“Ohw-kay,” said Lisa Kroup abruptly, startling Ben out of a train of thought involving telephone robots, “do you happen to know why she wants this information?”
Ben took a breath, let the thought ‘for an obituary’ cross his mind at speed, and settled on the more disarming, “I don’t know anything about any of this, I’m afraid, Ma’am, I’m just her admin assistant.” He tried to sound ingratiating, which he never felt he’d been much good at or much inclined to in the past, and added, “She say jump, I say how high. Which is why I’m calling out of work hours.”
“I know the feeling,” said Lisa Kroup under her breath. “Ohw-kay, I can tell you that it’s one of our sponsors who’d prefer us not to release this information just yet, not the university, if that’s likely to be any help — maybe your Dr Yagoda could speak to them instead?”
Ben caught his breath. “That would be very kind,” he said, “although let’s be honest, it’ll probably be me who has to talk to them.”
“Ha ha,” said Lisa Kroup. “Yeah so it’s XXXXX and XXXXX in partnership, unless they’ve actually merged?”
“Thanks,” said Ben, making a note of this. The names sounded familiar, but only in a vague, news-story way.
“Oh and if it helps?” Lisa Kroup went on, conspiratorially, “and ‘cuz no one said we shouldn’t tell anyone this yet? They sponsored his work on asymptomatic intervals about like, a dozen years ago?”
Ben wrote all of this down, thanked Lisa Kroup, finally hung up what he suspected was going to be an expensive phone call, and stared at the back of the gas bill he’d written it on.
“Well done, Ben,” said Ben to himself, as the washing machine finally reached the end of the spin cycle. “What the fuck are you going to do with this? What does it even mean?”
He tapped his front teeth with his thumbnail, and with a certain amount of reluctance, re-opened his laptop.
To: Khoo, Daniel; Yagoda, Natalya; Dr Bill Greenhill
From: Ben M
Subj: I have literally no idea why I’ve done this but it might turn out to be useful later
Daniel brought my attention to the suicide of a virologist in Wisconsin called Simon H Crawford; I looked him up and found out there’s been a revert war on his Wiki page over a quote from his suicide note which reads:
I’ve been naïve. Maybe there is a god who will forgive me for what I have allowed, but I cannot forgive myself. I kept thinking this was a coincidence. Latency was supposed to open scope for study and prevention
I went to look up what he’s worked on and when I was talking to UW Madison his assistant said they’ve been asked by a research sponsor not to give out the details of any of that and the research sponsor was XXXXX/XXXXXX, and the work of his they sponsored specifically was to do with “asymptomatic intervals” which sounds like latency to my completely unscientific brain.
Ben stopped in the middle of this composition and began tapping his teeth again.
He looked up the companies Lisa Kroup had mentioned.
He looked up the locations of their sites.
He was not entirely surprised.
Also, XXXXX/XXXXXX has a large site in Stevenage, which is where the “delete” side of that Wiki revert war was coming from.
I don’t know if it’s relevant but considering what happened to Natalya I’m kind of invested in weird-doings to do with virologists right now.
[except Daniel]
He erased the last line, on the assumption that Daniel might not necessarily take this as a joke, and sent the email.
The Princess was not exactly teeming, but Kolya-behind-the-bar assured them that the place had been stuck with a non-regular’s unwanted stag do for most of the earlier evening and that they’d made a fortune, and that he was now going to sit back and enjoy the relative absence of customers. Ben asked if he should open his set with the funeral march, and Kolya asked if Ben was in desperate need of urine in his Pabst.
“You’ve missed a great opportunity there,” said Ben, taking his unopened bottle and bottle opener solemnly, “you could have said ‘piss-Pabst’.”
“Not missed,” Kolya assured him. “Skilfully avoided.”
He returned to the table. According to the poster above it, this table was reserved for the use of Kathy P and her friends, who had been and gone and also left one of their fingerless gloves behind.
“Where’s mine?” Molly asked sorrowfully, engaged in braiding her hair.
