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Professor Harris' Ivy
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Title: Professor Harris' Ivy
Author: Tem-ve H'syan tem-ve@gmx.de
Pairing: Q/O
Rating: R
Summary: An AU set in the alien world of organometallic chemistry... actually, at a very Earthly chemistry faculty where Benjamin Algernon Morgan finds himself struggling with an extra language, some unexpected feelings, and altogether too much ivy.
Notes: Originally published in the MA fundraiser zine (http://www.hawksong.com/zine/ for those of you who haven't got one yet – it's a very pretty piece of multimedia). Lori kindly released the stories early, so here we are! My very talented Padawan Shiun did two gorgeous illustrations for this, only one of which was in the zine. The pictures can be found at http://www.tem-ve.de/art/ivy.html and http://www.tem-ve.de/art/chemistry.html respectively. Go look!
Some of the minor characters are based on people I have met, and Nick was a highly apposite recommendation from Layna (the song really exists too). AU!Santa!Qui appears courtesy of Raina's fevered imagination.
Last but not least, thanks to my faithful betas, Alex, Jennifer/Gail, Shiun, and Lea (who never did tell me what she thought of the ending :).
I love swimming in the sea.
Considering that's something I haven't done in at least ten years, that is saying something. Not many men would instantly take to an activity that gives them a very acute idea of what it feels like to have your balls squeezed into tiny shivering things that wouldn't mind crawling right back inside your body if they could.
Right here, right now, however, I can't bring myself to care. The coldness of the deeper layers, the chilly currents just two, three feet below the surface, the fact that when I tread water for a moment, I can see my feet and they're miles away – that is really all I need. All I came here for.
All right, and the sun. The sun that still warms my head and shoulders above the water, and turns the splashes of surface water into piss-warm little caresses.
I'm quite a long way from the shore, the yellow buoy marking the shipping route rather larger now than anything behind me. There's this small piece of real ocean reaching into the bay, and I revel in it, ploughing through the waves, not caring that I'm not making any real headway because I'm swimming against the currents, facing the waves. Every new one seems to want to redefine my sense of 'up', tilting my system of reference just this little bit until I accept the crest of the wave as the horizon, for lack of another one. Out here, there's only me, and the next wave. And sometimes, the little yellow buoy. When the waves feel like letting me see it. And when they don't, that doesn't matter either.
I feel sort of pointless, cut loose, and that is fine. That is what I came here for.
The thinking will come back soon enough, and then I'll be on shore, drying off, that crazy Englishman going into el mar in October when he should be doing sensible things, really. Like making the necessary phone calls. Scouting for a flat. Well, being in a different country for starters. Paying courtesy visits. Reading up. Even just watching TV in an attempt to polish up the language. Reading the book that Mike recommended so highly. The one with the gay DCI in it.
As it is, it's lying on my bedside table at the hotel, still unread. Good little me made a point of getting the German translation of it, of course. That is for later.
Now, my hands are revelling in pure unrefined movement. Now, the chill in my lower body feels very much like excitement. The touch of conscience almost adds to it.
Now, there is the next wave. A cheap holiday in Spain, two weeks before what's supposed to be the beginning of a brilliant academic career. In a place I've never even been.
I take a deep breath, and dive.
That must still be my predecessor's rubbish in the waste paper basket. A nice touch. Something personal, I suppose.
That said, the room is fairly impressive for a Hall. Large, a little draughty. Shelves and a wardrobe, probably more places to put stuff than I can fill with what little stuff I have brought. Bed just under the window, a huge desk right next to it, jostling the thin little bed for the prime place nearest to the daylight. The carpet is dark green with black stripes in it, slightly surreal given the bland eggshell-and-grey colour scheme of the rest of the building.
It's nowhere near bedtime yet – dusk is just beginning to fall around the glitzy angular building that is taking up most of the view from my window, at least the bit that isn't taken up by the thinning crown of a chestnut tree. Yes, it has been a long drive, but somehow sleeping is not the first thing I want to be doing in a new place. It's against my convictions. I should be going out there, getting the lay of the land. Exploring the campus. Finding out what that big monolith of glass and steel is inhabited by. Locating food, picking up directions. Unpacking.
Or maybe just finding out where the toilets are. All I have in this room is a sink, and an incongruously large mirror above it.
I look more tired than I feel actually. Something about the lighting in this room, yellowish autumn dusk reflected off the windows of that glassy office block opposite my window, catches in my hair and makes it look redder than it is, bright flaming spikes standing up above my forehead. I'm pale, even though I'm neither a genuine redhead (only half-Scottish, or so my father used to tell me) nor quite the worn-out stubbly man facing me from the mirror. It must be the light. I'm told my eyes need illumination to really sparkle... well, that probably does not involve six hours on the autobahn squinting at unfamiliar signs against the hazy low October sun.
I attempt a smile, and am reassured to see I'm still me and my face hasn't gone German yet. Shaving can wait until tomorrow morning, it's not like I'm out to make the conquest of a lifetime. I am, however, out to fill my rumbling stomach, preferably with something that does not require crockery or cutlery as I have, at present, no idea which of the four huge cardboard boxes that's in. Nor where the kitchen is.
Küche, my mental voice mumbles as I wander off along the corridor, but find no door labelled thus. What I do find, though, is that the first-floor landing affords me an excellent view of this end of the campus, featuring, besides the space-eating glass house and the struggling trees, a pair of narrow streets, some parked cars, a lone cyclist, an illuminated doorway almost covered up in cheaply photocopied posters, and a more decisively illuminated sign that looks like it belongs to some sort of eating establishment.
I venture out along the second of the two streets, past the parked cars with their cheery fly-stained number plates shouting hyphenated words at me, past a few stray posters pasted to every available surface that isn't a window. Student parties, probably. I find I'm having difficulty with the abbreviations, it's been too long since I've actually had to decipher posters and flyers and bus timetables as opposed to the high and haughty, and inevitably long-winded, works of literature the Dept of Humanities deigned to throw at language minors. Still, the four months at Tübingen have probably done more for my vocabulary than the preceding (and succeeding) years of earnest study of what isn't such an earnest language at a closer look anyway. Some of the words Gerd and the Esthers (actually an Esther and her permanently-attached boyfriend) taught me back then, over cheap French wine in the dimness of cellar bars decorated with disused medical equipment, some of these words I still haven't found in dictionaries. Well, I'll hold back on using them until I've found the equivalent of the Esthers here. For the time being, phrasebook German and remembered literature will suffice. All I want is to get fed, after all.
The inviting sign turns out to belong to a tiny kebab shop. Lots of kebab shops here, I remember that much from my foraging for food in Tübingen – which was often, as the flat I shared with two others was notoriously empty-fridged. This one seems to belong to an optimist with a small, brightly-lit conservatory decked out with white plastic chairs, a conspicuously silent pinball machine and some sad-looking plants.
The owner turns out to be Pakistani and replies to me in English the minute he detects my accent. I swallow my embarrassment along with a hearty bite of the kebab sandwich he's conjured up suspiciously quickly, and with a mouth full of red onion and bread, decide to give the optimistic conservatory a miss and make it a kebab-on-the-run.
I take the other street back, past much the same rain-crumpled posters and a signpost full of white metal markers that must have come from the same place that makes the cheery car number plates. Some of the departments are abbreviated as the signs are clearly too short to convey the notion of 'Contemporary History' or 'Clinical Anthropology'. None of them says 'chemistry' in any abbreviation or version I can think of. It's on this campus, that much I gathered from the thinly smiling employee at the student accommodation office or whatever the foot-long local name for that is. Why they didn't abbreviate that escaped me completely at the time.
Oh well, there's time enough tomorrow to find out where I'll be spending the next few years of my life, conditions and funds permitting, working my way into a field I hadn't even considered mine until the application came through, unexpectedly, and I found myself a prospective member of the organometallics research group at the University of Mainz (which I'd never heard of), headed by Professor Matthew Harris. Whom I had heard of. And the rule is, if you've heard of someone as an undergrad, they're way too famous and too high up the scale to go for.
I expect I'll be told tomorrow just how outdated my sad little organometallics course was. Still, steep learning curves are my speciality, and at least I can be sure I share a language with the boss. Canadian, I think, though he spent most of his professional life at Cambridge.
I have finally made it to the meat in the kebab sandwich. Good. I'm nearly home as it is, might make a little detour around that annoyingly glitzy box of a building that's hiding the structured-concrete ugliness that is my Hall from view, just to see what it is that's making up most of my neighbourhood single-handedly.
Sure enough, there is a sign outside the main entrance. Not illuminated, and mostly taken up with the medieval-looking sigil that this place uses for its logo and probably has since the invention of the printing press, which the university website proudly tells me happened around here. Next to it, a few lines of sober text proclaim this glass monster to be the department of Chemistry, General, Organic and Inorganic.
Uncharitably, my first thought is that it's generally a good idea to have the Physical chemists physically separated from the rest of the world. My second is that it looks like the next few years will be graced with the shortest home-to-work commute I have ever heard of.
Well, that means I can have a bit of a lie-in tomorrow before I locate the great Harris (who, it has to be said, has not deigned to reply to my introductory and slightly apologetic e-mail from the internet café in Spain) and make myself known.
Well damn it. Shortest ever walk to work, and I managed to get soaked. Waited until the last minute, but it just wasn't letting up, and the spectacular view from the first-floor landing promised nothing but more heavy rain-sodden clouds. Good thing I went easy on the hair gel this morning – it just does not do to face one's new employer with shiny goo running down one's forehead. Plus, it might be a good move to not look too spiky. Hell, I'm even in my Understatement Trousers today, and a respectable shirt.
A respectable shirt that's gone a shade darker at the shoulders and back now. I sigh and straighten my hair in the reflecting surface of the glass-covered departmental noticeboard downstairs, then scan the haphazardly arranged plastic letters for anything resembling a Professor Harris.
Second floor. The lucky sod gets a view.
I peer up at where the stairs are going, and briefly wonder where the hell they managed to put a second floor here. There's not much here beyond stairs and walkways, and more stairs and a few more walkways, some of them seeming to support glass-fronted lifts that go up to more stairs and more walkways. Like a prison, I find myself thinking. There can't really be much room for actual, well, rooms between where that architect's dream of stairs and walkways ends and where the actual outside world begins.
Oh well. Up two flights of stairs, I suppose. I wander around the perimeter of the hall for a bit, admiring the criss-cross of walkways and stairs and the floating-between-the-floors platforms that are decorated with aluminium tables and toxic green chairs as if to emphasise the point that this is a student meeting place and not a Star Wars set.
I'm grinning, imagining Professor Yoda as my boss. Well, it's a valid consideration – it's not like I have seen a picture of him before. Scientific publications aren't that hot on giving you an impression of who writes them. Still, at least I know I'm looking for a man, probably in his 50s, and non-German. And not small and green. That should narrow it down.
That means the person who's shouting at me to come in when I knock on the door marked 'Prof. M. Harris' isn't the one I'm looking for.
It's a woman for starters, and only a little older than me, though it takes two glances to ascertain that. Her hair is pulled back quite severely under a light blue headband, springing up into a curly brown mess at the back of her head. She wears glasses and peers at me as if trying to determine whether I will be necessary trouble or unnecessary.
"Ah... Morgan's my name. I'm looking for Professor Harris. Wanted to introduce myself," I say to her, in hesitant German.
She blinks, then motions me to follow her into an adjoining room before I've even had time to take in Harris's tiny office. A box of tissues on the windowsill is the only odd thing I notice about it really. Hayfever sufferer, maybe? The side room is even smaller and taken up mostly with a huge desk on which the typewriter takes pride of place over the computer, and big boxy files take up most of the wall space.
This is very obviously a departmental secretary's lair.
She bids me sit down on the visitor chair that is uncomfortably far away from everything else, so I choose to stand while she rifles through her calendar and a large green file of correspondence, muttering to herself, then kicks the computer into action and putters around, ostensibly looking through a database (it looks more like she's looking for a database to me).
You're not in our department, are you, she says in the end.
Well, not yet, I say, but I'm due to start work here next week, and hand her the small sheaf of papers I have kept since I received the first letter of acceptance. The medieval sigil-thingy clearly impresses her, and about halfway down the page her face lights up in a grin I certainly hadn't expected.
"Aaaah. You are the new assistant," she says, slowly and in English. "I thought you are a student, so I did not find you!"
I'm not young enough to be a student any more, I say, not sure whether she understands me. Maybe she just doesn't move her face when digging through files. I decide to revert to German. My name is Benjamin Morgan, I say, but Ben Morgan will do just fine.
"Benjamin Algernon Morgan," she says, triumphantly, making a royal mess out of a family middle name that just isn't designed to be pronounced by foreign secretaries. "You were born in 1976. Very young." She grins mirthlessly, then proceeds to make a note in the thin cardboard file she had evidently prepared for me ages ago. "Well, you have contract already, so you are finished here. Oh, and I am Mrs El-Badaoui."
She must have seen the faint look of puzzlement that crosses my face as I take her outstretched hand across the desk and shake it, wincing slightly at her unexpected strength. "My man... my husband, he is from Marocco."
Ah, I say. Well I'm from England, but I'm sure my accent and your file agree on that. Is Professor Harris going to be in later today?
He is on holiday, she says, still in English (It's the Battle of the Accents, I'm sure). Until Friday, but the other people in the lab are already here, it's in the other building, same floor, the last door on the left, and do I need her to show me the way there.
I decline politely – can't hurt to find my way slowly, learning the landmarks of this maze of a department, and ask if I can get an appointment with Harris for Friday then.
She laughs, thinly. "Professor Harris does not make Termine. You just come, knock on the door, and there he is for you."
Oh well. I excuse myself before she gets any ideas about shoving some of the piles of paperwork in her office on me (I'm sure there must be lots more paperwork to do – this is bureaucrat country after all), and go in search of the walkway that will take me to that ominous 'other building'.
It turns out to look just like the first building, only with slightly more concentrated stairways (wider and fewer in number), and the floors tiled in an unnerving light green. Well, I suppose it stains less easily than the godawful lino we had in our old labs. The doors have round windows in them like portholes, and the whole thing has a certain ferry-ness about it.
Also, there isn't a last door on the left. There is another huge stairway, and past that there is a glass wall giving an excellent view of what looks more like a factory to me than a lab. This architect clearly did not believe in ceilings – everything, every tube and wire and ventilation shaft is visible, circling above people's heads and swooping down on their workbenches like well-aimed predators. Everything's gleaming. Also, the place looks deserted.
I press the handle of the heavy glass-and-steel door experimentally. It's open. As is the next one leading me from one deserted lab into another, slightly more well-lit one. Well, this one has shelves of chemicals in it at least, and low cupboards with their doors wide open, affording a spectacular view of equipment that is at least three decades older than this building. There is a faint noise of activity coming from one of the aisles, and as I turn the corner I see a bottom clad in a white lab coat. The voice belonging to its owner has suddenly got louder, and it's addressing me as someone called Ramsey or similar. It's hard to tell with the dialect she's got going, but apparently she wants a hand. I lend her one, and together we produce a giant rotary evaporator from the recesses of the cupboard. I'm still marvelling at this piece of 1970s lab design while she has long ago moved on to staring at me.
"Hey, sorry. I thought you were Ormsey." (Ormsey? What kind of a name is that?) "Thank you. These buggers are incredibly heavy. I'm really just waiting for one to break so we can get rid of it... I'm Monika, I do the work around here. Who are you?"
She's Monika. She's in possession of the most horrendous Frankfurt accent I've ever heard. She's grinning at me, showing off hundreds of laugh lines, big teeth and deep reddish-dyed hair that her pet rabbit or parrot must be exceedingly fond of. She radiates tech-ness.
I'm Ben, I say, Ben Morgan, the new assistant. The word feels odd in my mouth – I'm supposed to be a research associate, but they'd warned me that some teaching would be expected here, so I suppose I'm some sort of assistant teacher to them.
Well, Ben, she says, welcome to your empire. She actually says Reich, which is more than a little odd. You'll have to share it with me and Ormsey (what is this Ormsey?), but we're all nice people. And the students are too. I've had them for a semester already, you know. They're second-years now but they're still all kids. How old are you?
I'm 23, I say. Mrs El-Badaoui mistook me for a student.
She laughs. You're about a year older than most of them, the boys at least, she says. Wolfram is older than you, and she points at a workbench, and I'm momentarily confused because I'm imagining a bloke named after a chemical element. Wolfram is tungsten, at least in the literature. Here, he seems to be a person.
Come on, I'll show you your colleagues, she says, and leads me through yet another glass-and-steel door. There is a last door on the left now, and behind it is an unimpressive-looking little lab. Green floor, a pair of switched-off fume cupboards along one wall, a very tidy-looking workbench, the white ceramic top gleaming. Along the window front, someone has arranged a few hopeless-looking potted plants. There's a short row of the ubiquitous boxy files, a PC monitor, and a tall person sitting in front of it.
Hey Ormsey, look what I found, Monika crows amusedly. I think this is your new colleague.
The tall person swivels around on his stool and turns a bemused-looking face towards me. He's got spots, and a scruffy brown beard trying to cover them up, and really short hair and a smiling pair of brown eyes.
"Welcome to the pleasure dome, mate. You're the new research associate, right? Pleased to meet you – I'm Richard Ormerod. Rich to my parents, but everyone else seems to have settled for Ormsey." A tinge of Lancashire, maybe, but well-concealed. Familiar-sounding.
I'm Ben, I say, Ben Morgan, and I don't really know what else to say. It's a pretty small lab, and judging from the giant handbag and the pile of magazines on one of the window-front desk spaces, we're sharing it with the ever-bustling Monika as well.
Ormsey picks up on my puzzled look. "Actually, this is only where the demonstrators work. That'll be you and me and probably Andrea on Tuesdays, if we can convince her to commit herself to a whole day this semester. Most of the gear in here is Monika's... well, and some leftovers from your predecessors that got dumped here during the move and were never really missed elsewhere" – he gestured vaguely at a small crowd of battered-looking bottles in one of the fume cupboards – "but in here you'll mostly be using the desk." He pointed at the leftmost space on the window-front desk, elbow-close to a set of analytic scales on a granite pedestal and currently mostly occupied by boxy files parked there. "Most of the actual work happens downstairs."
"Ah."
"Have you met the rest of the group yet?"
"No. Apart from the secretary. And the boss is on leave?"
"Yeah, but he'll be back Friday, just in time really. Come on, now's probably the best time to get to see all of them, before they elope for lunch. Oh, lunch is at 11 here – takes a bit of getting used to. Mostly, I just skip breakfast, but it really pays to get to the fleshpots before everyone else. You might get a chance of actual hot food."
He's awfully tall, I'm thinking as he strides ahead of me along the same connecting corridor with the portholes, almost all the way back to Harris's office, then down the Sing-Sing walkways and stairs to yet another annex. Conveniently enough, it's the last door on the left here too, just next to the emergency exit wedged open with an ashtray.
