Offcomer (4 page)

Alan’s long-standing fascination with phenomenology had turned his eyes inward. Things did not exist, for Alan, except in the conscious puzzle of his experience of them. Which was why, when he first noticed Claire, it seemed like a triumph of perception, a work of art. He felt that by perceiving her he had called her into existence. It seemed appropriate to Alan that this should have occurred in life-drawing class.

He went every week to the class, had been going every week for three years. Every Thursday night at seven he would arrive at the Oxford College of Further Education and for the following two hours of the class he would be lost in intense concentration. The act of drawing pleased him, puzzled him. It seemed unaccountable, almost mystical. Curves and creases became scratchy black lines on his A3 sheet. His charcoal snapped in his fingers, his fists rubbed and smudged the
paper. Mrs. Blundell could teach him nothing: she had given up trying to.

Then, one winter evening, the second Thursday of the Michaelmas term, he noticed her. She was leaning down to dip her pen into the inkpot by her feet. Her drawing board started to slip, and she clutched at it. Alan watched, expecting to see her drop the board, but she straightened up, righted it, settled back on her stool. Solemn, she glanced up at the model, back down at her picture, drew her lips in against her teeth.

Alan glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to eight. The curtains were drawn against the November night. They were of a thick, man-made material, with a texture like Shreddies and a geometric design in red and brown and yellow. An electric heater blew warm air at the model, Mrs. Peters, who was reading a paperback. She turned a page, sighed, shifted on the upright wooden chair. The rolls of her flesh settled back, not quite as they had been.

Alan noticed all this, his eyes fixed on the young woman. He couldn’t look away. She was so utterly absorbed, so caught up in the act of perception that she seemed to have lost all sense of her physical self. She bent over her drawing board, hunched up so that her forehead nearly touched her paper. Her legs were crossed, drawn up, supporting the board, her whole body a rictus of concentration. Her eyes flickered continuously from the model to the page. Each time she leant down to dip her pen, she teetered on the brink of disaster, her drawing board and paper slithering out of her grip. Each time she managed to shift her balance just before she fell. Her pen seemed to need constant dipping.

Mrs. Blundell, dusty and nicotine-stained, passed behind
the students, stopping to comment and encourage. She came to the young woman, stood at her shoulder. Alan watched. The older woman’s expression seemed appraising, grim. She leant down to the young woman, spoke to her. With permission, she took the pen from her hand and made a few quick sure strokes across the paper. The young woman watched, frowning, concentrating, nodding. Mrs. Blundell handed back the pen with a smile, then a pat on the shoulder. She stood and looked at the picture a moment longer, moved on.

The young woman stared at her drawing. She looked up at the model. She held the barrel of her pen to her lips, folded her lips in against her teeth. She tapped gently several times. She drew nothing more.

“Coffee break,” announced Mrs. Blundell, reaching into her handbag for cigarettes. “Mrs. Peters must be getting stiff.”

Alan tended to be brisk in the matter of the coffee break. He liked to be first at the confectionery machine so that he could be sure of getting his usual three-biscuit pack of chocolate digestives. He kept these in his pocket as he dropped the right money into the drinks machine and selected number 26: sweet milky coffee. Then he sat down at the table near the window, to keep away from the others’ smoke. He still found it uncomfortable that Mrs. Blundell, a teacher, smoked in front of the class.

But somehow the coffee break didn’t have its usual urgency for him that night. Instead of bolting for the door as he rummaged around in his pockets for change, he walked calmly over to the sink and began rinsing his sooty hands under the tap. He could hear the usual friendly clamour of the group as they funnelled out, the scratch of Mrs. Blundell’s match as she lit up even before she left the room. And as he stood at
the sink, from the corner of his eye, he could see the young woman still sitting, pen on lips, looking at her picture. Mrs. Peters buttoned her dressing-gown, stuffed her feet into her furry slippers, followed the class out the door. Alan, wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans, turned and sauntered over to the young woman, preparing a smile.

“Hello,” he said.

Her head jerked up. He had startled her. Brown eyes looked up at him, edgily. She took the pen away from her mouth, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Hi.”

“You having problems?” His tone was friendly; helpful, he thought.

