Glow (5 page)

Raf is baffled. ‘Burmese men? Why?’ He thinks of the newcomers at Myth.

‘I can’t say any more.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I work for the British government.’

‘What, like, MI6 or something?’

The guy shakes his head. ‘Not MI6,’ he says, his tone suggesting that somehow his job is even more secret than that. ‘The important thing is, if you hear any more about any of this, then call me straight away. And if you want to give your friend the best possible chance of coming back alive, don’t talk to anyone else about any of it.’ He grabs a last couple of chips as he gets up, his unbuttoned jacket revealing a stowaway paunch, and when Raf follows him back outside he sees that the clouds have cleared. ‘My God, that place is awful,’ the guy says. He’s about to cross the street when he halts abruptly and Raf turns to see why.

A white van is coming towards them, sun reflecting in the windscreen so Raf can’t make out the driver’s face.

The guy hurls himself back into the restaurant, almost knocking over a boy in a tracksuit, but Raf doesn’t react as fast, so he’s still standing there when the van brakes right beside him. The rear doors don’t open, though, and when the lights at the crossing change and the van drives on, Raf can hear the tired growl of an ageing diesel engine just like any other. On the back, in the grime, with index fingers, someone has written ‘i wish my wife was as dirty as this’ and someone else ‘she is with me’ and someone else ‘
were
as dirty’.

Day 4

2.27 p.m.

Raf is at Isaac’s flat playing an Xbox game in which the virtual New York has its own diurnal cycle that lasts only forty-eight minutes, with light-modelling a hundred times more sophisticated than anything he’s ever worked on. He tells Isaac what he heard the day before, but he has to admit for all he knows the guy in McDonald’s also responds to every lost dog notice he sees with a story about ethnically specific kidnappings. After Isaac insists on switching the television over to the cricket, Raf starts leafing through a stack of the Japanese girls’ quasi-pornographic fashion magazines.

Raf and Isaac have been best friends since they were at comprehensive school together when they were fourteen. Isaac’s biological parents were alcoholics and he’d been taken into foster care when he was younger, but his new family were a gas giant of warmth and tolerance, and he always stayed out of trouble – except in the sense that he used to deal a lot of weed and pills, but nothing nasty ever came of that, and Isaac would probably disagree with the Southwark Council Family Support and Child Protection Office on whether it constituted ‘trouble’. He started DJing on Myth when he was nineteen in slots that weren’t so much graveyard as necropolis, but he didn’t really get to know Theo, or introduce Theo to Raf, until last year.

Raf thinks back to a night in January when he and Theo stopped at Isaac’s flat to pick up a spare CD deck on the way to a house party. A few weeks earlier, Isaac had been looking around on the internet for a site that would sell him dried psilocybin mushrooms by post when he’d come across one that instead sold fresh
Gyromitra esculenta
, a type of false morel used in Finnish cookery. Isaac is fascinated by these false morels, firstly because they are pinkish, bilobed and furrowy like a human brain, and secondly because they contain a precursor chemical called gyromitrin, which breaks down in the liver to a toxin called monomethylhydrazine, which was a component of the hypergolic propellant used in the Apollo Lunar Modules. Monomethylhydrazine is a toxin because it blocks the production of
γ
-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, an important neurotransmitter that you can buy in tablets as a treatment both for social anxiety disorders and for sleep disorders. But Isaac has spent his entire life swallowing pills without asking what’s in them – all kids do that, and a certain set of adults – so naturally he is cocky around fungus.

