Glow (4 page)

‘Who’s that from?’

‘By the time we left the laundrette the second time, the flower market had started,’ says Isaac. ‘Those kids from the dryer insisted on buying me those. They said I was beautiful. Hello, dog! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello!’

‘But you and Barky went home before I did.’

‘We went back later on. We felt better.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘Your phone was off.’

Last night, before they ate that first portion of wontons, Isaac told Raf that he had something exciting to show him in Walworth, but he wouldn’t expand on the oxymoron. After the dog and her friend have sated each other’s tactility, Raf puts the lead back on Rose and they take her downstairs to Isaac’s car so they can drop her off at home on their way. As usual she resists the back seat as if it were a vertical plummet. Someone’s windscreen must have got knocked through outside Isaac’s block of flats, because in the gutter there are diamonds of safety glass with which this morning’s rain has mingled an alluvium of damp white blossom and a few fronds of synthetic wig hair caught on a chicken bone, like the shattered remains of a tribal fetish.

‘I was at Myth earlier,’ says Raf as Isaac starts the car. ‘There’s something weird going on.’

‘Yeah. I got a call from Jonk about it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘You can’t believe anything that fucker tells you. Do you remember when he said he met that guy who could shoot electricity out of his fingers?’

‘Yeah, but what did he say?’

Late on Wednesday night, Isaac explains, Jonk apparently left Myth FM after his two-hour slot, wandered across the road to the playground, and sat down to smoke a spliff on one of those plastic sheep they have on wobbly springs for the kids. Through the trees, he could see Theo walking down the street, and he was about to shout a greeting when a van pulled up right beside Theo. It was just a grimy white builder’s van, ‘no tools left in this vehicle overnight’, but the two men who jumped out of the back wore some kind of hi-tech goggles and were dressed all in black. Theo, taken aback, said something Jonk couldn’t hear, and then they pulled him inside the van and slammed the rear doors. The van drove off, and the strangest thing, Jonk claimed, was that somehow the engine didn’t make any noise at all: apart from the soft crepitation of tyres on the asphalt, it moved in total silence, headlights sweeping across the playground like the blank eyes of a wraith.

3.51 p.m.

They park outside a salvage yard with a sign that says ‘wholesale ironmongers’, radiators and baths and sinks piled in their rusty dozens behind the fence like an old house multiplied in a broken mirror. The next building down on the left is a medium-sized warehouse built from grey steel panels with a pitched roof and sliding garage doors at the front, generally looking as if the most exciting thing it could possibly hold is cardboard boxes full of spare parts for machines that make more cardboard boxes. Isaac leads him round to the back of the warehouse, where two green wheelie bins lean their open lids against a brick wall, empty but for a can of Coke and some wisps of cling film. A padlock that must have been snapped with bolt cutters lies on the ground beside the back door.

Inside the warehouse it’s dark so Isaac takes out a torch and shines it around. In the corner there’s a row of four portable toilets, and at the far end there’s a metal shelving unit, but apart from that the building is vacant. Raf sees tyre marks on the ground. ‘What are we doing here?’ he says.

‘I’m going to put on a rave.’

‘We’re right off Albany Road.’

‘So?’

‘Someone drives past, hears the music, calls the police, they’re here in ten minutes.’

Isaac smiles and shakes his head. ‘Go back outside and close the door.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to bang on the door as hard as I can with the torch, all right?’

Raf does as he’s told. After a minute or so, he hasn’t heard anything, so he presses his ear to the door, and that way he can just make out a faint percussive sound as if Isaac is tapping at the door with one gentle knuckle. He opens the door again and finds Isaac with the torch in his hand and his arm drawn back in a walloping posture. Raf can’t believe it at first, so they repeat the experiment, this time with Isaac on the outside, banging on the door again with the heel of the broken padlock. Then they each move ten paces sideways along the wall, then ten more, and it’s the same. Vibrations can’t penetrate. The warehouse is soundproofed, like Myth FM, but much better.

