“Fuck off the old world /The old girl /Fuck off the old world
Come, come and see/Come, come and show me”
Lean Year, Come and See
The landscape outside the train windows is completely invisible. It’s the first week of January, where Ben’s birthday always falls. The sun had already set by the time I boarded at Queen Street. Now as I pull up to Waverley it is black as midnight. In hindsight, this journey into the depths of the long, cold night in another city was destined to have the almost mystical, movie-like quality that it ended up having, both in terms of what unfolded on the night and afterwards. Even the location is telling. Our first stop is The Caley Picture House, a Wetherspoons sited in a disused cinema. As I wait for the others to arrive, I survey the film posters that serve as decorations. Parts of the ticket office and popcorn counter still remain. The carpet is red, of course.
Eventually they arrive, and we go in. The bar is directly beneath where the screen used to be. Although the ground floor is hollowed out and looks like an ordinary pub, all the balconies and galleries are still there, and are used for additional seating. A great maze of stairs connects the whole network, and the path to the bathroom is even more intricate than normal. There are televisions, which is rather unusual for a Spoons, and they are showing a short BBC piece about Greek Orthodox monks. I point this out to Andrew, who shares my interest in the topic more than anyone else in the group, and we talk about it briefly. Andrew has an interest in any and every topic, though, so I’m not taking this as a sign that he’s ready for conversion. I am simply comforted that I can have someone else to talk about it, as I struggle to believe that the spectre of Orthodoxy has followed me even here, to the heart of Presbyterian Edinburgh.
After a couple of pints of ice cold lager, we wrap ourselves back up and head over to the Three Sisters. The walk feels longer than the whole time we spent in Caley Picture House as we twist and turn through the narrow cobblestone streets. The lager provides a source of warmth against the bitter air. Once again I find myself conversing with Andrew, this time about the recent Black Mirror episode, Bandersnatch. More than any other installment in the series, Bandersnatch reached into the depths of my being. The themes of stress, burnout, and professional disappointment held up a mirror to my present condition. For the perhaps first time since starting my job at The Hotel I understood what an undesirable situation I had found myself in, a graduate, a STEM graduate, slaving away in a job I was vastly overqualified for. I was financially stable, and more prosperous than ever, but I could not let this become my life. And yet, the worst was still to come. The outcome of my applications was still unknown, and, as far as I knew, my sentence would only be brief. That episode, and the feelings of mental unease it brought to the surface, was almost foreshadowing the ordeal that would befall me in spring of that year.
Naturally, I didn’t know any of this as I walked the dark Edinburgh streets side by side with Andrew that night. I am too excited to tell him about the G.K. Chesterton book that I’d just read, where the author exposes the beautiful paradoxes of traditional Christianity with his unforgettable wit. Now Catherine appears, and Ethan with Hannah, and our party becomes quite large and lively. The beer garden of Three Sisters is strange and alien on a January night. The long wooden benches feel American and remind me of the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks. There is a separate outdoor bar serving watery pints in plastic cups. By now, the pints have added up and I am well on my way out of the land of the lucid. The sentences don’t string together quite so well, and somewhere in the pit of my throat a vicious and invincible hiccup is preparing to spring itself on me. The halo of bliss and comfort hangs around me still, and will leave me somewhere on the journey to our next and last destination, a very traditional pub with some kind of Gaelic name. As we begin to leave, Jack’s younger sister appears with her friends, including the dark brunette who looks a bit like Alice. I had met her before, at one of Jack’s birthday parties a few years previously when she was in the last year of school. It takes me a moments to make the connection. They share a laugh about something from school that I don’t remember, or something that goes over my head either way. The alcohol is already fueling the flames of lust as we become separated from the girls and the realisation that I might never see the black-haired beauty again triggers my slow descent from the serene peak of inebration I was at just a quarter of an hour ago. When we arrive in the last pub I am already in a noticeably gloomier mood as I find myself talking to Ethan about immigration. At one point I take out my Polish passport and wave it theatrically to make my case. We are sitting in the gallery, and while Ethan and I go round and round metaphorically, a ceilidh begins on the floor below us. By now I am so detached from reality that the spectacle provides a welcome alternative from the sisyphean task of trying to have a coherent conversation.
