Mainlander

How on earth could he ask subtly if the boy had intended to jump off the cliff? That was the sort of question you either asked directly or not at all. And if you were going to ask it, you had to ask it at the relevant moment. To ask afterwards implied you didn’t really care, but simply wanted your curiosity satisfied. Colin needed to know that, if the boy had been building up to a jump, it had been a flash of madness from which he had moved on.

He manoeuvred the shopping trolley on to the pavement, deciding he would assess the boy’s mood in class.

‘He’s looking thin, don’t you think? Probably hasn’t had breakfast!’ The cat, Marmalade, belonged to the Ozoufs, a middle-aged couple in the ground-floor flat. Mrs Le Boutillier was often coaxing it upstairs for a snooze on her lap in exchange for some raw chicken, a source of tension with the cat’s owners. Colin tried to stay out of it. ‘You get on, my dear, I’ll stay and have a chat with my second favourite boy in the block. Poor thing, they don’t feed him enough.’ Mrs Le Boutillier started tickling the cat under the chin as he stretched his paws in front of her. ‘I’ll bring back some bacon, my furry love.’

‘Have a good day, and I’ll pop in later to fix the light, promise.’ Colin took the get-out. On the occasions he’d walked with her to the market, what would have been ten minutes on his own or twenty with Emma had taken forty. Mrs Le Boutillier, who would need to pause to get her breath, or put on or take off her hat or her coat, and stow or retrieve it from her shopping trolley, would treat the walk as a guided tour, interspersing it with lengthy anecdotes of frankly unstartling local history. All was delivered in the peculiar flat vowels and nasal drone of the indigenous Jersey-French patois that to Colin rendered the accent bizarrely akin to South African.

‘This Le Brun’s here used to be a haberdasher’s back in the fifties … The Midland Bank where your wife works used to be the post office … Used to see some of the postmen coming back from their rounds in the east of the Island, with fresh lobsters from the pots. This was before we started getting overrun with grockles, what we call tourists … Of course, back then there was a train that ran from Gorey to Corbière …’

He normally walked to school from the flat, along the main shopping precinct of King Street, with its mix of local outlets, the odd mainland chain, such as Woolworths, and tourist tat shops peddling ‘Damn Seagulls’ baseball caps streaked with fake guano. It was empty enough at that time of the morning for him to hit a long, pounding stride, unlike during the tourist season when aimless milling led to frustrating stop-start manoeuvres. He liked to walk with purpose; Emma liked to mooch. From King Street he would make his way to the bottom gates of the school grounds and up alongside Conqueror’s Lawn on a wooded path leading to the top of Mont Millais, where Normandy College presided over St Helier, like the castle of a local baron. He enjoyed the walk – it cleared his mind for the day. Today, though, he was now running slightly late, thanks to Mrs Le Boutillier, and this, coupled with the hollow dread of needing to know that Duncan was okay, meant that he drove.

As he sat in the glacially paced traffic he remembered the other reason he usually chose to walk: it was quicker. The Island had the world’s highest number of cars per head of population. This was due to a bus service that was patchy in its reach and erratic in its timetable, and also a culture of flaunting, stoked by the mainly illusory belief that the inhabitants basked in a near-Mediterranean climate, which justified the ownership of multiple cabriolets. Colin was stuck in Hill Street, known locally as the Street of Forty Thieves, although he was sure the brass plates of law firms numbered higher than that. He looked around. His car was the cheapest, boxed in by BMWs, Mercedes, the odd Porsche, and other pointlessly overpowered makes. Even the less exclusive vehicles, the Fords, the Peugeots, the Renaults, were models with that extra i to the name, which the owner hoped would suggest wealth and sexual potency. It was a sunny day, bright rather than warm, but the air was fresh so windows were open, hoods were down, sunglasses were on, music was blaring. A man next to him in red-rimmed glasses was beating time on the roof of his Mazda RX-7 as he sang along loudly to ‘Living in a Box’. Colin was certain that the man’s abode was considerably more opulent than a box. He wound up his window and opted for Today.

A sixty-four-year-old man has been shot dead in front of his family in Belfast …

He felt relief when he lost the signal as he crawled through the short tunnel that went under Mount Bingham and the Fort Regent Leisure Centre, which billowed on top of it, like a huge white tent. The tunnel cut off a loop round the harbour and supposedly shortened the journey. It didn’t seem that way this morning. He snapped The Joshua Tree into the stereo halfway through ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.

He’d thought he had. Now he wasn’t so sure. He rewound the track, as though it would bring him clarity. The traffic suddenly freed up. He kept rewinding and listening as he made his way up the hill to the school. Bono’s full-throated determination to spin disappointment into hope and joy chimed with his own feelings of melancholy. He loved how Adam Clayton’s bass just kept walking as the Edge’s guitars flicked ever upwards like the corners of a smile, while Larry Mullen Jr’s drums clattered away, always coming down with a hammer blow at the end of each line. As he neared the school he let the album run into ‘With or Without You’, and he felt a surge of doubt and regret. As he parked, all optimism faded as he remembered the events of the night before. A pupil poised to jump off the edge of a cliff, a husband and wife wrangling over a marriage sliding away.

