The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  Ben tried not to appear too relieved to his audience of an empty flat, a TV showing adverts, and a sleeping cat.

  “Hello?” Samantha Adrian’s voice came to him. “Is this Ben Martin again?”

  “That’s me,” Ben said.

  “I’m abusing work resources,” she said, conversationally. “I ran out of free calls this month so I’m using the land line. Thought I’d done a wrong number. Anyway. Sorry about the massive delay, meetings the entire morning, although at least I had warning for these.”

  “That’s alright,” Ben said, mentally adding you don’t hurry a favour. It seemed too much of a cliché to say out loud.

  “Okay. DeWalt’s number is 07XXX XXX XXX; most of the time you’ll go through to voice mail and she’ll call back, she likes to be in control,” Samantha said with a certain grimness. “So try to leave something enticing but non-confrontational. God help you if she decides you’re not genuine.”

  “G-great?” Ben said, already worried. “07XXX XXX XXX?”

  “That’s it.”

  Ben pushed aside the memo file on his screen and said, “Er, while you’re here, do you mind if I ask you something about when you were at the Mail?”

  “Oh, hah, if you want Mail on Sunday PTSD stories I’ve got thousands. Everyone here’s sick of them.” She sounded as if she were only half-joking. “Ask away, I’m on lunch and I’ve missed the exodus to the pesto place. Not supposed to be leaving my desk.”

  “Right,” Ben composed himself. “Were you working there when the first KBV stories broke?”

  “Hm. No, I wasn’t there for the first ones…got in for some of the first origin ones, though. Is that what you’re interested in DeWalt for?”

  She was shrewd, he thought, but he supposed you couldn’t survive at the Mail without having an instinct for that sort of thing.

  “What was it like?” Ben asked, sticking to the vaguest possible parameters.

  “Weird,” Samantha said, with emphasis. “I mean, I was new, I didn’t really know what it was like there, so I didn’t have anything to compare it against but oh my god…okay, I don’t know if you’ve talked to anyone else there but they’ll verify this for you: the editorial culture there is batshit insane. You get bizarre orders regarding even really simple things, emails at nine at night saying ‘we need something nasty about Miley Cyrus by six tomorrow morning’, it corrodes the fucking soul — excuse me — but when the whole government inspector thing kicked off …”

  “Yes?” Ben sat forward on the futon.

  “Okay, anyone with half a brain could tell — even before the latency stuff came out — that it didn’t make sense for the spread of it for that whole Badai-Tugai thing to be true. It didn’t matter if whatshername came flying out of the dark and bit them like a vampire because only one of them travelled anywhere after that before coming back to Tashkent and going properly symptomatic. They’d all travelled before. There just wasn’t time. But we got so much pressure to write up that origin. It’s definitely from Badai-Tugai. It’s definitely something that came out of the wilderness. DeWalt got in first and got the prize—”

  “Prize?”

  “Oh, there was an incentive bonus going around for keeping the ball rolling on the Badai-Tugai thing and keeping it within the approved editorial channels with some good sources. Not the first time there’s been an incentive package for a story.” Samantha sounded unimpressed. “Bullshit sources, probably, or very confused ones. I used to get late night phone calls telling me ‘we need stuff about travel and Uzbekistan in the morning, hop to it, shove in a reference to Badai-Tugai and safety and whatever, we don’t want this slipping out of people’s consciousness.”

  “Did you ever wonder why?” Ben asked, immediately sure this was a stupid question.

  “All the fucking time — sorry — to begin with, but you get used to the madness after a while. Like I said, it corrodes the soul. You’re so busy competing that you don’t care what else is happening.”

  “You said it was weird—”

  “It was.” Samantha was firm. “The weirdest part was I was in contact with a couple of people at some other papers — friend of mine from university who got lucky and was writing for one of the proper broadsheets, friend of theirs was toeing the line at the Indy — and they were getting some similar pushes. Without, of course, the traditional Mail approach of ‘you useless cunts I’m going to eyefuck the lot of you’ — sorry — motivational speeches but nudges, removals, edits: DeWalt got the first one in but Badai-Tugai was everywhere after she’d pushed it out.”

