“That…”
“No, it’s fine.”
“That’s definitely pink, though.”
Daniel held his breath. Ben realised he was already holding his own.
“It’s only one,” Daniel muttered, squeezing his hand again. “One out of three is meaningless. Misfiring. It’s fine. It’s just one.” He leaned forward. “It’s not even very pink, it’s more…mauve. Purplish, really.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not fucking with you,” said Daniel, letting go of his hand. “It’s definitely more purple than pink.”
“Fuck does that even mean?”
Ben could have slapped himself. He’d been chanting one is nothing, two is something else, three means get a blood test solidly since the mantra occurred to him and he still couldn’t stop staring at the faint, almost imaginary flush of pink.
“It means,” said Daniel, showing him the piece of card, with two blue strips and one purplish-blue strip, “you don’t have KBV.”
“Jesus,” said Ben, leaning on the bench.
Daniel laid the piece of card down carefully and said, “Okay. Just so you know. I’m sorry in advance if I’m wrong about this.”
“What?”
Daniel grabbed him by the cheeks and kissed him.
“Ffff,” said Ben, startled.
“Am I wrong?”
“N-oo?” Ben made an attempt to grab Daniel by the waist, but owing to there not being a great deal of Daniel to grab, missed his hand-hold and vaguely punched the air beside him instead.
“Good,” said Daniel. “I hate being wrong.”
He kissed him again.
Ben had not been kissed for quite some time. He hadn’t been kissed sober for at least two years. He’d never been kissed in a laboratory, and he’d never been kissed while the cautious elation of knowing he hadn’t been handed a death sentence yet coursed through every part of his mind at once.
He managed to get hold of the back of Daniel’s t-shirt somewhere between his shoulder and his hips and realised he’d been kissing back for a while.
“Www,” Ben managed, as Daniel stopped for breath. “Oxygen,” Ben insisted.
“Oh don’t be such a baby.” Daniel grabbed him by the wrists and pushed him backwards into the bench. Ben’s back protested, and rather than try to mediate between his spine and Daniel’s expression of triumph, Ben lifted his hips until he was lying on a work surface that had probably seen more infectious matter than a hospital toilet.
Daniel collapsed on top of him.
“Nope,” Daniel said, and kissed him again.
“Oh my god.” Ben felt a rather stronger flutter of delight inside his midriff than he’d been expecting, but language didn’t cooperate with it. He made a helpless noise in the back of his throat and tried to remember to be embarrassed that his hips lifted towards the ceiling almost immediately.
“Correct,” Daniel said, and kissed him some more.
Ben tried to lift one arm to steady Daniel, but Daniel just shoved his wrist back into the bench again and pressed into him in six bony places at once.
There was a very firm tap on the open door.
Ben tried to turn his head to one side.
“No,” Daniel said.
“I know you’re leaving soon,” said Rebecca Lordes, from the doorway, “but you still have to follow the basic safety rules.” She raised both eyebrows at once.
“S-sorry,” Ben said.
“No you’re not. Piss off, Lordes,” said Daniel, trying to kiss him again.
Ben jerked his head away. “Probably not here.”
“Aren’t you that—” began Rebecca Lordes.
Daniel picked up a sheaf of papers from their bench and hurled them in her general direction. “Piss oooofff.”
She pissed off.
Daniel, despite this victory, slithered off the bench and waited for Ben to climb down.
Ben spent a moment straightening up most of the damage Daniel had done, including to his composure and the overall lie of his underwear, and put his hand over his mouth. “Leaving?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, looking out of the door, where Lordes was no longer visible.
“But…”
Daniel made an effort to tidy his hair. “I’ve been running a lot of errands for Natalya while she was locked out,” he said. “I wasn’t kidding about being busy.”
“Right,” said Ben, putting his hands in his pockets. His brain didn’t want to cooperate at all. It wanted to get back on the bench and possibly deal with some of the frustrations of the last couple of years by getting firmly, intensely, and comprehensively laid, and laid by someone he actually wanted this time. He told it to shut up.