"Welcome to Ah-Kaa Harris," he says as he swings open the portholed door. That's what it says on the sign next to it: AK Harris. Abbreviation Central. I'll have to find out what this one means later. Meanwhile inside, I'm greeted by complete indifference. The room looks the same as the one upstairs, larger maybe, and with more desks and less workspace. At two of the desks, white-coated people sit reading. They don't even look up. Must be exciting reading.
"The Russians," Ormsey whispers, with a distinct air of I'll-tell-you-later.
From next door comes a small glassy crashing noise, then a hearty curse. Ormsey grins and motions me to peek through the porthole in the door.
A short blonde woman in a white lab coat rushes across the equipment-filled room bearing a dustpan and brush. When her frown at the smell of the spilled substance dissolves, I find she's quite pretty in a refreshing, scientist-like way. She chucks the remnants of the glass container into a lidded bin, tucks her safety specs up into her tied-back hair, sighs and makes as if to wash her hands when she notices Ormsey's grin filling most of the porthole. She splashes water at the door, and Ormsey laughs and opens it.
"That's not funny, Ormsey. That was potentially important stuff I had there!" Her accent is only faintly German, or at any rate she sounds quite confident shouting at Ormsey in English.
"Potentially important? What, as in stuff that turned up at the bottom of one of the removal boxes? Hey, even if you'd found the philosophers' stone in there, I very much doubt you'd unearth the documentation from the same box, no?" He gingerly pats her shoulder and gets splashed with water for his efforts. The girl is grinning despite her furrowed brow.
"What are you doing in here anyway?" she enquires. "It's not lunchtime yet, is it? You never spend any time down here with us working people, Ormsey."
He blinks. "I was going to introduce you to our new colleague, duckie. Maybe you can scare him into becoming a working person for you. Andrea, this is Ben Morgan. Ben – Andrea Silberbauer. She does Tuesdays and... all sorts of other stuff."
"Pleased to meet you," she says in a genuinely friendly tone, then proceeds to nudge Ormsey in the ribs. "Now if you don't mind, I'm busy doing actual research. Like finding that documentation. See you at lunch? You too, Ben?"
Ormsey looks a little crestfallen. Actually, he looks like he's just realised his crush on this girl has probably outgrown his own impressive height.
Ah, the joys of relationships.
Myself, I don't mind sharing my bed with nobody at night. Sure, it certainly is fun to cover yourself in another's warm skin, but... it's by no means a necessity. Not getting woken up by a snoring lover has its advantages too, and at times like this I'm quite glad to have my own little space that nobody enters. Largely because nobody knows I'm here yet. I have no phone, no access to a PC yet, and haven't yet bothered to find my pens to make a suitably legible door sign with my name on it like most of my neighbours on this corridor seem to have done.
Perverse, isn't it, that I prefer the beehive that is a students' Hall to a cosy room in a shared flat? Still, the quiet, when it happens, is quieter here, and it's so much easier to tune out the din coming from upstairs if you know it's complete strangers upstairs and they're not about to barge in demanding cigarettes or that I join them. Not that my flatmates ever really knew me well enough to remember that I don't smoke anyway, and that I go to a party when I want a party rather than wait for the party to come to me.
No, I'm fine in this room. I'll meet people in the kitchen soon enough. Or in the bathroom - apparently there's only one set of toilets and shower stalls on this floor, so maybe we're all blokes? Whatever. I've done my bit of moving in - I've put all my bathroom stuff in a green plastic box that I can take to the shower-bath-whatever room whenever needed.
Must remember to take out the eyeliner at the bottom. Don't really want anyone nicking that.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: t_a_morgan@yahoo.co.uk; sylvia.henry@bbc.co.uk
Morning Dad, hi Mum
Just a quick note to let you know I've finally got an e-mail address over here (still haven't found out the external number of the phone downstairs in my Hall - will do so today). My colleague Richard was so kind to set me up with a user account at the lab PC, so I should be sorted for future contact. Had the full guided tour of the premises yesterday already, looks like a very decent place, spanking new labs and almost everyone here speaks English. What did I polish up my German for again? Anyway.
Haven't met the Professor yet as he's on leave. I hear he'll be arriving a few days before the students, so I hope I get enough time to prepare. At least my commute is short - I've found a room on campus, right opposite the Chemistry building. Talk about good luck.
More soon,
Ben
Well, that's that. Actually, I'm fine with not knowing the outside number of that phone. Saves me having to field calls from my overly-concerned parents about whether I'm 'behaving'. Each of them likes to imagine I've inherited the bad habits of the other, and each of them likes to be proven wrong as often as possible because damn it, they've been divorced for 14 years now but they're still not admitting they ever chose an unsuitable partner.
Actually, looking at the two of them, I'm amazed they ever considered each other suitable partners. They're just... so different. I suppose I'm glad they were deluded enough to try marriage and produce me. And anyway, for divorcees they're extremely nice to each other if and when they have to talk to each other. Being remarried helps really - Dad has his loving housewife who makes pies decorated like footballs and Mom travels the world with that Italian photographer of hers who landed her a job at the Beeb and brings out her arty side. She looks younger these days, and has mercifully enquired less about my sex life in recent years. I live in dread of her trying to write a novel about it, and anyway, I doubt I could give her more of an understanding of it than the dozens of works on homosexuality out there. Yes, I'm gay. Can we talk about something else now?
I'm behaving anyway. Always have been. Have never broken anyone's heart, nose, or vow of chastity. What more can you expect? I use condoms, I use my common sense, and every now and then I indulge in the delicious mouth and body of someone I got acquainted with on the dancefloor.
And I use my right hand. But then, that's not something I need to talk to my mother about.
And it's not like I've found the right bars here yet anyway.
Though the bar in the cellar behind the poster-encrusted doorway is quite nice actually. All right, it's a run-down student haunt and would probably look terrible when lit up properly, but it's comfy, it's cheap, comes with a full set of board games and magazines and talkative people, and the gin-and-tonics are fairly impressive.
It's also quite crowded on a Thursday night, I find, or at least on this Thursday night. The tables are all occupied by what looks like a theatre troupe in search of a play, a handful of gothic musicology students and an impromptu Turkish-German backgammon championship. I squeeze through to the bar and have a hard time spotting the bar staff in the dim light. That's because she's black.
She flashes me a white-toothed grin and asks me what I want to drink, in French-accented German. I order gin and tonic and find myself mesmerised observing her hands through the various glass containers behind the bar. You never notice how pale their palms are until you see them, right? Gorgeous in a faintly disturbing sort of way.
"That's two marks fifty. It cheer you up."
I blink, gaze into her broad smiling face. Have I said something? I open my mouth and am just about to close it again, then blurt a 'thank you'. I shake my head, take a gulp of the G&T. It's surprisingly strong. Does she think she needs to get me drunk? I clear my throat.
"Um, no, I was just musing... and if that's supposed to be a come-on, stranger, I don't think so." I grin apologetically.
"Oh no, oh no," she laughs, genuinely amused at my fumbling with words in a language that I should, by rights, speak at least as well as she does. "I have husband, you know. But you look like you don't. And like you should have husband." She winks at me. Her mascara is golden, and it confuses me more than her garbled words.
Gaydar must come naturally in the Congo.
Snorting, I sip my drink, trading the odd line with her while avoiding a deeper conversation. I should have husband. I don't think I want husband actually. Though a little warm skin wouldn't be amiss.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: mike216@aol.com
Hi mate,
no, before you ask, I haven't even started on that book yet. Waving, but not drowning, from Germany! Could you pass my new address to Drella - I keep forgetting his, and he moves around so much anyway... oh, and tell him that Japanese movie he's been raving on about for months is actually out here. I think I'll go see it if I can keep up with the dubbing.
Been spotted by a bar girl last night. Am I really that obvious? Sheesh. No more tight T-shirts for you, Mr Morgan.
Nah, Mr Morgan can wait until next week. Yes, I'll be a teacher here, or I think I will be anyway. They haven't told me yet, because big boss is still on holiday... but tomorrow's the big day, or so I'm told.
Say hi to Dr Clarke and Sarah for me (has she got married yet? And if so, did you at least get invited to the bash, given all the lecture notes you let her copy?), I'd better get some sleep and a clean shirt!
Ben
Oh great. It's, what, seventy, eighty pages? And they give it to me now? All right, I'm only supposed to copyedit it, but damn, they could have thought of that earlier, no? It's literally the last working day before the students hit the lab, and they'll want scripts, which is quite understandable under the circumstances. At least that hag of a secretary has promised she'll take care of the photocopying herself (well, thank you), but I'm a little annoyed here. It's not like she hasn't had it for at least a week, because the hand-written changes are Professor Harris's, he says so in a scribbled note on the front page.
Really. I bet she's just plain incapable of finding the file on her computer.
And the worst thing is, I've been at it since morning, and I'm still less than halfway through. The others have just left for lunch actually. Looks like it'll be overtime for me. Well, at least that way I get acquainted with what the heck I'm supposed to be supervising. They really don't use textbooks here, they have everything collated into one big pile of script that looks like it's gone through various stages of photocopying, pasting and optimisation over the years. And here I am, hammering the latest amendments into the computer. I just bet the printer's going to die the moment I'm finished.
Deep breaths, Ben.
At least his handwriting isn't as atrocious at it could be. Funny, that. That the first thing I see of my new boss is his handwriting. It's fairly large and very straight. Extremely economical - words like 'aluminium' are only really decipherable by estimating the length of the wavy line in the middle of the word. Fortunately he prefers 'Al' most of the time, or 'Al' with a couple of fly droppings in the top right-hand corner, which I render as 'Al3+' in the hope that he's talking about bog-standard aluminium ions here and not some weird species he's found in his research and is now pestering the second-years with.
He uses a fountain pen and blue ink, and he uses the margins to their full extent. I curse softly as I flip through the remaining, oh, fifty or so pages. There's a lot of blue to be transcribed as yet.
Someone chuckles behind me. Shit, I didn't hear the door open... I swivel round on the chair, ready to tell Ormsey off for scaring me, and for not having brought me any lunch, and find myself face to face with - well, no. Find myself staring up actually, at someone very tall wearing a tie, but no jacket. And a smile.
"You must be Mr Morgan. Welcome to Mainz, and to our little workgroup. I take it you've already acquainted yourself with the surroundings? Sorry I couldn't be here earlier... I'm Matthew Harris, by the way. Pleased to meet you."
His hand is huge and crushes mine quite conclusively. I mutter something about having been given enough course-relevant work already, and familiarising myself with the script, and he looks at the pile of papers on my desk and says, has she given it to you now, the cheeky woman, and shakes his head absent-mindedly.
His voice is soft, surprisingly so for a man his size, his accent worn pebble-smooth by what must have been decades abroad. I find myself hearing the spaces between the words, an economy of speech that makes listening hard work.
I'm a bit embarrassed I haven't really got anything to start a conversation with - I'm bogged down in this silly script, haven't got anything resembling a workplace or a research plan or even a reading list yet. "I'll... I'll get my bearings regarding the other projects as soon as I can. If I can bother you again some time next week, when... all this has settled down?" I make a vague gesture at the desk, the files, the plants, the half-edited script.
He blinks, then snorts as if I've said something funny. "Oh absolutely," he rumbles. "All this might prove to be your project," and he gestures sweepingly at the fume cupboards with their abandoned brown glass bottles and mysterious substances in them, "if that's where your special talents lie. That green stuff, by the way, had better go in the fridge, or it won't be much good any more by tomorrow. Palladium alkynes have this habit of sneaking out on you." He grins faintly, the smile failing to penetrate the air of casual aloofness he radiates from every inch of his impressive frame.
"Um... it's been there for longer than I have actually."
"Oh? Well, bin it then. You know, collect, pyrolyse, reduce, store, the usual routine. Don't want to waste the department's palladium. You might find it useful later on, who knows?"
Like some scientist out of a Victorian novel. I feel like a schoolboy. Of course I wouldn't have known immediately how to recycle palladium, and I hope to God it doesn't show on my face. If there's one thing I don't want to do on my first day it's blush, and twice not in the face of this rock of a man who calls himself my professor and doesn't seem to know any better what I'm supposed to be doing here than I do.
"Looking forward to working with you, Mr Morgan. Oh, and if you find you can't read my annotations, my extension is 2305. I'll be in most of the afternoon, going through my backlog no doubt."
With barely a glance at me, he leaves the lab, and I'm hard pressed not to describe his walk as striding. Awfully long legs, you see, probably as tall as Ormsey but broader. None of that gangliness that makes Ormsey so endearing. That said, he doesn't look like your average professor.
He's got long hair for a start, tied back in a neat brown ponytail but reaching rather lower than the collar of his shirt in the back. He's greying at the temples, a broad face with thin, light eyebrows, a pale mouth, a very large nose and a beard that is the perfect opposite of Ormsey's - neatly trimmed, narrow and short, and a little lighter and greyer than his hair. Actually, that's probably what keeps him from looking scary - so much about that face is colourless or pale, quiet-looking. Quiet-sounding, too. A pleasant voice, to be sure, low and with an unplaceable accent. Didn't they say he was Canadian? Could well be. He is used to being in charge, that's what that voice sounds like.
He has eyes that would actually qualify as blue under spectral analysis. Impressive.
And impress him I will, however hard that may be.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: mike216@aol.com
Oi - that was a fast one! Your computer up and running again, then? :)
>> because big boss is still on holiday... but tomorrow's the big day, or so I'm told.
> So, how did it go? What's the Great Harris like?
Damned if I know - I've only spoken to him for about ten minutes so far. Am scheduled to turn up at his office with plans for my postgrad research programme, but have not been able to clear my head enough to put one together yet. Yes, procrastinating, you know me, Mike.
And there's students to look after - thank goodness my colleague Ormsey is helping me with those. He says they're quite used to being given synthesis preparations in English, but so far I haven't even had time to find any for them. The semester has started in full swing, and I dread the day I'm having to teach my first seminar lesson (only three this semester phew, and one of them's UV spectroscopy so I can use my old notes and try not to trip over the language barrier).
Sheesh, some of them are older than me (they don't finish school here until they're 19 or 20, and then there's army stuff for the boys...), and one of them's named Tungsten. And you don't want to hear what I did yesterday when one of the girls was having trouble dripping the acid into the indicator solution. Well, all right, I know you do want to hear.
So I was checking this girl's burette for grease deposits, and showing her how to control the infusion of the one solution into the other, and there she breaks out into an almighty guffaw and goes bright red and giggles and of course attracts the attention of everyone in the entire lab and she goes oh my God, I can't believe what Ben just said to me (they all call me Ben already - not much point being Mr Morgan if I'm their age, right?), that is so funny!
Turns out my German got the better of me - you see, if you want to be impressive, you use the noun. Only there isn't a noun for dripping one liquid into another, or at least the noun that goes with the verb for dripping one liquid into another means something else entirely.
Apparently I said she'd have to practice controlling her enema. *facepalms*
I don't think I'll be able to speak to her ever again (well, I'll have to some day because I still haven't managed to remember her name). Way to go, Morgan.
The rest of the tribe is being very helpful - well, Ormsey and Andrea are, they're the ones I have to actually work with. And we've got this old German tech who claims she's running the lab and is best left to it because it looks like she actually is. There's a bunch of people in the research lab downstairs that I haven't really met yet, they're Russians or something. Still, I expect I'll get to know them too once I actually set up camp down there.
Don't hold your breath - might be a while before I surface again to present my Grand Master Plan. At the moment, it's pandemonium. Must dash,
Ben
"Ben? I'm sure there's something alive in my sodium carbonate solution!"
"Just a minute, Barbara. I'm negotiating a safety hazard here... all right, whose is this workplace? And more to the point, where is he or she?"
"Christoph? Oh, probably on the balcony having a smoke... if his swearing was anything to go by, he's not happy with his latest analysis."
I nod at the helpful neighbour whose name I also keep forgetting (it's not the girl with the enema, thank God) and start towards the fire escape landing, the students' unofficial smoking place. I needn't go far - the owner of the potentially hazardous mess comes sneaking towards me looking more shame-faced that I could have hoped to induce even with my most teacherly frown.
"Sorry, sorry...," he mutters, mopping at the glass shards in their pale green puddle of liquid. "Just couldn't bear to part with it yet..."
I sigh. "But you could have borne to part with your neighbour's finger, had they inadvertently leant on your workbench? What the hell is this anyway?"
"'smy analytic sample. Any chance of me getting another one today?" He's shrunk about an inch or so, and I nod grimly. Monika apparently hammered it home to them that analytic samples are only given out in the morning when she's around to do so, so they know perfectly well that they're asking a favour of me. But really, I'm perfectly willing to measure samples for them - as long as they give me the impression it's safe for me to leave the lab for even a minute without something blowing up or breaking.
I'm already on my way out with Christoph's second flask when it occurs to me. "I say, that was the nickel, right? I take it you know how to dispose of that?"
He nods determinedly. Good. Because I would have had to consult the relevant page of the omniscient script to make sure I knew too.
26.1 millilitres of nickel nitrate solution later, I'm back in the lab, plying the hapless Christoph with his second chance and plotting a path that would lead me to Barbara's inhabited solution without passing any further disasters along the way.
Turns out I don't have to - Harris has turned up, as he sometimes does, sneaking into the lab to check up on the students and answer the trickier questions, in his mild, thickly-accented German. Such as 'what is that thing floating around in my sodium carbonate solution?'.
He's holding it up to the light, peering quizzically at the crumpled filaments swirling around in the clear solution. He's not saying anything, and from the look on Barbara's face I can tell he hasn't said anything for the past two minutes. He looks strange that way, as if he's posing for the monument of the Unknown Chemist, and I have to grin at myself for thinking that. He's not even wearing a lab coat. If and when he comes into the labs, he's always wearing the white long-sleeved tunic of a male nurse with its strangely doubled-up V-neck and the sleeves rolled up almost to his elbows. His forearms are hairy.
Then again, a standard-issue lab coat wouldn't have looked any more impressive on him anyway - it would only have reached to mid-thigh anyway, he's just that tall.
He's turning away from his contemplation of the inhabited solution and facing the student again, waiting until she's noticed his movement. "I think you'd better release this one into the pond outside the maths building. It's some sort of anaerobic fungus that I'm sure the dragonflies would find quite tasty."
"But, isn't it... I mean..." Barbara's eyes are wide in righteous indignation.
"It's soda water, Miss Jung. But thanks for even thinking of the potential hazards." He smirks, then stalks off along the aisle towards the next problem waiting to happen.
Something about him irks me in a way I can't put my finger on.
"Not conclusive, then? Or are you just trying to analyse the sauce? Forget it. Generations of chemists have failed in that. Our guess is it's the stuff they found under the floorboards when they tore the old chemistry building down."
I make a face. While he's probably closer to the truth than either of us care to think, Ormsey's crude sense of humour takes a bit of getting used to. Especially at a lunchtime that is still too early to make me feel hungry.
"Yeah," I admit, "wasn't really what I expected. See, I wasn't counting on having to make my own project. Don't they usually give you some portion of their own work and then pass it off as theirs in their publications? Or at least unsubtly point out areas of research that they could do with?"
