The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  A headline outside the news agent reported a second X/X employee hospitalised.

  Another reported X/X ‘lackey beaten until stomach bursts’. Dead, Ben assumed.

  A third said, X/X Exec hires Serco guards after home arson threat.

  I work in payroll

  By the railway tracks, Ben stopped and checked his phone. There were approximately a thousand unread messages of various types, and he decided none of them were worth answering.

  He walked on. It was still cold, and his stomach reminded him without optimism that he was supposed to be eating something.

  He stopped in a Tesco Express and bought an egg sandwich. He scraped the egg into a nearby bin, and ate the slightly mayonnaise-wiped bread while holding his nose.

  A man with two dirty Bag For Lifes full of pillows gave him a critical look.

  Ben walked on.

  The sun hit its zenith and began to sweep back down the sky again.

  His phone rang.

  At first Ben considered ignoring it: he’d reached somewhere with traffic and people and he wasn’t sure what he’d have to say to anyone. But he reached into his pocket and found it was Tasneen, and answered without thinking about it.

  “Ben?”

  “I am, yes.” He was aware this wasn’t the right way to answer but his mind was beautifully, blissfully blank.

  “Oh god, listen…where have you been? Actually, don’t answer that.” Tasneen swallowed something. “I’ve seen the news, I assume you’re out there interviewing people kicking people’s heads in or something the last week? But listen, I managed to make him take a sputum test.”

  “Oh?” said Ben, suddenly thinking of Daniel with a kind of embarrassed twist in his stomach.

  “My brother, I mean,” said Tasneen. “I told him I was worried about me but didn’t want to do it unless he did it and listen — when he’d stopped saying it was impossible for me to catch it because I’m a sick boring nerd virgin and he’d fuck anyone up if they tried anything with me — can’t make his fucking mind up if he hates me or not — anyway yeah, I got him to do it and he’s clear.”

  “Good,” said Ben, staring around him in confusion.

  “Yeah,” Tasneen said, uncertainly. “I mean, hooray, he’s not going to die. That means I’ve got no explanation for what he’s doing.”

  “Coke,” Ben suggested, half-remembering.

  “Dunno,” she said, “I mean. It would have made sense. Now what? My brother’s just an arsehole.”

  “At least he’s not dying,” Ben said, leaning on a wall. The traffic felt like it was driving through his head.

  “So,” said Tasneen. “How’ve you been?”

  Ben said, “Fine. I’m fine. I want my mum.”

  It came out of him like vomit, like uncontrolled vomit, from a sudden belch, from bending over. Unexpected, unasked-for. He thought about the woman he hadn’t seen since he was fourteen and her disconnected emails, geographic breadcrumbs, clues to something forgotten and lost. He remembered Chris Clovelli, like a sudden snapshot in the darkness, writhing on a quarantine bed. Where is my mama?

  “What?”

  “I can’t do it any more.”

  He sat down against the wall. A woman with three children in tow frowned at him, tutted, stepped over his legs, and carried on scuttling along the cold pavement.

  “Whoa, what — what’s happened?”

  “Shit,” Ben said, holding his own head. “Shit, shit.”

  “Ben, where are you?” Tasneen asked, with a sudden flurry of banging noises.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Can you see a road sign?”

  Ben looked around him. He found a candidate and read it off, along with the ‘E1’ in the corner.

  There was a pause. “Okay yeah,” said Tasneen. “You’re in Whitechapel. Listen, stay where you are.”

  “What?”

  “Stay where you are,” Tasneen said. A door slammed, and a shower of voices followed her down an echoing corridor, laughing. “I’m coming to get you. Don’t go anywhere.”

  When she got to him, less than an hour later, Ben was almost asleep. Someone had stopped and asked if he needed help, and he’d been so uncertain as to the answer that they’d given up in disgust and gone before he could figure it out.

  A woman with a German Shepherd had given him fifty pee.

  Tasneen was wearing flower-patterned jeans, a Hogwarts sweater, and a hijab with what looked like a crow stencilled on it just where the pin went through.

