Page 7 of The Fallback

Neither of them said anything for a minute and then he gripped her arms and grinned down at her before pulling her into a goodbye hug.

‘Leave it with me,’ he said gleefully then he turned to walk back down the road. ‘I’ll have it all worked out by the end of the week.’ He looked back at her and waved.

Rosie watched him go and sighed. She hated saying goodbye to Mitch, but sometimes she hated his crazy plans more. She reached into her pocket where she always kept her bank card as Mitch turned the corner and disappeared. He sounded more serious than she had anticipated, and she wasn’t sure she liked the sound of it.

ChapterTwo

While Mitch might have willingly left behind the world of academia and research, Rosie was happily entrenched in it. And she loved it. All that order and methodology. There was nothing like the process of setting up an experiment to take your mind off things you couldn’t control, like emotions, or your best friend’s madcap schemes.

Not one for crowding her desk with personal effects, Rosie was still sufficiently proud of gaining her doctorate to have a laminated photo of her receiving it in her desk drawer. The drawer was locked, and the photo was under a couple of notebooks. But when she was feeling unsure of herself, or needed a boost, she would unlock the drawer and look at it, remembering the moment the photo was taken before locking it back up again and getting on with her day. Weird yes, but absolutely necessary when a month long experiment had just gone to hell.

Rosie had been one of the fastest students to gain her PhD, putting in crazy hours to get the results she needed and then tackling her writing up as a seasoned climber might think about plotting an Everest ascent. Pulling all-nighters was not Rosie’s style, instead she foreswore socialising and weekend fun and did her write up in record time. Much to Mitch’s annoyance both professionally and personally. The latter because he was bored of the hours he spent trying to persuade her away from her computer, only for her to ignore him and write up yet another chapter.

Rachel, her supervising professor, had been suitably impressed, although not surprised, and had quickly offered Rosie a post-doc position at the university. It wasn’t long before Rosie was asked to set up a lab under Rachel’s mentorship. Their area of virology was well funded and Rosie was lead author on several important papers and was regularly asked for comment by journalists if these made the news. Mitch loved the fact she always gave him first and often exclusive comment.

Rosie was now senior enough to be in charge not just of PhD students, but a number of post docs, too; something that caused her to become breathless with anxiety if she thought about it too long. She relished the research she did; to the outside observer it might not seem so important but Rosie knew that some of the experiments her lab ran had real impact in the world. One of the trials she had been working on resulted in a new drug which was now used in the treatment of previously hard-to-treat viruses and was heralded as a breakthrough. Her mum kept newspaper cuttings on that one but Rosie drew the line at adding those to her desk drawer.

Rosie felt an incredible sense of pride in her work and deep down she knew she was good at it, too. Not just in the lab but in the other varied roles she filled. Rosie actually enjoyed the challenge of writing grant applications, something most other research scientists dreaded, it was important to Rachel to keep the funding coming and it was important to Rosie to keep in Rachel’s good books.

On a more prosaic level she also loved where her lab was based. Right in the heart of London, nestled in between the beautiful squares of Bloomsbury. It was in a modern building that on paper would seem completely at odds with its neighbours, but when you stumbled across it, it fitted perfectly in with the Georgian architecture.

Unlike most Londoners, Rosie loved walking to work in the morning through the throngs of tourists that gathered in that part of London at all times of year and at all times of day and night. There was always a sense of anticipation amongst them; the excitement of seeing beautiful London landmarks for the first time, feeding off their energy. Perhaps it was because she had only moved to London as an adult but she still shared that feeling of excitement with them. Except on rainy days when they would cluster around the tube entrance with their umbrellas and wheelie suitcases blocking the entrances and just getting in the way.

Right now, Rosie was fulfilling another of her important roles, that of office confidante to her longtime colleague and friend Nadia. Nadia also worked under Rachel but in a slightly different area of virology, and she and Rosie regularly met to talk about work but mainly to gossip over whether Rachel was in a good or a bad mood. The latest news on Rachel’s love life was a constant source of considerable interest.

Rachel remained as terrifying to Rosie as she had been when she started her PhD. Despite the esteem that Rachel obviously had for Rosie, she wouldn’t cut her any slack if she thought Rosie had made a mistake or wasn’t performing to the standards of excellence she expected in her team. Rachel was effortlessly chic, her work wardrobe was simple and stylish and when she donned her lab coat she wore it as a fashion accessory.