"Mmh," Ormsey agrees through a mouthful of noodles with dubious brown sauce. "He does that for the Russians, mostly because he doesn't trust them to find their own literature and possibly blow up the entire department - "
"Who are they anyway? What's a bunch of Russians doing at this institute?"
"Same thing you and I are doing, mate. Well, more of what we're supposed to be doing anyway. Most of them don't speak any English worth mentioning, let alone German, so they're pretty much exempt from teaching duties by default. Actually, most of them probably aren't even Russian, but I'll be damned if I find out by whatever it is they do speak... it ain't much, that much I can tell you."
I nod. And Ormsey's pretty good with languages, or at least he's pretty proficient in German, probably more so than I am. He spends more time with the students than with the books anyway, and that includes getting drunk with them. Consequently, they love him.
"But he gives them directions - why not me?"
Ormsey's smirk is slightly marred by the drop of dubious brown sauce glistening in his beard. "Because he hopes you can think for yourself? Look, he's had the Russians for two and a half years now and they're still not going anywhere much. He took them on when he first came here, because his predecessor took his entire group with him - well, apart from me, I'm the departmental heirloom -, and he found himself with a lab to fill and a load of eager applicants with undoubted chemistry skills but not a word of anything comprehensible to their names. You're a graduate, you've got brains, and you've got both languages - why shouldn't he just release you into the library and let you make a name for yourself?"
"Hm." I suppose you could see it that way. "He doesn't talk much, does he?"
"Not as a rule, no. He's a pretty good listener, though. He may look absent-minded, but really he's there for you when you need to ask him questions. And he's serious when he says he's always available for those. I have yet to meet a mind more focused than his... which comes as a bit of a surprise when you see him wandering around the teaching labs in his silly tunic looking to all the world like he's forgotten whether he's a chemist or a biologist."
"So how did he end up teaching here anyway? From what I've read, he's quite the guru in organometallics? Platinum, palladium-alkynes, stable catalysts, that sort of thing? What is someone like that doing in a teaching lab?"
"Uh, teaching?" I'm beginning to suspect that Ormsey's had this conversation before, probably with any number of newbies he's seen come and go during his suspiciously long and as yet unfinished postgraduate career. "He took over the post as a stand-in originally, then after a few semesters found he couldn't be bothered to try and get rid of it any more. Says the contact with students clears his mind, and it helps with his language skills. Personally, I think he likes teaching. Second-years tend to be a little more responsive than palladium-alkyne complexes. Fractionally," he adds with a wink.
"So I suppose I'm just to go into the library and find myself something exciting and hope it meets his expectations?"
"Oh yes. By any means do, Ben. I have a feeling he's seeing something in you."
Well, that remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I suspect I can't help seeing something in him. I might just have to look that little bit harder to see what it is.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: mike216@aol.com
Hi Mike,
sorry I haven't been in touch for so long! Wanted to wait until I had something to present to you, ha!
Had The Talk with Harris, came away not knowing any more than I did when I went in. Ormsey reckons that's a good sign. You know me, I hate feeling uninformed, so I've been burying myself in the library after work all week to try and come up with something. I don't know, I really want to impress this Canadian tree-trunk now.
I've attached the outline – might seem familiar to you, no? Remember the chirality problem that bugged me so much during my three-step synthesis? When I couldn't stop the damn thing from changing colour under my hands? That may be a starting place... anyway, have a look and see if I'm making sense, huh? Hope the formulas come out all right, they're using a fairly advanced formula editor here... if they're garbled, that's probably just as well. I've got time enough to sort them out. He's not putting the pressure on, thank goodness.
And somehow I can see myself working with him for quite a while.
Enjoy,
Ben
Hah. Understatement of the year, Morgan. I can see myself doing things with him for quite a while, yes. But I seriously doubt that any of what I'm seeing there is going to positively affect our working together.
Come on, he's... well, he's my professor. But he's far from repulsive. Much less aloof and condescending than I had thought at first impression. Ormsey is right, he is always available, even on the stairs, or when he's having a packed lunch in his tiny office.
I think it was probably that – watching him eat in his little office while he listened to my explanation of the scheduling problem we'd run up against with the geography minors who were due to go on an excursion to Switzerland. There's something intimate about letting another person watch you eat. And yet he was his usual calm and unhurried self about it. He was wearing half-moon specs that had slid down slightly as he'd been reading and that looked endearingly frail balanced on the wide bridge of his once-broken nose.
I had to suppress the urge to gently push them up into the right position again.
It's little details like that that make me doubt my taste in men – that I could even entertain fantasies of a man just over twice my age. I remember looking at his fingernails, short, wide flat fingernails as he phoned the department of geography to ascertain the nature and duration of that trip to Switzerland. In the end, we ended up rescheduling, making four students go 'phew' simultaneously.
That really brought out the laugh lines in his face.
Yes, I admit I've been doing my fair bit of research on the side, talking to that busybody Andrea downstairs, and totally failing to avoid getting friendly with Monika who's turned out to be a more than questionable authority in all things chemical but an adept sorter-outer of student problems. And she's good with her hands, at least when her irregular arthritis lets her, always busy trying to mend things or nudge them into functioning again.
She's the one who told me that Harris was unmarried and lived in a house rented by Mrs El-Badaoui's ex-mother-in-law, just within reach of one of the rarer buses. That, in her view, also explained his unorthodox choice of clothing – she was quite ready to assume he was incapable of sewing on a button and eschewed traditional lab coats purely for that reason!
Actually, the thought of those big hands fiddling with a needle and thread does have something funny about it.
No points for guessing what I'd rather see them fiddling with.
And yes, he does fiddle occasionally. Andrea's quite open about that – after all, she's one of the few that Do The Actual Work, and inordinately proud of it she is too. He demands absolute honesty from his group, she says, but he has been known to keep a faked yield percentage in the table for publication, 'for the flow of things'. As long as he's told what was wrong with it and why it should have been different but didn't quite manage to turn out that way, he's inclined to let things pass. Surprising really, for a scientist of his calibre. He listens to the substances, Andrea had called it, with a slight frown of disapproval, and so far things have always caught up with his vision of how they should be. Sometimes only after publication, but what the hell.
Actually, that is something I find the students telling me too, especially this week where they're determining zinc contents complexometrically and the whole analysis depends on the indicator tablet dissolving properly and not turning the whole sample into useless murky brown broth. It's an organic indicator dye, you see, and I mean organic in the sense of 'made from living things', lichens I think. And it just doesn't always behave. That much is to be expected, and after all, we give out enough analytic samples for three trial runs... but when two out of these have already failed and the result depends wholly on the third one, that's when they find an excuse to wait until Harris is around.
Because things daren't go wrong when he's watching. That's what they're saying, half-jokingly, as if he has some magical power that he radiates that keeps the molecules from misbehaving. He needn't do anything, adjust, test or even just touch the apparatus or the chemicals – all he does is stand around silently, watching the experiment behave exactly as it should. A physics minor some semesters ago was apparently the first to refer to the 'Harris Force' as the as-yet-undescribed source of this phenomenon, and the name has stuck.
The Harris Force reliably turns the stubborn lichen indicator bright red, and makes the equilibrium point explode in a clear grass green.
If the students still get the result wrong, it's their calculations, I'm sure.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: t_a_morgan@yahoo.co.uk; sylvia.henry@bbc.co.uk
Hi all and sundry,
sorry I haven't replied to your e-mails for so long... I've spent the nights in the library, I swear! Have come up with an impressive area of research though, and am enjoying the teaching work immensely. This might mean I don't get to do much actual research until the semester break, but Prof. Harris is fine with that.
It's like being back in school again; I find myself doing all sorts of subjects, not just chemistry. I'm sure you remember how I tried my hardest to avoid studying anything I didn't like (you told me off for it often enough, so you'd better remember :)? Well, so far I've had excursions into German, English and French (which I don't speak at all, but a neighbour at the Hall does. She's from the Congo.), a liberal helping of mathematics, some biology that needed disposing of, and an excursion into the geology of Switzerland.
Not bad for a budding academic career, is it? Hope all is well with you,
Ben
Actually, yeah. I could have got away with telling them the girl from the Congo is the Thursday bartender at the Inter cellar. Her name's Okubu, apparently she only has the one, and no, neither of my parents would have dared to tell me off any more for going to bars when I should be studying.
My dad might get his hopes up, though. No, Dad, however gently you enquire. I'm just not interested in girls, right?
Went to a club last Friday, or the nearest thing to a club I could find. The really large ones must be out of town here, and I'm not savvy enough of the local geography to find my way there and back by public transport. Anyway, it was a nice smallish dancefloor, very mixed clientele, not much chance of a quick shag. Still, it felt good to flex those dancing muscles again – I'd almost forgotten I can still cut a rug with the best of them. Just watching the bemused faces was entertainment enough really. And it helped tune out the pretty grotty music. A visibly impressed (too impressed) goth girl told me it was much better on Tuesdays, and that Fridays was for the kids. Sounds like the kids like heavy metal in this part of the country, then. Anyway, it got me hot and sweaty, that was the one good thing about it.
And I spectacularly failed to even try to pick up anyone.
Goodness knows why – I mean, I should be over the whole move and job-related stress and just about ready for some skin-to-skin again, but somehow I couldn't keep myself focused on spotting shapely backsides in the cheap disco light.
That a certain pair of hands kept intruding into my thoughts didn't help either.
I mean, it's not like I'm pursuing him or anything, but... I wouldn't say no, and damn the consequences. He's my professor, and really it's only because I know he would never offer that I can admit it so freely that I would accept. Oh, I'd love to crack that calm serene shell of his open, find out where in that pale mouth the moans are hiding. But I won't.
Because he's almost certainly not offering.
Well, he's being nice to me, and he's bought me a drink last time the department went for an after-lab beer, and he leans in fairly close when pointing something out in my growing manuscripts, but he does that to everyone, doesn't he?
He has put his hand on students' shoulders, and I haven't heard accusations of sexual harassment from any of them.
He smells nice, of warm, barely-scented male.
But he calls me Mr Morgan. All right, he calls everyone by their surnames, even the students. He's not offering, right?
I'm going soft. I've never thought about my previous professors in that way. Then again, they've never been much of a mystery, flaunting their pink-haired wives and rebellious children in my face. This one could even be... but that is moot.
Because he's not offering.
I wouldn't mind if he were.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: drella_prod@drella.demon.co.uk
Hey old queen,
before I start: consider yourself slapped. Left, right! There we go.
> so I take it you dragged your hunk of a professor to the movie with you? And
> what happened afterwards... inquiring minds want to know! ;)
*rubs stinging hand* Drel-laaaaa... what in your filthy little mind made you think the movie and my boss had anything to do with each other? Not to disappoint you too much, but the film was quite unsexy, a bit too violent for my taste, badly subtitled (all right, I don't speak Japanese, but I like to hope the actual lines were nothing like the sad excuse for German that they slapped underneath!). And exceedingly dizzying in its camerawork (ugh). And I went alone, if you can picture that for a minute.
I. Am. Not. Fucking. Him.
Not even remotely. I'm not even considering it. He's my professor for Pete's sake.
So who have you been shagging? *evil grin*
Oh, and I'll try and get you the video of the film once it's released over here. Meanwhile, thanks a lot for the CDs – I could really do with some fresh sounds for my room. Is this Nick guy an acquaintance of yours, or do you just happen to like his songs? ;)
Now go – I have a feeling I'm keeping you from important missions. Such as revolutionising the theatre world. Or, failing that, fucking them.
Tara,
Ben
Harris came in this afternoon, bringing his sandwich and rightly claiming that as my room wasn't really a lab as such, it was allowable to eat in there as long as the students didn't see it.
Turns out he's planning a little surprise Christmas do for the group – wants to hand out little presents to the staff and later invite the students in too, for a drink of that fairly strong mulled wine they sell at every street corner at the moment. So far, so good. He's already secured a venue as well, the smaller of the two seminar rooms, and adornments for the tables that are still technically in his garden, but he's got more holly and ivy than he can shake a stick at, he says, but he's... well... (yes, he hesitated quite a bit. How odd.) looking for help with the decorations.
Turns out the decorations involve dressing up as the Christkind, some sort of Christmas angel, and generally being jolly and handy with the mulled wine.
A female Christmas angel.
For more than just a moment, I really didn't know what to say. And I didn't. Say anything, I mean. Watching him grin that laugh-lined lopsided apologetic grin of his was well worth the moment of stunned silence. Andrea would have my head on this here granite block, never mind the analytic scales, he said, if I asked her to do it, and Ormsey has that beard, and the Russians don't do Christmas until well into January. So would I mind terribly, it was sort of a tradition with the students...
And he would dress up as Father Christmas.
That did it. Santa Harris I had to see. And I must admit, it's sort of convinced me that this wasn't as much of an... offer as I initially thought it was. (If it had been, I'd have been worried about the implications. He finds me hot in a dress and blonde wig? With wings? Think again, Santa.) But hey, a little good-natured departmental silliness can't be bad.
And I get to serve him wine.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: drella_prod@drella.demon.co.uk
No, you silly ponce, I'm not!! It's a _tradition_ here! Get that into your sweet little blue-haired head! I'm not lifting that gown for him!
Grrr,
Ben
As a matter of fact, I'm pulling it over my head just now, and it's just that little bit too small even though I'm not one of nature's bigger men. Well, I suppose they only sell these in girls' sizes, and I would have been surprised if Harris had guessed my size correctly by just looking at me. Because that would mean he's been looking at me... rather closely.
I wriggle a little – it's no use. Take it off, start again. Might help to take those jeans off as well, certainly saves me mucking about under the cheap white polyester later. Off they go. Ah, better. Why they have to heat these changing rooms so much is anyone's guess. I mean, yes, it's winter, but really, all people ever do in here is get out of their jackets and jumpers and into their lab coats. It's not like you ever really undress in here.
Except when you're about to become a Christmas angel.
I wriggle into the dress again, and this time it slips over my head, only just, and the first thing I see as my head pokes out above the gold-edged neckline is Harris beating a hasty retreat from the changing room.
Well, that's odd.
I smile altogether too angelically as I shove the wig on my head. So he can't stand the sight of a nearly-naked bloke? Interesting. Very interesting.
And boy, is he a sight in his outfit – he really has gone the whole hog and dressed up in an utterly unprofessorial way. No long white beard though: his own was apparently deemed quite enough, and he's let his hair down and tousled it a bit where it peeks out under the cap. He must have borrowed the kit from one of the Coca-Cola Santas that have been haunting the city for the last few weeks, because where else would one get a Father Christmas outfit that's essentially a red, fur-adorned version of Harris's everyday wear, with its short coat that looks so like his lab tunic, and cheap velvet trousers instead of the long robe we were so scared of as kids? He's got some sort of heavy army boots on his feet, quite incongruous but I'm guessing the original boots probably didn't fit him.
The rest of the outfit looks sinfully tight as it is.
Of course, nobody's looking at Harris with anything more than approving amusement at a professor who dares dress up in something so festively silly. They've probably seen him in this before anyway.
No, all eyes are on me. Including Harris's.
I should feel like a right berk, but really I find myself wishing I could flap those stupid little wings and attract some more attention. From him. Let the students giggle, they know I'm not going to give anyone black marks for laughing at me when I do look silly to all the world.
Harris is slightly less quiet than normal, hands out the little gifts and kind words, chats with the students and staff, even has a few cups of the spiced wine. But other than the brush of hand over hand as he takes the cups from me, he doesn't touch me nor engage me in any talk. He's flushed a little, but whether from the wine or the warmth inside that fur-lined costume or something else I cannot tell.
So I serve wine, ladle it from the simmering big pot Monika has brought in from home, stain my costume with red and endure her tipsy chatter about how wonderful the seminar room looks with all that holly and ivy on the tables and the candles and really wouldn't it be lovely if we could drape the fire extinguisher in a little tinsel as well, it was so nice and red and matched Professor Harris so well...
For the first time in my life, I spent an entire Christmas party wishing I had been naughty.
Having this rather bloody delicious incarnation of Father Christmas taking it out on my bottom in an entirely unfatherly way suddenly sounds like an attractive option.
Of course, nothing of the kind happened, at least not in reality.
My nights were that little bit warmer, and it wasn't just the steady supply of mulled wine that the students plied me with after lab closing time.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: hallg001@uni-tuebingen.de
Hi Gerd,
wow, long time no speak! Good to hear you're doing well. So I take it we'll soon be witnessing the unveiling of Gerd++ or whatever you're going to call your scripting language? Sorry I haven't been in touch for so long, been really busy carving a niche for myself here. Organometallic chemistry, and if that means nothing to you, rest assured it didn't to me when I arrived here.
By the way, you cheeky bastard, I found out that at least two of the words you taught me aren't German at all!! *slap*
Anyway, have a good time at your parents' for Christmas, and I hope we can get together some time in the new year, for old time's sake, yes? I have a feeling I owe you at least one drink and probably some made-up words of my own.
I'll be in town over the holidays, so drop me a line when you're back,
Frohe Weihnachten und so,
Ben (Morgan)
"Eh, Ben! What you doing here? It's Christmas – you not going home to Mom and Dad?"
I grin wistfully. "Not this year, Okubu... neither of them is at home at the moment, and frankly, I can do without a family Christmas once in a while... you willing to make me a gin and tonic despite the public holiday, then?"
She grins widely and busies herself with the bottles. "You not going home to friends, then?"
"Not really. And anyway, I don't see you rushing off to see your family, do I?"
"Aaah, flying to Congo is too expensive, Ben. But my husband phone me to wish me merry Christmas, an hour we have talk! Very nice, very nice. So, you having Christmas with friend here? Boyfriend maybe?"
I smile wistfully. She's almost like my mother, only the other way round. "No," I say, "no boyfriend. Just me and Father Christmas, and some angels in my sleep."
And yes, it looks like there's not many people in town beyond those – the place has been extremely quiet to say the least. Suited me really. I've used the past week to catch up on the piles of paper I'd been amassing on my desk, the big one in my room, that is. I have a lab key, but somehow I don't feel like hanging around alone in a deserted darkened lab, with just Monika's sad Christmas decorations for company. I only go in there when I need to use the computer. My room's so much cosier anyway, and much more conducive to getting things done.
I'm a wee bit proud of myself here. The pile of photocopied literature has shrunk down to a small sheaf (might nick one of the boxy files from work to put that in), and I've started drafting paths of synthesis and possible starting conditions in one of these cheap Chinese black-bound notebooks that nobody seems to use here, even though you get them everywhere. Strange. Anyway, what with the library being closed over the two-week break, that was a good batch of finite work to do. Ha, I even went and sat in the city library in the end to celebrate the bottom of the pile – not library withdrawal so much as the fact that it looked infinitely more appealing than the station café, and was warmer too.
Leafed through some books on the area, found that people here take wine much too seriously. Pages and pages on the stuff, and festivals and customs and mythologies from forests that I for one haven't seen since I arrived here. It's all fields as far as I can see, and a lot of Rhine.
Got some girly shopping done too, browsing through the leftovers from the Christmas sales. Nice chunky shoes in a weird shade of orange that looks far less disgusting than you would think and combines very favourably with my new olive green slacks. One of these days I'll turn into a fashion icon, hah.