‘Why would anyone soundproof a warehouse?’ says Raf, looking around at this simulation of his own skull when he’s falling asleep sealed in his eyemask and earmuffs.

‘I don’t know. It’s perfect, though. Hire a generator, lights, sound system, more Portaloos. Make sure everyone queues round the back. The police could walk right past and they wouldn’t know there was anything going on. You could fit four hundred people in here.’

Four hundred dreams pushing into the skull. ‘No more parties in laundrettes.’

‘Yeah.’

The thought does give Raf great pleasure. ‘How’d you find it?’

‘You know Finn is always cycling around looking for new places to squat? He says he’s found five of these already. Warehouses that get put up overnight but by the time he spots them they’re always abandoned already. I checked the satellite view on Google Maps and he’s right. The photo’s only a month old but this was a petrol station then.’ And indeed this sterile prefabricated structure feels no more attached to the ground than a plastic tub you flip over to trap a rat running across a kitchen floor.

Raf takes the torch and walks farther into the gloom. Towards the middle of the warehouse something black is coiled on the ground. He picks it up.

‘That’s a speaker cable,’ says Isaac. ‘Someone must have left it behind.’

‘Does that mean there’s already been a rave here?’

Isaac looks disappointed for a moment. ‘But we would definitely have heard about it.’

Where the speaker cable was lying there’s a stain that Raf might have taken for another tyre mark, but now he sees it’s more of a rufous colour. He kneels down. ‘Hey, look at this.’

‘What?’ says Isaac.

Raf scratches at the stain with his fingernail. ‘I think it’s blood.’

Day 2

11.40 a.m.

The sooty scabs of chewing gum and the sycamore seeds trapped in pigeon shit make every paving stone in south London look like an unlabelled map of some distant volcanic archipelago, and when Rose browses along with her nose on the ground Raf sometimes imagines that she’s not tracing a scent but rather searching for the one unique slab that can correctly locate a priceless bone one of her ancestors buried. Today he’s taken the dog farther north than usual, almost into Bermondsey, where the streets are empty on a Sunday and the many new offices and flats wear visors of wood or aluminium as if to shut out Myth FM and all its influence. He’s waiting with her at a pedestrian crossing when he sees a photocopied notice taped up at the bus stop nearby.

‘Did you see me get knocked off my bike at this junction?’ A date and time. ‘Badly injured. Not at fault. Need to take driver to court to pay for dental work and new bike. Didn’t get number plate but driver was in white van with engine that didn’t make any noise (!). Looking for witnesses. Please call Morris.’ And a phone number.

4.59 p.m.

There’s a sort of famished muscularity to bicycle couriers that you also see in gay men who’ve kept on clubbing for a few years too long, and the dozen standing in this pub look as if they all have resting heart rates so slow that by any strict definition they’re medically dead. On the phone, Raf admitted that he hadn’t seen the accident, he just wanted to know more about it, so Morris said that Raf was welcome to come down later and buy him a pint. He has short dreadlocks under an orange baseball cap, and if he wasn’t easy enough to pick out from the stitches in his forehead and the plaster on his broken nose, then he would be when his smile reveals a black doorway where his front teeth once were.

‘The prick went right through a red light,’ he explains after Raf has introduced himself and brought back two lagers from the bar. ‘I was making a turn and suddenly he just gunned it. My bike’s fucked up even worse than my face. Using my girlfriend’s at the moment. Lucky she’s tall.’

Raf has always envied couriers for the MRI scan they take of their city, front tyres like toroid dog noses, a dead leaf’s difference in the height of a familiar kerb felt somewhere in their sinews when Raf himself probably wouldn’t even notice an extra few inches; and because, like pirate radio, they were supposed to get squashed under the internet, but didn’t; and also because he once saw a game of bike polo and it looked like a lot of fun. ‘So the engine didn’t make any noise?’ Raf says. Until he saw that photocopy at the bus stop he hadn’t believed Jonk’s story any more than Isaac had.

