Glow (12 page)

This is dangerous, because there’s no visible pretext to be walking in that direction, so if they’re spotted it will be obvious at once what they’re doing. But they carry on anyway. The path slopes gently down, with trees and tangled undergrowth on either side; the continual yap of a dog seems to have no material point of origin but instead is immanent in the air like a rainbow. Then, as if all this weren’t already enough to make Raf wonder if somehow they’ve been transported into the countryside, they arrive at a field of tall wild grass and flowering brambles. How can this possibly abide so close to a main road in south London? But beyond the trees three football pitches come into view, stretching off blankly towards a shed and a mobile phone mast and another row of houses bearing mullets of dead ivy on their back walls. These must be school playing fields; perhaps some administrator made a mistake annotating a map of the park, so that the ground is maintained up until a certain arbitrary border, a final touchline, but after that it’s the responsibility of no one in particular, and hence this colony of wilderness. At his feet are a few chocolate wrappers that look as if they know deep down that they can’t biodegrade but are doing their best anyway just to fit in. He realises it’s been far too long since he last caught sight of the Burmese DJs. ‘Where are they?’ he says.

‘They must have gone this way,’ says Fourpetal, pointing into the tall grass.

This is even more dangerous, because they don’t have their bearings and for all they know their quarry might still be only a few yards away, but they’ve gone too far to turn back. Thorns keep nipping at Raf’s jeans as the two of them press cautiously on. Then they come to a tall chain-link fence so overgrown with tough vines that the woven metal of the fence itself is not much more than a vestigial splint – and beyond the fence is a derelict tennis court. There’s no net any more, although you can still see the vague white lines between which weeds are now drilling up through the asphalt, and there’s even a rusty umpire’s chair with broken bottles and charred wood strewn around its base like tributes before a throne. On the opposite side, several sections of the fence have been wrestled down by shrubs, leaving only the steel supports between them. There are stains on the ground, mostly black but in one corner an inexplicable violet. The yapping dog sounds no closer and no farther away. This place is sepulchral, post-apocalyptic, a
memento mori
for those complacent football pitches about the fate they too will one day face, and Raf would already be planning a birthday party here if it weren’t for the four people he can see standing there in the middle of the court.

The two Burmese DJs. A balding guy who carries a sports bag. And Cherish.

Raf and Fourpetal both drop to a crouch. ‘Fuck! Fuck, that’s her!’ Raf whispers. ‘That’s Cherish!’ He wants to bring her a bunch of flowers. He wants to bring her a flower market.

‘Not bad at all,’ says Fourpetal in an appraisive tone.

Raf realises that their theory about Dickson and the ‘community programme’ must have been completely wrong, that somehow all these people are working together against Lacebark. They’re too far away to make out any conversation, but it’s obvious. He is about to shout to Cherish when Fourpetal adds, ‘So the two of you have only actually met a couple of times – that’s right, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘I only ask because, if it should happen that she and I . . .’

‘What?’

‘Would you object?’

‘Are you saying, would I mind if you fucked her?’

‘It’s just a question.’

‘When would that ever happen?’

‘It’s just an eventuality.’

Before Raf can make any retort, he sees Cherish take two envelopes out of her bag and pass one to each of the Burmese men. When Raf was a child he used to find it unsettling to overhear his dad make work-related calls on the phone, and that’s what this is like: her demeanour here seems totally estranged from the demeanour of the girl he kissed. And it’s not as if he’s really any expert on body language, but when Fourpetal says, ‘What are we watching? Is this a drug deal?’ Raf shakes his head, because he does know the body language of drug deals, and this doesn’t look to him like a drug deal. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she’s handing over some sort of wage or stipend, like when he gets paid for walking the dog. Why would she be doing that? There is something wrong about this scene that hasn’t crystallised yet, and for reasons that aren’t quite conscious, he finds himself thinking back to Wednesday afternoon. Cherish with one foot on the wet tarmac and one foot in the back of the white van. Those two soldiers, each with a gloved hand on her.

