The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  Nothing, apart from Tasneen’s last message, managed to achieve this.

  Ben started writing two different replies to it, and Tasneen went offline. He tried to stand up, almost hit his head on the underside of the table, tried again, and went to the bathroom, phone in hand.

  He didn’t have to take her advice, of course, he reasoned, as he stepped over a river of cables separating him from the bathroom door. It was just a suggestion. Sherazi would probably be fine with a project that didn’t include any quotes from patients.

  Ben tried to imagine what ‘Sherazi being fine’ with anything looked like but couldn’t really call it to mind.

  He put his phone in his shirt pocket and tried to make the door to the men’s toilets shut. When this didn’t work, he tried to find a urinal that wasn’t directly visible from the open door, and when that didn’t work he held his breath and went into the stall and tried not to look down.

  And besides, he had a lot of other work to do. Kyle wanted some kind of review of Source Protection to prove they’d been paying attention; Victoria had told them to prepare for mock interviews — and reduced a whole classroom to sudden panic — and it wasn’t like the KBV thing was the only work Sherazi wanted from them, and he was supposed to be doing Ina’s Bandcamp page for her.

  Ben caught sight of himself in the mirror as he tried to turn the hot tap on without touching it. He should have worn the contact lenses: the rims of his glasses made him look like a panda. His hair had become a roiling thicket of too-tight curls and the sides needed shaving again.

  It doesn’t have to be Leah, Ben thought, as he finally got to scald his hands in the name of hygiene. I could call other hospitals.

  When he returned to the table, someone had given Molly a cocktail and she looked less like she was about to fall asleep. “You look like shit,” she said, managing to sound concerned instead of insulting. “Are you okay?”

  “Uh,” said Ben. “Yeah, fine. I’m just going…just going to get a sandwich.”

  At four the next morning, when Ben walked into his flatmate’s bike, and then into his flatmate’s cat, and then hit his head on the school chair that was doubling up as a coffee table, he’d not quite started to sober up yet.

  “Shh,” he told the dark, empty room, and the gentle glow of a TV reiterating parliamentary debates under its breath. “Shh.”

  Minnie climbed onto the TV and let her cloud of a tail hang down in front of the Prime Minister’s face, thereby obscuring what might otherwise have been a taxing close-up. She regarded Ben with reproach. He hauled himself to his feet again, plopped down on the chair, and began to remove his boots.

  On screen, the round and affable face of Doug Lewis popped up to argue a point. Ben recalled he had some sort of vague connection to the MP, but even when he wasn’t smuggling a blood alcohol percentage in the high fifties he had no idea what it was, or if he’d merely imagined it because “Doug Lewis” was such a generic name attached to such a generic face.

  “It’ll be fine,” Ben told the cat, with conviction he in no way felt. “Everything will be fine. I’ll just, I’ll just call some other wards.”

  He fell asleep in the chair.

  “Can you do me an enormous favour,” Ben asked, as soon as Tasneen picked up.

  “Where are you?” she demanded. “Victoria’s going to be here in like five minutes.”

  “In bed,” said Ben, who was in fact curled up on the floor in front of the toilet, wishing he’d never been born or that he at least had some way of travelling back in time and knocking a few drinks out of the hand of his former self. “Can you tell her I’m ill?”

  “I mean, yeah,” said Tasneen, her voice echoing — Ben guessed she was heading up the steps to the classroom, which had reverb sound techs would have sworn about for a hundred years — but free from any soupcon of backstabbing. “But are you actually ill though?”

  “Yes,” said Ben, who had been sick once already. “Extremely.”

  “Like properly ill or didn’t go to bed until the sun came up ill?”

  “Does it matter? I’m not coming in, I’ll do it next week or something.” Ben put his cheek against the toilet bowl and tried to remember where, if anywhere, the aspirin had taken up residence. He had a horrible feeling they were in Kingsley’s room. Kingsley’s cupboard of a room.

  “She’s going to murder you,” Tasneen said, without concern. “But you’re lucky, I’m the heroic, self-sacrificing type, but also chaotic good instead of lawful good. So I’m not going to tell her you’re actually vomiting vodka.”

  “It was bourbon and thank you,” said Ben, hanging up on her.

  By two that afternoon he’d regained sufficient motor function to clean the kitchen, feed the cat, reorganise his notes twice, and watch three episodes of Murder, She Wrote without realising that he was procrastinating.

  “Dicks,” Ben muttered under his breath, when an email from Victoria showed up in his inbox. “Oh, I have to call the hospitals. Better do that. First.”

  Having acquired a fire for his frying pan, he looked up two quarantine wards that weren’t at St George’s, rehearsed something that sounded viable in his head, and began calling.

  “Hi, my name’s Ben Martin, I’m doing a piece on KBV, and I was wondering if any of your quarantine patients would be willing to be interviewed about their experiences—”

  “Sorry, Mister—?”

  “Martin.”

  “Mister Martin, the only callers allowed to talk to quarantine patients are members of the immediate family or named next of kin.” She did not sound especially sorry, and Ben wondered how many other chancing journalists and journalism students called up every day, determined to squeeze a little Human Interest out of the ward.

