And these people really know their chemistry. A random post about DMBDB argues that it’s not as good as MDPV ‘because the heterocyclic ring doesn’t allow the tertiary amine to be metabolised into a secondary amine, as it does in diethylcathinone’; another about the acetylation of opioids explains that ‘adding a cinnamyl ester to the 14-hydroxyl group on oxycodone can increase potency through means other than simple lipophilicity changes by acting as additional binding moieties — the 14-cinnamyl ester on oxycodone can raise potency to over fifty times that of morphine, for instance.’ Raf and Isaac might know a bit of trivia about the pituitary but they’ve never burrowed down this far. If anyone ever invents a cost-effective method of synthesising real MDMA without sassafras as a precursor, this is where the news will break.
The forum reminds Raf of conversations he’s overheard between engineers at Myth FM (including one friend of Theo’s who used to be a Communications Systems Operator in the Royal Corps of Signals before he was discharged for petty theft) about radiation patterns and capacitor rods and feedpoint impedance: the expertise is so commonplace that it should be boring to anyone with an A level in science and yet here it all feels occult, lawless, newly discovered — a pragmatic trade that does not have and has never had a theoretical or scholarly crust. And while there are sub-forums for salvia and ayahuasca and opium, the most animated discussion is about novel synthetic compounds imported from laboratories in China. Like medieval naturalists, the Lotophage users know that everything they study has been created for a purpose, but the prime intelligence is so distant and mysterious that they can only guess at its thinking.
Nonetheless, at the centre of it all, Raf feels a gap. What is absent is pleasure. In this sense Lotophage also reminds him of talking about sex with the boys at school when he was about sixteen. One of the main reasons human males have sex is because it is enjoyable to feel your penis being stimulated to ejaculation. To Raf this is not a controversial claim. But back then they always did their best to pretend otherwise. It was acceptable to talk about getting a ‘good blowjob’, for instance, but if you had ever been careless enough to talk about a ‘good orgasm’, or just ‘coming really hard’, everyone would probably have called you gay for weeks. Somehow there was felt to be something clammy and effete about valuing direct physical pleasure for its own sake — which is absurd, because the truth is that the supreme priority of any mammalian brain, especially a teenage boy’s, is to put itself in situations where it will get the chance to bask in hedonic neurotransmitters. Lotophage is the same. They fetishise the means, but never the ends. Why do these people even take drugs? Why do they spend their money and break the law? Presumably because they want to feel pleasure. And yet you wouldn’t know that from reading their posts. Pleasure is always hidden behind words like ‘potency’ and ‘recreational dosage’. They seem ashamed of pleasure, even though really they’re pleasure hobbyists. By contrast, when Raf and Isaac cut pleasure open with neurochemistry, it’s not because they want to kill it — it’s because they want to look deeper inside its lambent heart.
Day 8
4.56 p.m.
Does it still count as a surveillance operation if, instead of planting a bug, you just tune your radio to the FM frequency on which your targets are voluntarily broadcasting? Raf wonders this as he sits in Isaac’s car listening to the Burmese DJs come to the end of their show. Isaac isn’t here, but Fourpetal is in the driver’s seat beside him, and they’re parked by the playground across the road from the council block where the Myth FM studio is hidden. At 17.09 by the clock on the car radio the two men come out of the exit doors and Fourpetal puts the car into gear, ready to follow.
‘I think they’re going on foot,’ says Raf.
‘So?’
‘We can’t just drive along slowly behind them. We’ll look like we’re trying to pick them up for a sex act.’
‘If we get out of the car, and then they get in one, we’ll lose them right away.’
‘If that happens we can just try again tomorrow. They’re on five days a week.’
Even on foot they have to dawdle a long way back so they don’t get noticed. Raf, having never stalked anyone like this before, doesn’t know any tricks; these streets are his home terrain, which ought to give him a sort of supernatural guerrilla advantage, and he feels cheated to realise that apparently it doesn’t at all. (A fox would be great at this.) As the road winds up past a church, there’s a box junction and a traffic island and a pelican crossing and a speed bump and a bus lane almost on top of one another as if one night the council had to dump a lot of spare infrastructure in a hurry, and that’s where the Burmese DJs turn off between two squat detached houses down a path that Raf, despite all his walks with Rose, has never noticed before.
This is dangerous, because there’s no visible pretext to be walking in that direction, so if they’re spotted it will be obvious at once what they’re doing. But they carry on anyway. The path slopes gently down, with trees and tangled undergrowth on either side; the continual yap of a dog seems to have no material point of origin but instead is immanent in the air like a rainbow. Then, as if all this weren’t already enough to make Raf wonder if somehow they’ve been transported into the countryside, they arrive at a field of tall wild grass and flowering brambles. How can this possibly abide so close to a main road in south London? But beyond the trees three football pitches come into view, stretching off blankly towards a shed and a mobile phone mast and another row of houses bearing mullets of dead ivy on their back walls. These must be school playing fields; perhaps some administrator made a mistake annotating a map of the park, so that the ground is maintained up until a certain arbitrary border, a final touchline, but after that it’s the responsibility of no one in particular, and hence this colony of wilderness. At his feet are a few chocolate wrappers that look as if they know deep down that they can’t biodegrade but are doing their best anyway just to fit in. He realises it’s been far too long since he last caught sight of the Burmese DJs. ‘Where are they?’ he says.
‘They must have gone this way,’ says Fourpetal, pointing into the tall grass.
This is even more dangerous, because they don’t have their bearings and for all they know their quarry might still be only a few yards away, but they’ve gone too far to turn back. Thorns keep nipping at Raf’s jeans as the two of them press cautiously on. Then they come to a tall chain-link fence so overgrown with tough vines that the woven metal of the fence itself is not much more than a vestigial splint — and beyond the fence is a derelict tennis court. There’s no net any more, although you can still see the vague white lines between which weeds are now drilling up through the asphalt, and there’s even a rusty umpire’s chair with broken bottles and charred wood strewn around its base like tributes before a throne. On the opposite side, several sections of the fence have been wrestled down by shrubs, leaving only the steel supports between them. There are stains on the ground, mostly black but in one corner an inexplicable violet. The yapping dog sounds no closer and no farther away. This place is sepulchral, post-apocalyptic, a memento mori for those complacent football pitches about the fate they too will one day face, and Raf would already be planning a birthday party here if it weren’t for the four people he can see standing there in the middle of the court.