Glow (8 page)

‘What are you whistling? I think I know that tune.’

‘GABBA GABBA hey!’ he sings softly. ‘GABBA GABBA hey!’

Day 6

6.24 a.m.

The next morning she’s gone.

The realisation is pre-empted by his hangover, which as usual waits a few seconds after he wakes up before it pounces, as if it wants to savour the expression on his face. He mews in agony at Cherish, at the assumption of her presence, already looking forward to a tactical discussion of their mutual enemy and a fried breakfast that might bring as much joy as yesterday’s curry. But when he reaches out, his hand finds nothing but rucked duvet. He takes off his eyemask to look around the room, and then he takes out his earplugs to call for her. Last night, after they had sex for the third time that day, he said, ‘You’ll still be here in the morning, right?’

‘Yes, and I will still respect you.’

‘No, I mean – you have to be careful. The vans.’ By this point Raf and Isaac have asked all their mutual friends about Theo, but no one seems to know anything more.

‘I’ll still be here.’ So he lay there with his arms around her, trying to tune his breathing with hers, but couldn’t get the frequency, and after a while she said, ‘Are you waiting for me to fall asleep?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

With his ex-girlfriend, Raf didn’t like to install his eyemask and earplugs while she was still awake because it felt like the first step towards a marital schedule of fortnightly sex, but she did like to fall asleep on his chest, so he used to have to wait until she dozed off and then ease out from under her so he could barricade his head. (Isaac once reported going home with a girl who wore not only an eyemask and earplugs but also a retainer and an anti-congestant nasal strip, which made her look as if for some reason she were morbidly afraid of leaking cerebrospinal fluid.)

When Raf didn’t answer, Cherish explained, ‘We can hug for as long as you want, but I can’t sleep if I can feel someone else’s heartbeat. Plus spooning just doesn’t work, ergonomically. Everyone knows it but no one wants to admit it.’ Around this girl there were black iron railings and a neat buffer of grass. That evening, sharing a bottle of whisky at the kitchen table, she had asked him about his own parents, who moved out to Essex a few years ago, and taught him a drinking game where you had to bounce a ten-pence piece into a shot glass. In bed afterwards she was rougher and more impatient than before, and he had an enjoyable feeling of being used, but when she came it was in complete silence, like a fuse blown in a cheap speaker.

A minute ago, Raf was dreaming about those empty soundproofed warehouses, rising and multiplying until their steel roofs blocked the sun from every street. Now he rolls over to sniff the other pillow, to prove Cherish wasn’t a dream too, but it’s blank to him. At least the sheets do have that tired and porous quality of sheets that have been repeatedly fucked in. He wonders what Rose would be able to smell here. How would a Staffie go through a bad break-up? Reminders of your lover breathing out from every object. You’d have to move house and burn all your bedding. Which is not that different from the plan Raf recently made. The only physical object he still has of  his ex-girlfriend’s is a hexagon-print scarf he once bought her as a present. He could tell straight away that she didn’t like it, and sure enough she didn’t bother to take it with her when she was collecting the things she’d left here. But apart from the scarf, there’s all the rest of London, too. Isaac keeps telling him that it’s no use trying to flee the reliquary of a dead relationship. ‘Statistically,’ he once said when they were drunk, ‘every pint of beer you ever drink for the rest of your life will contain at least a few of the same molecules of H2O that she sweated out the first time that Brazilian cunt gave her an orgasm. So you might as well learn to live with it.’

That did not make Raf feel any better. What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless. And there’s more moisture between his toes than in his mouth.

He gets up naked to check the bathroom and the kitchen, but Cherish is definitely gone. Now a real anxiety begins to jostle with his headache. He goes back into the bedroom to draw the curtains, and in the early morning light, grainy and pale like an old VHS recording, he sees something that he hadn’t noticed with just the lamp on: the corner of a piece of paper poking out from under his own pillow. He pulls it out and unfolds it. The script in Biro here must be Burmese – the words are made of lots of circles squashed together, so they look like ornamented caterpillars – but at the top of the page, in English, it says: ‘Raf, this is really important,
don’t show it to anyone
! xx Cherish.’

