The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  Ben took the book back from her. “The Lost Artefacts of Truth?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ve read that,” Ben frowned, “that’s not meant to be in this section.”

  “Or,” said Tasneen, holding out her hand for the book, “you could just call up her boss and ask to speak to her, that’s what everyone does at Mum’s work.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she really appreciates that,” Ben sighed. “Okay, is that all of the ones on the top shelf?”

  “Dunno. Where’s Pacific Culture In The 21st Century?”

  Ben peered along the bookshelves, and groaned. “Above the top shelf.”

  Tasneen deflated. “Maybe we can throw things at it until it falls down.”

  Standing outside with an e-shisha, watching the more conventional smokers turn into a penguin circle to keep their cigarettes alight in a wind that was stripping the trees faster than a herd of hungry giraffe, Ben took out his phone.

  A few minutes of trying to connect to the college Wifi, and a more fruitful minute trying to connect to the wifi of the cafe next door, and he had the number for HPA Colindale’s enquiries desk.

  Small lies, Ben thought. Small lies wouldn’t hurt too much.

  “Hello,” he said, when the phone picked up, “can I speak to Dr Yagoda, please? My name’s Ben Martin, she’s expecting me to call, but I wrote her extension down wrong and it keeps coming up as Number Not Recognised.”

  “Well, I can put you through,” said the voice on the other end, “but it won’t do you much good — she’s not down as having come in today.”

  “Day off?” Ben hazarded, disappointed.

  “Nnnope,” said the voice on the other end, apparently perusing something. “No holiday booked, hasn’t called in sick. Do you want me to leave her a message?”

  “Can you just tell her I called, please?” asked Ben, his heart rate speeding up uncomfortably.

  “Of course. What was your name, sorry? Ben—?”

  “Martin.”

  “Well, that’s nice and easy.”

  She didn’t seem unduly worried, Ben thought, as the enquiries receptionist hung up. Probably Dr Yagoda was prone to forgetting to call in when she was sick. Maybe she’d just dramatically overslept and wasn’t even awake yet.

  He went back inside.

  A long gap awaited him between the last class of Victoria’s for the day and the last class of Kyle’s, and tempted though Ben was to just go home and ignore Kyle entirely, he was aware he’d already graced the American’s bad books with the number of times he’d decided that he didn’t care enough about Law for Journalists and Research Skills to show up.

  He wandered up to the quiet study area with an illicit slice of toast from the cafeteria — they hadn’t yet figured out how to fuck up toast, but they’d definitely worked out how to overcharge for it — and contemplated having a nap across the table again.

  There were too many people to make this viable and non-humiliating, so he stuffed an entire slice of toast into his mouth in one go, opened his Macbook, and prepared to waste some time.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: So now you’re a proper journalist

  Poor Gina’s never going to get the chance to bore me again. Just offer to interview her. I’m going to keep you on speed dial.

  j/k though, nice work on not totally misrepresenting Dr Yagoda’s work.

  Ben coughed toast crumbs all over his laptop keyboard: two girls sitting opposite him sniggered, and the one sitting next to him leaned away.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: re: So now you’re a proper journalist

  Pretty sure I’m not a proper journalist until they pay me, but as soon as they do I’ll … be sure to menace Gina at my earliest convenience?

  Weird thing about all this, though. I tried to contact Dr Yagoda again to make sure I hadn’t totally ballsed up, even though I admit it’s a bit late for that when the article’s already out, but she’s AWOL? Is that normal?

  For a while he checked his other messages: Molly reminding him (and herself) that they were working that evening; Ina reminding him that she had a gig in a week and he was supposed to be helping her find a technician; someone asking after Maggie, because what he needed was for his stomach to churn even more painfully and make him feel like a colossal failure. He couldn’t bring himself to respond with ‘we split up more than a year ago’ and only bothered with the first part of the sentence before Daniel’s reply cut through the overwhelming sickness.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: re: re: So now you’re a proper journalist

  The timing’s unfortunate but I wouldn’t worry about that, you should see how many people on our team arbitrarily fail to show up. Lordes is disappointingly bad at going missing, more’s the pity, but Liam could vanish for England if he wasn’t, in fact, Welsh.

