The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Not until ten.” Kingsley deposited Minnie across Ben’s lap. “Minnie’s going to eat your sandwich.”

  “She’s going to shed on it,” Ben corrected, putting the cat on the floor. “Don’t do that.”

  Typically the mail brought Amazon purchases, bills, and angry demands from bailiffs directed at people who hadn’t lived at their address for six years, and so Ben was more than a little surprised to find a handwritten envelope with his name on it, roughly a week later. He was slightly less surprised to find, when he picked it up, that it was Melinda’s handwriting and that someone had trodden on it.

  He wandered up the stairs, and as usual the light went out just as he got to the door. The clock dwelt in the hazy hours between two and three, which are full of loud drunk people until the main roads are behind and then become deserted and eerie. The shop downstairs, of course, was still open, but that was because Marsh Road Mart Ankara would probably be open through the middle of Armageddon, a fact which had saved Ben’s absent-mindedness from leading to outright starvation on several occasions.

  He crept into the flat. The TV was stuck on rolling news again, announcing the day’s headlines over and over in a feverish loop, but Kingsley had either gone to bed or gone to someone else’s bed, and the cat was nowhere to be seen or stood on.

  Ben dropped his bag on the futon and wandered into the kitchen to open the letter, because it was the only room in the flat with a light bulb that threw out more wattage than a phosphorescent mushroom.

  Melinda had sent a card: a painting of the local landscape apparently done by someone who’d seen it on an acid trip, with an extra folded sheet of paper inside. She’d used a purple ink pen, and not for the first time.

  Dear Ben,

  Your Dad says hi. Just thought I should drop you a line and see how things are going at college; everything is more-or-less okay here except the Youngs have had their house vandalised because it got out that Mr Y had been for a blood test — negative of course but very responsible of him to check — and because Mrs Kalinska’s little Nina had to go away recently a lot of people seemed to think it was his fault.

  We still haven’t heard anything from Leah and of course no one knows where Sandra is anymore, the last anyone heard was that she was in Puerto Rico but that was last year, wasn’t it? I don’t suppose your mum’s mentioned to you where she is? Does she know Leah’s in hospital? The ward did ring us and say she’s being moved to the symptomatic ward one over and not to worry about it, but you know how it is when someone tells you not to worry about things I expect! They said they should have done it about a month ago but there’s been a massive backlog.

  Hope all is well & that radio silence is because you’re having run, Mrs Lyon of course thinks you’ve met someone. I hope that’s the case, it would be lovely to meet your new girlfriend if you have one. Maggie was very nice and everything but I don’t think she behaved very well, I know you said not to mention it but there it is.

  Anyway give us a call or email or something when you have a moment, or drop back and see us — we’re only an hour and a half out of Marylebone after all!

  Love,

  Melinda (and Geoff/Dad)

  Ben noted that it apparently didn’t matter how many times you said you didn’t want to talk about something anymore if Melinda felt like dragging it back up again, put the card back in the envelope and the envelope in the recycling, and went back into the living room with a bag of bread.

  He sat down on the futon and unmuted the TV at a volume that wouldn’t have disturbed a mouse, and began to check through the loaf for mould.

  This task was happily interrupted by a familiar face in the extended news round-up: the long, surprisingly youthful and intensively-bearded face of Dr Bill, animated as Ben understood was typical with vigour and a good deal of restraint from actual swear words.

  It took him a moment to realise the man wasn’t talking about KBV but science policy in general.

  “The thing is that the entire history of medicine has been a long, slow procession of people getting things wrong in slightly less massive increments,” said Dr Bill, talking across a man in a suit who looked like someone had drained all the lymph out of Nigel Farage. “No one has ever claimed it’s perfect, but we’ve made a good practice of learning from our mistakes and making those mistakes less frequent and less disastrous. The whole of medical history is a massive wobbly human period that starts before Galen and will go on a long time after either of us, and everyone has been learning from each other’s research — and mistakes — and using it to get slightly less wrong answers.”

