Outline: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing. As a teenager he was self-conscious and sedentary and avoided any physical exposure of himself. But then he spent a year in America, on a writing programme there, and had discovered that by effort of will he could make himself look completely different. There was a pool and a gym on campus, and food he had never even heard of – sprouts and wholegrains and soya – in the cafeteria; and not only that, he was surrounded by people for whom the notion of self-transformation was an article of faith. He picked it up almost overnight, the whole concept: he could decide how he wanted to be and then be it. There was no pre-ordination; that sense of the self as a destiny and a doom that had hung like a pall over his whole life could stay, he now realised, behind him in Ireland. On his first visit to the gym he saw a beautiful girl exercising on a machine while at the same time reading from a large book of philosophy that lay open on a stand in front of her, and he could hardly believe his own eyes. He discovered that all the machines in that gym had bookstands. This machine was called a step machine, and it simulated the action of walking upstairs: from then on he always used it, and always with a book open in front of him, for the image of that girl – who to his not inconsiderable disappointment he never saw again – had fixed itself in his head. Over the course of the year he must have ascended miles’ worth of stairs while remaining in one place, and that was the image he had internalised, not just of the girl but of the imaginary staircase itself, and of himself forever climbing it with a book dangled just in front of him like a carrot in front of a donkey. Climbing that staircase was the work he had to do to separate himself from the place from which he had come.
    It was more than just a stroke of luck, he said, that he happened to go to America: it was the defining episode of his life, and when he thought about what he would have been and what he would have done had that episode not occurred it frightened him in a way. It was his English tutor at college who told him about the writing programme and encouraged him to apply. By the time the letter came college was over and he was back in Tralee, living in his parents’ house and working at a chicken-processing plant, and having an affair with a woman much older than himself who had two kids he didn’t doubt she’d got him lined up to play father to. The letter said that he’d been offered a scholarship, on the basis of the writing sample he’d submitted, with a paid second year to follow if he wanted to earn himself a teaching qualification. Forty-eight hours later he was gone, taking a few books and the clothes he stood up in, on an airplane and leaving the British Isles for the first time in his life, and without a clue really where he was going, except that sitting above the clouds it appeared to be heaven.
    In fact it so happened, he said, that his older brother left for America at more or less the same time. He and his brother never had all that much to say to each other, and at the time he was barely aware of Kevin’s plans, but thinking about it now it was quite a coincidence, except that Kevin hadn’t had a stroke of luck to send him on his way. Instead he’d joined the US Marines, and probably at much the same time as Ryan was treading the step machine, Kevin was also shedding the flab of Tralee at boot camp. For all Ryan knew he might have been down the road, though America is a big place and it was unlikely. And of course the job involves a lot of travel, Ryan said, with apparent sincerity. By a further coincidence both brothers returned to Ireland three years later and met in their parents’ sitting room, both of them now fit and lean; Ryan with a teaching qualification, a book contract and a ballet-dancer girlfriend, and Kevin with a grotesquely