  “Even if they want to?” he tried.

  “Even if they want to,” she said. “As I’m sure you’re aware, there are a large number of neurological and psychological symptoms resulting from this illness and we find it’s better for the patients if they’re not excited or put under undue stress.”

  “Right,” said Ben, making a fruitless, contextless note. “What happens if they’re unduly excited?”

  “I think you know that as well as anyone else who reads the papers,” said the reception nurse, coldly, and hung up.

  Ben tried another ward.

  “Absolutely not,” said an extremely posh, male voice almost immediately. “These people are very sick. I can’t have them being bothered by every Tom, Dick, and hack who wants to sensationalise their suffering. Piss off. You can use that one.”

  He made a third attempt.

  “Are you family, love?” said a gentle, warm Welsh voice. “Only we can’t let you talk to anyone on the ward unless you’re family. It’s for their protection, you see.”

  “Do you think any of the ward nurses would mind talking to me about their experiences with the patients?” Ben said hopelessly. “I mean, anonymously? I don’t have to identify the hospital.”

  “That’s lovely of you to say, Mister Martin,” said the reception nurse, “but we’re not allowed to anyway, and I don’t think we need any more sad stories about this right now. Maybe you should write something about our funding being cut.” Her voice hardened perceptibly. “Get someone to put that in the fucking papers, would you? How d’you fight a bloody epidemic when you’re cutting cleaning staff and only giving us point bloody five percent a year, I’d like to know?”

  Ben listened to her for another ten minutes or so, until someone came to the woman’s desk to ask a question, and she composed herself.

  When she’d hung up, he thought: well, you do have—.

  Then he got up, and made himself another sandwich. Minnie, trying to catch the Home Secretary’s face with her paws, looked up to watch him go.

  A little later, Ben called The KBV Support Line, and asked if they had a line to any patients in quarantine who might want to talk to someone about their situation.

  “Do you have the diagnosis yourself?” asked
the operator, who’d given her name as Karen.

  “No,” said Ben, “or I’d be in quarantine, wouldn’t I?”

  “Sometimes people ring us up after the diagnosis to ask if we know what they should do,” Karen said, in the very special Support Line voice that Ben was uncomfortably familiar with. “Sometimes people call us because they’re worried they might have contracted it. You won’t be quarantined immediately. Have you had a retest?”

  “I don’t have it,” said Ben, who’d been somewhat robbed of opportunities to contract it.

  “Do you have a family member with the diagnosis then?” Karen asked, deviating admirably from a script but, Ben suspected, sticking to the substance of it. Minnie had disappeared, but he would have put money on her currently drinking out of either the toilet or the sink.

  “I really just want to know if there’s any way I can talk to other people who have KBV,” said Ben.

  “So you do have a diagnosis? You really need to report to a hospital,” said Karen, a certain tension in her voice. “It’s very important that you see medical staff if you have any questions about your infected status.”

  “So I can’t talk to anyone who has the diagnosis? Find out what it’s like being in quarantine?” Ben asked, falling back on the futon. There was something increasingly Kafkaesque about the quarantine system, he thought gloomily, as the TV offered him a recap of local news.

  “You can talk to other people in quarantine when you’re in quarantine yourself,” said Karen patiently, “or if you wish to contact a family member who is in quarantine hospital wards are required by law to allow you to have phone contact with them.” She took a breath. “Do you need to see a doctor about blood screening?”

  “No,” said Ben, giving up. “No, I’m fine. Thanks for your help.”

  “One of the little bastards got arrested,” Kingsley said, dropping two Tesco bags on the floor just inside the door, around six. “I’ve got to go down to the nick and explain that he’s A Good Boy Really. Pierre’s coming to pick up his fucking, his contact sheet, he left it in my courier bag, it’s under my bed. Just let him in.” He raced past, pulled his funeral tie off a picture hook, and shot back out of the door again with a cry of, “Put the chicken in the fridge!”

  Ben picked up the shopping bags. Kingsley had, by anyone’s measure, too many jobs eating up his waking hours. He was aware that this was partially his fault for having to drop a sizeable portion of the rent: the courier stuff, on top of the social work and the producing, had only started when he’d lost his job and they’d swapped rooms.

  He put the chicken in the fridge.

  He spent an hour browsing Facebook with the distracted air of someone who knows he ought to be doing something else but can’t remember what it is, and is waiting for someone else to explain what it was he should have done half an hour ago.

  Instead of this handy guidance, he got an email.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: I have to know

  Seriously, though, are you gay? My gaydar is normally a 99.7%-accurate piece of scientifically calibrated machinery and you’ve fucked it up. Straight or gay?

  Lordes says straight, if that’s any incentive for you. Jenny is on her side, because she’s a brown-nosing hate figure.

  Ben abandoned the last of his seventh peanut butter sandwich of the day and his nagging sense that he ought to be doing something else, and dived into the fray.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: Re: I have to know

  Are straight and gay the only options?

  He eyeballed the remainder of his sandwich. He’d lost his appetite, but if he left it sitting around the cat would eat it and make herself sick.

