The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  The Next Big One

  Other works published by House of D include:

  Pass the Parcel (Delilah Des Anges)

  Tame (Melissa Snowdon)

  The Other Daughter (Delilah Des Anges)

  Protect Me From What I Want (Delilah Des Anges)

  The Curious Case of the Firecrotch (Melissa Snowdon & Dionysia Hill)

  Brown Bread, Boys (Delilah Des Anges)

  The Breaking of M (Melissa Snowdon)

  As Simple As Hunger (D. Des Anges)

  Copyright © 2016 by Derek Des Anges

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-326-68759-5

  House of D Publications

  London, UK

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to offer my thanks to the many, many more scientifically-minded people who have contributed at varying stages of this book, often with frustrated noises at my inability to understand them; areas in which the contents of fiction do not match up to the rigours of reality are entirely my bad at this stage, not theirs. K. Fuhr helped me to understand much of what I now know about microbiology and Borna disease virus in particular, although I am sure she is horrified by how much I’ve fluffed that explanation; Samantha Kitchener, distinguished by her work in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic, was also kind enough to try to explain where exactly I was going wrong with some of my more off-base assumptions; Holly Burns translated a certain portion of my nonsense into Actual Science; Cyn Ouszt also tried to explain the motivations and characterisations of virologists and correct laboratory procedure. I am especially thankful to these busy women for giving up their time gratis for an author who, rather notably, didn’t manage to achieve a single solitary qualification in any science his whole life so far.

  To those involved in club and live music work, in particular Muffy Hunter and Misha Ankwell, I would like to offer more thanks for their advice on venue layouts and the technicalities of DJing, and especially to the former for letting me shadow her (and DJing partner Phil Parsons) at work. Charlotte West-Williams at the Bethnal Green Working Mens’ Club events department was kind enough to let me have floor plans of the venue.

  Sandra Duffy, for casting an eye over the legalese sections to make sure I wasn’t pulling my Threatening Letters out of my behind; Georgina K for her anecdotes on working in academia, Lindsey C for information on pathology, and Alison F for her insight into working in and around disease outbreaks and other disaster areas as part of a charity.

  I would also like to thank my traditional core of live-readers and draft editors: Abigail Brady, Ruthi Cooke, Dali Regent, Natalie Kingston, Sharon Harney (who also put me in touch with further science readers), Leah Slootweg, Cindy Rosenthal, Jess Reilly, Elena Deagle, Anuscha Corazon, and Marika Kailaya.

  Huge thanks to Abbi Shaw, who somehow managed to proofread this in between running her own businesses and being a bodybuilding goddess; if only I were half the person you are!

  My passionate thanks especially go to Hornsey Library, who have tolerated my presence in the quiet study room year on year, banging out manuscripts with less-than-good grace.

  Preface

  Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people? The concept by now is so codified, in fact, that we could think of it as the NBO.

  — Spillover, David Quammen

  When this book first took form it was intended as an art piece: a collection of invented media pertaining to the reporting of epidemics, concerned primarily with amusing one specific friend. As I got further into look at how diseases were researched, how the spread of illness was politicised, and how it was described in the media, my interest shifted to the human perspective. I owe a great deal in this to the work of Ben Goldacre, which will become apparent quite quickly to the reader!

  My apologies to Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose work was subject to a great deal of derogatory press at the time of writing; voices critical of Dr Kawaoka’s work have included Marc Lipsitch and Simon Wain-Hobson. I am scarcely qualified to comment on the utility or bravery of his work.

  During the course of planning and writing this book, the Ebola epidemic of 2014 broke out, providing me with unrestricted and unpleasant access to exactly how the media and public respond to a viral catastrophe. A good friend working in a pertinent field took the courageous decision to go to Sierra Leone as I was drafting and work processing Ebola samples in a field laboratory. What began as a curiosity inched somewhat closer to home.

  The story of Ebola has been a cautiously hopeful one: after little funding from the initial outbreaks in the 70s, the most recent epidemic spurred on focus in working out a viable cure.

  There are still a lot of viruses waiting to find us.

  The Next Big One

  NEW MYSTERY ILLNESS REACHES 100 CASES, SCIENTISTS BAFFLED

  With the number of UK cases hitting a hundred, it’s clear that KBV is a problem which isn’t going away. Downing Street have released the following statement: “The total number of KBV cases in the UK is still comparatively small, and we are confident that the disease can be contained. NHS leaflets advising on lifestyle and behaviour changes which can help protect against infection will be available soon. We ask the public to remain calm and to continue to behave responsibly about their health in all areas.”

  A few months later in the archive:

  NO END IN SIGHT FOR KBV SUFFERERS AS DEATH TOLL MOUNTS

  18 months ago no one had heard of koneboget virus and now it’s the first word on everyone’s lips. What’s certain is that this would not have happened had Britain maintained a sensible quarantine; it’s time to talk honestly and openly about immigration and admit that this country’s open-door policy to asylum-seekers and economic migrants is responsible for endangering the native English people.

