You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  “Yeah, I enjoyed it, thanks. Weren’t many people there; about sixty I think.”

  At the start of the conference I had hooked up with two girls I didn’t know before, both late stage PhD students, and we had a good time together. None of us was overly fussed about attending the sessions. We were there for a break, from daily lab routines and our dragging PhD projects. One of the girls got upset when she saw her own data being presented by a different research group on the first conference day.

  “That is my data,” she whispered during the talk.

  “Huh… how come they have it?” I asked.

  “My boss gave it away in return for collaboration on a different project.”

  “What about you?”

  “I wasn’t asked, and now I have to stay on for another year to generate other data for my PhD thesis,” she said, with watery eyes.

  “Great boss.”

  “Yeah, he’s a dick.”

  Tears were running down her cheeks. It was unexpected and sad, but an excellent excuse to skip the next session and spend the rest of the day in a pub instead. We partied hard and discovered all three of us were passionate scientists who are being demotivated by ropy PhD experiences. We had fun, and we realised we are not unusual. That’s oddly comforting – yet distressing from a neutral point of view.

  “You travelled with Brian?” Mark asks, leaning on the bench of the two undergrads. Was too dangerous – we might inspire the other to jump out at 30,000 feet.

  Being at the same conference was one thing, but actually sitting next to him on a long flight was unthinkable. I don’t tell Mark that Brian and I merely said hi in Toronto and thereafter cold shouldered each other until the flight home. We were on the same flight, and we dutifully sat together in the airport. And we both sighed with relief when we could finally board and take a seat far away from the other.

  “No, unfortunately not. I took the opportunity to see the city and Niagara Falls, so I travelled two days earlier.”

  “You liked the Falls?” No, this natural-wonder-gone-Disneyland sucked big time.

  “It was impressive,” I say, wondering if Mark and I have ever before had such a normal conversation?

  “Okay. Any news from the conference?”

  “Well, the presentations were like in Venice, mainly research that has been published, but Prof. Clark and Prof. Green took their collaboration to the next level,” I say, smiling.

  Mark raises his eyebrows, clearly awaiting elaboration; Clark and Green are two of the most eminent researchers in the field of cystic fibrosis. “He banged her,” I add.

  Mark expresses a mixture of shock, confusion and worry as if I had just used a bad word that the little boys at the bench should never hear. “How do you know?” he whispers.

  “With two other PhD students, I bumped into them. We came back from the pub, heard some strange noise coming out of a meeting room and had a look to see what was going on. And there they were; on top of the piano – a grand piano of course.”

  Mark looks entertained yet unsure how to react. Apart from some drunken comments during our Christmas night out, our lab is bereft of erotica when Mark is around. The guys at the bench definitely overhear the conversation, but pretend to be absorbed in the work they obviously prioritised lower than yet another beer in the pub the night before. “‘We’re just collaborating’ Prof. Clark said when he saw us standing in the doorway. It was a plausible statement since he had both hands on her ass and she had lifted one leg onto the piano – they were jointly committed to the project, indeed.”

  “Okay, okay, enough!” He must be visualising Prof. Green with one of her dwarf legs on the piano. I liked that I had furnished him with sufficient detail to do this.

  Prof. Green is small and has chubby legs that she likes to pack into a tight leather skirt. I had previously seen her at the conference in Venice. She is an excellent researcher, no doubt, but also the perfect personification of academia as a drip can of eccentric species. I love watching her; how she laughs, how she dresses like the hotty of the local flea market, how she endeavours to be sexy. I remember her pausing during a lengthy monologue at breakfast to dart to the buffet, grab a sausage soaking in fat and slide it into her mouth in one go. Prof. Clark, by contrast, is tall, handsome and well-dressed. He is also married. And he had proudly announced at the start of the conference that his wife had just given birth to his third daughter. They are the two professors who did, after some talks, get a good discussion going. However, the day after their piano sex scene they both sat through the sessions looking red-faced and ashamed.

