You Must Be Very Intelligent

by Karin Bodewits

  I have heard that with group sizes increasing to well above twenty people it gets very hard for supervisors to maintain meaningful personal contact with every single student. Plus, the big shots spend a lot of time hanging around at conferences; some are hardly at university during semester breaks. If you are lucky you have a postdoctoral researcher in the group working on the same or a very similar project, and they guide you through your PhD. But if you don’t have that, you can become like a ghostly hermit doodling in a secluded bubble. Poor, poor girl. At least I don’t have results to grill me on. I still have nothing, nada, not a sausage…

  I feel my heart starting to beat faster and cramps shooting through my belly. Only one more presentation to go and then it will be me on stage; the final presentation of the morning.

  Anton is on stage now, a PhD student working in the Simpson lab. I have spent some evenings in a bar with him and of course I see him often enough while fetching a coffee. He is a pleasant, sociable chap who can down a pint of beer within three seconds, and he is physically fit and apparently an excellent researcher. He managed to publish a paper in the “tabloid” journal of science, Nature, during the second year of his PhD. I’ve never seen him present before, but Felix told me he is good. Still something desperate and nasty inside me hopes he will flop miserably; so that the contrast between us is not too brutal. Anton opens his presentation on the laptop connected to the projector next to the podium, comes a few steps towards us and starts to talk. After only a few sentences I am blown away by his speech.

  He talks confidently and engagingly. His presentation is designed with precision, and he manages to explain everything so well that even me, coming from a totally different field, understands every single word of it without getting the feeling that this is a dumbed-down presentation for idiots. He presses the button to open his next PowerPoint slide which is a movie, no less. Colourful complex molecules walk along a string, calling to mind a sloth on a tree branch. It is perfect and impressive. I quickly scan the faces of the three staff members in the room; they all look suitably pleased. How did he do all that? And precisely why on Earth is it miserable me talking after amazing Anton?

  He keeps talking with passion for another twenty minutes after which the audience erupts into applause. I feel my heart pounding in my chest as if it wants to burst out of my body. I could only think about how this all happened. Why had I accepted this hateful PhD position and why did I not leave the moment I realised it wasn’t leading to anything? How could I have gotten myself into such a humiliating situation? What are all these people going to think of me?

  Anton is still answering a few questions from the audience. My head is buzzing, my nerves are fraying and my brain can no longer process Anton’s words. My hands are trembling and I feel sweat coming out of every pore of my body. He rounds off the Q&A, receives his second applause and makes his way back to his seat.

  “It’s you now,” says Logan, sitting on the chair next to me.

  I stand up slowly. My legs feel wobbly. They move forward uncertainly and seemingly of their own volition. I climb the two steps to the podium and am in a state of shock. As I walk to the laptop, I am conscious of an eerie silence filling the room. Everyone is waiting for me to open my PowerPoint slides. My vision is blurred and my fingers are so sweaty they stick to the mouse pad. A typical Windows desktop with a little white arrow jerkily jumping around the screen, unable to reach its goal, is projected on the large white wall. I try to dry my fingers on my skirt. When I reach out for the mouse a second time Logan is standing next to me and opens my presentation for me.

  “Thanks,” I hear myself whispering hoarsely.

  Never have I felt so nervous about a presentation before. I used to quite like talking in front of an audience, but today I am overwhelmed by the silence and the number of people watching me. I am no longer secure and confident academically, and apparently not as a person either. If this would have all been a week later with more results – maybe then – but not now.

  I look back at the audience, catch a few eyes and force myself to smile. I am searching for the starting sentence in my head, which I had prepared for this presentation, but I don’t find the words. Desperately, I look at the first PowerPoint slide showing the title of my talk and decide to read that out instead. I hear my own shaking voice reverberate in my ears, sounding weird and gurgley as if I am hearing myself underwater. I keep on talking; the words seem to be flowing out of me without my control as if a radio is playing in the background. I flick through the PowerPoint slides one by one explaining the things I have done in the last three years. It appears to be beyond me to even try to make the work understandable or inspiring for the audience. Within a few minutes I am conscious enough to observe that everyone is drifting off in much the same way that I drift off during boring presentations. I charge through the presentation apologetically, genuinely sorry for detaining everyone, especially myself. I get to the finishing line in half the allotted time and everyone seems suitably relieved when I say “thank you”.

  The applause is, of course, embarrassingly weak. One of the young lecturers stands up and faces the audience, “Does anyone have questions for Karin?”

  “Why are you here?” might have fitted the bill, but the room just fills with a silence which conveys more clearly than words can, “let’s just get this over, of course I wasn’t listening, nobody was…”

  Normally, if no one has a question and the professors have been dozing during the presentation, one of the senior scientists steps in with a face-saver such as “Did you try this reaction in a different solvent as well?” or “What are the potential applications for this work?” But not this time. The audience is resolutely silent, lest I forget just how amazingly dull I was.

