You Must Be Very Intelligent Read online

  Mark talks to me, a lot. Invariably when I am tired and want to go home he comes into the lab and buttonholes me for hours. I see the other PhD students leaving, grabbing their coats as soon as he appears at the door, but I’m staying. He talks quickly and loudly and constantly. His monologues are intense, piercing, self-dramatising, but at the same time deeply enthusiastic. I try hard to follow everything he talks about but sometimes I don’t even know if he is talking about my project or someone else’s. It is difficult to contribute and I am not sure if I am even supposed to. His conversational rhythms are so unrelenting and bereft of pauses. The flow is all one-way, forceful, unstoppable and dark like a river delta without the allure. Sometimes I seem to be watching and listening from a distance. At other times I feel like a sounding board, just an object soaking up this torrential flow of words. Most nights, I leave with cramps in my stomach, a bad headache and the sinking feeling that I’ve been violated. But I convince myself I am newly charged with research ideas. Mark sees a rosy future for me – my research will be groundbreaking!

  “I’m not walking slowly, Ka,” Daniel states.

  “You are,” I say, turning towards him and closing the chest clip of his backpack.

  Daniel looks surprised. “Now, move your arms to support your steps, and we will go double the speed,” I add.

  Daniel laughs it off and starts to move his arms as I instructed him in an exaggerated fashion; we do indeed go faster. When we arrive at the chemistry department we say goodbye. Daniel wants to give me a kiss before heading to the other side of campus, but I decline. I hate being kissed in front of university or anywhere really when the setting is new and the kiss has nothing to do with love; just the mere male need to publicly mark territory. “Let’s keep it professional,” I say, pushing him away from me.

  “Have a nice day,” I add.

  “Right.”

  Daniel has delayed me a fair bit, so it is almost 9:15 a.m. when I finally arrive in the lab. I drop off my bag and coat, get into my lab coat and walk straight into the cold room, which would easily fit two bunk beds and a small desk and is always kept at four degrees. There are no windows, and the smell inside is awful. There are shelves filled with buffers and chemicals that need to be kept cold, plates with bugs and several machines running almost round the clock. Like the rest of the lab, it’s a mess. I take the rack holding the one falcon tube I had left here yesterday. There are white flakes swimming through a colourless buffer inside, like out-of-date milk curdling into coffee. Shit, that doesn’t look good.

  “Should I check this with Mark?” I ask.

  “Mark? When does he do experiments in the lab?” Hanna asks.

  She regards me like I have seriously messed up. “I have no idea… I just started.”

  “Believe me: Mark is not the right person to ask.”

  I look surprised.

  “He’s in his office, he hasn’t been working in the lab for years,” she adds.

  “The imprint of his ass is engraved in his office chair,” Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl’s voice shouts from the office.

  She must have overheard our conversation. As our small office is directly attached to the lab, you always hear what’s going on and being said everywhere.

  “He doesn’t have any skin on his ass anymore from sitting too much,” she adds.

  “Oh now it’s getting interesting! How do you know what his ass looks like?” says Quinn, a six foot Englishman with short, light blond hair, in the third year of his PhD.

  Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl replies, “Don’t be so literal! I don’t actually know if he suffers from decubitus! But I suspect he does.”

  “You don’t need to defend yourself, but let’s talk about it over lunch.”

  The guy, and several other people in the office, are grinning. Under other circumstances, I would have put my head round the office door and joined in this rare moment of levity. Instead, a worried smile is spreading over my face. Hanna holds the 50 ml falcon tube in the air, and looks at it a second time.

  “Did he really say you should add so much salt to the buffer?” she asks.

  I check the loose piece of paper lying on top of my brand new lab book. With my finger I move over the sloppily written notes while reading them out loud. I stop in the middle and turn the paper in her direction.

  “It really says 900 mM NaCl right?”

  She takes the sheet of paper out of my hands. She looks at the scribbles for a few seconds.

  “Could be, but it could say 300 mM just as well. Which would be just about right.”

  She looks at me with her large brown eyes. I look down at my slightly too large lab coat. It still shows the wrinkles of coming just out of the box. From this piece of new clothing everyone can tell that I am a newbie, obviously a keen newbie, but still not someone you need to take seriously.

  “Is there any way to desalinate it?” I ask, in despair.

  It has taken me a full week, including the weekend, to purify this protein that I don’t need for my research. Mark told me it would be good to purify it anyway, to familiarise myself with this particular technique which I might need later on. I loathe pointless exercises. I am a scientist. I look for meaning and reason. I find the mere idea of having to spend more days and late evenings in the lab redoing this futile experiment quite upsetting.

  “No,” says she. “It has all precipitated.”

  She points at the white flakes swimming in the tube. She hands me the tube and says: “I’m afraid you might have to redo it.”

  “But… it will take me days, and I don’t even need it for my research.”

  “Then don’t do it!”

  “What can I do? Mark told me I should do it.”

  “You should only consider doing something after the third time he has told you to do it,” chips in the female voice from the office. “Otherwise you go mental here.”

