Glow (34 page)

Admittedly, Bezant doesn’t have much to do here either. It’s quiet out on these scrubby hills. There have been a few silly rumours about the Gandayaw Liberation Organisation operating in West Africa, but he knows for certain that the cunt who called himself Zaya has been dead of unknown causes since at least the start of the year, so Bezant isn’t exactly gnawing his phalanges off with apprehension. And the workers here are docile. The turquoise pills that arrive on the courier plane every week make sure that they don’t sleep and they don’t make mistakes and they don’t complain. They might look like voodoo dolls of themselves by the time their contracts finish, but Yu claims the pills are chemically analogous to the nootropics some of his friends used to take when they were studying for exams at Harvard, so they can’t be so bad for you.

Still, Xujiabang are keeping those prescriptions a secret. They’re even more obsessed than Lacebark were with ‘process efficiency optimisation’, but they also don’t want the reputation for human rights abuses that was just beginning to break out like herpes sores on Lacebark’s face before the takeover. Last year they announced with plenty of fanfare that they would welcome inspections by human rights charities and television crews even at short notice. Apparently the first of these inspections took place at a mine back in Shaanxi. Because Xujiabang had access to the NGO’s email servers, they knew about the visit several weeks in advance. So they simply built a second mine, a temporary fake, a few miles away from the real one. The inspectors never knew the difference. Bezant has heard that a lot of the people who used to work on MOUT training facilities for Lacebark are now doing set design and special effects for these Potemkin mines, including one English guy whom everyone calls either the Invisible Man or the Gimp because on sunny days he walks around in one of those latex masks that Chinese women wear at the beach to avoid getting a tan. The investment’s worthwhile because they won’t have to play the trick many times. When there’s too much good news people lose interest.

‘Who opened this package?’ Yu says, pointing at the box that sits on the steel table in the middle of the room. Predictably, he’s going to try to bluster his way out of this, but when he’s nervous he keeps shooting the cuffs of the shirt he wears under his ridiculous designer blazer.

‘I did,’ says Bezant.

‘You aren’t authorised to open it.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I should have been present.’

‘I counted. There’s three hundred and fifty grand in there. That’s five thousand each for seventy men.’

‘So?’ Young Angus is now alternating between his cuffs with such force that he looks like a skydiver trying to deploy a faulty parachute.

‘As you know, there are only forty-eight grunts on site at the moment. So we only needed two hundred and forty grand. That’s a difference of a hundred and ten. You must’ve thought no one would check the paperwork. Like one of those Chinese restaurants where they don’t bother to itemise the bill so you never know if you’re getting ripped off. Is that where you learned how to do it? The old moo shu switcheroo, eh?’

‘That is racist language,’ said Yu.

‘So you’re desperate. You owe someone a bundle. Fair enough. What I don’t understand is, how can it be so urgent? Whoever it is, they’re not coming to collect. We’re in fucking Simandou.’

‘You should leave right now.’

‘Listen, Angus, we both know what you were going to do and we also both know I can’t prove anything. But if you think you’re keeping any of this, you’ve got tailings for brains. And you’ll show a little bit more respect from now on, eh?’

Since the takeover Bezant has been trying to learn Mandarin from a language tape but it doesn’t cover any of the words Yu is muttering as he leaves the shed. For an instant before he slams the door a rectangle of dawn nudges limply at the fluorescence within. After making sure the latch is closed, Bezant retrieves his rucksack from the nook beside the eyewash station and goes back to the box on the table. He’s in the process of counting out the twenty-two stacks of bills he’s going to take back to his quarters when he feels something hard against the back of his neck.

‘That doesn’t feel like a firearm,’ he says evenly.

‘It’s not,’ says the person behind him. ‘It’s a cordless rivet gun. It won’t make much noise. Put your hands behind your head.’

She has an American accent. He doesn’t recognise her voice.

Acknowledgements

I lived in at least ten different flats and houses (depending on how you count it) during the two years it took me to write and edit this book, so I’d like to express special gratitude to all my hosts, landlords and flatmates, including the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Omi International Arts Center in upstate New York, plus the British Council for all the travel. I’d also like to thank Professor David Sulzer and Dr. Carl Hart for talking to me about the chemistry of pleasure, although I must emphasise that I never offered them the opportunity to check the manuscript and so they cannot be held responsible for the outrages against serious neuroscience committed within. Finally, for all their help, I’d like to thank Jane Finigan and everyone at Lutyens & Rubinstein; Drummond Moir and everyone at Sceptre; David Forrer and everyone at Inkwell; and Gary Fisketjon and everyone at Knopf.

BOXER, BEETLE

Ned Beauman

This is a novel for people with breeding.

Only people with the right genes and the wrong impulses will find its marriage of bold ideas and deplorable characters irresistible. It is a novel that engages the mind while satisfying those that crave the thrill of a chase.

There are riots and sex. There is love and murder. There is Darwinism and Fascism, nightclubs, invented languages and the dangerous bravado of youth. And there are lots of beetles.

It is clever. It is distinctive. It is entertaining.

We hope you are too.

 
‘An astonishing debut...buzzing with energy, fizzing with ideas, intoxicating in its language,
Boxer, Beetle
is sexy, intelligent and deliriously funny’
Jake Arnott
 
‘A rambunctious, deftly-plotted delight of a debut’
Observer
 
‘Ned Beauman's astonishingly assured debut starts as it means to go on: confident, droll, and not in the best of taste . . . Many first novels are judged promising.
Boxer, Beetle
arrives fully formed: original, exhilarating and hugely enjoyable.’
Peter Parker, Sunday Times

THE TELEPORTATION ACCIDENT

Ned Beauman

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2012 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

HISTORY HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE HUNGOVER

When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.

If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't.

But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini; and why a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him can't, just once in a while, get himself laid.

From the author of the acclaimed BOXER, BEETLE comes a historical novel that doesn't know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can't remember what 'isotope' means; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.

‘Terrific . . . if there was ever any worry that he might have crammed all his ideas into his first book, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside.’
Guardian
 
'If you care about contemporary writing, you must read this . . . BOXER, BEETLE was acclaimed as the most inventive fictional debut in years, buzzing with energy and ideas, and Beauman's second novel keeps up the pace'
Tatler