  “Any idea where she got it from?” Ben said.

  “Hah, I wouldn’t want to talk to her either, but she was guarding that fucking source like a broody rottweiler You’re going to have to call her.” Samantha made an eesh noise down the phone. “Rather you than meeee. Say hello to Gareth for me, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  The conversation petered out slowly — Samantha Adrian clearly didn’t want to do any work any more than Ben did — but they’d run out of topics, and soon enough the dial tone was back in Ben’s ear.

  He made a couple of notes.

  “Fuck,” Ben muttered, looking at the empty file labelled with Kyle’s name. “Alright.”

  By four he wasn’t exactly happy with the outline but at least it existed. He threw the email at Kyle in desperation rather than confidence, and stared at the memo file with Amanda DeWalt’s number in it.

  He opened her profile page at the paper and stared at the byline photo.

  She looked a little like the mid-nineties incarnation of Julia Roberts, but without any softness in her eyes, and lighter hair. Gaunt, almost, around the neck. Definite hint of plastic surgery but nothing solid. Smile which was so self-assured that Ben was sure at least six people he knew would have wanted to launch a brick at it even without knowing the kind of things she wrote.

  The headlines underneath her name were a treat:

  Gay Adoption Is Ruining Our Country

  Climate Change Swindle Benefits Illegal Immigrants With Sob Stories About Global Warming

  Hospital Trust Allows KBV-Infected To Roam The Wards

  Ben closed the window again and stared at her mobile number.

  It was only a voicemail message, he reminded himself. She never picked up. She’d just…in all probability devour him whole like some kind of—

  You’re used to Sherazi, Ben reminded himself. How much worse can she be?

  He emailed Daniel instead.

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: frying pans and fires

  Assuming you’re not in prison for blowing up UCLH and haven’t run away to Guatemala to shove your junk in people’s faces, do you have any words of wisdom on the enterprise of phoning Amanda DeWalt?

  He sat back on the futon and Minnie walked across his shoulders, purring noisily.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: frying pans and fires

  You mean the journalist? The one from the Mail? The one who thinks gays are trying to win tax breaks and corrupt children and the world is cooling down and actually polar bears are fine and KBV is both natural and God’s punishment on a corrupt earth? That Amanda DeWalt? My words of wisdom are: wear a hazmat suit and find some way to Taser people over the phone. Rather you than me.

  But if you’re going to do it, do it. Like pulling off a fucking plaster, don’t be a big baby about it and just get it over with.

  “No, that’s not what I wanted,” Ben said to the ceiling.

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: re: re: frying pans and fires

  Sure I can’t tempt you to talk to her instead? Less likely to remove your head and play football with it.

  Ben wasted a few minutes wondering whether pitting Daniel against DeWalt would be an even match or a massacre, and then which side it would be a massacre on, before getting another disappointing reply:

  To:
Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: stop being a baby

  I’d rather put my dick in an autoclave for the remainder of this century than try to make a civilised sentence in her direction but if you need someone to call her a cunt until I run out of breath, I’m your man.

  As I’m suspecting you’re not after an automated abuse machine, you’re going to have to do it yourself.

  “Ugh,” said Ben. He switched through to Facebook and found another invitation.

  Joel White: Got foisted a Groupon thing to FNoodle in Camden, fancy it?

  Ben tapped the keyboard, and then his teeth. Well, he couldn’t phone Amanda DeWalt during dinner. That would be rude.

  Ben M: Yeah, why not.

  After a couple of hours of Joel, and Joel’s love-life, and Joel’s escalating war of passive-aggression with his flatmate, and Joel’s complete certainty that this job was going to be the job that he stuck at, and endless reminders of why Joel was not a regular fixture in the roster of his friends, Ben felt curiously elated when he walked out into freezing rain.

