Certainly the mood in the lab relaxed when they left. How can intelligent people with common interests and common goals be reduced to this: people imparting happiness by departing, and at no other time. It is not just wrong – it’s weird.
Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl had hated each other. And everyone seemed to dislike them, including myself. Yet no one ever spoke about their dislike; there was no need, it was so clearly understood, by everyone. As soon as they packed up, and closed the heavy brown door with the number 262 behind them, a silent and yet unmistakable sigh of pleasure filled the room. Their names were crossed out on the telephone list in the office and removed from the door within a week. I don’t know who crossed them out, but no one objected. For the rest of my stay in Edinburgh I will never see them again. And Mark will never mention them again.
I found Bubblegum-Bobline and Diet-Coke-Girl equally irritating, but in different ways. Diet-Coke-Girl was too sensitive, too emotional for me; an incredibly unhealthy, high-pitched drama queen, in my eyes. I struggled with her, but Mark seemed to despise her. He couldn’t stand having her around. She was very different from Mark, at heart a dour man who squirmed in the presence of normal feelings. Diet-Coke-Girl’s emotional incontinence was dreary for all of us, but for Mark it was the stuff of nightmares.
Maybe Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl was Mark’s best sparring partner. She ran roughshod over the hierarchical structure and sparred on equal terms. She did not give a damn about him, or about hiding it. I would have admired her if she had at least smiled or said a friendly word to me just once, but apart from the drunken-girlie-chat at Christmas dinner she didn’t. It was a mystery whether or not Mark disliked her. He seemed slightly scared of this woman, who rounded off all their interactions with choice words like, “Thanks for your input, Mark! It’s an absolutely idiotic plan and I’m not going to do it!”
They weren’t bad scientists. From what I heard and later read in their theses they were both good. Bubblegum-Bobline-Girl built the fundaments (and even published) a research topic Mark is still working on today. Part of Diet-Coke-Girls’ thesis would easily have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, but Mark hated her so much that he never read her thesis before submission. His old boss, Prof. Gilton, had to tend to that. But even if Mark had read it, he would probably have opted out of them writing a paper together. This would not be because of his lack of input – that’s so passé it doesn’t merit comment – but because he is so bloody-minded he would cut off his own nose to spite his face.
Now I wonder: Were they really such awful personalities or was that just how I experienced them? How would it have been had we met as colleagues in a different lab – possibly rather nice, sadly. Mark bad-mouths others to me and apparently badmouths me to others. Only Lucy and Logan manage to steer clear of Mark’s rants, mostly because he isn’t interested in their projects. We all know what is going on, and feel we should be able to rise above it, but in reality we can’t. Mark is sitting in our ears like a menacing earwig repeating over and over again how incapable the others are. And even though we know he is a brutal character assassin, our brains cannot help but look for evidence to confirm his incessant put-downs. Consequently we all feel defensive and traitorous. It’s a wonder we interact at all – a triumph for the social animal inside us all.
I muse that, no matter what, we have to be happy with the small things in life. Two departures have freed up two desks and two chairs; for Logan and me. Mark had organised a few more desks in a room on the other side of the building; for Babette, Erico and Barry. Perhaps he could not bear looking at Barry’s sad face any longer and he hoped that more office space would cheer him up, but it didn’t. I guess their new room, inhabited mainly by postdocs of Barry-ish hues, doesn’t inspire them. It is not very practical either. They have to cross the whole building to get to the lab, which is disastrous when most experimental waiting steps tend to last five to twenty minutes. But they luxuriate in an indulgence many of us envy. They have desks in a clean office where Mark cannot easily sneak up on them. I am happy enough just having a desk facing the window, next to Lucy.
Barry is standing next to me, looking through a chemicals catalogue, with his bored undergrad close by. As soon as he notices that I am doing nothing more intellectually challenging than clock-watching, which is precisely what I am doing, he starts to talk, in a surprisingly pompous voice which I hadn’t heard before, and instantly never want to hear again.
“We have been looking for you, Karin. This morning, you were unusually late.”
He even manages a sigh. I have never found Barry amusing but right now he almost makes me laugh. He is seriously expecting me to justify my lateness to him. Wow! A Pussy with no authority trying to lord it… we are in that strange space where tragedy and comedy blur…
I raise my eyebrows. “True. I was. You missed me?”
He looks confused, somehow surprised that I am not intimidated by his non-existent authority. “Eh… no. Or maybe, yes. No! Anyway, this project student of yours… what’s his name…” How did he cock up this time?
“His name is Nick. What did he do?”
“Well, he came in this morning, but I sent him home. Actually Logan did. We did… He was drunk.” Barry, you couldn’t get a toddler out of a sandbox... Of course it was Logan who kicked him out!
“Drunk??!!” I feel my eyes widening at the hang-dog misery which is Barry’s default expression.
“Yes, apparently he has a side job in a lounge bar…,” he pronounced the words “lounge bar” as if he had never heard of the concept before. “They had a cocktail tasting for the personnel this morning. He was smelling of alcohol and was clearly unsteady on his feet.”
