“So you really are just dancing?”
Daniel laughed at him — it was a bitter laugh, this time, rather than a malicious one. “God no,” he said with what looked like the baby sibling of a leer. “I’m still fucking people. Put a rubber on it and keep dancing.”
Through a cloud of vapour, Ben said, “Bit cold. Sex with no kissing.” He tried not to think about either, and almost succeeded. “What’s that like? Fun? Worthwhile? Fulfilling?”
“Are you someone’s grandmother?” Daniel barked. Several people stared at them. “Learn to adapt. Adapt or die, either of KBV or exploded balls.”
Another long, long moment passed.
“See,” said Ben to no one in particular, “this is why I hate the gay scene.”
“Please,” said Daniel. “Ten minutes ago it was the music.”
Ben had all but forgotten that conversation, still indoors, bashing back and forth why Ben insisted on hiding in ‘your stupid shitty hipster clubs’, followed by Daniel’s admission that he’d never actually been in one of those stupid shitty hipster clubs, and a standing détente on the subject of music.
“It’s everything,” Ben’s mouth said, independently of his brain. “Arrogance, biphobia, one night stands, horrible toilets, shitty crystal meth no one else in this country is dumb enough to take, endless subdivision, piss all over everything, and the music. Fuck the stupid gay scene.”
Daniel grabbed his arm. “Shhhh.”
“Oh, now you’re not out at work either.”
“No,” Daniel said, “I am extremely out at work. And you’re being not-fun.”
“Well, maybe I’m not a fun person.”
“Nope,” said Daniel, squeezing his arm through his coat. “Maybe I shouldn’t keep getting you drunk.”
Ben looked at the bottle of wine in Daniel’s other hand, and deflated. “Yeah,” he said, climbing slowly down from his high horse, “maybe I shouldn’t keep getting me drunk either.”
He got home before the tube stopped running, and made use of this uncharacteristic spare time by showering himself back to sobriety.
Minnie had taken up the whole of his futon with a kind of feline expansion that owed little to physics: the fact that she wasn’t in the bedroom meant Kingsley probably wasn’t back yet, and Ben felt slightly less guilty about bogarting the bathroom for an hour.
He microwaved the remains of the takeaway, and unmuted the TV.
“—South, Doug Lewis, raised questions in Commons today—”
He muted the TV again.
Why didn’t I tell him about Leah? He thought, rolling himself up in his duvet.
Because it’s none of anyone’s business, he thought, pulling his pillow over his face.
Because you don’t want to think about it, he retorted, that’s why you won’t talk to Stella about her either. And he curled up into a sausage of bedding with his hands over his ears.
After an entire day spent discussing Ina’s “powerful, blossoming” music career, and whether or not it was appropriate for him to introduce her to Kingsley (“Doesn’t he do records?” came back up no matter how many times Ben told her not your genre, and he’s really busy), Ben ducked out of a proposed visit to MeatLiquor in good grace and bad finances.
He shuffled home, intending to fill up on sandwiches before heading out again to work.
There was an email in his inbox from Daniel.
He meant to ignore it, but the subject line had FWD in it, and curiosity got the better of him.
To: "Ben M"
From: "Khoo, Daniel"
Subj: FWD: Are you the one with the reporter boyfriend
Thought this might be of some use. D.
To: “Khoo, Daniel”
From: “Yagoda, Natalya”
Norris tells me you’re the person to talk to if I want to get hold of a press body with prior connections. She doesn’t remember his name but says he’s your other half. Can you pass on to him: I’ve been offered a substantial sum of money not to mention the gene patents ever again, and if he wants an interview I’m on this number. If I’ve got the wrong person, sorry.
“I’m not his—” Ben began, before recalling that Sherazi would probably murder him and sow his innards to the winds if he turned down the opportunity to talk to the person he’d been trying to contact in the first place.
Obviously I quibbled “boyfriend” and frankly I’d quibble “reporter” but look! Norris turned out to be useful after all.
