Glow (29 page)

‘This is pretty awesome,’ Cherish says into his ear.

He never sees her arrive or leave anywhere, he thinks. She’s just there. Like Batman. One day he’d like to watch her untangling her headphones from her scarf from the strap of her bag as she comes into a pub. He kisses her straight away, just as if she was his girlfriend. ‘Yeah, it is,’ he says. Then he remembers the reason he’s not supposed to enjoy himself. ‘Hey, I really have to talk to you about Fourpetal.’

She puts a hand on his arm. ‘It’s fine. We’re watching him.’

‘You know where he is?’

She nods.

‘So he can’t do anything stupid and get himself interrogated?’

‘Raf, relax. It’s fine. I promise.’

There’s something a little bit slippery about Cherish’s casualness here. Just watching Fourpetal isn’t going to be enough, surely. That won’t stop Lacebark from getting him. Cherish should have snatched him up herself and locked him in a room somewhere. Coming to a rave with Raf should not be the priority tonight. Unless she already has a reason to be certain that Fourpetal isn’t a threat any more.

Is it possible, Raf thinks, that Fourpetal is already dead, and Cherish doesn’t want him to know? Zaya is a soldier, after all, and he probably wouldn’t think twice about killing someone who was about to wreck the whole operation. Of course, Zaya couldn’t have physically accomplished it himself. But Ko could have. Or Cherish. Raf looks at her, wondering if she would have been capable of a pragmatic murder. It doesn’t feel plausible. But maybe that’s just because she’s so pretty and he doesn’t have any imagination. After all, she’s a soldier too. Raf doesn’t know how he’d feel about the right and wrong of it all if he learned that Fourpetal really had been stubbed out. For the hundredth time, he runs through all the people Fourpetal could doom. Cherish and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself.

But Cherish is right. He should relax. Even if Lacebark had conquered the whole of the rest of London and driven every other cuckoo out of every other nest, for the next few hours it wouldn’t matter. Tonight this warehouse is a demilitarised zone. ‘I need to say hello to Isaac.’

They swim through the crowd towards the low platform where the decks are set up. Isaac is sharing a spliff with the MC. When he sees Raf, he waves and hops down off the platform. ‘Mate!’ he shouts. ‘You made it!’

‘Of course I made it.’

Isaac looks at Cherish. ‘Is this her?’

‘This is her,’ says Cherish.

Isaac turns to Raf and makes such a diverse and protracted series of gestures and facial expressions signifying ‘Good work!’ that even Cherish giggles.

‘When’s your set?’ says Raf.

‘At three. Assuming the next DJ turns up. Otherwise it’s in twenty minutes.’

‘Make sure you play that track with the harp sample.’

‘Listen, Barky finally managed to get hold of some real glow,’ says Isaac. ‘Do you two want any? I know this is sort of the wrong way round, given where it . . . You know.’ He looks at Cherish. ‘Comes from.’

Raf panics. Isaac might as well be wielding a syringe full of sodium thiopental. If Raf gets high with Cherish, the oxytocin will make him feel like nothing in the world could be more pleasurable than spurting out all his secrets. She doesn’t know that he visited the real Win in the training facility, nor does she know about Win and the Serbian mafia. Even if Win is ready to betray Cherish, it doesn’t seem to Raf that he has any right to betray Win after Win confided in him like that.

‘I don’t want to take any tonight,’ he says.

‘Why not?’ says Cherish.

This is especially frustrating because for obvious reasons he is desperate to find out for himself what glow is like. Also, he knows Cherish would look more gorgeous than ever as the drug took its effect on them both – objectively gorgeous because of the bloom of elation it would put in her face and subjectively gorgeous because of the lens of elation it would put in his eyes – the love they’d find in each other until it wore off would be silvery and fathomless like the small universe between two mirrors. A rave like this deserves glow. But he just can’t.

Improvising, he says to her so Isaac won’t hear, ‘When we fuck later, I want to be able to come.’

