Glow (19 page)

Fitch: ‘maybe they heard about that big UKG night in Elephant & Castle next week.’

Raf: ‘If they’re looking for you, wouldn’t it be dangerous for you to talk to me? You don’t know who I am.’

Fitch: ‘doesn’t matter who you are!! even if you could make Lotophage turn over their IP records, I access the site through a proxy. I could be right behind you on the sofa typing this on a laptop. no way you could trace me.’

After Raf instinctively turns to look, he feels like an idiot. ‘Are you Burmese?’

Fitch: ‘why all these questions about glow? you buy drugs?’

Raf: ‘Sometimes. Why?’

Fitch: ‘the government say when you buy drugs you funding terrorism.’

Raf: ‘Was it you that sent me that video on Sunday? Are you Horologium Florae?’

For the next twenty minutes Raf sits there refreshing his Lotophage inbox and reading a long news story about a vet who nearly died after she induced vomiting in a dog that had eaten rat poison without knowing that the zinc phosphide in the rat poison had turned into phosphine gas upon contact with the water and hydrochloric acid in the dog’s stomach. But Fitch stays silent. Raf is excited, but when he looks back over the exchange, he realises Fitch didn’t say anything to confirm he’d ever even heard of Lacebark before Raf started asking questions. If you set aside that reference to Elephant and Castle, Fitch still might very well be a college student in Wisconsin.

He gets dressed, fills up Rose’s water bowl, and leaves the flat. The sky is a mess of sagging aeroplane contrails, and by this stage of the spring the street lamps come on long before the sun is down, hanging around awkwardly like guests early to a party. When he gets to the Burmese restaurant, it’s the same waiter as usual, but one of the Maneki Neko cats seems to have run away. Raf wasn’t actually planning to eat here but when he smells the food it occurs to him that he’s ravenous.

‘I’ll just have the same curry I had last time,’ he says after he’s been seated. ‘And sticky rice, and some of those stir-fried beans, and a beer. But I need to speak to Ko first.’

‘Ko cooking,’ says the waiter.

‘Just for a minute. Please.’

The waiter purses his lips. ‘OK.’

Raf gets up again and follows him around the counter to the kitchen. Ko is torturing something in a wok flame while a second chef is peeling a butternut squash faster than a normal person can shuck the foil off an Easter egg. The waiter says something in Burmese, and Ko looks up. ‘Yes?’

‘Can I talk to you?’ Raf says. ‘Outside?’

The second chef takes over the wok and Raf goes with Ko out to the alley at the back of the kitchen, a bit surprised that this didn’t take more persuasion. Empty drums of cooking oil are piled against the wall beside the wheelie bins and three canisters of butane lie around like circus animals inside a locked metal cage. Ko takes out a packet of cigarettes and lights one. ‘So?’ he says.

‘Last time I was here you said you could sell me some glow,’ Raf says. ‘I need to know where you’re getting it from.’

Ko blows out a smoke ring. ‘Want to see something?’

‘OK.’

After pausing to balance his cigarette on the edge of a wheelie bin, Ko takes something dark out of his pocket and holds it out at chest level. As Raf looks down to see what it is, his forearms are grabbed from behind, and Ko flips the black hood neatly over his head.

Before he has any idea what’s happening, Raf feels something tightening around his wrists, and he’s hauled sideways down the alley. He struggles as hard as he can, and shouts for help, but then his feet are off the ground, and four hands lower him on to the floor of what must be a van because he can feel the vibration of the idling engine through the rubber mat on which his cheek now comes to rest. The doors slam and the van drives off. They’ve got him.

The inside of the hood smells of damp socks, and the loop around Raf’s wrists feels as if it might be one of those cheap plastic zip ties with ratchets at the ends. He is fucking terrified. Sitting there already in his head is a proposition, one that has substantial mass but that he doesn’t yet know how to approach or interpret, like a non-Euclidean cadmium sculpture that just appears in your kitchen one morning, and the proposition is that he is going to die tonight. Ten days trying to find out what happened to Theo and now he’ll see for himself up close. Perhaps it took Lacebark a few hours to be absolutely sure that their facial-recognition system hadn’t registered a false positive after all, and by that time he’d left the training facility, so they had to snatch him at their next opportunity. Or perhaps it was his message to Fitch. ‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them.’ He might as well have filled out an application form to get kidnapped and interrogated.