  The elation was dampened somewhat by a drop of said rain falling down the back of his neck before he could do anything about it, but by the time he’d got to the Sainsburys bus stop to wait for a 253, he felt more capable of dealing with a voicemail than he had.

  “Hello,” Ben told Amanda DeWalt’s voicemail, as the bus pulled away. “I was wondering if you could get in touch with me on 07XXX XXX XXX as soon as is convenient. My name’s Ben Martin, I need to talk to you about your work uncovering the potential source of KBV.”

  That, he thought, would have to be sufficient. Either she wanted to follow up on it, or she didn’t.

  His phone rang at nine. Ben nearly jumped out of his skin, but it was only Daniel.

  He peered around the living room at Kingsley, who was eating cereal out of the packet and had said nothing about the bathroom whatsoever, and ran down the stairs with his phone pressed to the side of his head.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m stuck in the fucking lab all fucking night, entertain me.”

  “All night?” Ben asked, turning outside his front door and discovering that freezing rain was still happening and that it didn’t agree with his t-shirt. “I don’t know that I have that much entertainment in me.”

  “Nor do I,” Daniel said, grimly. “But I’ve run out of internet and it’s this or Grindr.”

  “I’m honoured to be in such illustrious company.” Ben shuffled around the corner and under the awning of the now-shut shop next to the one he usually thought of as ‘his’. “I called DeWalt.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing, I spoke to her answerphone.”

  Daniel groaned. “No, no, no. There was meant to be a half an hour of drama and invective and you didn’t even speak to her.”

  “You know you could just watch TV on your laptop.”

  “Have to keep an eye on things,” Daniel lamented. “This is the worst job in the world.”

  “I think there are sewer-cleaners who might disagree with that. Come to think of it, Kingsley might disagree with that. He keeps having to do sputum tests because the kids keep spitting at him when they’re pissed off.”

  There was a silence on the other end. Daniel said, “Yeah…speaking of tests.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “Just sort of. As a ballpark figure. Roughly how many people have you slept with?”

  Ben leaned back against the dark window of the shop, and shivered. He could think of better conversations to be having, and better places to be having them.

  “Why?”

  “Humour me.”

  “Fuck’s sake.” Ben scuffed a piece of chewing gum on the pavement with his toe. “Four.”

  “Four?” Daniel screeched. “What the fuck are you, a monk?”

  “I was in a relationship for five fucking years,” Ben pointed out, aware of how unfriendly he sounded. “Which I was quite happy with until it fucking fell apart.”

  “Yeah but you’re what, twenty…eight? Twenty-nine? Nearly gay dead—”

  “Good thing I’m not gay,” Ben informed his trainers, feeling his face grow hot. “Is this what you wanted to do? Call me up and be a dick? Weren’t you planning on not being a dick?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I was, actually,” Daniel said, in a less exuberantly alarmed voice. “I actually meant. I was considering.”

  Ben said nothing.

  “How many people have you kissed?”

  “Fuck off, Daniel.”

  The dial tone returned to his ears. Ben couldn’t work out if he’d hung up on him, or if he himself had managed to hang up the call with his own face, which wouldn’t be the first time.

  He considered calling back, but instead remembered he had his e-shisha in his pocket, and removed it.

  “Hey,” Nas stuck his head out of the door, one building along. “Fuck, man, you know the point of those is you don’t have to go outside? It’s fucking raining, yeah? Get in here.”

  Ben obeyed, and spent a few minutes vaping, listening to Nas explain that Ozil’s speed had turned out to be mostly glucose, but that they were getting more soon, and if he wanted any all he had to do was ask.

  “We do you a discount, yeah,” said Nas, patting Ben on the arm. “You’re proper good, yeah.”

  Ben gave him a weak smile, and had just got into the door of his staircase when his phone rang again.

  He’d been expecting Daniel — composed enough now not to tell him to fuck off again — but the number wasn’t familiar.

