Glow (21 page)

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No.’

‘Zaya, I’m going to college in September.’

‘You’ll move to London and work for Lacebark. You’ll be a resourceful American girl who speaks Burmese – they’ll think they’re lucky to have found you. I’ll follow you there in about a year.’

‘What’s happening in London?’

‘Pepper,’ said Zaya. Noticing a baby leech on his forearm, he plucked it off and threw it into the trees.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sis, this is really big now. It’s bigger than you or me. It’s bigger than Gandayaw. It’s bigger than Burma.’

‘I just graduated from high school. I live in Echo Park with our mom. I still don’t really understand what you want from me, but I’m not a freedom fighter.’

‘You’re my sister and I know how strong you are.’

‘From when I was ten?’ said Cherish.

‘You can’t have forgotten that talk we had the night before you left. I was going to stay and fight. You were going to come back and fight when you were old enough. We both swore to it. And now it’s time.’

Then he saw the snake.

It was a hognose, about four feet long, pale yellow with hexagonal brown blotches, and it was slithering out from behind a mango tree. Dead leaves didn’t even quiver as it passed, as if it existed at a slight physical remove from the rotting muddle around it. He pointed, and Cherish gave a little gasp. ‘Is it dangerous?’

‘Yes. Shoot it in the head.’

‘What?’

‘Quick – shoot it in the head.’

But Cherish aimed too fast and her hands were shaking, so the nut whished through a fern beside the snake. Hissing angrily, it lifted its head and flattened out its hood.

‘Again.’ This time the nut hit the hognose just below its right eye and its head dropped back to the ground.

‘Is it dead?’ said Cherish.

‘No, of course not, it’s just stunned. Pick it up by the tail.’

‘Zaya, use your machete!’

‘There isn’t time to argue – just pick it up.’

Cherish bent over, trying to stretch out for the snake without putting her feet anywhere near it, but Zaya knew that was no good so he shoved her forward. Cringing, she reached for the tip of its tail.

‘No, about two thirds of the way down. Both hands. Just don’t let its head near you.’

Slippery in the rain, the snake flexed hard as Cherish lifted it off the ground, and from the way she jerked her shoulders around you would have thought she was wrestling an opponent of twice her own weight. No one ever gripped a big snake in their hands for the first time without feeling badly unnerved by the strange autogenous torque of it, this lever with no fulcrum.

‘Swing it against the tree to break its skull,’ Zaya said. Cherish faltered, and the hognose, hanging upside down, made a lunge at the flesh of her thigh just below her shorts. ‘Sis, don’t freeze up! Listen to me: do Lacebark know you’re here?’

‘Lacebark?’

‘You may want to whirl it around your head a couple of times to build up speed. Did Lacebark come to you? Did they offer you money?’

Cherish hadn’t got the motion right yet and she was just flopping the snake around. ‘How the fuck would Lacebark even know who I am?’

‘Tell me the truth!’ Zaya watched her face, knowing that for the first time today he’d be able to see all the way through to her bloody core, like holding a snake’s jaws open to look down the tunnel of its body.

‘I am telling you the truth!’ she screamed. And Zaya, with relief, felt certain that she was. Now that Cherish had raised her arms higher she could finally build up some momentum, hurling spiral ripples out through the downpour. After a couple of spins she dropped her arms again and let the snake’s head meet the mango tree. There was a gristly thud and for an instant the whole length of it went stiff.

‘Good. Again, to be sure.’

This time, more confident, Cherish put all her fury into it, grunting with exertion, and hit so hard that wet bark shrapnel jumped from the tree. Afterwards, Zaya could see that part of the skull had caved in. ‘All right. You can drop it.’ The hognose landed in the dirt and a last couple of shivers fled down its tail.

‘I could have fucking died just now! What was that? A cobra?’

‘It was just a hognose. The bite hurts but all you get afterwards is a nasty swelling. You wouldn’t have been scared of one of those when you were eight.’

‘You said it was dangerous, you prick!’ She was panting.

‘It is, if you’re a frog.’ He thought about making her skin and gut the snake as well, but he decided the kill had been enough to make his point. So he carried it over to a tree stump and hacked off its head with two strokes of his machete. A weak gargle of blood soaked into the wood.

‘Why the fuck did you make me do that?’ Cherish said. ‘And why the fuck were you asking me about Lacebark? I hope you choke to death on a chicken bone.’ She was swearing in a mixture of Danu and English, alternating like a boxer’s two fists, but then for the second time that day she started to cry. She sat down heavily on the ground.

With the tip of the machete Zaya made a slit all the way down the snake’s belly. The skin was so tough and elastic that it peeled off in one long rag like a split condom, and the innards could be ripped from their binding almost as neatly, leaving a long pink tube of meat which the scales had stained with that same faint imbricated pattern that you sometimes saw inside fish. Only when he was finished with the hognose did Zaya get up and go back over to Cherish. He squatted down and tried to put his arms around her but she pulled away. ‘Don’t touch me with your disgusting snake hands,’ she said.

He knew how proud of herself she’d feel later. ‘You’re just like I remember, Sis. If you stayed for a week I’d probably come out here and find you knocking mangoes out of the tree with three pythons in each hand. You’re going to go to London and you’re going to win this fight for us before I even get there.’

She sniffed and glanced over at the coil of hognose meat, like a pork loin forced through an exhaust pipe. ‘Is that what we’re cooking later?’

‘Of course.’

‘Is it nice?’

‘Didn’t you ever eat snake when we were kids?’

‘No.’

‘It’s horrible. But it’s good for your heart. Come on. Let’s wrap it up and take it home.’

