Outline: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

extravagant shaggy pelts. They were insensate in the heat, motionless except for the breath faintly moving in their sides. From a distance they sometimes looked like women in fur coats who had fallen down drunk.
    ‘Do you step over a dog?’ Ryan said, hesitating. ‘Or do you walk around it?’
    He didn’t mind the heat, he said – in fact he was enjoying it. He felt like years of damp were drying out. His only regret was that it had taken him till the age of forty-one to get here, because it seemed like a really fascinating place. It was a shame the wife and kids couldn’t see it too, but he was determined not to ruin it by feeling guilty. The wife had had a weekend with her girlfriends in Paris just now, leaving him to take care of the kids alone; there was no reason he shouldn’t feel he’d earned it. And to be perfectly honest, the kids slowed you down: first thing this morning he’d walked up to the Acropolis, before the heat got too intense, and he couldn’t have done that with them in tow, could he? And even if he had, he’d have spent the whole time worrying about sunburn and dehydration, and though he might have seen the Parthenon sitting like a gold and white crumbling crown on the hilltop with the fierce pagan blue of the sky behind, he wouldn’t have felt it, as he was able to feel it this morning, airing the shaded crevices of his being. Walking up there, for some reason he’d remembered how, in the bedroom of his childhood, the sheets always smelled of mould. If you opened a cupboard in his parents’ house, as often as not there’d be water running down the back of it. When he left Tralee for Dublin, he found that all his books were stuck to the shelves when he tried to take them down. Beckett and Synge had rotted and turned to glue.
    ‘Which suggests I wasn’t much of a reader,’ he said, ‘so it’s not a detail I give out that often.’
    No, he had never been to Greece before, nor to any country where you could take the sun for granted. His wife was allergic to it in any case – to the sun, that was. Like him she’d been raised in the damp and shade and the sun brought her out in purple spots and blisters; she couldn’t cope with heat at all, which induced migraines and vomiting. They took the kids to Galway for holidays, where her parents had a house, and if they were desperate for a break from Dublin they could always go back to Tralee. It’s a case of home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in, he said. And his wife believed in all that, in the family network and Sunday lunch and children having grandparents on both sides, but if it was left to him he’d probably never cross his parents’ threshold again. Not that they did anything particularly wrong, he said, they’re nice enough people, I just don’t think it would occur to me.
    We passed a café with tables in the shade of a large awning, and the people sitting at the tables looked superior, so cool and watchful in the shadows while we toiled incomprehensibly through the heat and turmoil of the street. Ryan said he might stop and drink something; he’d come here earlier, he said, for breakfast, and it had seemed like a nice place. It wasn’t clear whether he wanted me to sit down with him or not. In fact he had phrased it so carefully that I got the impression inclusion was something he actually avoided. After that I observed him for this characteristic, and I noticed that when other people were making plans, Ryan would always say ‘I might come along later’ or ‘I might see you there’ rather than commit himself to a time and place. He would only tell you what he was doing after he’d done it. I met him by chance once in the street and noticed that his slicked-back hair was wet, so I had asked him outright where he’d been. He admitted he’d just swum at the Hilton hotel, which had a large outdoor pool, where he had posed as a guest and done forty lengths alongside Russian plutocrats and American