During the next three hours, which were mostly spent watching Daniel dance like an electrified noodle while becoming even more intimate with the wall, Ben somehow managed to consume a steady flow of various drinks, none of which he actually liked.
“ARE YOU HERE WITH SOMEONE,” bellowed a man old enough to be Ben’s father and muscular enough to be a wrestler, directly in Ben’s face. “YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE HAVING A SHIT TIME.”
“Yes,” said Ben, ducking to avoid the accompanying spray of spit. The thought of invisible infection crawled into his brain again and he felt his throat close up in response; the bass shook the fabric of his jeans and the ugly cacophony of booze in his stomach vibrated with menace.
“COME HOME WITH ME INSTEAD,” roared the man in the knee-high Grinders.
“No,” said Ben, stumbling under his arm and out through the dance floor.
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Daniel demanded, as Ben, dragging his coat like a fallen flag, pinballed his way towards the exit.
“OUTSIDE,” said Ben, and pointed.
He didn’t check to see whether Daniel had followed him — he couldn’t make himself care — but when he reached the door and the bouncers and the queue of people trying to get in, there was a bright-red vest behind him and Daniel saying, “Good idea.”
Outside the pub Ben wormed his way back into his coat, and took out the same metal cylinder he’d tried to grab before. He leaned back against the first empty bit of wall, his ears ringing, and vaped self-consciously until he could feel his legs again.
“The first time I saw one of those I thought it was an asthma inhaler,” said Daniel conversationally, breathing hard.
Ben wiped the mouthpiece conscientiously, hoping he’d say no and keep his germs to himself, and offered it to him.
Daniel shook his head. “Nicotine is nicotine,” he said, as a taxi crawled past them. “And carcinoma is carcinoma.”
“So did I fail your test?” Ben said at last.
“Eh,” said Daniel, making a so-so motion. “It’s full of wankers.” He plucked at his vest, apparently too drunk now to feel the cold. “This isn’t just irony. No femmes, no Asians.”
“Why’d you say there, then?”
He shrugged. “You don’t seem like you’d enjoy a basement place but I wanted to dance.”
“I fucking hate the gay scene,” Ben said, reflectively. He watched his breath turn to fog and a swarm of people on the far side of the street trying to genteely bum-rush one of the basement places Daniel had alluded to.
Daniel considered this, and pointed at him. “Nice try, but not enough. If you were straight, you’d say ‘I haven’t got anything against The Gays, of course’.”
“Yeah, well,” said Ben, putting his e-shisha back in his pocket, “I’m not straight. That was the point of this, wasn’t it?”
“I KNEW IT,” Daniel barked, and put his hand over his own mouth. “I knew it. I said, I told that Doubting Thomas fuck you were gay.”
“No,” Ben said evenly, “I’m not.”
Daniel frowned unsteadily. “Whoa, no. I’ve had too much vodka for you to pull this shit on me. You just said—”
“I said are those the only options,” Ben said doggedly.
“Oh, bullshit,” said Daniel crossly, leaning back on the wall and slapping the bricks with the palm of his hand. “I thought you were an enigma and you just turn out to be a tease, what a waste of an evening.”
“Once again,” Ben said, slightly stung by this, “I’m neither.”
Understanding, or something like it, dawned on Daniel’s face. Ben put his hands in his pockets, feeling more rather than less sick now that he was out of the crush at the bar. Leah came fleetingly to mind, followed by Maggie, and he began to wish that he could just throw up and get it over with.
“Bisexual?” Daniel said, narrowing his eyes.
Ben nodded vaguely, and put out a hand to steady himself.
Daniel snorted. “Cowardice, more like. Either you’re gay or you’re not.”
Oh, Ben thought, his fingers scraping the brickwork. He closed his eyes. There it is. “And you’re the expert on bisexuality because, what?”
“It’s just your bullshit cover for coming out to anyone properly,” Daniel announced, spreading skinny arms to the cold night as if he was presenting his case to an audience. “You’re too squeamish and squirmy to lie and too much of a coward to tell the truth so you just weasel about with made-up sexualities. Everyone knows that.”
