The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  The fragmentary plan came back to him.

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: you’re right

  I do only email you when I want something. Consider this an attempt to rectify that:

  I’ve been roped into doing a slot at my other and slightly more frequently paying job on the 18th of next month, at Bethnal Working Men’s Club, for what the organiser is claiming is a charity benefit thing for Live Through This, a KBV-relatives-support charity thing.

  If you think you can stomach several hours of “abysmal music” in exchange for nicking my drinks tokens for the evening…

  Ben spent an instructive few minutes cleaning gift offer spam out of his inbox and posting a picture of a porpoise on every status Ina had made in the last week, and was rewarded with a near-immediate response from Daniel, who appeared have nothing better to do on a Saturday morning.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: you’re right

  Of course I’m right, I’m always right. I’ve literally never been wrong about anything in my life. Do you want someone to do the science reading for something, is that it? Because there’s probably a good inconclusively spooky article in the whole comparison between Natalya gets kidnapped, Crawford kicks his own bucket thing. And since you asked so nicely, I’m willing to translate things into layperson.

  (Also I’ve got to kill time before I can go home and have a shower because I need to pop in at a time which says “diligent overnight work” not “dirty stop-out”)

  Is there some way I can come to this thing with earplugs?

  Ben ignored the bizarre attempt at baiting him and sipped coffee. He hadn’t really considered the possibility of writing anything about Crawford, although now that he thought about it in the slightly less paranoid light of day there wouldn’t appear to be much sense in him racking up international phone calls in pursuit of tidbits if he wasn’t going to do something with them.

  The trick, Ben thought, as Crystal thwacked the last of the evergreens into position, was probably to try to think a bit more like someone who was going to be writing articles and a bit less like someone who was chasing down information for other people to use.

  Old habits, he thought, burning his mouth.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: co-authoring

  I’ve got the okay from Natalya to have a look through her work for reference so if you want to start smacking together some kind of hackery I can provide you the facts in idiotspeak by lunchtime.

  Also since you didn’t ask I’m sitting in my lab, on my own, and I smell incredibly bad. Quite sure I look worse. If anyone asks, lab coats and body glitter are the new thing.

  “Well thanks for the mental image,” Ben snorted, under his breath. He tried the coffee again. His mind’s eye couldn’t help drawing in dark circles and a couple of hickeys, even though he was pretty sure Daniel was entirely too vain and too prudent for that.

  It’s a bad time to be a virologist. Dr Natalya Yagoda, recently abducted by unknown parties and threatened in relation to her work on KBV; Dr Simon H. Crawford, who has no known or diagnosed history of mental illness, committed suicide less than a week ago, referencing regret and guilt relating to his work in his suicide note. With most media categorising KBV as “less of a threat than measles” and “not as scary as the flu” (inaccurately: while measles and flu are presently far more widespread and contagious, KBV has yet to produce a single survivor), and pills to prevent and protect against HIV infections already available, many might assume that virologists are well-valued and free from undue pressures right now.

  Dr Daniel Khoo of UCLH’s Virology Department thinks otherwise:

  “It’s not the most well-paid or prestigious of jobs,” he says, “and it’s poorly understood by the public, in part thanks to a lot of films where people just wave a magic wand and have an antidote in the nick of time. The reality is that working out how a virus functions at all can take years, and the funding for research like that is thin on the ground. A dedicated scientist could very well be tempted by the kind of bribe Dr Yagoda was recently offered, we should be grateful that she has too much integrity to take it up.”

  Which work Dr Crawford refers to in his suicide note is still not known, but the profound nature of his guilt towards it speaks of something we ought to know about. Unfortunately, his employers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have received a firm request from one of their major funders to keep all further requests for information on this subject from reaching their goal. Even the name of this funder has been kept in the dark.

  “That’s not true,” said Daniel, reading over Ben’s shoulder. “You said it was XXXXX/XXXXXX.”

  “I want this article to stay up,” Ben said, closing the paper before Daniel had a chance to finish reading. “I told them that when I gave them it. I know who it is, but I suspect if I mention that you’re going to get asked to take it down. Or sued.”

  “And they just went along with that?” Daniel asked, as they got to the front of the queue. “Latte and a double espresso and, oh, one of those weird pink cakes, Tottenham cake, and he’s having sadness or a diet or something.”

  “I’ll have one as well,” Ben interrupted, folding the paper back into his bag.

  “Ah, so this is bland enough,” said Daniel, whipping out his card. “Amazing. Do you have taste buds in your mouth or did something happen to them?”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  Daniel scooted along the rail to the pick-up area, humming something under his breath. As the first of the coffees arrived, he added, “Also, that is not what I said.”

  Ben scrabbled for context for a moment, made contact with comprehension, and held two lurid pink-iced cakes self-consciously while Daniel made a meal of collecting coffee. “It’s what you said eventually.”

  “After you asked me to paraphrase about ten times.”

  Ben shrugged. “I said don’t swear.”

