Lab Rat

  

Human beings are, in the main, compliant and easily managed. Witness for evidence the Milgram Experiments in the 1960s when participants willingly induced electric shocks to a man strapped to a chair causing him apparent pain.

So, when asked to dig a dead shark out of a lab freezer I complied with this request without question.

“Dave, go and dig a dead shark from that freezer”

“Nae bother, boss!”

I am after all employed by this institution to undertake tasks rational and reasonable and in accordance with my duties and the needs of my employer and, right now, it is to be the removal of dead sharks from freezers.

At other times it is the extermination of mice.

“Dave, go and have those mice killed”

“Not a problem, boss!”

I sing them a wee Jethro Tull song on the way to the death-chambers. I’d recite Burns if I could remember any.

I wonder where I’d draw the line. What would be the command where I’d finally turn like the mouse that roared and say no fucken way, boss!

“Dave, here’s the keys tae ma hoose. Away over and caw ma wife a clatty cow for screwin’ the butcher man”.

“No fucken way, boss, and anyway, I’ve been screwin’ her anaw!!”

 

Of course, we’re taught all about this obedience thing very early on. Your elders, parents, teachers, until eventually, your bosses. Christ almighty! During a war, you’d even obey some mad sergeant who’d bawl at you to leap out of a trench into gunfire and certain death. I’d likely have been one of them too, I’m so subservient sometimes that I’ll agree with folk saying things I don't agree with just so they like me.

I am an assistant in a biology lab belonging to North East London Polytechnic. It is on the Romford Road on the outskirts of Stratford, east London. I have a girlfriend who is a student here and I live with her in a condemned house nearby. Sometimes I race home at lunchtime and she waits for me in just a white lab coat with poppable buttons. She has bought The Joy of Sex for us to explore and spice up our sex life. Later on in our relationship, she will fling a half brick at me in her fury. She is of Irish stock from Liverpool, an only child, and mentally a bit suspect.

Of course, it’s not just so easy, digging a dead shark from a freezer. It is laid in deep, compacted ice which takes a long time to de-frost, as it were. So long, in fact, that it has been decided not to wait for full de-frostation and begin chipping at the ice with a chisel until the body of the fish is revealed and eventually can be recovered. About four foot in length this fish. Not very big for a shark you might say, and you’d have a point. Some sort of smallish shark, perhaps, or even, God forbid, a baby shark – a pup? This shark had a mother and a father, maybe a sibling or two and yet, here it has been lying God knows how long in this lab freezer and now I’m digging the poor thing out.

Very carefully, I might add, almost as if it were still alive. I do not want to blemish the poor thing any more than may be necessary. I chip very lightly my hammer onto this chisel affair they have provided. They being my bosses; all those that wish to have nothing further to do with this operation. One of them – the so-called Cat Man of Walthamstow who was on the morning telly – occasionally pops his head round the large wooden lab door (this is an old building that used to be some sort of town hall) and asks how I’m doing. I pop my head up over the lip of the freezer and tell him I’m ok and, though he can see how distraught I am, he edges away guiltily and almost runs back down the corridor to the staff room.

What will become of the shark? (I now call him Jaws affectionately): What will become of Jaws when I’ve released him from his frozen grave? They would not tell me when I asked. They were consumed in the business of opening a sheep’s stomach and everyone was so staggered and aghast by the smell to take any notice. They like me here at the science annexe, but I am forever the butt of their jokes and japes. The other day I was told the lab manager, Cyril, wanted to see me about something and complying with this request, I went upstairs to his office. Upon arriving he asked my for my work schedule. I put my hand in both pockets only to find baby crabs secreted there. I very nearly soiled myself, but old Cyril seemed to think it about the most hilarious thing he’d ever witnessed as did the two scalliwags behind the door who had devised the wheeze.

 

I regret to say that I was not present at the end, when Son of Jaws, was finally exhumed and released from his icy and temporary resting place. True to form I went off on somewhat of a drinking binge and missed work for a full week and by the time I returned the job had been done. When I asked Scalliwag One what had become of ‘the fish’ he blithely told me that it had been thawed then cremated in the college incinerator. An ignoble end for such a noble being. I think of Son of Jaws every time I happen to see a programme about sharks on the telly, the way they glide and dart through the water always with purpose and endeavour, true royalty of the sea. That should have been his outcome, free as a big fish in the wide ocean.

In the little time I applied myself to unsticking him from the ice it never crossed my mind. What the hell was he doing there?