You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 9

  Do we?! Really?!

  The gaunt, grey-haired bartender smiles. “Just climb up!”

  Mark turns to us and says: “It is the only pub in town where you can dance on the bar.”

  “You want to dance on the bar?” I ask Lucy.

  “Sure.”

  That wasn’t the answer I anticipated. But I can never resist a challenge. So we find ourselves clambering on to the bar by way of a chair. It’s an unsteady, unnerving business when you’re doused in alcohol and sporting a short dress. I get a ludicrous sense of achievement when I stand up on the bar even though it feels a bit wobbly at first. Something yields inside me – my self-respect perhaps – and I feel comfortable, as if dancing on a bar to entertain prime specimens of the Edinburgh underclass has always been an ambition. We get full support from our lab members, all cheering wildly when we start dancing, and playacting of course, to You’re the One that I Want from Grease.

  “Somehow I knew we needed the wine before,” I say to Lucy, when the song ends.

  She laugh, “Yes!”

  Mark says, “If you keep on dancing you get your PhDs!”

  I know he’s just trying (and failing) to be funny in a boorish drunken way, but our inhibitions have also dissolved in alcohol and Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl, who joins us on the bar instantly, shouts in my ear, “If he would just read my fucking thesis I’d get my PhD! I am working for free; does he really think I should do some lesbian lap-dancing for him too?!”

  I exchange knowing smirks with Lucy and we even manage a reproving smile at Mark.

  Two more colleagues join us on the bar, and a couple of songs later every student member of Lab 262 is there; on the bar in this seedy hovel dancing like there is no tomorrow. Mark is the one lab member not on the bar, but in fact that’s fair enough since he is already unsteady on the terra firma. During I’ve Had the Time of my Life, from Dirty Dancing, I propose Lucy tries out “the lift” and, quite suddenly, I know I really have had too much to drink now. Lucy talks me out of trying it but we dance and laugh plenty more. For the first time since my arrival in Scotland, I love Lab 262.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_10

  Chapter 10

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  Consciousness is upon me as soon as the alarm goes off. I’m not sure I was fully unconscious for much of the past six hours in bed. Even during supposed sleep, my experiments are on my mind. In my sleep, I had run through the streets of Edinburgh, to the university to save the samples that I forgot to put in the fridge the day before. When I had arrived at the university I realised I had forgotten my card, but a Batman-like figure appeared and helped me through a window. I feel physically tired and mentally confused. I’m happy to escape my quasi-dreams and get my day started.

  I get out of bed and go to the bathroom. On my way I see that Daniel is already in the kitchen. It is unusual to see him up this early.

  “What’s up?” I ask, chewing on a toothbrush.

  “You have been kicking around the whole night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  For a few seconds I wonder if I should say sorry, which would have been nice, but I decide there is no reason to excuse myself for something I can’t control. I nod instead, sympathetically I hope.

  “I made you a fresh orange juice and the toast should be ready in a minute.”

  “What a luxury!”

  I walk over to Daniel and give him a kiss, then to the window and look out over Gorgie Road. It is still pitch dark outside, and it is at least three hours till the sun rises, if it rises as such… It is the end of January, the middle of Edinburgh winter, and there are many grey, foggy days that see little light. Some of the Lab 262 inmates are laid low by the lack of light but it doesn’t seem to have much effect on me. Daniel is coming towards me.

  “You got a lot to do today?” he asks.

  “No, not just at the moment. I have to start my experiments from scratch because they didn’t work.”

  “You want to come over for lunch today?” he says resting his hands onto my shoulders.

  “I could do,” I say, looking him in the eye.

  There has been a lot of tension between us for over a month now, since Christmas really. I’m getting tired of it. I guess Daniel is too.

  The Christmas holiday was raw stuff. I had known that it had incensed Daniel when I packed a crate full of stuff to read over Christmas. But it never occurred to me to care. His parents had given short notice that they had rented a cottage in the Highlands for a week to spend family time with Daniel and his sisters. I’ve never been a big fan of Christmas holidays but for the first time since I moved out, at the age of seventeen, I had looked forward to spending the holiday with my own parents. To go back to the village where there is the Christmas and New Year tradition of “carbide shooting,” whereby the town alcoholics buy themselves explosives and use them in conjunction with milk jugs to create a deafening bang. It’s horribly dangerous but somehow they never seem to sustain major injuries. We would hide from the heavy, flying lids inside the house and sit around the plastic Christmas tree. We would exchange presents which we had all hand-picked for ourselves. My family doesn’t like surprises so all of us specify exactly what we want, what it costs and where you can buy it. This year I had looked forward to the predictability, the low excitement and being surrounded by reassuringly familiar characters. The absence of fuss does not deplete the ritual and love, for my slightly eccentric family anyway.

