Offcomer Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 onlyto 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