“In front of you?” Ben pointed to the sweating pint glass between her elbows.
“Oh,” Molly looked at it in some surprise. “I thought it was Ina’s.”
“Which is why it was directly in front of you?”
Molly shrugged. Ben sat down on the wobbly stool — Molly and Ina had grabbed the two more stable chairs — and fiddled with the bottle opener for a moment. Technically he shouldn’t have been allowed an unopened bottle, but then, according to Kolya, “technically we decide who does what in here”.
“I was thinking,” said Molly, after a while, “you should do OKCupid, or Tinder.”
“Didn’t that stop being a thing two years ago?” asked Ben, who knew very well that it was still flourishing.
Molly shook her head, and exchanged half-braided hair for untouched pint. “I can help you make a profile,” she said. “There’s that photo from when we went to that Beer Festival in Worthing, that looked really good, you could make that your headshot.”
“I had a profile,” Ben pointed out, “I closed it.”
“Or,” said Molly, rubbing condensation off her glass with the sleeve of her jumper, “when you and Cade did the clay heads thing they took reference pictures and yours looked really artistic.”
“Do you get money off or something if I sign up and say you signed me up?” Ben asked, his drink somewhere in front of his mouth.
Molly looked confused. “No?” she said, bewildered. “It’s free.”
“Then why are you doing this?” Ben made an incoherent gesture at the table.
“I read this thing and it says half the length of the relationship is long enough to get over someone and shorter if you meet someone new,” Molly explained, trying to show Ben the article in question on her phone.
Ben jerked his head away. “Didn’t you get some new cats in at —”
“And it’s a really good way to meet people,” Molly persisted. “One of my friends in Lancaster got married off it.”
“I don’t want to meet anyone new—” Ben protested, flapping Molly’s phone away from him. “I already know too many women.”
“But most of us don’t want to go out with you,” Molly said, reasonably but without tact. She put her phone back down and scrubbed the side of her glass with the other jumper sleeve.
“None of you do,” said Ben, internally adding, thank God.
“It would be good for you,” Molly persisted.
“It hasn’t been two and a half years,” said Ben, “so by your article I’m not even ready yet anyway.”
“It might cheer you up,” Molly said anxiously. “If you—”
“Ina!” said Ben desperately, as he spotted her coming across from the toilets. “Ina, my God. Help me.”
Ina, who had recently adopted a black porkpie hat into her Personal Brand despite its failure to in any way suit her, deliberately took her time. She arrived looking tall, regal, and drunk, in a grey Breaking Bad wife-beater and jeans which had started out as artfully-ripped and which had clearly become mistaken for a paint rag.
“Is she trying to pressurise you into doing online dating drugs?” Ina said slowly, inserting herself into a seat next to Molly.
“Yes,” said Ben firmly. “Did she do it to you too?”
“No,” Ina said with a huge, terrifyingly American smile, “she tried to practice a plan of attack with me but I’m not cooperating.”
“Thank fuck.”
Ina sprawled out with her arm over Molly’s shoulders, and began the process of trying to steal her beer.
“See,” said Ina, as her hand inched closer to the glass, “I don’t think you should be dating anyone.”
“That’s mine,” said Molly, sharply.
“You’re a trainwreck,” Ina said, not changing her expression as she gave Molly a quick squeeze and released her. “No one wants to date someone who is just going to spend all his time crying into his girlfriend’s old jumpers.”
Ben narrowed his eyes. “Okay, I take back my ‘thank fuck’.”
“Also,” said Ina, as Molly toasted her silently, “you’re easily distracted by dick. And vag. And you’re supposed to be doing this…not-degree…thing. Don’t fuck it up by falling in love with the first person who is nice to you.”
She stood up again, a little unsteady but magnificently tall and framed with sea-coloured tips of escaping hair. “I,” she said, pointing around the table. “Am getting another drink. Who wants?”
Molly and Ben shook their heads.
“I don’t do that,” Ben muttered.
Once Ina had made it to the bar and draped herself in front of Kolya, Molly said into her pint, “She’s talking about herself.”