  Loser One and Loser Two are slowly packing up their stuff, and Mark and I follow them out, locking the door behind them. The guys leave the building through the nearest exit and Mark and I walk back to Lab 262.

  “You happen to know where Lucy is hanging out?”

  “She is still writing up, at home.”

  He shakes his head. “Tell her to come in! She is not finished yet.”

  “She is still working weekends,” I say, not mentioning that she picked this time schedule to avoid Mark, who spends weekends with his girlfriend in Stirling.

  We cross the glass bridge back to the old building. When we have almost reached the end of the bridge the first safety door swings open. A young handsome guy is walking toward us, smiling at me; it is Alex. I freeze in mid-motion. What the hell is he doing here? My mind works fast enough to realise how ridiculous I must look to both Mark and Alex, but my knees seem immobilised for a few seconds. Alex is a step closer and I can smell the triggering mixture of cologne and body odour. He lets his eyes roll over my body and I instantly regret wearing my jeans. I am looking at his face, but I can’t stare at him too long because I am flustered and Mark is examining me. Move! Move!

  “Hello,” Alex says, unclear if he is greeting me or Mark or both.

  “Hello,” both Mark and I reply, and I tentatively take a few steps towards the door.

  Mark is looking at me, puzzled, “You know Alex?”

  “Not really. I know one of his PhD students.”

  After the Oxford Alumni Party we had met only once. Alex had proposed we spend an afternoon together in the seaside town of North Berwick, which we did. I had been excited to go there with him and left work around lunchtime. Alas, when we had finally strolled over the beach and climbed over rocks, I could barely talk. I felt such a need to impress him, find the right words, contrive the perfect message for the perfect man, but I was simply too drained of energy to do so. Though he still failed to mention it, I knew from both Chris and Greg he was dating someone else. This should have taken the pressure off me, but it didn’t. He did his best, but his mere presence stifled me. I had stayed at his place another night, and we had a lively chat at the breakfast table about university policies, particularly around lectureships; how they become more and more like administrative jobs and forever move away from research, how the percentage of time he spends on each activity is monitored non-stop for everything he does, how alarmingly spoiled and spoon-fed students are becoming, and how tragically much time is invested in parenting them. Research became a “hobby” for your “leisure time,” but one that you’re appraised for, which translates into promotions. We had talked a bit about Mark, and Alex had confirmed he has a bad reputation at the university. After that day on the rocks of North Berwick beach we had some email contact, but that was it. I guess we both silently concluded that it would not work between us; no bad feeling, maybe in another life… but not now.

  We walk through another set of doors and enter the dark corridor where Mark’s office is located. We smell cigar smoke, permeating from Prof. Gilton’s office. Occasionally, he smokes outside and we have a friendly chat between the chemical containers. Other days he doesn’t feel like walking downstairs and we see the smoke billowing through the slit of his doorway. To so completely and utterly neglect the rules and policies in a place where you are supposed to be a role model to students is appealingly cavalier, at leas
t to me. I came to like him in the last year. After my first year exam he enquired a few times how I was getting on and explained that the exam had been a “normal procedure.” He seems to care deeply that the people in our lab can finish their PhDs. He hardly ever enters our lab, but he talks to the Lab 262 inmates in the corridor, offering his help whenever he can.

  Mark unlocks his office door and I can only hope he is not inviting me in to continue our conversation.

  “Did Brian tell you he found a lectureship position in Cork?” he asks, standing in the doorway.

  “He didn’t.”

  “You can join him to Cork for a few months to help him set up his lab.” Are you really this clueless?

  “I would like to finish my PhD first, have a nice evening,” I say hurrying off to the lab, though just to fetch my coat and backpack.

