The trick is to find someone who specialises in lyssa, HIV, or filoviruses to discuss this with, they’re more likely to have additional materials around/be better versed in what if anything relating to viral synthesis might be on in their field. Happily I have Noelle Anathan’s home number from when she gave a talk at one of XXXXXXXX’s sponsored conferences, and last time I checked she was both still a well-regarded person in the area of filovirus research and also not actually doing any research and with a lot of time on her hands
N should tell you more about what she wants tomorrow — drop around to hers.
There was a map attached, and Ben faintly recalled the drunk phonecall which felt like a hundred years ago: Natalya doesn’t like anyone to come to her place. Either some of that was wearing off, or Natalya was paranoid about being overheard.
Ben crossed his legs under his laptop. It was too, too early on in Natalya’s…in Natalya’s infection for that to be a symptom, but he couldn’t help thinking: paranoia is one of the early signs.
It was slowly passing into general, everyday insult. He’d already heard some of the young, stupid students at college — the NVQ2s, sixteen and thick as concrete — gleefully accusing each other of having KBV for infractions like mild aggression or being a little paranoid, and he wondered if it would keep going like that, or if it would disappear like the “piggysniffles” jokes; if it would sit next to “ur, you’ve got AIDS, you bummer” or pass into the rear view mirror of disease-related teasing.
Ben supposed that depended on whether it went on like AIDS, or faded like the flu scares.
He squinted at the TV. The story about the Norfolk family had reached a conclusion: windswept presenter standing in a winter field, looking grim. It didn’t look much like it was fading away.
The faint, irritating sound of a chat notification which he could have sworn he’d disabled dragged him back from East Anglia.
Tasneen Ali: Are you at college still
Ben felt a sudden bilious stab of guilt. Was he supposed to have found her there after all? Wasn’t she supposed to be pretending to be sick?
Ben M: I went home, I can get back in about an hour tho
Tasneen Ali: I’m stuck in the fucking library until the end of time, Sherazi ate my face
Ben M:Oh shit
Tasneen Ali: She told me to ask you for help
Ben M: Seriously?
Tasneen Ali: Yeah, Mr Research Skills.
Ben held his breath as he pulled his shoe back on, made a series of contorted faces at the ceiling, and stood up.
It took him less than an hour to get back, which surprised him, but once his foot had stopped hurting he decided to make up for lost time by running part of the way — a decision he was sure to regret later — and made it back into the library just as it was getting dark outside.
“My hero,” said Tasneen without much enthusiasm.
“I did tell her you were sick,” Ben protested, sitting down at the weird, blobby white table the college had decided were perfect for communal study areas. “She didn’t believe me.”
“Your untrustworthy loyalty to your study buddy,” Tasneen said, without satisfaction. “Urgh.”
“My unSherazi-fooling skills at lying,” Ben said. “You look…thrilled by life. What do you need my help with?”
Tasneen, who had red eyes and a very plain headscarf today, looked petulantly at the table. “Okay, first, she eventually stopped eating my face when I pointed out that most people don’t have to live in a domestic war-zone when they’re doing a research project about pollution and that she could stop her stupid macho ‘people were shooting at me’ bullshit because at least if people are shooting at you the problem is really easy to identify and it’s just you, yeah, it’s not your whole family? And possibly I called her a rude word.”
Ben inhaled. “Jesus.”
“Not that one.”
“The C-word?”
“The B-word. Anyway,” Tasneen pushed a mostly-blank sheet of lined writing paper around in front of her. “The thing is, actually, it’s like what James said before he left? Like, you have to have priorities and some people don’t actually put a stupid shitty HND in front of their family, and some of us don’t have a choice about that anyway, by the way.” Tasneen blinked at the ceiling for a while, and continued in the same hot, angry voice, “So my brother moved out. But he moved out like ‘fuck you all, I’m never coming back’ moving out.”
“He ran away,” Ben suggested.
“Only he was all, this is Tasneen’s fault, I wouldn’t be leaving if she hadn’t brought that fucking lesbian into our house, you’d better remember that when you never hear from me again — which, right, bullshit, because he will be back asking Mum for money the minute he runs out and she’ll give it to him.” Tasneen thumped the table, and as one of the librarians changed direction, added, “No, shut up.”
“Wait,” Ben said, caught in the process of getting his Macbook out — not sure why, beyond lending a vague ‘study’ air to the meeting — and holding the laptop above the table like a fool. “This is still the whole thing with, er, what was her name, Aliyaah?”
“Yeah,” Tasneen rubbed her face briefly. “He wouldn’t leave her alone and kept on all this ‘would you still be a lesbian if’ and ‘your Dad is right, you should go back to your auntie and get fixed’ and so we told him to fuck off and then he just went around the house hitting things until Mum yelled at him to grow up and deal with things like a man—”
“Sounds like he already was,” muttered Ben, who recognised some of the rhetoric and the outcome from his own family.
“Yeah,” Tasneen said, with a certain amount of venom. “But instead he just went to Mo’s for a week and when he came back he was all ‘I’m leaving, you’re all disgusting’.”
