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  “Couldn’t you tell him that I am waiting here in the pouring rain for almost an hour, and you just need to tell me that you’re late?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure if I could.”

  “What bullshit! Who are you working for? Stalin’s long lost son?”

  “How was your day?” I ask, to change the subject.

  Daniel’s mood improves instantly. We make up on the way home, while he tells me about the PhD students, his supervisor and the lab itself. He’s got a desk and Wi-Fi access. He speaks with much more enthusiasm than I did after my first day. His PhD colleagues don’t seem to work too hard; they spend much of their time playing Facebook games and chatting, which doesn’t seem to bother Daniel in the slightest. By the time we arrive home, he is slowly changing topics. He is talking, I am listening, passively, as if I am not there. He tells about an uncle who has just announced that he intends to leave his wife and two children in order to live with a younger women round the corner… It should interest me, but my mind is drifting off… I leave the room, get into my sports shoes and run through town, like a distraught little girl who wants to flee…

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_8

  Chapter 8

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: [email protected]

  “Hello.”

  “Hi,” I reply.

  A strange pause occurs. It may be rhetorical and is definitely confusing.

  It’s Lucy, the Wallonian girl from the lab standing next to me while I sit on a stool holding a pipette through purple gloves. I carefully place the tip between two glass plates while making sure I press the blue stained protein solution in the right slot. After pulling the tip back she is still standing there, a tad too close methinks, holding nervously on to the bench. Lucy is an outsider, like me – never involved in lab conversations; for hours at a time it’s as if we do not exist. I’m not sure I have ever heard her speak except when answering very occasional questions from Mark. I turn my head in her direction and lift my eyebrows.

  “I actually went to the Pear Tree Bar yesterday, it was very nice,” she says in a firm voice.

  Having never properly communicated with each other, this seems like a peculiar gambit, for strangers anyway, but hey… chemists. I look at her and am quite fixated by her large green eyes and her perfectly symmetrical jawbones. For the first time I notice that Lucy is astonishingly beautiful – a beautiful weirdo.

  “Really, who did you go with?”

  “With a few people from the Johnson group.”

  “Okay.”

  “I thought maybe you might want to join us next time?”

  Fucking finally! Someone to go to the pub with! I don’t care how weird you are… I don’t care if men will look straight through me and even push me out of the way just to catch a glimpse of you… I don’t care if you’re a Neo-Nazi sex perv who kills babies for kicks… ANYONE is preferable to the life of a scientist with nothing but a lazy boyfriend evening after evening…

  “Why not? When are you going?”

  “We might go for a few drinks to KB House after work today.”

  Why on Earth would you want to go to that dreary dirt-hole on campus after work?!

  “Great! I’d love to join you. Thanks.”

  “Okay, I’ll let you know when we leave.”

  I manage to nod casually while my heart leaps for joy. The blissful day I’ve been waiting for, fantasising about for weeks, has finally arrived. I got invited to join people for drinks, just when I had concluded I was as welcome in the world as Mussolini at a reggae festival. One evening not in the lab… not in my apartment… not strolling aimlessly through town…

  I am almost three months into my PhD and I am doing – mostly – meaningful work. Like all other first-year students I gave my introduction presentation at the School of Chemistry lecture series. Both Mark and James had been happy with it. Hanna had shown me some techniques and took me to the hospital a few times. I like her but she seems socially saturated with long-lasting friendships in Edinburgh. And even if she wasn’t, I’m not sure our personalities are suited to hanging together outside of work. I got introduced to Brian, the postdoctoral golden boy, who I subsequently encountered several times and pegged for a frustrated dictator. Existing as he does in the obvious and repellent bubble of research failure, he gets ever so wound up about everything I touch or use. Information he supplies is – magically – bereft of at least one essential puzzle piece, and this slows my progress. He is clearly afraid of being overthrown by Hanna, Leonie or me, which is paranoid nonsense since we are not even working on remotely similar projects. Maybe he had a toy taken away from him once too often in childhood and is still in trauma. Who knows? Who cares?…

  Despite Brian providing a rough edge, the hours spent at the hospital feel like mini holidays compared to the School of Chemistry. The extraordinary tensions in Lab 262 befit high drama, yet they are generated by the petty matters of money and space – or, rather, the lack of both. The constant struggle to get access to equipment and consumables is enough to make a strong woman weep and a good woman murder. We have several shopping lists hanging in the lab, filled with stuff we need but every time anything is added, it is followed by a lively discussion about the allegedly consumerist behaviour of certain lab members drying up lab funds. It’s all balderdash and flummery; nobody is terribly wasteful. Our lab is simply dirt poor.

  The financial stress is compounded by a nasty element of interpersonal power-plays owing to there being just two people with access to grant money. The big shots downstairs conduct ground-breaking research with fancy new kit while we waste precious time and life trying to get by with out-dated, inefficient, old hand-me-downs. Mark just sent Erico and Quinn down to northern England to fetch a second-hand table top centrifuge that Marie Curie would have called an antique. It occupies a large part of the lab but it works, up to a certain speed, which is all we dare hope for. The very basic equipment triggers a Boy Scout instinct, which I somehow like, but at times it feels like we’re stuck behind the east side of the Iron Curtain smelling the bananas of the big shots a floor down.

  Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl spend less and less time in the lab. Some weeks they call in for merely a day. For me it feels like two chickens less in a battery cage, but it frustrates Mark. “They don’t have enough results to become doctors yet!” he keeps on telling me.

  In the evenings, the jingling noise of Mark’s key chain betrays his entrance and resounds like a gun for the race to start; all the other PhD students grab their coats and race off, with practiced stealth. This we-all-happen-to-leave-at-the-same-time ritual seems too obvious to me, for now. Within a few months I will be a devout follower.

  With shocking examples, Mark shares his concerns about the competency of the other lab members with me, over and over again. At first I feel sorry for him, having landed so many rotten recruits from the vast ranks of applicants. Due to his stories, my colleagues – the people I am learning from – are not blank slates anymore. I see them as ropy, workshy second-raters giving me suspect guidance. At the same time, I hear my colleagues complain about Mark with no holds barred. They laugh behind his back about the advices he gives. They warn me that the projects he has in mind for me are not possible within the timeframe of one PhD and the equipment we possess. And I fear they are right about this. He expects me to clone, purify and design novel assays for nine different types of proteins of a complete biosynthetic pathway – even for my non-expert ears this sounds like over-reaching on a megalomaniacal scale.

  Independently, Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl convey markedly similar tales of Mark not reading thesis chapters that have been on his desk for months. Oh didn’t he? Really? Of course, he has got a lot going on… and from what I have heard about your work… I suppose, if anything really took his eye, the
n he would…

  They both talk about swerving round Mark to Prof. Gilton, Mark’s old PhD supervisor, and asking him to read their theses instead – just in order to leave this lab astern forever. I feel shunted between the two sides and have no idea who to believe. Perhaps deep down I know who the rotten apple is, and I am in denial.

  I am committed to my research, so most of my waking days I am at the Chemistry Department. I leave the house before Daniel gets up and often do not return till just before bedtime. The majority of the time in the lab I am working but sometimes I am just avoiding going home. Daniel sitting at my IKEA kitchen table each evening, quietly smoking my last cigarette, is not spicing up my life. I dare say I’m not spicing up his either. Some spice is needed somewhere… His bags are still unpacked and lying in the small corridor of our flat. Every day he takes out the pieces of clothing he needs, no more. It has transformed the almost empty flat; the beautiful wooden floor has become a sort of playground where you have to jump from one island to the next. I’ve got good. But I am bored of the game and I am hoping Daniel gets bored of it too. I would be equally delighted if he just decided that airing his clothes by way of a sojourn on the floor was insufficient in cleanliness terms, and that he really needs to start washing them. But it’s early days; one of these happy events could yet occur.

  Regardless of Daniel being there or not, I feel lonely, but after tonight this could change. I will have some social contact, just like a real grown-up with a real life.

  With a smile on my face I start to move agar plates to the flame. After the second plate I quickly walk to the “list of consumables to buy” hanging on the door and write “Ampicillin” adding an exclamation mark in the vain hope of conveying some urgency. The list is almost full, with restriction enzymes, chemicals, pipettes and other everyday stuff. That will lead to another discussion about who finished it. I don’t care, it’s all… Suddenly I hear yelling in the office. It doesn’t take me long to realise that it is Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl and Mark having yet another argument, but today it’s all-out nuclear thunder, even by their own high standards. I had not heard either of them enter because of the radio and the background noise of machines running. Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl is not the type of person to mince her words, not to us or Mark. The verbal violence between her and Mark is a show to behold, captivating in a train crash way.

  “Your thesis is worthless without it!” Mark shouts.

  “Thanks for your input, Mark! It’s an idiotic plan and I’m not going to do it!”

  I know this will be the end of the argument. The note of finale chimes with the familiar assertion.

  I take a pipette from the rack and, like the other PhD students, pretend to work so it isn’t too obvious that we have all been listening – as if we had a choice. Mark storms out of the office with a red face, boiling from anger for sure, but perhaps also from embarrassment. He stops just after passing me. He turns around and fixates me with his bulging eyes that so far, when he talks to me, expressed energy. Today they express pure rage. He barks “Why is the water filter not being exchanged, Karin?”

  My heart lurches. Where is this coming from?

  “Um. What water filter?” I am such an idiot, we only have one. This will make him furious?

  “What water filter? What water filter?! How long have you been here, Karin?”

  “Three months.” He’s not looking for the literal answer, stupid girl.

  “And where do you get your water from for your experiments?”

  He looks at me as if I am some form of life akin to the slime on a snail’s belly.

  “From there,” I say, pointing at the water purification system.

  “The light on the machine has been red for weeks, indicating that the filter needs to be exchanged. Why did you not do it?” I’ve never seen the light green during my time here.

  “Because I didn’t know I had to.” I am really digging my own grave here.

  I feel everyone is watching me. For the first time I see my colleagues, from the corner of my eyes, expressing sympathy for me.

