Offcomer (5 page)

Her room was draughty. When someone left the hall door open, wind rushed in under her door where the floor was worn away with age. The warp and weft showed through the carpet, which didn’t reach the walls. Her desk was too small. It wasn’t a desk at all really, but a narrow fragile hall table, an occasional table. She couldn’t cross her legs underneath it, but sat sideways, twisted round, to lean over her work. She didn’t think to ask for a different desk. It didn’t occur to her that it mattered.

Brown mineral scum floated on the surface of tea and coffee. When she washed her hair, the hard water left it dull and rough. She got used to the metallic taste in her mouth, but found herself daydreaming of soft clean water from off the fells, tasting of geraniums and grass.

She got used to feeling hungry. There was nowhere to keep food fresh, nowhere to cook but a baby gas-ring in a cramped, overpopulated pantry, up two flights of stairs. There was never enough money to eat out. When she ate in Hall, the food was pale and flaccid, cooked almost beyond recognition. And she quailed at the communal joviality that the awful meals generated, the girls’ school laughter. She ate only when it became necessary, when hunger threatened her concentration. She ate furtively, in her room, bread and peanut butter and apples that she kept in her bottom drawer. If anyone knocked while she was eating, she froze, apple juice gathering and running down her chin, until the caller walked away.

Her bed was metal, narrow, and creaked when she turned.

Sometimes, at night, under the parchment-shaded lamp, when she should have been working, she drew. Pictures in ink, moments in ink. Ink that should have been words pacing out an essay, laying down arguments in straight lines. Her old ink pen. She drew Jennifer’s face, the patterns of her body. Turning, smiling, laughing, always moving, hair swinging round her face, eyes looking sideways out of the picture. Patterns of home: carious drystone walls, soft mulchy curves of moorland, massing windblown clouds.

Cycling back to College from Schools on the first day of exams, her gown fluttering like a bat in daylight, she noticed metal mesh barriers sealing off the sidestreets, holding back massing onlookers as if there were a parade or a carnival or a celebrity about to arrive. Thinking she was out-of-bounds, expecting to be challenged, she pulled over to ask someone in a bowler hat,

“It’s okay to cycle up here?”

He frowned at her.

“Of course.”

“But isn’t it sealed off?”

“Yes.” He said it slowly, drew out the vowel sound, as if he were talking to a child.

“So how come I’m allowed up here?”

“It’s sealed off for you,” he said, exasperated. “So you can all get back to your colleges for lunch, and then back to afternoon exams. So none of you get hassled by the tourists or run over.”

“Just to make it a bit easier for us, they’ve sealed off the whole area?”

“That’s right.”

She slid back onto her saddle, cycled on, trying not to look at the clustering sightseers. Put up a barrier, she thought, and people gather.

The June sun glared outside. She lifted the fork to her mouth, felt the mushy food spread out across her tongue.

“This stuff is disgusting.” Emma dropped her tray down opposite Claire, dropped herself down into the loose-jointed wooden chair. Over Emma’s shoulder, through the crossed bars of the windows, Claire could see the heavy-leafed tree, the thick grass of the quad. “You can smell it from Front Hall,” Emma went on. “It even gets into my room. It stinks the whole place out. By lunchtime, you’ve got no appetite left. It’s revolting.” She prodded the stew with a fork. “I think that’s one of the cats.”

Claire looked down at her plate, placed her fork down on the table. Emma was right. It just hadn’t occurred to her that it mattered.

“So how did it go?” Emma asked, reaching forward to fill her waterglass from the earthenware jug.

“I don’t know.” Claire’s head had been full of dancing letters, morphemes, words. Prefixes and suffixes, the elegant declining of a noun, a conjugating verb. They had stepped and slid about in a formal dance, taking partners, spinning away. Two and a half hours had passed in a loop. She had looked up from her finished translations to find the time was up. Lost inside her concentration, she had inadvertently taken a shortcut, while the world had gone the long way round.

“Did you get the pieces you wanted? I did. More or less.
The bits I’d memorised. Bluffed the rest.” She stuck her fork into her mashed potato. “Stew on a day like today! What about this afternoon? I’m crapping myself.”