Ben closed his eyes again and tried to remember how to sneer. “You’re the scientist, where’s your evidence?”
“Same place your balls are.”
“Fuck off,” said Ben, wondering what the hell that was meant to mean. He could taste bile in the back of his throat, and he was quite sure that any minute now he was about to kiss goodbye to seven peanut-butter sandwiches and a lot of mixed drinks. “I came out when I was twenty-one and my Dad didn’t speak to me for a year. My step-mum had to threaten him with relationship counselling to get him to stop being a dick.” He laid his hand flat on the brick work, and in a moment of raw self-pity — trying to remember the words but not the occasions, he turned and pressed his forehead against the wall too. “When I got together with Ma—my ex, he said he was ‘so glad I’d got over all that stupid poof shit’ — what did your parents say? What did they say when you came out?”
“Please. I still live with them,” Daniel said, as if he’d just said something incredibly stupid. “I’m not out at home.”
“Now who’s a coward?” said Ben weakly, unable to remove his face from the wall.
He didn’t bothered to look at Daniel, couldn’t make himself do it, but he could hear the drunken anger in his voice, and his own insides knotted themselves up in hot sympathy. “My parents are in their seventies. They’re Chinese. They vote Conservative. My father has heart problems. If I came out there’s a better than average chance it will actually and literally kill my dad.” Daniel prodded him in the shoulder. “You don’t know shit about the situation so shut up.”
Ben levered himself off the wall, opened his eyes, and took a deep, steadying breath. “I know exactly as much about it as you do about being bisexual, Daniel, don’t paint me as a coward for knowing what I am and not lying about it. Even when people like you are trying to force me to.” He took a step backward, in the direction he remembered as possibly being the one the night bus went from, and added, “I’m sorry to have disappointed you so much.”
He took another step backward, stumbled, turned, and threw up.
“Jesus,” said several people at once.
“Fuck,” said Ben, and threw up again, leaning on the wall.
“Right,” said Daniel by his ear, neither disgusted nor sympathetic, only quietly practical. “Let’s find you a taxi.”
“I’m fine,” said Ben.
“Clearly,” Daniel said, rubbing lightly over his back, “you’re not.”
“Victoria’s going to murder you,” Tasneen said as soon as Ben had picked up the phone. “She’s going to cleave you in half and scoop you out and turn you into an art exhibit.”
“I’m nearly there!” Ben protested, dodging slow morning pedestrians on the pavement, trying to keep his gorge down and his phone in his hand while unaccustomed exercise thudded through his knees. “I’m on the same road!”
“Yeah but you’re still late,” Tasneen pointed out without mercy. “She’s going to skin you and turn you into a coat.”
“She’s going to hear you,” Ben gasped, nearly missing the turning for the college altogether.
“Oh she’s nodding in agreement with everything,” Tasneen said cheerfully. “Now she’s miming a slit throat. Only hurry up, because she’s going to murder me for letting you be late, Study Buddy.”
“All the lifts are out,” Ben complained, fumbling with his pass to get through the gates.
“Are your legs out?”
“I don’t think I’ve got knees anymore,” Ben said, heavi
ng himself into the echoing staircase. “Can you hear that? I’m on the stairs.”
“You’re like fifteen minutes late,” Tasneen retorted. “Did you get me Starbucks?”
“…What? No!”
“Then you have no excuse for being this late. BYE.”
Ben stumbled through the classroom door, and found the class was as dramatically under-subscribed as usual. Victoria was sitting on one of the free tables with her legs crossed, and the words “TADPOLE STRUCTURE” were projected behind her in Impact font the size of small children.
“Sorry I’m—” he began, but Victoria waved him magnanimously towards a seat.
“Fuck happened to you?” asked Jack, who’d acquired a laptop since Ben last saw him. “Did you catch the vampire virus from hugging KBVers or something?”
“It takes three years before you get symptoms,” said Graham, leaning away from Ben as he passed. “He’s not going to pick it up overnight like that, is he.”