Wonder what Drella's doing tonight? (Wonder if he'll remember by tomorrow morning what he did tonight – that's more of a question with Drella...) Mike, I can pretty much pinpoint. He'll be at his parents', they don't live that far from where he's based, and is probably just out for a beer and curry with his mates from school. God, he still knows them. Ormsey said something about his sister's family and Margate, and even Gerd, probably the geographically closest acquaintance, has gone home for the whole week.
So it's only me, then, out for a rough night. Or so the stupid wine book told me anyway – that's what they call the nights between Christmas and some time in early January, the rough nights, Rauh Nächte, and something about Odin and his rabid wolves chasing across the sky.
Not that it's been a rough night so far – drifted around town all day, treated myself to dinner at the Thai place that favours generous opening hours over such simple things like chairs (sat on cushions on the floor. Gave me ideas, that.), then went to a movie. Had the cinema almost entirely to myself, watched some silly French comedy dubbed into German, which didn't give me ideas, so I made my own, and now I'm sitting on the top level of the multiplex car park in my spanking new shoes gazing at a lot of Rhine and some weakly flickering stars, waiting for the fireworks.
It's freezing, but then what did I expect from a rough night?
Not that I would terribly mind a pair of warm arms snaking around me from behind and a wide chest to lean against. Not at all.
And no, I can't bring myself to form New Year's resolutions about quitting fantasising about my professor. It's not that it hurts him anyway, and... it's not 1999 yet, is it? What time is it anyway... oh.
Fireworks. Quite a bloody lot of them too, and I'm wondering briefly if German TV issues some kind of mass command to go out and blast small balls of red and green fire into the unsuspecting sky, because it certainly looks like it. Or maybe there's some sort of rivalry between the two sides of the river... the river itself is fading behind a curtain of smoke already. In the street beside the multi-storey a gang of kids are fighting a battle with, and a losing battle against, Chinese firecrackers, running about and coughing and setting the walls of the building echoing with the explosions.
A rough night indeed.
Well, it's too late for resolutions, then. Suits me. The bright silver showers are pretty, and the coloured starbursts are perfect reminders that chemistry can be something to look at if properly applied. The green barium salts, the red strontium, the yellow sodium, blindingly white magnesium, purple... God knows what they use for purple. And a single blue one I saw too. One winking eye.
Yeah, probably. Harris's eye.
The fireworks went on until about half past one, and somehow I wasn't feeling quite cold enough to leave my vantage point until I was sure even the last puny little sparkler had been shot. I walked up and down the parking deck to keep warm. The new shoes hurt a bit after all that walking, and so I'm more than glad to be home, almost three hours into the new year.
A small folded piece of notepaper falls on to my aching, orange-shod feet as I unlock the door to my room. Oh? Someone must have been looking for me, then. Maybe Okubu was feeling lonely... somehow I don't think I would have managed to uphold a conversation spanning two years with her though –
Damn. The handwriting.
It's from Harris?
"If you're reading this before the year is over, I'd be happy if you'd care to join me at the Inter for a quiet drink?
MHarris"
Shit. Is that even for me? He's not calling me Mr Morgan... well, and he's not calling me Ben. But really, the sign on my door is calling me both, so he must have meant that for me. I'm back on the first-floor landing before I've even sorted my thoughts – shit. No, the poster-covered Inter Cellar doorway is dark, the place must have closed a while ago.
Damn.
With a question mark. How endearing... and yet he's put his usual signature squiggle at the bottom. Well, really, what was I expecting? 'Matthew'? Hardly.
So he's been on campus on New Year's Eve? Whatever for? (Not to see you, you romantic fool.) Or maybe he has? At any rate, that one's past. Who knows, could have been a boring evening. Drinking alone with your professor – what would Mike say if he heard that? (I know what Drella would say...) Hell, can't even think straight. Something in me wants to go back to just how nice it could have turned out, you know... how we could have got to know each other and had a really good chat and things and something else in me keeps imagining what it would have felt like to exchange New Year kisses over sparkly wine gone stale because my lips are too busy exploring the ticklish texture of the stubble on his cheeks, tongue darting out to tease the corner of his mouth into smiling.
Ah, a rough night indeed. All I can picture for the moment is his hand on me instead of my own. It'll have to do... and through all that wishful thinking and desperate stroking and fucking adoration all I can really think, with the thinking bit of my brain, is how ironic it is that my own New Year's fireworks are now over three hours late.
It's about midday when I awake again, and it takes me a few moments of gathering my errant brain cells to determine that the source of the pounding and crashing noise isn't in fact my head, and that the blur outside the window won't go away when I blink.
No, I'm not hung over. How could I be, after just a beer and one of these silly orchid-adorned cocktails the chairless Thai concocts?
They've started tearing down the old chemistry building, diagonally across the street from the new one. Started tearing it down on the first day of the new year. Probably quite right – the students don't come back in until Monday, and that way they get a head start and probably get most of the dustclouds-crashes-and-sprays-of-water-from-a-hose business out of the way before people start complaining that they can't tell which car is theirs any more because they're all the colour of German taxis, greyish sludgy beige.
They also started too early for my tastes, but then it's technically a working day for me as I haven't bothered to take leave, so it's probably a smart move to get my arse up to the lab. And Harris is in town, of course.
Not that I have anything to discuss with him... unless he asks.
"Lovely shirt, Mr. Morgan. Christmas present?"
Damn. How can someone that size make no noise at all when sneaking up on you? And I've just been e-mailing Drella too – I close the window faster than light, trying my damnedest not to blush.
"Uh... sort of. From myself, though... happy new year." Say something meaningful. Yeah, but what?
"Ah. Guaranteed to suit your tastes, then. Quite a refreshing change to see one's colleagues out of their lab coats..." He winks at me. Winks! Bet he's imagining me in that angel costume now. But before I can even decide whether I have enough righteous indignation in me to frown, he continues.
"The reason I'm cornering you in your laboratory, though, is slightly more work-related." A weak smile. "I have a proposal to make – nothing major, but it might be of interest to you. Cambridge have invited me to panel a symposium on ferrocenes and sandwich complexes, to listen to the brightest young blooms of the organometallic scene... and I was wondering, what with your, well, colourful area of research you've found yourself, and about two months of work under your belt already... would you be able to give a brief presentation on your findings?"
What the... does he even know I'm nowhere near even starting on the experimental stage, much less presenting anything that isn't collated from literature that others have written? Does he even care? I shake my head, slowly.
"Um... I'm afraid I'll have to pass on that one. Sorry. I really haven't got anything... interesting yet, I'm still very much at the theoretical stage. The students," I gesture vaguely at the too-tidy lab, "have been taking up most of my time really. I mean, I've got... I've got a plan of where I'm going, and I'm keen to start as soon as I can, but really, I haven't got anything to present at a symposium yet."
He smiles, nods, then sighs. "Pity. You would have created quite the stir."
"Me?"
"You could have taken the pick of the cream of organometallic chemistry, Ben." There's metal in his voice, ringing ever so slightly. Ringing loudly in my ears.
"....oh." is all I manage to say. He's not really saying what I think he's saying, is he now?
"We're not saints, you know."
Damn. He is.
And it irks me more than it should. What is this man... I make my excuses quickly and politely, leaving an unfinished e-mail and a slightly bemused Harris behind. Of all the ways he could have confirmed my suspicions about his potential sexuality... it doesn't bear thinking about.
Angrily, I shut and lock the door of my room behind me, flop down on the bed and stare at the ceiling. Thinking doesn't seem right now. I rifle through the meagre CD collection I have built up here, put in the new one from Drella I haven't heard yet, flip through the songs. Awful. Awful. Cheesy. Awful. Shaking my head, I let the next song run on at random, trying to concentrate on thinking of Drella and the guy who's singing, and how they have probably met in some darkroom somewhere, and how they would probably not have minded at all to have been the target of the words Harris has just said to me.
Somehow, coming from him, they feel wrong.
What has he said? Only that he finds my shirt pretty, and that he would like to show me off at some symposium. And that chemists apparently have random sex at conventions, like... like Trekkies, and that he... fully expects me to take advantage of that.
Yes, Professor Harris, I enjoy sex. But I will have you know I am not a slut.
The slut on the album – Nick, was it Nick? – is singing badly, in a sneery voice that doesn't suit the song but suits my mood perfectly, and it's the one word I'm really not keen on right now that makes me prick up my ears. What...
Sometimes in the night I hear the songs Professor Pig has taught me
Cutting up with scissors all the stupid sexy clothes he's bought me
I snort, bitterly. Thanks, Nick. That was just what I needed. Professor Pig. It rankles oddly with how I see Harris, want to see Harris, the pair of warm hands and the crinkly smile, not this cynical old man who talks about me showing off my pretty young flesh to any willing takers. Stupid sexy clothes... I know it's irrational, but I take off the shirt anyway. The memory of the angel dress I can't take off.
It irks me, and it's strange. Not so much that he apparently thinks I'm a slut, but that I don't want to think of him thinking that. Thinking like a pig. I suppose I preferred the saint.
Sure as hell I don't want to think about him screwing around with random presentants at that symposium of his. Ugh.
I switch off Nick and his sarcastic warbling, slip on the tracksuit jacket, zip up and unlock the door. I need to ping Gerd. I need some time away from this mess, to calm down.
Preferably where I can't see Harris sitting at his desk in the only lit window across the courtyard from where the lab PC is bathing my frown in turquoise light.
Yes, I have taken the Nick person's album, and am liking it marginally better now that it's blaring out of the car stereo as I crawl along the autobahn in pitch darkness at only six in the evening. It certainly beats the constant traffic bulletins that interrupt the radio programme literally every few minutes here. I must have hit the end-of-holiday travel frenzy, and find myself really not minding too much. As long as I get home before tomorrow morning, and as long as neither the bottle of Coke on the passenger seat nor my supply of CD-Rs runs out.
Tübingen's been good for me – not that I have been doing much. Sleeping, mostly, and frequenting my old student haunts for cheap food and beer. One half of the Esthers managed to come out for the evening – their radar still works admirably well. And really, dipping back into a different time zone was a blessing. Idle chit-chat, silliness, talk about work mostly, and long games of animated computer chess with Gerd in his electronica switchboard of a room in the mornings and evenings. Not talking much at all during those. And admitting to amusement every time one of the bishops stomps on something. He claims he's programmed that piece to act like me when I'm dancing.
I don't feel like stomping on anything any more. Numb, maybe, but hopefully more like calm.
I've decided I'll ignore Harris's remark. It's not like he knows how much it's annoyed me anyway, so I can play cool credibly. And, in a small way, it's given me hope too. At least he finds me attractive. That's something I can work with.
Not that I will do anything about it, not from where I'm standing. But I'm not going to be all grudgy either. He is, after all, just too damn nice to warrant that.
And I'm going to have to present stuff to him, at least to him, several more times in the foreseeable future.
As if on cue, the traffic jam loosens up a little, and the Nick person sings the one song I really liked on the record. As I put my foot down gently, I am struck by how my new shoes have become really comfortable really quickly.
Maybe the rest of me will too.
Of course, there's a note on my third-of-a-desk when I enter the lab on Monday morning. Another torn-off bit of notepaper wedged between the sheaf of write-ups I've gathered for handing back to the students as soon as they come in. It sticks out, not because it's written in blue ink on square-ruled paper so like the students' scribblings...
It sticks out because I know the handwriting almost as well as I know my own.
"Ben,
sorry.
MH"
Oh. So he... either he has noticed, or he thinks he's been silly. Well, yes, he has, but... well. I must admit I'm a little mollified... warmed at how he's bothered to leave me a note. Must have come in during the weekend then. Hoping to find me? Hm...
And as I distribute the marked write-ups on the students' workbenches, I find myself hoping he's not regretting calling me attractive. Or calling me Ben.
It's not a student. It's a broad bearded face peering through the porthole, waiting for my answer to his knock. Yes, he's knocking on the door rather than sneaking in. Ormsey grins, and minimises the game of Age Of Empires he's currently engaged in on the lab PC, just to be on the safe side.
"Come in!"
"Morning Mr. Morgan, Mr. Ormerod – good to see you back." Blue eyes searching mine for reassurance that everything is all right. Well, I suppose I hope so too.
"Thanks. And you. Did you have a nice weekend... and a nice holiday?"
"Oh yes. Nice. Didn't do anything much at all... that's what makes these holidays nice, isn't it? What about you?"
"Oh, fine. I got a good look around town, got some work done, saw some old friends from my student days... yes, I suppose I really enjoyed myself." I attempt an honest smile, and find myself receiving one back.
"Good, good. Any important New Year's resolutions I should know about? No more lunch with brown sauce?" He grins, a tad forced.
"Not really." The mention of resolutions brings up the night I was watching the fireworks and wishing for rather more. But I can't really say that. "I'm not much for resolutions. How about you?"
"Nothing major... little things. Like finally getting the hang of word processors. Or getting on top of all that ivy that's choking my garden."
"Ah." I make chop-chop movements with my hands.
"Precisely. It was all right when it was just the garden, mind, but it's graduated to trying to choke the house now, and I really appreciate having some kind of a view out of that living-room window. Not that there's much to see but sky, a fence and lots more ivy."
"So the Christmas decorations for the seminar room didn't really make a dent in your iviatorial riches, then?" Easier now, less awkward. Good, just good.
"Oh my goodness no. I could have wreathed the entire department in the stuff and probably killed a few of the nuclear chemists' rats with the leaves while I'm at it, but no... I'm quite covered in the stuff. And the landlady's beginning to drop hints..."
Oh. Now there's an image... not the landlady. Harris covered in ivy. Preferably naked. Preferably helpless. Into the breach, Benjamin Algernon Morgan!
"Well, if you ever need a hand... I sort of miss having a garden to hack away at. As long as you provide your own tools, I'd be happy to, you know... help keep the plant life in check."
"In return for some dubious Matthew-Harris-style home cooking? You're a braver man than I thought." That smirk again. Makes it really hard to not feel silly for being so matey with a professor, and in the presence of a fellow researcher at that. Makes it really hard to not look forward to... gardening.
"You obviously don't know me well enough, then," I say, smirking, daring. "Ivy it is, and I'll demand to be fed well!"
"Next weekend? If it's not raining, obviously, or freezing I mean..."
"Saturday? Done."
And that's how I came to have a date with Professor Harris's ivy.
It isn't raining, nor is it freezing, although the former is still quite likely what with the grey clouds covering the entire sky as far as I can see from where I'm standing. And that is currently four feet above the ground on an old aluminium ladder Harris has unearthed in the garden shed (I suspect that prior to my arrival here he hadn't had so much as an idea that he had a garden shed at all), hacking away at the all-choking ivy with a pair of slightly rust-stained but serviceable cutting shears.
It hasn't been raining for a few days, which is apparently unusual for January here, but good for me – at least I don't get slapped by wet leaves as I work. Yes, I work. Alone. Well, mostly alone. Harris has dragged a ludicrous-looking wheelbarrow from the same potting shed and proceeded to load it with my ivy cut-offs with a view to carting them somewhere where they wouldn't offend the eye. The wheelbarrow protested loudly at this utilitarian usage, and Harris went to answer the phone half an hour ago and hasn't yet returned. He must be exceedingly well-attuned to the ring of his phone; I certainly didn't hear it.
And I can't see him either, not through the huge panorama window that takes up most of the rear wall of the house, inviting casual spectators to view the interior of the living room much as one would a puppet theatre. The curtains are pulled aside, and the scene is quite empty.
And that isn't where I should be looking anyway. I've got work to do, and goodness knows I am working. My arms are feeling just that little bit achy already, and I'm only just halfway along the highest and wildest of the growths that were once fences. Or walls, I can't really tell, at least not where I haven't already trimmed the ivy down to a serviceable length. And I'm warm. Have tied my jumper (my oldest one, the baggy faded 80s affair I once liberated from Mum's cast-off bag that was due for Oxfam. Funnily, she never commented, not even when she saw me wearing it) around my waist by the sleeves as keeping it on my shoulders wasn't an option. It kept slipping back and pretending to choke me rather humorously.
If the neighbours were in, and bothered to look, they'd be quite amused to see a strange man in Harris's garden, in just a T-shirt, in mid January. I'm thirsty as hell too.
But it's soothing work actually, for all but my shoulders. The ivy is a glorious, glossy dark green, much-needed colour in a landscape that is as dull and grey as putty at this time of year. Leaves lighten from almost black to a sprightly chartreuse along the vines, from the old flat leaves already veined with silver to the spindly young shoots crumpled and curled up against the January cold but holding out nevertheless. And holding on, clinging to each other when they can't find anything to grab hold of, weaving a thick net of tendrils, leaves and shadows.
It's slightly toxic, and it smells as it's cut off, an aggressive smell that's faintly chemical, as if it was offended at my trimming work, at my stepping on the vines creeping along the ground towards where more ivy is encroaching on the giant window.
I wonder why Harris left it for so long – it's quite unlike him to let anything run wild or get messy. What does he see in it?
I stare down into the shaggy green that's fast turning into a neat crop, showing glimpses of the wall between the leaves in places. So unlike him to let it grow out so much, so wild... um, yes. I have to literally shake myself awake. One hand has sunk in the thick green tendrils, roughly caressing the wiry strands as if it were hair, long extravagant hair. And all the awakeness and reason in the world, much less my own, can't block out the image that flickers up in front of my inner eye. Train of thought set moving on slippery rails...
'I'm quite covered in the stuff,' a warm voice says in the back of my head, and a pair of blue eyes smiles at me, half-obscured by a wild mop of ivy-green hair. It's growing, spreading thin tendrils and sprouting small green leaves as I watch. His beard is a well-groomed lawn of tiny ivy leaves while the hair just... runs rampage across his skin, and I don't notice he's naked until he isn't any more because the ivy is twining around his every limb in long sinuous strands. Rows of identical small leaves trail down his torso like exotic tattoos, and his fingertips appear even larger and blunter next to the small barely-grown pointy leaves sprouting along the backs of his hands.
He's quite covered in the stuff, and... it suits him. Right down to the large quiescent penis nestling in an unruly bush of tiny dark green leaves that seem to spring straight from his skin... it's only when I twitch to run my hands through the little leaves that for want of a better word look quite curly that I realise what I'm doing. I'm cutting the stupid hedge, and holding a large sharp implement to do this with.
I'm also fantasising about Harris.
Who is nowhere near, so why not? Getting my hands back into the rhythm of chopping the unruly plant life down to a manageable size, I let the ivy of my fantasy reach out from between his fingertips, searching for a new stronghold, and in the end binding my body to his, enveloping us, naked, sweaty, clinging to each other in a mercilessly gorgeous green cocoon until we cannot but rub against each other with each gasping breath we take, wriggling against the tender hold the ivy has on us, skin sliding along skin, beautiful flushed sensitised skin stretched over warm muscles and throbbing flesh, my hair tangling in his ivy as our erections rub against each other, flesh with a mind of its own hellbent on release while lips find lips, teasing, suckling, and his beard smells of ivy and he poisons me with that kiss, renders me absolutely senseless, helpless, hanging from his arms and the web of ivy, moaning and spurting, bathed in sweat and the crinkly smile in those awfully blue eyes...
