The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Right, back in the bar,” said Dr Bill, with some satisfaction. “You’ll note they didn’t actually identify their client.”

  “I’m…kind of sure it was XXXXX/XXXXXX,” Ben said, suddenly not sure at all.

  “Oh, indubitably,” Dr Bill boomed, without much concern. “You will also note that they didn’t throw a bucket of lawyers at you and they haven’t made direct reference to any specific article, if your letter’s like mine, and they are, on the whole, being very vague and mafia-esque, aren’t they?”

  Ben mumbled an affirmative.

  “So,” Dr Bill concluded. “I have quite a lot of experience in pissy letters from angry corporations who are insistent that, whatever else I do, I need to shut up mentioning them and their concerns and their missteps where anyone else can hear me. Sometimes when I’m feeling vindictive I like to put the letters on my blog so they put footers to the effect of ‘any form of publication of this letter will be treated as copyright infringement’ and sometimes ‘breach of confidence’, which I’m sure you know they can’t actually support. Anyway, where was I?” There was a short pause. “BASTARDS. That was it. The bastards in question — yes, hello? I can, if you’d like, but can I finish my conversation first? Thank you, that’s very sweet of you.”

  Ben held his breath.

  “Sorry, there’s a very nice young woman here who wants me to sign a copy of her book. Anyway, as I said, they’re doing what is typically regarded as the ‘we can’t sue you but we want you to think that we can’ dance; we’ve very carefully avoided making any accusations or speculations in that article outside of contextualisation or juxtaposition. Saying that our friend in Tashkent contacted their company is a verifiable statement of fact. Any inference that this is why he has gone missing is a far-fetched fabrication. And while there is a very slim chance they could make an enormous fuss about defamation via inference and implication, I don’t know that they’d have a very good case and at any rate the defamation laws are becoming a good deal more favourable to journalists right now. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Right,” said Ben, who still was.

  “In fact,” Dr Bill said, cheerfully, “if they keep this up we can probably put together a reasonable case for harassment. I’ll ask. It’s a shame your friend didn’t record that phone call.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, closing his eyes. “It is.”

  “I have to go and tell off a lot of very stupid people about their reliance on very disproven science in about — bloody hell — fifteen minutes? — and I did promise this girl her autograph — sorry? Hermione? After the book? After the scientist? Your parents have excellen-oh, you changed your name? You have very good taste. She was a very impressive woman.”

  Ben wondered if he should just hang up now, but Dr Bill resumed:

  “I have to go. Just, do bear in mind I’m not about to let you flounder in this on your own if anything does come of it, which it probably won’t. And…God, what’s that quote — oh yes, when you start meeting resistance it’s because you’re going in the right direction.”

  Ben massaged his own face again.

  “Thank you.”

  “And stop panicking.”

  Easier said than done, Ben thought, as Dr Bill hung up.

  Ben stepped over the post the following evening, and wandered up the stairs with his bag hitting him in the thigh. He had four texts, which had boded well until he saw they were all from Gareth. One, the one he probably wanted — Ben turned the corner and reached for his keys — was blank and had a contact attachment. The other three, Ben thought, he was just going to delete without opening. Ignoring his texts in case of the possibility of someone inviting him to somewhere Maggie might be was also, probably, an overreaction.

  He added Samantha Adrian to his contacts, and after two tries at opening the door without looking, stopped trying to multitask and actually let himself into his flat.

  Minnie had sprawled out belly-up on the futon and was purring noisily, which Ben interpreted as a good sign.

  He opened the next three texts.

  It had not been a good sign.

  Gareth [shithead]: Look I really hope you’re not planning on doing something shitty with her phone number. I gave that to you in good faith.

  Gareth [shithead]: Also I think you owe it to me to tell me what exactly it was you said to that friend of yours and, frankly, who else you’ve been talking to because I’ve had some dubious conversations recently.

