Glow (32 page)

It’s not just that he’d rather live in south London than in a mudhole in the Serbian countryside. He’d rather live in south London than anywhere else in the world. All he needs to do is tape up some honeycomb over his door. Nothing is so bad that it can leave an indelible stain on this place, not break-ups, not Lacebark, not Theo’s death, not anything: however frightening the last couple of weeks may have been, they should have reminded him of that. Cherish was right. There is no hole in things. Right now, if he saw a fox sidling out from under a parked car, that would feel so appropriate, so fated, so perfect, that he almost can’t believe it won’t happen, and he’s looking around optimistically when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He sees an unfamiliar number on the screen and guesses straight away who it’s going to be. ‘Hi.’

‘Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?’ Cherish says. ‘Win’s gone. We think the Serbians have him. But maybe you know better than I do.’

‘He didn’t want to work for you any more.’

‘This wasn’t about what he wanted. This wasn’t about you or me or Win or Zaya. This wasn’t even about Lacebark. This was about revolution. We were going to take over northern Burma and turn it into a narco-state. Like Bolivia. Like Guinea-Bissau. The world’s first and only benign narco-state. We would’ve laundered our money through the same banks Lacebark use. Al Qaeda’s annual budget is twenty million dollars. Even Hezbollah’s is only four hundred million dollars. Do you know what we could have done with ten billion dollars a year from a monopoly on glow? Every man, woman, and child on this earth working as a slave to some corporation, we would have gone out and given them their freedom. First at the Concession, then everywhere else. Can you even begin to imagine the good we would’ve done? The lives we would’ve saved? And you stopped us, because now the Serbians have glow. You just made sure your friend Theo died for absolutely nothing.’

‘But you were going to let all those other people die too. They were on your side and you were going to give them up.’

‘Letting people die is something you have to do sometimes when you want to do good. Killing people is something you have to do sometimes when you want to do good. Do you really think whacking a snake against a tree was the worst initiation Zaya put me through when I went to visit him in Burma?’

Raf doesn’t even want to think about what she’s implying. He remembers Zaya’s pious claim about how he didn’t want any of the Burmese extras in the training facility to get into trouble as collateral damage. ‘You have to stop listening to Zaya. I don’t know how he convinced you to do this but—’

‘Convinced me? You’re just going to assume that it would have taken a man to come up with that stuff? Do you know how fucking condescending that is? Raf, it was my plan. Passing Fourpetal to Lacebark was my plan. Not Zaya’s.’

‘And feeding me all that false information about Win was your plan too.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So when we had sex in the bathroom, you weren’t even turned on, it was just business.’

‘I guess it would never occur to you that maybe the reason I was so turned on was exactly because it was meant to be just business.’

Graupels of crushed styrofoam packaging skitter across the pavement as the breeze picks up. Rose walks off to piss against a lamp-post. Raf felt pathetic asking that last question but somehow it seemed important. And maybe also it was a way of working up to the question he really wants to ask, which is whether it means anything that she tried to protect him. This morning, she must have thought that if he went back to his flat to fetch Rose without knowing what was about to happen, there was a chance he’d be there when Lacebark launched their raids. So she tried to make sure he didn’t go home. But he knows there are any number of reasons why she might have made that choice. ‘Cherish, you knew I was going to do this, right?’ he asks instead. ‘At the tennis court, I could tell that you knew. But you didn’t try to stop me.’

After a pause, Cherish says, ‘I didn’t know you were going to sabotage my fucking cellphone.’

But that isn’t really the point, Raf thinks. He wishes that somehow they could be face to face again for this. ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’

‘Seriously? You are seriously asking me that question? No, of course you are never going to see me again. And you’re never going to see London again, either. I hope you know that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lacebark are going to come looking for you soon.’

‘Are you going to give me up to them?’

‘No, Raf. I could, and maybe Zaya would say that I should, but I won’t. But when Lacebark realise Win’s not in London any more, they’ll start to wonder how things went so wrong here. And I know for sure that when they take another look at their ImPressure• metadata, it’ll tell them to take you in. You have to go somewhere they won’t think to look for you.’

‘But I want to stay in London. I’ve only just decided I want to stay. Summer’s starting.’

‘No. Leave. And stay the fuck out of Burma, too.’ She hangs up.

Raf puts the phone back in his pocket and looks around. He doesn’t see a fox.

AFTERNOON, SUPPOSEDLY

Isaac has been following the white van for nearly five hours. Because he already knows the route the van is taking – þjóðvegur 1 loops around Iceland like a giant M25 and there’s no other sensible route from Reykjavik to Dalvík – he hasn’t needed to stay within sight of it all the time, so it’s possible that the other driver won’t even have noticed him. While he’s been driving, the sun has hauled itself up to the parapet of the horizon, hung on there panting for a while, and then fallen away with a bronzy moan of resignation, leaving no trace but the last drag of its fingernails in the clouds to the south. Now it’s night again. During that long fermata of dusk, when the motorway was snaking alongside what he is reasonably confident in identifying as a fjord, he saw four ponies grazing on the hillside opposite, bearlike in their winter duffles, not far from a gingerbread farmhouse with a red roof; some of the time this place could pass for a kind of steroidal, mythic Yorkshire. In his wallet he has the phone number of a tall blonde he met at the airport whose genotype must be perfect in the same way that the circles and squares described in mathematical proofs are perfect. She told him four or five times how to pronounce þjóðvegur but he couldn’t even get the first syllable right.

Somehow even in the darkness you get a sense of the huge cliffs rising over Dalvík across the bay. On the approach to the harbour Isaac pulls closer to the white van, because for the first time he doesn’t know exactly where it’s going and he doesn’t want to lose it among the warehouses and containers and derelict fishmeal plants. This must be one of those Icelandic towns that over the course of the previous decade started to feel a bit embarrassed that it was good for nothing but fishing and now is learning to feel proud of that again. The van carries on all the way to the second-farthest jetty, where a boat is already waiting for its exceptionally precious cargo. Isaac parks not far away. For a little while he’s worried that there’ll be no one here to meet him but then there’s a knock on the window. He gets out of the car. When Raf gives him a hug they’re like sumo wrestlers in their jumpers and parkas. Out here it’s several degrees below zero and a razor-edged wind is blowing in off the water.

‘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.