Wait a minute. I'm wet. I mean, really wet. I'm also really aroused, but that was to be expected, and there's nothing that baggy trousers won't conveniently hide... but it's started to rain, and not too little judging from how my T-shirt sticks to my shoulders already, uncomfortably cold.
A total cloudburst. Shit, if I may say so. Harris is nowhere to be seen, so I get off the ladder as fast as dignifiedly possible, untangle my feet from the ivy at the bottom and make a beeline for the potting shed, knowing that that will at least be open and dry and will offer me shelter through the worst of the rain.
I arrange myself on a rickety table under the tiny, plastic-covered window in the dark shed, slipping my jumper back on and hiding my hands in the oversize sleeves more for comfort than for actual warmth. So much for a real-life cold shower!
It's quite loud in here, the rain drumming noisily on the tarboard-and-wood roof as if trying to find a way in by force. Maybe I should have run to the house after all, hoping that Harris would get off the phone for long enough to let me in? Well, that's moot now. I'm not going out there again until this pandemonium has let up a little, even if that means having to resort to reading the backs of fertiliser packages to keep myself from getting bored.
What am I saying? I had this lovely little meditation on the subject of ivy going, hadn't I? Now, where was I...
It's the light more than the creak of the door that jerks me out of my barely-begun reverie. The rain is still raging outside, and framed in the narrow doorway is a more than slightly wet Harris, eyebrows raised in greeting or in surprise, I cannot tell. I'm trying hard to banish my lustful thoughts at the sight of him, and failing miserably. It's suddenly got quite a bit warmer in this shed.
He doesn't say anything, not even a perfunctory 'ah, there you are!'. Not that he would stand a chance of being heard above the drumming rain unless he were to shout. He just flicks me that half-second, half-uncertain smile that seems to acknowledge he's recognised me.
But he's coming closer. Shutting the door behind him, leaving enough room for two men to comfortably stand next to each other, and still he's coming closer, stepping carefully as if afraid to tread on a stray potsherd. But he's not looking at the floor. He's looking out of the window above my head, and then he can't look there any more and he's looking at me, still advancing. Leaning in closer. Close enough that I can see the individual spatters of rain on the leather jacket he's hastily thrown over himself. Close enough that I can smell him. The frown at the sight of the blurred grey mess outside the window dissolves into a shaky smile, and that does it for me.
Eyes wide open, mouth only half, I raise myself up off the wonky tabletop and bring my face up to his, less than a breath apart, challenge in my eyes. I imagine I can feel the tickle and scrape of his beard against my chin, and a moment later I am feeling it, his lips gently brushing mine, a mouth dragging along mine, closed but softer than I had imagined, lips slightly moist and warm tracing the outline of my own, resting, one, two, three heartbeats, comfortable warm breathing. I feel his mouth curve into a faint smile against mine, and I answer it, surprised at my own boldness. Even though all I really want is to tease these lips open and taste that mouth thoroughly, ravish and be ravished... but for now, just being this close feels fantastic.
He has his eyes closed, and I can see his lashes fluttering just that little bit as he pulls back, then places another tiny dry kiss against my lips. I lick mine, hunting for the taste of him, willing him to open his eyes and see the feast I am.
I untangle my hands from the sleeves, reach out to him, to pull his head down into another kiss. He opens his eyes just that second, stares at me. I stare back, smouldering, parting my lips. Hungry, thirsty. My hand stopped in mid-air, waiting for that twitch of permission.
Lowering his eyes, he takes a step back, shakes his head a tiny fraction. My mouth is still open, though now in disappointment. Now it's me who's frowning, I can feel it forming between my eyebrows, see his hand reaching out across the reinstated distance to gently touch my shoulder.
As he's nearly out of the door, he murmurs, "You should come inside, it's freezing in here..."
Against the grey light streaming in, I'm trying hard to determine whether he's blushed, whether he's at least feeling a tiny part of the need and arousal that's warming me through and through, all the way up to my mouth, still moist and open. Above that, my brain is shivering at that faint shake of head. No? What is he saying no to? What are all these allusions, styling himself 'not an angel', what is all this leaning in close, what is this hesitant kissing if not an affirmation? If he's unwilling to let himself be 'seduced' by his associate, his Mr Morgan, his Ben, then why does he keep doing these things? No. He's not toying with me. And he's not about to refuse me. Call me stupid, call me a hero-worshipper, but he's too damn wonderful, too damn good and sincere and too much of a living, breathing male to not acknowledge the desires of his heart and body every now and then. No.
At least I'm hoping with all that I am that he is. Because my heart and my body have made it abundantly clear what they want – what I want. I am too far into this already to back out. I am too wet already to get out of the rain.
Pushing the door open, I venture out into the downpour. Let's hope the house door will open for me...
It does, after two rings of the bell. He opens, can't help smiling at my soaked appearance, but takes a respectful step back anyway, clearing his throat.
"You look like you could do with a hot shower."
I grin weakly, pushing back the thoughts bubbling up in my mind at that suggestion. He's almost certainly not offering that, I chide myself. Although another kiss may well be the only thing that ensures I will still be alive by tonight.
He claps his hand on my shoulder, warm and probably dry, although that really doesn't show through my soaked shirt under the jumper. "Go on," he says, "bathroom's the last door on the right. Use any of the towels from the stack, they've all been washed at some point. And not used since," he adds, cryptically. Frankly, I'd be happy to use a towel that smells of him, but am not saying anything yet. I could do with time in the shower, to come up with something to say.
"Do you want a dry T-shirt as well? I'm sure I can find something..." Not even waiting for my answer, he strides off into what must be the bedroom, one door along from the bathroom he's sent me to. At a loss, I set myself in motion. I am, after all, quite cold now that I have time to think about it.
What is this man playing at, is the only thought that keeps buzzing in my head as I scrub myself under the stinging hot spray of his shower. I'm still mildly aroused, but somehow... I can't touch myself in his bathroom. Not when he's... well, not when he's not yet signalled that that's all right with him. He's a mystery to me, and that irks me no end. Not that I want him to fall at my feet and beg to be loved by me (although I've had that happen too, not entirely unironically), but... I can freakin' smell he's interested. So why? Afraid? Catholic? Married? Something wrong with me? I shake my head violently, spraying little droplets of soapy water against the shower curtain. It feels awful to be stuck like this.
I should just move on, forget the entire affair just as I decided to forget his faux pas about the symposium. That would be sensible – step back, relax, allow myself the odd fantasy and leave it at that. But... well, I can't. I am more than merely interested. I yearn. This wanting, and obviously being wanted but not taken up on it makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, like a lingering headache, only spread throughout my whole self. For a moment I entertain the thought of lovesickness, and my snort at this isn't entirely convincing.
Lovesick before I'm even in love. If this is what falling in love means, I'd rather it hadn't happened in the first place... not that I have a say in that. It's Harris whose lips I'm depending on, for words... or kisses.
The living room smells of an enticing combination of smoke and tea when I emerge from the bathroom, clad in my own slightly clammy jeans and Harris's light green T-shirt. Predictably, it's a little too large for me, and sadly it doesn't smell of him.
He coughs, busying himself at the perfunctory semi-open fireplace. "Would you like some tea? I fear my attempts at creating some cosy winter atmosphere are somewhat thwarted by the quality of the firewood..." He coughs again, slams the glass doors in front of the fire and straightens himself up. "Let's leave it to the fire to decide whether it wants to warm us, eh? It's not like this marvellous abode doesn't have central heating. Tea?"
I nod, squeezing myself into one corner of the overstated leather sofa that was almost certainly Harris's landlady's fault.
"Milk, sugar, lemon?" He's so breezy I can almost taste the insecurity in his voice. Just a lump of sugar, I say, shivering a little against the cool leather. Trying to convince myself it's anticipation.
He comes back out of the kitchen balancing a pair of mugs and a box of lump sugar in one hand and holding the teapot in the other. Chemists' hands, it crosses my mind, of course. He can hold the hot teapot without giving a second thought to getting burned. He makes a perfunctory remark about how the window now affords him a much better view of the grisly weather outside as he sits down beside me and fills my mug with steaming, dark brown tea.
We sip in silence for a moment. The tea is very strong, but not bitter. He must have experience in that... screwing my eyes shut, I take a deep breath and face him.
"Professor Harris, I have..."
A hand stops my incipient outburst. "Matthew. Please."
Matthew. Yes. That tastes right on my tongue, and I almost laugh, an insane laugh. Nothing is resolved, but... Matthew. I nod, breathe deeply again.
"Matthew. I have a question I've been meaning to ask you... because I'm fairly sure I'm not hallucinating. Nor do I want to be hallucinating. I'm as much of a scientist as you are, and goodness knows I love living in the real world. So... what's wrong? What, I mean... why did you kiss me just then and – " I throw my hands up in resignation. This is not going well, but really I can't think of any more eloquent ways of putting it. I'm feeling sick with it, sick with not being able to control this weird infatuation, or maybe just with not being able to simply give in to it. "I feel awful," I add, in a small voice. "Sorry."
"Ben..." And there is almost a hint of question in his voice, rough and higher-pitched than normal. His eyes are open wide, as they were in the shed, but this time he's not shaking his head. He's nodding, just as minutely. "Ben, I am the one who should be sorry. I'm a stupid old git who can't see he's hurting someone's feelings until he's told so. And you're the last person I want to hurt, believe me that, Ben. I'm sorry that my clumsy advances make you feel... uncomfortable. I don't know what prompted that really... I haven't been acting like that for – oh, you were probably not even born then." A weak attempt at laughter.
"So," I say, voice still only half-there, "what's keeping you?"
"What's... Ben? What is keeping me? You mean you..."
"I mean I want you to act foolishly if that involves you crowding me against a wall in a dark shed and you kissing me and flashing those crinkly smiles at me, yes. Yes! What I want to know is what's keeping you from doing just that? If you fear losing my respect, forget it. I greatly respect men who trust in their senses."
He is silent for a few moments, then nods sadly. "See – I am a fool after all, whichever way you turn it." A small laugh. "Seeing in you what I wanted to see, the fiery gorgeous young man full of potential and full of drive. I mean, you... the way you dress, and the way you go to clubs and bars and... and the way you completely didn't react to any of my timid attempts at... showing affection. I say timid, they were quite daring by my standards... I suppose. And you weren't... well, I thought you weren't accepting."
"And I thought you weren't offering!" The shout is liberating, and I have to swallow hard to avoid sounding tearful here when all I want to do is cry with relief and laugh at the same time, laugh at this impossible knot of male stupidity he and I have woven. The knot that has sprung open just a moment ago. "You see, I... I tried so hard not to lust after you. Goodness knows you might find the mere idea disgusting. All that touching, you touched them all, hands on their shoulders, so I told myself over and over again that that doesn't mean anything when it's my shoulder you're putting your hand on. And that silly dress-up party, it was just for the students, I told myself, so –"
His hand interrupts me again. This time it's lying on my forearm, heavy and warm, and I feel a shiver creeping up my arm. I never want to move away from under that hand again.
"It was for the students, the dress-up part was. But when I saw you in the dressing room, all but naked and trying to wriggle into that dress... forgive a poor man for not being able to control his physical reactions, will you?" He nudges me playfully, and I nudge him back, and before we both know it we're all over each other, groping and pushing and unsure whether to let this strange thing turn into a fight or a good sound snog.
Thankfully, I opt for the latter, and he goes along. Oh, how he goes along. So this is how it feels to really be touched by Matthew Harris, I think hazily as his arms wrap around me, crushing me against him, his lips blindly seeking skin and latching on to my earlobe while all I can do is nuzzle my face into the hollow of his throat, cover my skin in his scent and purr like a cat. He's licking my ear and I feel my hands clawing into his shoulder and arm because damn, it's loud and wet and it feels wonderful, and it feels wonderful not because he's some kind of marvellously skilled lover, but because it's him, it's Harris, it's Matthew doing this to me, doing this for me, it's his beard tickling the side of my face as I squirm my way up to reach for a kiss.
And a kiss I get, a deep kiss that feels as if it's been freed from long imprisonment. Lips nipping at mine, smiling, the tip of a tongue hesitantly touching my mouth, and I all but suck him in, feasting on the sweet taste of him, of tea and relief and Matthew, so much Matthew.
When we've both regained our breath and I have settled comfortably against his broad chest, his borrowed T-shirt slid halfway up my bare midriff, we look at each other speechlessly for a long while, waiting for the other to quip first. In the end, it's me who cracks up. I just can't resist those little sunbursts of lines around his eyes. And his eyes are smiling now, they really are.
"There should be something like classes in emotional expression for men. And we should both be in them! Sheesh..." I give him another little nudge, and he grins.
"That's one thing I certainly deserve to be a student of again... although I suspect you could still teach me a thing or two privately. It's been so long, you know... you teased the old lion awake."
I can't help but guffaw at the awkwardness of that image coming from my wonderful calm Professor Harris. But he's not, awkward I mean. More like lion-esque as he does his best to squeeze the breath from me, then resorts to more perfidious techniques and tickles my exposed tummy until I squirm halfway off the sofa and nearly take one of the mugs with me before he lets up.
"No fair," I gasp. "There should be a rule against using clichéd metaphors when engaged in serious snogging. Besides, you're not old!"
He blinks at me in mock surprise, but I can see in his eyes that that's hit home. Was that what he'd been so insecure about? And strangely enough, while my mind says it's a stupid thing to believe, my belly says something about how sweet it is that he should want me just as much and put me on the same kind of pedestal as I had put him. Only a different material, and maybe a different height, seeing as he's bloody tall already.
He trails a fingertip down my nose as I hang half off the sofa. "I can see, young Mr Morgan, that you're already cooking up a retort, and I strongly oppose that. I suppose we could both do with lessons in shutting up when necessary, and talking when even more necessary. The rest of the world doesn't seem to have that problem, after all..."
"And neither do we, Pr... Matthew. Neither do we. Not any more." I wriggle myself back on to the sofa, intent on another kiss when my hand brushes something rather... interesting in his slacks. Pretending to hold on for leverage, I give the hardness a good squeeze. Mmmh, that was a delicious little gasp. Wonder how many more of these I can get out of him... oh, it feels lovely. Quite hard and of a size that befits a big man like he is. Humming approval, I close my hand around it as best I can through the stiff fabric of his trousers and squeeze rhythmically, hard. He breathes heavily, eyes sliding shut and remaining shut even as I grab the back of his head and pull him down for a deep slow hungry kiss.
I can feel his hips thrusting against my hand in small urgent twitches, and it feels gorgeous, gorgeous to drown in the eager warm mouth and lick those small desperate gasps from his lips. His hands fly to his crotch, fumbling eagerly with his belt and zipper, and he's kissing me all the while, mouth locked on to mouth, my hand fisted in his hair, working the tie loose, holding on while my other hand burrows inside his briefs for that eager cock. I find it by touch alone, seeking heat and hardness, adjusting myself in his lap, getting a good hard grip, never stopping the kiss.
Oh, is he ever hard. Glorious thick flesh, thin delicate skin stretched over it, my hand slick with a hint of sweat and the thick drop of fluid seeping from the tip. My other hand has loosened his hair and is spreading it over his shoulders, rich greyish-brown darkness enveloping our faces, and I taste the urgency in his heavy breathing, small grunts of desperate pleasure escaping him and slipping into my mouth as his hips begin to buck up under my stroking hand and I squeeze hard and plaster myself against him, squirming and rubbing my own joyful heat against him.
Oh, oh it feels good, so, so good.
He is limp under me, breathing deeply, slack features radiating happiness. When I experimentally nibble his upper lip, his eyes fly open and he fixes me with the bluest gaze I have ever seen (and that after several months of having seen him gaze at stuff). A moan is the first thing he manages, then a small kiss and a mumbled "Thank you... that was... wow."
"My pleasure," I reply, pleased with how my voice is anything but steady. Oh, the things this man does to me just sitting there. The things he could do to me in the very near future... I wipe my left hand on my trousers and reach up to hold his face in my hands, to try and fully grasp the phenomenon that is Matthew Harris.
"You're sticky," he mouths. "I've made a mess on you, have I?" He smiles, as if to reassure me that he truly enjoyed making that mess.
"Oh, not just you..." I grin, laughter bubbling over in my mouth as I take his hand and guide it to the stain in the front of my own trousers. He makes a wonderfully surprised face, then purrs at me, proud to have done this to me.
Wholly incapable of purring myself, I choose instead to suck his purr off his lips. It's not exactly a difficult choice after all.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: drella_prod@drella.demon.co.uk.
All right, I am.
Will you shut up now? No, thought not.
Ben
I find it more than a little difficult to write anything more from the lab computer. Not that I'm being watched – my so-called colleagues frankly try to spend as little time in the little coop behind the teaching lab as possible. Ormsey at least makes it a point to hang with the students in the actual teaching lab for long hours, though I somewhat doubt that what he teaches them there is chemistry. Well, unless you count cocktail recipes as chemistry, which I suppose you could. I shall only be impressed if they can casually explain to me why absinthe is cloudy and demonstrate the cause using only the readily available materials in the lab.
And hopefully not try to drink the result!
Everyday life has caught up with me as if nothing had happened at all on Saturday. How long ago is it now – almost a week. Far too short for me to get used to anything at any rate.
I'm still Mr Morgan in the lab, by unspoken agreement, and he's still Professor Harris, although the smiles seem to be more frequent now, easier, and the unobtrusive touches, the leaning-in-closer while checking that my latest proposed synthesis path doesn't have any glaringly obvious flaws like five-bonded carbon atoms or other such stupidities that occasionally flow from even my pen. Really, I'm glad only Matthew gets to see them that way. I suspect he knows perfectly well he's the cause for them.
Strange, it's all pretty strange when you stop for a moment and think about it, not that I get to do that enough anyway. I mean, it's not like I came equipped to deal with such things, and it really shows. I remember Mike's sisters' serial crushes, and boy, did he have sisters, and boy, did they have crushes. They just wouldn't let up, and while I graciously accepted Mike into the safety of my room all hours of the afternoon, I never even ventured to ask why they kept on falling in love and out of love and starting all over again. It wasn't something either of us were too interested in at the time. And later, when I discovered the dizzy pleasure to be found under another's skin, I didn't think about it any more. I think I believed I had the answer then.
Well, as a true scientist I should take that theory and chuck it in the nearest bin. Because it's not, this is not about having sex with him. Well, it's not that I don't want to, God forbid. It's that... he leaves me unsatisfied, and not in a bad way at all. Leaves me craving more. I suppose that's what being on drugs must be like – the addiction is certainly there. And I find myself wanting him all for myself, as if even telling people about it would alienate him from me, make him public property to some extent.
And I know that's silly – he is public property, he belongs to the department when he's arguing with the geographers who have got cheekier by the week, he belongs to the university when he goes to his symposia and talks about bright green complexes in his deep brown voice, and he belongs to the students when they woo him in a thinly-veiled effort to make him stop long enough for their experiments to go right purely because he's around.
