A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
that I’d learned was essential for effective field workers. Releasing four Hunt-ington’s researchers on to the market at once was practically a flood, but they were young and good at what they did and would surely get new positions in due course.
Fran was asking me about other grants, and I wrenched myself away from my gloomy reverie. Taking my hand back, I grabbed my wine glass and emptied it. “Not a chance, I’m afraid,” I told her. “The fact is, I’m finished. God knows how I lasted as long as I did.”
“Anna, stop it. It’s not like you to be so negative about your research. You’ve done wonderful things. You can’t give up because you’ve lost your funding. Researchers lose grants all the time; they just have to get another one.”
“Trouble is, the reviewers’ reports were damning. And they’re right. I was lucky to have the funding rolled over last time. They were probably giving me one last chance to do something new, but I blew it. I simply carried on in the same old way because that’s all I know. I’m a fraud. I’ve always known it deep down, and now I’ve been sprung.” As all this was spewing out of my mouth I could feel myself getting lighter and lighter. I felt hysterical laughter burbling up through my chest, and I poured myself another glass of wine and took a gulp, all the while watching Fran’s face as her expression changed from concern to shock. Then a snort exploded out of me, along with a mouthful of wine, and I put my glass down quickly and grabbed the blue table napkin, mopping the dribbles from my chin and dabbing at the red splotches on the white tablecloth.
Fran’s sweet face split into a grin and she giggled. “You’re drunk. Wicked woman. It’s not funny.”
“It’s definitely not funny, but I’m bloody well not drunk. This is all I’ve had to drink today, and half that’s on the tablecloth.” I wiped my eyes. “Let’s finish this bottle and get another one.” We grinned at each other and then sobered up.
“So what now?” asked Fran.
I looked at her, my mind blank. My pulse was pounding through my whole body. I forced myself to focus. “I suppose I will have to apply for more grants, but you know how long that takes. I don’t think I’ve got much hope of getting anything substantial.”
Fran screwed up her face. I could almost see her neurons flashing as she searched for a miracle.
I tried to ignore the churning in my gut. “I’ll be okay for a while. The good old Medical School Dean said I could have a cubbyhole and a computer for the rest of the year so that I could finish all the papers I’ve still to write.” I swirled the wine around in my glass, and watched the ruby liquid as it came dangerously near to the rim. “Given that boring old basic research is no longer considered worthy, I wonder why I should bother, really.”
“Is he going to pay you?”
“Huh, no hope of that. Although he did say that I might be able to give a few guest lectures, so I suppose I’ll get a few meager dollars for those.”
“Why don’t you go back to clinical practice? You know so much about Huntington’s disease. You’d be a wonderful doctor for them and other neurological patients.”
“Fran, what are you thinking? You of all people know that I’m hopeless at the bedside thing and anything that involves actual patient contact. That’s why I became a researcher.”
“But that was twenty-five years ago. You’ve grown up and changed since then. You might like it now if you gave yourself a chance.”
“I haven’t changed, that’s the problem. I don’t even like socializing with other research staff. You’re the only person in the entire universe who I feel comfortable really talking to.”
“Well you have to do something. What are you going to live on?”
“That’s one of the advantages of being a workaholic with no kids. I’ve got heaps of money stashed away in the bank. Now at last I’ll be able to spend it. Perhaps I’ll fly off to some exotic, tropical paradise and become a recluse.”
“Very amusing. But you could travel. At least for a few months. Go to Europe. It would give you time to refresh your ideas, and then you could write a new grant that would blow those small-minded pen-pushers out of the water.” Fran sounded excited by all these possibilities opening out in front of me.
I could feel my brain shutting down, and shook my head to wake it up. “Perhaps I could take a trip.” I pushed my lips into a grin. “Go and see my mother and her lover in their hideaway. Now there’s a nice tropical island.”
“Doesn’t she live in Shetland? That’s a great idea. You should visit her.”
Fran didn’t always get my sense of humor.
“Fran, it’s practically in the Arctic Circle. I do not want to go there. And right now my mother and her gigolo are the last people I want or need to see.” I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t be unkind. Your mother has a right to happiness, and I think her life sounds very exciting. I thought she was married?”
“She is. And good on her. But she and I are better off living a long way apart.” I yawned. “I can’t think about all this any more tonight. And it’s way past your bedtime; you have to work tomorrow.”
Fran frowned. “I wish you didn’t have to go through all this. It’s horrible. But I know something will come up that’s better. It always does.”
BUT NOT FOR THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS. I CLOSED UP—OR down—the lab, took the team out for a subdued redundancy dinner, and moved into the cubbyhole, where I put my head down and wrote the final report on fifteen years of work. Then I wrote a grant application and sent it off to an obscure private funding body that gave out small grants from a legacy left by some wealthy old woman who died a lonely death from Parkinson’s disease. I had little hope it would be successful, as all I could come up with as a research project was further analysis of the neurological material we had collected over the past few years—hardly cutting-edge research. At least waiting to hear would give me a few months of pathetic hope, rather like buying a ticket in a lottery.
That done, I dutifully went into the university every day and tried to write a paper on a series of experiments that we had completed and analyzed just before the grant was terminated. But my heart wasn’t in it, and I could sit for eight hours with no more than a bad paragraph to show for it.
Boston was hot and I felt stifled. Fran and her family were away on their regular summer break at the Professor’s parents’ cabin on a lake somewhere, and the medical school was as dead as a dodo. I used to begrudge any time spent talking trivia to the researchers in my lab, but now that I didn’t have it, I missed it. Even my once-pleasant apartment had become a prison, clamping me inside its walls the minute I got home in the evenings. I was no stranger to loneliness, but over the past few years I’d polished my strategies to deal with it. I would remind myself that the flip side of loneliness could be worse—a houseful of demanding kids, a husband who expected dinner on the table, a weighty mortgage, irritating in-laws—it became almost a game to see what new horrors I could come up with. You, Anna Fergusson, I’d tell myself sternly, are free of all that. “I’m a liberated woman,” I once shouted, before glancing furtively around in case my madwoman behavior had conjured up a sneering audience. If self-talk didn’t work, or even when it did, more often than not I’d slump down in front of the TV and watch three episodes straight of Morse, or some other BBC detective series, and one night I stayed awake for the entire 238 minutes of Gone with the Wind.
When Fran finally returned from her lake at the beginning of August, I was on the phone to her before she had time to unpack her bags. Understanding as always, she put her other duties aside and the very next day met me at our usual lunch place. She looked fantastic: brown and healthy and young. I felt like a slug. It wasn’t until we were getting up to leave, me to go back to my cubbyhole and Fran to the supermarket, that she remembered.
“Gosh, I almost forgot. Callum was mucking about on the Internet while we were at the lake and came across