“You could say that.”

“This your first class?”

She nodded, drawing in her lips again. A nervous tic.

“Maybe I could give you a few pointers.” Alan drew himself up, rolled back on his heels. His grey cable-knit sweater rose up slightly and he tugged it back down into place.

“I need all the help I can get.”

He made to walk round her, to look over her shoulder at the picture. With one quick threatened movement she tore away the page and crumpled it in both hands.

“No. Not this one. It’s crap.”

“Well,” said Alan, eyebrows raised, “would you like a coffee?”

He walked down the stairs behind her, not watching the inky hand that ran down the black plastic banister, watching instead her backside as it moved in her faded soft jeans, as she stepped down each tread of the stairs.

She bought her own coffee: black, thin. She sat down on the empty chair at Alan’s table. She accepted one of his biscuits.
Her face, apart from the big inky eyes, was not beautiful. Not even, thought Alan, really pretty. Her nose was just too straight and there was a quality about her skin he didn’t quite like. It was pale, but that wasn’t the problem. It seemed to be too thin. It wasn’t quite transparent, because you couldn’t actually see the blood vessels and lymph nodes and sinews through it. It was translucent, Alan decided. Like greaseproof paper.

He was still trying to work out if she was his type. He wasn’t really sure what his type was anymore. He hadn’t had much luck since he came to Oxford. He blamed the fact that there were so few female postgrads, women of a similar age and understanding. The undergraduates were only interested in one thing—celebrity. In that small pond if you weren’t President of the Union or taking time off to direct your first feature film or in possession of a Blue you didn’t have, Alan had decided, a hope in hell of getting laid. And Alan had none of these attractions. After one desperate term of sharking in college bars and discos he had settled down to three years’ (one year B.Phil., two years of a Ph.D.) masturbation and the occasional guilty visit to Northgate Hall of a weekend. He never picked up the same boy twice. He never took them back to his rooms. He never analysed his hostile and boorish post-coital behaviour towards these smooth young men. He only ever thought about them again while he masturbated, guiltily, into one of yesterday’s socks.

So he had little context in which to fit this young woman. She wasn’t of a type with the other female undergraduates he had tried to chat up; polished, hard, dismissive. Nor was she like the ones he hadn’t bothered to talk to, the unformed, muddy-looking girls who seemed never to have cut their hair. She wasn’t like the young women back home who had gobs on them that could kill from fifty paces and who seemed only
to come in bunches of three or more. She didn’t fit into any of his categories. She was polite, he noticed, deferential. Not unattractive. And she seemed to be impressed.

“So you’re Irish,” she asked. Alan nodded. The ghost of his Orange grandfather growled at him, but was ignored. This was too good a start, he thought, to be missed, if he decided he fancied her after all. English women, he’d been told by a Ph.D. student from Offaly, just could not resist the Irish thing. The poetry, peat and Celtic mist sob-stuff. He should have tried this before. And being from the north, of course, the glamour of violence. Irresistible. They’d lap it up.

“Where’re you from?”

“Belfast,” he said, accenting the word harshly, deliberately.

“Ah. What’s it like these days?” She smiled at him.

“Depends where you live.” He frowned, gave her a troubled look. “I had to get away. Nothing for me there.” He paused a moment, then added, his accent shifting towards the authoritative tone he would soon, he thought, assume with his students: “You know, in German, the verb ‘to be’ is very similar to the verb ‘to dwell.’ It comes from the same root. So, ‘to be’ is literally ‘to be in a place.’ Heidegger called it ‘being-in-the-world.’ To be a human being is to be a human being somewhere. So it really matters, the place where you choose to be. It makes you what you are. That’s why I left.”

She looked up from her coffee, looked at him, eyes wide with interest. In her eyes Alan saw himself, magnified, and fell in love.

The other students were stubbing out cigarettes, scraping back chairs, standing up and making their way back to class.

“I guess we’d better go,” Alan said. She drained her plastic
coffee cup. He twisted the biscuit wrapper into a knot, then followed her up the stairs.

