The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “It’s December,” Ben said, “that tends to happen.”

  “I’m hungry,” Daniel said, meditatively. “I wonder if anywhere’s still selling reconstituted chicken innards, or spit-roasted homeless person or whatever is in those things.”

  “Gross,” Ben said, putting his hands in his pockets.

  “Gimme your hand,” Daniel said, as they neared the crossroad and the proliferation of bus stops.

  “Why?”

  “What why? Because I want to hold your hand, that’s why.” Daniel plucked at his sleeve. “Gimme. You can’t catch anything from holding hands with someone. Except The Gay, and you already caught that.”

  Ben produced his hand with a smile, and Daniel squeezed it. His hand was cold, and a little rougher than Ben hand expected. “Oh, now you believe me.”

  Daniel shrugged.

  They reached the bus stop.

  “Eighteen minutes?” Daniel complained. “What the gay fuck sort of time is that?”

  “God,” Ben said, into his coat. “Can tell you’re from London. We got three a day where I grew up.”

  “Hillbilly.” Daniel squeezed his hand. “You know that Gareth is a piece of shit.”

  “Shh,” said Ben, looking around the bus stop. “I wouldn’t go that far—”

  “I would,” said Daniel. “Does he ever hit on anyone sober, that’s what I want to know?”

  “Do you?” Ben felt a wave of tiredness crash up on him.

  “I’m always drunk when I’m drunk-hitting on drunk men,” said Daniel, glaring at the LED readout. “Oh my god now it says nineteen, this thing is broken.”

  “I still don’t think,” said Ben, and yawned expansively.

  “I’m not taking that bait,” said Daniel. He positioned himself directly in front of Ben, and without warning put his other arm around Ben’s waist. “Right,” he added, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I am not trying to kiss you so don’t freak out.”

  “I know,” said Ben, sleepily.

  “Let go my hand a minute.”

  “Fine.” Ben released his hand.

  Daniel slipped his other hand under Ben’s other shoulder, and tapped him on the back of the neck. “Okay, you’re good,” he said. “I’ll wake you up when the bus gets here.”

  “You don’t have to—” Ben yawned again.

  “Shut up,” Daniel said. “There is a limit to how much less of a dick I can be.”

  “Yeah, fuck you too,” Ben muttered. He leaned forward: Daniel’s neck was thin but surprisingly warm, and his shoulder was steady even when he rested most of his weight on it. He guessed Daniel was leaning against the bus shelter.

  “GAY,” someone nearby said, loudly, but without animosity.

  “OBSERVANT,” Daniel called back.

  “Hooraaay!” said the first voice.

  Ben felt a hand stroke the back of his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” Daniel said in a low mutter.

  Ben dropped into a standing reverie which was almost, but not quite, the same as sleep.

  On the evening of the twenty-first, Ben finished his last engagement before the New Year party rush, where Molly had managed to book them both in for three different events with maybe an hour to get between the venues for their slots. Sorting this out took the better part of the evening, shouting into her phone, and he had the sneaking suspicion he’d agreed to work somewhere completely different to her by the end. He wished her a happy Christmas, wished Disappearing Steve a bad case of the piles, and tried to start packing before he passed out.

  On the morning of the twenty-second, Kingsley left with a cat carrier and a camping bag full of presents, and a promise that he’d bring Ben back some of his Mum’s cooking if he could manage not to eat it on the train.

  Around lunchtime on the twenty-second, Ben left the flat, looking strangely forlorn with Kingsley’s bicycle in it and no Kingsley, Minnie’s fur on everything but no Minnie, and the TV screen switched off for the first time in about six months. It looked like a sucking, empty black hole in the middle of the flat; Ben looked away from it every time it caught his eye.

  He checked he’d locked up properly about four times, and stood on the pavement trying to decide whether he was going to manage a full four and a half days with his parents or if he should have told them he was working up until Christmas Eve.

  “Off home?” Nas asked, from the doorway of the shop. He had one of the crates of Laimon balanced on his hip, and an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ben, looking for his gloves. “Have a good, a good Christmas.”

  “Listen, yeah,” said Nas, lowering his voice, “come in when you get back, Ozil’s got some speed in.”

