Mainlander
The thrilling debut from comedy writer and stand up star, Will Smith – a novel about loneliness, about not belonging and about the corroding effects of keeping secrets.‘John le Carré meets 'Middlemarch’ Independent`We're on an island. Know what that means? Surrounded by water. No way off it. So he's not really missing. He's just not where he's supposed to be.'Jersey 1987.An island wrapped in secrets.A community simmering with rivalries.A marriage on the rocks.An outsider, resented by locals.A missing boy, seen on the edge of a cliff.And a Great Storm brewing.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
Copyright © Will Smith 2015
Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images
Will Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
‘The Boy in the Bubble’ Words by Paul Simon, Music by Paul Simon and Forere Motloheloa, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ Words and Music by Paul Simon, Beginning by Paul Simon and Joseph Shabalala, Copyright © 1986 Paul Simon (BMI), International Copyright Secured, All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission. ‘Fame’ Words and Music by Michael Gore and Dean Pritchard © 1980, Reproduced by permission of EMI Affiliated Catalog Inc., London W1F 9LD. ‘Jigsaw’ Words and Music by Fish, Mark Kelly, Pete Trewavas and Steve Rothery © 1984, Reproduced by permission of Charisma Music Publishing Co Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007594269
Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007594283
Version: 2015-12-23
Contents
Hundreds of feet below where Colin Bygate sat on a moss-covered rock, the Atlantic was eating away the coast. Huge surges rolled in to fling up their spray as they hit the cliff-base, then sprang back to collide with the next incoming wave and send a line of water skyward. The sinking sun gave the brilliant white of the foam an apricot tinge, and turned the vapour trails above to threads of fire. It was one of those sharp and clear dusks peculiar to Jersey, with a brightness that belied the approaching dark. A sky that might have hung over Eden.
Since he couldn’t climb down to the waves, he dreamt of them rising up to wash the Island clean of all the impurities that so irritated him.
A vast storm, a second Flood: that was what was needed. One that would carry off the bankers, the lawyers, the accountants and all the others who looked down on him from their vertiginous social position, with their sports cars, their boats and their skiing holidays. It was his wife’s sensitivity to his low altitude, and his resentment that he should be made to care about it, that had brought him here tonight.
‘Rob and Sally have invited us to Chamonix for New Year.’
‘I don’t know if we can afford it. We’re stretched enough with the mortgage, and we’ve got to get your car through a service in February.’
‘Sally says they’ll pay.’
‘No.’
‘Why not? She’s my best friend and she can afford it.’
‘You mean he can afford it.’
‘Don’t be jealous.’
‘I’m not jealous.’
‘You’ve such a problem with money, you’re really not suited to this Island at all.’
‘That’s not true. You can’t just throw that in. Hey, come on, look at me.’
‘I’d rather not. I don’t like your face when you know you’re wrong.’
Colin wasn’t being disingenuous: he didn’t have a problem with money. He just preferred it to be earned rather than inherited, but he could live with this inequality on the grounds that people inherit plenty of things that give them an unfair advantage in life – a disarming smile, a propensity for kicking a ball, or precocious numeracy. His problem with Rob de la Haye was Rob de la Haye. He didn’t like the way the man laughed at his car.
‘Renault 5! Don’t drive it too long, you’ll grow tits!’ Rob had a Porsche 911, which, on an island that had a maximum speed limit of 40 m.p.h., on only two sections of road, Colin saw as a needless display of conspicuous wealth.
Neither did he like his attitude to the local itinerant Portuguese workers.