  “And only consider it; considering doesn’t mean doing,” Erico adds in his charming accent.

  Hanna nods in agreement and walks off to continue her own work.

  A great lesson, I have learned something useful here.

  I look at the tube one last time, in the way you might look at an unwanted gift from an ex-lover. This tube contains the only proper chemistry work I have done since I arrived. I let it drop into the yellow waste container at my feet.

  For a moment I am staring at the chemical waste containers outside, below our lab, unsure what to do next. My plan for the next three days has been screwed by the precipitated protein in the bin. “If you have time you can join me going to the hospital today,” Hanna says. “I’ve got stuff to do there; I could show you around the cystic fibrosis lab.”

  “Thank you,” I hear myself say. “When will we leave?”

  “Now.”

  We put on our coats and walk to the bus stop close to campus. “You’ll like it in the hospital,” Hanna says.

  “You did your master’s there as well, right?”

  “My bachelor’s. I don’t have a master’s degree.”

  “You don’t have a master’s degree?”

  “Nope.”

  “How did you get this PhD position?”

  “In the UK you don’t need to have a master’s to enrol in a PhD programme; a bachelor’s is enough,” Hanna says proudly.

  “Really?!”

  And we all end up with the same title?! It’s just that some skip two years of study in the process, apparently. WTF…

  “Schools are short in Scotland too. You can finish high school and start studying when you’re only seventeen. So if you don’t take breaks, you can be finished with a PhD as young as twenty three. Like Stacey, the Scottish girl next door in the Baxter group; she’s only twenty one and in her second year.”

  “Maybe the chemicals in Irn Bru bring out your inner Einstein…” I mumble bitterly.

  “Oh no, that just makes people fat.”

  Within ten minutes we arrive at a glistening white building just outside of town, surrounded
by agricultural fields. The autumn sun reflected by the building hurts my eyes as we walk to the main entrance – it looks dazzlingly Brave New World. We enter a large open hallway with a high roof. In front of us, on the first floor, there is a large library with bookshelves reaching to the next floor.

  “Right goes to the hospital, left to the labs,” says Hanna, taking a left.

  We go up the stairs and arrive at the library but we walk in the opposite direction. She takes a card out of her wallet and swipes it through a card reader next to a glass door. “You need a card to enter; otherwise patients could stroll in.”

  We walk through a long corridor with a carpeted floor and into the last office on the left. It is large, hosting at least twenty people. “This is my desk. If you come to the hospital, you can drop your stuff at my desk. As you can see there are no places free here either.”

  Of course not. In this hidden slave world, a lowdown newbie cannot dare demand a desk, good grief no… So you have two desks and I have none… I nod.

  We drop off our stuff and go to the labs on the other side of the corridor. We walk through a lab full of impressive machines and then through another glass door. “This lab has biosafety level II, meaning you can grow pathogens which are moderately hazardous to humans. It is important here that you always keep the door closed; we don’t want the bugs to leave the lab. And this is not Lab 262; you really do need to wear a lab coat and gloves here.”

  Hanna hands me one of the lab coats at the door and points at a box with purple gloves next to the sink. There are large benches on one side of the lab, and intriguing equipment on the other. There are a few people working, but most benches are empty. It is tidy, organised and new, sort of heavenly to my jealous eyes. “Quite different from the mess in the chemistry building, isn’t it?” Hanna says, upon seeing me gawp.

  “It is indeed.”

  “It’s a nice place to escape to.”

  “Yes. I believe you.”

  “Those three benches belong to James’ lab. This is my bench. We will have to share it, so please keep it tidy.”

  She rests her hand on the one in the middle and then indicates the next bench: “That is Brian’s bench, the postdoc Mark talks about a lot.” Oh yes, I’ve heard his name so much I am bored of him before even meeting him.

  “He must be really good,” I say.

  “Right,” Hanna says, clearly unconvinced. “Anyway, don’t use his bench. He will go mental if you do.”

  There is a girl laughing at the last of the three benches. “You really don’t want to touch stuff on top of this bench either,” she says.

  “Have you met each other?” Hanna asks.

  “No, we haven’t.”

  At this point two girls get rid of their gloves and jump off their lab chairs to reach out their hands to me. One of them has long reddish hair bound together in a ponytail. She is tall and skinny, and her hands feel as soft as silk bed sheets. “Leonie,” she says, smiling.

  The other one is almost a head shorter and has shoulder-length, thin blond hair hanging sadly over the collar of her lab coat. She has a large blue bruise on top of her eyebrow and fresh scratches on her chin. Her right wrist is covered in a bandage but nevertheless she uses her right hand to shake mine. Her skin feels much rougher than Leonie’s. As I say my name I notice a dried-up drop of blood leaked from her ear. “Sharon,” she says as if she herself is not a hundred percent sure of her name. She must have noticed that I’m observing her with caution and smiles reservedly, almost shy. What kind of arsehole is this girl with?!

  “Karin is the new victim of Mark’s relentless monologues in the evening,” Hanna says, looking from Leonie and Sharon to me. New? Victim? Hmm…

  “Oh, poor you!” says Leonie.

