He’d huffed and puffed most of the way to the top of Pentonville hill when Dr Bill called him.
“Urghargh hello,” Ben managed, significantly out of breath.
“I thought now was a good time?” Dr Bill asked, somewhere between worried and amused.
“Great time for listening,” Ben wheezed. “Might need a while before I can answer.”
“Well, pin back your ears,” Dr Bill advised, as an ambulance went past Ben at a crawl, its lights off. “I’ve been in contact with the young wife of our Uzbek friend — Daniel still had her number in his phone — about four or five days ago, a little before Christmas, if you remember?”
Ben spared a moment’s guilty recollection for one of several unread emails which had vanished off the front page of his inbox just before the festive season and immediately become non-existent.
“…Not exactly.”
“I wondered why you hadn’t answered,” Dr Bill went on, without malice. “Now, apart from being very grateful that someone was taking her seriously — she’s got onto the police and so on but they don’t see to be very bothered — she’s been going through her husband’s emails and says that on the thirtieth of last month — so a day, maybe, before your article came out, if I remember — yes, what?” He broke off, and added, “Yes, the day before your article came out, he’d been in touch with the press division of XXXXX/XXXXXX.”
Ben felt a cold wall of water rise inside his stomach, providing an uncomfortable counterpoint to the hot whirlwind of embarrassment that still emanated from his inability to keep track of his emails.
“He wanted to know what they’d been doing a trial on when they invited him to that trial back at University, what they’d given his classmates. He got a fairly bland, standard reply, so he sent them one off saying he had reason to believe that they’d been deliberately infected in this trial and that he wanted XXXXX/XXXXXX to provide him with some kind of explanation as to what they thought they were doing.”
Ben clamped his phone to his head as a bus, stuffed with passengers, staggered past him and began barrelling down the other side of the hill with little semblance of control. Unpleasant stomach acids began to churn within him. “Uh huh.”
“So they said they were passing him on to another department and they’d be in touch. No further emails from them. That’s on the first. Now. I know you’ve been worried about your article — which, by the way, isn’t on the website any more because of ‘potential copyright infringement’, according to the replacement.”
That, Ben thought, was getting to be typical. He held his breath.
Dr Bill cleared his throat, and went booming on. “So my good news is that I really don’t think you are to blame with this situation. Mr – our friend in Uzbekistan has been inquisitive, bold, and courageous, and something has happened as a result of his courage.”
“What was the bad news?” Ben asked, backing into a wall to let a woman with a triple-width buggy pass him.
“Yes,” Dr Bill said, slowly. “The bad news is that I can’t get hold of his wife any more.”
“Shit,” said Ben, under his breath.
“Yes,” Dr Bill said. “Shit. She’s been making a catastrophic fuss, as you can imagine — her husband has been missing for nearly a month and she’s extremely worried about him — and so there’s no real way of knowing who she was talking to before…I stopped being able to get hold of her.”
“Maybe she’s just lost her—” began Ben, and scolded himself.
“It would be nice to think she’s lost her phone,” said Dr Bill, like a dejected foghorn. “But I made a point of contacting her employers. They say she’s called in sick unexpectedly and they don’t know when she’s going to be back.”
“Over Christmas?” Ben asked.
“Yes,” said Dr Bill. “I thought that was overkill as well. Very suspicious. Of course, Uzbekistan is a heavily Muslim country so it isn’t so much a given as it is here but still: suspicious.”
Ben tapped his teeth.
“I want to offer,” Dr Bill said, clearing his throat. “And it is just an offer, that if you’re still worried about being responsible for the repercussions of your articles, I am happy to write up what’s happened here and on my own head be it.” He added, with a self-deprecating air, “You know I’m hardly adverse to a scuffle in the press.”
“I—” Ben stopped walking and shuffled under a bus stop as some fat and ominous drops belted out of a deeply threatening and slightly purple sky. “I. Are you sure either of us ought to be drawing attention to this? I mean. Look what keeps happening.”
