Glow (33 page)

To Isaac this is an example of evolution’s brusque mercy. Evolution hasn’t bothered to prevent human childbirth from being agonisingly painful, because the pain of childbirth doesn’t make a woman any less likely to reproduce. But it has gone to some lengths to soothe the pain of these mole-rats, like a boss who grudgingly lets you have a nap every three and a quarter hours because it might make you more productive. The more Isaac reads about the question of consciousness, the more persuaded he is that the shortest route to the answer will come from understanding the relationship between the functional roles of pain and pleasure and their phenomenology – between what purpose they serve in the brain and what they actually feel like. The subjective experiences of colour and pitch and temperature don’t seem to have any intrinsic meaning, any intrinsic push. But the subjective experiences of pleasure and pain have ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ built into them. How can that be? How can banal matter achieve that?

After a while Raf reluctantly gets back to his feet and waves goodbye to the kennel as it’s taken off down the gangway. The Icelanders seem to relax a bit now they’ve seen that Raf was sincere, and when they’ve finished with the kennels, the driver says, ‘Where are you two from?’

‘London,’ says Isaac.

‘But I live in Akureyri now,’ says Raf.

‘Oh, I went to London once! Great for clubs.’

‘Yeah, I put on some nights myself,’ says Isaac.

‘Have you been out in Reykjavik yet?’

‘We’re going to drive down there tomorrow night.’

‘Do you want to buy some glow?’

Isaac exchanges a bemused look with Raf. ‘There’s glow in Dalvík?’

‘A friend of mine has a lab nearby.’

‘How much?’ he says.

‘Fifteen thousand kronur for a gram.’

‘That’s a lot.’

The driver smiles. ‘This is Iceland.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not like your friend is paying VAT and import duty,’ Raf says. ‘Ten thousand.’

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.

6.03 a.m.

The problem started when rumours reached the camp of what had happened in Mauritania. Three weeks ago, after the collapse of their financing, a Chinese oil syndicate had abruptly pulled out of the country, leaving behind nearly a hundred low-grade private military contractors who had already been hired as security for the project. The rations began to run out, and the men soon realised that they were not going to be paid the wages they were owed, nor were they even going to be flown home. They’d been abandoned like a litter of kittens. So they spent a few days half-heartedly pillaging the countryside before they were dispersed by a series of confrontations with the army, and by now most of those who hadn’t already been killed or jailed had reportedly found their way to the streets of Nouakchott, where they were eking out the money for plane tickets by any means they could. There is no such thing as a consulate for mercenaries.

When Bezant’s boys found out about this, they started to worry that the same thing might happen to them. That was nothing new. Mercenaries on deployment are always needy and neurotic. In other circumstances, instead of indulging them, Bezant would simply have reminded his boys that Xujiabang Copper and Gold was not some tinpot oil syndicate, that its annual turnover exceeded Guinea’s entire GDP, that the cash registers in its staff canteens were more solvent than most of the banks in their home countries. In other words, they should shut up about Mauritania because they were certainly going to get paid. But then Angus Yu announced that to ‘restore confidence’ they were all to receive an immediate advance on their wages. He hadn’t consulted Bezant and it made the entire command structure look feeble.

What arrived on the courier plane last night was not even a steel briefcase, just a white cardboard mailing box, as if someone had ordered a pair of high heels off the internet, and inside that a mylar bag, and inside that a few dozen vacuum-sealed stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Because the box was too big to fit in any of the camp’s safes, three men were posted outside the door of the metallography shed, which nobody ever uses, to guard the box until the money could be disbursed. Bezant did not mention to those men that he was going to spend the night dozing on a camping mat in the nook beside the eyewash station. So when Angus Yu comes into the windowless shed just after six o’clock in the morning, he must be expecting to have the place to himself. Bezant waits until Yu shuts the door and flips on the lights before he gets up from the mat with a pantomime of yawning and stretching.

‘G’day, Angus,’ he says. ‘Have you brought me breakfast?’

To watch Yu flail is going to be a real pleasure. Since his arrival he has been so prissy and condescending and autocratic that Bezant sometimes lulls himself to sleep with fantasies of feeding the boy limb by limb into the impact crusher. He can’t do anything of the sort, though, because Yu is the son of one of the vice-presidents of Xujiabang Copper and Gold. For this princeling who spent four and a half semesters at Harvard to have been sent to manage a mine in Guinea, he must have done something exceptionally naughty. Someone must have died, maybe on American soil, maybe in baroque circumstances. Yu knows nothing whatsoever about mining, and although he once announced that he was ‘too busy’ to appraise himself of the difference between Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea, he spends most of his time here watching sitcoms and video chatting over the satellite broadband.