Curse of the Potency Read online

  I was confused, both because I couldn’t understand why wine had to be vegan and because of the alcohol thing.

  “I thought you said I wasn’t allowed to drink.”

  “No…” she said. “But this is vegan wine. And you’ve been doing so well. It’ll only be one glass. It won’t mess up the diet. Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks,” I said, though I was hardly worried on that score.

  “Have you got any glasses?”

  She looked around the room expectantly.

  “Not wine glasses,” I said. “But got some normal glasses somewhere.”

  I normally drank out of cans or bottles or whatever the packaging of the drink I was drinking happened to be, but I did have a glass or two hidden in one of the boxes. When I’d moved my stuff, I just chucked everything higgledy-piggledy into them.

  “That’s fine,” she said while I rummaged. “And plates. Do you have those? Cutlery?”

  She was being sarcastic, but I liked that.

  “Yeah, course,” I said. “Even got chairs. And a normal toilet for you.”

  At the mention of the bathroom, I realised I had done zilch to clean that up for her. Women did appreciate a clean loo—or at least not an absolutely disgusting one. I made a mental note to zip in there and give it a quick once-over just as soon as I located the glasses, which as yet I was having trouble finding.

  *****

  When we got down to eating, the spag-bol was actually alright, though I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was good. It wasn’t. Whoever thought that this chewy, vaguely meaty substance tasted anything like real beef needed their head examined. Plus, for me, half the appeal of a spag-bol was the mounds of parmesan cheese I would dump on it, yet clearly with this vegan diet I wasn’t able to do that. She did bring some vegan parmesan, of course, but I wasn’t touching it. Been there, done that.

  “What do you think, Dave?” she said as I shovelled it down the hatch.

  “It’s alright, yeah.”

  In truth I was simply starving, as I generally was whilst under the oppression of that diet. I ate most vegan meals like my life depended on it and not like eating was the one pleasurable thing in my life, which ordinarily it was. There was no pleasure for me now.

  “Good,” she said.

  She poured a glass of the “wine” into one of the tumblers I’d located. I’d cleverly gone to the toilet to wash them up and used that time to give the place a bit of a spruce—give the toilet itself a flush, wipe the seat and close the shower curtains (to hide all the hair and dirty underpants that were lying in state).

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I did my best not to grimace as the sourness of it hit my tongue. I wasn’t a wine critic or anything, but it wasn’t exactly brimful of fruity flavour. Nothing like that wine I’d had round the doc’s. It was funny though, because I saw a similar shudder of distaste ripple over her face.

  “How’s the wine?” I asked.

  “Hmmm…” she said, putting down the glass. “I’ve had better. But look, I wanted to talk to you, Dave.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, it’s about the diet. And your condition.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to get excited or not. Could I go off the diet? Did she have some results for me finally?

  “I can’t be one-hundred per cent sure yet,” she said hesitantly, “but I do think, looking at things so far, the two are definitely related.”

  “I see,” I said, nodding meaningfully, waiting for her to explain that a bit.

  “What I mean is,” she continued, “it would seem that the potency of your urine is in direct correlation to the toxicity of your diet. If that makes sense?”

  I had a sinking feeling this revelation was going to involve me going on more diets.

  “Direct correlation?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, simply put, the worse the diet, the stronger the pee.”

  That was indeed what old Meg, the cook at the prison in Crawley, had said and what I had suspected, though I’d really hoped it wouldn’t be true, since it almost definitely meant me changing quite a few cherished lifestyle choices.

  “So, Dave,” she said, putting a hand on mine. It gave me a little shiver, actually, but it was also quite obviously a friendly gesture rather than a romantic one. “This information will have consequences, okay? I just wanted to say I know it will be hard for you, but you may need to consider a longer-term diet if you want to get better.”

  “Right,” I said. “You mean, like, staying vegan?”

  “Maybe,” she said with a solemn nod.

  I shook my head to myself. The mere idea felt like a death sentence.

  “I mean, I should stress that I cannot definitely draw this conclusion yet. It’s just where things appear to be heading, with the analysis I’ve done so far. It is much healthier for you anyway. Surely you feel—I don’t know—better recently?”

  I considered this. Yes and no was the answer. Perhaps it could be said that physically I felt a bit less… heavy on my feet. But really, honestly and truly, the food was awful. Terrible. I think I hated it more than I’d ever hated anything in my life. Even more than Daryl.

  “Oh my God, Dave, if you could see your face sometimes. You look like someone’s just walked over your grave.”

  She laughed. I smiled through the dread I was experiencing. It was always nice to see her laugh.

  She did an embarrassed sort of a cough. “Well look, Dave, let’s not rush ahead too quickly. This would seem to be the obvious conclusion to draw, but it’s hardly definitive yet. I still can’t help thinking I am missing something. I mean, why you? Why now? Why not others? It is very weird.”

  It was touching to see she had invested real emotion into my case yet bizarre to think that the fixing of my horrifically mutated member was behind everything we did.

  “Er… Because I’m special?” I offered. “Because I’m a fat bastard?”

