Mainlander. Will Smith
banged his fist on the south-east corner in a primordial rage. Maybe, thought Colin, it was Triton, furious at the discovery that his wife had previously dated Neptune. As he sat on the headland looking down on the churn and whomp of a foaming inlet, he noticed a seagull that kept settling on a sea-besieged rock, then taking to the wing as the water heaved itself over the smooth dome. The bird would not relinquish its perch, but slowly it would be driven off. He felt like the bird: eventually he would be swept from the larger rock. His surname hadn’t helped. Bygate. ‘How long have you been in the Island?’ was a question he heard a lot, the implication being that he didn’t intrinsically belong there, that he was permanently marked as an outsider. Even the grammar of the question, with the local idiosyncrasy of ‘in the island’ rather than ‘on’, felt loaded against him. His isolation had crept into his home. The qualities for which he felt his wife had initially cherished him were now held up as examples of his shortcomings.
Her reaction to his Bond-villain crack had frustrated him. Granted, it had been said in a row, but it was the sort of flippant comment that used to puncture her dourness and make her laugh. These days, she would take such comments at face value and fling them back at him.
Her birthday, a few weeks before, had been an oasis of happiness that now felt like a mirage. Colin had wrong-footed her by telling her to pack a bag and meet him in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, an unremarkable establishment on the west coast, which overlooked a beach with notoriously stinky piles of seaweed. He’d led her down into the Tartan Bar, the walls of which were covered with swatches of random tartans and where a man with a Bontempi organ was entertaining elderly couples with an off-key rendition of ‘The Skye Boat Song’.
‘You always complain you’ve seen everything on this Island,’ he’d said.
‘In this Island.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Doesn’t matter, you’ll get it eventually. Well, you’ve certainly opened my eyes. And they hurt! This décor is unbelievable.’
‘It’s like an explosion in a Scottish tat factory.’
‘I’ll say this for it, though. We’re not likely to bump into anyone we know.’
She’d cheerily gone along with his plan for anonymity in an epicentre of naffness and was proposing a toast to a night away without bumping into friends, colleagues or relations, when a waiter had walked in and announced there was a taxi for Mr and Mrs Bygate. Half an hour later they were making love in a suite at the luxurious Hotel L’ Horizon, Emma having been wowed by his extravagance. To Colin, it felt as if they had started over, but when they’d got home the next day, the evening had assumed the status of a one-night stand that neither party chose to acknowledge. Now they seemed further apart than ever.
As the light around him started to die and the temperature made him feel numb rather than refreshed, Colin slid back from his introspection. Further down the coast stood the Marine Peilstand 3 Tower, the silhouettes of its viewing platforms jutting out like the teeth of a key. The Germans had built it as part of a battery to defend St Ouen’s Bay from an Allied invasion that never came. He stood up to restore some blood to his buttocks, then turned to the outer wall of Grosnez Castle, caught in the fading rays. Such a bizarre place. Where else in the world could you sit looking at the sea, with a Nazi fortification in front of you and a medieval castle at your back? He fought an unwelcome memory of standing there, watching the subject of his wife’s gibe about ‘admirers’ giving a talk to members of the National Trust for Jersey. He had told her he was going to the talk to learn more about the Island, and had neglected to mention it was being given by his colleague Debbie Hamon. Was his deception on a par with his wife’s? No: nothing had ever happened between him and Debbie, and nothing ever would. He could erase a possible future; Emma could not erase an actual past that, to his mind, had stained their present.
He remembered that the castle was something of a folly. Although it must have seemed impregnable when built, protected on three sides by the cliffs of the promontory on which it stood, there was no water supply, perhaps accounting for its easy capture and partial demolition around the time of the French occupation in the late fifteenth century. So its current lustre seemed more like fool’s gold. Perhaps his marriage, like this castle, had been doomed from its inception.
The granite was glowing pink and orange. On the horizon the white-yellow brightness of the sun had turned to a burning red as it edged its way towards the ceaseless billow of the sea. As the bottom curve melted into the ocean a flickering swathe of ochre widened towards him as it stretched from the point of contact between sea and star. He wanted to get closer to that beam across the water, to get lower to the horizon as the sun disappeared. He set off along a path heading inland and rounded back through the castle, bounding up the steps to the doorway that stood next to the portcullis arch.
As he picked his way through the crumbling inner walls as fast as he could in the swelling murk, he tried to remember the path he had found that went from the headland to a platform further down the cliff. He had wanted to climb down once with Emma, but she’d said it looked dangerous, she was too tired, and she wanted to get home for the EastEnders omnibus.
He saw the white railings that led to the automated lighthouse at Grosnez Point, and the route began to come back to him. As the concrete path banked right, he bent down to climb through on the left, and began crabbing his way down a steep, grassy slope as carefully and speedily as he could. The light was waning quicker than he had anticipated and he wasn’t sure he would make it. It suddenly felt imperative that he get down there before the sun had gone. If he did, everything else would be okay. As a boy, he had often set himself such meaningless superstitious tasks, perhaps because of the insecurity he had felt when his father had been taken from him – ‘If I can throw this ball up in the air and catch it ten times in a row I’ll get into Cambridge.’ Sometimes the tasks were subconscious impulses: ‘If someone as beautiful as Emma marries me, it makes me okay’; ‘If I can climb down to watch this sunset, I married the right person …’
He reached the bottom of the slope and, holding on to two chunky tufts of grass, turned to lower himself down the fifteen feet of jumbled granite that led to the platform. His toes found a tiny ridge, and he twisted round to see where his next foothold would come, but his eyes stayed ahead.
The sun was now winking over the edge of the horizon. Going, going, gone. He felt a calming chill descend in the now colourless dusk. He’d drive the long way home, round the top of the Island. Maybe stop off at St Catherine’s harbour and walk along the breakwater, watching the moon on the sea and listening to the creak of the boats.
He looked down at the ledge he’d been making for and, to his surprise, saw a figure. It was a young boy, a teenager. He stood, feet together, right on the edge of the gently undulating rock that formed the basin, looking down the sheer drop to the sea below. He leant back, his face to the sky, arms raised above his sides. The light wasn’t clear enough for Colin to be sure, but the boy seemed to be preparing to jump.
Colin was about to cry out when one of the tufts he was holding on to tore out of the loose earth and he was sliding and scrambling down the rock. The boy ran over, helping to break his slow fall as he crumpled at the base.
‘Sir?’
‘Aah! Ooh! Hello, Duncan,’ Colin said, rubbing his knees, which had been scraped on his descent. His mind was split between the pain, the general awkwardness of meeting a pupil out of school, and the specific angst that he might have interrupted a suicide attempt.
‘Just sit for a second, sir. Don’t put any weight on it.’
Colin wanted to stand, partly for the sake of his dignity, but also so that he could grab the boy if he had indeed been about to jump and was minded to make a further attempt. ‘I’m fine. I can stand – better to walk it off,’ he said, wincing as he got to his feet and hobbled round to put himself between Duncan and the drop.
‘It’s hard to spot the footholds in the dark,’ said Duncan. ‘I can go and get my bike light to help you climb up.’
Colin was confused by how normal the boy sounded. He was talking as though they’d ended up stuck