  “Those mistakes kill people,” opined the man in the well-tailored suit and ill-tailored face. Ben stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth. “What we’ve developed has a hundred percent success rate. Everyone who has been on this course feels better as a result—”

  “Pardon me,” said Dr Bill with the expression of someone who would rather be somewhere else, “but that’s complete bullshit. Nothing is ‘one hundred percent effective’, almost everything has some degree of negative side effect if it’s doing anything at all, because messing around with the human body has consequences. Your parameters are incredibly hazy — how are you measuring ‘feels better’? What does that mean?”

  “The fact remains,” replied the deflated toad man calmly, “conventional medicine is killing people.”

  “Conventional medicine,” said Dr Bill with the exasperated voice of a man talking to a classroom full of toddlers, “or ‘medicine’ as it’s properly called, is a lot of people doing their best to narrow the large margin of ignorance we have as a species and apply that to making people less ill in any way that we safely can. If we can’t do the trials we can’t know if something works or is harmful and no one benefits. We narrow the margins of ignorance by getting things wrong and working out why they went wrong, not by hocking something we’ve repeatedly proven has no intrinsic effect and then claiming it’s somehow superior because people don’t get any side effects from it.”

  Ben, who normally had infinite patience for watching people argue about things he didn’t fully understand, became abruptly tired as an evening of having requests shouted at him for songs no one wanted to hear caught up with his metabolism. He ate the remainder of the bag of bread, and muted the TV again.

  He woke to the sound of the door slamming, which suggested that Kingsley had come home, however briefly, and to the sound of the cat complaining, and shortly thereafter to Minnie climbing on his face and trying to treadle the side of his head in case it could be persuaded to dispense food,.

  “Nooo,” Ben rolled over, but Minnie clung on. “You smell of cat foooood.”

  Rrroll, agreed Minnie, sitting on his face again.

  After a battle to remove an increasingly fat cat from his face, Ben succeed in sitting up, getting up, and running away before Minnie could try to climb up his leg. Eventually he went into the kitchen, picked up her still-full bowl, and rattled it once or twice before setting it down again.

  Minnie ran over to the bowl with her tail in the air, rrrp’d at the bowl, and started eating. Ben escaped from the kitchen armed with a piece of cold toast that Kingsley had apparently forgotten about, and went to check his emails.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t:

  REMINDER:

  You’ve asked for a tutorial with me today. Show up or the wrath of a hundred thousand mighty warriors will fall upon your forgetful head and you won’t be able to book one for another fortnight because I don’t have time.

  Sherazi.

  “Shit,” said Ben, who had indeed forgotten that this was happening, and could not in fact remember what time it was supposed to be happening at.

  He ran around the flat trying to assemble himself into a functioning, adult, and most of all fully-dressed human being, and managed to eject himself — freshly-shaven and only moderately bleeding — into the weak morning sun only forty minutes later.

  When he arrived at the staff room,
Sherazi wasn’t there.

  “I’m supposed to have a tutorial,” he panted.

  “Yeah,” said Kyle, unimpressed, showing him a post it. “At three this afternoon.”

  “Oh,” said Ben.

  “While you’re here,” Kyle said, “you’ve not been to the last eight of my classes—”

  “I’ve been ill,” Ben said hastily.

  “For the last four, yes,” said Kyle, leaning on the doorframe.

  “Er,” said Ben, and he retreated to the library.

  When he sat down he discovered that his inbox had sprouted another worrying addition.

  To: Dr Bill Greenhill; Khoo, Daniel; Ben M

  From: Yagoda, Natalya

  Subj: bloods for hpa

  I have been in contact with the remainder of my team at HPA. They tell me they have yet to see any samples marked with my name or sample number.

  As Ben had no idea how long they were supposed to take, he’d not really given much thought to this. In his world, blood test results came back when they came back, someone told you off for being anaemic and having no vitamin D or dietary folate in your blood whatsoever, and nothing happened.