  “Okay,” said Ben, taken aback. “Sure.”

  “Happy Christmas, innit,” said Nas, raising his voice again.

  After two hours of not-exactly conversation about how the traffic had been and how Ben was and how Melinda’s friend with the cyst on her neck was, Ben was immensely relieved to find his phone ringing during whatever it was Ant and Dec were currently hosting on ITV.

  He excused himself, and returned to what had once been his room. These days it was an impersonal, unobjectionable guest room so slavishly adherent to the principles of Habitat that it was possible to imagine where the price tags would be photoshopped in for the catalogue pictures, but Ben remembered well enough where his Manics poster had been, where he’d hidden the joss sticks for getting rid of the smell of cigarette smoke, his tragically tiny stash of porn. His attempts to hide the consequences.

  It was Daniel.

  “Er, alright,” said Ben, closing the guest room door carefully. “Bored with Christmas already?”

  “Massively,” said Daniel. There was music in the background. “But can’t be arsed with going out for a couple of hours.”

  “Nice that you’ve called on me to fill the time,” said Ben, leaning on the door. “Are you at home? I didn’t think your parents were into techno.”

  “They’ve gone awaaaay,” said Daniel, cheerfully. The volume of the music increased. “Don’t do Christmas but I get the house to myself for a few days while Mum and Dad go to Margate.”

  “Margate?”

  “Maaaargate,” Daniel confirmed. “My Mum befriended this lady from Guangdong who runs a B&B down there and she goes every year to tell her cooking’s shit and how much better Hong Kong food is and they bicker about it for a week while my Dad stares at the sea. I went once. Never again.”

  Ben looked around at the dark of the guest room, familiar and alien at the same time, lit up by the streetlight outside coming through the curtains he’d forgotten to close. “Are you drunk?”

  Daniel made a derisive noise. “Why do you even need to ask that?” he said, in a sing-song voice. “I have the house to myself. Of course I’m drunk. I’m drunk, I’m bollock naked, and I’m listening to MiniLove’s Hospitality set at neighbour-threatening volumes, and in a couple of hours I’m going to inflict myself on Heaven until they all wish they’d never been born.”

  “Nice of you to let me know,” Ben said, staring at the shadows of raindrops on the wall. “Sorry I’m not there to complain about it but I’m needed here to fall asleep in front of Ant and Dec.”

  “Shame,” said Daniel. “I’ve got more of that disgusting mint ice cream drink.”

  “More fool you.” Ben watched one of the rain shadows run down the wall like a blob of treacle. “Was that an invitation to your house?”

  “It might have been, but now it’s definitely not,” Daniel assured him.

  “Maybe if you switched from MiniLove to Tom Waits,” Ben said. He could hear laughter from downstairs, but it was the TV.

  “Actually,” said Daniel, turning the music off abruptly, “I was going to show you my stick insects.”

  “Is that a euphemism?”

  “Nope. Literal stick insects. I’ve got three, and a pair of giant African land snails.” He sounded absurdly proud. “Mum tried to talk me into getting fish so
that we can ‘all enjoy’ them, but the whole point is she doesn’t like them and won’t come into my room while they’re there. They’re guard snails.”

  “Guard snails,” Ben repeated, amused. “You could just move out, like normal people.”

  “Haha,” said Daniel, without humour. “No, I couldn’t.”

  Ben didn’t answer this. He pulled down the sleeves of his jumper until they covered his hands, and braced himself for the cold of the guest mattress. He climbed onto the bed, but couldn’t bring himself to lie down: the bedframe had changed, and so had the mattress, but there was only one place in the room a bed could reasonably go and he was too familiar with the ceiling and its associated sorrows to want to stare up there now.

  “On the plus side,” Daniel said, into the lengthening silence, “I’m going to be fucking loaded in February.”

  Ben said, “Birthday?”

  “New Year. It’s all about New Year. Cash from every relative and like ten pairs of red socks.” Daniel sounded like he was trying to force enthusiasm for this around something else more important, like a stone sitting in the stream of his conversation. “It’s been quiet here,” he added, suddenly.