  Ben succeeded in swallowing some of his toast.

  There was also a long enough gap between Kyle’s class finishing early (to everyone’s relief) and Ben’s required presence at The Princess to merit going home first to dispose of his laptop, change his shirt, and hopefully encourage a dinner out of Kingsley.

  When he arrived back, things looked promising. Kingsley was in the kitchen, cooking angrily and in a vest, while Minnie repeatedly tried to jump up on the counter and stick her face in the dinner.

  “What’s that?” Ben asked, stuffing the cat under his arm to a gesture of gratitude from his flatmate.

  “Cock soup. Can you shut her in my bedroom, she’s being a little fucker.”

  Cat imprisonment achieved, Ben returned to lurk in the doorway. He hadn’t realised he was hungry until the smells of cooking came to him, but now he was starving. “How’s your, uh, your kid, the one in the hospital?”

  “You can’t interview him,” Kingsley said, shortly. “The whole fucking thing is an anus pain. Sorry—”

  Ben waved it off. “He’s definitely—?”

  “Oh, he’s got it. He’s basically banged up in hospital until he dies or there’s a cure. Which he hasn’t got into his fucking head yet, because apparently he keeps demanding to be let out and give evidence for the defence.” Kingsley waved a wooden spoon at Ben and went back to shuffling other pans around the tiny stove. “Right, they won’t fucking let me see him. I said, I’m responsible for him, legally he has to be allowed to see his social worker, youth worker, any support worker.”

  “Right,” Ben agreed.

  “Only the prosecution want him as a witness, and apparently they can have him as a witness, even though he’s in quarantine, because they can just put him on videophone or something, and he’s not symptomatic so they don’t have to discount his testimony on the basis of being mental from KBV — sorry—”

  Ben avoided the apology. Kingsley looked stressed, and had already dripped soup on the floor, which suggested why Minnie had been more keen than usual to get out of the bedroom.

  “I got to talk to him once,” said Kingsley, bitterly, “at five, and he doesn’t spend even a second thinking how he’s going to square this with his mother or where she even is, just starts claiming ‘we knew he was KBV pos, we was cleaning up dirty blood, bruv’, and then, then the little prick jams his foot even further in his own ass and says I’m just gonna fucking lie to the Feds and say we wasn’t nowhere near, they can’t put me in prison cuz I’ve got the plague.” He took a deep breath. “So. You were in the papers, man.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, scratching his head. “That was weird.”

  “Nah, it was good, it was well good.”

  “Did you actually read it?”

  “Of course I fucking read it,” Kingsley said, offended. “To everyone else in the fucking office, too.”

  “Oh, god.” Ben retreated from the d
oorway. “I tried to get hold of her again,” he added, backing out towards the living room and the ever-broadcasting TV.

  “Who?”

  “Dr Yagoda. They said she wasn’t in and she hadn’t called in sick.”

  Kingsley stuck his head out of the door and pointed a wet wooden spoon at Ben. “Call the police.”

  “What?”

  “If you think there’s something fucked up about it, call the police.” Kingsley retreated into the kitchen and delivered his last line of wisdom with his back turned.

  “The receptionist seemed to think it was normal,” said Ben, avoiding any mention of Daniel.

  “Then don’t call the police,” said Kingsley, over the sound of bubbling soup.

  “But the timing is pretty dodgy,” Ben said, tapping his tooth with his thumbnail.

  “Then call the fucking police. Stop confusing me, man.”

  By the start of his set at ten, Ben had more or less forgotten about his quandary. Molly had photos of four new inmates at the cat sanctuary which everyone was required to see, and a new bruise on her knee which had to be dug out from under fleece tights and jeans in order to have a proper airing.