Dr Bill didn’t answer him, but — his first real indication that he was on speakerphone — Natalya did. Ben tried not to ask himself why Natalya was at Dr Bill’s house on Boxing Day, and hoped that the answer was, against all the odds, a pleasant one.
“Everything so far we have seen,” Natalya said, “that these people do or allow to be done, is in name of keeping quiet revelations. Discrediting sources: oh that mad virologist claims she was abducted but there is no proof. Oh that awkward Uzbek man has gone away, how unfortunate. Oh, keep an eye on that nuisance boy who keeps write articles, we will give you money. Oh, take down this article it is plagiarism or it is not provable or…” She took a breath. “What this man does by pulling down this fate on him is confirm that something is hidden. Noelle is afraid something similar happens to her.” She took another breath. “If we are responsible for his life,” she said, her accent smoothing out into something less obvious, “we are responsible for making sure it is known about. We owe him and his wife possibly, to tell everyone what is happening.”
“Er,” said Ben, leaning back on the bus shelter. “Would we not need to know what’s happening ourselves for that?”
“Keep asking questions,” Natalya said.
“Actually,” said Ben, sitting up, abruptly. “I’ve been doing that. You know the original hypothesis with the whole, whatshername, deranged government inspector attacks students thing…”
“Yes,” said two voices at once.
“There’s no confirmation of it and no source on it and I was wondering who wrote it at first because it sounds…” Ben made an embarrassed noise, “it sounds like the kind of thing you find on GADdamnNews.”
“Or the red-tops,” Dr Bill said, with a certain amount of irony. “Go on. Do you know who published the first story?”
“Yes,” Ben said, peering up at the LED display, which was broken. “Amanda DeWalt.”
“God, her,” Natalya muttered.
“Well, I don’t envy you this, because in my experience it’s like being slapped,” Dr Bill acknowledged, “but you need to talk to her.”
The week between Christmas and New Year was, as was traditional, quiet, boring, punctuated by people returning to the capital. Kingsley returned armed with so many plastic containers that they barely fit in the fridge.
“What,” said Ben, as Minnie ran out of the cat carrier and hid behind the TV.
“I told Mum I was worried you weren’t eating properly,” Kingsley said, putting a final ice-cream tub into Ben’s hands. “Those are goat, the ones with the fork marks in are chicken. It’s not all from her, some of it’s from my auntie, and some of it’s from my cousin’s girlfriend.”
“I see over-mothering runs in your family.”
Kingsley gave him an unimpressed look. “Well she won’t give me none if I say it’s for me, so don’t stress, I am going to eat most of this.”
Ben lifted up the lid of the ice cream tub and stared down into mounds of golden-yellow patties. He hugged the tub defensively to his stomach. “No, these ones are mine.”
“How’s the commuter dormitory?” Kingsley asked, taking a brace of rum bottles out of the last carrier bag.
“Sleepy. How’s Bristol?”
“Stabby,” said Kingsley, tessellating rum behind the toaster, where rum appeared to live now. “Kid two streets over tried to have a go at someone with a fucking carving knife.”
“This shit just follows you.”
“Uh huh. I spent Boxing Day talking to the police. Just what I wanted.” Kingsley screwed up the carrier bag into a ball and threw it into the living room.
A tail and a paw cautiously extended past the rim of the TV, which was currently displaying an advert exhorting customers to ‘be more dog’.
“Oh, uh,” Kingsley added awkwardly, scratching underneath his dreads at the nape of his neck. “Are you working New Year?”
“Uh huh,” Ben said, taking out one of the patties.
“Oh right,” Kingsley looked relieved.
“Do you need me out all night? I can stay with Ina and…whatshisface…”
Kingsley shrugged. “Dunno. Viola and Cate are coming here.”
Ben saluted. “I’ll hide my porn.”
New Year’s Eve had never, in all the years Ben had lived in London, been anything other than a loud and chaotic hell of lights and very, very drunk people. With Maggie, it had been a loud and chaotic hell of lights and trying to find their way through crowds to their somewhat larger friends circle, armed with hidden vodka or whatever else was required to make the party go with a bigger bang than the ones outside.