  Two weeks after that:

  HAVE YOU BEEN TESTED?

  The triple-test is an expensive process with a large backlog, which requires six to nine vials of blood for proper analysis, and health officials say it is a last resort for those who are sure they’ve been in contact with someone suffering from KBV. But there is no other way of knowing, and with an infectious, asymptomatic period of roughly three years, how can we tell whether the people we come into contact with have been infected or not? Jenny Stone investigates.

  Ben Martin wished he’d been given female genital mutilation instead.

  That wasn’t his first thought, of course. Originally he was glad not to have got such a contentious and disgusting subject to cover, but that was before his name had been called.

  Unlike the rest of his tutors at the FE college — unlike his university tutors, before he’d dropped out — Sherazi didn’t go by her first name. All the others affected what was either a kind of matey companionship or an acknowledgement of the fact that they were all adults imparting skills, if only in one direction, rather than grown-ups ladling out irrefutable truths into the impressionable minds of children. Sherazi, on the other hand, had said on the very first of her sessions:

  “I know Victoria and Kyle have told you to be informal but unless you’re Iranian I don’t want to hear my first name out of your mouths. None of you ever get it right, and there’s nothing worse than a room full of white boys making farmer noises every time they want to get your attention. And there is no t in my last name, so I don’t want to hear one.”

  Two weeks further into the course, Sherazi admitted to her students that she’d also grown used to being addressed by her surname when she was in the field, and she’d never particularly wanted
to leave the field. No one asked why she’d left.

  They all asked each other, the first week: why are you here? A broad church of bodies from nineteen to fifty, in every available hue and contemporary gender, none of them loser enough to suggest they were in it for a burning desire to reveal the truth, and at least two people said it was because their A-levels hadn’t been good enough for them to go straight to do a degree in journalism yet.

  “There’s no practical difference between what we’re teaching you here,” Victoria Okongo had said, scaring the shit out of them all with what later turned out to be her signature move of appearing like a ghost in their midst to demand their completed assignments, “and what you’d learn on a BA, you just pay about eight grand less for this and don’t have as much busywork.”

  “And no one will hire you without a degree,” Graham, one of the older students had said, under his breath.

  “Then you should have got better A-levels,” Victoria had said, brightly. “Also, that’s bullshit.”

  The college was recently-rebuilt, furnished with all not-quite-fully-installed mod-cons, some very bad architecture, a cafeteria that looked like a prison, and several whiteboard projectors that didn’t entirely work, because while the building was new a lot of the equipment — as Ben discovered when he tried to sign out a Dictaphone — appeared to have been bought in 1976.

  “Blame Labour,” Kyle had said, when Ben mentioned it in class.

  “Not the Tories?” Ben had said, in some surprise.

  “Labour started it,” Kyle said, with aggressive conviction. “Tony fucking Blair and, by the way, fucking RIPA.”

  Kyle’s accent slid back and forth across the Atlantic like an air hockey puck, and it made Ben feel seasick.

  “Weren’t you the one who used to work for the BBC?” Graham asked, four weeks in, when the introductory sessions had finally ended and the late summer kept teasing them all with the possibility of temperatures anyone could sleep through, but not quite delivering yet.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, trying to fit McNae’s and his Macbook in his bag at the same time and succeeding in squashing something he’d been intending to eat instead. He didn’t mean to sound unfriendly, but Graham looked as if Ben had called him a cunt.

  It didn’t stop him from following up on the question:

  “Why’d you quit? I thought they had programmes for getting into different departments or something. My niece went in on a production internship and now she’s doing licensing—“

  “They moved,” Ben said, squashing his lunch more violently.

  “I thought they were doing resettlement stuff too—“

  “I didn’t want,” Ben said, stuffing his Macbook under his arm in defeat, “to go to bloody Salford.”

  Prehistoric Dictaphones and overly-invested classmates aside, it had seemed to be going well until the research projects had been handed out.

  Research Project: 1 Year. This is equal to one third of your final mark.

  Ben accepted when he saw that on the course outline, on Moodle, that the rest of his classmates might not be filled with the same degree of relief as he was. A couple of them had already been confused and annoyed by the idea that they had to do anything besides hound sources or hang out with famous people, and research — as he well knew — involved very little glamour and a lot of Google, which some of his classmates were bewilderingly bad at.

  But five years of having “look this up for me” as his literal and actual job title, description, and day-to-day reality suggested that of all the challenges that a HND in Journalism threw at him, this one wasn’t going to be the one that precipitated him dropping out a second time. Not like university, with theoretical analysis and close readings and trying to sound like he knew or cared about Queer Theory: all this wanted was a legible presentation of the facts, and he was, he thought, at least passably good at that.

  That was before the actual topics had been handed out.

