Unless for some reason Cherish wouldn’t care if Fourpetal was captured today. But of course she would care, because then she and Zaya and Ko and Win and Jesnik and Raf himself would all be under threat.
He stops to revise that. Not Cherish or Raf, because they’re here at the tennis court. And not Win, because Lacebark don’t know about the real Win, only the fake one. And not necessarily Zaya or Ko, because if they really are watching Fourpetal, they’d have plenty of notice if Lacebark snatched him.
In fact, the only people in real jeopardy would be Jesnik, the fake Win, and any other Burmese guys from Zaya’s organisation who weren’t warned in time. If Fourpetal told Lacebark everything he knew, they wouldn’t have to wait for the first of June to start trampling. They’d launch immediate raids all over London, expecting to declare victory by morning. But they wouldn’t catch anyone very important. They’d just waste a day in a pointless convulsion. Which makes Raf recall what Cherish told him about her plan to get Win out of the city: ‘It’s too dangerous to move him at the moment. Lacebark have too many eyes. Until we can find some way of making them blink. .’
Just like when he adjusted that line graph and realised the truth about Win, the understanding surges through him all at once as if administered intravenously, except this time there’s a colloid of venom suspended in the mixture.
Zaya wants Lacebark to catch Fourpetal. Zaya wants the raids to happen.
By the end of today, Lacebark will have only Jesnik, the fake Win, and a handful of other expendable Burmese guys. And Zaya will have all he really needs, which is a heartbroken, angry, loyal chemist, ready to leave London.
The reason this can work is that Fourpetal will give Lacebark a lot of false information. But he’ll believe it’s all true, because he learned it from Raf. And back then Raf believed it was true, too, because Cherish made sure that he did when he went to the flat in Camberwell. When she took him to the kitchen, it wasn’t an accident that he saw those pictures of Jesnik up on the fridge. Raf was meant to find out Jesnik was in a relationship with Win. And when she took him to the bathroom, it wasn’t an accident that the bin bag had fallen away from the window, or that they fucked in just the right place for Raf to see it. Raf was meant to think the location of the flat was a big secret so that he’d present it as such when he next talked to Fourpetal. He couldn’t have been more gullible.
This has got to be Zaya’s scheme, Raf decides, not Cherish’s. He can see how she might do nothing to prevent Lacebark from capturing Fourpetal. Maybe that has a sort of moral logic. And maybe that’s why she didn’t want to take glow with Raf last night. But there is just no way that she would be willing to see Jesnik go to his death in order to manipulate Win when as far as she knows the boy has nothing to do with any of this. Cherish must be following Zaya’s orders without understanding the whole picture. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Raf is trying to make up his mind whether to tell her all this when she says, ‘Are you zoning out already?’
‘Yeah, a bit.’
‘What time is it for you now?’
‘Only about midnight.’
‘I have to pee.’
She gets up, pulls on her high tops without bothering to lace them, and walks off towards the trees. Her phone is lying there on the ground. Raf picks it up, wondering if he’ll be able to find any clues in her text messages or her call log, but it turns out Cherish has a PIN lock on it.
There is one other thing he can do. But he has to decide right away, too fast to think about it, and there won’t really be any going back afterwards.
Raf slides the back of the case off the phone, takes out the SIM card, and bends it hard enough that it cracks down the middle without actually breaking in half. Then he replaces it exactly as it was, and puts the brain-dead phone back down. By the time Cherish comes back, he’s pulling on his trousers.
‘Are you going somewhere?’ There’s no concern in her voice. She’s a much better liar than Belasco, he thinks.
‘I just want to go back to the shop to pick up some water or some juice or something. We should’ve got some before.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No, don’t bother, I’ll only be a minute.’
He thought maybe he could get away with this. But he can see it straight away: she’s guessed that he’s guessed.
The truth has been dragged out of the undergrowth and dumped there on the ground between them, flayed and steaming and membranous: the moment he leaves, Raf is going to do whatever he can to stop Zaya’s plan from going ahead, and Cherish is going to do whatever she can to stop him from stopping it. Each of them is going to fuck over the other, and it’s going to be irreparable, and each of them knows it, and neither of them wants to acknowledge it out loud. Since there’s no chance they’re going to change their minds, there’s nothing to be lost by talking about it. But he won’t until she does. And she won’t until he does. They’re locked together in an ouroboros of silence the same shape as the sex they just had, playing these underwritten roles like the extras in Lacebark’s training facility, and when he looks into her eyes it’s so frustrating he thinks his heart is going to pop like a light bulb in a microwave.
‘OK,’ Cherish says. He can tell that she’s trying not to cry now, which is contagious like a yawn. He takes a step forward to kiss her, and at first they’re both stiff with the awareness that if this kiss is any more passionate than the usual dutiful parting kiss you might give someone preparatory to a minor errand, it will spoil this pointless game they’re determined to play; but then it seems to occur to both of them at the same moment that if you’ve recently been entwined it’s customary to make your next kiss a small aftershock of what you just did to each other. By the time they reluctantly pull apart, they’re both too tearful to hide it any longer.
‘Do you ever feel like there’s. . you know. . a hole in things?’ Raf says softly.
‘No,’ Cherish says, shaking her head as if this is quite important. ‘No, Raf. There’s no hole in things. There’s just a hole in people.’
Raf steps back and gives her a small chest-level wave. Maybe every break-up is basically the same, he thinks, no matter how strange the circumstances. All that oxytocin is wonderful until you try to escape with it and somehow it’s transmuted into embittering agent, the same way that when you rob a bank the cashier hides a dye pack in your bag of money that will explode ten seconds after you pass the radio transmitter in the door frame. ‘See you in a bit,’ he says. Cherish looks at the ground. void void void void.
10.06 a.m.
When Isaac arrives at the playground opposite the Myth studio, his pupils are different sizes, but otherwise he seems lucid, which is a relief because Raf was worried that by now he’d be too far gone to be any help. Since the last time Raf was here someone has dumped one of those old-fashioned gumball machines in the bushes, its empty glass dome reflecting the sky like an astronaut’s helmet. ‘When did the rave finish?’ he says.
‘It hasn’t. You made me leave my own fucking party. What’s going on?’
Raf tells Isaac what he now knows.
‘And you worked all this out because Cherish seemed a bit shifty just now?’ Isaac says afterwards.