Isaac will take good care of Rose.

He can hear a scooter engine, and dance-hall burping from someone’s car stereo, so they must be out in traffic now, and he wonders if he can work out where they’re going by paying attention to the turns they make, but he decides there’s no way his vestibular gyroscope is sensitive enough. Then brusque hands are under his armpits again as he’s pulled into a different position – a more comfortable one, in fact, sitting up against the side of the van with his knees half bent.

‘Ko?’ he says.

‘Don’t worry,’ Ko says.

‘What do you mean, “don’t worry”?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Ko says again.

‘Ko, do you work for Lacebark?’

Ko doesn’t reply.

After ten minutes – or maybe five, or maybe fifteen – Raf feels the van pulling up to a kerb. As Ko helps him down out of the back, he can hear a dog barking, which is odd, because that means they must still be out in the open, whereas both the Lacebark warehouses he’s seen have sliding garage doors so that vans can drive inside, out of sight, before they unload. But then Ko prods him impatiently in the back, and he walks a few steps forward, nearly tripping on the threshold of what feels like a front door. Behind him, he hears the van drive off.

‘Stairs,’ warns Ko, and puts his hand on Raf’s shoulder to guide him. Awkwardly, Raf makes his way up three flights. On the first landing he can smell bacon frying, and he begins to consider the possibility that, for the second time in one day, he has entered what he expected to be a sterile Lacebark dungeon and has found himself instead inside a block of flats – except that, to judge by the creaking yield of the wooden stair treads under his feet, this block of flats seems to be genuine.

Ko knocks at a door and shouts something in Burmese. The door opens, and once Raf has shuffled through, Ko finally pulls the hood from his head.

The first thing Raf sees is Cherish standing there with her hand on the shoulder of an emaciated Burmese guy in a wheelchair.

As Ko snips the zip tie off his wrists with a small pair of pliers, Raf looks around. He’s in the living room of a two- or three-bedroom flat, part of an old converted house rather than a council estate. Just now, when he heard those two heavy bolts sliding back, he was reminded of the Myth FM studio, and he sees now that the comparison was pretty apt: this is another of those small pressurised containers you sometimes find in London that are put to such a brutally demanding and urgent and contradictory selection of uses that every organic or inorganic body within them, and perhaps also the local fabric of space itself, will before long find itself scoured and mulched into a sort of ragged black kimchi. There are bin bags taped over the windows and cardboard boxes stacked in the corner next to a folding futon. Up on the wall there’s a map of London, a faded poster of a huge pyramidal temple somewhere in the jungle, and a one-page advertorial torn from a magazine announcing Lacebark’s new annual human rights grant. The table by the doorway through to the rest of the flat has been converted into a sort of workstation whose purpose is clear to Raf because he’s seen others like it, with latex gloves, spoons, tinfoil, small resealable plastic bags, a few tubs of lactose, a vacuum brush, and a set of microgram digital scales.

‘What is this?’ says Raf. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ If he’d been thinking more clearly when he was in the van, maybe it would have occurred to him sooner that the van’s engine wasn’t silent.

‘We had to get you away from the restaurant before Lacebark worked out what we were doing,’ says Cherish. ‘But we also had to make sure you didn’t see the route here. Ko’s English isn’t that good and there wasn’t going to be time for him to coax you into putting the hood on. So he did what he had to.’

The guy in the wheelchair murmurs something in Burmese. He’s so deathly in appearance that Raf is almost too squeamish to look straight at him – cheekbones and eye sockets way too big for the rest of his face, glossy lesions swarming around his mouth, skin greyish and almost translucent in places like undercooked prawns – and yet there’s something in his gaze and in the set of his shoulders that gives the impression of real strength.

