Glow (16 page)

‘Orchid tea,’ says the waiter. ‘It’s really sweet.’

‘Has it got any caffeine?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll have one of those.’

‘Are you Turkish?’ says Fourpetal.

‘We’re Serbian.’

As the waiter goes back to the counter, Raf passes
Lacunosities
to Fourpetal. ‘Apparently Lacebark are really into this book but I don’t understand how that can be.’

Fourpetal flips through it. ‘Well, the IDF read Tschumi on deconstruction. All the young generals are mad for this kind of thing now – supplementing their tactical manuals with postmodern conceptual schemes.’

‘We should read it to see if there are any clues about how Lacebark operate.’

‘Yes, perhaps one of us should, but why me?’

‘You went to university.’

Fourpetal harrumphs. At that moment a man in a black suit walks out of the depot’s side entrance and carries on past the gate. ‘Do you recognise him?’ says Raf.

‘I haven’t seen his cock yet, if that’s what you mean. But he could still be with Lacebark.’

Fourpetal throws down a tenner for the drinks and they hurry out of the café. It’s one of those May mornings when you can stand in the sun and it might already be summer but the slightest breeze will peel all the warmth from your skin. Hanging back at a cautious distance like they did with the Burmese DJs, they follow the man as he turns left at the self-storage facility on the corner. Doing this kind of thing with Fourpetal has started to feel surprisingly normal.

‘He must be walking up to the Tube,’ says Raf. ‘Otherwise why wouldn’t he have taken a car?’

‘You know my flat’s about ten minutes from here?’

‘He’s not going to your flat.’

Even though there’s not much traffic at the next junction the man still pauses at the crossing and presses the button on the panel. The traffic lights around here wear tiaras of spikes to stop kids from climbing them. While the man waits for the green hieroglyph to appear he takes his BlackBerry out of his pocket and starts thumbing through his messages.

Without permitting himself the chance to think it through, Raf flips his hood up and breaks into a sprint.

The man doesn’t look up until Raf’s almost upon him, and Raf doesn’t slow down, he just snatches for the BlackBerry and drops his head and charges on up the road before he’s even certain that the thing itself is there in his hand instead of just the anticipation of its weight. Veering off behind a row of semi-detached houses, he can’t hear feet behind him, and he hopes the man was too surprised to react in time, but he can’t be sure, so he carries on running until his lungs are crumbling into powdery white ash and then finally stops to catch his breath. Behind him an old dub track lollops out of someone’s open bedroom window. He pulls off his hoodie to stuff it underneath a hedge just in case it might be recognised, and down there already is a child’s discarded glove, damp and blotchy like the carcass of a small blind mammal with a body made mostly of fingers.

1.06 p.m.

‘Just to confirm your appointment to tour the south London facility at 9.30 a.m. on Monday. Looking forward to showing you round – I think you’ll be very impressed. Best wishes, Denise.’

That’s the only email of any relevance that Raf and Fourpetal can find on the BlackBerry when they meet at a McDonald’s to look through its folders. They do discover, at least, that the man in the black suit works for a South African company called Nostrand Discovery, and he’s visiting London specifically to take this tour, but there are no hints about what might actually be inside the freight depot. When Raf was fifteen he wanted so much to know what sex felt like that he thought his brain was going to pop with the frustration, but he still didn’t want to know that as much as he now wants to know what Lacebark are doing in there.

‘How are we going to get in without getting caught?’ he says.

‘Well, if you’re really that eager, there is a means.’

‘What?’

Fourpetal drafts an email on the BlackBerry and shows it to Raf. ‘Hi Denise. One of my colleagues has just had to change his travel plans and he’s going be in London for a couple of days this week. I’d love him to be able to see what you showed me this morning. Sorry for the short notice but is there any way we could set up another tour? I’m going to be out of contact for a while, so if this does turn out to be practical, please call my colleague directly on the UK number below.’

‘Do you think that will work?’ says Raf.