The understanding hits him like two darts from a Taser. They weren’t dragging her inside.

They were helping her up.

Raf finds that the only way he can calmly process the knowledge that Cherish might be working for Lacebark is by pretending he’s talking it over with Isaac.

So if it seems so obvious now, Isaac would say, why didn’t you notice at the time?

Because Fourpetal made me afraid of the white vans, Raf would say. But why would they have been helping her into the van?

Chivalry?

No. They were in a hurry.

You’d doubled back to get your umbrella and they didn’t want you to see them.

But they were too slow, Raf would say. And then Cherish realised that there was an ambiguity in what I’d seen that she could exploit. She did a really good job of seeming shaken after I ‘rescued’ her.

So she wasn’t kidnapped from your bed after all.

But in that case, Raf would say, why did Rose insist that someone nasty had been through my front door? When could that have happened, if not that night?

When you were both at the restaurant. The meal was her suggestion, right?

Fuck, yes, and we didn’t leave until she got that text message!

She gave the Lacebark guys time to break into your flat like they broke into Fourpetal’s.

So Cherish was helping Lacebark to investigate me all along?

Well, what’s the alternative? Isaac would ask. That it was just a weird coincidence you ran into this girl again, right outside your flat, four days after the rave in the laundrette?

OK, yeah, that sounds stupid now. But I wanted to marry Cherish before I’d even talked to her. Wouldn’t it be another weird coincidence if the girl who was helping Lacebark to investigate me was also this beauty whom I developed a big crush on as soon as I saw her?

In your whole life, how many girls have you seen at raves that you’ve immediately developed a big crush on?

I don’t know, Raf would say.

Conservatively?

Ten to fifteen thousand. More if it weren’t for the MDMA drought.

So it’s statistically almost inevitable that at least one of them was going to turn out to be working undercover for an American mining company.

Fine, but I still don’t understand why Lacebark would want to investigate me in the first place. I’m nobody.

We were trying to find out what happened to Theo.

But we hadn’t got anywhere. We’d barely even tried. We were no threat to Lacebark. It doesn’t make sense. And I really thought Cherish liked me . . .

That’s as far as Raf can get with imaginary Isaac. He feels as desolate as the tennis court. But now the four figures look as if their business is concluded.

‘What do we do?’ says Fourpetal.

‘Follow Cherish,’ suggests Raf.

But the problem is that she seems to be heading off towards the football pitches. If she cuts across diagonally in the approximate direction of the mobile phone mast, they won’t be able to follow her because they’d be right out in the open. They could hurry around the perimeter of the park where there’s some cover, racing two sides of the triangle against a hypotenuse, but that way Cherish could lose them at the other end without even trying.

The Burmese DJs, meanwhile, are just standing there rolling a spliff. Which leaves the guy with the sports bag, who now for the first time turns far enough in their direction that they can see his face. Fourpetal jerks his head. ‘Christ on a bloody cross, you have got to be joking.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Raf tells him. ‘What is it?’

The guy with the sports bag is going to take the same path between the street and the tennis court that they just took, in which case he’ll catch them if they don’t move on fast.

‘It’s him! It actually is.’

‘Who?’

A dragonfly lunges past. ‘I’ve seen that man’s cock,’ says Fourpetal.

‘We really have to get going,’ Raf tells him. Keeping low, they tunnel back through the wild grass, and then break into a sprint when they get to the path between the trees. There’s no hope now of circling back to follow Cherish. Instead, at the other end of the path, they look around for somewhere to hide. After they’ve crossed the road and dropped down panting behind the wall of the churchyard, Raf finally has the chance to ask, ‘What do you mean you’ve seen his cock?’