  I manage to regard the expressions on people’s faces but I’m not sure if they simply hadn’t followed a word I said or if they just feel pity for the dull Dutch girl. As the silence intensifies and I start to feel even more undignified and exposed, like a fat stripper at a posh Gentleman’s Club, the short guy who just grilled my Spanish peer says: “So, it’s cystic fibrosis you’re working on, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding in his direction.

  “McLean group, eh?”

  “Yes.” Wow, technically speaking, my talk even inspired two questions!

  He nods, suggesting that one can expect no better from a McLean inmate.

  “Very interesting,” he says, valiantly trying to hide his complete lack of interest in my research. “If no one has any questions then thank you very much.”

  Slowly I walk off the stage, during which everyone is informed about the lunch and what time we will start again in the afternoon after our outdoor activities. I guess it was empty stomachs as much as anything which saved me and my dirt-poor presentation from tougher scrutiny. Right now there’s nothing I want more than to go home with a bottle of wine and down it on the window sill. But I am not even close to home… Everyone heads to the canteen except me who makes for the bar in the basement. The door is open, but there is no one inside. A middle-aged lady with freshly coloured hair comes out of the little staff room at the side.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  “I wondered if I could have a drink.”

  “The bar isn’t open yet.”

  “Could I secretly get one?”

  The woman looks me in the eyes, presses her lips together, and nods. She unlocks the door and hands me a beer from the crate behind the bar.

  “Thank you. I will drink it outside.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just nods conspiratorially.

  I climb the stairs out of the basement to be back on ground level and head to the Loch. I sit down on a large stone close to the water, far enough from the conference centre not to be seen, and take a monstrous gulp of beer. The fog hanging in the valley over the water slowly starts to burn off for the first time since our arrival. Normally, I would be happy to see the gloom of claustrophobic water drops vanis
h, in the magical way of the elements. But today the bright world revealed is not something I want be part of. Firbush is a lovely place but this year it just bears me down. I feel small and, as ever, I wonder how it came to this?

  © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

  Karin BodewitsYou Must Be Very Intelligent10.1007/978-3-319-59321-0_40

  Chapter 40

  Karin Bodewits1

  (1)Munich, Germany

  Karin Bodewits

  Email: office@karinbodewits.com

  It is just after midday when I enter the lab. I had been writing my thesis this morning, when I realised I was mainly staring at a blank screen. So I had put on my backpack and cycled to university through mid-summer Edinburgh. There are still a few small experiments to finish for my thesis, to round off the story. There is also data that needs to be processed and I don’t have the right software at home. Alas, I still have to come in for a few days.

  “Karin, can I have a word with you?” says Barry with a trembling voice. He would be bullied so much by teenagers if he was a high school teacher – or a high-school student.

  “Sure,” I say, much more enthusiastically than I feel.

  It’s an ominous phrase for me. I doubt any conversation that begins with “can I have a word with you” ever ends well. I am completely mystified as to why Barry would open a conversation with this condescending remark.

  He is the postdoc and I am the PhD student, but that does not make him my superior. We had recently chatted about the mess in the lab, and with drooping shoulders he had politely requested that I participate more in cleaning up. True, I had gotten lax, but I tried to change after we talked. These days I am hardly in the lab. Surely he isn’t going to get all sergeant major on me about mess that isn’t mine?

  “Let’s go outside,” says he, now sounding uppity.

  “If you like.”

  Is he actually taking me outside to tell me off? Beyond outrageous. He’s flipped…

  We walk to the few wooden benches behind KB House and I sit down. Barry does not. He remains standing. A charged silence ensues. He is extremely nervous, and it seems to be contagious; now I am nervous as well. What the hell is this about?

  “You want a smoke?” he asks, holding a pack of cigarettes in front of me, with a hand that would suggest he has severe Parkinson.

  I take one and light it with one of Barry’s matches. He lights one too and inhales deeply. This seems to fill him with confidence. He looks at me, angry now, which is really kind of silly but, nonetheless, he looks concentrated like a tiger focusing on its prey. If it weren’t so public I think such a personality change might scare me. I still have no idea what is going on.

  He takes another extraordinarily deep drag from his cigarette, which he has now half-finished with two magnificent puffs. Without a word of explanation it is already plain as day this will get nasty and threatening very soon. He doesn’t hold a weapon, but it feels like he does. In some way, it seems kind of absurd, even comical; Barry playing the role of scary mean guy, which he is just not cut out for. I think of him replacing Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and that makes me smile. The smile disturbs Barry. He wants me intimidated, that much is clear.

  “Uh… about this article you’re writing,” he says, opening his mouth a bit too far, moving his lower jaw from left to right, as if he isn’t yet sure what words to use next.

  “It’s already finished. What about it?”

  I speak guardedly, but I am eager to know where this can possibly be going. The article concerns the project I took over from Erico and it has nothing to do with Barry. He did help Peter when I had been in Firbush, plus on the one morning I had been too hungover to come in. And we did ask him for advice on the protein assays when we got stuck, as he is supposedly “an expert” on that, but that was it.