  “You didn’t know you had to? Does someone need to spell everything out to you?!”

  Mark is getting even more red-faced by the second as he leans towards me. I inhale deeply and feel my face getting red as well.

  “No, but…” I really should stop digging.

  “It’s my fault, I’m on it,” says Logan, my tall Northern Irish colleague, while closing in on me and Mark. “We don’t have filters anymore. I’ll get the order in today.”

  Logan started his PhD just a couple of weeks after me. We haven’t talked much. Logan is more of the quiet type and, like Hanna, did his degree in Edinburgh. He seems nice enough as a colleague but he is well dug in at the Uni and in Edinburgh, socially saturated, like Hanna. I am pretty sure he has never seen the light being green on the machine either. He’s just trying to help me, out of decency.

  “Right!” Mark says, nods to Logan and storms out.

  “Thanks,” I whisper, after the door falls closed.

  “No worries.”

  I feel my heart pounding in my head and sit down on a lab chair trying to take long breaths. The entire tirade had taken less than a minute, probably even less than thirty seconds but it feels like I’ve just run to the top of Arthur’s Seat. What was that all about? Why did he marginalise me in front of all those people? What on Earth did I do wrong?

  I feel small, downright belittled, a tricked and trapped fool now bound to play the fawning, gawping subject at the court of King Dullard.

  “Welcome to Lab 262,” Quinn states, resting his eyes on my face, pressing his lips together.

  During the lunch break I quietly escape to the changing rooms of KB House. I change my jeans for shorts, slide my feet into my sport shoes and run away… I run away from university, away from my fellow lab-mates, away from the maddening hierarchy of King Dullard and his PhD jesters…. I don’t fit in, it’s my fault, I feel this. Tears well up in my eyes, but as long as I keep my eyes wide open they are dried by the wind before they can run down my cheeks.

  It is almost 9:00 p.m. when I open the door to KB House. I order myself a pint of Guinness, plop down on the seat Lucy has kept free for me and slump down.

  “He talked to you for ages,” says beautiful Lucy.

  “He did.”

  It had been two hours ago that I quickly signalled to Lucy that I will join them later. Like most evenings, Mark came in to talk to me. Though the atmosphere was different from other nights, Mark pretended that nothing had happened in the morning. For me it was weird, but at the same time reassuring that he still trusts me. He talked with enthusiasm about all the projects he has in mind, complimented my work and gossiped about the other students. I tried to listen, but as it was already well past seven I couldn’t decide whether I was just exhausted or ravenously hungry. He went on and on and I just kept on hoping that he had other plans for his Friday night, something other than just talking at me. But he didn’t seem to have any.

  “Don’t worry, he will lose interest in you,” Lucy says.

  “Did he use to talk to you every evening as well?”

  “No, he has never been really interested in my project. And I started at the same time as Babette; her project is Mark’s baby, so he talked to her.”

  “I notice he doesn’t talk to Logan either.”

  “Nope, Logan is just a space-filler.”

  I lean forward to catch a glimpse of the handsome guy ordering at the bar.

  “He’s good-looking, isn’t he,” Lucy whispers.

  “Gorgeous. Have you dated him?”

  “Yes. He’s got a girlfriend though…”

  “Nice one.”

  “She doesn’t live in Edinburgh.”

  “If it’s a different post code then it doesn’t count…”

  Lucy laughs. “True. He’s weird anyway. I went to the cinema with him last week. At the end of the evening, instead of a moment of intimacy he opted for crossing the city
in the middle of the night to a particular 24/7 in order to purchase one cucumber, one tomato and one carrot to make up for the lack of vegetable matter in the food he had consumed that day.”

  “Wow!”

  “I bet he sent a message to his mum afterwards to tell her he’d been a good boy.”

  “Is he good in bed at least?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I left him with his carrots.”

  “I also wouldn’t want to have a rabbit in my bed.”

  We giggle like old friends.

  “You’ve got a boyfriend, right?”

  “I have.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “Dangling in the purgatory of eternal studentdom,” I mumble softly.

  “Right…”

  “That was mean. He’s doing a research project for his masters at the Biology Department.”

  “Will he do his PhD after?”

  “No, he doesn’t want to.”

  “Will he stay in Edinburgh?”

  “I guess he would like to, but the British economy is in tatters and good employment is a long shot for an indolent non-native speaker without any relevant experience in anything…”

  “Haha, you really like him, don’t you?”

  “I used to, but I’m no longer sure.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  “I do, but don’t have any on me.”

  “Have one of mine, you must need it.”

  We walk outside. I feel tipsy from downing a full pint on an empty stomach and decide I should definitely get something to eat after the smoke. Lucy points at the thick book sticking out of my backpack.

  “What’s that?” she asks with a mischievous smile.

  “What do you think it is?” I reply half smiling.

  “Thomas Bright’s thesis.”

  “You read it as well?”

  “Mark wanted me to.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “I flicked through.”

  “I really don’t want to read it. But he keeps bringing it up. Pretty much every evening he asks if I’ve read it. But it has nothing to do with my project, so I don’t know why.”