“Right… Good job sending him home. What was he thinking? Drunk in a chemistry building? I will talk to Mark about it.”
“Okay,” says Barry, letting his shoulders drop again.
I walk to Mark’s office with the timer in hand; a great device for terminating unwanted conversations. I just estimate how much time I believe I need with Mark, which is never more than five minutes, and set the timer accordingly as if the alarm means I have to do something important – which is sort of true; I need to leave. I am not the only one playing this trump card. Suspiciously many of the Lab 262 inmates hectically press random buttons on timers when we hear his keychain approaching – even some undergrads do it.
I knock on his door and he barks me in. Mark is behind his desk, hectically writing something on the A1 sized freebie calendar he got from a chemicals supplier.
“Crazy, crazy, so busy… and that within the semester break…” he mutters. “What can I do?…” he asks, seeming sort of pleased to see me.
“About Nick… Logan and Barry sent him home this morning because he was drunk, and it’s not the first time it’s happened… Last Wednesday he came in two hours late, which is par for the course, but so stinking of alcohol that he would stand out in a crowd of Irish football fans. Unsurprisingly, he emptied his guts in the lab sink. He destroys enzymes by forgetting to put them back into the freezer. He is an absolute monkey in the lab, which is an additional problem, beyond being pie-eyed. So, I’ve decided I don’t want to have him as a project student anymore.”
“Students…” he says in a weary way, as if struggling to martial an interest in such trite creatures. “You don’t want to supervise him anymore?” It is actually more of a statement than a question.
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay, then Logan will have to do it.” Yikes, Logan will be soooo pleased…
“Eh… What about just telling Nick that he is not welcome in our lab? Like firing him.”
“Not possible. He needs to finish the project for his degree. It’s part of his curriculum.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to care too much about his degree, and if it turns out he does, he can do his project somewhere else… start with a clean slate.”
My timer started beeping while I was speaking. Mark looks at
me, eyebrows raised as if I just proposed we should switch to researching alchemy.
Mark shakes his head and smiles uncomfortably. “Logan will supervise him.” Poor Logan. He will hate me. But then again, he could also just say he doesn’t want Nick as a student and then maybe Babette will get him… she will probably chain him upside down in the lab if he makes a mistake… despite all his ineptitude and sloth, Babette would be a cruel fate for hapless Nick…
I go back to the lab with a smile on my face, thinking of Nick under Babette’s dark wing. I walk straight to the small 37 degrees room where nine large Erlenmeyers with broth and E. coli have been shaking for the last hour. It’s a tiny room without windows. It smells worse than a sewer but I don’t mind any more, I’m accustomed to it. I take out two flasks and check from the outside if my bugs survived. Thankfully they did. I induce them so they – hopefully – start producing my protein, and close the door behind me.
Lucy sits at the bench with a piece of paper, pen and calculator. It’s not an uncommon scene; Lucy can very often be found calculating enzyme concentrations for her experiments – she has a very predictable routine.
“Wow, you seem happy. I guess you had a good night?” she asks.
“Yeah, it was… hmmm… very… nice…”
“Oh God, you did not sleep with the Neanderthal, did you?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“Tell me more…”
“Not here.”
It is only four days since my head turned red and my heart beat faster as I read the Facebook messenger invitation. I had blurted out to Lucy, ignoring the fact that Logan was in the office as well, “He invited me out!”
“Who?” Lucy had replied with raised eyebrows and a slightly worried look.
“One of the three hot guys in this department!”
“Your definition of ‘hot’ differs from mine. Sex with semi-evolved primates doesn’t appeal to me.”
“You don’t find the Scandinavian guy hot? He has a torso and legs to melt into. He has beautiful wild hair, chest hair sticking out of his shirt…”
I closed my eyes and inhaled deep breaths through my nose as if by doing so I could get a whiff of his bodily scent and testosterone. The only smell reaching my nose was from the methanol and chloroform mix. It’s quite toxic for fantasy, and human lungs, so I came back to boring reality.
“No.”
“It’s not him anyway. It’s the theoretical physicist in the office down the corridor.”
“Thomas?!”
Lucy closed her eyes, rested her head in her right hand and shook it sorrowfully.
“Yes,” I say, feeling much less thrilled. “What’s wrong with that?”
“I just declined his invitation half an hour ago.”
“He invited you as well?”
I tried to sound surprised, but of course he would have tried to date Lucy first.
“Yeah.”
“At least he feels like going out then,” I say gamely clutching for a bright side.
“Yes, but it is a bit cheap to try both of us.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know we work in the same office?”
“I’m pretty sure he does.”
“Why did you say no?”
“He is closer to a human being than the monkey in woollen socks, but he still skipped too many millennia of evolution.”
“He’s one of the top three!”
“I suppose he represents one of the last three stages before Homo sapiens – that’s as kind as I can be.”
Lucy could read the excitement on my face. I was second choice – at best – maybe third of fourth, God knows who else in the department he asked. Too bad. The prospect of going out with other men was what I needed.
Lucy looked at me as if she totally understood.
“Where are you going? Ceilidh dancing I presume? That’s what he proposed to me at least.”
