Outline: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

businessmen and girls with surgically enhanced bodies. He had felt sure the pool attendants were watching him, but no one had dared interrogate him. How else were you meant to exercise, he wanted to know, in the middle of a traffic-choked city in forty degrees of heat?
    At the table he sat, like the other men, with his back to the wall so that his view was of the café and the street. I sat opposite him, and because he was all I could see I looked at him. Ryan was teaching alongside me at the summer school: from a distance he was a man of conventional sandy-coloured good looks, but close up there was something uneasy in his appearance, as though he had been put together out of unrelated elements, so that the different parts of him didn’t entirely go together. He had large white teeth which he kept always a little bared and a loose body poised somewhere between muscle and fat, but his head was small and narrow, with sparse, almost colourless hair that grew in spikes back from his forehead and colourless eyelashes that were hidden for now behind dark glasses. His eyebrows, however, were fierce and straight and black. When the waitress came he took the glasses off and I saw his eyes, two small bright blue chips in slightly reddened whites. The rims were red too, as though they were sore, or as though the sun had singed them. He asked the waitress if she had non-alcoholic beer and she leaned towards him with her hand cupped around her ear, not understanding. He picked up the menu and together they studied it.
    ‘Are any of these beers,’ he said slowly, running a tutelary finger down the list and glancing at her frequently, ‘non-alcoholic?’
    She leaned closer, scrutinising the place where his finger pointed, while his eyes fixed themselves on her face, which was young and beautiful, with long ringlets of hair on either side which she kept tucking behind her ears. Because he was pointing at something that wasn’t there her bewilderment was long-lasting, and in the end she said she would have to go and get her manager, at which point he closed the menu like a teacher finishing a lesson and said not to worry, he would just have an ordinary beer after all. This change of plan confused her further: the menu was opened again and the whole lesson repeated, and I found my attention straying to the people at other tables and out to the street, where cars passed and dogs lay in heaps of fur in the glare.
    ‘She served me this morning,’ Ryan said when the waitress had gone. ‘The same girl. They’re beautiful people, aren’t they? It’s a shame she didn’t have the beer, though. You can get that everywhere at home.’
    He said that he was seriously trying to cut down his drinking; the past year he’d basically been on a health kick, going to the gym every day and eating salad. He’d let things slide a bit when the kids were born, and anyway it was hard to be healthy in Ireland; the whole culture of the place militated against it. In his youth in Tralee he was pretty seriously overweight, like a lot of the people there, including his parents and his older brother, who still regarded chips as one of their five a day. He’d had a number of allergies too, eczema and asthma, which no doubt weren’t helped by the family diet. As a child at school they’d had to wear shorts with knee-high woollen socks, and the socks would adhere horribly to his eczema. He still remembered peeling them off at bedtime and half the skin of his legs coming off with them. These days, of course, you’d rush your child off to a dermatologist or a homeopath, but then you were just left to get on with it. When he had breathing difficulties, his parents would put him out to sit in the car. As for the weight, he said, you rarely saw yourself with your clothes off, or anyone else without theirs for that matter. He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it laboured in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs