“You left it at the Queen,” Molly explained, “I was going to give it back but um.”
“But you need it,” Ben said, trying to muscle in on her heater spot. “Did I book us this one?”
“It was supposed to be in August,” Molly said, as someone jostled her. She took a hat out of her dress pocket and pulled it down over her hair. “Brr. But they kept overbooking so we’re on now.”
“And they don’t do coffee?” Ben repeated, taking out his laptop to lay on the wide ledge of a narrow booth.
“Nope.”
“Anything warm at all?”
“I had some chips but I didn’t think you’d want them.”
Ben contemplated how he felt about eating chips versus how he felt about freezing to death. “No, you’re probably right. Do they even do hot cocktails.”
“Oh my god, like seven people have asked the barman about that and he just got really stroppy and said he was cold as well and they don’t have a kettle.”
“Well that’s not our fault?”
“I know, right?!” Molly took out some fingerless gloves from her other pocket and pulled them on sadly. “I look like I’m homeless.”
“They all match,” said Ben. “I’m sure homeless people don’t match.”
“Rue knitted them,” said Molly, showing them off. “You should get a friend who knits, you’d never run out of gloves ever again.”
As Club Dump filled up it grew damp with breath but somehow not any less cold, until Ben realised he was also slightly sweaty. The tiny, tiny dance floor was stuffed with people who couldn’t decide whether they should or shouldn’t have a coat on, and after what looked like some lengthy haggling at the bar, Molly returned to him and to the booth with a triumphant look.
“There’s an all-night Tesco about a mile down that way,” she shouted, pointing in the vague direction of the Maritime Museum.
One of the bar staff, clad in a down jacket, shuffled up the stairs in bad grace.
“They’re going to look for a mini kettle or one of those Costa machines they have in there,” Molly said, backing into the heater. “I’m brilliant.”
“You’re definitely brilliant,” Ben conceded.
“I’m fucking freezing,” Molly added, mournfully. “Why can’t I be brilliant and warm?”
“Because God hates you,” Ben said, trying to squeeze past her, “and wants you to suffer. You can hog the heater for a minute, I need to pee—”
“It’s your set,” Molly complained. “Wait.”
“I’ll be five minutes.”
He lifted Molly out of the way and almost knocked her laptop off the parapet trying to get through the tiny space which apparently was all that was necessary for a grown adult to get out of their booth. It was a nice idea to have an actual church pulpit as the DJ booth, Ben thought, aesthetically speaking…it was just enormously impractical. And an odd thing to find in a former public toilet. How they’d got it in was anyone’s guess.
“Hooray!” shouted a drunk girl in his face.
“Yay?” said Ben, trying to get past.
“It’s Ben!” shouted the drunk girl, grabbing his shirt sleeve.
“It is,” agreed Ben, who vaguely remembered her from a party but not whose party, her name, or whether he’d made an arse of himself at the time. He couldn’t tell much about her under dim club lighting, other than that she was shorter than him, had long dark roots on her long blonde hair, and was extremely drunk.
“It’s so good to see you!” she bellowed, ecstatic.
“It’s, it’s great to see you too,” said Ben, patting her on the arm. “Really great. It’s been ages. I’m just going to the, to the loo, and then—”
“I’m so drunk,” she insisted in a loud whisper, by his ear. “I shouldn’t even be here, I’ve got exams tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Ben. “You should probably go home soon, then.”
“You’re really cute,” she went on.
“You’re really drunk,” Ben said, taking one of her hands to try and peel her off him. “You won’t think that when you’ve sobered up.”
She either ignored this or couldn’t process it. She swung around his neck, laughed for a moment, and tried to kiss him.
Ben jerked his head back, hit someone else’s head with the back of his—
“OI, MATE!”
—fell forward, got something wet on his cheek, and successfully got the drunk girl to let go of his neck.
“Fuck,” Ben said, bursting into the men’s toilet at the speed of what felt like actual sound. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
“Hey, great se—” someone shouted, as the door shut.
“FUCK,” said Ben, all thought of peeing completely forgotten. He dumped freezing cold water all over his hands, and began scrubbing it over every damp patch on his face. There was condensed breath and sweat co-mingling all over the tiles and ceiling, and ‘damp patches’ added up to almost the whole of his body, never mind his face.
He stabbed at the soap dispenser and got a piffling stream of apricot-coloured goo.
A tall, unreasonably good-looking and very dark-skinned man watched him from the hand-dryer, a bottle dangling forgotten from his hand.
“Bad pill?” he asked at last, unsteady.
“No—” Ben repeated the syllable a few times, still trying to clean his face. “Wait, is that vodka?”
The stranger looked down at his hand and then hugged it protectively. “It’s mine, they didn’t take it off me so it’s mine.”
“I’ll buy it off you,” Ben said with desperate urgency, patting his pockets.
“No!”
“Fuck,” Ben ripped a twenty pound note out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll buy it off you, I don’t even need the whole bottle, I just need a bit, come on.”
“You know you’re fucking off your head,” said the stranger, taking the twenty slowly and passing him the half-empty quarter-litre bottle of Grants with a dubious expression. “You are proper fucking mental.”
“No,” Ben said, splashing vodka on his hands and then onto his face. “I’m not fucking dying is what I am.”
“Mental,” said the stranger, putting the twenty in his pocket and beating a sensible retreat.
The door to the men’s toilets opened again, and admitted a head with long, dyed red hair and a worried face under it. “Ben?”
“This is the men’s,” said someone from the urinal.
“Shut up, I know,” said Molly. “Ben?”
She slid into the bathroom.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she asked, evenly. “Oh wow, it stinks in here.”
“Then go into the ladies, you stupid bitch,” advised the man at the urinal.
“Ben,” Molly said, taking the bottle out of his hands. “What the fuck?”
“I,” Ben said, trying to find an English sentence that would explain. “There’s no sanitiser.”
Molly looked at the vodka bottle. “Okay.”
“Someone.” Ben rubbed his shirt sleeve over his chin. Everything smelled very strongly of vodka, which was a moderate improvement on how the bathroom had smelt immediately before. Although given Ben’s feelings on vodka, not much of one. “This girl.”
“Oh, Hetty?” Molly looked at the bottle again. “Hetty tried to kiss you.”
“Tried?”
“She didn’t succeed,” Molly said. “That’s…vodka?”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Ben asked, his chest heaving.
“Positive, she missed you by like six inches, she’s paralytic.” Molly put the vodka bottle up her jumper sleeve and patted Ben awkwardly on the back. “She’s not that gross.”
“No, uh,” Ben took a deep breath. “Oh no.”
“What?”
“God, I hope she doesn’t remember this evening,” Ben said, putting his hands on his head.
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” Molly assured him. “You don’t even like vodka.”
“She definitely didn
’t succeed at kissing me?”
“No, Ben, what the—”
“Okay.” Ben took his hands out of his hair and began to feel acutely embarrassed. “I just. Really. Don’t want to get KBV. Let’s. Finish this set.”
Molly opened the bathroom door, and patted him on the back with the concealed vodka bottle. “If I buy you a bottle of alcohol sanitiser or something,” she said, quietly, “will you promise not to do that again?”
After an evening in which several people stared at him like an unclaimed bag in a railway station and, a mini kettle having been purchased, he drank nothing but tea all night despite smelling very strongly of vodka, Ben was too wound up and caffeinated to sleep.
The solution to this was in the bottom of the Quality Street tin that passed as a first aid kit-cum-medicine cabinet, and although Ben broke the pill in half he woke up groggy and confused to the sound of the alarm on his phone.
“Nryo?” Ben asked, trying to answer it.
YOU’RE GOING TO OXFORD
Said the alarm notification.
“Why would I do that,” Ben asked the phone, which didn’t provide him with any more information but at least stopped beeping at him when he’d found the Yes I’m Awake Shut Up button. Pleasantly, he could remember very little of his dreams or the night before at the moment, and he was very tempted to ignore his urgent message from his former self and claw back a little more sleep.
One of the side effects of the sleeping pills, that Ben had discovered only after he’d had them for a while, was that they had a mildly amnesiac effect as well as knocking him out cold for several hours. Kingsley had, at the time, been faintly disquieted by this:
“So they’re roofies.”
“Kind of?” Ben had, of course, not thought of it like this.
“You’re not using those on anyone else.”
Ben had just stared at him and pointed out slowly that he was Kingsley’s boring, tediously law-abiding (minus some occasional cocaine and downloading of the sort everyone engaged in from time to time) flatmate from Buckinghamshire, not one of his youth worker placement criminals, to which Kingsley had pointed out that roofies and rape and Cambridge and Oxford went together like salt and vinegar on chips.
“The only person taking them is me,” Ben had assured him, highly offended.
“If I come home and there are passed out girls on the floor—”
The word “Oxford” wandered through Ben’s memory waving a flag and Ben walked into the fridge door while looking for milk.
He was alarmed to find that his foot was one large bruise, although it didn’t seem to be enormously painful at the moment.
“I feel like Dr Jekyll,” he told Minnie, as she came and sniffed his toes.
Oxford, his brain said, and then, rather unexpectedly, a cushion.
“Oh,” said Ben, as the word connected with some context at last. “Oh shit.”
One hasty shower and attempt to shave the smell of vodka off his face later, Ben collapsed onto the tube in the general direction of the arranged rendezvous for being shoved into a probably MOT-less car for a couple of hours. He had not brought the cushion, but he had his Macbook, out of the talismanic hope that this would somehow turn him into a real journalist, his phone, the Kapture, a sinking feeling, a stomach full of peanut-butter sandwich, and a headache.
As the tube idled at Kings Cross, he borrowed the station Wifi to compose a short farewell and explanation:
To: Khoo, Daniel
From: Ben M
Subj: impending doom
Setting out to Oxford in Natalya’s rusty box of springs, if I don’t come back don’t bother avenging my death, I will probably be standing on the hard shoulder still waiting for whatever the terrifying former Soviet version of the AA is.
When he arrived at Hangar Lane he found Natalya had, very thoughtfully, folded up a blanket on his seat.
“When I was young,” Natalya told him, pulling away from the kerb almost before Ben had managed to configure his seatbelt in a way that wouldn’t immediately decapitate him when she stopped, “we went to school in back of pick-up truck.”
“The soft Western Decadent thanks you for your blanket,” said Ben, with honesty.
“Western decadence has much to recommend it,” said Natalya, distracted as she pulled through two lanes of traffic and Ben assumed a position like a cat in a cat carrier. “More than one type of cheese, fewer secret police, I’m A Celebrity…” She thumped the indicator stick so hard Ben was afraid it would come off. “Until recently life was very good.”
Ben said nothing and tried to concentrate on willing the bus next to them not to get into a battle for dominance with Natalya over the next turning. He was quite sure she wouldn’t take a several-ton challenge in quite the same way that he was accustomed to — which, typically, when he’d still driven, had been to pull over into the verge and hyperventilate.
Once onto the dual carriageway and a slightly greater distance from sudden incursions by cars graced with airbags, crumple zones, or brakes that didn’t sound like crying children, Ben relaxed enough to let go of the door handle and tried to medicate his headache and footache into somewhere less immediate.
They promptly got stuck in a traffic jam.
Natalya said something under her breath which was definitely a swear word but probably not English.
“You have looked into Dr Anathan’s career?” Natalya asked, slumping over the steering wheel.
“I…I read a couple of profiles,” said Ben, cautiously, “which is about my level.”