‘Also, it won’t have done you any harm to see what it would be like if Lacebark really got to you,’ adds Cherish, apparently translating. ‘It’s happened to a lot of our friends. We all need to learn to be grateful for our good luck so far. Incidentally, don’t go back to the restaurant for a while after this, OK? Lacebark aren’t going to believe you like
mohinga
that much.’

Raf starts rubbing his wrists where they’re sore from the plastic cuff but then he remembers how often he’s seen the gesture in films and feels so self-conscious about it he has to stop. ‘I thought you were working for them.’

‘Yeah. That’s my day job.’ She gestures at the sofa. ‘Sit down. There’s a lot to tell you.’ She’s wearing a black rayon zip-up shift dress with no tights, and the dress shows nothing off, it’s tersely functional, but this is still the first time he’s seen her in anything girlier than jeans and a T-shirt, and the contrast would be enough to staple his gaze to her hemlines if he weren’t so unnerved by what’s happening.

‘Who is this?’ he says.

‘Raf, I want you to meet my brother Zaya.’ The guy in the wheelchair nods at Raf. ‘By the way, he can understand us fine. His English is good. But he’s really sick at the moment. Even though he’s barely taking any pain meds, he has to work really hard just to keep his mind clear. It’s too tiring for him to speak English. So I’m going to translate for him.’ She says something in Burmese. And then, through Cherish, Zaya starts telling the story of the day the two of them met for the first time in eight years.

Living in the hotel during the monsoon, Zaya explains, was like being half blind and half deaf: the site was surrounded by jungle, a warm mist blurred the air, and the rain drowned out nearly every sound, so that nothing broke through into the swaddled pinhole of your awareness until it was close enough to toss a pebble at your feet. He didn’t mind this too much, because it liberated you from the delusion of vigilance – in December, as you tried to fall asleep, you still listened for every hornbill squawk, convinced that somehow you would be able to pick out the one that warned of an attack from the jungle, but in June, you just learned to accept that there might be a noose of fifty soldiers tightening around your base and you wouldn’t know it until the first shot was fired.

However, today, it also meant he didn’t hear the truck until it was almost at the top of the slope. He hurried out from the lobby to the verandah and watched as the old grey Toyota shuddered to a halt like a mule forced home with too much on its back. Mae Sot, where Kham had gone to pick up Cherish, was only about forty miles east, across the border into Thailand, but if you were trying to avoid checkpoints the drive through the muddy hills took five or six hours that left you numb and boneless and shaky. From this distance he couldn’t make out through the streaming windscreen whether there was anyone in the passenger seat, and he knew it was still possible that Cherish had refused to come here with Kham, or that something else had happened to pull her out of their reach in the three days since they’d got word of her arrival in Mae Sot. But then the passenger-side door opened, and the girl who got down was his half-sister. She saw him and her eyes widened.

He tried to take in her height, her beauty, her tourist clothes. As his heart swelled in his chest, he forced himself to recall that almost half this girl’s life was unknown to him, that she was an American of untested loyalties, that for all he knew she had Lacebark money in her bank account and a GPS tracker in one of her body cavities. But then their arms were tight around each other and for a while none of that was in his mind. He waited until the motor of her sobs had slowed before he said, ‘Come in out of the rain,’ and led her by the arm back to the shelter of the verandah, the bank of the vertical river. Behind them, Kham was fixing a tarpaulin over the van.

After she put her rucksack down she stood there wiping her face and wringing out the hem of her vest. ‘Where are we? What the hell is this place?’

At first, you might have taken it for the overgrown ruins of an old British governor’s mansion. But if the building lacked an east wing or a rear elevation, it wasn’t because they’d been shelled by the Japanese, it was because they’d never been built. Back in the eighties, Zaya explained, an Indonesian company had come to this site to begin construction on a colonial-style hotel. They had plenty of investment from the Burmese government, who also planned to build a road here from Kawkareik; on the other side of the slope there was a gorgeous natural waterfall, and the aim had presumably been to tempt a few travellers across from northern Thailand during the dry season. But the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism didn’t put up the rest of the stake it had promised, and the Indonesians pulled out.