  He finished the bloody thing.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: Re: Re: I have to know

  Yes, yes they are. Since you won’t answer I’m going to assume you’re trying to avoid saying “gay”, so I have a test for you. Come to the Admiral tonight. If you don’t show up I’ll just assume you’re a sad closet case and you’ll be free of any more explanations of virology. If you do, I’ll buy you a drink.

  “Subtle,” said Ben, amused. “And not very scientific.”

  The TV said something about stabbings in West London, and Ben checked his calendar. There was nothing for tonight that looked like it might conceivably distract him from hospital calls, overdue assignments, or the sneaking possibility that one of Kingsley’s teenage clients had been the one responsible for the most recent perforation of someone’s liver.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: Re: Re: Re: I have to know

  Alright, when? And where’s the Admiral?

  “I’m not dressing up for this,” Ben told Minnie, as she wandered into the living room with a wet face. “I fucking hate gay pubs. I don’t even own t-shirts that tight.”

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: The Admiral

  It’s in Soho, and you’re doing a very convincing job of not being gay, well done. I’ll see you at nine.

  The Admiral was already heaving full, spilling customers out onto the windy pavement irrespective of cigarettes. There was nowhere to sit and, Ben was sure, nowhere to stand. There wasn’t room to take his coat off, as far as he could tell, but Daniel seemed to have managed it. He was wearing a bright red, skin-tight vest bearing the words: no fats, no femmes, no Asians in cursive. Ben forbore from comment on this.

  “Great,” Ben said, trying to squeeze between a bear and a beanpole, “I’m glad we got here before it got busy.”

  Daniel either didn’t hear him — the roar of conversation and the wub of shit chart pop was loud enough to drown out an invading air force — or pretended not to. “What’re you having?” he bawled, still separated from the bar by six layers of flesh.

  “A panic attack, probably,” Ben said under his breath, but he shouted his order back.

  “Good. I’m having a vodka tonic, go get it,” Daniel said with a merciless smile that looked half shark and half cocaine. Ben wished then that he’d hunted someone down for a line before he came out: the only way to make the night bearable would be to make himself unbearable.

  He wondered why he’d come.

  Ben squeezed between two more bodies — warm and shirt-sleeved, and sweaty in the crush — and stumbled against the bar.

  “I don’t mean it,” Daniel said, directly behind him, and threw his forearm onto an inch of bar to indicate his readiness to order. “Hi. Hello. Yes.”

  This last was addressed to the bartender.

  Ben peered over the bar, into his own reflection — red-cheeked and dishevelled already — and beyond, into a mass of humanity reminiscent of Earls Court at rush hour. His throat began to close: some distance behind him he saw a friendly peck on the lips and couldn’t extract the thought of invisible infection working its way to salivary glands from out of his mind. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a metal cylinder—

  “Can’t do that in here,” said a disinterested but not unfriendly voice by his ear. “No vaping, minimal voguing—” he missed the third object required for good rhetoric as someone yelled:

  “RICKEEEEEEEY!”

  in obvious delight, and drowned everything else out.

  “They don’t have your stupid hipster beer,” Daniel called over his shoulder, “so I’m getting you more vodka.”

  “I don’t—” Ben began, but the crowd closed up around him like a healing wound and left him stranded only half-facing the bar.

  Someone ran a hand over his back and vanished into the throng. Ben felt his face growing redder in discomfort and, staring up at the distant ceiling rafter
s, made a spirited attempt to struggle out of his coat.

  He punched someone in the shoulder, blurted a “shit” but not a “sorry”, and was subsequently helped out of his jacket by three strangers at once, two laughing and one only saying, “You’re new,” a little archly.

  At some point in his unceremonious communal undressing, Daniel materialised in front of him with a clear, condensing glass in each hand and stood amid the cramped conversations, watching.

  Once Ben had been presented with his coat, and before any of his rescuers could try to strike up further introduction, Daniel thrust a glass into his hand and barked, “This way,” immediately plunging into an even thicker crowd.

  “Is this vodka?” Ben asked, when he’d caught up. They were on the far side of a postcard-sized dance floor that allowed the place to qualify as a club, pressed against a black-painted wall like twelve-year-olds at a school disco, rather unfortunately right next to a speaker.

  “Plausibly,” said Daniel, who’d already started on his.

  “I don’t like vodka,” Ben said, trying to give the glass back.

  Daniel glared at him. “Well it was eight-fifty,” he said, swigging his own, “so you can fucking tolerate it.”

  Ben sipped, and winced. A thought occurred to him, and the current song faded into something older and more popular: men flooded out in front of them.

  “Is this some sort of trial by fire proof of sexuality?” he asked, when he was sure Daniel could hear him.

  “Yeah,” Daniel said, sarcastically, “and if you fail I’m going to shove you in a massive fanny. Calm the fuck down. I didn’t ask you here to make a martyr of yourself trying to be something you’re not.”

  Grr, wub, thump, went the bass, right by Ben’s head.

  “Anyway,” Daniel said, finishing his drink. “I wanted to talk about not-work. Whatever happens, I’m not discussing work.” He slammed the glass down on the edge of the tiny DJ booth, where it was promptly knocked to the floor.

  Ben highly doubted that.