  “I fell off my bike,” she said, sadly, “and into a car door.”

  “Every time you make it to work alive it’s a miracle,” Ben assured her. “They’ve got a new IPA though, so you’re cured.”

  His set swapped with Molly’s at eleven, but he hadn’t made it to the bar before his phone began to ring, and he bumped and thumped his way into the toilet to answer it.

  The number wasn’t one he had stored.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, is that Ben Martin?” asked a slightly drunk and worried-sounding woman’s voice that he didn’t recognise.

  “Yah, speaking?” Ben stuck his finger in his opposite ear. Someone in a grey t-shirt pushed past him.

  “Nice set,” said the grey t-shirt.

  “Hey uh, this is Rhiannon Groat,” said the woman.

  “Uh-huh?” said Ben, waiting for this to become even slightly clear to him.

  There was a mumble from a male voice somewhere close to Rhiannon Groat, but Ben didn’t catch what it said. “Did you call Natalya today?” she asked.

  “Uh,” said Ben, “who are you?”

  “We’re on her team,” said Rhiannon Groat, “and it’s pub night and she’s not been in all day and she never, ever calls in sick except for that one time with the fridge and then everyone was sick.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ben patiently, as grey t-shirt left again.

  “We like, we called everyone else, and, and she’s not answering her phone,” said Rhiannon Groat. Something went a little cold inside Ben’s abdomen. “Did you call today and ask for her?”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, “I interviewed her and I wanted to make sure I’d got it all right.”

  “Oh you’re the reporter,” said Rhiannon, with dawning comprehension. “She’s not answering her phone. No, Anil, he’s the reporter.”

  “Get out of the doorway,” complained a man in a red checked shirt which, Ben was embarrassed to note, was identical to his in every way apart from being slightly smaller.

  “She never misses pub night,” Rhiannon said, with the excessive emphasis of the mildly-drunk. “And she’s not answering her phone and she didn’t come in today.”

  “Did you go to her house?” Ben asked, with coldness spreading through his entire body.

  “No one goes to Natalya’s house, she hates people going there,” said Rhiannon, then, decisively, “I think we should go. David, David, call a taxi and we’re going to go—”

  She hung up on him. Ben couldn’t work out if it was deliberate or by accident, but he pushed his phone back into his pocket and decided that if the corner shop across from the Princess was still open, he needed to eat before his next set.

  Half an hour and a surreptitiously-consumed pack of white bread rolls later, his phone rang again.

  Molly caught his eye from the booth and held up five fingers. Ben nodded, put his phone to his ear, and said, “Hell…o?”

  “She’s not at home,” Rhiannon Groat’s voice bawled, somewhere where the wind blew across her speaker. “Hello? Is that Katy?”

  “No, it’s Ben Martin.”

  “Whoops, sorry.”

  Ben put the phone back in his pocket, and bumped his way along the edge of the dance floor to the booth.

  “What’s up?” Molly shouted in his ear, as she moved over. “You look like you saw a ghost!”

  “I THINK THAT DOCTOR I INTERVIEWED HAS GONE MISSING,” Ben shouted back, reaching for the switch between his laptop and Molly’s.

  “YOU SHOULD CALL DR BILL,” she said, moving her laptop out of the way but not unplugging it.

  “WHAT?”

  “Call Dr Bill?!” Molly said, so close to his ear that he could feel her nose on his cheek.

  “WHO?”

  Molly held up her phone, with the words: Dr Bill Green-something? written on the screen.

  “HOW’S THAT GOING TO HELP?” Ben plugged in his laptop, hit play, and began tugging the fader over towards him as the first drums began to kick out.

  “He got threatened by that homeopath guy,” said Molly, as the bass bin stopped shaking underneath them.

  “What?”

  “It was on TV,” Molly said, climbing over the rail. “I bet he knows what to — shit!”

  She slipped, but Ben caught her arm, and someone on the dance floor below caught her hips, and together they righted her and lowered her onto the ground.