Ben nodded to himself, and tried to work out how to address what was, potentially, an exclusive interview on an unknown subject, when he didn’t even have anyone to show it to.
To: Yagoda, Natalya
From: Ben M
Subj: Inducement/interview.
Hi, I got your message via Gina Norris/Daniel Khoo. When/where would be a good time to talk to you about what’s happened?
He sat back against his pillows, and tapped his thumbnail against his teeth. He felt like an enormous fraud, but — Ben glanced at the silent, flickering TV — oddly elated. Maybe anyone could do this. Maybe even he could.
To: Ben M
From: Yagoda, Natalya
Subj: Re: Inducement/interview.
Come up to Colindale around four tomorrow afternoon, I’ll meet you at the main gate to the car park. I’d prefer to talk about this in person.
Ben found his heart beat at a strange, unexpected speed. Did other people just wander into things like this by accident?
At four, he stood outside the main car park at HPA Colindale — the farther reaches of the Northern Line, where no one in their right mind dared to go — compulsively checking that his Kapture was, in fact, working. After five minutes of this he thought he should probably announce his presence, and sent Dr Yagoda a short email.
She arrived so quickly that he realised she’d already been on her way.
“A little further down,” she said, leading him down the road to a layby fenced in on three sides with chain-link and topped with barbed wire coils.
Natalya Yagoda was tall. She was taller than Ben, who himself was only just shy of six feet. She had an almost aggressively conservative style of dress, and she looked as if she could quite easily break a man in two with her mind, never mind her hands.
“Hello,” said Ben, rather uselessly, when they’d stopped.
To his surprise, she offered her hand. He shook it, impressed by the strength and sturdiness of her grip, if not a little intimidated.
“Hello, Mr Martin,” she said. “Thank you for listening to me.”
“I don’t fully understand,” Ben admitted, as the wind blew her hair into his face. “You wrote an article for the Guardian — you definitely have press contacts already.”
“I have had at least one article removed recently,” said Dr Yagoda. “And now I think I remember your name. You were one of the people who told me about it. The Guardian took two days to let me know it had happened. My supervisors, three.”
“Did they explain—” Ben began, pulling his coat slightly tighter around him, while trying to leave the Kapture free.
“No,” she said. “No, they did not. I know, I suspect, as little as anyone else.”
A car swished past, crunching loose gravel and dirt. Dr Yagoda watched it go with her jaw clamped shut.
“I have been offered,” she said, when it was gone, “directly, not through my employers, an amount of money which would easily secure a flat in this area.” She paused. “It was not phrased as the purchasing of silence, but the exchange of favours. The money was termed ‘a support grant’, and my contribution to securing it was to ‘focus more fully on the evolution and natural path of the viruses I work on’.”
Ben said, “I’m guessing they emphasised natural.”
She gave him an appraising look. “Yes. There was no doubt what they meant. They were only careful not to use the words themselves.”
Another car passed, a dark red, metallic Saab. Silence
descended upon them again for the duration of its passage, and it didn’t slow down. Several dead bramble heads smacked into the arm of Ben’s coat.
“So,” Ben said, “was it an email, or a letter, or a phonecall, or?”
“A phone call, of course,” said Dr Yagoda. “Nothing I can give you physically. They are not stupid.”
“I don’t suppose you recorded the phone call?”
“I wish I knew how,” she said, with a frown at something beyond Ben’s head. “Never before has it been something I would have considered necessary. I shall find out. They may contact me again, I suppose.”
Ben, dry-mouthed, said, “if you have an iPhone you can usually just set it up to voice record next to the speaker. The quality isn’t great but it’s very straightforward.
“Hm.” Dr Yagoda said.
“I don’t suppose they identified themselves?” Ben asked, rather hopelessly.
“Of course not,” she said, with a very thin smile. “But for a member of the public to have that number would be unusual. It limits the possibilities to every pharmaceutical company and government on earth.”