For the next half hour the young woman stared at Mrs. Peters. She didn’t once lean down to dip her pen into the ink, didn’t make a single mark on her paper. Whenever Alan glanced up from his own murky sheet, he saw her sitting, pen on lips, lips folded in against her teeth.

Mrs. Blundell pulled a stool up next to her, sat down, began talking. The young woman listened carefully, mutely, pen on lips. Once or twice she lifted the pen to reply to the teacher’s comments. Then she folded her lips in again, put the pen back. She sat like that until the class ended.

While the other students were shuffling on their coats, Mrs. Blundell went to talk to her again, a cigarette dangling from her hand. Alan slowly coiled his scarf round his neck, listening.

“I hope I haven’t put you off …”

“No, no, no …” The young woman was dragging on her heavy overcoat. “It’s just it’s hard …” Mrs. Blundell nodded eagerly, agreeing.

“Oh, I know …”

Alan dropped his stubby bit of charcoal into its box, rubbed his hands together. He clamped his drawing board underneath his arm and waited, proprietorially, for their conversation to finish. Mrs. Blundell began gathering her things, setting the room to rights. The young woman pulled on a pair of grey gloves and picked up her board.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“See you next week.”

Alan fell in beside her as she trudged down the stairs.

“You should try a different medium,” he said generously. “You should try charcoal.”

“I’m useless with charcoal. I just make a mess.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs. Alan regarded himself a moment in the glass-panelled door before opening it. He stepped out into the carpark. She followed and the door slammed shut behind them. Their breath disappeared in the mist. She held her drawing board between her feet as she buttoned up her overcoat. He wondered briefly what her breasts were like. They walked across the carpark together, and Alan became aware of a strange warmth spreading out through his chest, like when he drank his tea too hot. He found himself blinking away tears, sniffing in the cold. This little frail being walking along beside him had listened to him. For the first time since he had come to Oxford, he had met a woman who looked at him while he was speaking, who didn’t stare over his shoulder, glaze over, or just wander off to talk to someone else. And she was even quite good-looking. If he could just persuade her to get some decent clothes, make her realise how unattractive it was when she folded in her lips, he was flying.

“Are you coming back next week?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, we should meet up sometime.”

“I’m at Somerville. You could drop me a note. Claire Thomas.”

She shifted the board under her arm, settling it as comfortably as possible for the walk back to college.

“Goodnight.” She headed off into the dark, up towards Hythe Bridge Street. Alan was vaguely disappointed. If she had been going his way, he would have walked her home.

It was the place, she thought. It was the weather and the geography and the architecture all working together. A mist-filled
airless swampy lowland ringed round by hills. Filled with walled-in spaces. Walls that guarded libraries, lawns and cloisters like children shielding their answers with an arm. Great wooden doors, studded and barred, that creaked open for you if you knew the code, if you had the key. Bolted side doors, back gates, barbed wire and blackened sandstone. Men in bowler hats patrolling the street in front. She tried to look confident, to look like she belonged, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before she got caught out.

She kept every letter sent to her by the college or the university. Anything with a crest or a letterhead or an official stamp. She laid down each sheet of paper in her desk drawer, filling it eventually so full that she could hardly shuffle it shut. She was never quite sure whether the papers were souvenirs, an archive or evidence.

There was a code, Latinate, ecclesiastical, abrupt. She learned it, but it never seemed quite natural. The sounds did not attach themselves to the world around her. There seemed to be fewer articles and more capitals than in the language she was used to. Schools was just one building, many-roomed, draughty, where they had exams and Freshers’ Fair. Sub fusc were the clothes you wore underneath your gown. Halls were where you lived, Hall was where you ate, Front Hall was where the notice boards were. St. Cross was a college just down St. Giles, but it was also the name of the Faculty building.

It had taken her a whole term to learn her way around the college, the university, the city. When she tried to cycle to St. Cross for her first lecture she got swept up by the traffic, unable to pull over, looking desperately around her for the turning, the right way. She was deposited, like jetsam, halfway up the Banbury Road. By the end of the year she still
had not found an easy way to get from College to Faculty and back. Each time her journey was nervous, faltering. She dodged down the Lamb and Flag Passage, careered across St. Giles, dismounted to push the bike through the churchyard.