“That’s…shit,” Ben said, finally putting his laptop down. Privately, he thought, well good fucking riddance, but he assumed it was more complicated than that. It always was, where families were involved.
“He’s my mum’s favourite,” said Tasneen. “So now she hates me, and she hates Aliyaah, and she hates everyone else, and a-a-all of my sisters think I’m a fucking troublemaker as well. How is this even my fault?”
“It isn’t,” Ben said. “What did Sherazi say you should ask for my help with?”
Tasneen scrubbed at her cheek for a minute, and Ben politely turned his attention to the laptop. When he looked up she said, “You know how you used to do that job at the Beeb?”
“Yup.” Five bloody years of it.
“Did you, like, have any kind of go-tos for looking stuff up?”
“Oh, right,” Ben said, understanding creeping up on him like a slow sunrise. “Yeah, loads. I’ll put them in an email for you.”
Ben fell asleep twice on the route out into the wilds of the Northern line’s Northernmost reaches, which was embarrassing but not as bad as being kept awake by foot pain, the first time. The second time it meant he had to get back on a Southbound train at Edgware and try not to overshoot his stop again, but he did, at last, make it onto the right street.
Natalya’s flat was on a completely distinction-free suburban road lined with unassuming yellow brick houses, some five stories tall and others down to two. This was as much variety as the architects had evidently wanted to dabble in: the windows were all the same, and the paved, fenced front gardens filled up with varying ages of cars and one motorbike were all the same.
He found her building by the by-now familiar sight of a Frankenstein Lada in the front, and reached the porch for the ground floor flat (a peaked porch with white wood and tiles on the roof, at once twee and uniform) just as it started to rain like the sky had a hole in it.
Ben wasn’t entirely surprised to see, when Natalya let him in, that her flat was barely furnished and completely spotless, but he was struck by an interlude of related shame at having left the futon unrolled and his dishes in the sink.
Natalya herself seemed completely unchanged. She was dresse
d, unshod — but socked — and had from the looks of things washed her hair that morning. It seemed to be damp. Ben realised he was looking for some sort of sign of internal decay, some kind of outward bruise or hollowness or even a lesion that showed she was carrying around something deadly and contagious in her blood, and possibly by now her saliva.
That wasn’t the point of KBV, Ben reminded himself. The point was you couldn’t tell, at all.
She led him into the front room, where he found Dr Bill waiting. There was a TV the size of a small cinema screen, and everything else looked as if it had been rescued from a Salvation Army shop, including the large steel butcher’s table that took up most of the rest of the space. Some seedling plants had been displaced onto newspaper in the corner by the door, and an array of what Ben assumed were propagation lights had been rigged up over the table and were now switched off.
“You’re limping,” Dr Bill observed, by way of a hello. He looked tired, but Ben thought he had also been on the TV an awful lot recently. Camera make-up gave you entirely the wrong impression of people’s health most of the time.
“I, er,” Ben said, feeling somehow embarrassed to mention it to a man who was usually in a wheelchair, “I slammed my foot in a train door.”
“Well done,” said Dr Bill. “Back when I was still on the bloody crutches someone managed to slam the ticket gates into my ribs and fractured one of them. Sometimes I think the Underground is just an attempt to weed out the unwary from the populace.”
“Did you, um,” Ben said, turning to Natalya. “Did you manage to talk to the…I’m sorry, I can’t remember her name.”
“Noelle?” Dr Bill said. “There have been some complications there.”
“This is why you’re here,” Natalya said. Behind her, the black space of a sleeping TV sucked at Ben’s attention and made him feel as if someone had poured spiders on him.
“I tried to talk to Noelle,” Dr Bill said, exasperated. “I asked her if she’d like to make contact with Natalya to talk about similarities and differences between filovirus and KBV structures and potential shared ancestors; I asked her if she knew of any work on filovirus mutation or synthesis which hadn’t been published but had yielded interesting results — you know how things don’t always make it into journals, I said — she does a lot of work for XXXXXXX’s publications these days — and maybe there have been some things rejected which could be useful just by the way in which they’re wrong—”
Ben braced himself for an inevitable shutdown, but it was Natalya who delivered it, which required him to turn around as if he was watching tennis.
“She said she was not interested, told us not to call again, and put phone down,” said Natalya. She very slowly repositioned some of her hair behind her ear. “Dr Anathan has been speculating stridently in a variety of places about zoonotic origins of KBV. ‘Anyone who claims this is not a natural virus is mistaken’.”
“She’s so adamant, in fact,” Dr Bill said, as Natalya made a disgusted face, “that I’m beginning to suspect — we’re beginning to suspect,” he glanced at Natalya, “that possibly Noelle has some kind of information on this that we don’t.”
“It is unlikely based on analysis of samples,” Natalya said, catching his eye. “You say she has done no lab work in at least four years.”
“That doesn’t mean she hasn’t got information about it that we don’t have, or that her information is right,” Dr Bill said, with a meaningful lift of his enormous eyebrows. “It just means she’s got something and it’s something we need.”
Natalya made a rude sound. “Of course it is not right.”
