Offcomer Page 7

  He leaned away from her to rummage in his jeans pocket for a condom. She watched him tear off the foil, roll the latex down his penis. He smiled at her, leaned in to kiss her, and there was another awkwardness as skin adhered to rubbery skin, as limbs were shifted and rearranged. He pushed into her with some difficulty, and it occurred to him that she might have been a virgin. She was quiet underneath him. Perhaps she was nervous.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  He closed his eyes and came, shuddering. He felt his whole body go slack, his mind melting with relief. Winded and delighted, he felt he could almost laugh out loud. A whole different arena, he thought, from masturbation. A whole different world. He had almost forgotten. He sighed deeply, satisfied, and reached down to grip the condom, and withdrew. He sat up, began to ease the condom off.

  “You okay?” he smiled at her.

  “Yes,” she said, “fine.”

  She sat up awkwardly. He knotted the condom, dropped it on the floor. He put his arm around her shoulders, but that felt awkward, so he drew her to him, held her a moment. He felt the curve of her breast against him, felt her breath on his chest. He felt himself expand.

  “Bit cold,” she said, and drew away from him.

  He rubbed her arms, chafing them.

  “I’ll put some clothes on,” she said.

  He smiled as he watched her go through to the other room. She walked stiffly, arms wrapped across her breasts. He slumped back into the sofa, and closed his eyes. He could hear her moving around in his bedroom. Her scent hung around him, reminding him, oddly, of pink wafer biscuits from Christmas tins, that weren’t quite a mouthful, were there-and-gone, leaving just a sweetness on the tongue.

  She was sharp, too, had to be. Nineteen, she would be. Nineteen or twenty. Good looking, an Oxford undergraduate. Wait till he told Paul. Alan’s eyes opened, he reached round for his pants, his lips still tender with the memory of her nipples, like raspberries they were, dark pink. He stood to pull his pants on, picked up his jeans. Her eyes had sharpened, he remembered; he had seen something click into gear when he’d started talking philosophy. Heidegger. Where had he put his Heidegger? Alan settled his softened cock into place, padded across the room as he zipped up his flies. He ran his hand over the dark spines of his books, tugged Being and Time from the shelf. He turned at the sound of her feet, smiled.

  She was dressed, her hair long and loose, a slightly bruised look about her eyes. She tucked in her lips, pushed her hair back from her face. He came close to her, put his arms around her, kissed her, unexpectedly, on the ear. She shifted, made a small sound: he released her, walked back to the sofa, filled his glass. He smiled at her. Draining the lees of the wine into her glass, he began to talk. In philosophical terms, he said, it was impossible to prove that either wine or glass existed. She perched on the arm of the chair, tugged her hair back into a ponytail, secured it with a band. He outline the proposition that the Universe exists because man perceives it, that man exists in order to perceive the Universe. She swung her feet slightly. Her toes, cold and bare, just scuffed the floor. Smiling, he expanded upon the implications of quantum theory for Judeo-Christian theology. She had to go, she said. She stood up, shuffled on her shoes. She had a tutorial in the morning. She had books to read. As she heaved on her ugly outsized overcoat, he held out the book.

  “It’s amazing,” he said. “It will change your life.”

  Her rucksack was already weighted and angular with books, but one more wouldn’t make it that much heavier.

  Over the following days Alan became aware, with mounting surprise, of his need for Claire. He found himself daydreaming. In front of the pale luminous computer screen swam the image of her; silent, naked, and still. His hand, as it turned and flattened a page, was haunted by the curve of her hip. The distraction, although pleasant enough in itself, was currently inconvenient. He was busy, very busy. He didn’t have time to daydream. Especially when the daydreams were so engrossing that he ended up having to masturbate, and even that was never quite enough to clear his mind. At the weekend he would call her, he decided, and ask her to come round. It would be nice to see her.