‘Yes. After we send it we delete the sent message from the email server. The Nostrand chap may never find out he’s been impersonated.’

‘So I’m just going to walk in there pretending to be South African?’

‘All you really have to worry about is ImPressure•.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember that presentation video we enjoyed so much? ImPressure• has a facial-recognition system built into it. If you’re in their database – and you presumably are if they’ve been in your flat – it won’t matter how well we disguise you. The system will notice the match.’

‘And then I’m fucked?’

‘Not necessarily. All those facial-recognition systems spit out plenty of false positives. Someone will look at their screen and say, “ImPressure• is telling us that this important executive from Nostrand Discovery is actually a carefree young Londoner called Raf whom we already happen to have on our watch list. But that’s absurd. ImPressure• must have made another blunder. Cancel the alert.” Have you ever bumped into a close friend but the context was wrong and you had no idea who they were?’

Nearby a teenage boy in a uniform is trying to mop up a spilled strawberry milkshake but the milkshake is trying to ooze away to safety. ‘So the only thing that’s going to keep me from getting handcuffed is that they don’t trust their own computer systems?’

‘I know you’ve never had a real job, so take it from me: it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in – nobody trusts their own computer systems. Anyway, you’d better make your mind up. We don’t know how soon your mugging victim will remember to change the password on his email account.’

‘Would you do this?’

‘Honestly?’ says Fourpetal. ‘No.’

Would Raf do it? Would he risk his life against Lacebark like those foxes did? It horrifies him to think that Theo, the born rescuer, might be beyond rescue. But if that’s true, he wouldn’t want Raf to hurl himself down the same bottomless hole. There’s nothing left to do for his friend now but mourn. He also has no reason to think he can even do anything useful for any of the Burmese people who’ve been snatched by the vans, and he certainly can’t ‘save’ Cherish. In any case, whatever quiet war Lacebark is waging here, whatever toxin may be gushing from their nozzles, he’s supposed to be leaving for good in a fortnight. The city isn’t his problem any more. None of this is.

But then he thinks about the reason he’s given himself for going away, his sense that he had to make a physical escape from the site of his heartbreak because this cold termite hollow wasn’t just in him, it was out there, objectively, in things, in all of them, down to the waltzing fall of a cigarette paper when it slips from your fingers, down to the void void void void that the ticket machine at an overground station prints on the orange chit when it cancels a sale. Now Lacebark are in south London, infiltrating it, altering it, coughing this mist of dread over the streets that once meant so much to him. When his girlfriend left, everything here went to shit for a while, and all he could do was sit there and suffer. Seven weeks later, everything is going to shit again, but this time he has a chance to try to stop it.

Day 11

11.58 a.m.

While he’s waiting at the gate of the depot, Raf happens to reach into his left trouser pocket and discovers for the first time a sheet of paper crumpled up in there. He takes it out, uncrumples it, and realises that it’s the order of service sheet from his grandmother’s funeral in 2007, which was the last time he took this suit off its hanger.

‘Mr Rose?’

Raf looks up. A woman in wireframe glasses is striding towards him across the concrete. He stuffs the sheet back in his pocket as fast as he can. ‘Yes,’ he says, pronouncing it ‘Yiss,’ because yesterday he watched a lot of South African accent tutorial videos on YouTube, and now he’s trying to keep his premolars pressed against the thighs of his tongue.

This woman’s accent, on the other hand, is American. ‘Great to meet you. I’m Denise Belasco. We spoke on the phone.’ They shake hands. ‘How much did Mr Jacobs tell you about the facility?’

‘We didn’t have a chance to speak for very long. But he told me he found it very impressive.’ Raf reminds himself he needs to ride like Fourpetal, high in the saddle of his lies. Two Lacebark security guards stand like bouncers outside the side door of the depot and as he passes them he thinks of how he felt the first time he brought pills into a club in the toe of his shoe. Inside there’s a windowless ante-room where a third guard sits at a desk behind a bank of screens. A fridge in the corner is filled with mineral water and energy drinks. There are no clues here. For all he knows it could be a gate to the underworld.