  Gareth [shithead]: Ben, you’d better not be trying to fuck me over. I mean, I already said I don’t appreciate the kind of new friends you’re bringing along to my nights, okay. I just think if we’re going to maintain a good professional relationship you need to stop asking for favours quite so much or if you’re going to ask for them maybe do something in return like not spread rumours.

  “The fuck are you on about?” Ben asked his phone, sitting down next to Minnie.

  He scrolled through to Samantha Adrian, and called her.

  “Hello, it’s Sam,” said a recorded voice that sounded as if it came from the same band of nothing towns scattered outside the M25 as Ben’s did. “Sorry, my phone’s probably off at the moment, but leave me a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Providing you leave your number, that always helps. Bye!”

  “Hi,” said Ben, with years of practice in speaking to the answering machines of strangers, “Ben Martin here, friend of Gareth’s and occasional journalist but honestly, mostly a DJ. Gareth gave me your number, hope that’s okay. I’m calling because you used to work for the Mail? And there’s something I was hoping you’d be able to help me with, perhaps? My number’s 07XXX XXX XXX, but if it gets lost Gareth’s got it as well. Thanks! Bye.”

  He checked the time, which was somewhere in the nowhere stretch of the afternoon where most people, in his experience, had given up and gone on Facebook, or had let their work pile up and were now desperately trying to wade through it before five.

  Ben turned up the volume on the TV.

  “—Return to Ava Lawson, who was diagnosed two months ago, and has agreed to be interviewed at St Mary’s. In the last section, we followed Ava’s progress through diagnosis, denial, and acceptance.”

  “Ugh,” said Ben. He reached for the remote, irrationally annoyed that it was possible now to no longer need to mention the name of the disease you were reporting on, because everyone was only talking about one of them. A leap from its previous role as an obscure subject only mentioned by nutters, and not one he appreciated.

  “The main problem is the loneliness,” said a pretty, dark-haired woman in her early thirties, as she sat on a bed. There was a pane of glass visible between her and the lens, Ben noted, and her voice sounded as if it had been recorded over a phone line. “So far, anyway. Of course I’m very scared of what’s happening next — every time I wonder what’s going to happen I start thinking ‘is this me, or is this the illness talking?’, you know? But really, before anything else happens — I know I’m fortunate, it’s probably not very advanced, I have a lot of time to hope for a cure to be developed…but I also have a lot of time to think.”

  To Ben’s deep dislike, the screen cut away from Ava Lawson and began to show photos of her family and her friends, some of them grainy and out of focus, against the worst offender of the ‘pattern of red lights’ stock backgrounds. Ava’s voice continued in voiceover:

  “And a lot of time to be alone. I really miss my family. I miss being able to just call up my friends whenever I want and say hey, how was your day, or whatever. Sometimes they come and visit, but it’s a long way and they can’t stay for long, so it’s really, it’s not the same. It’s very…isolating, I’d say it’s really isolating, like this — knowing that I’m probably going to be in here for actual years, not able to, not able to kiss my husband or hug my little girl, and then you know, you get really afraid — what if one of those times I kissed her goodbye for school, I gave this to her? What if I’ve just sentenced my baby girl
to death? And I didn’t even know?”

  A picture of the girl in question came up on the screen.

  “I think about that a lot,” said Ava. “I’ve sent her to get a sputum test as soon as they’re back in the pharmacies, I’ve got to be sure. I want to hold her more than anything, but — I’d rather never hold her hand again than have her in here with me.”

  Ben turned the TV down, changed the channel to something featuring monster trucks, and stood up. “That’s enough,” he muttered, and began looking for the landline.

  Once he’d found the handset, he made a thorough search of the flat, then of his email inbox, until he found the number.

  He got back onto the futon, sat cross-legged with the phone in his hand, and took three long, deep breaths. It didn’t matter how he felt about it, Ben reasoned. This wasn’t about whether he was comfortable. It wasn’t about being freaked out or not wanting to get stuck obsessing about what was happening or trying to fight off the inevitable moment when he scorched the inside of his mouth with stomach acid again. This was about Leah and loneliness and isolation and about making sure she didn’t feel like everyone had abandoned her, even if she couldn’t retain that knowledge—

  His mobile buzzed, and then beeped.

