels not quite natural. One of the weird double qualities of bodily intimacy in relationships is that it gives you an excuse for those times when you’re so exasperated that in some trivial but not entirely symbolic way you find yourself trying to physically coerce someone, tugging at their wrist or sitting on their lap like a child, and that’s what Raf is reminded of here.

‘OK,’ he says cheerfully, and sits down again, because although he’s suspicious now, he wants to give himself time to think.

Does Cherish think Raf might be in danger somehow if he goes back to his flat? In danger from Lacebark? She said earlier that Lacebark quickly dismissed him as a false lead. Yes, they’d turn their attention back to him right away if they found out from Fourpetal how deeply he’s involved in all this. But that can’t happen if Fourpetal is already dead. And it certainly seems as if Fourpetal is already dead, since that’s the only explanation Raf can think of for Cherish’s nonchalance about the whole issue.

Unless for some reason Cherish wouldn’t care if Fourpetal was captured today. But of course she would care, because then she and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself would all be under threat.

He stops to revise that. Not Cherish or Raf, because they’re here at the tennis court. And not Win, because Lacebark don’t know about the real Win, only the fake one. And not necessarily Zaya or Ko, because if they really are watching Fourpetal, they’d have plenty of notice if Lacebark snatched him.

In fact, the only people in real jeopardy would be Jesnik, the fake Win, and any other Burmese guys from Zaya’s organisation who weren’t warned in time. If Fourpetal told Lacebark everything he knew, they wouldn’t have to wait for the first of June to start trampling. They’d launch immediate raids all over London, expecting to declare victory by morning. But they wouldn’t catch anyone very important. They’d just waste a day in a pointless convulsion. Which makes Raf recall what Cherish told him about her plan to get Win out of the city: ‘It’s too dangerous to move him at the moment. Lacebark have too many eyes. Until we can find some way of making them blink . . .’

Just like when he adjusted that line graph and realised the truth about Win, the understanding surges through him all at once as if administered intravenously, except this time there’s a colloid of venom suspended in the mixture.

Zaya wants Lacebark to catch Fourpetal. Zaya wants the raids to happen.

By the end of today, Lacebark will have only Jesnik, the fake Win, and a handful of other expendable Burmese guys. And Zaya will have all he really needs, which is a heartbroken, angry, loyal chemist, ready to leave London.

The reason this can work is that Fourpetal will give Lacebark a lot of false information. But he’ll believe it’s all true, because he learned it from Raf. And back then Raf believed it was true, too, because Cherish made sure that he did when he went to the flat in Camberwell. When she took him to the kitchen, it wasn’t an accident that he saw those pictures of Jesnik up on the fridge. Raf was meant to find out Jesnik was in a relationship with Win. And when she took him to the bathroom, it wasn’t an accident that the bin bag had fallen away from the window, or that they fucked in just the right place for Raf to see it. Raf was meant to think the location of the flat was a big secret so that he’d present it as such when he next talked to Fourpetal. He couldn’t have been more gullible.

This has got to be Zaya’s scheme, Raf decides, not Cherish’s. He can see how she might do nothing to prevent Lacebark from capturing Fourpetal. Maybe that has a sort of moral logic. And maybe that’s why she didn’t want to take glow with Raf last night. But there is just no way that she would be willing to see Jesnik go to his death in order to manipulate Win when as far as she knows the boy has nothing to do with any of this. Cherish must be following Zaya’s orders without understanding the whole picture. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Raf is trying to make up his mind whether to tell her all this when she says, ‘Are you zoning out already?’

‘Yeah, a bit.’

‘What time is it for you now?’

‘Only about midnight.’

‘I have to pee.’

She gets up, pulls on her high tops without bothering to lace them, and walks off towards the trees. Her phone is lying there on the ground. Raf picks it up, wondering if he’ll be able to find any clues in her text messages or her call log, but it turns out Cherish has a PIN lock on it.

There is one other thing he can do. But he has to decide right away, too fast to think about it, and there won’t really be any going back afterwards.

Raf slides the back of the case off the phone, takes out the SIM card, and bends it hard enough that it cracks down the middle without actually breaking in half. Then he replaces it exactly as it was, and puts the brain-dead phone back down. By the time Cherish comes back, he’s pulling on his trousers.

‘Are you going somewhere?’ There’s no concern in her voice. She’s a much better liar than Belasco, he thinks.

‘I just want to go back to the shop to pick up some water or some juice or something. We should’ve got some before.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, don’t bother, I’ll only be a minute.’

He thought maybe he could get away with this. But he can see it straight away: she’s guessed that he’s guessed.

The truth has been dragged out of the undergrowth and dumped there on the ground between them, flayed and steaming and membranous: the moment he leaves, Raf is going to do whatever he can to stop Zaya’s plan from going ahead, and Cherish is going to do whatever she can to stop him from stopping it. Each of them is going to fuck over the other, and it’s going to be irreparable, and each of them knows it, and neither of them wants to acknowledge it out loud. Since there’s no chance they’re going to change their minds, there’s nothing to be lost by talking about it. But he won’t until she does. And she won’t until he does. They’re locked together in an ouroboros of silence the same shape as the sex they just had, playing these underwritten roles like the extras in Lacebark’s training facility, and when he looks into her eyes it’s so frustrating he thinks his heart is going to pop like a light bulb in a microwave.