He’s almost sure he can see a flicker of relief behind her smile, and he realises she probably had just the same worry as him. She has plenty of secrets to keep too. That much he knows for sure.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘I guess if you’re not taking any, I’m not taking any.’

‘So it’s “love is the drug” with you two now?’ says Isaac. ‘All right. More for me.’

‘Let’s get some shots and then I want to dance,’ says Cherish.

Raf gives Isaac a hug. ‘See you in a bit.’

Day 15

5.26 a.m.

Because Raf wasn’t paying much attention back in the shop, he’s confused to see that all Cherish has brought for the ‘picnic’ is two cans of Guinness, a bottle of Tabasco, and a bag of lemons. When they emerged from the rave into an exceptionally warm and brilliant dawn she said she didn’t want to go back indoors for a while, and as much as he was looking forward to taking her back to his flat and undressing her he couldn’t really disagree. The yard at the back of the warehouse was acrid because of all the people who’d got bored with queueing for the Portaloos and gone outside to piss behind the wheelie bins, so it was a relief to get out on to the street. Now they sit cross-legged in the centre of the derelict tennis court, which was only about half an hour’s wobbly stroll from the warehouse. At this time of the morning the quills of sunlight flaring through the trees at the side makes it feels less like a gravesite and more like a garden. This would be a good place for Linnaeus’s
Horologium Florae
.

Cherish takes from her bag a foil blister pack containing eight mauve lozenges and passes it to Raf. ‘Put one of these on your tongue and let it dissolve.’

‘I thought we weren’t doing any drugs tonight.’ The ringing in his ears from the rave is like a thin cloudy liquid trapped in his cochlea.

‘Just take one.’

The lozenge tastes fruity. ‘What is this? Flavoured temazepam for kids?’

Cherish uses the edge of the bottle opener on her keyring to saw a lemon into quarters. She passes one to Raf. ‘OK, bite into this.’

‘But it’s a lemon.’

‘Trust me.’

Raf apprehensively does as he’s told. There’s an interval of controversy in his mouth, like when you put your finger in a basin of cold water that you were expecting to be hot, and then he realises that the lemon is delicious.

‘What did you just give me?’ He turns over the blister pack and finds only a quotation printed on the back: ‘?“Again, it is proved that sweetness is not really in the sapid thing, because the thing remaining unaltered the sweetness is changed into bitter, as in case of a fever or otherwise vitiated palate.” – George Berkeley.’

‘They’re made from miracle berries,’ says Cherish. The fruit of a West African plant called
Synsepalum dulcificum
, she explains, contains a glycoprotein that distorts the shape of the sweetness receptors on the tongue so that they respond to acids instead of sugars. ‘Ko gave me some. I’ve been wanting to try them for so long.’ She opens both the cans of Guinness. ‘Now this.’

Raf takes a swig. ‘Chocolate milkshake!’ And the Tabasco is a piquant syrup. Cherish tries everything after him. Perhaps somewhere in the Concession there’s a shrub that can be fermented into eye drops to make everybody look as beautiful as her. She leans forward to give him a long kiss and he puts a hand inside her top. ‘You taste as sugary as all the other stuff,’ he says afterwards.

‘Yeah, but that’s because all the other stuff is still coating my tongue. I don’t think miracle berries do anything for saliva. Otherwise you’d taste your own mouth. OK, now rinse with Guinness like you were at the dentist.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want any Tabasco left in your mouth when you go down on me.’ She starts to wriggle out of her skirt. Surprised, Raf looks around like a meerkat. ‘I come here all the time with the Lacebark guys and I’ve never seen anybody else come near here,’ she reassures him.

Raf wishes she hadn’t mentioned Lacebark, because it reminds him that he’s still concerned about Fourpetal. He thinks of Win, there in the lion’s mouth, so cocky but so defenceless. But then it occurs to him that in fact Win would be safe even if Fourpetal got interrogated, because Fourpetal still knows only about the fake Win. Every Lacebark mercenary in London would swoop down on that flat in Camberwell, but the real glow chemist would still be in Lacebark’s blind spot. Which makes Raf think of a question he’s been meaning to ask Cherish.