  She laughed. “Well indeed. Or perhaps you were abducted by aliens.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly I almost thought she was being serious.

  She laughed again. “I just wanted to let you know where I was at though, okay? As I said, your case is extremely perplexing, and I believe it will require years of exhaustive study to truly get to the bottom of it—if ever. It’s going to be a long road.”

  “Well that’s reassuring…” I said, chugging my wine and wondering blissfully if that meant I could be working with her for years and years.

  The conversation came to a sort of an impasse at that point, so I decided to give it a little push in the right direction by downing my glass of wine, giving her a face like I’d just drunk the world’s tangiest lemon, and swiftly following that up by refilling my glass before she had a chance to stop me.

  “Well here’s to you learning all the mysteries of my waterworks,” I said, holding my glass out to her. “Cheers.”

  She looked at me, sort of repressing a smile and also slightly disapproving of me but doing so in a long-suffering parental sort of a way, like I was a naughty, much-loved dog that had just peed in the corner again after repeatedly being told off for doing that.

  “You are truly a gross man, David Smith, but I guess you know that already. Cheers.”

  She lifted her glass too, and after a brief chink, I said “bottoms up!” and downed mine before she had a chance to say anything.

  “Dave!”

  “Your turn now.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. You’re in my territory now. My rules.”

  She made a face and then, to my delight, downed the glass in one go.

  “God,” she said, her eyes streaming. “This stuff really is disgusting.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I agreed. “There’s only one way to drink it.”

  I filled the glasses once again.

  “More?”

  *****

  We finished the meal and the wine on a pleasant note, a nice buzz and a bit of that heart-pumping fizz you
always get from the downing of alcohol with someone new. We chatted about various things: education (my lack of), food (my love of), her ambitions (so many), and daily life since my world had been shattered by the onset of my little “problem.” Never the elephant in the room—at least, what I considered to be the elephant in the room: Daryl. Why she tolerated him and what was or had been going on between them. There came a point when I was ready to broach this subject or, rather, could not let it pass by any longer, but then, at roughly that same point, I needed a wee, and so we arrived at an awkward pass where I had to invite her to leave the room while I did my business into the special green metal bin thing.

  “I’ll wait outside,” she said. “It’s no problem.”

  When finished, I dutifully pushed the button and instantly felt a bit of a downer as I realised that Bill would likely show up at any second and ruin the mood. To my surprise, he didn’t. Instead, Molly came back in and did the job herself.

  “Where’s Bill?” I asked, not really caring, just being polite.

  “Oh, I gave him the night off,” she said, unscrewing the tank. “I figured he could use it. It’s been almost three weeks straight for him now.”

  “Yeah, what a trooper.”

  “You don’t like Bill, do you?” she said, lifting the container.

  “Er, what makes you say that?”

  I felt my face flush. She had hit the nail right on the head. He was a grumpy bastard was why, though of course I didn’t fancy saying that to her.

  “Because,” she said. “He told me.”

  “He told you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s very shy, you know. He struggles in social situations, especially with people who are… different to him.”

  “Different?”

  I was completely lost now. I had no sympathy for the guy, really, apart from the nasty job he’d been lumbered with.

  “Yes,” she said, carrying the tank out. “More confident, I mean.”

  Confident? There were many things I’d been called, but that was definitely not one of them.

  “I’m not confident,” I said when she came back.

  “Of course you are!” She laughed. “You speak your mind. You say what you mean and mean what you say.”

  “Do I?”

  I was about as confused as a cow on AstroTurf, mainly because I had the suspicion that she was paying me a weird kind of compliment.

  “Yes, Dave.” She said this forcefully, standing there before me.

  I couldn’t help briefly wondering if she ever thought about that moment during the examination.

  “Alright then,” I said. Sod it, I thought. I’ll give it a go. “Tell me about Daryl.”

  “What about him?”

  “Come on. I know there’s something going on between you.”

  Her face went red. “Oh really?”

  “Yes. I have a nose for these things.”

  I didn’t have such a nose, of course, not at all, but it seemed like the words a confident person might say. Unfortunately, she seemed a little distressed being confronted in this way and I instantly regretted asking about it.

  “Well,” she said. “Yes, we did once have a”—she searched for the word—“a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  I desperately wanted to end the conversation but couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know. I did, mainly so I could figure out the best way of ribbing Daryl about it and hopefully scupper any plans he may have had for getting back with her. But it was obviously causing her pain to talk about it.

  “Look, Dave, it’s complicated, you know. Sometimes people have things and they don’t work out. We were just very different people. Too different. It happened. Now it’s over. End of story.”

  There are times when I do wish I would just shut up, but she had riled me a bit with that comment about people having “things.” I didn’t have “things” and she knew that only too well, what with her pages and pages of notes about me.

  “It didn’t seem over to me when Daryl came down to your office. I mean, how can you work here with him? Work under your ex-boyfriend?”

  She frowned hazily down at her fingers.