  “Hel—”

  “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, or how the fuck you got my number,” rasped a woman’s voice that had seen too many cigarettes and not enough water, “but if you think for one minute that you can just stuff your beak into my work and expect to get away with making insinuations you can think again. I will sue you within an inch of your fucking bones. I will find your contact and I will sue them until their eyes bleed. You can expect to see every brush your family has had with so much as failing to put their bins out in the national press for the next since months. You will never know privacy again. I will remove your goddamn spleen and feed it to the pigeons, do I make myself clear? Get fucking back!”

  The line went dead again.

  Ben stared at his handset for a moment, frowning. It hadn’t sounded like Noelle, but — as he was alarmed to realise — he had probably annoyed so many people recently that the list of potential candidates for abusive phone calls couldn’t be whittled down by just removing the voices he recognised.

  He went back upstairs.

  “Sup?” Kingsley asked.

  Ben dropped his phone on the futon and flopped down next to it. “I’m never answering that again.”

  Kingsley nodded solemnly. “Oh, that feeling.”

  Ben picked up his laptop. “D’you mind if I watch a—”

  Kingsley reached down the side of the futon and passed him a set of recording headphones. “Knock yourself out.”

  A cold, sinking feeling attached itself to Ben’s diaphragm. He opened the laptop, sinking into a sitting position with it balanced on the side of his knee. He could still be wrong. After all, the voice he was looking for was one he only really knew from its written form.

  While his flatmate argued amiably with an episode of Only Connect Ben was sure he’d seen once already, he hunted through YouTube. Eventually he found it: the episode of Question Time where someone had pitted Phil Jacy — belligerent, intelligent, professional atheist and stand-up comedian, friend of Dr Bill, utterly placid to most and entirely pugnacious to people he regarded to be purveyors of malicious falsehoods, and possessed of some very very red hair — against Amanda DeWalt, alongside the usual smattering of politicians who had recently disgraced themselves and audience members who had spent months researching their questions.

  He watched without interest. The clip was from more than a year ago — nearly
two — and the issues which had seemed important now seemed silly.

  There was an audience question about global warming, and with obvious glee the cameras turned to focus on Amanda DeWalt, Amanda’s big, dark-golden hair which had evidently been dyed at the roots, Amanda’s wide mouth and dark eyes.

  She opened her wide mouth, and a voice rendered hoarse by cigarettes said, “I think it’s making a mockery of scientific progress in this country to allow the continual suppression of contrary views.”

  “Oh, shit,” muttered Ben.

  Half-way between classroom and cafeteria, Ben found himself faced with Kyle. Behind him, Tasneen pulled up her hood over her hijab and pretended very hard to be invisible.

  “Nice outline, Ben,” said Kyle, with a mild smile. The mild smile blended in seamlessly with the non-descript, faded Metallica t-shirt, the bald patch, the determined remains of a greying ponytail.

  “Thanks?” Ben offered.

  “Do you actually know any of that?” Kyle continued, with the same mild smile. It felt a little like being chased by a sheep.

  “Ahah,” Ben said, backing into the wall. “No-ot…yet…”

  Kyle nodded to himself. “Perhaps you’d like to catch up with your set reading and find out that everything you need is in the course books, since you seem to be allergic to my classes?”

  “Er…sure…” Ben said, accidently bumping into Tasneen.

  “If you happen to see Tasneen,” Kyle said, with grave irony, “tell her I’d like to see an outline by the end of the week or I’m going to want to see her in the staff room for a conversation.”

  “Will do,” Ben said, as if she wasn’t directly behind him and hiding her face against his back in slapstick despair.

  When Kyle was out of earshot, Tasneen popped out from behind him again and said, “Argh.”

  “Just bullshit something. Find some chapter headings and rephrase them.”

  “Bleh,” said Tasneen, who’d clearly given up on English for the day. She slumped against the wall. “What if I just mail my brother a sputum test?”

  Slightly fazed by this abrupt change of subject, Ben said, “W-would he take it?”