Glow Read Free Page B

sounds fun, and cheap, and it’s the only place he’s ever heard of where apparently it’s considered normal to go dancing right after you get out of bed, but of course it’s also the only place that’s forbidden. There’s a part of him that hopes something will happen to change his mind this month, but donating an emetic to a beautiful girl isn’t it. Or maybe a fox on a bus is a start, but it’s not nearly enough.
     
     
    2.35 p.m.
     
    Every day Raf has to carry a Staffordshire bull terrier down a ladder. At first she used to wriggle but now she sits so happily on his shoulders that sometimes it feels as if she’s reluctant to get down off her bony palanquin. Rose is four years old, black all over except for a white cravat, and for the last thirteen months she’s lived on the roof of an eighteen-storey council block, guarding a radio transmitter bolted to a wall. In a chemistry lesson at school Raf was once shown how to do chromatography, where you watch the different pigments in a smear of anthocyanin extract bleed different distances up a grid of filter paper, the same way they test for MDMA in the blood, and he sometimes thinks of a building like this as a giant chromatograph for the streets below, with nothing soluble enough to reach the very top but police sirens and motorcycle engines and on hot days a faint prickle of smog. The skyscrapers across the river are cramped together into one narrow band of the horizon’s curve, a string of paper dolls, as marginal and unconvincing as one of those tourist board graphics where they cut and paste a dozen famous silhouettes into a greatest hits compilation.
    Like all pirate stations, Myth FM have installed their aerial on a separate building from their studio, parasitic off the lift’s AC supply like a tick deep in a scalp, because otherwise if an Ofcom van triangulated the signal they could wreck the whole operation with a single raid. The studio needs only an uninterrupted line of sight in order for the link box they’ve pried out of a satellite TV dish to beam the audio by infra-red up to the main rig. But this also means there’s no one around to guard the transmitter, which is worth nearly a grand, and there are a lot of other pirate stations in south London who’d rather steal a working box than build their own. Theo, the genial forty-one-year-old proprietor of Myth FM, has paid off the caretaker to let him keep two heavy D-locks on the door out to the middle part of the roof, and in the past he’s even experimented with razor wire and electrified scaffolding poles around the rig, but the problem is that the sort of cunts who would know what to do with a stolen radio transmitter are, by definition, self-taught engineers with a lot of persistence, and they can get around anything you invent. So Theo adopted Rose. Maybe you could cut her down with knives if you were lucky, but only an idiot would start a fight with a full-grown Staffie on a roof with no parapet.
    Theo’s original plan was to leave the beast up on the roof, feed her twice a week, keep her hungry and resentful; but he loves dogs, and he just couldn’t restrain himself, especially after Isaac told him he had a friend needing cash work. Rose now lives in a sort of shanty cabin nailed together out of tarpaulin, cardboard, insulating foam, and whatever else Raf could haul up the ladder to the roof, with a tub of rainwater next to a pile of old blankets that Rose can nudge together into a bed, and the lift machinery as her noisy neighbour. During the winter, Theo even put in a small electric heater on a timer switch, plugged into the same mains cable as the transmitter nearby, although he made Raf swear never to tell anyone. He sometimes jokes that he should move some students in there and charge two hundred quid a week.
    Every day, Raf takes Rose downstairs in the densely annotated lift and gives her a long walk. He knows she must be lonely and bored up there, and he doesn’t like it any more