9.04 p.m.

Perhaps it makes Cherish uncomfortable that her brother is almost powerless to speak except through her, and that was why she made sure to tell this story about herself precisely as Zaya wanted it told, not adding a word of her own commentary, as if she were reading out a long confession that someone else had typed up on her behalf. While they were talking, Ko made dinner; he’d explained apologetically that he couldn’t really cook because the stove in the kitchen was out of use, so instead he sat at the table by the door chopping up mangoes and carrots for a dried shrimp salad.

‘I was in London for about a year before Lacebark started their operation here,’ Cherish adds. ‘They recruited me right away.’

‘What did you say to them about why you were in London?’

‘I said I’d come for the parties because there’s nowhere to dance in LA. Which is true. Then Zaya arrived in February. He nearly got caught on his way through Pakistan.’

‘Oh my god, that was you!’ says Raf, who still has a damp paper plate on his lap and peanut crumbs stuck in his teeth. ‘I heard about this! How did you talk that Brazilian guy into letting you out of the van?’

Translating again, Cherish says, ‘The type of guys who carry guns for Lacebark have a lot more in common with us than they have with their bosses. If you talk to them for long enough, you can often make them see that. Most of them are basically good guys. Although it wasn’t the Brazilian who gave him the pin to get out of his handcuffs, he says. The Brazilian wouldn’t listen to him.’

Raf wonders what Martin would say if he knew that. ‘But if Zaya wasn’t in London until February, why were Lacebark already here last year?’

‘Getting revenge on Zaya for causing five years of mayhem in the Concession is secondary. They’re here because they want to get glow back.’ This is just Cherish talking now.

‘Get it back?’

‘To make glow in significant quantities, you need an organic precursor. You understand what that means, right?’

Raf nods.

‘The precursor is a flower. In Danu it’s called
glo
. And until we brought it to London there was only one place in the world where it grew. You can guess this part.’

‘Inside the Concession?’

‘Yeah. But now it’s all over south London. We’ve been planting it since I got here.’

Lacebark arrived at the Shan forest in 1989, Cherish explains, far too recently to change the course of
glo
’s evolution, so it can only be an accident that the species has certain genes that help it thrive in anthropogenic environments. Most flowers that open and close do so at regular times of day and prefer the high-colour temperature of real sunshine. (Raf knows all about colour temperature from his freelance 3D rendering jobs, because property developers like it high, too.)
Glo
, on the other hand, is both nourished and seduced by the wavelengths of artificial light. If you plant
glo
near a light that shines twenty-four hours a day – such as any security light outside an estate – the flower’s photonastic rhythm will run faster and faster until it’s opening and closing every eight or nine hours. Somehow, the constancy of the light seems to compensate for the deficiencies of the local climate, so that
glo
will happily bloom at latitudes with average temperatures several degrees colder than the Burmese jungle, as long as it never has to endure the dark. There’s even a condemned council block in Stockwell where the housing office put big concrete flowerboxes on all the balconies to beautify the wreck a little bit but all the plants died last summer and now
glo
has found a home there instead. Linnaeus wasted years trying to find a way to acclimatise tea plants to northern winters so that European nations wouldn’t have to spend so much of their South American silver on Chinese imports, but
glo
would have been a better proof of concept.

‘And you know what else we brought here from Gandayaw?’ Cherish adds. ‘The one guy in the world who knows how to make glow, the drug, from
glo
, the plant.’

‘Nobody else knows the process?’

‘Nobody.’

‘But why should Lacebark care?’ says Raf. ‘They mine copper and rubies.’

‘Yeah, but they’re not very good at it any more. They want a new business. You know what 3M stands for? The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. They used to mine aluminium oxide. They make a lot more money now selling Post-its and Scotch tape and stuff. That’s why Lacebark want to start manufacturing and selling glow. If no one else had the plant or the process, they’d have a monopoly over it, like the British East India Company had over opium in China. The wholesale ecstasy market is worth about twenty billion dollars a year worldwide. It’s impossible to find out Lacebark’s real annual revenues because they pull a lot of Enron shit to keep people from finding out that they’re fucked, but by now the number might be about seven billion and dropping fast. If Lacebark could get glow to the point where it was even half as popular as ecstasy, then they could forget about mining. They’d be profitable for ever, and no one would ever have to find out how close to the edge they came, and none of them would have to go to jail.’

‘But they’re a legitimate company.’

‘Those laboratories in China that make mephedrone and ethylbuphedrone are legitimate companies too. Soon they’ll all be part of conglomerates. That’s the way it’s going.’

Isaac has a theory that drugs like mephedrone are a sort of delayed act of revenge for the Opium Wars: two hundred years later, the Chinese finally get to sell a debilitating narcotic back to the British.

‘Lacebark are accountable in America, though,’ Raf says. ‘They’d have to start laundering money.’

‘Are you kidding? They already do. Most of the money Lacebark makes from the Concession goes through banks in Macau to dodge corporate taxes. If things worked out with glow, they’d probably keep the Concession open, but by then it would just be another step in the money-laundering process. The fabric softener or whatever. That’s one thing Lacebark and the tribes of Burma have in common. We both love dodging taxes.’

‘So Lacebark are paying you to help them find Zaya and this chemist.’

Translating for Zaya, Cherish says: ‘Our people don’t have a lot of legends, but there’s one from about eight hundred years ago that’s very important to us. When we lived farther down in the valleys, there was this jumped-up local king who tried to take a census. No one had ever tried to take a census before. We dragged him off the throne and cut off his head.’

‘That’s the whole legend?’

‘Yeah. The point is we don’t like people trying to make lists of our names.’