Ben made a face. “So no clues yet.”
“None.” Dr Yagoda straightened up, which gave her at least another inch on Ben. She said, “Thank you for listening, for placing this where others can see it. If this has done anything, it has convinced me that I was not mistaken.”
“Did you think you were?” Ben asked, putting his hands in his pockets. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who’s mistaken about much.”
Her thin smile widened momentarily. “It is my job,” she said, with a slight nod, “to make as few mistakes as possible.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kingsley asked, coming out of the bathroom with around forty towels wrapped around his head and one around his midriff. “Are you trying to stamp out ants in the carpet?”
Ben, who hadn’t realised he was pacing around the living room until this interruption, stopped and said, “I should just call the letters desk.”
“YES,” said Kingsley. “Do that. Call the…fuck it, man, just stop wearing a hole in the flat!”
Ben, encumbered by Minnie and Minnie’s insistence at being under his foot with every step, stumbled into the kitchen and leaned on the microwave as he searched his pockets for his phone. “What’s the worst that can happen,” he said to himself. “They’ll just say no.”
“I CAN HEAR YOU TALKING TO YOURSELF AND YOU SOUND MENTAL AND PATHETIC,” said Kingsley, through the wall.
“Letters desk,” said Ben, under his breath.
“Barbecue Pork in the fridge,” said Kingsley, fully-dressed, as he passed the kitchen doorway. “Needs eating.”
Ben saluted, still searching the paper’s website for the appropriate number.
“‘Thank you, Kingsley, for ensuring that I don’t starve’,” Kingsley added, picking up his bike.
“Cheers, mate.” Ben found the number. He debated asking for features, for science, for news, and eventually blurted “HEALTH” when he got through.
“I’ve got an interview to sell,” he said, immediately concerned that everything he said was the wrong way to go about this. “I mean, I have an interview with Dr Natalya Yagoda about…relating to KBV.”
“We’re not taking stuff about the gene patents right now,” said the woman on the other end of the phone. “We’re not running it until HPA Colindale’s figured out what it’s position is.”
“Oh,” said Ben. “It’s…er…it’s…not about the gene patents.”
“Alright, good,” said whoever was talking to him from the Health desk. “Send it over. Make sure you include the name you want to be credited by if it’s different to the one you want to be paid under.”
Ben blinked at the kitchen wall. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Well, bank details. Just send the interview.”
F U C K Ben mouthed at Minnie, as she lay down in front of the fridge like a furry draught-excluder.
For once, Ben made it into the classroom before Sherazi. He was given no time to luxuriate in not being reprimanded, because as soon as he was in the door James sucked his teeth and said, “Oh here’s the fucking All-That.”
“What?” said Ben, genuinely looking behind him.
“Think you’re King Shit,” James elaborated, slumped on his chair. “Fuckin’ ‘oh everyone’s following my lead’ bullshit.”
“What,” Ben asked, sliding into his seat, “the fuck are you talking about.”
“Don’t you fucking cuss at me,” James growled. “With all your ‘oh oh my stupid story got picked up by everyone’, making out like no one was talking about it before you fucking started.”
“…I’m not,” Ben pointed out, slowly.
“He was still the first person to mention the Soviet thing,” said Tasneen, “and now loads of people are talking about that.”
“Yeah and no one’s talking about the gene patents,” said Ben, under his breath. “Funny, that.”
“It’s still bullshit,” said James, irritably. “It was all over fucking, all over Twitter and Facebook and everything. You didn’t do shit.”
“Well thanks for pointing out what I already know,” Ben said, more loudly than he’d intended to. “It was a bullshit story I made up for a shitty website because that’s what we were told to do, which you’d fucking know if you ever did anything.”
“Fight, fight,” said Jack, somewhere in the background.
“No, don’t,” Olivia blurted, alarmed.