  “Oh thank god,” Ben muttered, dropping one handset in favour of the other.

  It was Samantha.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello!” she said, with the same Home Counties accent-eroded-by-London that Ben knew came out of his mouth. “Is this Ben Martin?”

  “Yes! Thank you for getting back to me so quickly—”

  “Ugh, sorry, I was in a horrendous meeting and I’ve just escaped, you are a distraction from going back to header wars. Please tell me you’re a pleasant distraction?”

  “Dunno about that,” Ben said, leaning back on the futon. “I actually wanted to talk to you about when you worked at the Mail and I suspect that’s not a happy subject.”

  “No,” Samantha agreed. “Well, the part where I left is. Why do you need to know?”

  “I’m, uh, I’m sort of part of the way through a journalism qualification myself, and—”

  “Don’t do it,” Samantha said abruptly. “Don’t do it, do — do not do it.”

  “Bit late,” Ben said.

  “May God have mercy on your soul. At least steer clear of the Mail.”

  “I’ve,” Ben tapped his teeth, realised he was tapping his teeth in the middle of a sentence, and stopped. “I’ve been told that by a few people, yeah.”

  “God the things I could tell you about that place,” Samantha said grimly. “Although that will have to wait. Was there something specific?”

  “Yeah, I just…I was wondering if you happened to be in contact with Amanda DeWalt?” Ben fidgeted with his socks.

  “Hell fucking no, not if I can help it,” Samantha sounded horrified, which Ben gathered was a standard response to the woman’s name. He frequently felt the same way himself, and he’d never even met her. “Do you want her number? I’ve — unfortunately — got her number. If there is some way you taking her number can erase her from my life and or memory please, for the love of God, take her number.”

  “I would, in fact, like her number,” said Ben.

  “Okay,” Samantha said. “I will dig that out of my big fat folder of no this evening and call you back tomorrow with it, if you can wait that long.”

  “Sure.”

  “Also,” said Samantha, “my condolences on having to speak to Amanda for whatever reason. You don’t sound like Satan in human form and you said you were a friend of Gareth’s so I’m assuming you’re not actually bred in the sulphurous pools of hell?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” said Ben, who wasn’t quite sure how being Gareth’s nominal friend meant he was free of being tarred with an apparently eggy brush.

  “Well, good luck,” said Samantha. “I should have a moment around lunchtime. Also, take my advice and stay far, far away from journalism in general, it is horrible and it will make you a horrible person.”

  Ben laid his phone down on the futon and wriggled his fingers at the cat, who sneezed. Rather reluctantly, he picked up the phone again and sent Gareth a short missive of thanks for the contact, carefully ignoring the entire rest of his complaints.

  The sky outside had darkened to a deep blue that was almost beautiful.

  “Shit,” he added, apropos of little. “I forgot the post, post.”

  He slipped trainers on his feet, thumped down the stairs, picked up a collection of letters, and thumped back up the stairs.

  “Kingsley, Kingsley, Kingsley,” Ben dropped the letters outside his flatmate’s bedroom. “Me, from the Labour Party — you’re late, everyone else was yesterday — me, from…no I don’t want to buy a sofa…me, from — oh.”

  He gave the blue NHS logo a worried look, and opened the letter.

  Dear MR BEN MARTIN,

  We regret to inform you that it has been necessary to remove LEAH MARTIN onto the secure ward of K wing in order to provide her with the care she needs. It will no longer be possible for you to transfer phone calls through to the ward via the hospital switchboard, but should you wish to contact your SISTER, an appointment can be made ten or more days in advance for visitation and conversation via the intercom at the visiting room.

  In order to make this appointment please call the main hospital number plus extension 0990.

  In order to contact the team in charge of your SISTER’s care please call the main hospital number plus extension 0991 and state the case number.