Wow, he really knows how to make a girl feel special…
“Yes.”
“Ceilidh is not dancing. It’s an invention of the Scots; a sport consisting of people whirling frantically and tossing each other about while folk music happens to play.”
“Well, at least physical strength counts for something… and there is someone instructing everyone to keep the whirling and tossing vaguely synchronised…”
“Yes, yes, it’s a good place to go ‘dancing’ with partners who can’t dance which, I presume, a theoretical physicist is.”
“Yep.”
“What will you tell Daniel?”
“That I’m going to the bar with you.”
“Make it a ceilidh, otherwise he might get suspicious. A normal bar night does not make you leak three litres of sweat.”
Logan had been packing the autoclave and had overheard the whole conversation. He walked to the office door, turned around and said: “Can I give you a disapproving look, Ka?”
He was right. What I did was wrong. But it was good to be held on the dance floor by two unknown strong arms. It was good to have the feeling of being special and wanted; the warm feeling I get in my stomach if I think about his dark brown eyes, filled with emotions, and his messy black hair… His eloquent and smart words with an exotic accent made me melt like a little Belieber being invited backstage. But he is much too intelligent for me. Doesn’t matter…
Lucy takes our communal pack of cigarettes out of the drawer and we head out for a smoke.
“Did he gnaw on your ear?” she asks, imitating a rat.
“No, he didn’t gnaw on any of my body parts.”
“You kissed?”
“No, only nuzzled between each other’s legs,” I say, sarcastically and sniffing like a dog.
I am telling Lucy about the evening before, how Thomas had talked to me, looked at me and led me over the dance floor. The strange character of the Scottish dance had actually enhanced the romance. I had felt good. It was a rare feeling, an alarm call; how joyless my life has been for so long…
“Did you tell him about Daniel?”
“I did, but he didn’t seem to mind too much. And Daniel wasn’t suspicious either about my whereabouts. So, all good.”
When I came home and got into bed Daniel had said: “Why are you so late? I’ve been waiting for you.”
He leaned over and wrapped his arms around me in such a way that I couldn’t move. I didn’t give him an answer and waited until his breathing was heavy. I moved his arm off me and rolled my body to the other side of the bed. I don’t know if it was guilt or distaste for the touch of Daniel, but either way I should have felt bad. Yet I felt great.
The late evening sun is projecting shadows of fluttering leaves on the wall of the lab. It gives the feeling of summer, which it is. It is Friday evening and there is only Lucy and me in the lab. I’m preparing some buffers while telling her about what happened with Nick; that Logan got to supervise him instead and how thrilled he wasn’t by this. Thankfully he didn’t blame me for the swap, just Mark.
Suddenly the sun is not only projecting the shadow of leaves on the wall but also the shadow of a man. My heart stops and my body stiffens. It is easy to scare me. As a kid I didn’t want to sleep alone in a bed. I was even scared to go to the bathroom in the evening as I had to pass the glass front door. With the light on in the hallway and the pitch dark outside I knew anyone passing could glimpse me while I could never see them.
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
It is a low voice. I’m still staring at the wall. From the voice and the posture I know it’s him. I turn around and he smiles at me with his open, intimate gaze. He’s even more handsome now than he had been at the ceilidh, with his shining eyes and strong jawline – so manly.
“We didn’t hear you enter.”
My heart is beating fast and my voice is trembling.
“Sorry, next time I will make more noise.”
He really does look as if he regrets sneaking up on us.
“You are still working?” No, I am just pouring solut
ion A and B together for the sake of it; I can’t get enough…
“Almost finished.”
“I wondered if you fancied going for a walk, to Arthur’s Seat in the evening sun.” I would love to!
“We won’t make it in time before sunset.” Stupid girl! We would easily make that. It will be light for another three hours or more. Now he thinks I’m retarded or don’t like him.
He looks around the lab, thinking carefully about his next question.
“Maybe your boyfriend would like to come along? I would love to meet him?”
“No!” I say, way too loud. What a dreadful idea!… That was witty.
Thomas bites his lower lip and smiles at me in the super-sexy way he did repeatedly yesterday evening.
“No,” I repeat, much more casually. “You two are probably too different. Plus, I planned to go for drinks with Lucy.”
He looks disappointed.
“Another time?” I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t, I musn’t, I won’t…
Lucy is looking at me, more curious about my answer than he is.
“Sure. What about tomorrow?”
“I’ll give you a ring in the afternoon, okay?”
“Okay.”
He walks out of the lab.
As soon as we hear the door close she blurts out: “You like the Neanderthal!”
I struggle not to be obvious. “He’s okay.”
“What about Daniel? That dude you live with?”
“I guess I will break up with him.”
“About time.”
Lucy’s expression is wry, very knowing. She certainly isn’t overloaded with moral fibre when it comes to infidelity.
We head to the city, deciding to have a beer in the Royal Oak, the Scottish pub close to South Bridge. We normally don’t go here but tonight I feel like listening to live Scottish folk music, filled with emotions. Am I really going to break up my (very) long-term relationship – just like that? When did I become a fickle hussy?
You Must Be Very Intelligent Page 17