I am awake, on a mattress on the floor. The last hour of the night is unclear. Izzy is lying on the bed above to me, to my left, and some other bodies surround me on the floor. The curtains are still drawn but a powerful light is breaking through the cracks. It starts coming back to me. I remember Andrew trying to force me to explain Eastern Orthodoxy to Izzy. I was completely powerless to formulate anything like a clear sentence by this point, and so my attempts inevitably fell flat. Though it was a rather humiliating exercise, it was useful for exposing gaps in knowledge. One of the many consequences of that weekend was a redoubled resolve to read more on the topic. I was determined to breadpill, as I called it at the time, as many of my friends as possible. From that weekend on, the Pauline Sisters’ bookshop in St Enoch Square, and the religion shelf of every Oxfam in Glasgow became my second home, and I steadily fed my brain a diet of Lewis, Chesterton, Ratzinger, and Belloc. I try to think on this and other things as I tentatively watch Izzy’s body, still tossing and turning on the bed. One by one, everyone else begins to wake up. A message arrives in the chat, from the group sleeping over at the other flat, summoning us to a breakfast in Caley Picture House. We end as we began.
The day is glorious and peaceful. It is closer to noon than dawn when we finally gather ourselves but it doesn’t matter. We recall as many funny and exciting moments from last night as we can, each filling in the blanks for the other. I think to myself, out loud, that there has never been a nicer place to have a hangover than the here and now. When we arrive in the Picture House it is almost unrecognisable in the daylight. By some unknown magic, it is almost like seeing the wardrobe before and after stepping into Narnia. Last night, under electric lamps, the interior looked more like the cinema that it once was. Now as natural light creeps and spills in through the windows, it looks like any other pub. The sun has risen, the spell is broken – we are out of Narnia and the wardrobe is just a wardrobe again.
Back in Glasgow, I go through my first long spell of breakfast shifts at work. The experiences already recounted are compounded by sleep deprivation. I wake up at 5 or 5:30am, have breakfast and get dressed. I brush my teeth, put my earphones in, and leave. I listen to Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, which featured prominently in Bandersnatch. The music fits the early morning landscape perfectly in the first stages of the journey. The quiet and ambient intro underscores the stillness and darkness of a city that is still in deep sleep. The pulsating synth mirrors the lonely streetlights that periodically puncture the darkness without overpowering it. Then, around the time when I cross into the much less densely built-up Pollokshields area, the music takes a sinister turn. The synth picks up the pace and is now frantic and uneasy, and it is around this time that I usually skip the song.
Meanwhile, the day of destiny approaches. We are serving a funeral, and it is about 3 in the afternoon. Everything is just about finished and yet WMC refuses to let me go on time. This infuriates me, of course. It’s one more straw on the camel’s back, but I try to be as magnanimous as I can. I steal away and quickly email my man in Manchester to let him know that I will need to reschedule our Skype interview by about an hour. He is very understanding and the talk goes ahead. We spend shy of half an hour chatting about glycoproteins and organelle formation. He gives me a good impression that only reinforces my ill-judged optimism about the application. Another talk around this time with a PI in Dundee ends in a similar way, and for now it looks like all my avenues are closed. Five applications submitted around Christmas time, and five rejections. Nevertheless, there is a twist. Most likely some applicants ahead of me in the shortlist had already accepted offers elsewhere, and out of nowhere I am offered an interview for Dundee. It seems like an unusual stroke of luck and now I begin giving in to predictable delusions. These delusions reach fever pitch when I arrive for the interview and see fewer than 10 other applicants. Knowing that there is a second interview day, and considering the number of available places, I quickly calculate my chances at 20-33%, before the interview has even started. This is all well and good, but counter to this is my physical condition. I had stayed up very late the previous night preparing my presentation. As I talk to the PI about the project in the less-formal section prior to the interview, I feel myself struggling to stay awake already. I try to look as interested and engaged as possible, but I know that he knows that I am barely listening. A flutter of anxiety starts up in the recesses of my mind, but I manage to keep it silent for now. I still feel the pull of destiny and the invincible conviction that I deserve this and the interviewers will see it plain as day without me having to break a sweat.
“How did you perform the membrane isolation?”
The first question knocks the wind out of my chest. The simple answer is that we did that on a particularly busy day in the lab and Gwyn never took the time to explain it to me and even though I could have researched it myself, I simply never bothered because I thought it wasn’t terribly relevant. Now I feel angry and confused and betrayed that this is literally the first question they ask me. I give my best non-answer which is a very diplomatic attempt at saying that I simply don’t know and don’t remember.
“How did you do the differentiation?”
“How did you know that it worked?”
“What reagents did you use?”
“What do you think that band on the gel is?”
“How do you know?”
“How would you find out?”