  When I had announced I might visit my own family instead, Daniel had gasped at me as if I just confessed to child murder. His parents had paid a fortune at the last minute to rent a cottage large enough to afford private space for Daniel and me. They had rented a second car, presuming I would be joining them. Though I didn’t want to join, I felt strangely relieved that I did not need to face my family: How could I honestly answer the questions they would ask about my PhD? My parents knew that I did not have a desk and no access to a computer, but they were unaware of the full grimness of the situation – and oblivious to my lack of research results. They were still on cloud nine about their daughter doing a PhD at a highly ranked university, doing groundbreaking research on cystic fibrosis. They were talking about it as if I was on a wonderful, noble mission which would save and enrich lives. I knew my dad would beam like a Cheshire cat whenever someone enquired what his daughters were doing. They probably did not have to enquire; he always contrived opportunities to brag about us as children. He is, like any good dad, embarrassingly proud of us. How could I tell him his youngest daughter, who just graduated with excellent marks, has so far not generated one remotely significant result nor learned anything scientifically useful. Tail between legs, I followed Daniel and his family to the Highlands.

  For a week I had more or less locked myself in the cottage bedroom to read scientific papers, coming out for food and showers. A few times Daniel begged me to partake in family hikes, and I did. I avoided talking to his family as much as I could, and only exchanged necessary information. I could not stand being there. I could not stand them. When Daniel and I were alone in the car back to Edinburgh he shouted at me. I had misbehaved and disrespected his family. I had never seen him so angry. My initial reaction had been defensive: “I have work to do.”

  “Over Christmas holidays, Ka?!!”

  “I don’t have a clue what others do, but I want to be a successful researcher, Daniel,” I had shouted back at him.

  Then I had apologised, because I had behaved selfishly, no doubt. But at least the reading had given me plenty of new ideas. Feeling replenished, I began again on the second of January, with new methods … I tried… and tried… and tried… Nothing worked thus far. Mark was putting the squeeze on me. He was starting to expect meaningful results, and I had zip. The most noteworthy biochemical reactions in my wor
ld were those taking place inside me, owing to frustration and stress.

  The stress of work never helped any relationship, I know. But when you are blinded by stress, it’s hard to know where work problems begin and relationship troubles end; they blur and cloud the mind and the only certainty is, I discovered, that selfishness runs amok. Daniel doesn’t deserve it, he is a good man, so today I oblige him and agree to go for lunch. It might help puncture the tension between us.

  I spread some E.coli cells onto the agar plates, place them in the 37 degree stove below one of the benches and make my way to the Darwin building where Daniel’s lab is on the eighth floor. It is spacious, much larger than ours. A stereo blares out Coldplay’s piano ballad The Scientist, so Chris Martin’s falsetto fills the room with whimsical longing. It’s quite carefree, as befits the mess. This is different mess from the mess in Lab 262. There it is cheap, shabby mess. Here it is relaxed and rather expensive mess. Also in contrast, the benches in Daniel’s lab are – gosh! – separated. This strikes me as a magnificent triumph of aesthetic design, though really it is just a bunch of workspaces with room to breathe and concentrate. On a shelf above one of the benches there is an A4 piece of paper informing everyone: “I will break your fingers if you touch that.” Arrows point down to different spots on the bench.

  “Wow, that is quite direct,” I remark.

  “Ha ha, yes it is,” says a short blond-haired guy, lifting his shoulders.

  “He is not British, is he?”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “How do you know?” asks a girl with long brown hair.

  She is also smiling. My God, people are friendly and happy in their university lab!

  I reply: “Because it would say: ‘I will break your fingers if you touch that. Terribly sorry, excuse me, I was only joking.’”

  I walk towards Daniel on one of the last few benches. He is wearing gloves, pipetting a PCR product into an agarose gel.

  “I still need a couple of minutes,” he says.

  “No problem.”

  I take a seat on one of the lab chairs and out of boredom open the lab book on the bench. Only the first two pages are filled. One is dated the start of October, just after his arrival. The other is dated today. After spending eight hours per day over a course of four months in the department, Daniel has conducted enough experiments to fill precisely two pages in his lab book. I am with someone who takes four months to do two PCRs. [Polymerase chain reaction – basic stuff in the 21st century, requiring less than an hour of hands-on work.]

  “It seems that the probability of me catching you working in the lab is slightly less than me winning the Nobel. Yet in fact it happens – today. I guess I’m lucky.”

  “Hmmm…”

  “In all fairness, I already noticed on Facebook that you do devote an impressive amount of your time in the lab to playing Candy Crush Sage. You’ve got good.” Daniel looks at me, then lets his eyes rest on the floor.

  I look out of the window, disappointed. His lab overlooks the dramatic little mountain known as Arthur’s Seat. This unique, volcanic offering sits in the middle of Edinburgh, a lovely burst of greenery for a city centre. High and mighty Edinburgh Castle is also in clear view along with the sprawling countryside around what is actually a small city – barely more than a large town.

  “Nice view, isn’t it?” says Daniel. “On clear days you can see the North Sea and across the Firth of Forth to the farming lands of Fife.”

  “It’s a splendid sight, which is just as well because you seem to spend much of your day admiring it.”