“I thought she was trying to collect a full set of indie bassists?”
Molly shrugged.
“Oh shit,” Ben added, glancing over his shoulder. “Here comes Gareth. I have to go outside to smoke. Right. Now.”
He left his jacket and scrambled away over the stool, nearly knocking down his Pabst in the process, but escaping from the front of the bar before Gareth could get to the table and corner him.
“Ben—” Molly called plaintively after him, but he was already out of the door and reaching for his e-shisha.
The air was crystalline with frost and everyone else on the pavement was swaddled in coats. Ben regretted his hare-brained decision to leave his inside, and tried to compensate for this by tucking his chin into the collar of his shirt and his hands into his pockets. It didn’t have much of the desired effect, but at least he felt like he was trying.
He had just about managed to slip into a contemplative frame of mind that was free of things to actually contemplate, when the door to The Princess opened and emitted the spectre of bad, grandiose ideas, immoveable policies, no bonus payments ever, and incidentally terrible hair that Ben had specifically been trying to avoid.
“Hi, Ben,” said Gareth, raising a hand. He had a down-lined coat on, and Ben made a Herculean effort not to stare at it with envious eyes.
Fuck off, Gareth, thought Ben. He took the e-shisha out of his mouth and croaked a greeting.
“You know the whole point of those is that you don’t have to go outside to smoke them,” said Gareth, with a nod. He exhaled a cloud of vapour as he spoke that made it look as if he’d come out to smoke as well.
“Actually the whole point of them is that they give you less cancer,” said Ben, “and old habits die hard.”
Gareth ignored this. “Actually,” he said, in his adenoidal drawl which had, some years ago, sounded very cool to Ben. “I was meaning to talk to you.”
Ben said nothing.
“I’ve had an idea for a gig,” Gareth went on, “and Bethnal Working Men’s Club might have a vacancy that night after all.”
“Ugh?” said Ben, who had honestly meant to say ‘oh really’ but couldn’t quite stop a noise of disgust.
“Yeah, and I know the booker there, obviously, and since it’s a pretty good cause, you know, they were like, yeah, let’s do this, why not,” Gareth went on, using his usual superpower of assuming that everyone else had all the information that he did.
“Great,” said Ben, putting his e-shisha back in his mouth nearly hard enough to chip his teeth.
“And obviously, there’s the acts and everything earlier on, but I thought it would be dealing you and Molly a poor hand if I didn’t ask you first to fill the later slot. I mean, the three of us practically come as a package deal now, yeah?” Gareth didn’t actually appear to be talking to Ben at all, but to some apparition in front of both of them who presumably liked him a lot more than Ben did. “So you’d be on from about like, one until two-thirty?”
“Sorry,” said Ben, pulling out the cylinder briefly, “what is this for?”
“Oh right,” Gareth said, slapping him on the upper arm. “I thought Molly told you. We’re going to do a benefit thing, yeah?”
“For what?”
Gareth looked at him as if he was sitting in Remedial Humanity, and said, “Uh, for Live Through This? You know, the charity?”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Ben had been bombarded with so much indigestible information in the last couple of weeks that it registered only as a collective of syllables. “Who?”
“Ben. The charity. They provide counselling? For kids whose parents got taken into quarantine?”
Ben said, “Oh, right,” and looked at his shoes for a while.
“I mean,” Gareth said, by way of bestowing a forgiveness Ben had in no way requested or desired, “I hadn’t really heard of them either, but then my friend Kaylee, you know, she did some trails for that documentary? The one that was on Channel five a couple of weeks ago — so obviously I had to watch it because Kaylee’s working is just always, it’s just on point every time, you know.”
Ben caught Gareth’s eye and nodded encouragingly, which required him to clench his jaw tight enough that he could hear his teeth squeak.
“Anyway,” said Gareth airily. “Ever since then, you know, I was just afflicted by the need to do something to help them. So we’re going to have this a couple of weeks before Christmas — probably the eighteenth? And you and Molly are first choice for the late set.”