  “Mmhm?”

  “It’s weird,” Daniel went on, “that means different things to different people. Like, if your family spend all their time screaming at each other, I suppose ‘quiet’ means things are going well, right?”

  “Yes,” said Ben, with considerable feeling.

  “Whereas,” Daniel said, with sudden, swift-flowing bitterness, “mine don’t talk to each other. At all. So ‘quiet’ just means.” He cut himself off with the return of MiniLove.

  Ben opened his mouth to say did you want something, and realised that if he did that Daniel would probably hang up on him. And then his options were either sitting in a cold bedroom doing nothing and saying nothing, which sounded a great deal like being fourteen, or going back downstairs and pretending to be enthralled by ITV’s evening line-up while his father snored and occasionally complained from the sofa.

  “By the way,” Daniel said, with such forced casualness that Ben was more or less bowled down by the warning that this was the point of the phone call, “About you ‘not failing to notice that’.”

  “…What?” Ben said, jerked out of the contemplation of his duvet cover. “Not failing to notice what?”

  “When we were at that horrible Christmas charity patronage bullshit,” Daniel said, failing to sound even slightly casual. “Just before you decided to tell me you’d for some reason let that fucking ambulatory advert for euthanasia put his dick near you…”

  “Did you call him a sexual predator?”

  “I called him a lot of things,” Daniel said, hurriedly. “I don’t like him.”

  “I can tell,” said Ben, “by the way you basically accused him of being a rapist at his own party.”

  “Look that’s not the point,” Daniel said, in a valiant attempt to steer the conversation. “That’s not…before that.”

  “We drank a really inadvisable amount of a really horrible cocktail which I will really never forget as long as I live,” said Ben, “yes.”

  “But,” said Daniel, honing in on his target with palpable discomfort. “I believe I was pointing out, at the time, before you went off on an ugly tangent about your colossal sexual mistakes, that I am in fact incredibly good-looking, and that everyone in the world was aware of this except for you, and you said you hadn’t failed to notice.”

  “Did I?” said Ben, annoyed at having his tryst with Gareth so accurately characterised. “You’ve got a good memory.”

  “You’ve got an omnipresent recording whatsit,” said Daniel, testily. “So you should know what you did and didn’t say.”

  “Alright,” said Ben, examining the cracked skin around his fingers under the light of the streetlamp. “What’s your point?”

  “Did you mean it?”

  “What?” Ben nearly laughed. “Oh, come on. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  Daniel made an impatient noise. “Can we for one minute,” he said, in a low, hurried voice, “pretend that I am in fact a very deeply insecure person who makes a lot of noise to cover up for the fact that he’s sure everyone only acts as if they’re interested in him out of politeness?”

  Ben looked at his fingernails for a little longer. “Of course I’ve noticed you’re good-looking,” he said, eventually. “My eyes work.”

  “Hmph.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Ben asked, annoyed. “Yes, when I walked into your lab I was briefly confused as to why there was a pop star wearing a lab coat? That I’m continually perplexed as to why you, apparently sincerely, think I’m worth your attention, when you are quite clearly capable of pulling down a, a, a fucking avalanche of hot cock on you every time you go out? That you’re actually so bloody attractive I have difficulty mentally processing it?”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said, stifling a laugh. “Is any of that true?”

  “More than I would like?” Ben said, sourly. “And you know all that so I don’t see why I have to—”

  “Okay, okay,” Daniel cut him off. “I am going to tell you a story.”

  “Oh good,” said Ben. “Drunk story time with Prince Charming.”

  “Shut up and listen,” said Daniel, “Or I’ll put a mirror shard up your dick.”

  Ben closed his mouth, moved his phone to the other side of his head, and slowly lay back on the cold mattress with an air of resignation that wasn’t even a little faked.

  “I think I mentioned,” said Daniel, over the sound of his own stereo, “my parents are in their seventies.”

  “You did.”

  “And I’m twenty-six.”

  “Yes, and that’s on your Facebook which I definitely did not look up.”

  “Liar.” Daniel sounded pleased. “That’s quite a big gap, right?”