  “What up?” she said, squatting beside him. “How’s Whitechapel?”

  “Cold.”

  “Fancy moving?”

  Ben made a helpless gesture and tried to say something. He choked instead.

  “Okay,” Tasneen slowly sat down, cross-legged. “Let’s just stay here.”

  Ben put his head in his hands.

  “Have you told anyone at college what’s wrong?” Tasneen asked, putting her chin on her own hands.

  Ben shook his head.

  “You know if it’s this bad — it looks pretty fucking bad — I don’t think they’re going to get pissed off with you about it, you know that?”

  Ben tried to settle his glasses back on his face and nearly knocked them off instead.

  “Can you tell me?”

  Ben choked again.

  “I can make something up if you want me too,” Tasneen concluded. “I’m pretty good at that shit.” She turned her head on one side, and said, “I can tell them you got attacked by an army of owls.”

  Ben tried to laugh, got stuck, choked again, and started crying instead.

  “Oh shit,” said Tasneen, and hugged him.

  It didn’t stop. At first Ben was sure that he would just reign it back in, apologise, get up, and think of something reassuring to say, but instead his eyes caught fire and his nose filled up and his chest shrank, and he just cried as if he was six years old and had just discovered the actual meaning of death.

  After a while, he slid over sideways.

  Tasneen put an arm over his back.

  Ben continued to cry into her thigh.

  “Who was it?” Tasneen asked, when Ben had managed to draw two breaths in a row without choking, gurgling, or setting off a fresh wave.

  “What?” Ben tried to sit up, but she wouldn’t let him.

  “That,” Tasneen said, “that’s lost people crying.”

  Ben obliged her by dissolving into tears again.

  The sun began to set.

  Tasneen stroked his back.

  “It’s really cold now,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Ben said.

  “Do you control the weather?” Tasneen asked, punching him in the ribs. “Are you a fucking wizard?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck’s been going on,” said Tasneen, “but you’re okay, okay? I’m not going to run around telling people this fucking happened. You know why? You put snot on my jeans, how do I explain to anyone I let a sad white boy put snot on my jeans.”

  “S—”

  “Apologies are banned,” Tasneen said, “they are actually illegal. If you try to apologise again I’m calling the police.”

  “Have you got a tissue?”

  “If I had do you think I would be sitting here talking about my snot leg?” She rolled one of her shoulders back. “Gonna tell me who it was? I don’t — I’m not saying you have to, I’m saying, okay, I’m still chaotic good, right? And you’ve spent…six months…listening to my family turn into a circus of stupidity and you didn’t even know me before that. So you owe me a bit of yours.”

  Ben tried to sit up again, and this time she let him.

  He rubbed the underside of his nose ineffectually with his hand.

  “You got tears on your glasses.”

  Ben wiped them on his shirt. “This is fucked up.”

  “What?” Tasneen pulled her knees up and hugged them. “This is brilliant. You’re watching a be
autiful sunset in beautiful east London with a beautiful girl. How could this possibly be fucked up?” She finished with a sympathetic look, and a gentle pat to his shoulder. “Everything’s fucked up, you’re not winning any prizes for ‘most awful outburst’ this week, never mind in history.”

  “Hah.” Ben looked at the toes of his shoes. “My sister died on the seventeenth.”

  Tasneen was silent for a moment.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess,” she said, at last. “That this is why you didn’t want the subject you got given.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Okay,” Tasneen said. “Listen a minute. I am going to tell you a thing about how to feel about someone dying, okay?”

  Ben nodded again.

  Tasneen made a sweeping motion with her arm. “Literally everything is the right feeling.”

  “What?”

  “Anything is the right feeling. Every single emotion you have about her dying is alright. All of them. Anger, sadness, relief, weird moments of euphoria, totally forgetting about it for half a day, not feeling anything for what feels like a frighteningly long time—”

  “Hah,” said Ben.

  “It’s all normal.”

