Wet lab

It was her first ‘wet lab’, Alicia told us, and that evening in the School of Anatomy at the university, with the storm slipping its eerie transparencies through the dust-filmed windows – when she had tried to concentrate on the leader of the session who, flanked by a pair of skeletons on slabs and a bucket of brains, had paused for a moment during the worst of the thunder – she wondered why her mother had been at her all her years at high school to do this course, having implied that physiotherapy was not only a well paid, but also a benign, even innocuous profession.