‘Yeah. Not just quiet like a Rolls. Silent.’

Raf’s pint tastes a bit cloacal. It’s that time of the early evening when the slant of the sunlight makes every pane of window glass look as deep and scummy as an old fishtank. Raf has to stop himself from yawning: he woke up at 1 a.m., so he’d like to be in bed by now. ‘Has anyone else called you?’ he says.

‘No. Except there was one other bloke, same as you, said he didn’t see it happen but wanted to hear about the van.’

‘Why?’

‘Didn’t say.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Didn’t say. And he didn’t want to come here to talk to me. I started to wonder if maybe he was the driver wanting to find out how much I knew.’

Now Raf feels as if he should certify his own motivations. ‘I’ve got a friend who might have had some trouble with the same van.’

Morris shrugs. ‘You can have that other bloke’s number if you like.’

Day 3

5.29 p.m.

The guy on the phone had an accent so posh that Raf was surprised when he suggested meeting in the McDonald’s on Walworth Road. And when Raf said that if he wanted fast food there was a Happy Fried Chicken opposite that also served burgers – the ‘chicken’ in the logo on the signage there looks more like a nervous baby dinosaur wearing a glam rock wig – the guy still insisted on McDonald’s. Raf comes in out of the drizzle and walks over to the only person in the room wearing a suit, who sits alone at the table farthest from the window with just a bag of chips on his tray. Pop music drools from the ceiling and the lights are bright enough to scorch the melatonin out of your brain.

‘You’re Raf?’ He’s in his mid-thirties, with a keen aquiline nose, and the manner of someone explaining that he would sack you if he possibly could but he just doesn’t have time this week to look for your replacement. During their conversation, however, Raf will begin to wonder if hidden behind this impatience there isn’t also something shaped like fear, which is not to say that the impatience is fake, because it’s real, but only that it’s been deliberately propped up right at the front. And every so often he glares around as if he’s disgusted to find himself here breathing in beef grease, even though it was his own stipulation. Just now he mispronounced Raf’s name, with a long vowel instead of a short one (people often guess it’s either Mediterranean or Sloaney, when in fact there’s nothing but south London in his family for a long time back, and that includes the grandfather on his mother’s side who took up this variant on Ralph for reasons the younger Raf can never remember). However, instead of making a correction, Raf just nods and sits down; and instead of offering a name in return, the guy just says: ‘You have some information you want to share about the white vans?’

It hadn’t occurred to Raf that there was more than one. ‘A friend of mine’s gone missing. Someone supposedly saw him getting pulled into a white van that didn’t make any noise.’

The guy waves him on. ‘Right. And?’

‘That’s all I know.’

‘That’s all you know? You didn’t even see it yourself?’

‘No.’

The guy leans back in his seat. ‘Well, this was a waste of time. On the phone you made it sound like you could actually give me something.’ Only now does Raf notice what looks like a dried ketchup stain on the lapel of his jacket. The guy sees him staring and looks down, then brushes at it pointlessly with two fingers. ‘From lunch. Bloody annoying. I only picked this up from the cleaners on Friday.’

‘What are the white vans?’ says Raf.

‘Stay away from them.’

‘Why? They’re just vans.’

The guy looks around and then leans forward again to answer almost in a whisper, even though a nearby table of teenagers are cackling loudly enough over a mobile phone video to cover anything he might say. ‘They’re not just vans, actually. They’re camouflaged military vehicles. They have hybrid engines so when they’re running off batteries they don’t make a sound.’

‘What? Military?’

‘Yes. Not British Army, though.’

‘Who, then?’

‘I can’t tell you that. But they’re kidnapping people. Mostly Burmese men, but some others. Such is the general reputation of white-van drivers, of course, that to most Londoners it couldn’t be less surprising to learn that they might have someone tied up in the back, although we’d be more likely to expect a weeping schoolgirl.’