  To: Yagoda, Natalya

  CC: Dr Bill Greenhill; Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: bloods for hpa

  Everyone keeps harping on about the backlog for testing, should we really be worried if they haven’t made it through to your colleagues yet? And are they really going to see every sample that passes through?

  “Oh Daniel, no,” Ben said under his breath. Whether or not he was right, it didn’t seem a very sensitive thing to be saying.

  To: Yagoda, Natalya

  CC: Khoo, Daniel; Ben M

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: re: re: bloods for hpa

  It is possible they’ve just missed them or that they’ve ended up with someone else, but it might be worth checking. Although I wouldn’t worry, Natalya; whatever is going on so far seems to be going on outside your workplace, not inside it.

  Ben wasn’t entirely sure about this either, but he couldn’t put his finger on why or whether he was just being unnecessarily paranoid.

  “Shut up,” said someone next to him in a loud whisper.

  To: Yagoda, Natalya

  CC: Dr Bill Greenhill; Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: re: bloods for hpa

  Not that I wish to nitpick, but the process of submitting bloods to HPA involves enough ‘outside’ that I might be convinced to be worried if I were Natalya.

  “Are you using this power socket?” asked a girl with green hair and a sour expression, pointing at Ben’s laptop cord.

  “Yes,” said Ben, “that’s why my power cable’s coming out of it.”

  She stared at him. “No need to be rude, God.”

  To: Hepworth, David; Groat, Rhiannon; N209* Anil; GROUP#4

  CC: Dr Bill Greenhill; Ben M; Khoo, Daniel

  From: Yagoda, Natalya

  Subj: sample number NY/908669

  If none of you remember seeing this, would you mind checking with Gayle to see if it has been entered on the system. It won’t take five minutes and you may tell her I owe her.

  Sensible, thought Ben. A friend of his was funding most of his book release with medical data entry, and if there was anything Tom had to say about the job it was that every single last boring sample code had to be checked and checked again.

  “Are you sure?” said the girl with green hair, returning. “Because I need to look something up.”

  “There are fifteen power sockets in this library,” Ben said, staring at Facebook, “can’t you harass someone at one of those?”

  “You’re only using Facebook though?” she snapped. “And I’ve got to look up this thing?”

  Ben put some significant effort into ignoring her.

  To: Yagoda, Natalya

  CC: Dr Bill Greenhill; Ben M; Khoo, Daniel; Hepworth, David; Groat, Rhiannon; GROUP#4

  From: N209* Anil

  Subj: re: sample number NY/908669

  It’s not been entered and it wasn’t on the list that got sent through from the collection agency. Gayle says she’d have remembered if your name came up, but it definitely didn’t. Who are all these people I’m copying in?

  Ben felt a prickle on the back of his neck, but he couldn’t work out if it was a premonition or the girl with the green hair, sitting at the next table and glaring at him like she could set him on fire with her eyes.

  To: Dr Bill Greenhill; Ben M; Khoo, Daniel; Hepworth, David; Groat, Rhiannon; GROUP#4

  From: Yagoda, Natalya.

  Subj: repeat sample

  If no one objects I think for the sake of my peace of mind I would like to take a secondary set of samples and deliver them to Group 4 myself. I have nothing but respect for XXXXXXXX Delivery but would like to be absolutely certain there are no cracks for them to fall into.

  Ben looked up. The girl with the green hair was bothering one of the older students at a power socket opposite him, which meant that the crawling sensation across the back of his neck really was nerves.

  At three Ben trudged all the way back up to the top of the building again and knocked on the staffroom door.

  “And here he is,” said Sherazi to Kyle, giving Ben the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just been the topic of conversation. “Right, Benjamin, we’re going to one of the privacy pods—”

  She led the way across the mezzanine to some of the bizarre and discomforting interview rooms the architect had apparently felt the space needed. They looked a little like futuristic prison cells and a little like aquariums and left one feeling incredibly exposed, and Ben didn’t like it at all.