‘Just what I said. I don’t know him very well but I’ve seen his cock. A few months after I started at Lacebark, long before the email farrago, they put on a big staff Christmas party at a restaurant in Holborn. Afterwards a few of us carried on to a brothel. He was so drunk that at one point he came stumbling out of one of the rooms without his trousers on. He wasn’t in communications so I hadn’t met him before that night.’

‘Is he something to do with Lacebark security?’

‘If he is, he lied about it. I don’t remember exactly what he said he did but I do remember it sounded tedious. Something to do with lithium? And he might have mentioned Pakistan. Not Burma, though.’

The guy whose cock Fourpetal has seen now emerges from between the detached houses and turns left up the rise in the direction of Herne Hill, so Raf and Fourpetal follow him like they followed the Burmese men and Raf explains what he now knows about Cherish.

‘Well, it’s very touching that it’s taken you this long to realise that you can never trust women,’ says Fourpetal when he’s finished.

Raf thinks about his ex-girlfriend and the Brazilian techno DJ. ‘I think I’ve just had bad luck recently.’

After about fifteen minutes’ pursuit they come to a builders’ merchant with a big yard at the front full of pallets of flesh-coloured bricks wrapped in a thick plastic that makes them look to Raf like stacks of human biceps. Beyond that, past a steel fence, there’s a warehouse almost identical to the one that Isaac showed Raf last weekend, and when the guy they’re following goes inside, he remembers that bloodstain he saw on the concrete floor. ‘This must be a Lacebark building,’ he says as they wait half hidden behind a bus shelter. ‘Maybe they have them all over London. Fuck, I wonder what goes on in there.’

An old woman trundles by in a motorised wheelchair, Maltese between her knees, Union Jack pennant fluttering behind her, and they try not to look so furtive. Behind them, in the window of an empty shop, there are photocopied signs that read bill posters will be, four words only, as if the caretaker became resigned to the futility of his job in the process of composing the warning.

‘Should we wait and see who comes in and out?’ says Fourpetal.

‘I want a closer look,’ says Raf.

‘Have you forgotten that they’re hunting me? I’m not going to walk in their front door.’

‘Come on, we don’t have to go inside.’

Reluctantly Fourpetal follows Raf past the builders’ merchant to the warehouse. Here, Raf is braced to turn and flee, but he’s confused by the sight of about a dozen bicycles locked to a rack by the wall, and even more so to find that the door through which the cock/sports bag guy went is made of glass and covered in stickers.

Fourpetal chuckles. ‘Oh. I see. This is worse than the curry recipe.’

‘What do you mean?’

Fourpetal strides forward to pull open the door, and Raf sees that this isn’t a prison or a barracks or an armoury. This isn’t anything to do with Lacebark. This is a climbing gym.

Inside, colourful knobbly handholds bolted to fibreglass crags simulate a mountain turned inside out. Mid-nineties jungle plays from a cheap PA system and the smell of chalk is so thick in the air that it reminds Raf of dry ice in a club; the climbers are like the couriers he saw in that pub with Morris, lots of dreadlocks and blisters and robust specialised footwear and a general perverse infatuation with egregiously hostile man-made topologies. The two of them look around for Fourpetal’s former colleague, and they can’t see him up on any of the walls, but then he comes out from behind a bank of lockers, still looking a bit out of place even in a T-shirt and jogging shorts. He’s just started limbering up his hands on his way across the crash mats, cracking knuckles and wiggling fingers in a routine so complicated that it looks as if he’s casting some sort of necromantic enchantment, when he notices Fourpetal and stops dead. Fourpetal walks over and extends a hand of his own.

But the other guy’s are now paralysed in front of him so Fourpetal just grabs one and rattles it like a broken doorknob. ‘Mark Fourpetal. I used to work at Lacebark. We met at the Christmas party last year. Isn’t this a coincidence?’

From the guy’s expression it’s clear he knows exactly who Fourpetal is. ‘I can’t talk to you.’

‘Why not? Because if you see me you’re supposed to kidnap me?’