  It is still early but the office is dark and silent. Until two days ago the fossil autoclave had been hissing around this time of the day but an inspector had recently done some inspecting and – to absolutely nobody’s surprise – closed the old beauty down. Now it just stands there, waiting to finally rest in the knacker’s yard where it has long belonged. I lock all doors and cycle home.

  I say hello to Lucy, who is sitting at the desk typing on her laptop. I sit on the sill, stare out of the window and light a cigarette. “Mark wants you to come in and do lab work,” I say.

  “I bet. He writes me emails all the time. I actually found a teaching position in Senegal today. I decided to take it. I’ll write up till I go.” Noooo!…

  She is excited but I’m sad. I knew she was looking around for jobs to get away from Edinburgh. Of course sleeping on a mattress in my living room is nice for a slumber party but in the long run it is poor testament to a full life for a functioning adult. I just didn’t think she would find something so quickly.

  “I guess I should be happy for you. When are you leaving?”

  “In a month. I still have about four weekends of work to finish and then I should be ready to leave.”

  “So soon?”

  “You’ll be fine. You have Felix… and William.”

  I know. I’m a big girl. But still, the best thing about my PhD is going to West Africa, and work looms large in life when empty spaces appear. I sometimes think Lucy is one of the main reasons – even the main reason – I do not suffer from depression during my PhD.

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_36

  Chapter 36

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  Sunday morning 8:30, I open my eyes and stare straight into the back of a dude. Yip, that is definitely a dude’s back – in my bed. I presume it will have a dude attached to it… What the bloody hell is he doing here?! And who is he?…

  Image by blurry image, the night before comes into vague focus… And what had seemed like a fine and fun idea – to bring the Hungarian pizza baker home – now seems to have been inspired solely by alcohol. Why did he not just leave? Hasn’t he got some dough to knead? What is his name?…

  I hobble to the bathroom to empty my pressing bladder. My stay in the bathroom is longer than necessary as I take my time to torment myself with the events of the previous evening. The general narrative is clear and clichéd though lacunae abound, and my dignity does not appear to feature anywhere…

  Lucy and I had been in Dragonfly, a bar in West Port, close to the Grassmarket. We had been sharing our initial PhD interview experiences – our first oh-so innocent encounters with Mark and the Lab 262 inmates. The story of Quasimodo wanting sex on the bread toaster bed in Pollock Halls came up, inevitably followed by the story of the good-looking guy I had met on the street that same fateful day. I had sentimentally kept the note with his number in my wallet ever since. On discovering this, Lucy had encouraged me to dig it out and ring him.

  “Call him, invite him over,” she said brimming with wine-fuelled largesse on the bar chair.

  “Yeah, why not?” I thought, brimming with wine-fuelled derring-do on the seat beside her.

  A couple of glasses to the wise, it seemed a downright logical thing to do. I took out my mobile and rang the number of a total stranger. Explaining who I was – a girl you met very briefly on the street yonks ago – was a lengthy process. It wasn’t a matter of convincing him that he had found me attractive; it was a matter of convincing him I was not mad, desperate or pathetically drunk, and it was all in the tone, never overtly stated. In the end he very happily joined us.

  “No chalk on the windows with this one,” I whispered when the guy, whose name still eluded us, went up to the bar to fetch another round of drinks.

  “The IQ of a fish-finger,” Lucy estimated, quite generously. “But he’s hot!”

  After that round, Lucy left and things got hazy. I know I did invite him home, into my bedroom, and that we had sex, but that is about it.

  I feel disgusting and opt for a shower, a girlie attempt to wash away the reality. With shaking knees, I climb in the bathtub and warm water runs over my body, my face and hair. I manage to convince myself that with just one Ibuprofen, half a litre of coffee and another short nap, the day will be fine. If pizza baker would just kindly exit stage left pronto!…

  Right now, a stealthy text to Lucy seems the best option. I wrap my aching body in a towel, get my mobile out of my coat and plump onto the toilet seat: “Lucy, there is a dude in my bed. Could you please get rid of him!”