  “Whoops,” said Molly, patting her other saviour on the arm. “SORRY, I GOT MUD ON YOUR SHIRT?!”

  As the song hit the first of two key changes, Ben took out his phone, and looked up Dr Bill Greenhill and his experiences with threats, bribes, and TV.

  Saturday was, traditionally, the day Kingsley commandeered the living room to record things, and so Ben folded up his futon, found five quid under the futon, and beat a hasty retreat to the coffee shop with his bag before he could conceivably be thought to be getting in the way.

  “Was that you throwing up last night?” Kingsley asked, still bleary and vest-clad. Ben paused in the doorway.

  “Too much to drink,” he lied, and bolted down the stairs.

  He’d arrived before the majority of people, which gave him unfettered access to the power sockets and the comfortable chair. Ben refrained from actually making the face of a victorious conqueror, and spent an hour trying to edit the back-ups from his Kapture.

  It had genuinely recorded everything, he realised, and not just conversations. There was, for example, a group of several recordings which he immediately deleted because they showed nothing but walking sounds, and another small cluster of three which described the sound of him vomiting.

  He put the loops pertaining to the interview into a folder marked “disease project” and trashed most of the rest.

  After a moment Ben realised he was avoiding something.

  After another moment he managed to tease it out from the vast ocean of things he was avoiding, and thought, might as well.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: She’s actually properly missing.

  Her coworkers called me last night. Molly thinks I should call Dr Bill ‘off the telly’ Greenhill, which in the absence of a sane idea seems like I might as well.

  Do you know how I should get hold of him? The email address on his website doesn’t look promising.

  He considered emailing Sherazi.

  He considered the likely resultant lecture about McNae’s.

  He reconsidered emailing Sherazi.

  Ben opted to watch a video of one of Dr Bill Greenhill’s talks instead.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: re: She’s actually properly missing.

  Jesus fucking Christ, Ben, this is not the F
reemasons, it’s a poorly-paid academic area constantly being attacked by moron politicians. I don’t know every vaguely science-affiliated person walking the face of this earth and I can’t magic up phone numbers for you on a whim, he doesn’t even work in my cocking field. Aren’t you a proper journalist now? Can’t you go and find your own fucking sources?

  Ben took a long, stinging sip of ‘Wintergeddon Special’ latte, and reread the email.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: re: re: She’s actually properly missing.

  It’s a shame you don’t know Dr Bill because I think you’d get on. You sound just like him.

  Ben sat in the coffee shop until lunchtime, fiddling with recordings, watching videos, and occasionally responding to Molly’s photo spam of yet more cats with “that’s cute” and “are you sure that’s a cat, it looks like a horse to me” as the mood took him. Just as his stomach began to complain that he hadn’t consumed anything solid and had in fact brutally robbed it of food last night, he got his reply.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: source-wrangling.

  Dr Greenhill can be reached at 07XXX-XXX-XXX. Don’t ask me how I got this, and don’t forget that you owe me massively now.

  Refilled with food and not exactly bursting with confidence, Ben slogged his way to the gallery he was supposed to be meeting a handful of people in, arrived twenty-five minutes early, and decided not to spend the time playing Sad Crocodile after all. In part, he admitted, because his free trial had run out, but also because he was professional, and organised, and brave, and probably going to go through to voicemail.

  “Hello,” said the booming, impatient voice from the TV. “This is Bill. You’ve called me while I’m flagrantly ignoring my phone, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you when this deplorable condition has been remedied. Unless you’re calling to sue me, in which case I’d prefer an email.”

  “He-hello,” said Ben, pulling his scarf around his throat somewhat too hard. “This is, I’m Ben Martin, I’m — sometimes I’m a writer at the Guardian, I need your advice about something that I think has, has happened to Dr Yagoda, Dr Natalya Yagoda — my number is 07XXX-XXX-333, that’s three threes. Thanks. Sorry.”