Three of us applied for the grant, and two of us had not spoken to each other in three years.
Those two were Vera and me.
I do not know exactly what happened three years ago. That is the worst kind of anger: you remember the tone, but not the sentence. I know that at a meeting I said the plan would not work, and she said I only said that because I had not come up with it. She may have been right.
Since then we meet in the corridor every month, and every month we greet each other like two strangers who happen to be standing in the same lift.
Three of us applied: me, Vera, and a man from the other group whom nobody knew.
The application had two parts: a written plan and a ten-minute presentation. The plan had to be submitted at the beginning of November.
At the end of November it turned out that the committee could not decide, because the two best plans were the same.
Hers and mine.
Not similar. The same. The same structure, the same method, the same three case studies, in the same order.
I did not understand. Then I remembered an evening three years earlier, when we worked together until dawn, and at the end I said never again.
The chair of the committee asked us to work something out, because otherwise they could not decide. She did not say with whom. She did not need to.
I went to Vera.
“I didn’t copy it,” she said, before I could ask anything.
“I didn’t say you did.”
“You thought it.”
“Yes. But that’s not why I came.”
We sat down. Her office was the same as three years before: the same mess, the same two cups, the same calendar on the wall, only with a different year.
“Do you remember that evening?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s when we came up with the whole thing. You the structure, me the method. Then we quarrelled, and we both acted as if we had come up with it alone.”
Vera looked at the desk for a long time.
“I know,” she said. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“No. The stupidest thing was not speaking to you for three years.”
We did not make it up that day. That sort of thing does not take one conversation. But something shifted.
Two weeks later we submitted a joint plan. Not mine, and not hers: a third one, which we wrote together, and which was better than either. The chair of the committee said this was against the rules.
“Then change the rules,” said Vera.
We won. Not the grant — two people could not have that — but another funding award, which we received together.
On the morning of our first day working together she asked:
“Why didn’t you speak three years ago?”
“Because I thought that if you didn’t speak, then I didn’t have to either.”
“And why did you speak now?”
“Because I realised the question isn’t who is right. It’s how long I want to keep nodding at you in the lift.”
Vera laughed. It was her first real laugh in three years, and that was when I realised how much I had missed it.
We did not become a couple. Not then, at least. Two years later we did, but that is another story.
What happened then was something else, and perhaps more important: a person I had thought of as a rival turned out to be my best colleague. And the rivalry was never about beating her.
It was about the fact that alone, it does not work.