  Tasneen looked out across the lanes of traffic and the legs of curious passersby.

  “You don’t believe it at first,” she said, “or it’s not real, or you just…wander around like you’re operating your body from a spaceship orbiting the moon, and then everything’s terrible, and it’s terrible for a really long time — I’m not going to lie to you about that.”

  She pulled her bag onto her lap and began looking through it.

  “And then it sort of gets less frequently terrible. Your feelings get bored of torturing you. You’re sad but you can be happy at the same time.” She turfed out a pencil case. “And it starts just being anniversaries and family times or whatever, and then sometimes not even those…”

  Ben watched a couple of small, fluffy grey dogs pass like excitable clouds.

  “I found you a tissue,” Tasneen continued, passing it to him.

  “Thanks.” Ben wiped the underside of his nose again.

  “It just has to feel like shit first,” she went on. “And really it’s better that it feels like shit now instead of knocking you down in five, ten years. People understand when it’s this close. You have to feel shitty. You’re going to. Just…” she waved her hands again. “Let it happen.”

  Ben observed the screwed-up tissue in his hand. “I’m not good at that.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  He put the tissue in his pocket. “Thanks.”

  “Meh.”

  “How come you…” Ben exhaled slowly, feeling his mouth trying to trip him up. “Why do you.”

  “Ever wonder,” Tasneen asked, resting her chin on her knees, “why the saga of my stupid family’s stupid shitty shit never involves my dad?”

  “Oh.”

  They sat in silence. The sun sank lower.

  “What was he like?” Ben asked, eventually.

  “Big, fat bastard,” Tasneen said, with a distant smile. “Like a bauble with a beard. Loved everything. Just, enjoyed the shit out of being. Not clever — that was mum — but, y’know. I wish I enjoyed shit like just buying groceries as much as he did.” She tapped her toes together, and said, “And one morning when I was at school he just dropped down dead without any warning and no one really knew how to feel about it because no one could believe it had happened.”

  “Sor—”

  “Illegal, I will call the police.” Tasneen held up a hand to shush him. “And my mum just kind of…turned into a potato skin.”

  “A what?” Ben almost laughed.

  “She was kind of hollow inside,” Tasneen explained, with a mime. “Scooped out and empty and tough on the outside and just…missing her middle. I don’t want to say she just had a big cry and then got over it, either, that’s not…that’s not how anything works.” She tipped her head back and looked at the sky. “Look, it’s turned sort of green over there.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Ben, “it looks like deep water.”

  A star came out.

  “I have to tell my Dad,” Ben said. “I’m the listed next-of-kin. I don’t know if anyone’s told him.”

  Tasneen wrinkled her nose.

  “I don’t…” Ben put his head back in his hands.

  “Where’s your phone?”

  He passed it to her. “Please don’t call DeWalt again.”

  “Oh yeah, that’d be great. ‘Hey, remember that guy you stole a story from? Well, his sister just died of KBV, thought you might like to know’.”

  “She already knew Leah was on a ward,” Ben muttered.

  “Does Sherazi know that?”

  He nodded. “She does now.”

  Tasneen paused, half-way through the contacts.

  “You know too many people. Can I tell Sherazi what happened so she stops thinking you’ve died?”

  Ben shrugged. “Why not.”

  Tasneen showed him the phone. “Is that your Dad?”

  “Yeah,” said Ben. “You don’t — I should—”

  But she’d already called, her initial instinct to hold the end of the phone in front of her mouth spoiled by his lack of headphones.

  “Hi — no, it’s not Ben. Yeah, you can tell, I know.” Tasneen paused. “I’m a friend from college. No, nothing’s happened to him, he’s just…he’s had some really bad news, and…I need to pass the bad news on — well yes, Mr Martin, he probably could do it himself but he’s not in a good way and I offered to — no I’m not.”

  She made a face. He recognised it from the way he felt in about half of his own conversations with his father. The road in front of him purred and choked with exhaust fumes.