“Sounds great,” said Ben. “Usual rates?”
Gareth frowned at him. “It’s a charity benefit?”
“People still get paid for those,” said Ben, pointedly. “Especially when they aren’t Bono and have to pay their rent.”
“It’s a really good cause.”
“So’s your friend whatshername’s granny charity, they still pay her.”
Gareth gave Ben the kind of look Ben imagined one gave to someone who had just started speaking Klingon. “Who?”
“Sa…lly? Who used to be a journalist? You keep telling me about her.”
“Sam. Oh yeah, right, of course,” said Gareth, frowning. “I’ll have to check with the budget.”
“Bye, Gareth,” said Ben, going inside.
What the hell was I thinking, Ben thought, hurrying back over to Molly and Ina, who were doing something involving Molly’s phone and Ina’s infamous cat-face impressions, sleeping with him?
The Christmas benefit, unlike everything else Gareth ever suggested, remained in Ben’s head for the whole of the next day. Kingsley had the flat for recording again, and he retreated with his bag to the coffee shop around the time his flatmate was locking the cat in the bathroom.
“Who is it today?” Ben asked, hanging in the doorway while he checked everything was where he needed it.
“Killa E9,” said Kingsley, running cables across the living room floor.
Ben made a face. “That’s a…a name, alright.”
Kingsley shrugged. “Yeah, let’s just hope she moves to a different post code because she ain’t budging on the ‘Killa’ and that’s not my job.”
“Killa SW17 doesn’t really have the same ring to it,” said Ben, and took the stairs two at a time.
By the time he reached the coffee shop a faint and fragmentary plan was forming, blown out of his mind entirely by finding fake snow and piles of artificial holly with tastefully dark red berries strewn about the coffee shop.
Crystal was up a step-ladder, held in place by someone who Ben didn’t recognise at all and who was mostly playing with his phone.
“It’s November,” Ben said in a scandalised voice as she attached bunches of fake ivy to the ceiling.
“It’s after Halloween,” said Crystal, “that means it’s Christmas. Katarina, can you serve Ben please.”
> “Is that how it works?” Ben asked, ducking around the ladder.
He didn’t bother making an order and Katarina didn’t bother asking him for one. There was a sticker under the till, which Crystal had shown him when she wrote it out, reading: Hipster Ben: weakest-ass milky coffee we have. It joined regular orders for a host of other people, differentiated by flattering adjectives like “fat” and “speccy”. Ben supposed that if you were stuck in a room full of other people’s wishes all day it wasn’t easy to feel particularly benevolent toward them.
“Can see you’ve never worked in retail,” said Crystal, staple-gunning foliage to the rafters. “But you’ll be pleased to hear we’re not having Christmas songs until December.”
“You’re meant to,” muttered the boy nominally holding the ladder.
“I’d rather eat this fucking staple gun,” Crystal said, “than hear Bing Crosby for two solid months.”
Ben took his latte and sachet of Christmas Spice — the options were Christmas Spice, Yule Chocolate, or Peppermint Stick — and wedged himself into the armchair next to the stepladder. It was the only one left.
Crystal, permanently red-faced and the approximate shape of a bauble, stapled the holly berries to the ceiling, and came down the ladder.
“What’s in the Christmas Spice?” Ben asked, as she and the monosyllabic boy with the phone manoeuvred the step ladder along to the next beam.
“Dunno,” said Crystal.
“We get them from a factory in Peterborough,” said Katarina, behind the till. “There’s a pallet in the back. It doesn’t contain nuts but you shouldn’t eat it if you’re pregnant.”
Ben carefully laid the sachet on the arm of the chair.
“I think I’ll pass,” he said.
Inside the less traumatically seasonal world of his inbox there were four reminders from Gareth, just on the off-chance that he’d somehow managed to cleanse his mind of the stupid charity thing that Gareth didn’t think he should be paid for. Ben opened the most recent one, scanned through it, found the grudging admittance that he was going to pay both Ben and Molly their usual fee, and closed it again.
The Next Big One Page 19