“I don’t see how it can be,” Ben put in, somewhat intimidated: the black TV screen, the bare walls, the sparseness of the room and the intensity of the conversation made the whole thing feel both surreal and like an interrogation at which he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be present. “If that guy who emailed Daniel is right about his class…I mean…I don’t really understand medical stats but…it’s a pretty weird coincidence.”
“Yes,” Natalya barked, narrowing her eyes.
Ben nearly fell over himself and took a step backward. He hit his foot on Dr Bill’s wheelchair, apologised, and then had to bite down on a howl of unexpected pain, as the ache of worn-off painkiller turned into the throb of re-injured foot.
“Yes,” Natalya repeated, with some satisfaction, “yes, we will see if her source of ‘natural origin’ measures up to this very suspect — are you alright?”
Ben, who couldn’t quite handle the absurdity of being asked if he was alright by someone who had a death sentence in her veins, chewed his lips and nodded abruptly.
“We will see,” Natalya went on. “I have worked on this virus. She only receives second-hand information. We will see about her natural origin claims.”
Dr Bill said, “Noelle isn’t an idiot. If she’s suggesting this then she has or has been shown good, convincing evidence. And if that’s the case, we need to see it as well. Whoever has it shouldn’t be keeping it back from the main researchers.”
“Okay,” said Ben, who wasn’t sure why he’d been called into this.
“Tomorrow,” Natalya said, clearing up the mystery immediately, “we will go to see Dr Anathan in Oxford, and we will ask her about her evidence. I would like you to record this so that she cannot deny it later.”
“Oh,” said Ben, who was fairly certain that if he missed another of Kyle’s classes he was going to have, as Tasneen had put it, his face chewed off.
“Can you do this?” Natalya asked.
“Sure,” said Ben. “Are we getting the tube — the Oxford tube, I mean?”
Natalya regarded him with a small amount of pity. “I have a car.”
“Er,” said Ben, peering out of the window at it. He caught Dr Bill hiding a smile between his sleeve and his beard.
“I paid for that car,” said Natalya, “I use that car.”
“So,” Ben scrambled for an explanation that suited him, “so as not to endanger people on the bus?”
She gave him another pitying look. “I do not plan to spit on, bleed on, or have sex with my fellow-passengers,” Natalya said, a little coldly. “Or you.”
“Accidents happen,” Ben said, his mouth talking without him. “I mean, with regard to blood. Not sex, obviously. That would be…that would be a weird kind of accident.”
“Will you come?” Natalya asked, ignoring this.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ll record it.”
He showed up early to Kyle’s evening class, coming straight down from Colindale, and found himself stuck in the quiet study area for an hour before he was likely to even get into the classroom.
Ben decided that, if he was supposed to be potentially harassing someone tomorrow — and recording them without their consent, he supposed, since it didn’t seem like Dr Anathan was going to feel much like cooperating in person either — he might as well find out a little bit more about the person who was going to be suing him soon.
The reckless indifference of the thought, particularly the word ‘suing’, made him feel as if he’d already reached the stage of drunk or coke where the entire world seemed like a distant, unimportant event occurring alongside the far more important one of whatever he was doing, which would have been comforting had he not known full well why it felt that way.
Over the course of the hour he discovered that Dr Noelle Anathan was a consultant for XXXXXXX publications, who specialised in science journals; that she lived in Oxford; that she had been divorced six years ago but kept her partner’s name because it had a large pedigree of professional work attached to it; that she was 58; that she had been born and educated in Massachusetts and worked variously in Delhi, Chennai, Kuala Lumpur, and Penang; that she had a second, honorary doctorate from Anglia Ruskin; that she had a daughter slightly older than Ben who was involved in US politics; that she advocated yoga for stressed scientists; that she was vegetarian; that she had worn the same pair of infinity-symbol
droplet earrings in silver in every headshot ever taken of her; and that from the looks of things she was probably going to be very angry, and very rude, when they called on her.
Ben closed the laptop and closed his eyes. He tried to draw up a graph: who was likely to be more terrifying, Dr Anathan, or Sherazi, or Natalya? Which side, out of an axis running from Natalya in one extreme and Dr Anathan in the other, was Sherazi likely to come down on? How extremely sued was he going to be?
It then occurred to him that Dr Bill had been sued almost as many times as the current editor of Private Eye, and his friend Phil Jacy had done an entire Edinburgh show about it; that litigation was an occupational hazard and not the end of the world; and that it was possible he should stop freaking out about it and just ask Kyle how you were supposed to deal with harassment suits, and hope like hell that it sounded like an innocent, theoretical question.
He reopened his Macbook, and decided to see if Dr Anathan had known Simon H Crawford at all.
By the time Ben made it to Greenwich that night he expressly did not want to work. He wanted to lie down, put a pillow over his face, and pretend he wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack. Instead, he was on the DLR for longer than anyone should have to be on a glorified model train, and then he was required to DJ in what had until a few months ago been a Victorian public toilet.
“Club Dump” had retained all of the original tiling in the renovation, and as a consequence was extremely cold.
“Do they do coffee in here?” Ben asked, when he’d found Molly standing next to a tiny fan heater with two jumpers on. “Is that my jumper?”
The Next Big One Page 22