Raf’s left shoulder begins to sting, and he sees that he has a few scratches there, as if from the claws of her songbirds. He thinks about posting an ad, like Morris. ‘Did you see me get spun upside down by a half-Burmese girl? Badly smitten, not at fault. Looking for witnesses. Please call Raf.’ Instead, on a hunch, he gets dressed and goes out to fetch Rose. On the way, he notices that a weed of some sort has started to spread across the lawn at the perimeter of her block, a lather of silky white blooms. When he comes back with the yawning animal and lets her into his flat, she does something she’s never done before. She skids inside, looks around, and starts barking like she’s trying to drive a devil out.

Someone has been here. Not Cherish, because Rose made friends with Cherish. Someone else. Not a friend.

Day 7

10.23 a.m.

A pudgy electrician is up on a stepladder fiddling with a new CCTV camera that now hangs from the ceiling, so Raf has to squeeze past him to get to the chiller cabinet for a pint of milk. This is vexatious enough, because when you spend as much time in a place each week as he spends in this corner shop (or on the top deck of the 343) it becomes another room in your flat, an appendix stapled to the floor plan, and you don’t want to find a stranger in there rearranging your furniture. But then, handing fifty pence to one of the twins at the counter, he’s even more dismayed to see that they seem to be stocking only about half as many types of dog food as they did before. On that shelf instead are packets of something brown and flaky, with no English on the cardboard label, just some Arabic and a picture of a smiling prawn. Out of curiosity he picks one up, sniffs it, and asks what it is, expecting to learn that it’s some sort of Iranian snack product.

‘
Balachaung
,’ says the twin.

‘Sorry?’

‘
Ba-la-chaung
.’

The last time Raf heard that word was the day before yesterday, because it was on the menu in the Burmese restaurant and he got Cherish to pronounce it for him. She said it was a prawn relish with peanut and chilli. When he takes a proper look at the label he realises that the writing on it isn’t Arabic, it’s Burmese, just like the note, but in a blocky typeface, and then when he digs through the other packets in the tray he does find a couple with English printed on the packets: BBQ dry snakehead fish and herbal seedless tamarind jam.

‘How long have you been stocking this stuff?’ he says, with a queasy sense that certain tendencies are propagating through his surroundings much too fast, as if someone has been editing the machine code on which the world runs.

‘Since last week. New supplier.’

‘Do you sell much of it?’

The twin shrugs. ‘Not yet.’

3.50 p.m.

Raf lied on the phone to the guy he met in McDonald’s, or half lied, and said he had new information about the white vans. But this time the guy didn’t want to go back to McDonald’s, or anywhere else public. And Raf, feeling a crackle of paranoia now, didn’t really want to be on his own with the guy, so he suggested that he come to Isaac’s flat. Today, the girl knitting at the table by the front door is wearing muddy skate shoes and a gabardine blazer with a lot of zips, and the girl dozing on the futon is wearing transparent stiletto heels and a dress that looks like a banana skin. As always, they are magnificent. When the guy arrives, he looks around and says to Raf, ‘Who are all these people?’ Raf notices that he still has that ketchup stain on his lapel, like a pin badge in support of a charitable foundation for gluttons. If he works for the British government, shouldn’t he own a spare suit?

‘Nothing to worry about,’ says Isaac, who is growing a beard at the moment. ‘Their English isn’t great, and I’m involved.’

‘Involved?’

‘I’m another mate of Theo’s. Who disappeared. Sit down.’

The guy looks around for a few seconds as if he’s expecting a chair to be wheeled out for him, but at least when he finally resigns himself to Isaac’s sagging sofa he flops right into it instead of perching on the edge. A folding plastic clothes airer hung with damp T-shirts blocks off one corner of the living room like some sort of ramshackle crowd-control barrier. ‘So what more do you know?’ he says.