When Raf and Theo arrived in Isaac’s kitchen, he took three cans of beer out of the fridge and explained that he was cooking a traditional Finnish false morel omelette, but he wasn’t going to offer any to his guests because with gyromitrin there was some risk of headache, vomiting, diarrhoea, jaundice, delirium, coma and/or death, although many tough old Scandinavians did eat the mushrooms raw without reporting any sickness whatsoever and in this case he’d parboiled them for so long that he was pretty sure he’d ingest only the very minimum amount of gyromitrin necessary to meet the goal of the experiment, which for the historical record was to show that he had metabolised rocket fuel in his own body. He sang part of the ‘GABBA GABBA hey! GABBA GABBA hey!’ verse from ‘Pinhead’ by the Ramones. But then Theo snatched up the frying pan and said he wasn’t going to let any idiot eat poisonous mushrooms in his presence, and somehow the scuffle ended with him scraping the entire omelette into his mouth, choking down about half, and then vomiting into the sink. When it was over, Raf asked Theo why he didn’t just tip the omelette on to the floor. Theo shrugged and said he’d panicked. (A few weeks after that, Isaac learned from a messageboard that, like a confused ecstasy dealer, the site from which he’d ordered the false morels wasn’t selling real false morels but instead real morels falsely advertised as false morels. Real morels, which are harmless ascocarps used in Provençal cuisine, do contain hydrazine, which was a rocket fuel in the Nazis’ experimental Messerschmitt 163, but the problem is that they contain it from the very beginning, without the intervention of human biochemistry, which doesn’t excite Isaac.)

Even if the expedient was impulsive, the impulse itself was characteristic for Theo, who is a born rescuer. There was the time Barky got in trouble with an ecstasy wholesaler who supposedly had ties to the Serbian mafia, and Theo not only let him hide in his flat for a couple of weeks but also redeemed half of his debt by bartering away a block of daytime radio ads for the dealer’s brother-in-law’s motorcycle workshop. There was the time Theo needed a sentry for Myth FM’s single most valuable asset, and instead of just training up one of the Staffie puppies that are always oversupplied around here, he bought Rose, in effect a slightly faulty adoption dog. And there was the time he rescued Raf, too. Raf had begun to give up hope of ever finding any ongoing employment that didn’t involve just sitting alone in his flat doing piecework and wondering why he was alive. He didn’t want to be one of those sleep disorder patients who become nothing but vassals of their illness, but he could see himself going that way, and he had no idea what to do about it. Until this recent break-up it was the lowest point of his adult life. But then Theo heard about this from Isaac, and gave Raf a job that not only let him roam the streets but even exploited his peculiarity as a minor asset: if Rose was walked according to any regular timetable, then it would be easy to work out when the Myth FM transmitter was next going to be vulnerable for half an hour, but no one without a copy of Raf’s own home-made calendar application could predict his pseudo-random arrivals.

Raf can’t help dividing the world into the people and institutions that are friendly to his disorder and the ones that are hostile to it – like a fox nesting behind a bus depot, he’s a creature making the best of an environment to which he is in some respects maladapted. So he feels an extra gratitude to his omelette-gobbling boss, maybe a unique one, on top of the friendship that’s developed between them over the past year. Should he believe the worst about what’s happened to Theo? He doesn’t know. But he won’t if he can possibly help it.

Day 5

1.51 p.m.

The next-of-kin information you see on signs under railway bridges – ‘in case of emergency: if you witness a vehicle striking this railway bridge please contact railtrack’ – has for a long time made Raf hope very dearly that before he dies he will witness a vehicle striking a railway bridge just so he can finally call one of those engraved telephone numbers. On this rainy afternoon, walking Rose not far from his flat, the dirty ground under one of those bridges is a tintype of the dark belly above: from the square of dry asphalt you can make out its girth and from the inner grid of pigeon shit you can make out its iron ribs. Past the bridge is a basketball court, and from the way Rose strains forward Raf knows straight away that she’s scented something. Then he sees the fox sitting on the waist-high wall at the edge of the court, and just like when he got on that bus on Saturday, he’s so startled that he forgets his grip and the leash slips out of his hand as Rose shoots forward, snarling. She jumps against the wall, claws rasping at the brick, and what’s strange is that the fox is only a few inches out of her reach and yet it doesn’t even flinch as it looks down at her. It’s as if the fox has calculated that it’s safe and therefore has no reason to be alarmed, even though Raf knows that’s not how animals operate. The fox lets the wave crash against the wharf for a bit longer and then turns round, jumps down, and canters off across the court into some bushes. Rose keeps on barking loud enough to snap a glottis until Raf picks up the lead again and hauls her away. ‘Good job, girl,’ he says. ‘You definitely scared it off.’ He turns right at the end of the road, intending to go back to his flat to pick up an umbrella before he carries on the walk, and what he sees then is a lot more surprising than any sanguine fox.