“I was getting under David’s feet a lot,” Daniel went on, smoothing down his t-shirt with a rueful look, “and eventually he said look stop wasting time with horse depression, this is a lot more important and we need you.”
“Just like that?” Ben said, trying to force his attention back to the conversation and not to the fit of Daniel’s clothing and the suddenly unacceptably tight-feeling fit of his own.
“Well, no. He put in a word with his boss’s boss, pointed out that since they were missing Natalya he needed more help—”
“But she’s back now?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, making a meal of playing with his belt for a moment. “But they need whoever they can get and she just backed David up. Said I’d proven myself extremely useful and that I was being wasted here — couldn’t fucking agree more — and god I’d much rather work for her than bloody Lordes. Or anyone else.”
Ben snorted. “You sound like you’re in love.”
Daniel threw both his hands up and stared Ben in the eye. He nodded a few times, with increasing sarcasm, and said, “Yeah, I’m in love with Natalya. That’s why this is happening. Nothing to do with a massive KBV epidemic and an incredible career opportunity and — nothing to do with any of that at all.”
“What about your vaccination problem though?” Ben asked, restraining himself from grabbing Daniel by a belt-loop and pulling him closer. “I thought you said you had a bad reaction—”
“It’s not a generic BSL-4 thing,” said Daniel, impatiently. “It’s literally a dedicated KBV team. There’s no vaccination — you know that. We’ll all be in the same boat.”
He looked away and added something else Ben couldn’t make sense of.
“What?”
“I said,” Daniel said, lifting his chin too high and talking a bit more loudly than he needed to, “and I fancy myself doing something heroic.”
Ben laughed at him, leaned forward, and ended up head-butting him in the chest.
“Oh god, don’t mock me and assault my nipples,” Daniel said, pulling him up and sliding both arms around Ben’s back. “Don’t do that, for fuck’s sake. Tell me you fancy me doing something heroic too.”
“I think I kind of do,” said Ben, still laughing.
“God,” Daniel put his face into Ben’s neck. “I have been trying since October to get you to — give me a fucking break now.”
Ben stopped laughing slowly, and squeezed Daniel’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I’ve been…I’ve been so far up my own arse.”
“I will only say this once,” Daniel said, to Ben’s neck, “probably about anything, in my entire fucking life.”
“What? Ben asked, alarmed.
“It was worth the wait.”
In the aggressive enthusiasm of late April, spring sun beat on the drawn-down blinds and cooked everyone’s arm on one side of the classroom. Sherazi, two coffees into the class and as bored as her students, gave up. “Alright,” she said, turning off the projector and yanking it out of her laptop. “We’re clearly not going to get anywhere with this. Go nuts.”
“Is this an Easter reprieve?” Jack asked, sitting up immediately.
“No, it’s a discussion group,” said Sherazi, waving him down before he could get up.
“Can we discuss why Chantelle isn�
��t here?” Tasneen suggested.
“Legally, probably not,” said Sherazi, with a sigh. “So we’re going to talk about mandatory testing.”
“Isn’t that an unfair advantage—” Jack pointed at Ben without much of the subtlety he probably thought he was affecting.
“Mandatory’s not a good word,” Ifeoma said, into the sleeve of her shirt.
“It’s an inaccurate word,” Sherazi said. “It relies on cooperation still. People have to show up at test points, most of which seem to be the places they usually vote, and you know how impressive the voter turnout is in this country.”
“The workplace stuff—” said Graham, who’d evidently heard a lot about this.
“How many people dodge out of workplace drugs tests — this isn’t a poll, stop looking guilty, I don’t care what you’re taking,” Sherazi waved down the beginnings of a raised hand. “So what’s the alternative?”
“The military?” suggested Jack.