‘I met this girl . . .’ begins Raf.

‘I’m delighted for you.’

‘She – they tried to kidnap her, like Theo. I saw the van. They had guns. And I stopped them once, but some time last night I think they took her from my flat. When I woke up, she was gone.’ He describes Rose’s reaction. ‘So I know there was someone in my flat. And if they broke in and took her I might not have heard anything, because of how I have to sleep.’

‘Quite audacious to snatch her from right beside you, if it’s anyone but Nosferatu that we’re dealing with. Do you have any other evidence?’

‘She didn’t drink any water.’

‘What do you mean?’ says Isaac.

Raf didn’t mention this earlier, although Isaac did ask a lot about Cherish, excited that his best friend had finally got laid after seven weeks of dolorous chastity.

‘There is no way a human being could voluntarily leave a flat the morning after drinking as much whisky as we did without drinking a glass of water first. And there was no glass on the counter.’

‘Maybe she washed it up.’

‘There was nothing in the drying rack. All my glasses and mugs were where I left them.’

‘Maybe she drank straight from the tap.’

‘You can’t. The taps are too low.’

‘I’m really sorry, man, but that is the shittiest “clue” I’ve ever heard.’

Raf knows Isaac might be right, but at the same time he feels certain, as certain as he’s ever felt of anything, that right now Cherish is in the back of a white van, or somewhere even worse, with Theo. He thinks of her in a dark room, in front of a camera, motionless and naked and very clean.

‘Still, congratulations on finding a girl who will spend an evening just sitting in your flat getting wasted with you for fun,’ adds Isaac. ‘They are the best kind.’

‘Anything else whatsoever?’ says the guy in the suit. ‘So far this has been, once again, a total bloody waste of time. My fault, I suppose. Fool me once, and so on.’

‘She left this note.’ Raf passes it over.

‘Do you know what this means?’

‘No. But read the top. She must have needed me to keep it safe.’

The guy sighs. ‘So this piece of paper is the only concrete asset you have to show me? This is truly all you have?’

‘Yeah.’

He folds it up. ‘I’ll have to keep it, of course. I’ll get it translated by one of our analysts.’

‘No,’ says Raf. ‘I need it back.’

The guy looks at the note, looks at the front door, looks at Raf – then he jumps to his feet and tries to make a getaway.

‘Hey!’ shouts Isaac. And that’s when his flatmate, without even looking up from her knitting, sticks out her slender right leg, and the guy topples forward and smacks his nose on the brass rim of the peephole in the front door.

‘Oh, wow, Hiromi!’ says Isaac. ‘Wow! Cheers, darling!’ With help from Raf, who now feels guilty for assuming that Isaac didn’t know the names of his flatmates, he hauls the guy back to the sofa. ‘Let’s tie the cunt up.’

‘No, that absolutely, absolutely won’t be necessary,’ says the guy. He hands over the note and then finds a paper napkin in his pocket to wipe a trickle of blood from his upper lip. And he does look defeated, sitting there with a red postmark stamped on the bridge of his nose. So instead Raf and Isaac just stand over him.

‘Who are you really?’ says Raf.

‘My full name is Mark Edmund Fourpetal.’

‘Do you really work for MI6 or whatever?’

‘MI6?’ Fourpetal laughs. ‘No. Quite a long way from MI6. I’m in PR.’

‘What do you know about the white vans?’

‘Not much. They’re kidnapping Burmese men, as I told you last time. I don’t know why. But they have something to do with my former employer. An American firm called Lacebark.’

‘Lacebark are a mining company,’ says Raf.

‘Yes, but they’re vertically integrated. Everything’s in-house now. Including corporate security.’

‘And they’re chasing you?’

‘What makes you say that?’