Lemons

It’s Tuesday, and I haven’t left the flat now for two weeks. There’s certain adjustments you have to make, to really survive this kind of lifestyle, this kind of living. For instance, milk doesn’t usually last longer than a week, so I’ve learned to take my tea black, or with a slice of lemon. Lemons last longer than milk anyway, and the citrus feels clean and sharp on your fingers when you cut it, like those adverts for washing powder or fabric softner, where they lace them with chemical fragrances designed to smell of oranges, or lemons, or bluebells or whatever. So when some housewife, stuffing her baby’s soiled clothing into the washing machine, is going to, on hanging up row after row of old socks and underwear to dry, imagine herself suddenly transported into a freshly cut meadow.

 

After the first week, most of your perishables, not just milk, start to go off, and you have to start getting inventive. Anything dried is good, obviously, I find most of my meals revolve around three staple bases; Beans, Rice, and Pasta or noodles. It’s up to you to put in variations, I can knock up a half decent tomato sauce with just a tin of tomatoes, garlic, some dried oregano, and balsamic vinegar, and I still remember the recipe for the risotto my girlfriend used to cook for me when I was still in medical school, usually at two in the morning when I’d be high as a kite trying to finish a paper or a dissertation on a mixture of coke, whiskey and coffee.

 

From medical school in Manchester, I went to California for a while to do my post-grad. It’s strange the things you remember from a place or time of your life, for instance you work for the pre-eminent microbiologist in North America, you actually get the chance to sit and listen to his lectures and attend his classes, and all you can remember is the shape of his beard, or the way he curiously mispronounced words you thought were so common, so accepted, that interpretation was taken as given. For example, instead of saying, say, Al Pacino, like ‘Pa-Chee-No’. He would say it like, ‘Pa-See-No’. Like the David Coleman football commentary my father used to listen to, religiously, every Saturday afternoon between three and five whilst the football was on. Some of my most vivid memories of my childhood, would be driving back from some national trust park, or stately home or some kind of outing that my Mother would drag me and my sisters to. And Dad would announce final score, that it was 4:45 with a wave of his hand and a barked warning of silence, and we would sit with him as obeyed in the backseat, waiting for the result of his beloved Manchester City to come crackling out of the car radio in perfect BBC English. We would all dutifully go quiet, as if in a theatre, waiting for the silent pumped clenched fist that meant a win, or the open handed slap onto the wheel that meant a loss. Every time he would look round to me, the only other male in a family of six, for support and consolidation, and each time I would look blankly at him and try to celebrate or commiserate as necessary, “That’s great dad!” or “That’s terrible dad”, and every time I would see the tiny thought of disappointment form in him, like a man coming home to find a dead houseplant.  

 

The phone rings again. I still get a lot of calls from people, even though I made the number ex-directory when I bought the flat, just like they told me to when I took the job. After the first five or six messages I disconnected the answering machine, so the phone now just rings and rings, and I imagine the person on the end of the phone, primed and waiting, like a gun or a spaceship. All bile and swearwords and rage, waiting to go off. Like a cartoon bomb with a big oversized fuze, fizzing and crackling like a sparkler on bonfire night.

 

Other things you begin to do once you start getting death threats are; locking back doors and windows and keeping keys out of reach. Some colleagues bought baseball bats or kept kitchen knives within easy reach. I even know of one person, a virologist with several published articles to his name, who took to sleeping with his cricket bat, - unused since his days bowling left arm spin at Oxford- by his side. I haven’t quite got to that stage yet, and so far I haven’t had to call the glazier, though now I have a list of reliable ones in the area. Some people keep the bricks, put them up on the mantelpiece like old trophies. Other’s throw them away, me, I’m not sure what I’d do.

 

I try to keep fit and healthy, when the lab is shut down by the protests and picket lines you get a call before eight thirty telling you it’s not worth coming in today. I expanded my cable tv subscription, and there’s a lot of aerobics and keep fit on in the middle of the day when you have nothing to do, for the same housewives who are smelling their fabric softner and imaging themselves in an alpine idyll I suppose. I used to play a lot of sports before, we got subsidised gym membership at the lab, I would do squash or even golf on the driving range.

 

I wish I had a stronger opinion on things to be honest. I get called ‘monster’ and ‘scientist’ in equal measure, and am told what I do is both a vital service and a crime. For me, I just do what I do. It’s about science and numbers, and computer printouts and problem solving. Seeing what reactions these chemicals get, and the effects of those substances, altering, analysing, producing a solution. I’ve always liked puzzles and problems, ever since I was a kid and I used to devour those ‘1001 crossword’ and ‘1001 wordsearch’ books you can buy for long drizzly holidays in Cornwall and the Isle of Wight. It’s what I do, I’d prefer not to have to use a living thing, that we didn’t have to do the testing, but that’s what’s done. I just take an emotional step back and don’t think about to be honest., like a guy who works at a mortuary, or a mental home, you just can’t get that emotionally involved. Sometimes there’s no alternative, and I concede sometimes it’s a more practical and effective solution. I know lots of people who still eat steak, despite the fact that they could be just as easily be eating an aubergine.