  “Ugh.” Daniel climbed onto a window-sill — all the seats were full with the kind of coprolite parties of middle-aged women that weren’t moving any time soon — and balanced his espresso on a piece of wood which looked too narrow for the task. “It’s the Guardian, they can cope with a bit of swearing.” He took a cake out of Ben’s hands. “I particularly liked,” he added, taking a bite, “the bit about ‘has never worked with, for, or anywhere near the Soviets’.” Cake crumbs misted the floor in front of him. “Whoops. Trying to distance yourself from your early work?”

  “It’s still the only thing people find if they look for me,” Ben complained. “I mean, the only thing that’s actually me and not that film guy.”

  “Stop getting your articles pulled, then,” said Daniel, with no sympathy.

  “I’m trying to.”

  “Don’t you have classes?”

  “Don’t you have work?”

  Daniel rolled his eyes and finished the cake. “I have students so I’m not there,” he said, with a grimace. “What’s your excuse again?”

  “Teaching staff are on strike because they’re giving management a 2% pay-raise and nothing for anyone else,” Ben said, promptly.

  Daniel peered out of the window at the square beyond. “Alright,” he said, checking his phone. “It’s quarter past one, let’s see if it’s still up.”

  Ben took out his phone too, and checked the Guardian site.

  “Still there.”

  “Still there on the Android app as well,” Daniel confirmed. “Amazing. Maybe this one’s a keeper.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Eat your cake while you’re not holding your breath,” Daniel suggested. “I have a bet on with myself that you’re actually a being of pure gas and don’t eat food at all.”

  “Wha’?” Ben picked up the cake, and looked at it for a minute. It was yellowish-white, underneath the icing, and looked inoffensive enough.

  He picked the
pink icing off in one sheet and left it on the paper plate.

  “Are you mental?” Daniel asked, fascinated. “That is quite clearly the only bit of this boring cake worth eating.”

  Ben broke the cake in half and ate it, which was something of a feat: with Daniel watching him with all the aggression of a London pigeon, every mouthful stuck in his throat and needed washing down with increasingly unwanted coffee, and by the time he’d finished a four-inch square of cake felt like the Titanic.

  He checked his phone.

  “Oh, I’ve got an email from Natalya…”

  “Condemning you for mentioning her research or thanking you for not mentioning the fact she’s a fucking plague vector?” Daniel asked, more loudly than Ben would have thought sensible.

  “Neither,” he said, opening the email. “The Guardian called me to check if information given in article was in keeping with my views before publishing. So far it remains on site. Congratulations.”

  “See,” said Daniel, with a malicious smile, “even Natalya thinks your disappearing article problem is hilarious.”

  “That’s not the impression I got,” Ben muttered. “And you have cake in your teeth.”

  As he spoke, another email arrived.

  To: Ben M

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: congratulations

  You appear to be the author of an article which hasn’t yo-yo’d off the website yet!

  “Ughh,” said Ben, covering his face with one hand. “Alright. But if I get one from my tutor I’m giving up on life forever.”

  To his relief, no one even mentioned the article at the Queen that night. He wasn’t sure if any of them had made the connection or if everyone he knew there just thought that Ben Martin who did film reviews had expanded into features and op eds, which did admittedly seem more likely than the Ben Martin who once played “Dog Days” three times in one evening suddenly developing the ability to engage in journalism.

  The only thing anyone seemed to care about, at midnight when there was a changeover and Molly climbed back into the booth with a hot dog to take over, was his set list.

  “What the fuck was that?” Molly asked, wiping the fade switch over to her side so smoothly in time that Ben could have wept at the perfection of it.

  “What the fuck was what?” Ben asked, stepping back from the desk and passing her his headphones — The Queen’s were getting temperamental — as she offered him her hot dog. “No thanks.”

  “The one before last,” Molly said, twiddling angrily with the bass dial despite it having already been set in a perfectly good position.

  “What about it?”

  “Ben, you killed the dance floor.” Molly pointed her hot dog at him, and Ben had to duck to avoid taking a jet of ketchup and fried onion to the chest. “What the hell.”

  He shrugged, surprised. “I thought it would be funny?”

  Somewhere beyond them someone very drunk was trying to grind to a recent mix of Tainted Love, and failing heroically.

  “One,” Molly said, brushing her hair out of her eyes with a hand mustarded on the far side, “that was folk music, no one listens to weird folk music at the Queen. Two, that’s not a danceable beat. Three, it’s too early in the evening for people to be pissed enough not to care that it’s weird undanceable folk music. Four — ugh, there’s ketchup in my tits — four, Ben, that was a song about cholera?”

  Ben shrugged again, and felt around for something to offer Molly’s recently condimented cleavage. “I just thought it was appropriate, I guess?”

  “Literally the opposite.”

  Ben found a packet of tissues that still had one in it, and passed it to her.

  “Thanks. God, don’t do something like that again.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the bar. “I don’t think they’re going to mind, everyone goes to the bar when they don’t like the song. Kerching.”

  “There’s ‘I don’t want to dance to this’,” said Molly, dabbing aggressively at her boobs while her hot dog circled dangerously above the decks, “and then there’s ‘why the fuck is this song about people pooing themselves to death in India’. Thank you—”

  This last came as Ben hastily rescued the hot dog and held it out of the way of the equipment.