  Ben put his head in his hands.

  “No. Yes. Yes, it is a family matter.”

  He sighed.

  “I’m not giving him the phone if you’re going to shout.”

  Ben put his head back against the wall and watched another star slowly appear in the polluted sky.

  “It’s about your daughter.”

  Ben felt his chest begin to shake again.

  “Yes. I’m sorry Mr Martin, that is exactly what the news was.”

  Ben put the side of his hand in his mouth as it curled up into a horrible grimace.

  “I know, and I’m really very, very sorry, but I am not putting your son on the line because he’s crying in the middle of Whitechapel and I’m trying to make his life easier.”

  Ben bit into the bones of his hand and tried to hold onto what felt like a vanishing shred of sanity.

  “To be honest I think that’s a good idea. Call them up and check. No, you too. I’m sorry I had to tell you this. Goodbye.”

  She put the phone on his knee. Ben slowly pushed it into his pocket.

  Tasneen stood up.

  “He’s going to call the hospital.”

  Ben nodded, and removed his hand from his mouth. His teeth began to chatter.

  Tasneen reached down to take his hand. “Get up,” she suggested. “It’s cold and it’s late.”

  After four emails from Victoria, whose existence he had shamefully forgotten, Ben made the earth-shattering decision to actually attend one of his own classes.

  She didn’t acknowledge him when he came in, too busy wrestling with a new piece of equipment plugged into her laptop in a storm of ferocious jingling, but when her bracelets had finished breaking the sound barrier she turned and raised her eyebrows at him, briefly.

  “Alright,” said Victoria, “today, as the news cycle’s so obliging us with the opportunity: how to report two sides of a story even when one side is complete bullshit, but without letting anyone stop thinking that one side is complete bullshit.”

  Jack put up his hand.

  “No,” said Victoria. “This is not a discussion.”

  She jiggled the USB connecting the mini projector, and brought up the first slide.

  “Here we hav
e the Telegraph reporting that the government are ‘applying pressure’ to X/X to make them release stockpiles of KB-AO for safety testing immediately, or have them seized, along with their data.”

  Victoria said. “By structuring this as ‘government tell X/X’ instead of ‘X/X are told by government’, there’s a subtle emphasis on the rectitude of the government in this instance. Instead of making X/X the victim the way it would in the second example, leading with ‘the government’ puts a heroic slant on their action. It also makes them active.”

  She moved onto the next slide.

  “Now we have, in the body text: X/X argues that this ‘threat’ is tyrannical, and sets a dangerous precedent for business. Note how far down the story it is, and how brief the reply from X/X is.”

  Victoria pressed through to another slide.

  “More quotes: a quote within a quote — government cites various medical agencies and aid agencies defining this as a health and humanitarian crisis, and insists that X/X have a ‘moral duty’ to release their stocks of KB-AO. There’s a sidebar explaining what antigens are, what prophylaxes are, and why X/X have stockpiles of the KB-AO treatment, because—?”

  “Because you always have to assume the readers have the memory of a goldfish,” said Ifeoma, completing one of Victoria’s favourite aphorisms.

  “Yes, because they do.” She scrolled down as the class fidgeted. “And the conclusion that, in the face of an emergency of national importance, traditional business concerns have to be sidelined or they will have no one left to do business with. Don’t put your main argument in the conclusion, ever. No one reads to the end unless they’re in a press-clippings agency and need to skim.”

  Victoria closed the slides.

  “Now. That was yesterday. Today is today. We have new headlines, and new ‘debate’. Kenneth, what did X/X do next and how do you report it to make it look like the flagrant bullshit it is?”

  “Er,” said Kenneth. “Something about fuck the UK law.”

  Victoria gave him a look that shrank him in his seat.

  “X/X have claimed,” she said, starting the projector again, “that as an international company not headquartered in the UK, they do not believe they should be subject to the whims of the UK government about stocks which they keep in the country — Ben, put your hand down — and that they are planning to sue the UK government for threatening their business interests.”