And he belongs to me, in a way nobody here needs to find out. Belongs to me because I wouldn't function any more without him, and that is a scary thought. A man just over twice my age, my teacher at that! We'll be stuck together in this lab for three more years, someone in the back of my mind shouts, with a view to getting me to be sensible about this. Three years is nowhere near enough, the rest of me hums, nowhere near enough to get to know this large quiet mind, not even to get to know this large quiet body...
Wishing desperately that Fridays would go faster than other weekdays, I shut down the e-mail programme and head out into the lab to distract myself.
There's not much to distract me with, though. Almost the entire population of the lab has left already, leaving nothing but mildly stained workbenches, empty sample flasks and a fading smell of ammonia. Christoph, the glass-breaking little ditz who so fittingly appears to major in PE, specifically ball games, notices my slightly surprised expression and crows, across a mostly-tidied up workbench of his own, "Excursion, Ben. To Biologists' Green. You coming too?"
I blink. "What?"
He takes his time letting his grin spread across his coarse features, nonchalantly scrubbing a grimy test tube without even bothering to look at it, which results in a spotlessly clean tube with a blob of almost-certainly toxic gunge in the bottom. I frown at it, and go entirely unnoticed.
"Bio Green party – don't tell me you haven't heard? Sheesh, Ben, where are you living again? On campus, or in a parallel universe? What do you think this din is?" And almost on cue, a series of cracks like gunshots echoes across the courtyard that separates the lab block from the main building.
"Police breaking up the party already?" I venture, trying my best ironic grin. A party is the last thing I want to go to tonight really. Even though I feel like bubbling over.
"The Horst Tappert Show Band. More precisely, their drummer warming up. He's my flatmate's cousin, and they're not to be missed, d'you hear?"
"Crap!" comes a sonorous voice across the aisle, and it's only now that I notice the hum in the background wasn't a radio tuned to some classical station.
"Wolfram?"
"Honestly, don't let him tell you to go to the Bio Green for the band – they've played there every semester since I started here, and they still haven't got the hang of it!"
Ah, Mr Tungsten again. His major, it turns out, is musicology, and he is, in all fairness, the oddest-looking musicology student one could have imagined. Tall and broad, with spotty skin and two-foot-long receding hair that's showing traces of black dye about halfway down and is hiding massive ears. Well, I suppose the latter are justified. He's got quite a good singing voice too.
"And what do you know about it, Wolfie? I'm pretty sure they haven't started including things like 'groove' and 'fun' in that precious curriculum of yours, have they? Nor have they ever looked at anything newer than, oh, what, 1800?"
With the calm of a rock about to... well, roll, Wolfram (who hates being called Wolfie for obvious reasons. Werewolf would be more appropriate anyway) puts down the Erlenmeyer flask he was just rinsing off, sending up a small crowd of detergent bubbles. "Just for your information, the concept of singing in tune is one that is probably far more precious to modern pop music with its traditionalist tonality than it is to the stuff I have to listen to!"
Christoph backs away a little, his stocky footballer physique slightly more intimidated at Wolfram's advancing than his mind.
"Yeah, and I'm sure you're still stuck in the mists of time before music was even invented. Thorough research, my foot. What is it you're singing these days, the greatest hits of Ancient Greece?"
The growl from Wolfram is probably closer to the greatest hits of Stone-Age France, but it's only to clear his throat for the attack about to follow. Advancing slowly across the aisle, foaming tube brush in hand, he stalks towards his hapless opponent, pinning him with the sheer strength of his voice, a male Valkyrie in a lab coat.
From what I can tell it is Greek he's singing, although the tune sounds suspiciously modern and ends in a blues flourish that would have melted quartz glass if Christoph had had any unbroken quartz glass left anywhere near him.
Sensing a truce when I hear one, I nod and turn back towards my coop.
"Mr Morgan?"
Oh. Harris. And where Wolfram's admittedly impressive vocal performance totally failed to make my skin crawl, these two words do. Instantly. I turn around and try hard not to smile too broadly. There are students present after all.
He cocks his head to the side. "Inciting them to Sängerkrieg, Mr Morgan? How considerate of you to be concerned for their universal erudition!" The crinkle around his eyes doesn't escape the two boys this time, and Christoph pipes up in mock hurt: "I got sung at in Ancient Greek! For all I know anyway... can't you make it stop, Professor Harris? I fear for my eardrums in this lab, you know...?"
Wolfram has actually blushed, which makes him look even more awkward than he usually does. Harris snorts, then bellows, "Stop!!", before continuing in a quieter and less threatening tone, "In the name of love, before you break my heart... um..."
No, he doesn't know the words. And he's not singing well at all, more like reciting emphatically as if he had a speech to make. But damn it, I'm flushed all over. Imagining him saying 'stop in the name of love' to me. After I've been doing some... deliciously indecent things to him.
Outwardly, I stand gaping like Christoph and Wolfram. Harris is not exactly known for singing at his students, much less old disco tunes. That he even knows them rankles oddly with the image of the calm, pale and gentle giant who nudges molecules in the right direction by gazing at them with his awfully blue eyes.
Well, I suspect I am the only one here who is about to find out more. And I'm looking forward to it. It's the weekend after all...
"Anyway." He haughtily clears his throat. "What I'd come here for was to abduct Mr Morgan for a minute, if you don't mind. Mrs El-Badaoui is about to smash in her precious PC, and I would rather she not do that and spoil both her and my weekend. Because really, we wanted to take that addendum to the printers before they close. And before she breaks down, the poor soul. So, if you don't mind, gentlemen...?"
"They're washing up already anyway," I say, perfunctorily. He's seen that of course, but I feel uncomfortable not saying anything and making myself look like the piece of wax that I feel like. Wax in his hands. Oh, yes.
Of course he's been telling the truth, and Mrs El-Badaoui is actually still there and staring out of the window, trying hard not to look at her computer, which, from what I can tell from the doorway, has frozen in the middle of an application.
I take a careful step into the lion's den, meeting her thunderous gaze with as sunny a smile as I can manage. Behind me, Harris sneaks away into his own office, motioning to me to come see him when I've finished.
"It died!" she shouts, in her heavily-accented English that she insists on using around me. "I was almost finish, and it died, and now I can't do nothing any more. So much work, and I have to go home now, and... stupid computer!"
She would have kicked it if I hadn't been standing in the way, that much I am certain. Warily, I bend down to eye the screen. She's not offering me her seat, clearly offended at the world at large for saddling her with a computer in the first place.
I breathe a small sigh of relief as the Task Manager pops up. Not entirely dead after all. I shut down the poor abused word processor, forestalling another tirade from Mrs El-Badaoui with a quiet 'shhh' before I go hunting in the temp folder. Shit, it would have helped to remember what she'd called the file... but as it is, the computer is being helpful. There's only one text file in there that has the tell-tale dollar sign tacked onto the file name. And it's called 'Document1'. Not a surprise really. I bet her beloved typewriter doesn't do that sort of thing to her.
Without any fuss, I bring the auto-recovered file copy up on the screen, and to my great relief, find that it actually resembles the thing she had been frowning at just a few moments ago. I hit the 'save' button and prompt her to put it somewhere, well, safe, to which she brusquely replies that all it needs is printing now anyway, which she does, without a word of thanks, slamming the printed document on top of the pile of papers in her 'Out' tray, then sighing deeply and shovelling the contents of said tray into a plain brown cardboard folder which she places on top of her packed briefcase.
Have a nice weekend, I say, smiling extra sweetly as I watch her shut the monitor off and climb into her quilted coat. I don't press Harris's door handle until I'm fairly sure she's not going to do anything more than disappear immediately. Saying thanks is apparently not high on her weekend agenda anyway.
"Ah, Mr Morgan. Do take a seat, please. It's just a little thing really I wanted to talk to you about. Erm, on the subject of... weekend plans." He's waited for the door to shut until he says the last words. How sweet. He doesn't know we're alone yet. I do though, and the knowledge, coupled with the nearness of him in this tiny office that even smells of him, of his leather briefcase and his shelves of books and that musky scent that he occasionally wears, does nothing to keep me calm. The thirst is there in an instant, and I refuse to take a seat and make straight for him, perching on his desk, leaning over him suggestively. Mmmh, his hair smells good.
"I could think of a few things that require... minimal planning," I quip, stroking the place behind his ear with my free hand. "In fact, they require so little planning they're virtually ready to be embarked on." With a laugh, I slide off the desk and land awkwardly in his lap, nearly toppling the huge padded office chair that was clearly not made to hold two people. His face is so close now, and so delicious in its surprise. He really wasn't expecting me to do this? Does he even know how flippin' gorgeous he is? Frankly, I'm amazed I'm the only one who wants to eat him up, and I do my best to show him I do, licking slow wet trails across his forehead, along his eyebrows, down his nose. Ah, now look at that. What a feast... eyes closed, mouth half-open, breathing deeply, savouring the attention. So beautiful, so tasty.
I can't resist a small nip to the tip of his nose, and he starts under me, giving a small shout of surprise that makes me laugh out loud. His eyes widen, and he hisses 'shhh' at me even before his hand has had time to let go of my waist and fly to his lips. I just go on laughing, adding a few 'rrrr's for good measure, reaching for the tie in his hair to pull it out while dipping into the V-neck of his lab tunic with my other hand. Oh, warmth. Skin. I purr my approval at the looseness of the T-shirt underneath. Much easier for me to get in that way.
All right, the tie is out, his hair falling about his shoulders in messy greying waves. As if on cue, he grabs hold of my now-idle hand, and the other one, and levers himself off the chair, eyes narrowed. I stumble, hang from his hands for a split second before I catch myself. He straightens himself, towering over me, his voice almost menacing in how quiet it is, this close.
"Ben... you have no idea how much I want that too. But... we're not yet alone here, and I won't have you ruin your reputation with how noisy you are when you're enjoying yourself." That lopsided smirk again.
I shrug, a tad awkwardly as he still holds both my wrists in his grasp. "Then I suppose you'll just have to silence me, eh? Because there's no way I can even bear the walk to my room in the state I'm in." As if to illustrate, I rub my raging hardness against his thigh. Oh Jesus, that's good! The moan that escapes my mouth is not exaggerated one bit...
And still, he makes no move to kiss me into blissful silence, damn his control! I thrust against him, a hot, need-filled moan warming the already-hot air in his tiny office.
And then things go too fast for me to follow, and when I next catch my breath, I find myself bent over awkwardly, lying on my back on his desk, legs scrabbling for purchase on the floor, on the chair, anything, while he's covering me with his body, his breath hot in my face. He is magnificent, and completely silent.
So am I, actually. His hand over my mouth makes sure of that. I exhale shakily, attempting a little squirm. No, I can't get any more comfortable, and really I don't need to. The way his hand is clamped over my mouth, muffling my insistent little needy noises, is such a turn-on in itself, and I can see it beginning to work on him. He's flushed, hair awry, breathing heavily, and I'm sure the hard thing pressing into my groin through two layers of trousers is not a thigh muscle.
He's got me where he wants me, and where I want me, and I'm loving it, squirming under his weight, dislodging a fair share of his stationery and giving muffled voice to how glorious this feels. To be crushed under this magnificent rock of a man, to goad him into unleashing his strength and taking it out on me. Oh, to have him just flip me over and pound into me right here on the desk... it would be heaven. I squirm some more with a view to getting the message across, my brain slowly melting into pure animal fuck-me-ness, my mouth still held captive by his insistent hand. Eventually, I manage to get on to my side, exposing my throat to him, inviting the bite, the leonine possession, one hand scrabbling for my belt buckle, trying in vain to push down my jeans.
That's when he straightens himself up, and I can see the lust in his eyes taking over, turning the gentle pale Professor Harris into the delicious beast I'm craving right now. His hands still possessing me, he pushes me over to lie on my stomach and grabs my crotch none too gently through my jeans while he assists me in freeing myself from their confinement. Oh, oh... he could hold me by my balls for the whole weekend, and I wouldn't complain, no really I wouldn't. I'd just lie there and whimper, invitingly.
Hell, I am whimpering now, jeans and boxers finally around my knees, holding on to the fake-mahogany tabletop, hungry for the pounding that I know is going to be a revelation even though he's far from my first. In a way he is... and I wish he would hurry already!
My head whips around in shock as I hear the creak of the chair. He's not... yes he is. He's sitting down, leaning back, those paws grabbing my ankles and hoisting them on to the armrests of his chair, face full of a distant smile that seems to say he's not quite sure what to do next. After a few moments' contemplation, he lets go of me altogether, swivels round in his chair, leaving my legs flailing in mid-air, and punches the button that lets the blinds down, plunging the room into near-perfect darkness. He's feeling his way up my legs now, pulling my jeans off me slowly, then my boxers, just as slowly. Damn it, I'm trembling here. How can he stand to draw it out so long when I know he's just as desperately aroused as I am? I can smell it, for fuck's sake!
And now the chair is moving again, not quite as far round this time, and one hand leaves my ankles again. I brace for impact, await the stinging slap that is sure to follow... or else the gentle rough stroke down my flank... I almost startle off the table when I feel something soft and dry tickling down the small of my back, then disappearing into my crack, pressure slowly increasing until he's rubbing my perineum and I'm trying hard to bite back a moan. What the... he's wiping my arse? Am I not clean enough for his use – I'll show him... oh.
Oh.
And a lot more 'oh'... my God, that's his tongue. Warm, slippery, and... wow. I clench like a virgin under the unexpected caress, and feel him chuckling against my flesh, feel the tickle and scrape of his beard as he works me over with that tongue of his, stroking me in that most sensitive place, gently at first, then rough. Oooh. He's having a hard time holding me down when he reaches the tight little pucker that only minutes ago was so greedy for his cock and is now fluttering helplessly under his tongue... oh. My. God. Is he ever good... oooooh. More, damn it. Harder. Something harder! Need...
Ssssh, he says, and the cold air of his breath hits me like ice cubes, drawing a long shaky moan from me. I thrust my hips up against where his face must be, and he laughs softly and bends to his task again, reducing me to shapeless moaning goo in no time at all.
My knuckles have gone white long ago from holding on to the desk, and he lets up again, leaving me empty and wet and panting, cock squashed under the desktop, painting small stains of pure desire on its underside.
"Want... you inside me... please, Ma... Matthew, inside me." God, I'm barely conscious enough to string a sentence together! The things this man does to me... and I'm desperate for more of those things.
"Haven't got... anything," he murmurs against my skin, sounding as crestfallen as I feel. Fuck. Condoms. And even I haven't got one on me, I'm supposed to be at work, damn it. And I'm aching, aching with need and the emptiness in me that thirsts for him.
"Your... fingers," I grind out. "Fuck, I need you. You, in me."
"Such language, Ben," he purrs, but I can hear the shiver in his voice at my raw need. I can feel him slicking a finger with spit and gently pushing it inside me. Oh, good. Take another one, come on. I egg him on with tiny squirms and whimpers, want him to fill me, to fuck me with his fingers at least. Wonderful hands, possessing me. Oh yes. Another one, now. I can take three, they're wonderful, hot and a little rough, almost as good as his cock would be. I can feel them curling inside me just that little bit, scrabbling for my hot spot, and I thrust back on them, pushing him deeper inside me with every thrust, chasing the dull hit of pure lust that lives in there.
There!
Oh, oh, he's felt it too, and he's rubbing it, hard from the first stroke, and grabbing my poor abused cock under the desk and squeezing that in time with his strokes, and I whimper and melt, completely at the mercy of these hands, moaning my release into the darkness. Oh.... oh, God.
I am near insensible when he turns me over gently to check for signs of life. And now, only now is he kissing me, and it tastes sweet and soft and wonderful. I scrabble to raise myself off the desk but only succeed in nearly falling off, grabbing the nearest thing to hold on to in the striped darkness behind the blinds.
It's Matthew, predictably enough. Who is still far too dressed for the occasion. If only my body wouldn't insist on wanting to be a puddle right now... I give in to my knees' urge to be as close as possible to the floor and scrabble at his belt in an effort to free his cock. I hear another tissue being ripped from the container and crumpled in his grip before a pair of now-dry hands pushes mine aside and makes short work of the fastenings.
A wave of musky man-scent hits me and drives a new wave of lust through my limp body. Oh, he's leaking, I can feel the small stain in the front of his briefs. They have to come off. Now. Ah, better. God, hard. So deliciously hard. I grab hold of his cock with one hand and swallow the tip, licking the salty sweat of arousal off him. He staggers a little at my assault, then clamps both his hands around my head, holding on for the ride.
And what a ride. This cock is made for eating, such wonderfully firm flesh, hard and tender and throbbing in my mouth as I suckle the bitter drop of pre-come out, squeezing his shaft with one hand and caressing his heavy balls with the other. Oh, I can feel him twitching. And he's moaning now, long low moans vibrating through his entire body. Oh God, wish I could see him now, now as he's about to come, and I look up anyway even though it's dark, and drink in his agonised moan and feel the wet warmth of his spunk hitting the side of my face and dripping on my throat. Drip. Drip.
With a deep sigh of contentment, I nuzzle into his groin, placing small kisses on the softening cock, feeling the wiry hairs above it brushing my face. It could be ivy leaves, tiny ivy leaves, I think, and then have to grin at how inadequate my fantasy seems when compared to the real thing. He smells so much more real, and oh, the sounds he makes...
His hands in my hair have unclenched slowly, and he's petting me gently now, patting the back of my head in the end. Trying to get me to get up I suppose. I do, slowly, groping for support that isn't there. He's taken a step back, and a second later I see why as white light streams in through the window, framing him in shining brightness, flushed and dishevelled and oh so kissworthy.
I do, and keep doing it, and am still kissing him when another tissue gently wipes the mess off my cheek and throat.
The milky white stains in the carpet under the desk will just have to be explained away. Freak condensed milk accident, maybe.
Really, what do I care?
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: drella_prod@drella.demon.co.uk
Can I just opt out and say yes, it's wonderful and I'm more in love than I have ever been in my life and be done with it? Would that make me look too much like something out of one of your treasured Pierre & Gilles pictures?
Actually, all irony aside, I think I am more in love than I have ever been. I am in love full stop. That's already more than I bargained for... hell, you're the artist. Is it supposed to feel so... strange, like an achy joy that grips every cell in your body and reassembles you from within? Or had I better see a doctor? ;)
And no, *sticks tongue out* I'm not sharing details of my sex life with you over the university's network (you've got my phone number, right? Early in the morning is usually a good time to get hold of me. Provided I'm actually kipping in my own bed.)
I'll say this: there's a lot of it, and it's highly satisfying. I'll leave your filthy imagination to make up the rest.
Oh, and thanks for the records – found someone to pimp your latest discovery to, eh? "I'd like to thank everyone that I have ever slept with" – yes, I admit that's a highly original song title. What I want to know is why are you not in it??
Talk soon,
Ben
There was a lot of it, and thankfully there was a lot of other life squeezed in between too. Really, some days I feel like Matthew's so vast I will never fully get to know him. We've shared our past lives over strong tea and burned biscuits (got distracted while they were in the oven. Naturally.), and found that a childhood in 1950s Canada isn't all that different from one in 1980s Reading if you have certain... preferences.
