Manchester, By Train

One year ago I could not raise my hand in a seminar room. This week I took my samples to Manchester in a padded case on my lap, like a woman transporting her own heart, because the speaker I once asked fourteen words now wants to test them on her instrument. Cause, meet effect. The distance between the two is three hundred and something days, and, as of Tuesday, four hours and eleven minutes by train.

A country, sideways

I had not really seen England until this week. My England has been one university town and the inside of a lab — a postage stamp of a country. The train unrolled the rest of it sideways past my window: canal boats painted like sweet tins, sheep arranged on hillsides with what looks like deliberate composition, the Pennines shrugging up out of the fields, back gardens with trampolines, back gardens with roses, one back garden containing, inexplicably, a full-sized fibreglass shark. England from a train is a country that has been lived in so long it has gone soft at the edges, like a book read by generations of the same family.

I thought, as one does at train windows, of the other trains — the coastal line from Colombo to Galle where the carriages lean out over the ocean and salt spray comes in through the windows. That train runs through my chest, permanently. But I noticed, somewhere past Stockport, that this landscape has stopped being scenery and started being somewhere I live. The sheep did it, I think. It is hard to feel like a stranger in a country whose sheep you have opinions about.

Someone else's lab

A borrowed lab is a foreign country with familiar customs. Everything is recognisable and nothing is where it should be. Dr. Okafor's group runs the same class of measurement as ours, but their instrument is younger, their software is stricter, and their kettle — I report this with awe — is somehow more violent than any I have yet encountered in this nation of violent kettles.

Protocol for working in a host lab, as learned in three days:

• Ask where things are before touching; the third ask is still welcome
• Adopt their logbook habits instantly, even the weird ones
• Bring biscuits on day one. Real ones. This is not optional
• Credit their postdoc by name in every conversation with your supervisor
• Leave the bench cleaner than any bench you have ever left

The measurement

And on the second afternoon, the thing itself: my samples, her instrument, both our questions. The substrate-temperature discrepancy I flagged in that first terrifying lab meeting — the one that began as me failing to have read a paper — has grown into an actual experimental question, and her machine can hold temperatures mine cannot. We ran the series overnight. At 9:40 the next morning the analysis finished, and there it was: the effect survives at her temperatures, cleaner than either of us predicted, a small stubborn fact that now exists because a nervous person once put her hand up.

Dr. Okafor looked at the plot for a long moment and said, well, that's a paper, in the tone another person would use for well, that's lunch. A joint paper. Two groups, my name near the front. We stood in her office sketching figure layouts on a whiteboard, and I had the out-of-body realisation that I was collaborating — that this is simply what the word means: two people who like being asked things, asking things together. The research on question-asking in academia that I once read as an indictment of my silence, I now reread as a mechanism: questions compound. Silence earns nothing. The interest rate on fourteen words, it turns out, is extraordinary.

On the train home, southbound, the shark garden appeared on the other side of the window, which felt like the landscape closing a bracket. I ate a bad sandwich and wrote the methods section notes while the Pennines unshrugged themselves back into fields. Somewhere around Crewe, I understood what this entry is actually about. It is not the collaboration, or the plot, or even the question. It is that at no point in three days — not once, not in her office, not at her instrument, not at the whiteboard — did I check whether I was allowed to be in the room. The checkpoint system is not merely decommissioned. The building has been demolished, and something with train tickets and sample cases has been built on the site.