“Tyrannical, and also ineffective,” Sherazi pointed out. “I’ve yet to meet an army that wasn’t riddled with corruption and all it takes is the right person with the right backhander for god knows how many people to be conveniently overlooked because they don’t fancy going to hospital.”
“Change in the nature of quarantine,” said Ifeoma.
“Meaning?” Sherazi stopped, and threw a packet of tissues into the seats. “Kenneth, do you have the plague?”
“Cold,” he said, accepting the tissues. “Sorry.”
“Well, at least it’s not KBV,” Sherazi muttered. “Ifeoma?”
“Remove the stigma?” she offered, in a tone that made it sound like a wild stab in the dark. “Try something like: Loads of people have KBV, it’s not a judgement on you by God, go to this nice complex with other people in the same position and wait until there’s a cure—”
“Or you die,” Jack muttered.
“More independence within quarantine,” Sherazi said, nodding. “That’s one solution.”
“Lots of people have AIDS,” Tasneen protested, from the back of the room, “no one’s stopped treating them like they’re lepers—”
“Yeah but,” Jack twisted in his chair, “People don’t get AIDS by sharing toothbrushes, that was in all the sex ed stuff at school, wasn’t it?”
“You’d have to share a toothbrush pretty fucking soon after using it to get KBV,” Ben muttered. “Like, immediately after.”
“Okay,” Sherazi looked at the time on her laptop. “Congratulations, we have survived over fifty percent of this session, which means this counts as a full class you’ve attended and I’ve taught. Piss off! Enjoy the sunshine. Smoke weed. Be somewhere I am not.”
The majority of her students took this invitation and shoved everything they had with them back into their bags, filing out of the door without delay. Tasneen gave Ben a friendly — if somewhat too hard — punch in the arm on her way past, but she didn’t wait.
“Seeyaaaa.”
“You’re still here,” Sherazi noted, pulling her coffee out from behind her laptop. She sipped it. “And this is cold. Two tragedies in under a minute.”
“I thought I should tell you in person,” Ben said.
“Well, that’s already ominous. Picked any more good fights recently? Broken into Stevenage?” Sherazi folded up her laptop and leaned on it. She gave him a distinctly hawkish look.
“Not going near Stevenage,” Ben muttered, into his shirt collar.
“Not a fan of carnage, I take it?”
Thinking of cans of pepper spray in Stevenage, Ben said, “I’m not a fan of being blinded either.”
“What is it?” Sherazi said. “It may be hard for you to believe but I actually have a disgusting amount of work to do and some of your classmates have successfully produced drafts they want me to check over, and that takes a certain amount of run-up.”
“I er,” Ben forced a smile. “I’m reducing your workload, then.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Pardon?”
“I applied for interruption of studies,” Ben said, looking at the floor. “It’s on Moodle — well, it’ll be on Moodle when it’s started working properly again, I checked with the college admin, and. It’s definitely being processed.”
Sherazi didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked at her coffee for a little while and said, “I’m not altogether surprised, but frankly, I am a little disappointed.”
“Sorry,” said Ben.
“You were improving,” said Sherazi.
“Sorry,” Ben repeated.
“Albeit through giving me regular cause to consider turning to drink again,” Sherazi said, holding her coffee in both hands. “But in between the perpetual despair and possibility of your death and/or arrest I think you were definitely improving. I was actually proud of you.”
“I’m…definitely not a past tense,” Ben said, slowly. “I mean…if I can afford to start again next year, I will. I just…Kyle and Victoria both think…”
Sherazi made an impatient gesture by her face, as if swatting a fly. “Oh, no doubt they’re right. I don’t think we’ve ever had to give anyone a Distinction and two Fails before, it would look strange on the records. Maybe you could dedicate some of your time off to addressing your obnoxious hyperfocus problem.”
“And I’m still,” Ben coughed awkwardly. “Er, still. Still writing things. About KBV.”
“I’ve noticed,” Sherazi said dryly. “This is why I’m only hoping I’ll see you back next year, instead of certain of it. Who knows if you’re going to need the rest of this course.”