“Yeah well,” said James, settling further into his seat. “S’cuse me if my fucking priorities aren’t the same as yours, alright? Family comes first.”
There was no earthly way he could know, Ben thought, but the comment slipped poison into his ear all the same. He settled down and stared morosely at the desk in front of him.
The door opened, admitting Sherazi and a travel cup full of coffee. She had a copy of the Guardian under her arm, and Ben, who had these occasional bouts of psychic ability, slid down in his chair with a small groan.
“Everyone congratulate Ben,” said Sherazi, throwing the newspaper down on her desk.
“Please don’t,” Ben muttered.
James rolled his eyes.
“What’s he done?” asked Graham, a little more circumspect.
“Where’s Ifeoma?”
“Getting her teeth seen,” said Chantelle, promptly.
“Ben’s sold an interview to the Guardian,” said Sherazi, holding her coffee with both hands. “Granted, it isn’t the best interview I’ve ever seen and I suspect they’ve had to edit a lot of rubbish out if his previous class assignments are anything to go by,” she took a sip, “but he’s still successfully put something in a national newspaper, I assume in exchange for actual money?”
Ben shrugged. He hadn’t really paid much attention to that part, and was now wishing that he had.
“I would have liked some warning,” Sherazi added, as Chantelle scrabbled for the paper. “Some kind of buffer for the shock of anyone in this class succeeding at something — besides Chantelle, whom I fully expect to see either presenting the six o’clock news or the subject of it.”
Chantelle paused in leafing through the paper to beam uncertainly. Her hair had somehow tangled itself around one of her enormous earrings.
“You don’t think it’s weird,” Ben suggested, glancing uneasily at James, who looked like he was about to explode, “that it was me she decided to talk to? Or that no one else had run one about her article being pulled or—”
Sherazi held up her hand for silence, and went on with her coffee. When the pause had grown uncomfortably long, and Ben’s classmates were beginning to fidget, she said, “Articles get pulled for all kinds of reasons, and unless someone has actual proof of a conspiracy, no one’s jumping on that. Also, it’s not as if editors are precisely incorruptible.”
James sat upright, all interest in enmity with Ben apparently fled, and said, “Whoa, is that
what happened to you, Miss—uh, Sherazi? Did someone like, bribe you out of a job?”
Sherazi sighed heavily, and put her coffee down. “Yes, James,” she said, with sarcasm so thick and heavy it could have lined a canal, “that is what happened. It had absolutely nothing to do with getting shrapnel in my lung.”
“That sort of thing leaves a scar,” James noted.
“Yes,” Sherazi confirmed, picking up her coffee again with a dangerous expression. “Several.”
“Can we see them?”
Sherazi replaced her coffee without taking a sip. “Admirable though I find your commitment to truth and evidence,” she said, “and far though it will undoubtedly take you, I am not in the mood for this shit today. Get out of my classroom.”
James hesitated.
“I said get out of my classroom, James,” said Sherazi in the same tone of voice. “Why are you still here?”
By lunchtime Ben had wound himself up about the interview to a point where he was beginning to annoy everyone else around him too.
“Just call up and ask if what you published was okay,” said Tasneen, impatiently, while Ben jittered around the library. “Call up her, I mean, not the paper. Fucking. Why do they put them up on that shelf, is this some kind of sadism — get me that one with the blue spine.”
Ben obliged, although he had to stand on tiptoes himself to get to it. The library shelves, which were nothing like as new as the building they stood in, had been put together wrongly and possibly, yes, by a sadist — certainly by someone who didn’t understand that, as students weren’t typically seven feet tall, they might need a ladder, and that it would help if, when the ladder broke on the first day of term, someone actually replaced it.
“I don’t have her number,” Ben said, passing her An Introduction To Self-Editing.
“Well, you got hold of her for the interview,” Tasneen said, very sensibly. “So just go that route again. I meant the one next to it, by the way.”
The Next Big One Page 10