  As soon as I press “send” I hear the beeping noise of her mobile in the living room. With tired legs I waddle back to the bedroom, lie down next to the pizza baker and wait.

  In the faint light coming through the curtains I can vaguely see the details of his back. A few lost hairs, some spots and some curious white bits and pieces. I survey this white matter for a while – I have nothing else to do – and conclude these could be skin flakes. However, taking the occupation of the Hungarian into account I wonder if they are actually dried-out pieces of dough. I could easily test this theory by wetting my finger and seeing if the dried flakes turn into something malleable. But I decide that would be rude and I don’t want to touch him in case he interprets it as erotic desire. In that case I would have to come clean; “God God, no! I was just wondering if you had decaying foodstuff on your back.”

  The living room door opens as Lucy makes her way to the bathroom. At least it didn’t take much to wake her. The sound waves from the toilet flushing temporarily fill the house, and are followed by clatter as Lucy moves heavy gear around. Her footsteps come close to the bedroom door but she doesn’t enter. The light snore of the Hungarian pizza baker is unperturbed by all this. I have no idea what Lucy is doing but then the whole house fills with a terribly loud cock-crow followed by the Beatles song Good Morning, Good Morning. She must have pointed the large stereo boxes right at the bedroom door and put the music on full volume. Now she is banging on the door and shouting “Ka, get up! Get up! We have to go to church now!” Church? Church, really? Do you think the poor guy is that stupid?…

  The pizza baker sits up straight in bed, totally overwhelmed by Lucy’s ruse. He looks at me like he wants me to do something about the noise, but the only thing I can do is laugh and shout, “Well done, Lucy!”

  He gets dressed, though a bit too slowly for my liking. Just before he finally leaves the bedroom, he says, “It was very nice and maybe I see you again?”

  I don’t want to be rude or cruel, but neither do I want him to imagine that he might ever rest that dough-splattered back in my bed again, “Well, I’m glad that one of us sees potential…”

  The front door opens and closes a few seconds later. He is gone. I look at the clock, 9:00 a.m., still early. Lucy left just before the pizza baker, so I can have a little nap before going to the lab. I can wake up with the Hungarian memory consigned to the dustbin of history.

&
nbsp; On Sundays it looks quiet on the King’s Buildings campus. If you peer closely – through the windows of the labs – you will find that there are in fact many people working, mostly PhD students, some postdocs. A professor or lecturer might occasionally be spotted, probably just fetching something from their office which they meant to take home. What defines the scene is the lack of undergraduate students walking from the bus stop to the lecture theatres, filling up the teaching labs, having their lunch in the canteens or corridors. During term, this is a thriving university environment brimming with people who believe the world is at their feet and their parents’ investment will soon lead to returns. At the weekend it is a joyless place, hosting mostly people that – at least once upon a youthful day – are longing to become real scientists. Many spend hours upon hours here at unsocial hours, desperately trying to salvage the treasured dream fading to grey amid forbidding cloisters – never to be revived.

  The statue of Joseph Black looks sad in the late autumnal drizzle. I park my bike at the entrance, on top of a thick pack of yellow leaves from the majestic trees which adorn the pavement. When I walk upstairs I literally bump into Ajit, the unsporty, short Indian guy who works in the organic synthesis group next door, and is collaborating with Lucy. I grab at the guardrail to stop myself from tumbling backwards down the stairs. Attentively, Ajit holds my arm and helps me regain balance. As soon as I am out of immediate risk he steps sideways to establish a polite distance from my body. He smiles sweetly and I can all but hear him thinking: You are really clumsy.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, in a chirpy way which jars utterly with the distraught state of my body and brain.

  “I’m fine, thanks for catching me.”

  “Sorry, I did not see you.”

  “I should say sorry, I was staring at the floor,” I say and continue on my way.

  In the lab, Lucy sits at a bench with a Bunsen burner, trying to pick single colonies from an agar plate.