Ben looked at his shoes. “Doing that didn’t work out very well last time.”
Sherazi shrugged. “Well, I’ve enjoyed your petty spite grudge match with the Demon DeWalt,” she said, by way of summary. “Don’t let that drop, for goodness sake — watching people appear from nowhere to explain that she’s a plagiarist and a bully and a shitty person is giving me reason to wake up in the morning — god knows this job doesn’t—”
“I’m not going to miss your sarcasm,” Ben said, rather more loudly than he’d intended to.
“Yes you are,” Sherazi said. “Get gone. Buy your own bloody copy of McNae’s.”
Ben went a circuitous route home, and halfway through it realised he wasn’t so much “enjoying the sunshine” as “blatantly avoiding a phone call”: he got on the next train and told himself to stop being so stupid.
The stairs were beginning to smell of mould.
He elbowed open the door, blocked Minnie’s dash for the doorway with his leg, and sniffed. “Oh, that’s what I was meant to do.”
After an instructive half hour changing the cat litter tray and trudging up and down mould-scented stairs with bleach, Ben reached the tipping point: bleaching under the edges of a wet carpet was more revolting and boring than a phone call would be stressful.
He went back upstairs.
The landline rang for so long that he was sure he was going to end up with voicemail, but it appeared to have been disconnected.
“Hello?”
“Hello Dad,” Ben said, sitting down on the futon.
“Hrm,” said his father, lapsing into his usual phone manner immediately.
“I’ve er,” Ben began, starting strong. “I applied for interruption of studies at college.”
There was a silence.
“You’re dropping out again?” his father asked. He didn’t sound enraged this time, only resigned. Ben resented this more than if he’d shouted, but he held his breath and waited.
“No, I’m deferring and taking this year again.”
His father sighed. “How badly did you mess this year up?”
Ben twisted the cuff of his shirt so far around his wrist that it nearly got back to its original position from the wrong direction. “Well I got a Distinction in one of my classes…”
“One of. How many classes have you got?”
“Three that count,” said Ben, tipping his head back to address the ceiling. “So
they said it would make more sense to just interrupt now, and come back and do them again next year, and I’d keep the Distinction from this year, so I only have to do two classes — they said under the circumstances—”
“What ‘circumstances’?” his father asked, suspiciously.
“I think,” said Ben, a little stiff, “they meant Leah.”
His stomach screwed itself up a little, but that was all.
“Oh.”
“I mean,” Ben said, “you don’t have to pay the third instalment on the fees now, so it’s saving you six hundred quid, really—” he broke off, and held his breath.
“And I have to pay the other two twice,” said his father, who wasn’t stupid.
Ben began to tap his teeth with his thumbnail.
“What’s that noise?”
“Er.” Ben stopped tapping. “I might be able to pay those myself, you never know.”
“I’m not holding my breath,” his father muttered. “Yes, I know you’re getting your name in the bloody papers like you wanted, but how long is that going to last, I’d like to know?”
Ben treated this as the rhetorical question it clearly ought to be intended as.
“So they know about your sister,” his father grumbled. “I suppose.”
Ben also treated this as rhetorical. His father might not read The Sun as a matter of pride, but he knew people who did. Nine million people knew about Leah, and that was just the direct circulation.
There was a silence which stretched away into the distant sirens and rumbling of trains, the sounds of the city continuing to live whatever else happened in it.
“Are you—?” Ben began.
“Stella’s been here,” said his father, at last. “We were going to have, to have a. It seemed pointless without a body.”
“You never said,” said Ben, feeling his chest tighten.
“It seemed pointless without a body,” his father repeated. “She’s going to Brighton, I think it was, to see some of Leah’s other friends. They’re going to do something. A walk. I’m not sure.”
“Are you going?”
Silence once again stretched out long hands and engulfed both sides of the conversation.
The Next Big One Page 48