He's always been a very private man, and still is even when it comes to such simple things as to where he lives and whether he has any pets or whether he owns a motorbike or likes Canadian whiskey. We come to the lab together more often than we don't these days, and still we're both keeping quiet about it at work. Not that I could keep it quiet from Okubu... but then she's a special case. Must be a mind-reader in her family somewhere. And she was happy for me anyway. Still, I haven't yet found it in myself to take Matthew along to the Inter on a Thursday. Things could get... loud.
Mind you, they all know bits and pieces. Monika in her infinite naivety congratulated us on becoming such good friends so quickly, my parents at least know that I have found a very sweet lover and that I get on well with my professor, but not that they are one and the same person. Only Mike knows the whole story really, and he's simply too straight to be in any way affected. Or to judge me.
Matthew doesn't seem to have any family left who need telling. And his friends... well, apart from the woman who unsuccessfully tried to teach him Italian when he first came here and who has become a friend, I can't really think of any of his professional buddies wanting to know whom he's bedding. And he agrees with me there. And the Italian teacher (Petra? Paula? God knows. I've seen a picture though.) hasn't yet managed to be in town on any of the weekends we are. At the moment, she's in Italy, I think.
Other than that, I don't think as much as I was afraid I would. You know, he's my professor, my superior, my boss even, at least on paper, he's so much older than me yadda yadda. If anything, he's taught me to quit thinking occasionally, and just feel. And that, that feels gorgeous.
Two-and-a-half years to go. And then... oh, I'll marry him.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: hallg001@uni-tuebingen.de
Hey Gerd,
congrats on passing! Or shall I say defending? Anyway, great stuff. Got any takers yet for your invention, or are you going to snuggle in the lap of academe for a bit longer? What exactly is it you're off to do in Marburg?
Yes, I know, I could ask you all these questions at your party on Friday, but... thing is, my boyfriend's not letting me go. He was using his eyebrows a lot and making meaningful remarks about how I was not supposed to make any arrangements for the weekend, so God knows where he's going to take me. Looks like he's getting all of his seeing-Europe done (he's Canadian) now that he's found someone to travel with him! Anyway, I promise solemnly that I will be there to help you with your move next month, and so is my car, with what little capacity that holds. Still, I think I can rustle up enough spare packing materials in the storeroom to turn my car into a safe computer transport device. What do you think? The boot and the back seat I can offer; the rest might be full of Canadian, if I can convince him to come lend a hand... at any rate, see you soon!
Bis bald,
Ben
I could convince him to come with me for once, and even though I'd warned him it would not be the pleasure trip his weekend escapes usually were, he found himself quite enjoying lugging Gerd's possessions down the stairs and packing my poor little car as full of electronic equipment as could possibly be safe. We got away with just calling him Matt all day, and Gerd did me the favour of not asking about that annoying professor of mine, wasn't he Canadian also, what was his name again...? Phew, was all I said once we'd got back into the car and slugged our way back to Mainz, limbs aching and stomachs growling despite the cartload of pizza Gerd had so thoughtfully ordered to his new flat. Pizza with such odd things as peas and grated coconut on it, ugh. Not on one and the same pizza, but still. Germans don't get the concept of pizza.
We spent the whole trip back telling each other how we'd massage the aches and pains out of each other's sore muscles (when Matthew wasn't asleep in the passenger seat anyway, head pillowed on a wad of leftover bubble wrap and his hair), only to find, when we finally did make it to his house, that the bathtub was smaller than we'd both remembered it being, and that there was no way we'd both fit in without causing more aches and pains. Under normal circumstances, it would have worked, but sore as we were... no way. In the end, we opted for a quick really hot shower (separately – we wouldn't get anything done otherwise) and a snuggle under the pile of extra rugs and throws that his bed has become in the last weeks and months.
His feet stick out over the foot end of the bed when he lies straight.
He is vast. And I'm still exploring, with no hope of finishing before I'm dead.
From: morgan@ac.chemie.uni-mainz.de
To: mike216@aol.com
Hi Miiike!
Calling to you from across the great divide (shit, now I've got that song stuck in my head again. Matthew and I decided we wanted something different yesterday, and opted for a Maori band that happened to be visiting from New Zealand. Jesus, were they ever catchy!). Actually, from the floor above where I usually am. Yes, above. I know full well I should be down below, tending to my palladium alkynes (which are behaving very nicely, thanks for asking), but the last week of the semester means all sorts of things cropping up, and all sorts of silly sods on holiday already.
In other words, I'm herding kids. Schoolchildren to be precise, from the local girls' elementary, out on a day of science promotion. I mean, I sort of hazily knew they have this lab set aside specifically for visiting school classes upstairs, but... I had somehow hoped I'd never see the inside of it. That's Jenny Berger's job really, she's the kid herder around these parts, and I'll gladly leave them to her when she's back from her little trip to the doctor's...
Right, back. They really keep you running, they do. Can't type much more than a sentence at a time, let alone think. Where was I? Oh, yes, you wanted to know whether I've had any decent parties here yet. Well, I think I told you about the Christmas one, yes? Other than that... I gave the Bio Green a miss, because the band really were awful (as one of my students had surmised), and other than that... Carnival I suppose, though you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in this town who doesn't do Carnival.
(one broken test tube and a few tissues for crying girl eyes later). Really a good idea to always keep a box of tissues around. Sorry if I'm sounding a bit stressed – I am. :) So, yes, we went to the AStA ball, which is the big one and not at all studenty. Big ballroom down by the river, three bands, a DJ, bars, lots of costumes... I was going to get Matthew a samurai outfit because damn, he'd look good in that, but alas, they didn't have anything remotely Japanese-looking in his size at the costume hire. So in the end I was the samurai, and he was Julius Caesar, or as Julius Caesar as one can be with long hair. Looked more like a laurel-wreathed Jesus Christ to me, but hey. At least he got the initials right, and he wasn't at all saintly, thank God :)
Argh, must dash. Kids driving me up the wall. Thank God I only have them today!!
Ben
There's a kid in my lab when I come back down, more exhausted than I care to admit to myself. What's more, she's alone in there, and she's not sitting in front of the computer playing solitaire. She's filtering something in a huge glass funnel, and from what I can tell by the mess on the worktop, she's only not been using the suction flasks because she's not tall enough to reach the water pump to plug them in!
The first thing I do is rush past her, checking every corner of the lab to make sure there really isn't anyone watching over her. This is crazy. A kid of, what, ten years, alone in a laboratory full of potentially deadly substances? Heavily, I drop my notepads on my desk and turn to face her.
She's not even looking at me, peering intently at the blue and grey stuff sitting in the filter paper atop what is now a clear blue solution.
"What do you think you're doing here, young lady?" I inquire sharply.
She's still not looking up. "Filtering stuff I haven't been given the name of. What do you think you're doing here, besides disturb me?"
Rude as well! The 'stuff' is copper sulphate, probably with charcoal or sand or whatever in it, standard experiment in recrystallisation for novices, but... just leaving a kid alone with that is... whoever did this deserves to be fired, really. I mean, what if she got the copper sulphate dust into her nose, or eyes?
She looks at me irritatedly through neon-rimmed lab goggles. "Well?"
I choose not to answer her question. Won't do to shout at a kid, however rude she is. The one who deserves the shouting is whoever let her in here. "That 'stuff' you're taking about is copper sulphate, by the way, and it's not exactly nice stuff to get on your skin. Maybe they should have told you that too. Who let you in here anyway, and where are they?"
She shrugs, a little 'ph' noise escaping her brownish lips. She's pretty dark-skinned anyway, with a shock of thick black hair woven into a reluctant braid that barely reaches her shoulders. "The professor around here gave me this, said it was a riddle. It's not much fun so far, but I guess it's something to do. And the devil knows where he's gone. Go ask the devil. Or wait for him to come back, the professor that is, not the devil." With that, she produces a box of matches from her pocket and proceeds to light the Bunsen burner.
I turn it off immediately. She lights it again. I stalk to the door and hit the main gas shutoff. The flame flickers and dies. "You broke it!" she shouts, at ear-splitting volume. "How am I supposed to get any work done in here?"
"Well, you're not," I snap, patience stretched to breaking point. "Not if I've got anything to do with it. Stay here, don't touch anything, and... just wait, right?"
On second thoughts, the kid-sized frown on her face is thunderous, and a kid with a frown that dark, plus a box of matches only three feet from a bottle of very flame-happy acetone... I sigh, go back to my desk, and dial Matthew's mobile.
He'd better have an explanation for this.
He had. Well, he kept talking anyway, and I kept going 'hm' in increasingly bitter tones. The kid had been his idea. Or his discovery, whatever.
Turns out she'd been with the school group I had upstairs, only not in that not even the teacher had the nerve to call her a classmate or make any effort to keep her around. Apparently she was the single most destructive pupil the poor teacher had ever seen (which, in a girls' elementary, seems to mean immediate segregation from the rest of the flock), and Matthew had found her hanging around the outer lab that was still pretty much a building site, examining the residues in the sinks and dripping water on them to see if she could make them dissolve. That's his story anyway – personally, I think she must have been following the universal kid-to-muck attraction. Similia similibus and all that.
Anyway. Apparently she's the only daughter of some Bolivian chap posted over here to work in something I won't even pretend to have understood the name of. She's been around the world a bit (which explains why she managed to be rude to me in English, something I hadn't even noticed at the time!), done time around Europe and now her dad's been moved somewhere temporarily and she's all alone and no, there isn't a mother and the school don't know what to do with her because she refuses to speak German even though she understands a little already and spends the lessons looking for things to break and yet she's so marvellously intelligent and just needs a challenge and...
I 'hm' one last time around that point and hang up. We'll have to discuss that in earnest over dinner tonight. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in my lab in what is theoretically my own time, biting my tongue and overseeing a rude kid who's spattering the workbench with copper sulphate solution because she's put too much heat on the burner.
"You're not going to get any nice crystals that way," I say, trying my best to sound reasonable and calm.
She just glares at me and turns the heat down as if she'd just been waiting for a reason to look at me condescendingly.
Ana, her name is Ana, Matthew said. Ana Something. But really, I try to talk to her as little as possible lest she decide to fling a beakerful of scalding copper sulphate solution in my direction.
And the stuff is really unpleasant when it gets up your nose.
"So, let me get this right. She's a ten-year-old elementary school girl who..."
Matthew fidgets slightly with his incipient ham sandwich, then resolutely piles another layer of the salty Spanish ham on it. "Nine. She's a fourth-former who was a year ahead of her class in the last school she went to. She says the teacher wants to move her back a year because she clearly isn't understanding any of what she's taught. Well, excuse my bluntness, but that's rubbish. She's brighter than your average fifteen-year-old, and from what I can tell, she's not grappling with the extra language either. She's refusing it."
"Oh great. So you've given her shelter in my lab and enough equipment and chemicals for her to kill herself with? What's that, an act of mercy?" I feel I've talked myself into a rage already. Not a good start. I lower my voice abruptly, almost swallowing that last word.
He drops his sandwich on the plate. "I supervised her for the first half hour or so. Ben, this girl is an adult in a kid's body. She's incredibly good with her hands, and she must have been working in a technical environment before because she recognised all the things. She even called our water pumps antiquated!"
"So you're saying what she lacks in social skills she makes up for in technical dexterity. But what would you have done if something had gone wrong, Matthew? You don't leave any of the other students alone in the lab, or at least I don't since I'm supposed to be supervising them. The rules are there for a reason, no?"
A slow sad smile, a question in his eyes. "I leave you alone in your lab, don't I?"
"But... but you can't compare me to a nine-year old Bolivian kid who's not even tall enough to reach the gas shutoff, damn it! This is irresponsible, and you know it. Let's just be glad nothing happened, and that we have no casualties to mourn except for a few of my nerves. Really, I pity that teacher of hers..."
"Oh, I think you'll come to like her. I find I get on quite well with her, once I've tuned out the argumentative streak."
"A mile wide, that streak! Looks like they don't teach them manners in Bolivia, do they? And what do you mean, come to like her? I have no intention to ever invite her back."
"You won't have to. I already have."
I stare at him calmly chewing his cursed ham sandwich. "Excuse... me!!" is all I get out after about a minute of staring. "You mean you've invited her back? Into my lab?"
He waves his hand airily. "Oh, she can work in the students' lab if you're afraid to have your little room crowded. It's not like they're going to need it during the semester break. And her school breaks up for the summer on Thursday anyway. Miss Helfrich is quite happy to have Ana looked after until then, as long as she's in some sort of equivalent of a school. And I should think we can manage that, yes?"
Over my dead body, I think. Aloud, all I manage is an unconvinced 'hm'.
"I'll be around if anything breaks. Promise."
The first thing that breaks will be my patience, Matthew, just you watch.
I'm feeling awful, doing little more than stretching my cramped back in-between bouts of organising the lab PC because I can't bear to look at what Ana's doing behind my back. Not because she's doing it wrong. It's – she's about half the size a chemist is supposed to be, and handling the gear with such nonchalance as if she'd grown up with it when she can't even name the things she's working with. No, not even in Spanish. I asked, and got a frown that was almost pitying, and one of the little 'ph' noises she's so good at.
Words are apparently superfluous in her world.
And spending a whole day trying to not interact too much with the other person in the room because they're almost certainly going to be offended if you even say so much as 'copper goes into that bin over there' (she would snap 'I know!' even if she doesn't – I've tried several times) isn't exactly my idea of a holiday.
And I could do with one – I slept really badly last night, partly as a result of refusing to snuggle up to Matthew who proceeded to take up most of the bed, the bastard. Still, at least there's only two more days of this before I do get a holiday. And Matthew owes me for this. A lot.
So I'm reduced to shuffling files around, updating sample tables for the next semester, repairing the damage Monika has done to the reference solutions database when she tried to make it prettier and ended up reshuffling some of the entries into complete incomprehensibility, and trying to keep an eye on Ana without actually having to confront her.
Two days of this are enough to leave me seriously cramped, and I feel a bit of a supplicant asking Matthew for a massage, but really, I wasn't employed to run a nursery. Especially not one involving a smart-arse Bolivian.
Oh, his hands are good. Just having him lay them on my sore muscles goes some way towards relieving the tension that's been sitting in there since... oh probably since I first set eyes on that brat Ana. I give a small sigh of relief, and Matthew chuckles above me, warmly. For the first time this week, I can actually imagine us making love again – we have an upcoming holiday to celebrate after all.
As he kneads my shoulders, gently at first, then more roughly until it almost hurts, I stare out of the huge window into the garden. It's still almost daylight, just past ten in the evening, and I can see the ivy has pretty much recovered from my savagery of half a year ago. Matthew had told me, in one of our quiet moments on this very leather sofa (as opposed to some of the louder moments on this very leather sofa, of which there had been a few too, and they had been no less delicious), that he was actually happier with it being the way it was now, thick and unruly and frighteningly green. A childhood thing, I think, he'd said back then, and told me about how he'd always had this fascination with all things alive. It had started in a Canadian winter with the company of an injured racoon that proceeded to chew the Harris family's slippers until it was banished to the shed under the threat that little Matthew would be the one sleeping in the shed if he didn't stop bringing the thing into the house... and it's been going on ever since then. The collection of houseplants in various states of jungleness attests to that – they were all near-dead when he got them, or so he says.
I suspect Ana is another one of his projects, but I'm not saying anything for the time being. And tomorrow is her last day anyway.
"So," I murmur, my voice massaged into softness too, "where do you fancy going for a holiday? Somewhere nice and warm and kid-free?"
"Kid-free?" His hands still for a moment. "So you've still not made friends with your little assistant, have you?" I can't tell whether he's serious from his voice, and I can't see his face right now.
I decide to be serious. "I have no intention to cry a single tear the minute she leaves my lab, Matthew. Good intentions and all that aside, and I'm sure her teacher had a whale of a time, never mind her poor father, but... that was quite enough charity for one semester, yes? You're not planning to take her into you home next, are you?"
"Oh no." Oh good. But I can't hear him smiling.
"But I've seen the results of her work, and... well, I'm thinking of taking her into our workgroup. As some sort of intern, apprentice, what have you. Someone to help Monika out with the technical side of things, you know how her arthritis is playing tricks on her now and then. And... well, she can do with having a meaningful task for once."
"A meaningful task?" I have spun around, putting the crick right back into my neck. I wince. "What you're proposing is exploiting a kid as a lab tech? What the hell do you think the students would say? 'Could I have another sample please, Miss Ana?' And she'd shout at them? Forget it. Seriously. Not a good idea."
"Oh, she wouldn't have much to do with the students. Besides, she'll have to be back at school some time in August. I'm thinking more along the lines of preparatory work, mixing samples, test-running new experiments, setting up the gear. And she wouldn't be exploited, Ben, far from that. She'd be a paid member of staff."
"Member of staff? This... child? Hell, Matthew, I don't even know if it's legal to employ anyone this young in this country, and you're talking about paying her? Where do you think that money's coming from – your pocket? Are you going to pass her off as your maid? I can't see anyone in the Department standing for that at all." I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, my voice. "And I'd rather you spend that money on a holiday with me. Somewhere that'll clear your mind of impracticable schemes."
He frowns. "Ben, some days your inflexibility astounds me. You would refuse a gifted child the chance to make herself useful in a working environment just because there are rules to follow?"
"Yes! I don't see what you're trying to achieve with this, other than annoy absolutely everyone around you. This kid belongs in an institution, or failing that, in a family. She has nothing whatsoever to do in a laboratory. Much less get paid for it!" I'm shouting now, and I mean every word of it. I've sat up, and now I'm standing up, in a vain attempt to feel taller than Matthew, who is still sitting on the edge of the coffee table.
His voice is low and quiet, but the veins on his forehead are visible. This is an explosion waiting to happen. "I don't see why that's any of your business, Ben," he says. "It's not your money that's being spent."
"Well, whose is it then? The Department's? You're never going to get permission to put a nine-year-old on the payroll, Matthew. You're going to get fired if you even try!"
"There is no need to tell the Department about any of this, Ben," he says, his voice deadly quiet. "Stay with me this once. You may not be able to see it, but there's talent in this girl. There's something indescribable about her. She needs to exercise that, Ben, she needs to work. She needs to learn what it's like to work with people!" His eyes are blazing blue now, possessed. I shake my head, my own voice dropped to a resigned flatness.
"Matthew, I am not going to be one of these people. It's too dangerous. Everyone will tell you so. A chemistry lab is no place for a precocious kid, however much you may see in her! It just doesn't work that way, and I'm not going to stand for it. End of discussion."
"You are trying to tell me when to end my discussion? All right, I will end it. But you, Ben, you disappoint me. I had expected a greater mind of you, more trust in my decisions –"
That does it.
"Decisions? Oh, so you have decided already? In that case, thank you for listening to my concerns, Professor Harris. I assure you this is not going to go well. And as for that holiday, forget I ever asked. I'm in no mood to talk about it any more."