“You said that the antibodies didn’t work – why do you think that is – how would you test this?”
Each answer is worse and worse than the previous one. I start to feel like I am drowning inside of a dream, where I can’t remember how I got there or what happened previously but only that everything is so vivid and real even though it’s too terrible to be true.
“Do you think -”
This is the real sucker punch. I am doing so badly that now the main interviewer, out of five, is trying to throw me a lifeline.
“- do you think that you weren’t supported properly when you did this project?”
I instantly recoil against this accusation. Gwyn was a wonderful supervisor. I was in and out of his office constantly, and though the experiments didn’t work as we anticipated, he repeatedly reassured me that we were on track to get some decent results, and that there was nothing more that we could have done and that stuff like this is just part of science after all. I had it drilled into me that my honours project was not about generating Nature-quality results, but about learning techniques and getting lab experience. You’re not graded on the results, but the write-up, is what every single teacher said. Now this Stalinist struggle session seems to be trying to convince me that it was my fault that the experiments didn’t work.
“Why are you interested in this project?”
I begin answering, in a bit of a meandering way, and as I’m about to get to my point, the pompous cunt on the left side of the room cuts me off.
“That wasn’t my question, I asked why you are interested in this project.”
If I hadn’t already been on the verge of tears, I could have summoned the strength to call him out on this, but I simply don’t have the strength. Each question feels like one more punch in the gut.
“Do you know that a PhD is very hard work?”, the main interviewer now asks me. My mind travels back to the last two weeks of my project, endless hours starting at gel tanks, blot after blot after blot, sitting on the bench until even the PIs have gone home. I want to explain all of this to him but I can’t because I can’t even draw the breath necessary. My lungs are so weak and tight and heavy, like they were tied up in great iron chains.
When the interview has finished, Dave the PI is supposed to take me on a tour of the lab. He starts by sitting me down in his office and offering me a cup of tea. There are no further words that need to be spoken. I know, he knows, he knows that I know, and I know that he knows. The tea is not enough, but it’s a nice gesture. When the formality of the tour is complete, and I finally get out of that building, I meet Gowsi. He takes me to the pub, we have a quick pint and then go back to his place to play Fifa. The flat is almost all medics and one engineer, who pops in at one point towards the end. He reassures me that the interview probably did not go as badly as I thought it did. I thank him – he is only a kind stranger whom I will never see again. There is no point in telling him the truth.
After a couple of hours, Gowsi walks me back to the train station, and there is still some trace of daylight falling timidly on the water around the V & A Museum. He tells me that he will be back in Glasgow for the Easter break and we agree to arrange something then. We never did – that moment remains the last time we have seen each other.
It is still early spring, so in the time that it takes me to board and find a seat, the last rays of light scurry away and darkness falls completely. Since there is no point in sitting at the window, I pick an aisle seat and pop my bag on the window seat. Broadly speaking, there is no point in anything at the moment. The train departs and I try to be alone with my thoughts for a while, to tune into the quiet rhythm of the tattat-tattat-tattat sound, but this is unbearable. The wound is still too raw and fresh. Though I don’t have the energy to read, I must, because I will go insane if I don’t divert my mind. I reach into my bag and pull out the fresh, untouched copy of St Augustine’s Confessions. I begin to read, and barely a few lines in I stop dead in my tracks:
“Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud.”
To remind him that you thwart the proud.
To remind him that you thwart the proud.
The sentence hits me like a thunderbolt. It is impossible to convey a moment like this if you don’t already know what I’m talking about - as Conrad’s Marlow said, “it seems like I am trying to tell you a dream.” And it really is like a dream, when the veil is pulled back like this for just one second and you see reality as it truly is: that our lives have eternal meaning and significance, that every deed is written down, that even in those moments – especially in those moments when He seems infinitely far away, the Author of our world sees us, as He saw Nathanael under the fig tree.
Admit it – you don’t really understand what the hell I’m on about, do you? I don’t blame you. On the surface it surely seems bizarre and irrational that my theophany would come in the form of one sentence in a book that I had randomly picked up before leaving the house that day. And yet if you had been there with me, you would understand, as I did, that for me to have read that sentence in that moment must have been preordained from the beginning of time. I know that I am not sinning by an excess of credulity because this intuition, though undoubtedly received in a state of heightened emotional stress, has been tested and verified many times since. The whole pattern of my life from that moment on attests to it.
Come and see.
This is a serial fiction project published fortnightly in collaboration with Ross Anderson at The Broken Quill.