  A feeling of sadness is coming over me. It takes a certain mindset to stand in awe of PhDs; to perceive the honour and to respect the effort encoded into those three humdrum letters. Admittedly it is an elitist mindset, but it genuinely embodies a noble aspiration; ultimately, a PhD is driven not only by the desire for personal affirmation but also by the desire to enrich the common stock of human knowledge. A PhD, for me, is some people’s idea of a contribution to society; a contribution they would like to make. The desire is infused with a certain humility even if status is also being sought. Other people want to contribute to society in other ways; greater and lesser ways depending purely on how you care to measure it. However, some people simply do not buy into the concept of contributing to society – at all. To my surprise, my boyfriend transpires to be one such non-believer. I want to shout at him, shake him, ask him if he really is such a loser? But we are surrounded by people, by his colleagues.

  “You want to go for lunch now?” Daniel asks running his hand through his thick blond hair that always looks like it’s recently had a few thousand volts sent through it.

  “Sure. You paying?”

  It’s a cheap shot but the open goal is irresistible. Daniel does not get paid for the time he spends at the university. Daniel does not get paid for the time he spends anywhere upon this Earth. His Dutch scholarship ended and his parents cancelled his monthly allowance in a vain attempt to pressurise him into the adult workforce.

  One corner of his lip curls up and his eyes shoot fire at me. “Please Ka, shut up.”

  He looks away and, in a different tone, says, “You guys come as well?”

  The brown-haired girl and the short blond-haired guy both agree and put down their pipettes. Apart from the tension between me and Daniel, it’s relaxed and sociable – it is, gulp, normal life. And I realise normal is now weird to me. My telephone rings in my pocket, I see on the display it is Lucy. I invite her to join the impromptu lunch party.

  I turn to Daniel’s two colleagues. “Hi, I am Karin,” I say shaking the child-like hand of the short guy.

  “Edward.”

  “Stacey. Nice to meet you.”

  Stacey is very skinny, a bit shorter than me and has large blue eyes with long eyelashes. I recall a story Daniel told me the other evening after watching a movie with a few people from his lab.

  “Ah, you are the girl with the one-legged dog!”

  She smiles widely, “Actually, it has three legs.”

  “She has an aggressive rabbit as well,” Edward chips in.

  “Oooh, she isn’t aggressive!”

  “It is! It bit me the other day as soon as I entered your flat.”

  “She is just afraid of other people.”

  Normal banter – how weird…

  We pass their office. Daniel has been blessed with a large desk to stare across, and the office has at least three free spaces. There are two black plastic trays hosting ten small cacti each. Next to the trays there are about thirty well-organised low-fat margarine containers filling up a desk. In most of them tiny green leaves are emerging through earth – I presume these are cacti-to-be. In Lab 262 we would no sooner dare start a cacti farm than ram a cacti up our intimate places.

  “Hey Vlad, you coming for lunch?” Edward says to a guy in the office.

  “That’s the guy who wrote the note,” Daniel whispers to me too loudly.

  Vlad abruptly turns his head in our direction. He has the face of the slighter fatter twin brother of Mr. Bean, with a trimmed circle beard. He looks much less harmful than his note implies.

  “What are you telling about me, Daniel?” he enquires, in an Eastern European accent.

  “She just asked who wrote that friendly note above your bench.”

  “Unfortunately, that is necessary here.”

  He stands up and comes over to shake my hand.

  “Vladimir.”

  “Karin.”

  I gesture towards Daniel, indicating he is the connection point. “You can score better,” says he, completely ignoring that Daniel is standing behind him. “But you need to let your hair grow longer. Like this is nothing.”

  Wow, that’s a bit cheeky, my hair isn’t so bad… But ‘score better’ is hunky dory, I should co-co!…

  “I like your honesty and directness,” I say.

  “Good, most people don’t like it. Or simply don’t get it.”

  He adds this com
ment while patting the back of a long-haired, overweight guy in a track suit. This chap looks misplaced; much too tall for the low desk, too chubby for his office chair and with fingers too fat for the keyboard he is tapping.

  “I gave him a print-out with ten eating manner rules, but look at him…”

  He uses the guy’s shoulders to turn the chair towards me. “Still, Chinese noodles sticking at his T-shirt everywhere.”

  I fall silent. He just treats this poor guy like a piece of meat we are checking out. I feel embarrassed but the guy doesn’t seem at all bothered. “He just doesn’t get it,” Vlad says despairingly while turning the guy back towards his computer. “At least he won’t spoil our appetite now; he has already eaten.”

  I am watching the scene with wide open eyes. The others also look uncomfortable with the situation, but less surprised. “You can’t do that,” I say very quietly.

  “Let’s go,” Edward says, slightly pushing me in the direction of the door to avoid any conflict.

  The five of us walk to the elevator and wait until it moves the eight floors up to fetch us.

  “Sorry, but I really don’t think that was very nice what you did there,” I say to Vlad, still not having the faintest notion what sort of man I am addressing.

  In a very friendly tone, he replies: “You know what is not nice?… To hear him slurping Chinese instant noodle soup next to your ear, soup which he eats with his hands. Have you ever seen the consistency of Chinese noodle soup? You can’t eat it with your hands, as you just saw from his T-shirt.”

  “Okay, that is quite disgusting. But still…”

  “I already went to my boss three times to ask where he got him from. The last time I asked him if he started recruiting new PhD students at the zoo.”