  “I figured they were actually your grandparents,” Ben said. “I used to know this girl who grew up thinking her mum was her sister and her grandparents were her parents.”

  “No,” said Daniel. “I was born when my mum was fifty.”

  “Fifty.”

  “See?” Daniel snorted. “They tried and they tried and they tried for nearly thirty years, and they went to doctors, and they went to quacks, and they sent their family back home off to shrines, and they thought about all kinds of solutions, and eventually they gave up hope, and then boom, out came Daniel.”

  “And that’s the story?” Ben asked. “You like making an entrance? I’d already noticed that.”

  “No, shut up, listen,” Daniel insisted. “So, my mother — her whole family — called me the Miracle Boy and the Little Blessing and a lot of other nauseating names. And I was so very important to them, you can’t imagine. Nothing too much for me, everything has to be right, can’t possibly endanger myself in any way because I’m their little Miracle and nothing in the world is more special.”

  “You know,” said Ben dryly, “I think that shows. Just a little.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said, without humour. “It’s fucking great. I have to be perfect. All the time.”

  “Ah,” said Ben.

  “Yeah, ‘ah’,” Daniel said. “Oh, and I get to hear about all the sacrifices they’ve made, of course. Re-mortgaged the house so Daniel could go to that expensive school because we want the best opportunities for him. Dad worked sixty, eighty, a hundred hour weeks to help pay for it because Daniel’s going to be something amazing and we can’t let anything stop him, even if it means Dad giving himself a nervous breakdown and spending a whole fucking year crying.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “It’s fucking wonderful,” Daniel said, with brittle sarcasm. “I am the best at absolutely everything!” He sighed, and said in a more normal voice, “The one thing you can say for judgmental drunk dickheads on the scene is that they’re fundamentally honest about whether or not they want to fuck you and the only merit they care about is that.”
>
  Ben tapped his teeth with his thumbnail.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “Sorry.” Ben stopped. “So that’s…what…that’s why you like me, is it? Because you think I’m not impressed?”

  “No,” said Daniel, thoughtfully. There was a fizz of depressurising carbon in the background. “No, I like that it doesn’t matter very much to me when you’re around.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Whether I’m as good as people seem to think I am,” Daniel said. There was a pause, and something that sounded like swallowing. “I pretend the spotlight’s on you instead. The attention. Mine is.”

  “I think,” Ben said, after a long pause in which Daniel appeared to be drinking for some time. “I think you’re going to regret this conversation.”

  “I’m doing my best not to remember it,” Daniel said, with forced cheerfulness.

  “Okay,” said Ben, sitting up. “I’m going to go in a minute.”

  “Right.”

  “Um, but I felt I should say,” Ben added, scrubbing at his face with the heel of his hand. “I do actually appreciate the effort not to be…so…”

  “Full of my own shit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” said Daniel. He swallowed again, “Because if you use this to fuck me over, I will end you.”

  Ben spent the twenty-third removing malware from Melinda’s desktop.

  On the twenty-fourth, Ben hunched up on the sofa with his fingernail in his mouth.

  “Good news in time for Christmas!” Melinda said, in reference to a news item Ben hadn’t been listening to.

  The next item announced that the sputum testing kits were lining up with an eighty-six percent accuracy alongside the triple-test, and that they were being manufactured as quickly as possible for distribution to doctors and chemists in the new year.

  Ben tried to ignore the fact that Melinda was looking at him, and tried even harder to ignore the fact that his father wasn’t.

  “Basically,” said the chummy-looking news team’s Science Explainer, “If you take one of these swabs…rub it around the inside of your cheek like this…then drop it in this vial here…that’s the developer…then you rub it on these three strips. It’s identifying specific proteins. And now, when you look at each strip, blue, blue, blue — that’s good, it means you’re not getting a false positive on anything. If you get one, you’re okay, these proteins do sometimes occur naturally in the body. If you get two, talk to a doctor because there’s likely to be something else wrong with you. If you get all three you need to report to a doctor ASAP for a blood test to confirm — these aren’t to replace the triple-test, they’re an early warning, to help thin out the numbers of people who need to go through to the triple test, and reduce the workload for the testers.”