  “Am I in trouble?” Ben asked, eyeballing the pod as Sherazi fumbled to unlock one.

  “Yes, but not with me,” Sherazi said, showing him inside. “Also, you’re far from the only person missing Kyle’s classes. I think he’s going to juggle the timetable a bit so they stop being at such an inconvenient time, so you might want to show your gratitude by actually turning up.”

  Ben sat down on what proved to be a very uncomfortable chair, and put his bag on his lap by way of a barrier.

  “Now,” Sherazi said, putting her coffee down on the table between them. “Many people do not know that I’m actually possessed of psychic powers, but you’re about to find out: you’ve come in because you’re worried about your research project and the frequency with which articles connected to it are disappearing.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “I do read the papers,” Sherazi said in her most condescending tone. “That is my job.”

  “It’s not just articles going missing,” he pointed out, slumping back on his chair.

  “Yes, I read that as well,” said Sherazi. “So? There are risks involved in high-profile stories. It wasn’t you that got black-bagged.”

  “She called me,” said Ben, fidgeting with his bag. “I mean, she called me from the police station when she was reporting it to them. I sort of…passed her on to Dr Bill.”

  Sherazi raised her eyebrows, and embraced her travel mug with both hands. “That was stupid. You had an exclusive in your hands and you just palmed it off on someone else. What for?”

  “He has a better record of not getting his articles pulled,” said Ben, evenly, “while I’m at fifty percent.”

  Sherazi gazed at him evenly for a moment. “I have to admit I wasn’t expecting you to stumble onto something dramatically worth writing about,” she admitted. “I was expecting a nice, dry little research piece with a huge list of scientific articles and to have to give you a grudging Merit for spelling everything correctly and a big fat talking to about trying to be a little more interesting.”

  Ben said, “I wasn’t expecting this to happen either. Mostly it seems to have been an accident.”

  “Best things often are,” Sherazi said, immediately. “Why did you sell that interview?”

  “What?” Ben asked, taken u
nawares.

  “The first one, the one that got pulled for non-confirmation,” Sherazi said, holding her coffee to her mouth without drinking it. “Why did you sell it?”

  “B-because that’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing?” Ben offered.

  “Right, you’re a journalist. You’re meant to be selling articles,” Sherazi agreed, and took a mouthful. “And I am entirely sure also because your interviewee wanted that interview out there. She’s been, as far as I can see, consistent about wanting as much publicity for the weird shit that’s happening around her work as possible. It seems to me that she has some suspicions.”

  Ben considered this. “Well, yes.”

  “Did you read her profile in the Times from last year?” Sherazi asked, apparently at random.

  “Er,” said Ben, who had but hadn’t remembered most of it. “Sort of?”

  “Okay,” said Sherazi, pinching her nose briefly. “Do you understand the implications of it?”

  “No,” said Ben, seizing on the one thing he was sure of.

  Sherazi sighed. “Dr Yagoda grew up in the Soviet Union,” she said, “in Kazakhstan. She does not come from a wealthy family. She is transgender. She has paid for her life, and her education, through her own work. What you should take from this, Ben, is that she is a woman of extremely steely motivation and she is not about to be put down by a little thing like being kidnapped and threatened.”

  Ben, who had indeed already formed that impression from his conversations with her, and thought he could hear something like admiration in Sherazi’s voice — it being an unfamiliar tone from her he couldn’t be very sure — said, “I guessed that.”

  “Then do yourself, and her, a favour,” Sherazi said, leaning forward, “and stop chickening out. So Bill Greenhill has more experience fighting legal battles over his writing than you do? I happen to know he’s also the kind of man who’d be keen to fight your corner if you published the same content. One of these nauseating ‘I don’t care about the credit I care about the cause’ types, because he doesn’t rely on it to pay his mortgage like the rest of us.”