  “It’s not that bad, just his timing is sometimes a bit awkward,” I say. “Are you working for James?”

  “Yes, I’m a postdoc in his lab,” Leonie says happily. “And sometimes I’m also his personal secretary… like copying stuff for him…”

  She says this playfully, rather than resentfully, but Sharon adds wryly, “It’s because you’re female. Brian is the apple of his eye!…”

  Sharon explains that she is a technician working for James, mainly analysing saliva samples from patients, “Checking if they caught any infections and checking the antibiotic resistance of their newly acquired bugs, and stuff.”

  She points at the piles of Petri dishes standing next to Leonie. I tune out trying not to stare at her bruises – so incongruous with her demeanour and friendly disposition. I am relieved when Hanna indicates the tour is continuing. She opens a drawer and takes a key out. “Come, I’ll show you where we keep the bugs.”

  I follow her and as soon as we are far enough away from the glass door, I ask, “What’s wrong with Sharon? Did you see? Is…”

  “You mean the bruises?”

  “Yes!…”

  “Plays rugby, always injured.”

  “Oh thank goodness! I thought she got beaten up.”

  “Well, she did, that’s rugby.”

  We go down two floors to the basement. Hanna carefully instructs me that the key always has to be returned to its rightful place; the university keeps a lot of bugs which are potentially dangerous to mankind, so we don’t want evil loonies from the outside world coming in with anarchic ideas. We enter a basement room that reminds me of The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitzbergen. It hosts eight large white freezers, each with a display on the door indicating a temperature of minus 80 degrees. “A404 is ours, so no need to touch the rest. And you need to wear gloves, no bare hands here.”

  Hanna sticks the key in the keyhole of the freezer and turns around. A blast of deathly cold hits my face. “We have to hurry. The alarm goes off when the temperature rises above minus 68.”

  There are about fifteen drawers, all fully covered with mysterious flaky icicles which make the letters on each hard to read. “We have got the lower two drawers, N and O.”

  Hanna pulls on one of them. There are at least five hundred different tubes carefully organised inside. All tubes have a number and Hanna tells me which ones to take. When lifting the tubes up they immediately freeze to the gloves, and I need to use a second hand to prise them off and place them in a special rack Hanna brought along. By the time we have gathered all the samples, which takes us less than two minutes, and closed the heavy door, the display indicates minus 71 degrees. “What we have here are the mother stocks of all bugs you might need for your research. Only use them once, and create your own stocks, so you don’t contaminate those.”

  Walking upstairs, Hanna points out where to get buffers, freshly poured plates, bottles and anything else I might need. She shows me which media to use for which bug, how to isolate DNA and she gets me started creating my own “superbug stocks.” We happily chat with Leonie and Sharon, who seem curious enough to get to know me. They tell me about lab conflicts, unwritten rules and competition between researchers. It isn’t all positive, but I do get the feeling that I’m doing something useful, that I am learning stuff and I am surrounded by people who treat me like a human. I sense it as a divine reprieve from eternal disappointment. I want to stay here.

  Mid-afternoon we troop back to King’s Buildings campus. When we enter the office of Lab 262 Mark is talking to one of the new project students.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asks as soon as he sees us.

  “Well, the protein I purified precipitated overnight…”

  “Where is it?” he asks, shaking his head from left to right.

  “I binned it.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, you should have shown me!”

  “Sorry. Hanna showed me around the hospital instead, which was very nice,” I say, desperately trying to steer the conversation onto something agreeable.

  Mark nods at Hanna. “Good. But you don’t need to spend much time there. I want you to do your research here.”

  “Why?” I ask surprised, thinking about the nice people, la
rge benches, fancy equipment, clean lab and general glory of the Brave New World.

  “Because I am here, and I can help you,” states Mark, and promptly makes to leave.

  “Mark, wait a sec,” Hanna says, tentatively drawing his attention. “I just wanted to tell you that I booked a holiday with my family in February for a week.”

  Her voice is almost trembling. Mark sighs and ticks his keys against the doorpost. “It’s up to you, it’s your PhD,” he snarls, and walks out.

  I sit down on one of the temporarily free chairs, and notice that I am out of breath for no reason. I am trying to persuade my lungs to work at a normal speed while my mind plays ping-pong. Is he serious?

  It is early evening and the weather has changed from stunning sunshine to pouring rain. Daniel has been waiting for me in front of the chemistry building until I am finally ready to go home. I’m at least forty-five minutes later than agreed, because Mark came in to tell me about a new research idea he had, just as I was packing up. The sharp teeth of the tone he demonstrated this afternoon was largely gone, and he spoke with enthusiasm about an article he had read – something I could follow up on. I listened to it with the lesson I’d learned this morning in mind; only consider working on a project when he has mentioned it at least three times or you will go mental here.

  I left the lab the moment Mark captured a straggling project student. You really have to run with the pack at the end of the day or the predator will get you, and bore a hole in your soul…

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say to a soaked Daniel.

  “I phoned you three times! Why did you not pick up?”

  “Because Mark was talking to me, so I couldn’t.”