‘You heard that her and the Vice Chancellor are no longer a thing?’ Nadia asked Rosie.

‘I didn’t know theywerea thing!’ Rosie exclaimed and immediately grimaced. The VC was at least sixty-five and looked as if he could stand in as an extra Hogwarts professor at a moment’s notice. ‘I thought she was with that musician that we went to see that time at the Scala?’

Nadia frowned at Rosie, ‘That was ages ago.’

The lab had heard rumours that Rachel was dating this hot twenty-something female singer-songwriter and had gone en masse to see her in concert, hoping to catch a glimpse of who had captured the heart of their professor. But the outing had been short-lived when Rachel was spotted in the crowd, wearing tight leather trousers and a distressed (obviously vintage) Ramones T-shirt and they had issued the abort mission signal and made a quick exit before they were seen or had heard a single song. Rosie still had palpitations when she thought about how close they were to getting caught that night.

But the musician made more sense than the aging VC. Rachel’s tastes were certainly eclectic, which was why everyone in the lab so eagerly followed her love life.

Rosie and Nadia had taken a while to get used to one another when Nadia had first arrived, because for a long time Nadia had seemed disorganised and scatty to Rosie. But weeks and months of Nadia coordinating tea breaks and offering cookies had finally won Rosie over. And now, Rosie recognised that Nadia was neither disorganised nor scatty but simply permanently preoccupied either with gossip about their boss or with whatever she happened to be working on at the time. Nadiawasquite simply a genius and Rosie had lost count of the number of times she had turned to her for advice on a trial that was going wrong or a drug result not going the way she had anticipated.

Over the years Nadia had become even more preoccupied, first when she acquired a boyfriend – Nico, who was now her husband – and then latterly when the two of them became parents. Now Nadia’s brilliant brain was as likely to be filled with school schedules, parents’ evenings and planning the weekly food shop, as it was to be dreaming up a cure for the common cold.

Honestly, Rosie didn’t know how she did it. Nadia raced around at a hundred miles an hour, leaving a wake of dropped Post-it Notes and scattered pen lids behind her. Yet she never messed up her experiments and rarely forgot to pick her kids up. And over time Nadia had also managed to master the technique of appearing to be interested in Rosie’s life when Rosie strongly suspected she was thinking of the next stage in her latest clinical trial, or whether she had enough fish fingers in the freezer for the kids’ tea.

Right now, uncharacteristically, Nadia was not in motion, she was sat in Rosie’s office leisurely sipping her coffee. Rosie tried to subtly nudge the mouse on her desk to see what the time was. It was lovely that Nadia was taking a breather but it would have been nice if she had checked in with Rosie to see if they could coordinate their time for headspace. Rosie had some results she needed to go check on and if she left it too long they would be completely unusable. She sent up a silent prayer to a deity she rarely believed in that one of her students would realise the time crunch and do it for her, if they weren’t too busy sleeping off their weekend hangovers.

Nadia took a long sip of her coffee and pulled absentmindedly at the sleeve on her misshapen cardigan. If Rachel was poised, then Nadia was her absolute opposite; tiny and curly-haired, she moved through life as if it was out to attack her. Except for now, when she seemed happy to spend most of her morning in Rosie’s office chatting.

‘Aren’t you in the lab today?’ Rosie asked hopefully.

‘I was,’ Nadia responded languidly, ‘but I swapped my slot when I saw who had reserved the next bench to me.’

Rosie raised her eyebrows quizzically.

‘Handsy Pete.’

‘Oh, god. Yes, good thing you swapped,’ Rosie said shuddering.

Handsy Pete was one of the less desirable colleagues in their lab. Apparently, it was OK to make sexually suggestive comments to colleagues if your publication list was as long as Pete’s. Rosie had voted for the moniker Pervert Pete, finding something rather pleasing in the alliteration, but she had been vetoed by Nadia, amongst others, who felt ‘Handsy’ was less confrontational than Pervert, should Pete ever find out about his nickname. Sometimes Rosie despaired that the #MeToo spotlight had completely missed the dingy corner that scientific academia occupied.

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