Ben recalled that, before he’d gone away to Uni, it had been the unfettered delight of watching the fireworks on TV in a silent living room with Melinda and his dozing father, or the giddy heights of going to the local pub so that they could drink a toast at midnight in the company of everyone who was too tired or indifferent to go into London for the festivities.
He wasn’t really sure which of the options was objectively worse, but arming himself to get to a four-storey nightclub-cum-shitty bar for a night’s work with all the trepidation of a soldier preparing to go to the front, he didn’t have much good to say about his fellow-commuters.
“Wankers,” Ben sighed, as a bus full of them went past his stop without pausing. The bus driver looked as if he was on speed and on it out of self-defence.
His phone vibrated against his leg, made some aggressive beeping noises, and vibrated again.
Wrestling a record bag over one shoulder, a laptop bag over the other, and a small box of CDs in his hand, Ben struggled to answer the phone.
“Bring vinyl he says,” Ben muttered, fighting his way under a coat and a jumper to his hip pocket, “it’ll sound warmer and more intimate, he says. They’re all going to be fucking drunk anyway!”
“HAPPY NEW YEAR MATE,” shouted a complete stranger behind him.
Ben raised his hand in cautious acknowledgement, and finally managed to put his phone to his ear.
“Nrgh?”
“Are you busy tonight?” Daniel asked, shouting over the sound of God-knew-how-many people also shouting over each other.
“Working.”
“What?”
“WORKING.”
“Jesus Christ, really?”
“They’re paying me a lot,” Ben assured him, which was true only if one considered how little he usually got paid.
“Where’re you working?”
“What?”
“WHERE’RE YOU WORKING?”
Ben rearranged his medley of packages and put his arm out for a bus that took him somewhat further away from where he wanted to go, but close enough.
There was enough space to squeeze into the section next to the driver, where he wasn’t really supposed to be standing. He told Daniel where he was working.
“I could come down there,” Daniel said, without enthusiasm. “I mean, it’s sold out but if you’ve got a plus one or –“
“Don’t ruin your night out on my account,” Ben said, conscious that an entire bus of people could hear him.
“I’m at the Admiral, it’s already ruined,” Daniel shouted. “Everything is awful and the drinks are three times what they normally are.”
“Oh I see,” Ben said, with mock-disappointment. “You want to leech off my free vouchers again.”
“Maybe,” Daniel bellowed. “Maybe I’d like to explore a subculture where no one’s wearing fucking Lycra right now.” There was a microscopic pause. “YEAH YOU HEARD ME, YOU LOOK LIKE A TWAT.”
“Up to you,” said Ben, trying to protect his records from the crush. “But this bus is like a sardine can and I don’t think they’re going to improve for another six hours.”
“Is your rapist friend going to be there?”
“It’s his event,” said Ben, a little exasperated. “And he’s not a—”
“I probably shouldn’t come, then,” Daniel said, sounding annoyed. “That whole ‘not being a dick’ thing is really an imposition.”
“If you can keep your mouth shut—”
“I can’t,” Daniel sighed, and it was the tone, rather than the words, which made it through to Ben over the sound of yelling and throbbing bass. “Do you want me to come though?”
“What?”
“I said do you want me to come — fuck off and mind your own business, that’s what—”
“I’ve got a double-length set and a room to myself,” Ben said, rubbing his face with his free hand.
“Is that a yes?”
“It — maybe.” Ben peered out of the front window. “Are you going to show up drunk and say horrible shit to Gareth if I say yes?”
“No,” Daniel said, “I’m not going to show up at all because I will be drunk and say horrible shit to your horrible fucking advantage-taking rapist piece of shit employer. But I want you to say yes.”
“Yes, then,” said Ben, “I wish you were coming and that you were capable of being enough of not a dick to make this really awkward.” It was convoluted as hell, he realised a moment later, but Daniel seemed to understand him.