  She had pushed the folded picture into her desk drawer, but kept opening the drawer to look at it. Angular unfamiliar limbs stretched out across the grey textile surface. The belly was flat and grey, the navel a deep black pit, big as a fist. The breasts were heavy and sore-looking, the nipples harsh and scratchy. But it was her face that had unsettled her most. An unevenly sketched shape, featureless as an egg. Eyeless. The picture was incredibly insightful. It was terrifying.

  It must be because he was so perceptive that he was offering her his help. He had seen what she was like, and sympathised, and wanted to show her how to be. He continued to invite her round, make her coffee and sit with her on the sofa, and all the time he seemed to be offering her oblique clues to survival. She sipped her thin black drink and felt that he was describing to her the route she must follow. The only way to be.

  Already tired with study, she tried to read the books that he lent her, but they left her feeling dizzy and bloated. She would wake up in the morning to find a dark hardback splayed across her chest, where she had laid it down last night as she drifted off to sleep. When he spoke, she always tried to listen attentively, drinking up as much of each disquisition as she could. She often became confused by the arcane vocabulary and devious logic.

  It took her quite a while to admit to herself that she doubted. She tried to ignore her suspicions, to push them away, but they hung around her like guilt. She suspected that Alan’s way of thinking resolved nothing. It seemed as if all he did was navigate his way around mazes. He wound his way through to the middle and he twisted back out again, and that was all very impressive, but that was all. She couldn’t help but feel that there might be better things to do than solve mazes, but these doubts only served to make her more unsure of herself. Alan did, after all, have a B.Phil., he was doing a Ph.D. He did, after all, know what he was talking about. And Claire, for all her As at A level, was only an undergraduate.

  She began to find it hard to be alone. An uneasy feeling descended on her whenever she realised that there was no one else around. At night, working under the parchment-shaded lamp in her college room, desk crowded with old books, she would grow suddenly cold and tense with the suspicion that she was not there. Unconnected and unperceived, her mind wrapped up in the knots of someone else’s thought, she half believed that she was slipping out of her own and others’ consciousnesses, growing hazy, fading. She would disappear.

  But nonetheless she found herself unable to enter the college bar and common rooms. To walk into a crowded room was like walking down a hall of cracked mirrors—Claire saw herself reflected in a hundred different ways, distorted, fragmented, multiplicitous. In company, she could not resolve the myriad reflections of herself. She couldn’t begin to know them. A crowd made her mind feel like a rubbish bin, stuffed full of discarded, throw-away ideas of Claire.

  She practically crawled into lectures. She always got there early while the room was still empty. She sat at the back, wondering at the ease of the habitual latecomers: the calm nod to the lecturer, the grin and half-wave to a friend.

  She felt safe in the library. There were people around her, but they were buried in their work. She felt she might be lodged somehow, barely noticed, in a corner of a mind, just another bent body amongst a barely noticed row of bent bodies. As she sat hunched over her own work, she fluttered from total absorption, total absence from herself, to extreme, painful self-consciousness. She hated the walk past rows of occupied desks to go to the ladies’ or to get a cup of coffee. It seemed like a tightrope. She wobbled, faltered, blushed, as if everyone was staring. Reluctant to move, her mouth became gluey, her bladder ached. By eight or nine at night she was exhausted and faint and her eyes hurt, and still she did not want to go back to College. Back to her empty room, or the noisy press of the college bar.

  The best place to be was a
t Alan’s set. As he worked on his thesis, she could sit on his sofa drinking black coffee and either reading or scratching away at an essay. He would glance around every so often and notice her. That was necessary.