‘We’ll just need a scan of your passport,’ says Belasco. ‘Sorry for the hassle but as you can imagine we take a lot of precautions at a facility like this.’

‘I’m afraid my passport’s in the safe at my hotel. But I’ve got my driver’s licence.’ Raf takes it out of his wallet. Fourpetal had warned him this might happen so last night he went over to Jonk’s flat with Isaac and the three of them spent the evening forging this card. Because Jonk once tried to start a side business selling fake IDs, he already had a pirate copy of Photoshop, a second-hand inkjet printer, and a box of those butterfly laminate pouches that you can seal with a clothes iron. The only problem was, Jonk had ordered the pouches from a website that specialised in supplying the ‘novelty’ ID market, so they were all printed in advance with generic foil holograms, but South African driver’s licences don’t actually have holograms on them, just pink watermarks, with the result that Raf’s fake licence has more ‘security features’ than a real one. In most circumstances this wouldn’t matter, but Fourpetal also warned him that quite a lot of Lacebark’s goons are hired from South Africa.

So Raf’s as nervous now watching the guard run his card through the scanner as he was earlier when a security camera first swivelled its head towards him like a carrion bird as he waited outside the gate of the depot. Then he realises that if he just stares across the desk in silence it’s going to make him look even more unnatural, so he turns back to Belasco and tries to think of something to say, but his mind is suddenly an empty trough. To his enormous relief, it’s Belasco who asks, ‘And you work with Mr Jacobs in Tanzania?’

‘That’s right.’ (‘Thitt’s hroitte.’)

‘He told me he was in the Nostrand office in Fehedou at the time of the truck bombing. That must have been a really nasty thing to experience.’

‘Yes, it really was.’

On the heavy steel door that presumably leads through into the main section of the depot, there is a sign that says authorised personnel
only
, which to Raf seems hilariously mundane and redundant in this context. (He’s relieved that the security measures here don’t extend to a fingerprint or iris scanner, and he remembers Isaac’s proposal for a biometric identification system which required the user to perform thirty seconds of oral sex on an androgynous piezo-electric tubercle, on the basis that any given individual’s precise oral sex technique is both unique and impossible to teach or imitate.) The guard at the desk hands back Raf’s driver’s licence without meeting his eye. Since he seems to be safe for the moment, he scrapes together his courage to take a small risk. ‘I must say, Ms Belasco—’

‘Denise.’

‘I must say, Denise, until recently I only really thought of Lacebark as a mining company.’ This remark will make sense as long as Raf is about to get a tour of something that is not a mine, and that seems like a good bet, unless Isaac is correct in his speculation that Lacebark’s big secret is the diamond mine they have dug under the streets of London with its entrance hidden in this depot. (Isaac has never believed that the true explanation for why south London doesn’t have a proper Tube network is that its subsurface geology makes tunnelling impossible – he has a selection of mutually contradictory conspiracy theories to propose instead – and in a sense an urban mine would prove him correct.)

‘Oh, sure,’ says Belasco. ‘You’re by no means alone there. The vast majority of Lacebark’s business is and always has been resource extraction. That’s what we’re known for. But over the last twenty years we’ve faced a lot of the same problems in Myanmar that you and your colleagues at Nostrand are now facing in Tanzania. One of Lacebark’s basic corporate values is that we never outsource when we can insource. So we’ve pumped major resources into developing skills that lie quite a long way outside our core competencies. And the best way to begin to defray an investment like that is to offer some of those skills on the open market. It’s much the same approach that San Miguel took with Sentinel back in the 1960s, for instance, if you’re familiar with Sentinel. If we build you a facility like this in Tanzania, you can be confident it will do the job, because we rely on facilities of exactly the same kind. We are our own most demanding customers.’