“Yeah, I wish I was too,” he said. “But I don’t like him. Say hello to Molly for me, I like her.”
“BONG,” said Gareth, materialising in the booth beside Ben. “Great countdown. You’ve got another half an hour, Henry’s taking over until three, and then you’re back on again until five.”
“I know,” said Ben, moving the fader slowly between channels, swiping the source from the phono where the turntable, almost redundant, sat, and the line, which had his laptop attached to it.
“Got you a—” Gareth looked at the label unsteadily, “—Bark Worse Than Bite.”
“Cheers, Gareth.”
“That friend of yours.”
Ben took off one of his headphones and gave Gareth an impatient look. “Have to narrow it down,” he suggested, a little sarcastically. “Facebook says I’ve got about eight hundred.”
“The Asian one.”
“Mouna? Ping?”
“No, the one who was at the Live Through This thing.” Gareth leaned back on a section of the booth which was predominantly Plexiglass, and nearly fell through it.
“Right.” Ben examined the label of the bottle Gareth had just passed him.
“He single?”
“Extremely.” Ben gave Gareth a wan smile and a pat on the upper arm, noting that this was clearly not what he’d been intending to ask. “Go for it.”
Gareth stared out over the dance floor for a minute, nodding, a bottle in his hand. “Yeah,” he said.
“Speaking of friends,” Ben said, pulling down his other headphone as inspiration struck. “What was that girl’s name…S…Sam…an…tha? Samantha? Something? You mentioned her, oh god, ages ago.”
“Yeah?” Gareth sounded disinterested, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to fuck off, either.
“The one who quit journalism and went to work for…oh god, what was it…” Ben tapped the edge of the decks impatiently.
“Uh, I think it was a granny charity of some sort,” Gareth said, uneasily. “She’s doing the web content stuff.”
“Right, right.” Ben forced a smile. “You mentioned her when I said I was enrolling at college, you were, you said you’re just going to end up like Sam, quitting in disgust, stick to what you’re good at.”
“I don’t think I did,” Gareth said, gl
ancing sideways at Ben with a frown. “That doesn’t sound like me.”
“The point is,” Ben said, flicking an eye over the various countdowns and putting his thumb on the crossfader. “Didn’t she used to work for the Mail? For a bit?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Gareth, plainly confused. “Samantha Adrian. She was at the Mail on Sunday. Fucking hated it.”
“Have you still got her number?” Ben asked, slowly wiping from the bridge of one song into the bridge of another which he’d realised, maybe six months ago, was almost identical at this point.
“Yeah,” Gareth said, frowning at him fully now. “But you do know she’s gay as hell, right? Two girlfriends, multiple cats.”
“I just need to talk to her about something,” Ben persisted, trying to dredge up another smile. “It’d be really helpful.”
“Fine,” said Gareth, taking out his phone. “I’ll send you the contact. You owe me…I don’t know, at least a drink at some point.”
“Yeah, sure,” Ben said, turning back to the decks as if there was anything he really needed to be doing, which there wasn’t.
“About your friend,” said Gareth, when Ben had been quiet for long enough that he’d hoped Gareth had pissed off.
“Same one as before?”
“Yeah.” Gareth sounded somewhat firmer. “What have you been telling him?”
“That I don’t understand what he’s talking about, mostly,” said Ben, poking at his laptop. “He’s a virologist. Everything goes over my head.”
“I meant about your social life.”
“That I don’t have one?” Ben suggested, scrolling aimlessly through the back-up playlist. He counted backward down to the appropriate beat, and began to fade in a classic. There was a slow-burning wave of cheers from the dance floor as each progressively drunker person recognised what was coming.
“About your sex life then?”
“Same answer,” Ben said, with a thin smile. “Why?”
“No reason,” Gareth said, picking viciously at the label on his bottle. “Only maybe, yeah, maybe you could not bring him to anything else, yeah, if I’m running it? Like I don’t want to dictate your guest lists and everything, but I do want these events to be fun, yeah?”
The Next Big One Page 34