  Sex, frequent, quick and uncomfortable, was also necessary. It left her awake after he slept, frustration chewing at her gut. She toyed with this vague unsatisfied desire, unable to leave it alone. She prodded at it as a tongue explores a broken tooth, irritating both the exposed nerve and the tongue. And it was this post-coital wakefulness, not the sex itself, that was so necessary. It reassured her, even as it troubled her. If she was alone, and wanting, if she had an impulse so strong that it actually kept her awake, then surely, somewhere, there must be an individual experiencing desire. However frail, however fledgling, however unlikely, her own perception of her own desire, untold to anyone, was enough to guarantee her existence. And the best of it was, she couldn’t tell Alan, so he couldn’t question her logic. She couldn’t tell him, because that would mean telling him how bad sex was with him.

  She had stopped drawing altogether.

  A Sunday afternoon in February. They walked out across Port Meadow. The raised track across the flat green waste was pot-holed and abraded by the winter weather. The sky was wide and grey. Ahead, the riverbank was marked by a row of bare willows. Riverboats were moored along the bank. Peeking up above the edge of the grass were smoking chimney pots, flat roofs, a splayed-out bicycle. As they came closer, Claire could smell the smoke in the air, and the soft sour scent of bread. She followed Alan through the gate and onto the footbridge. A small dog, gingerbiscuit-coloured, scrambled up onto a cabin roof and barked at them. From inside the boat a name was called, then there came a muffled whistle. The dog stopped barking, turned its neat, otter’s head. Another call, and, tail wagging, the dog leaped back down onto the deck, out of sight. Claire heard a woman’s voice, quieting the dog, and ached for the unexamined comfortableness of it all.

  “I want this,” Claire said thoughtlessly, then flinched, afraid of Alan’s reply.

  Alan shrugged, not understanding, and began instead to tell her how beautiful the North of Ireland was. The steep hills, the sandy beaches, the basalt cliffs. The names sounded melancholy, slow. Glenarm, Glenarf, The Mournes.

  “You should come,” he said. “I’d like to show you.”

  Claire took her finals in June. She stayed up at Oxford until she got her results. Skint, she stayed with Alan. She had to sneak out early every morning, before the cleaners arrived. She had to make sure she left none of her clothes or make-up lying around. She was not, officially, there. If the College found out that she was staying, Alan said, they would throw her out, and send him to the Dean.

  Alan was working on his thesis. She walked down to Schools alone. The results were pasted up on a grey fibrous board. She scanned down the list, found her name. Somehow, it didn’t look like her. Afterwards she walked down to the Botanic Gardens and sat watching the fountain, sniffing the traffic fumes in the air. A duck dozed on the side of the pool, its bill tucked into its feathers. A woman in an anorak leaned over a silver-grey shrub and read out its name in Latin to her husband. Claire couldn’t stop shivering.

  Later, on the High, she heaved open the door of a phone box and stepped inside. She lifted the handset, dropped a coin into the slot. She tried to keep her voice from shivering too.

  “That’s wonderful. We’re so proud of you love. You’ll be off out to celebrate tonight then?”

  They didn’t go out to celebrate. Even if Alan hadn’t been so busy, and they hadn’t been so skint, she was in no mood. Nothing to celebrate, really. Not much you could do with a 2.1 that you couldn’t do without. That weekend, she started work at Culpeper’s. The heavy scent-laden atmosphere of the place, coupled with the traffic fumes and heat of the streets outside, gave her a constant headache.

  When she left for work in the morning, he was just switching on the computer. When she came home he was still there staring at the screen. Exhausted, she would go to bed at ten, ten-thirty. He would come to bed hours later, waking her as he moved around the room, opening and shutting drawers, cleaning his teeth and hawking into the wash-hand basin. In her lunch break she bought sandwiches and walked down to his building, out of breath, heart pounding. He would consume his lunch wordlessly at the computer, careful not to drip mayonnaise onto the keyboard.

  They hardly spoke for a month. She felt that she was barely there, that she went through her days like a ghost. Her lungs felt permanently sore, her chest cramped up into a knot. She had to get some fresh air. She would go home.