  “Where did you get this, anyway?”

  “Trolley outside.”

  Ben regarded the hot dog with fresh horror. “Probably don’t eat it,” he suggested, “while we’re on the subject of pooing ourselves to death.”

  “No more ‘hilarious’ songs about dying,” Molly said, ignoring him. She balled up the tissue. “Please? You’re making us look like dicks.”

  If he thought he was going to escape the evening with one minor bollocking for poor taste, Ben was out of luck. He made the mistake of checking his phone on the night bus, as some kind of distraction from the man next to him looking a lot like he was about to lose his drinks, and found out that Ina had decided to give him the benefit of her wisdom, and probably her Carling, on Facebook.

  You know what your problem is Ben

  I know what all of them are, Ben thought, and at least two of them are that I’m stuck on a bus next to someone who smells of sick and one of the others is that I have a gag reflex on a hair trigger.

  Like it doesn’t bother me because I don’t care if you’re a soulless void

  Ben was a lot less bothered about being a soulless void than he was about being shortly a stomach-liningless one.

  But goddamn you make it difficult for people to be your friend

  “What?” Ben asked his phone, out loud.

  “Didn’t say anything, mate,” said the drunk man next to him.

  I mean do you remember when you used to be fun

  Because most people don’t any more

  Was that before I got dumped, made redundant, and found out my sister was dying, by any chance? Ben thought, unamused.

  I mean you just pull yourself into yourself and no one knows what’s up any more

  You’re a fucking turtle Ben

  To his relief, he also had an email.

  To: Ben M

  From: Rachel K Beanz

  Ben was surprised to find he was a little disappointed to hear from Rachel, and tried to work out who it was he would rather have heard from. His brain came back with nothing conclusive or helpful, so he read on.

  Subj: Stevenage

  What is wrong with that town, eh? Considering just banninating every single Stevenage IP from making edits on any Wiki server. We literally just need to ban that one user but nope: new account every time. Thought you might like to know since you two seem to be buddies and all now but there was someone going off all over Natalya Yagoda’s page claiming she’s ‘mentally unstable’ and ‘untrustworthy’. From guess where? Stevenage again.

  Ben awoke to an email informing him that the next day of strikes would be called off as management had agreed to negotiations – not, Ben noted, to actually stop awarding themselves ridiculous pay hikes at other people’s expense, so there were probably more strikes coming — and so he should consider himself going to class as usual.

  He also woke up to Minnie’s arse in his face, and the TV silently displaying storm damage from the North East like the scenes from an apocalypse movie set in a mining town, but neither of these things seemed especially detrimental to his day.

  Kingsley had already gone to work.

  Ben, having finally been overwhelmed by the jolting bus and the smell of his neighbour last night just as he’d stood up to leave, felt like an empty cavern with legs, and went to see if any leftovers had been earmarked for his consumption.

  They hadn’t.

  There was no bread, and no milk, and the only dry cereal looked unnecessarily wholesome. After a little searching, while Minnie yang and myangmmr’d around his ankles as if she’d never been fed in her loud little life, he found a half-used jar of peanut butter that wasn’t out of date, and a spoon that smelled and tasted of coffee.

 
“Breakfast of champions,” Ben informed the cat.

  He made himself coffee, which tasted of peanut butter, and was too strong, and recalled that there was no milk.

  “Arse,” said Ben, and he went back to the futon and pulled his duvet around him like a cocoon.

  He began to feel deeply unhappy with the place of his digestive system in the universe not too far into the peanut butter, and accepted that at some point he was going to have to go downstairs and buy the necessary, which would involve wearing clothes, and leaving the warm isolation of the flat.

  Ben decided that he probably wasn’t all that hungry and that he could function without coffee and everything would be fine.

  In defiance of the facts pointing to the contrary of this belief, chief among them being his inability to stop yawning and the noises his stomach was making, Ben pulled his Macbook onto his knees and tried to present at least the picture of a productive and thoughtful student of the journalistic arts.

  He found his glasses and tried again.

  The first email did not encourage his belief that his glasses were, in fact, working.

  The from address was a domain apparently owned by a very large, very successful, and very well-known news group.

  The to field definitely contained his name and his name only.

  “Shit?” Ben asked the empty flat. “What?”

  Hi, Ben

  “No,” Ben said, “I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe this.”

  He meant why are you being informal, and he meant this sounds weirdly threatening, but his pre-coffee brain was largely attached to the word “no” and didn’t feel like relinquishing it at this point.

  We here at XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX have noticed you’ve been doing some really excellent work for the Guardian. You don’t seem to be on an exclusive contract with them — apparently you’re freelance? — and we were wondering if, perhaps, you’d like to have a staff contract with us, instead.

  We can offer a whole host of perks: some of the most widely-read news outlets in the world for your work, great employment benefits like gym membership and first class healthcare, not to mention the stability of a regular wage and pension contributions. We’re also able to offer to pay for your continuing education, should you decide to complete a BA in Journalism at any university in the UK.