“Also,” Ben said, pulling out the wheelie chair and falling into it, “why would I catch it from hugging them? Why would I be hugging them?”
“I don’t know what your fucking interview technique is,” Jack snorted.
“What’s this about interviewing KBVers?” Victoria asked, looking up from her laptop. “Ben, you look like shit.”
“I haven’t been,” Ben explained, finding himself the uncomfortable centre of attention. “You’re not allowed to talk to quarantine patients unless you’re a relative. They’ve been really, really consistent about that. I tried.”
“Oh, you tried,” Victoria said, with considerable sarcasm. “Well. Do you have a relative in the quarantine wards you could talk to?”
Ben said nothing. He wondered if the subject selection process had actually been random after all, or if Tasneen had successfully fought off hers because of a personal connection too. Chantelle — who didn’t seem to be in today — had definitely had the best possible subject for her.
“Or,” Victoria elaborated, “why not pose as a relative? After all, it’s not as if people with advanced KBV are renowned for their ability to make sound judgements or remember things, is it?”
Ben stared at her for so long that Jack began making an oooh noise under his breath.
“Is this a test?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” said Victoria, getting down off the desk. “Congratulations. Deceiving people and forcing an interview from someone who cannot, medically speaking, give informed consent to giving that interview, or does not know that they’re being interviewed, is wildly unethical. McNae’s! Do any of you actually read the books you’re set?”
“You should just have said you were ill,” Tasneen said, as they were leaving. “You look like you’ve been run over.”
“How dare you,” Ben said, weakly. “I spent entire minutes on my hair.”
“Yeah? In a hurricane?” She led the way down towards the prison-themed cafeteria. “I’ve got a coffee voucher,” Tasneen explained. “They fucked up yesterday and now I’ve got a coffee voucher. Want one?”
“Less want, more need,” said Ben, who would rather have gargled with live eels than drunk college coffee. He squeezed parts of his face in turn. “I’m not ill.”
“Just rocking the consumptive look for fun and profit?” They joined the end of the queue which, owing to the time of day, stretched all the way past the toilets. “I can’t believe this many people want to eat this piss.”
“The things I drank last night had a lot of contrasting colours,” Ben said at last, putting his hand over his eyes. “And I think there’s something on the inside of my contact lens.”
“I’ve got a mirror…” Tasneen scrabbled in her bag, which was, today, something Ben didn’t recognise but which looked both vaguely military and vaguely related to anime. “Okay, that’s a lie, but the back of my iPod is well shiny, I usually just use that.”
Ben squeezed his own face again. “I didn’t bring my glasses anyway.”
“Ugh,” Tasneen closed her bag. “So while you were out drinking rainbow poisons, I had to clean three different carpets. My mum just got this idea into her head that tonight’s the night and that was it, everyone’s there with carpet cleaner and fighting over the Hoover. You have to have had a better night than me or I’m calling the reality police on the entire concept of Fun and having it revoked.”
“I went to a horrible pub,” Ben said, “and the person I went out with was an arse, and I drank too much, and then I spent too much money on a taxi, and then I went to sleep in the shower tray with all my clothes on. On a scale of one to ten, ten being ‘fighting over a Hoover’ and one being actual, literal death, I think it ranked around a three and a half.”
“This is just a suggestion,” Tasneen said, “…what coffee do you want?”
“Whatever tastes least like coffee.” Ben wished he’d had the foresight to put on a hoodie. Not only was he cold, but the bright strip lights of the cafeteria were drilling through his hangover and into his sense of self.
“This is just a suggestion,” Tasneen repeated, drumming her fingers on the metal rail the trays were supposed to run on, “but maybe don’t drink so much when you have to get up in the morning.”
“I don’t usually.”
“Also,” Tasneen leaned back and tipped her head over her shoulder, “don’t go out with ‘that person’ — don’t think I can’t see you playing pronoun games with me — again because he’s clearly a dick.”