 

I remember, a physiology professor of mine, back in California a good few years ago now, doing a live dissection of a frog. The demonstration was about spinal cord reflexes even without higher brain functions, in the event of brain death and so on. So the professor, a gruff old thing who looked like a bowling ball with a beard, chopped off the frogs head above the mouth with these big thick, dissection scissors, basically guillotining the thing, brain, head and all; almost instantaneous death. However, despite this, and as if agreeing with the scientific discourse about itself, the frog would flip over and right itself when placed on it’s back, like one of those wind up sucker toys that slowly recoil and popthemselves up into the air after a time. To further prove his point, the professor then demonstrated how the frog would flinch and move from pain stimuli, by dropping mild acid from a pipette onto it’s rear.

 

Some people, some scientists they get things in the mail. Bullets and letters and bones and blood of things. Photographs of their children or their wives, at the park, at the shops, outside school. I’ve never understood that. Like those ‘pro life’ protestors in America who blow up abortion clinics and shoot at doctors, that fanaticism, that which causes people not to see the inherent contradictions in their philosophy, pro life but willing to use murder that scares me.

 

The professor, after showing us the frog’s instinctive reflexes were still intact, then used a dissection probe; basically a four inch long wooden rod, and jamming it into the half-frog’s spine, wiggled it around like a stirrer in a cappuccino, waiting for the limbs to go limp, indicating the spinal cord had been fully destroyed. He then placed the frog on it’s back, and exactly as predicted, this time it didn’t right itself, or provide any reaction of any kind.

 

I’ve never really been scared of blood myself, which I suppose is quite important (though not as you might think) for a biologist. When I was seven, I was in the park with my father, with a bag of nuts to feed the squirrels. And my dad, who I thought was fearless, would sit, rock still, with a few nuts on his hand, and wait so patiently for the squirrels to come up, cautious and wary to gingerly pluck the nuts off his palm like opportunistic thieves. When I, who previously had just sprayed food onto the paths and into the bushes for the squirrels and birds, who had kept my distance, tried this, true enough, a squirrel emerged, skittish, and scuttled sideways up to my hand before reaching over and grabbing a cashew from me. In doing so the thing sank its two cartoon teeth into my hand. A squirrels teeth are both sharp and regular, like sheet metal, so the cut doesn’t hurt like if you fellow over and gashed your knee, the familiar pain for a young child, but just seeps and bleeds for hours because it’s so deep and there’s no jagged edges for the skin to knit together. That’s the first memory of my own blood, and I remember a sense of fascination with it, even then, rather than fear or pain, wondering what it was, where it came from, and what it did.

 

When I did my first dissection, I wasn’t thinking about the morals or the ethics of the hopping, soon to be deceased frog. Nor was I feeling any sort of excitement, nervousness, or malice towards taking the life, or having the power to take the life of something. I was thinking about muscle groups and ligaments, the location of bone structures and internal organs. The mechanisms and vessels and groups that were working inside. The chemical reactions, the base elements and the compounds, the effects of other chemicals. I was thinking of equations on a blackboard and diagrams in textbooks. Like looking at a car and seeing the cogs and pistons and  cylinders of an engine whirring underneath, I wanted to look at people and see through the skin and the bone and see the processes. And my knife cut through the frog like I’d slice a lemon in two on a chopping board, and I felt no more attachment for one than the other.

 

The end of my professor’s demonstration came when, having shown the ‘frog’s’ innate reflex to right itself when upside down, had been removed along with it’s brain and it’s spinal cord, then repeated his earlier test, spotting acid with a pipette onto it’s rear quarters. Whereupon, the ever decreasing frog, with no head and a four inch wooden sticking out of it’s neck, started hopping across the table. Started hopping in fact, at increasing velocity towards the professor, splattering him, horror movie style with streaks of blood up his arms and shirt.

 

“I obviously didn’t do a complete job of ablating the spine” he said, as around me people were laughing and wailing in equal measure.

 

I’m not sure why I remembered that story.

 

I look at the answer machine, lying upside down on the floor, and think of the frog. Hopping across the table with no nerves and no brain.

 

The phone’s still ringing. I go over to it and stare down at it. Trying to wait it out. It’s strange how phones don’t vibrate, emitting this huge noise, but not moving. They should be bouncing up and down on the table rattling their handsets, like they do in cartoons.

 

I’m tempted to pick it up and try to explain.

 

I’m not really a political kind of person, I wish I was. I’m just a scientist. I’m just trying to help.

 

On the news, there’s a piece about animal life protests outside the lab where I work. They’re saying that the lab is ‘reviewing’ it’s contract with the firm that hired me. They’re talking about Huntingdon. They’re talking about imtimidation. They’re talking about me.

 

That’s probably what caused the extra phonecalls today.

 

You don’t leave a place for fourteen days, everything seems less real. I understand rich fading celebrities, living in hotel rooms on champagne and amphetamines. Gradually disconnecting themselves. Taking themselves out of circulation. I get Xanadu and Randolph Hearst. I see the appeal.

 

I pick up the phone, like putting a gun to your temple, or your head in the mouth of a lion, waiting for that snap. That sudden onomatopoeia. That release of violence.

 

Because I want it, like a bucket of water over my face, I want it to feel real and to hurt, I want to take it all now at once, and then I can move on, get out of the middle of this. Because right now I’m hopping around with no head, waiting to know whether I’m dead or not.

 

Maybe it’s not a protestor or a death threat. Maybe it’s someone selling double glazing, or phoning to remind me to pay the gas bill.

 

Like I said, I’m really not very political. I don’t have any answers for you.

 

I press the receiver to my lips.

 

I want this.

 

“Hello?”