“The poetry paper? That’s okay. I like the words. I like the compounds. Lœnfeat for lamp. Dægred for dawn. That kind of stuff. Light-vessel and day-red. Like we have railway or greenhouse. It makes you think.” Claire grew self-conscious, her voice faded out. She lifted her waterglass, sipped. She had said too much. Emma would start to take the piss.

“When you put it like that it sounds almost interesting. But all that endless whining about being lost on the freezing, benighted whaleway. I wish they’d just bloody stayed at home and not bothered with their miserable pilgrimages. Or I wish I’d done PPE.” She lifted her spoon, let the lukewarm custard trickle back into the bowl. “Guess this counts as revision, though. For Virginia Woolf.
Room of One’s Own
.”

Claire padded up the footpath, past the library and round the side of the quad. It was a threatening evening, heavy and hot. The bar windows were open onto the quad, people were sitting out on the lawn with their drinks. Crushed plastic glasses flattened in the grass. Smooth round vowel sounds rolling over her like water. She rounded the corner and heard a rippling high laugh; Emma’s. She stopped between the windows, took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket.

She could walk into the room and straight to the bar and get herself a drink. Then she would have something to hold, some time to adjust to the room, to the push and din and swelter. She took a cigarette from the packet, tucked it between her lips, lit it. She inhaled and the smoke made her
shiver. As she walked in her expression would stutter and shift, her smile would suddenly feel hard and uncomfortable. Her shoulders would stiffen and she would force her hands deep into her jeans pockets, shoulders arched high and awkward. Her smoking would look like exactly what it was. An affectation. Something to do with her hands.

Claire knew she was a freak. She’d been born and grown up and lived her life so far without a skin. There didn’t seem to be a line where she stopped and everything else began. Her surface was smudged and pulpy, too permeable. And there she was, standing, smarting, on the edge of the sea, and was expected to leap in and swim and splash about in the salt water, happily, like everyone else. She drew on the cigarette again. The noise ebbed. One voice rose clearly above the rest, Emma’s actress tones:

“Claire is so—”

But the voice dropped, and the noise swelled, and she never heard what she was.

It wasn’t raining. Damp hung in the dark air, did not fall. It condensed on her eyelashes, her cheeks, on the fuzz on her upper lip. It seeped through her clothes, through layers of wool-acrylic mix and cotton, making her skin cold and clammy, despite the inner flush of exercise. It left her feeling shivery, feverish.

Feverish was a good word for it, for the way she was feeling. A kind of nauseous hunger, a chill heat. The exhilaration of having made a decision and being about to go through with it, like the moment before jumping.

She freewheeled down Longwall Street. Her vague
dynamo-powered bicycle light followed the tortuous descent of the double yellow lines. She felt as if she was slipping down them like a counter down a snake. The headlights of a passing car, grinding round the cold steep bends, made the fog glare back at her, for a moment appearing as solid and impenetrable as a wall, then it passed, and the air glowed red with the tail lights. Where the street opened out at the bottom, spilled itself into the High, she pulled over to the steep kerb, slid off the saddle. Another car passed, crawling round the final bend, growling past her too close as she stood on the edge of the pavement, waiting to cross.

She had just come from the library, a heavy bag of books strapped to her back, the straps cutting into her shoulders. Her eyes, dry from long hours’ reading in white artificial light, were softened by the fog. Her eyelids felt damp and heavy.

Above her, in the dark, yellow lights glowed. Windows, curtained and uncurtained, illuminated the wet night air. She crossed the street at a half run, pulling the bike along beside her, bumping it up onto the far pavement. She leaned the bike on its elbow against the wall, beneath a dark-paned window, and bent to shuffle the chainlock through its spokes. There was a keypad beside the high dark wooden door. She pulled out and unrolled a softened, smudgy scrap of paper, made out the numbers in the half-light. She looked up at the keypad, pressed the cold metal buttons with a fingertip. The door clicked. She pushed it open, slid through.

When Alan had first walked into his rooms (he had two) he had been delighted with their spare shabby grandeur, the
scarred boards, the chipped marble fireplaces, the empty shelves begging to be filled and furnished with his books. He folded his two jumpers and placed them in his deep, papered bedroom drawers, he pushed his boots under the bed. He flumped down on the faded grosgrain armchair, balanced his feet briefly on the sofa. He found the kitchen, one flight down and quite bare, and decided to keep his kettle in his room and his milk on the windowsill. His study window looked out across High Street, his bedroom window peered over the college wall, giving a glimpse of lawn, metal fence, and the edge of the deerpark.