A white van. Two men dressed all in black. And that same girl from the laundrette who said her name was Cherish. The rear doors of the van are open and they are pulling her inside.

Without even thinking, Raf runs forward. Rose is still riled so of course she keeps pace. When they’re just a leash’s distance from the men, she goes for them like she went for the fox. And the guy on the left pulls from a thigh holster what Raf recognises from many hours on Isaac’s Xbox as a semi-automatic pistol with a silencer, maybe an M9. He takes aim at Rose. ‘No!’ shouts Raf. Then the guy on the right puts a hand on the other guy’s arm, shakes his head, and says something Raf can’t hear.

As Raf tries to reel Rose back, both men get into the van and slam the rear doors behind them. The van accelerates away, silent if it weren’t for the squeak of its tyres on the wet road, and Raf watches as it turns left by the primary school on the corner and is lost from sight.

He looks back at the girl. Like the butt of a torch on a warehouse door, his heart is banging in his chest so hard that he can hardly believe it’s not audible. ‘Cherish, right?’ he says.

She’s wearing the same black hoodie but the hood isn’t up so her hair is straggly from the rain. ‘Yeah.’ Rose jigs around Cherish’s legs, all her violent energy transduced, until this new friend bends down and starts scratching her under the chin.

‘Do you have any idea who those guys were?’

‘No.’ She takes a long breath and puts a palm to her own chest. ‘That was . . . Fuck! I feel like I just ran a race or something.’

So the guy in McDonald’s was telling the truth after all, Raf thinks. He wonders again where Theo is now. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ he says.

‘Yeah, but I think I might cry in a second.’

Raf shrugs. ‘OK.’

2.16 p.m.

Raf doesn’t clean his kitchen very often, so the floor is sown with sesame seeds and there’s a grouting of cumin power in almost every cranny. All the cupboard doors are made of that cheap painted chipboard that’s so lightweight they never quite feel as if they’re wholeheartedly shut. He turns up Myth FM on the radio and brings the two mugs of milky tea over to the table. ‘I just remembered . . .’

‘What?’

‘The fake glow I gave you. Did you throw up? I’m really sorry.’

‘I never took it,’ says Cherish. Her hoodie is drying on the radiator. ‘I had to leave right after I met you. Lucky escape, I guess.’

Raf blows on his tea. ‘Have you ever had real glow?’

‘A few times.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘A lot like MDMA. But it lasts longer and it’s a lot more . . . Don’t ask me what the word is. And it does things to the light. That’s where the name comes from.’

‘Like magic mushrooms?’

‘No, not really. Any electric light you look at, you see this . . . I don’t know. But you can’t look away. Once I saw a guy in the street outside a party just standing there watching the traffic lights change like it was the most spectacular thing he’d ever seen.’

‘Only electric lights?’

‘Yeah.’

The contrarian hypothalamus won’t necessarily accept that you’re seeing what the visual cortex has decided you’re seeing, but instead insists on making its own private analysis of the heliometric data it gets from the optic nerve: that’s one possible explanation for Raf’s syndrome, but it might also mean that sometimes the hypothalamus knows the truth about light when all the rest of the brain is fooled by a hallucinogen. Out in the corridor Rose is dozing with the side of her face squashed against the skirting board. Raf knows that every minute he lets the dog idle in his flat is another minute that Myth’s transmitter is unguarded, and he already feels guilty. But for all anyone knows he could still be out walking her.

‘It’s weird that I saw you again,’ he says.

‘Yeah.’

On Myth they’re playing an ad for some club in Brixton: ‘Remember, dress to impress: no hats, jeans or trainers.’