  “I want to be first author on that paper,” he says.

  His voice is astonishingly firm, yet the words are ludicrous. I laugh at him, uncomfortably at first but then rather hysterically.

  “There’s not much to laugh about, Karin,” Barry says, peering at me.

  “Well it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Why would I put you on as first author, or any author?”

  “If you don’t, I will get you into big trouble with Mark. And you know I can do that. I’m on good terms with Mark and you aren’t. Guess who he is going to believe?”

  I look at him, flabbergasted.

  “So you’re going to make something up about me?”

  “We both know I can do that.” Oh hell yes, you could. And you even have such a passive, sad beaten dog reputation that people might well believe you. But… even so Barry, go fuck a donkey…

  I stare in front of me in silence, watching Fatso, the fat cat, under a bush sleeping next to something that I suppose had been a cute rabbit until a few hours ago. Barry is clearly waiting for me to respond, but I don’t. I stand up and walk away from the silence, across campus in the direction of the School of Mathematics, thinking I might explode any moment. My tongue is moving, but my lips stay closed. I repeat all the insults I remember hearing at the football match: you frustrated fuck trumpet, shit gibbon, bloviating flesh bag, and fuck the conflict management course I just wasted my time in, bloody useless theory…

  “Hi, flower,” Greg says, turning towards me.

  He has his arm in a bandage, his sausage fingers sticking out. Greg, like Sharon, spends much of his life suffering from severe rugby injuries. If it wasn’t that Sharon already had a partner, they could have been a good match; opting for assisted living in a house with a disabled toilet as soon as they move in together.

  “Hi.” I can’t quite speak yet.

  “What’s the deal, petal? Twenty minutes social time?… Oh God, you look furious.”

  I tell him what just happened. “Shall I come to your lab and beat up doctor Barry?”

  “With one arm?”

  “For Barry? A pinkie ought to suffice…”

  Greg is at least a head higher than Barry, and weighs about sixty pounds more. He does rugby, Barry does depression. We both smile, though I seriously like the idea.

  “Why would he do that?” Greg asks after a few seconds.

  “I guess he’s getting desperate, more than two years into his postdoc and no significant results.”

  “That kind of sucks, but it’s no excuse.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why don’t I get us an espresso?”

  A moment later, Greg is back with two tiny cups of espresso. “Why don’t you go to this Prof… the Gilton guy… ask him how to deal with the situation? From what you’ve said, he seems reasonable.”

  “I suppose that’s a better idea than punching Barry in the face, but less gratifying.”

  “You can still do the punching afterwards.”

  When we finish the coffees I head towards the chemistry building, still feeling stressed, bewildered and violent.

  As I approach Prof. Gilton’s office I think briefly about what it had been like when Barry started in Lab 262. He had never been keen on an academic career. As far as I remember, he signed up for the postdoc because he couldn’t find a position in industry. I suspect the postdoc was supposed to be a sort of parking place until he finds a job he actually wants. But now he owns a flat here, the economy is in tatters and the pickings are poor for scientists in Edinburgh. Maybe he needs a paper for his academic career now? He has certainly been very distressed of late. But that is as inevitable as night following day when you are dating Babette. Babette! No single punch in the face would be hard enough to rival the pain wrought by Babette. Poor guy… No, he is an arsehole!

  “Come in,” Gilton shouts in his husky voice.

  I enter the small, cosy office.

  “Sit down,” he says, stuffing an ashtray into a desk drawer.

  I take one of the two free seats on the other side of the table. “What’s behind those eyes, young lady?” he asks benignly.

  I want to start
my sentence with “the frustrated fuck trumpet postdoc” but I am determined to sound non-violent. I convey what happened as if I am not seething with murderous rage.

  Gilton listens attentively and when I am finished, he takes his glasses off his nose and lays them on the table next to him. “First of all, these kinds of things happen much more often than you think. And sometimes there is very little you can do about it.”

  “But… it is unfair.”

  “Barry probably feels his own output isn’t enough. His contract will soon run out and then the decisive moment will come: he either makes it in academia or he doesn’t.”

  “But that is not my problem, right?”

  “No it isn’t. Don’t care about him. But care about yourself, Karin. You only have a couple more weeks before your own contract runs out. Your focus should be on getting out of here. That’s much more important than this paper.”

  “But I don’t want to give Barry a paper just because he puts a knife at my throat.”

  “Then don’t. Just let the paper be. Or are you planning to pursue a career in academia?”

  “No! I don’t have a chance anymore. But it’s months of work. Plus, it was Erico’s project. What about him?”

  “Erico is digging for oil nowadays. I doubt he cares.”

  “Hm, true,” I reflect. “It’s already on Mark’s desk, has been for a few days.”

  “Well, don’t bring it up. I strongly doubt he will.”

  Gilton looks at me piteously. “How’s the thesis going?”

  “Got most of it finished actually.”

  “You got someone proofreading it?”

  “James reads it and gives feedback.”