At home, Alan couldn’t cross his legs without knocking over a china figurine or displacing half a dozen cushions. His mother, never having had a daughter to dress up, dressed up her home instead, filling their pebble-dashed detached villa with frills and lace and flounces. And when Alan caught a glimpse of the outside world through the pattern of the net curtains, all he could see was another grey house staring back at him from across the street. Here, in his new rooms, Alan felt himself expand in the unforeseen space, shake off the suffocating air-freshener atmosphere of home.

That was before he had seen the other college accommodation. That Ph.D. student from Offaly had invited him round for coffee once, in first week, to a set on stair six. Alan had shrivelled with envy. The rooms were beautiful. The walls were panelled in dark wood, the ceiling vaulted. In the study, a fireplace set with intense blue art deco tiles cupped a real, flickering fire. Mullioned windows overlooked the bare rose garden.

And it wasn’t just the postgraduates. Even the freshers seemed to have better rooms than Alan’s. In the Georgian New
Buildings, where they were mostly housed, the rooms were bright, high-windowed, the walls chalk-white and smooth, patterned with reflected light from the river. You could hear the dip and splash of punts going by.

He came to resent his rooms, the other students’ good fortune, and to feel he was being deliberately excluded. He applied assiduously and unsuccessfully for the better sets in College. He suspected everyone from the Dean to the cleaning staff of conspiring to keep him out. There was one consolation, however. The building opposite his, on the far side of the High, was a Rhodes House. He saw strong, brown, athletic-looking women with unfamiliar university sweatshirts and bouncing ponytails streaming in and out during the day. In the evening, some of them left their curtains open. At the end of three years, Alan was still bitter about his accommodation, but would have been unwilling to move.

That day he had bought candles and set them on the mantelpiece, on either side of his graduation photo. He had bought a bottle of wine. Then he remembered that he had nothing but a Smarties mug to pour it into, and had to walk all the way back up to Spoils to buy wineglasses. In a flash of inspiration, he had picked up a corkscrew and paid for it with the wineglasses. He had set this equipment out on his desk, beside his computer, and totted up the money in his head. If he’d asked her out for dinner, it would have almost certainly cost more, even if she’d paid for her own.

Hands stuffed into jeans pockets, he rocked quietly back on his heels, looking out across the dark at a blonde woman bent at her desk, hair shining in the light from her anglepoise.
He heard a creak in the hallway as a floorboard moved, then a tap on his door. Alan pulled the curtain across the window, turned to open the door.

“So that’s how I see it. That’s the plan,” he concluded. Claire watched him as he leaned back into the dusty sofa, swirling the dark wine round in his glass. “One more year, eighteen months tops, and I’ll have the thesis cracked. I’ve a couple of essays ready for publication, and it won’t take long to turn the Ph.D. into my first book. It’s a tough business, these days, but I stand as good a chance as anyone.” He smiled. “Who knows. Mightn’t be that long before I get my professorship.”

“So would you want to go home? Is there a university in Belfast?”

“Yes,” he said, briskly. “Two, in fact. UU and Queen’s. I did my BA at Queen’s.” He gestured up to the mantelpiece and Claire rose and padded across the room, stepped up onto the empty hearth to look at the picture. She had taken off her shoes.

On the mantelpiece the steady candlelight illuminated the unframed, brown-cardboard backed picture of Alan. In the photograph he was solemn, gowned, squinting in bright sunshine, clutching a blue folder. Behind him was a fuzzy, unfocused redbrick gothic building.

“It looks a bit like Somerville.”

“It has a very good reputation.”

She nodded, stood looking at the picture a moment longer, then came back across the bare boards. She sat down, picked up her glass. The sharp, dark wine had taken away the shivers, left her feeling warm and hazy. She remembered she
had not eaten since her early, starchy college breakfast. She sipped again, felt the wine coat her tongue, dust the roof of her mouth. She felt, for the first time in she didn’t know how long, relaxed. The decision to come here had been hers, and she felt that she had done her bit. Whatever followed, followed, and was up to him.