‘OK,’ Cherish says. He can tell that she’s trying not to cry now, which is contagious like a yawn. He takes a step forward to kiss her, and at first they’re both stiff with the awareness that if this kiss is any more passionate than the usual dutiful parting kiss you might give someone preparatory to a minor errand, it will spoil this pointless game they’re determined to play; but then it seems to occur to both of them at the same moment that if you’ve recently been entwined it’s customary to make your next kiss a small aftershock of what you just did to each other. By the time they reluctantly pull apart, they’re both too tearful to hide it any longer.

‘Do you ever feel like there’s . . . you know . . . a hole in things?’ Raf says softly.

‘No,’ Cherish says, shaking her head as if this is quite important. ‘No, Raf. There’s no hole in things. There’s just a hole in people.’

Raf steps back and gives her a small chest-level wave. Maybe every break-up is basically the same, he thinks, no matter how strange the circumstances. All that oxytocin is wonderful until you try to escape with it and somehow it’s transmuted into embittering agent, the same way that when you rob a bank the cashier hides a dye pack in your bag of money that will explode ten seconds after you pass the radio transmitter in the door frame. ‘See you in a bit,’ he says. Cherish looks at the ground. void void void void.

10.06 a.m.

When Isaac arrives at the playground opposite the Myth studio, his pupils are different sizes, but otherwise he seems lucid, which is a relief because Raf was worried that by now he’d be too far gone to be any help. Since the last time Raf was here someone has dumped one of those old-fashioned gumball machines in the bushes, its empty glass dome reflecting the sky like an astronaut’s helmet. ‘When did the rave finish?’ he says.

‘It hasn’t. You made me leave my own fucking party. What’s going on?’

Raf tells Isaac what he now knows.

‘And you worked all this out because Cherish seemed a bit shifty just now?’ Isaac says afterwards.

‘Seriously, Isaac, I’m sure of it. We have to warn everyone so they can go into hiding before the raids start.’ But it’s hopeless to carry the warning door to door like evangelists, Raf explains, even if they knew where to find Ko and the rest. There’s no way to be sure whom Zaya will decide to protect – maybe just himself and Win and Cherish, on the basis that the more bountiful the raids look to Lacebark, the longer it will take them to realise that the whole fox hunt has been deliberately allowed to happen. And even if Raf and Isaac could get to a few people in time, it wouldn’t be enough. When the captives from the first wave of raids begin to powderise under interrogation, they’ll implicate their contacts, and the danger will multiply out through all the dendrites of Lacebark’s ImPressure• network. Raf still doesn’t know how many Burmese immigrants Zaya has spread across London in honeycomb cells, but it might be dozens, and the second and third wave of raids might snare nearly all of them.

‘So what are we going to do?’

What Raf really wants to do is organise an assault of about a hundred foxes on Lacebark’s training facility. But even if Win could arrange that, Raf can’t. Instead, he gestures at the council block opposite. ‘Get on the radio.’

‘During the Burmese show?’

‘We can’t wait for that. But a lot of the people who listen to the Burmese show listen to Myth the rest of the day as well. If we can warn some of them, they’ll spread the news to the others.’ His plan is to get inside the studio and either trick the DJ into handing over the microphone or just overpower him with Isaac’s help.

‘What are we going to say?’

They won’t have much time before they’re thrown out of the studio by Dickson or whomever else is managing the station this morning. ‘?“If you have anything to do with Burmese anti-Lacebark activity or the production and distribution of glow, go somewhere no one is going to be able to find you, and stay there. Otherwise Lacebark may capture and kill you.”?’ If they can accomplish that much, then maybe the last two weeks won’t have been a total failure.

‘We’ll also mention that my rave is now down to six quid on the door.’

As they cross the road, Raf catches sight of the old gasometer in the distance, the sunset-coloured cylinder today pushed most of the way up inside its steel foreskin. At the council block, they get into the lift with Raf’s keys and go up to the fifth floor. Raf dials the mobile phone number that’s supposed to get him inside, but there’s no response. Even before Theo disappeared, this sometimes used to happen in the evenings when Dickson was so stoned he couldn’t be bothered to come to the door, and Raf wonders if discipline here has relaxed even further now. He tries the number a second time and then a third.

‘We should find a radio and check they’re at least on air,’ says Isaac.

But at that moment they hear bolts sliding back. As the door opens Raf is planning to whine about how long this took so he can avoid explaining why he’s turned up here without Rose on a Saturday morning.

The seven-foot Lacebark soldier in the doorway looks back at the two of them and frowns. At some point his big nose has been broken and reset so awkwardly that he now resembles a cartoon character trying to smell his own ear.

Raf, who isn’t quite as scared as he was last time, is hoping to stay calm and try to bluff their way out of this. But then Isaac bolts. And if one of them bolts then both of them have to.

The soldier was slow to react but by the time they get back around the corner and into the lift he’s not far behind. Raf punches the ground-floor button and then, frantically, again and again, the door-close button, trying to remember whether it’s a myth that those buttons do anything or whether it’s a myth that they don’t. Either way, as the doors begin to thrum shut, the soldier lunges forward with an outstretched hand. But instead of the safety sensor activating, the doors just keep closing, and as the soldier whips his hand back Raf gives thanks for poorly maintained social housing infrastructure.