  “Next year,” Sherazi said, holding Victoria’s weird tiny hat in her hands, “you get to choose. Next year’s research project you have to pitch to me, the same way you’d pitch a story to an editor. Since we haven’t taught you anything about pitching yet — shut up James — you’re going to be randomly assigned a topic from The Hat Of Choices.” She gave Victoria’s tiny blue hat a shake. The setting sun caught the edge of her teeth as she spoke. “The one thing I can assure you all is that you’re not going to like what you get, that you’re not swapping with anyone, and that if you don’t report on your progress occasionally I will cook you and eat you and Victoria will sell your shit on eBay.”

  “That’s right,” said Victoria, with an enormous smile and none of Sherazi’s inherent menace, “we’re underpaid lecturers in a tragically underfunded department of a moneyless college, and your shiny shiny laptops will nicely augment our prize-fighting money.”

  Nervous laughter echoed off the unpainted walls: it was usually obvious by now when their tutors were joking, but the tension was high.

  “Some points,” Sherazi added, shaking the hat, with its snowflakes of unknown topics, like a prospector. “A large part of your grade is supporting evidence. In addition to your final draft you will need to submit absolutely everything even vaguely related to your project. Interview transcripts, clippings, book titles, film titles, chat logs, emails, etc, are all a given, if you don’t already keep a diary I want you to get into the habit of writing one — you need to get a feel for how much time and energy and focus really goes into a long-term project like this.”

  A choral groan from the kind of people who always groaned at things like this.

  “The other point of doing that,” Victoria chimed in, “is that, as you will know if you bother to read McNae’s like you’ve been repeatedly told to, you will need dated, confirmed materials to back up your story if you get taken to court over it. Witness statements: always signed and dated. Interviews: always dated and confirmed with the interviewee. Get into the habit now, and save yourself a few of the enormous fines and potential prison sentences later on.” She stood, as she always did, with one hand on her hip and a forest of brightly-coloured wooden and metal bracelets slumped over her hand.

  “Jesus,” Ben muttered under his breath.

  “And if you are a lazy crybaby, like Benjamin,” Victoria said, sweetly, “remember that you’ve already paid for this course and you might as well learn how not to cost yourself any more money.”

  Ben went quietly scarlet, and looked at the desk. Victoria had an unpleasant habit of hurling around character assassinations with saccharine effortlessness, and he hadn’t yet worked out what the right response to them was. A couple of people giggled, but a couple more grumbled about the increased workload.

  At least I know how to keep a diary, Ben thought mutinously. He’d done it for years at the behest of his therapist. It wouldn’t be hard to start again and leave out all the doubts and self-recriminations for once.

  “Just pick them,” Chantelle complained, chewing vigorously on omnipresent gum. “The suspense is gonna fucking kill me.”

  Without a flourish or any ceremony, Sherazi pulled out a scrap of paper and said, “James, you’ve got climate change.”

  “Oh god,” James sighed, sliding down in his chair. “I hate science.”

  “It’s research, not an op-ed,” Sherazi cautioned.

  “I still fucking hate it,” James said, pulling his hood over his eyes.

  Sherazi ignored his discomfort and pulled out another scrap. “Graham, cosmetics manufacture.”

  “Great,” Graham said, confused. “Wait, how?”

  “Whatever angle you like,” Sherazi said, “as long as I get a 5,000-word feature by the end of the year. Chantelle, Russian military spending.”

  “Get in,” said Chantelle, who was the first woman Ben had ever met to combine Russophilia and Burberry with quite her level of ferocity.

  “Tasneen,” Sherazi went on, giving the hat another shake, “FGM—”

 
; “Whoa, no,” Tasneen said, alarmed. “No way.”

  “No arguments,” Sherazi said, serenely. “Mark, Nuclear power, Ifeoma, Greek economy, Olivia, third gender recognition—”

  “Third whating what?”

  “That’s what research is for, Olivia.” Sherazi cast a gaze over the room. “Why are we missing seven people, did I not say today was important and no one was to miss it?”

  “They get the dregs,” Victoria said, happily.

  “Ben, KBV,” Sherazi went on, “Jack, dog fighting rings, Connor, unaccompanied asylum seekers, and the rest will be divided up for the absentees next week. Whoever has Kenneth’s phone number please tell him if he misses one more week he’s going to be assumed withdrawn.”

  “I’m going to fucking die,” Jack said with absolute conviction, getting out of his seat. “I’m literally going to die, have you seen the kind of guys who run those things?”

  Ben leaned back on his chair and suggested, “It’s research: you can just talk to the police and the RSPCA.”

  Jack, who was twenty and had spent the last three years apparently acquiring a tan in Australia and Indonesia, gave Ben a disgusted look and said with absolute sincerity, “Yeah but you have go deep on this shit.”

  “While Jack is right,” Victoria said, materialising like the ghost of assignment guilt, “we’d prefer not to be sued so if all of you could make a reasonable effort not to die in the course of your research it would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Sherazi muttered, marking off names on a projected register.

  KBV, Ben thought, his hands flat on the table in front of him, his heart beginning to race. Why did it have to be that?

  “One or two more things,” Sherazi said, as Victoria glided out of the door in a rattle of jewellery, coffee cups in hand. “Don’t let me keep you from your conversation, Olivia, I’m sure it’s very important.”