  Alan was furious. He had never felt so angry in his life. His rage choked him. When she slung her bag onto her shoulder and kissed him, he just said, “Yeah, see you,” without turning away from the computer. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, then the street door slam shut. He half stood up from his chair, squinting out of the window. Her hair was glossy in the sunshine. Her bag didn’t seem to be weighing her down at all. He slumped back down at his desk. How could she abandon him like this, right now, when he needed her more than ever? How could she behave like this, making him so angry, so fucking furious that he couldn’t see straight, much less concentrate on his work? He banged his fist down on the desk. The screen blinked. His hand hurt.

  A single-track road wound round the edge of the reservoir, slipped out through the pass in the fells. A car had passed a moment ago, skimming headlights across the water, defining it, coating it with a smooth silvery meniscus. As the lights swung across them, Claire had seen Jennifer clearly, blinking sootily in the light, shifting slightly in her plimsolls. Since then, they had been standing there in silence. Claire had run out of questions. She was desperately raking through her head for something, for anything else to say. Soon, if she wasn’t distracted, Jen would ask a question, and she would have to reply, and she wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  “Well, what about it?” Claire said. Her teeth were aching.

  “I don’t know. Can’t we just go down the pub?”

  “If you want to.”

  “You don’t, I take it.”

  In the darkness, Claire pulled her lips in against her teeth.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Thomas? You’ve done nothing but apologise since you got back. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. It’s just. This was your idea, you know.”

  “Five years ago, it was my idea.”

  “Well. I thought you liked it.”

  “I always thought it scared the pants off of you.”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Well then. You go first.”

  Claire, unbuttoning her coat, shrank at the thought of ploughing out across the dark water. On an old map, somewhere, she had seen the dots and lines of habitation, the simple cross that marked the chapel, a whole village deep within the swelling water. Pike hanging in the dark fireplaces, eels slipping down the stairwells, minnows clouding the branches of drowned trees. The dark beneath her always felt, somehow, populated. She saw herself thrashing through someone else’s sky, alien, ungainly, and it made her panic. Every time.

  So why, she thought, grimly untying her boots, do this now. Why not go down the pub and sit by the fire and drink a couple of whiskies and just listen to Jen talk. And if she asks about Alan or Oxford or what next, spoof it. Lie. Because crying, Claire thought, tugging her jumper over her head, was a lot like kissing: it should never be done in pubs.

  Halfway up the hillside a sheep let out a rasping, belch-like bleat.

  “Are you ready?” Claire asked.

  “I’ll follow you.”

  The grit bit into her feet. Her skin puckered with goosepimples. She hugged herself, felt her nipples hard against the softness of her inner arm. From the edge of the dam you could wade out slowly, stepping down from rock to rock, letting the water rise up from ankle to knee to hip with each step. That was on summer afternoons when there were damsel flies and sunbathing with an arm across you
r eyes, and the water taking the sting out of sunburn. But when it was cold, you just had to jump.

  Claire jumped. In an instant she was deep, her hair lifted, legs and arms wide, breath knocked out of her, eyes open in the streaming bubbling dark. She crashed up through the surface, gasping, her lungs squeezed small. She pushed the flattened hair off her face.

  “How is it?” Jennifer called.

  “Fine.”

  Claire, winded, treading water, heard Jen laugh. She peered through the grainy dark, saw the pale luminescence of Jen’s skin, the curve of her back as she bent to pull off her plimsolls. The water tugged at the unshaven hairs on Claire’s legs, slid between her fingers, dipped into the hollows of her knees. She stopped treading water, lay suspended, still. Around her, a thin film of water grew a little warmer from her skin. Faint and pale, Jen picked her way down to the water’s edge, paused.

  “Cold?” Jennifer called.

  “Just a bit.”

  The figure on the bank shifted a little, finding a sure footing, then dived. The crash of body onto water, then quiet, and the backwash slapping against the bank, against Claire, washing her slight warmth away. Then a nearby splash and splutter as Jen surfaced.

  “Jesus. It’s so cold.”