“Sadly,” said Ben, taking a scalding-hot paper cup of ‘frothaccino’ from her hands with less gratitude than he felt, “he might know something useful.”
“McNae’s,” said Tasneen, trying her best to sound like Sherazi and failing to sound like anyone, “bonking your sources is unethical.”
“Not always,” said Ben, who’d also read that chapter. “And no one’s said ‘bonking’ since 1992.”
Tasneen thrust the coffee voucher at the cashier, who looked at it as if it had been rolled in dog shit. “Wouldn’t know,” she said breezily. “I wasn’t alive then.”
“Oh my god.”
“You’re so old,” she said, leaving the voucher-wrangling and stamping away from the counter. “So very old. You’re older than Graham.”
“Categorically not.”
They perched on the end of someone else’s table, and the collective of what looked and sounded like drama students glared at them before returning to a loud and incomprehensible conversation.
Ben’s phone vibrated. He pulled it out, and while Tasneen copied him, he found himself faced with a text from Molly, reading only:
Go look at the Guardian! Love, RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Grappling with the appropriate app — which he hadn’t used since he downloaded it — Ben skimmed through a series of headlines, none of which involved animals, Florence and the Machine, the banking crisis, or new ways to consume tea and therefore probably weren’t what Molly was talking about. And then he ran into the one which, on the available evidence, probably was what she meant, and stopped dead.
Leading scientist claims KBV ‘may not have natural origin’
“What the actual fuck?” said Ben.
“Is that that boy from last night,” Tasneen said, not looking up from her own phone. “Tell him to fuck off.”
KBV genes show ‘evidence of manipulation not consistent with normal viral evolution’, says Natalya Yagoda, inventor of the triple-test and well-regarded virologist at HPA Colindale.
“What,” Ben repeated, scrolling down. It appeared the article had been written by the virologist herself — or had, at least, been written in the first person. A bit dry, and by someone who was more used to writing academic papers than journalistic articles, and a lot of the words went a long way over his head, but…
While it may be too early to be definite on this, and while we do not have a full picture of the structure of this virus, I have checked against the patent I recall and the image that I have, and I can say this: part of the f
inal section of KBV’s RNA is almost identical to a patented gene sequence registered twelve years ago.
Whether it is a coincidence remains to be seen, but this evidence suggests strongly that the origin of this virus is not one hundred percent natural.
“Holy shit,” said Ben, under his breath.
“What?” Tasneen finally put her phone down. “What’s happened?”
Ben showed her the article.
“Well, that’s good timing,” said Tasneen, giving him his phone back. “That’s basically just handed you something to write about on a plate. Why don’t you email her and ask her some stuff?”
“Because last time I tried to contact Colindale their press office came really close to telling me to fuck myself,” said Ben gloomily. “And I feel like there’s an elephant tap-dancing on my brain.”
Tasneen handed him a bottle of water. “So don’t go through the press office, and also stop being a massive crybaby. You can’t be a journalist with thin skin. People get murdered doing this job.” She sounded quite satisfied by the prospect.
“Thanks, that’s not actually helpful.”
“The water was, right?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ben drank some. “I’d rather not be murdered.”
Tasneen shrugged. “I bet if you just spoke to her directly and weren’t a dick she’d say something to you.”
“I bet four hundred thousand proper journalists have already called her today to yell questions and she won’t want to talk to me at all,” Ben said, passing the water back.
“So you’re just going to give up before you’ve even tried?” Tasneen made a face. “Why are you even on this course, that’s what I want to know.”
Ben sprawled over the table, ignoring the disgusted stares of the drama students, and held his phone at arms’ length. “I don’t know how to get hold—”
“Fuck,” said Tasneen, shooting up to her feet. “Fuck fuckity, I was supposed to have a tutorial with Kyle. Fuckkkk.”
She bolted from the table, returned to pick up her phone, and ran off again. The sound of her heavy boots echoed through the whole cafeteria, and at least one person shouted, run, Forest after her. Ben gently extracted himself from the exceptionally hostile table, and went outside to vape.
The Next Big One Page 7