  “It was a hard decision to make, yes. And perhaps you don’t realise, but this is a big deal for Daryl. I felt it was the right thing to accept his invitation. And despite any issues we may have had, he’s been good to me here. And it has been a very interesting opportunity to work on your case. Very interesting.”

  That pleased me.

  She sighed and looked at her watch. “Anyway, I think I’d better be going now.”

  “You don’t have to. You could stay for a bit. Watch a movie or something. I’m sick of being here on my own all the time.”

  She bit a lip awkwardly.

  “I’m sorry, Dave,” she said. “I can’t stay. I’m glad we had this chance to talk, but I’ve got some work to catch up on now.”

  “What? Now?”

  Worst excuse ever.

  “Yes. I’ve always got lots of data and reports to go through. It’s one of the hazards of the profession, I am afraid.”

  And with that, she left.

  I had ruined everything. Not that I had in any way expected anything to happen between us. Not in the least. But I had a vague idea we could’ve hung out, chillaxed, shot the breeze. Shits and giggles and that. But it wasn’t to be.

  I blamed Daryl. That was easiest.

  *****

  Later that evening, I needed to pee again.

  When I was done, I automatically hit the red button. Not really thinking, I expected Bill to show up. I was planning to say something to him, actually. Not “What’ve you been saying about me to people, you miserable git?” More along the lines of “Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to upset you. Now can you tell Molly I said that and tell her what a super-nice guy I am too while you’re at it, would you?”

  But once again, it was Molly, not Bill.

  “I told you I gave Bill the night off,” she said.

  She seemed to have chilled out a bit and had changed into one of those ridiculous onesies, hers being of the fluffy pink rabbit variety. I say ridiculous, although it was something I’d wanted for myself for a while. Not a fluffy pink one, obviously, but they were perfect for chillaxing.

  “Are you sleeping the night here then?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve a bed upstairs. You know that.”

  She said this very pointedly, causing me to break out in what felt like an extremely hot red rash all over my body.

  “Well, goodnight, Dave,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She was about to leave—I had to say it now or I never would.

  “Sorry, Molly.”

  “For what?” She looked genuinely confused.

  “For mentioning, you know…” I was getting clammy just when it was really unhelpful. “Daryl.”

  “Oh!” She laughed. “Don’t worry. I told you there is nothing between us anymore. Now please don’t mention it ever again.”

  And with that, she really did leave.

  I couldn’t blame her, really. Apart from anything else, she had to carry a big canister of my urine to the containment facility.

  I sighed, sort of like how I imagine Cinderella might sigh.

  And tomorrow morning I could look forward to muesli with oat milk or maybe vegan “eggs.” Yuck!

  Just some more examples of how messed up my life had become.

  Chapter 9

  Putting to one side the lingering awkwardness of that discussion with Molly and the awful prospect that veganism might have been my only ticket to urine normality, I found myself feeling less and less happy about being banged up in that godforsaken basement and simply waiting for them to move me out. So reminded about Byron and Marcus and their work on the whatever-it-was-called ridiculously named mega-dega-blah-blah-blah material, I decided to finally pay those two eggheads a visit, see where they were at. Byron had said to come down any time, after
all.

  Their lab was by far the most impressive area in the whole Solar Ray building—at least, what I had seen of it. Completely open-plan, the entire third floor was occupied by workstations and humming machines and computers and microscopes and scientists operating all sorts of equipment, the purpose of which I didn’t understand in the slightest.

  “How thoughtful of you,” said Marcus politely, taking the bag of Danish pastries I had cleverly brought them.

  “No problem,” I said. “I just thought I’d come and have a look around. Is that okay?”

  “We are rather busy today, actually—”

  “Hi, Dave!”

  It was Byron, smiling and waving at me through his glasses, easily identifiable both by his weedy build and by the loud Hawaiian shirt which he had tucked in tightly to his straight-cut jeans. He had stood up from a nearby table, where he had been doing something on a computer whilst simultaneously staring into the eyepiece of what looked like a giant microscope.

  “Got some Danish pastries for you,” I said, ignoring Marcus’s clear frustration.

  “Thank you,” said Byron, coming over and eagerly taking a plump custard-filled pastry and tucking right in.

  “I was just telling Dave that we’re a bit busy today,” said Marcus. “Testing version 314, and we don’t really have the time to—”

  “Nonsense,” said Byron through a mouthful of Danish. “We owe everything to this guy. We should at least give him the tour.”

  “But what about the new lattice calibrations? Surely—”

  “It can wait a few minutes. No time like the present.”

  To be honest, Byron seemed a bit over the top. I guess he was a bit like me, happy in his own world and a hater of meetings.

  “Dave,” said Byron, putting a hand on my shoulder, pulling me to his workstation. “Let me show you around.”

  I heard Marcus give a little sigh, but he let his colleague continue. As for me, I really just wanted to find out when I could move out of that dump downstairs, but his enthusiasm was overpowering.

  “Have a look in there,” said Byron, indicating to the microscope he’d had his head stuck in.

  I peered into the eyepiece. Once I’d adjusted my eyes, it wasn’t all that impressive, really. Sort of a criss-cross of neat lines and silvery-green cables.