‘Why were you outside my flat last week? You were in the van with those Lacebark soldiers. But back then I had nothing to do with any of this. So why were Lacebark already watching me?’

‘They put you under surveillance because I told them to.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because you’re so handsome and I wanted some candid shots to take home with me.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’ Part of Cherish’s job as a double agent inside Lacebark, she explains, is to distract their attention. She tries to make sure they keep a lot of people under surveillance who have nothing to do with glow. But she can’t just pick those people at random: to retain any credibility, she has to find subjects who look as if they plausibly might have some connection to Zaya’s network. Raf was basically in the same position as someone who’s hired for a police identity parade because he happens to have the right facial hair. When he gave her that fake glow at the rave in the laundrette, he established himself as a candidate. And after Lacebark found out he worked for Myth FM, they didn’t need any more encouragement.

‘But after they searched your flat, and watched you for another day or so, they gave up and moved on.’

‘Did you tell them we had sex?’ he says.

There’s something especially creepy about the thought of Lacebark mapping sexual commerce in their ImPressure• network like a village gossip. If Fourpetal did tell Lacebark that Jesnik was in a prelingual relationship with Win, they’d note it down eagerly (even if they still had the wrong referent in mind for that name). Maybe the real Win is safe for a while, but Lacebark could still take Jesnik from him. Raf tries to imagine how he’d feel if those mercenaries did something to Cherish. With Jesnik gone, Win would presumably lose interest in defecting to the Serbians. In fact, he might be so furious with Lacebark that he’d pledge allegiance to Zaya and what he called ‘that Shining Path shit’ for the rest of his life.

‘I didn’t tell them everything,’ says Cherish. ‘I just told them I made out with you, so you wouldn’t be suspicious.’

He remembers that afternoon, and looks down at the pack of miracle berries. ‘Hey, did I say something to make you think I don’t like the way you taste? Because—’

‘No! I just want to know what this is like. Take off your pants and get on your back.’

She settles herself over him on all fours so that she can suck his cock at the same time as he licks her from underneath. He can feel when his tongue is in the right place because it makes her bobbing mouth falter and purse for a second before it hurries up again. After a while she pauses and says, ‘OK, what do I taste like?’

They’re both out of breath. ‘Pretty good but not as sweet as the lemons.’

She runs a fingernail down the dorsal vein of his penis and he shivers. ‘Are you disappointed? Were you expecting, like, cookie-dough ice cream?’

‘Kind of, yeah.’ He remembers Isaac telling him about a photographer’s assistant he went out with for a while whose prescription mood stabilisers not only diminished her secretions but also left them disconcertingly odourless and flavourless. Isaac, who is devoted to cunnilingus, said it was like having sex with a Scandinavian welfare system. To Raf there’s something persuasive about the finding that a person’s capacity for joy might percolate into their glands and follicles. If you wanted, you could say that the sweetness of Cherish’s clitoris on his kinked chemoreceptors is just a sort of oral hallucination. But the taste of her seems more truthful to Raf now than it ever did before. Take these miracle berry tablets often enough and you’d begin to believe that they revealed the real sweetness hidden in external objects in just the same way that MDMA sometimes seems to reveal the real joy, a coy pith of luminance like the alkaloids Win had such trouble refining from
glo
petals. After all, sweetness isn’t just a taste, it’s also the pleasure stitched inextricably into that taste. And you can’t be mistaken about pleasure: like pain, if you think you feel it, then you feel it. Then again, there’s not much that’s sweeter than antifreeze; he’s read that they discourage people from drinking ethylene glycol by accident by mixing it with something called an ‘embittering agent’, which is presumably distilled from pillowcase tears.

‘What do I taste like?’ he says.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she says, and puts him back in her mouth. He moves his hands over her body, mapping her vectors of influence. From this angle the sun reflects so brightly off the edge of her hip that it could be a coin or the face of a watch, and when he comes he feels as if he’s siphoning the light back into her mouth like a periscope. Afterwards, she spits a couple of times on the ground and then reaches for an open can of Guinness.