I'm in no mood to talk about anything any more tonight, and certainly in no mood to spend the night lying awake next to this infuriating man with his delusions of grandeur and charity. Grabbing my T-shirt from the sofa, I stalk out the door, slamming it behind me with as much force as I can justify.
He does not follow me.
'I'll be there if something breaks.' Oh, no, Professor Harris. You're not there, and something has just broken.
The half-hour walk to the nearest night bus stop has done something towards cooling me down, but even in a cool mind, stalking across campus towards my little-used cold single bed, I cannot comprehend why he keeps acting like this. His motives aside, does he not see he has no chance of success at all? The Department is not going to stand for this at all, never mind safety regulations, or what Monika would say to a brat that talks back at her in English!
And really, he can't hope to keep someone like Ana secret from the outside world. Even in the downstairs lab she'd stick out like a sore thumb. God knows, maybe she even knows how to swear in Russian, and then where would we be?
Paying her. Honestly. I can just imagine the dozens of laws he'd be breaking if he were to put a nine-year-old kid in a chemistry lab as a bleedin' technician. Never mind the extra laws he'd be breaking if he tried to pay her from the Department's budget.
Talent, my foot.
Pathetic life forms, more like. Haven't I just been thinking about the blasted ivy and why he can't bring himself to cut it back? What is Ana but another pet project of his. Talented. Bright. Shiny. The latest find. But you're not going to be able to present this one to a captive audience, Professor. Nobody will thank you for this one, nobody.
God, I sound like a jealous wife... and really, I'm not as far from that as I would like. Disgusted, I spit at some innocent ivy clinging to the kebab shop's mini-conservatory. The latest bright shiny thing, and now I'm no longer the most important thing in his life, as I had thought I was. He doesn't even bother shouting at me, and that pisses me off most of all. I'm not even worthy of his passion any more it seems. When I am fairly sure I did a great deal towards reawakening that passion.
A small rude Bolivian reaps the benefits, it seems.
I don't know him as well as I thought I did, it seems.
He is vast, and he contains multitudes. And they're no longer interested in me.
Looking up from my pit of annoyed misery, I find my hand has been putting into practice what I've been thinking all along. Destroying. In this case, tearing up the posters that cover the mouth of the cave that is the Inter Cellar's entrance. Judging from the noise, it's still open. And I feel quite unable to face an empty bed, even though sharing one with Matthew is even less of an option now.
A drink sounds about right.
I am nursing a deplorably weak gin and tonic, staring grimly at the third page of the city magazine (and I have been staring at that page since I came in here) when a small black missile hits me on the shoulder.
"Ow!" I protest, clearly in no mood to get into another fight tonight.
"Hey, stranger! Long time no see, yes? Husband keep you busy?" the owner of the small black missile says, and unfolds it into a waving hand with an unsettlingly pale palm.
Shit. "Okubu? Your day is tomorrow, isn't it?"
"Ah, who say I can't come drink when I like? Though Daniel make awful gin & tonic!" She makes a face, and I almost laugh. It comes out as a bitter little snort. She blinks, one finger flying up to my face and tracing the sharp little line between my brows that I always get when I'm angry. I flinch a little at her touch. I don't want to be touched, but how is she supposed to know? I don't want to be talked to any more either. I shake my head, lips thin.
"You not happy, mh? Poor Ben." She makes as if to stroke my hair, but I pull away, unwilling. I don't want to talk about it.
She folds her arms on the tabletop. When did she sit down? I don't want company now, sorry. Really. She's still peering at me. I avert my eyes, look down at page 3 again. She sighs softly.
"Old man trouble, yes?"
"I don't want to talk about it, Okubu. I'm sorry. I'm not happy, and I need time to myself. It will pass, I'm sure, but now... please."
She nods, earnestly. "Will pass. He come back, I'm sure." She pats my shoulder, and I'm too tired to flinch. She leaves, and minutes later I abandon the pointless magazine and go to my room to retrieve what meagre bathroom utensils I still have here.
The stupid eyeliner is still in the box. I don't need eyeliner now. I need a shower, a hot shower. I'm all tense, and no massage anywhere in sight.
Predictably, I have slept badly, if at all. Groggily, I lever myself out of bed and peer out of the window. Cloudy, thunderstorms hanging in the air already. Headache weather.
I should be at work, I know, but I really can't bring myself to go. I feel sick, and damn the consequences. The students aren't there any more anyway, and as for that kid, I don't even want to think about her. She's not my headache... and even though something in me admits she is a large part of the headache that's stuffing up my head, I do the irresponsible thing and slog downstairs to the phone and dial Mrs El-Badaoui's number to call in sick, probably for tomorrow as well.
I sleep like a log after that, waking only once when I dream there's a knock on my door.
When I get up again, it's late afternoon, and while my head still feels as if it's stuffed with cotton wool, at least I feel up to getting up. Not that I have anywhere to go or anything to do really. I can't go to work, don't want to either, can't e-mail people because the computer's in the lab, haven't really got anything worth reading here, and don't want to face Matthew until I've calmed down enough to trust myself to face him again.
Really, what I should do is just get away from this, take a train to the airport and hop on the first available plane and see something different for once. I don't think that holiday of ours is going to happen any time soon now anyway. Not if he's busy working with that precious Ana of his.
There. I'm thinking of him again. I ought to stop that, but I know perfectly well I can't.
Just leaving, that would be a nice thing. A nice thing that anyone could do, anyone but me. I can't bear the thought of leaving when there's such a muddle, such a knot waiting for me when I get back. And I feel that knot hasn't been severed yet. Call it responsibility, call it stubbornness. Call it love.
Call it what you will, it binds me to this idiot.
The best I can do is take a bus into town and drown myself in the shops for a while.
I don't know whether to be proud of myself for having made it through the weekend without breaking, without so much as making contact with the Department or looking in that direction. I've spent some time in the city library and some money in the shops, coming home with such incongruous impulse buys as dried cranberries in white chocolate and a length of green silk that was on sale and that would make for a beautiful bedspread if only it didn't so much cover the mess that is my bed as enhance the unevenness of it. Still, I have come to terms with how I can't fix everything right now.
I'm concentrating on fixing myself. Because it doesn't do to break, not when there's nobody there to look after me. And I don't think he'd want to. I'm not sure I'd want to.
It's bad enough I have to go back in to work tomorrow morning, after two days of playing truant. I'll at least have to be in long enough to sign a leave application and get the hell away again. I'll do that if he looks at me disapprovingly. I'm not standing for that. I don't need that right now.
I'm not coping all that well without you, but I'm not yours to command, Harris.
The lab's deserted – not that I would have expected anything else, it's the first week of the summer break after all, but it feels strange to come back to the place that had been the site of musical student arguments and interesting little accidents just a week ago. I feel reminded of how I first walked in here, wondering where the hell I'd find who I'm looking for.
I've found so much more than I'd been looking for. And now I'm about to find someone I am not looking for at all.
Or not, as the case may be.
I blink as I gaze around my small lab. There is a bag and a coat squashed in the corner, and there is a burette set up, and Monika hunched over it cursing softly at the stuck stopcock.
There is no trace of Ana. Not a scrap of paper, not a single crystal, nothing.
"Morning, Ben," Monika murmurs, then follows it with a hissed curse, kicks the bottom cupboard soundly, making the graduated glassware rattle. "Damn those biologists. Always buying cheap grease off the medical students, and it wreaks havoc on the burettes, I'm telling you. Havoc!"
She straightens herself up to look at me. I still haven't come any further into the room, as if it really wasn't safe for me to do so. "Stinky air, eh?" she says casually.
I sniff the air. Nothing out of the ordinary really. She laughs her toneless old-woman laugh that is several decades older than she is physically. "It's a saying, Ben. Stinky air. Bad..." she waves a hand around, "bad atmosphere. He's been in there for over an hour now."
I blink, puzzled. "Who has been in there? And in where anyway?"
Now she really looks up from her unwilling apparatus, so much so that she actually steps away from it, looking to all the world like a ham actress preparing for the great speech.
"Oh, so you haven't heard yet?" Quietly, knowing she'll get her chance at drama in a minute.
"No," I say, on cue, faintly dreading what's coming.
"Weeell," she says, in the broadest accent available to her, "you know about that kid, right? Ana Something, was supposed to start working here today. Harris's idea, I think you were already off sick, it was last week at any rate. So he says to me, you're going to work with this kid, and I say, I am what, and he explains to me about how great she is and that she'll do everything by herself and not need much 'guidance', as he put it. Damn right I'm not a nursery here, I said, and that was that. Didn't even introduce her or anything, she just waltzed in here and put a sheaf of paper on the desk," she motioned at my desk, empty now, "and started asking for chemicals. Could pronounce them all too, but not a single word of any thing else. Just chemicals. How weird is that to have a child standing four foot tall in front of you and saying 'potassium carbonate, hydrogen peroxide, silver iodide', and throwing a fit when I give her the wrong hydrogen peroxide because in my opinion it just ain't right to give a kid the 30%, you know? Could turn her lovely brown skin all white with that.
Anyway, so I'm doing my best to get along with her wondering where the hell he's picked that kid up, no manners and no German but a scary way with the gear, and next thing I know there's Kullmann at the door, you know Professor Kullmann from Inorganic, downstairs across the corridor from the Russians? That Kullmann. Was looking for Harris. I said I hadn't seen him, and could I help, so he said yes, if I see I should send him to the Head of Dept's office because they're waiting for him there and they haven't found him yet.
You know me, I couldn't resist asking what the hell they wanted. Turns out it was about the kid, so I sent the kid outside to have a lunch break or whatever, and Kullmann tells me that it wasn't good practice to work with individual schoolchildren, and I said I thought so but Professor Harris said so and she's pretty good actually. That doesn't matter, Kullmann says, steel in his eyes, you know Kullmann's awfully pale eyes, this is an irregularity that cannot be tolerated.
Turns out Jenny Berger, you know, short woman who runs the schoolkids' lab upstairs, turns out she's seen Ana around. With Harris, and she's asked questions. Asked Mrs El-Badaoui to be precise, and the silly bint invites her into her office and there's figures lying on the table, hand-written and still there because she hasn't entered them into the computer yet of course, and Jenny Berger looks at them and says, oh, rearranging the budget, are we, and the silly El-Badaoui woman says it's not her who's made these calculations, and Jenny puts two and two together and next thing you know she's ratted on Harris to the Head. Not that I don't think she's right – we need that damn budget, we do – but really, she should've talked to Harris first.
Anyway, they couldn't find him all Friday, I hadn't seen him either, so they put a message in his pigeonhole to meet them in the Head's office at eight-thirty sharp this morning. And he's been in there ever since."
She draws a deep breath, straightening herself up, letting the news sink in.
"What – I mean..."
"Oh, slapped wrists, nothing more. It can't have been much, and in all fairness he'd told me and Mrs El-Badaoui about wanting to employ the kid, so it wasn't exactly secretive action. But I don't think we're going to see her again in here, Ben. Not that that worries you overly much, does it?" Her wink is unexpectedly disgusting to me, and I say something to the effect of how I'm going to talk to Harris, and excuse myself.
Out in the deserted lab, things aren't very much clearer. I'm going to talk to him, but what am I going to say to him? And where the hell am I going to find him? The Head's office. I admit that for all that I've been here for half a year, I haven't got a clue where the Head's office is. I'll have to consult the departmental noticeboard at the bottom of the stairs.
It's on the second floor, and I walk up both flights, avoiding the glass lift. Really, the faster I get there, the less I will have thought about what to say.
It's the first door left of the stairs, and it surprises me by being ajar. Timidly, I knock. There is no answer. I push it open a little more and peer into an office that is the same tiny size as Harris's, and even more crammed with stuff, if that's at all possible. Several large crystal lattice models take up most of the desk, separating the office's inhabitant from whoever manages to squeeze himself on one of the two visitor chairs crushed against the big desk. There is nobody in there.
I'm just about to pull back when a thin girl carrying a box file and another crystal lattice breezes past, saying, "He's gone out for a coffee. Had a meeting first thing in the morning."
"Okay... thank you," I call after her as she disappears next door. That leaves Harris's office.
Predictably, nobody answers my knock. At the third knock, Mrs El-Badaoui shouts from next door. "He's not here!"
Carefully, I open the door to her office. "Sorry. Do you have any idea when he's back?"
"As many as the next person," she grumbles, bent over her files. "He had bad mood after the meeting. If he's not in the lab, maybe he went home. Devil knows. I don't know."
Trying my best to avoid making a quip about the resemblance between the king of Hell and a certain departmental secretary, I thank her curtly and leave.
I am halfway to the bus stop before my conscious mind admits it knows where I'm going.
I don't ring the doorbell. He gave me the spare key a few weeks ago, after I'd complained once too often that his ivy really didn't make for much of a bed while I waited for him to come home from his errands. I let myself in, quietly.
"Ben." He is sitting on the sofa in his shirtsleeves, tie tossed carelessly on the seat beside him, reading a newspaper. It is crumpled where he's holding it. He's looking at me, a mixture of emotions in his usually calm blue gaze.
"Matthew... I'm sorry."
He snorts. "You're sorry? You were the one who told me it was a hare-brained scheme from the start, and it looks like you were right. It's all over bar the shouting. Well, with some shouting from Ana when they tell her I imagine. There wasn't anything I could do except demurely accept that some things don't work here. You haven't come to rub it in, have you?" He looks at me sceptically.
"You don't really think so." Flatly.
"No," he admits, "I don't really think so. So what brings you here, then? Have you come to pick me up and drag me kicking and screaming to the lab? Sorry, Ben, I've taken the day off. Can't bear to return to the scene of my defeat quite this soon." His smile is bitter, and lopsided, and so him I can't help but answer it.
"Matthew, I... I think there's a few things we won't ever see eye to eye on. But really... I haven't exactly been happy these past few days. And that's... well, I think sad is the wrong word. But... however much you annoy me, I find I'm not happy without you either. You and I, we're... we're polar opposites sometimes. But..." I stare at him, incapable of saying another word.
His face, the look on his face. Softening, opening up. Warm, vulnerable, the face I have seen so rarely, even I who have been around him almost constantly. The question, the void in his eyes is palpable, and I cannot but fill it with myself.
His arms open for me, and he holds on, burying his face in my shoulder. He breathes deeply, at a loss for words, his hands doing the talking as they rub slowly over my back, unsure whether to hold or to caress. His hair is so much longer than the first time we sat on this sofa, I think absent-mindedly. He grew it out because I loved it so much.
Wrapping my arm around him, I pull the tie from his hair, bury my face in it. Polar opposites, I murmur, and he whispers, opposites attract. Law of nature.
Nothing I can do about that, I say, is there.
No, he says. Unless you decide to become me.
God forbid, I say, two of you would be the downfall of the department... and who would I have to love anyway?
Love, he whispers, yes. Love.
Love, I say, stroking his hair. Force of nature.
To:
Mr Michael Grady
12 Radcliffe Crescent
Bristol
(um, postcode... sorry, dear postman!)
England
Hi Mike,
yes, paper format for a change (cardboard – MH). Smartarse. If I didn't love that arse so much, I swear... where was I? Oh yes, sending you warmest wishes from Santorini where it's boiling hot and there's sea and a volcano and... well, you get the general idea. If not, turn over the card and bloody well look! :)
Hello Mike, this is Matthew getting a word in edgeways. Why are these cards so tiny? Anyway, greetings etc.,
MH & Ben
Epilogue
"Thank you, Miss Mendez, that's lovely. Just leave them there."
She's far too bright to be a mere secretary, I think for the umpteenth time, and far too pretty to be working for an old bugger like me. An old bugger in the true sense of the word at that. Not that she seems to mind. Ana Mendez. I do my best to be as nice to her as I possibly can, as if I was in some strange way trying to atone for my dislike of another bearer of that name many moons ago.
Mexico City is warm in January, and much more home than I would ever have thought when I first came here. They don't expect me to speak Spanish at all, much to my surprise. They're not famous for anything except for their archaeology here, but that spawns an endless number of possible collaborations. At the moment I've laid aside the x-ray crystallography that's been my forte so far, disappointing some pushy geologists that seem to be representatives of a world-wide breed. I'm concentrating on developing methods of chemical dating of stone artefacts. Corrosion, acid influx, that sort of thing. It keeps me in bread, and I get to live on campus in a nice air-conditioned bungalow that smells suspiciously like civilisation.
And I get the latest publications delivered to me – in paper format. Their computer system is still not reliable enough to warrant subscribing to the electronic formats and squandering all those pesos on printouts covered in hieroglyphs that even the archaeologists aren't interested in.
Hence Ana's breezy appearance, bearing the latest in chemical journals, no more than a week old, just in time to accompany me into my weekend.
I lock up my office, shout a cheery 'bye, Ana!' at the nearest door and receive a heartfelt and very loud 'bye, Señor Morgan!'.
Waiting for the rickety old lift that has been on the replacement list for over five years, I flip through the abstracts in one of the publications. Palladium-platinum alkyne complexes in chiral reactions... goodness, that's been a while. I doubt I even remember the details of my own publication at the time, and I spent, what, three years working on that? So they're still at it in Japan, in Osaka. One Mrs Andrea Silberbauer-Ormerod. Well, hello. And... oh? Still at it in...
No.
I'm not prepared for that. I hold on to the lift, shaking my head. God, now? I snap the thick booklet shut, then open it again, ignoring the lift that has arrived and opened its doors invitingly for me. That name... surely I misread that?
There it is, black on white, on paper in this day and age.
...and Professor Matthew Harris (deceased).
God, it's only been, what? Eighteen, twenty years? Enough to completely lose track?
Apparently. I shake my head and speed my steps, running down the stairs as if to escape the tears that attacked me up there on the landing.
I should have stayed in touch. We should have stayed in touch. To find out this way... no, we both knew it wouldn't last forever, but God, it was good while it lasted, so good. Such unconditional hard happiness I haven't felt with anyone before or after, not with the boys in the clubs and not with David, righteous David, and it was only when we were both sure we had irretrievably lost it, lost that sparkle, that I was ready and able to move on. Keele, Cairo, Mexico City, but never too far away for a letter or a casual e-mail.
Which I sent ever less frequently. In the end, his university e-mail address bounced. That was when he retired, and I know I could have written to his home address, I knew he hadn't moved, he'd told me so.
I don't know what I would have written, but I should have. Really.
He's taught me so much, and in the end, he's learnt so much from me too. We parted as amicably as two responsible adults can. Two responsible adults who had loved, loved through happiness and harshness, and who had spent their love on each other, spent it all. He gave me tea the last day we sat in his big house, me with my suitcases all packed and boxed up upstairs, and we shared the silence.
We thanked each other, and said we would be in touch.
I didn't write enough, and neither did he. And yet, I am in touch.
The last thing he gave me was a vine of ivy, threaded through a hole in a cork and planted in a test tube with water.
Through eighteen, twenty years of moving around the world, I have let it grow, and yes, I have let it grow shaggy and wild and alive. My maid in Cairo kept complaining about how it was stopping her from cleaning the windowsills.
Here, in Mexico City, it thrives under the cool breeze of the air conditioning unit. My window is getting smaller by the month.
--- The End ---