Natalya looked pained for a moment. “She ran a lab for a while, and now consults for journals and other labs.”
“I got that much,” Ben assured her.
“Her most prominent work is in the late nineties,” Natalya added, “she is still respected as an expert on filoviruses like Marburg, Ebola disease virus.”
Ben looked up through the windscreen and saw, somewhere far overhead, a red kite circling, deep-forked tail splayed in the wind. The day was bright and clear and very, very cold.
Unsurprisingly, Natalya’s car did not appear to have anything as frivolous as a heater.
“Have you met her before?” Ben asked, shuffling his hands into his coat sleeves. He leaned forward to wipe the condensation off the screen in front of his face, the better to see the kite.
Natalya shook her head. “I avoid conferences.”
“How come?” Ben scrubbed at the windscreen. “Daniel seems to think they’re a wonderful source of free drinks.”
“That,” said Natalya, “is why I avoid them. Large groups of drunk virologists are much like all other large groups of drunk strangers.” She sat up, and the car inched forward in a series of jerks and thumps. “Cruel. They forget their manners.”
“Oh,” said Ben.
“Daniel’s generation less so,” Natalya conceded, after a moment. “But those with connections, funds, prestige, history: I expect professional events to involve methods and discoveries, and instead each time without fail a man old enough to be my father asks about the content of my underwear.”
“Yuck,” said Ben, with feeling.
“Yes.”
They watched a ripple of movement pass through the jam, heading toward them. Natalya squeezed down on the accelerator, and the car sneezed and jumped.
“How are you planning on getting her to talk about what she knows?” Ben asked, eager to change the subject even at the potential cost of bringing the future closer. “I mean, what does she know anyway? Do we know?”
Natalya shrugged. “Appeal to her better nature.”
“Do you think that will work?”
“Of course not.”
They parked three roads away from where Google Maps said Dr Anathan’s home address was. There was still a sparkling sheen of frost in the deeper shadows, but in the sun it was almost warm enough that Ben didn’t regret not bringing a scarf as they walked.
The area was affluent, and seemed even more so to Ben, who’
d grown used to narrow houses and no gardens for even the comparatively well-off: here there were front drives which contained several cars, gardens which stretched around the sides of houses, and an impression that once the seasons allowed it, leafy suburban peace would descend and claim the place for Little England and the pleasures of late middle age.
Dr Noelle Anathan’s house had a metallic purple Toyota in the drive and wind chimes on the porch, which Ben hadn’t quite expected.
He checked the Kapture was working, and reluctantly stepped out of the sun and into the shadowed porch, where it felt at least ten degrees colder.
Natalya rang the doorbell.
A dog barked inside the house, and kept barking while a woman’s voice shouted something about coming in a second.
When Dr Anathan got to the door and opened it she presented an unimposing figure. She was at most five feet four, and wearing a turquoise jumper. She was holding back an elderly Jack Russell with her bare foot. She had short, greying hair which looked as if it had once been dark brown, and she wore the infinity droplet earrings Ben had seen in all her photos. She looked primarily like someone’s mother or a yoga teacher.
She also looked politely, affably confused.
“Yes? Hello?”
“Dr Anathan,” said Natalya, “we would like to talk to you.”
“Alright,” said Dr Anathan slowly. Her accent was a mixed bag, a softened mid-Atlantic that had somewhere picked up vowels from the south of Asia: she herself was as white as Ben. “Is there some reason you couldn’t make an appointment?”
“Yes,” said Natalya flatly, before Ben could stop her, “you were abusive on the telephone and hung up.”
Dr Anathan looked even more confused, her eyebrows drawing together in suspicion and disbelief. “I, hah,” she gave an awkward laugh. “I doubt that…”
Something in her expression changed.
“Are you journalists?”
“I’m not,” said Natalya, cutting across Ben. “I am a virologist.”
“Oh?” Dr Anathan said, cautious but apparently happy with this information. “And you—”
The Next Big One Page 23