  At the NHS we know that having a loved one in quarantine can be distressing. The incidence of depression and other mental illnesses in the families of quarantined patients is higher than in the normal population. Should you find you need support in this difficult time, a team specialising in KBV sufferers’ relatives has been founded at this hospital. To book an appointment to speak to the team, please see attached leaflet.

  [mailed unsigned to minimise delay]

  RICHARD ADEYEMI

  HEAD ADMINISTRATIVE NURSE, K WING, XXXXXXX HOSPITAL

  Ben looked at the attached leaflet: What to do when a loved one has KBV.

  He read the leaflet all the way through to the end. It was a new leaflet: it mentioned the sputum test, and referred to several helplines that hadn’t existed before Christmas, to his knowledge.

  He put down the leaflet, and the letter, and felt his face crease into a variety of different expressions. His stomach felt very hollow, and a little like someone had winded him. His cheeks kept twitching into what must have been a horrific parody of a smile.

  He turned the TV up to full volume and put it on the shopping channel, where a woman in a powder blue blazer was extolling the virtues of a copper bracelet that alleviated joint pain.

  He opened the calendar on his phone, and scrolled forward through three months.

  There was a certain sad sort of irony, he supposed, that it had to be April, at the absolute best. She might — might — just about make it to her birthday, so that she could be thirty-one and drowning in her own blood, only just able to make sense of her own suffering through clouds of rage and agony.

  Ben went into the kitchen, and opened the bread bin.

  He was woken at dark o’clock in the morning by the living room light. Confused, Ben sat up and squinted around him: after a while he reached for his glasses and found Kingsley standing by the light switch, ready for work, bicycle in hand.

  “Whu?” Ben asked, groping for consciousness.

  “We need to have a talk about you not flushing that toilet after…whatever it is you’re doing in there.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven.”

  “Can you bollock me this evening instead,” Ben said, sliding back down onto the futon with his glasses still on. “I won’t remember if you do it now.”

  “I ain’t bollocking you,” said Kingsley, turning the light back off. “But I keep finding puke in there and e
ither you’re drinking way too fucking much or you need to see a doctor like, yesterday.”

  “Sorry.” Ben pulled the duvet over his head, and then remembered he was still wearing his glasses.

  Kingsley opened the door and made a tcch sound. “This ain’t an apologising matter,” he said, simply. “This is a you are fucked up matter. Get help.”

  “Right,” said Ben, half-asleep. “Sorry.”

  When he woke up again at ten, Ben wasn’t sure if he’d dreamed the whole conversation. He got up, made toast, showered, put in his contact lenses, came back, ate cold toast, tripped over the cat, and made an executive decision. Maybe he’d dreamed it, maybe he hadn’t: the bathroom probably needed cleaning anyway.

  It was, he acknowledged, in no small way linked to a patient but unimpressed email from Kyle reminding him that he was still behind on last term’s summaries and that he didn’t appear to have done anything whatsoever for his final essay on Journalism and Law that Kyle had seen.

  Ben made a point of pulling the top off the toilet cistern and making sure the entire flush mechanism was working.

  An outline, Kyle’s email had said, some section headings. It’s only three thousand words. For a final piece that’s peanuts. You’re going to have to do better than this in the second year. Or if you want to do a degree afterward at all.

  Ben spent some important time in front of the mirror trying to work out how visible his broken blood vessels were becoming. He flossed several times, and surreptitiously drank some of Kingsley’s mouthwash without gargling.

  At last, it was evident that he was going to have to sit down and come up with an outline.

  It was however also sneaking up to half-past twelve, which Ben thought meant he probably shouldn’t get too deeply into anything, in case he wanted lunch.

  He opened the Macbook, avoided opening any new files, and spent a while ‘maybe’-ing invitations on Facebook in the sincere knowledge that he wasn’t going to show up and had no intention of doing so.

  He’d just given up and opened and saved a file entitled: Kyle’s Class Final Project Outline when his phone rang.