He switched off the engine and the music, and heard a tap on his window. He turned to see Debbie’s impish face smiling at him with a heart-stopping openness. He wound down the window as casually as he could, which took some doing – the handle always stiffened on the second forty-five degrees of the turn. The effort involved always left him feeling as if he was trying to crank-start a car in a silent movie.

‘You could just open the door,’ she said teasingly. ‘I mean, you are getting out, aren’t you?’

‘Sorry, not thinking straight. Bit out of it this morning.’

‘Oh, no, not coming down with something, are you?’

‘No, no, just a bit tired. I slept badly.’ As he said this, he realised she might construe this as a confession of marital discord, which would have felt disloyal to Emma, or a night of monogamous sex, which bizarrely would have felt disloyal to Debbie. She ignored or failed to pick up on either possibility.

‘So, you coming? Or are you going to leave me feeling like I’m taking your order at a drive-in?’

‘No, yes, coming …’ He rewound the window as quickly as he could, then tried to get out with his seatbelt still done up. Debbie shook her head. He opened the door. ‘I meant to do that,’ he said, with comic severity. ‘It’s important to test the mechanism.’

‘Hurry up, you clown.’

The seatbelt removed, he got out, grabbed his ever-present brown moleskin jacket and swung it on as he nudged the door shut with his left knee. He was on a continual lookout for a new jacket, but the Island shops had a limited range and he was an unusual size, tall and narrow. In this jacket, what he gained in length he gained also in width, leaving it hanging off his shoulders.

Emma had offered to have a jacket made for him by Hamptonne’s, the local bespoke tailor, but he had baulked at the price. Debbie had suggested she take it to her uncle, who ran an alterations service, but he clung to a stubborn and no doubt groundless paranoia that such meddling might make things worse and force him to come to school underdressed in a V-neck sweater. Beneath all of this he felt a mild annoyance that the women felt he couldn’t dress himself, which Debbie was presently reinforcing as she reached up to unfurl his collar.

‘You don’t normally drive.’

‘I was running late.’

‘Should have taken your time – you might have missed Le Brocq’s assembly.’

‘Oh, God, is it him today?’ The headmaster was giving one of his occasional addresses.

‘You should be happy, given you need to catch up on sleep.’

They made for an odd sight as they went in together, he with his lolloping gait, she pattering along beside him, sometimes turning to walk sideways with puppyish enthusiasm, before the presence and attention of colleagues and pupils demanded a more professional bearing.

The youngest members of staff, their friendship had started on his first day at the school. The austerity of the majority of his new colleagues and the body odour of his overweight head of department meant he had bolted from the staffroom into the playgrounds and corridors to get his bearings. Debbie had found him wandering through the main building, wondering at the names on the doors of the classrooms.

‘It’s pronounced “On-ke-teel”,’ she’d said, sidling up to him. ‘As in François Anquetil, who left here aged eighteen, and died on his nineteenth birthday at Passchendaele. All these old rooms are named after prominent former teachers and pupils.’

‘That would be the room to teach war poetry in, then. I’m Colin Bygate, the new English teacher.’

‘I’m Debbie Hamon, history. If only we had the choice of classrooms! We’re stuck in rooms with romantic names like A1 and A2. Do you want the tour of our rather uninspiring arts block?’

‘Mr Le Brocq already took me round, but not much went in.’

‘He does have that effect. Come on, I can tell you who to avoid sitting next to in the staffroom too.’

She had been his guide round the school, and latterly his guide round the Island. He had been surprised and confused at his first wedding anniversary dinner when Emma had told him she didn’t want them to turn into one of those insufferable couples who did everything together, and that it would be healthy occasionally to do different things at weekends. This had left him at several loose ends. Emma took herself off to try out a variety of short-lived hobbies, such as yoga (‘boring’), embroidery (‘full of old farts’), and ballroom dancing (‘too many creepy men’). She’d laughed when Colin had suggested he could come to the dance lessons to offer a better class of partner.

‘I love you, darling, but you’re not a dancer.’

‘But I’d learn. That’s the point.’

‘No. I already have a base level and you’d take ages to get up to that. Besides, the point is we’re supposed to have our own things.’

Her ‘own things’ had ended up as shopping and lunching, usually with Sally. His ‘thing’ had started as exploring places with intriguing names. One day while he was ambling down to Wolf’s Caves he’d bumped into Debbie giving a talk about the eighteenth-century smugglers who’d used them. He’d tagged along, and after that had gone along to her monthly Sunday history walks. Gradually they began meeting before and hanging out after. He realised after a while that he’d only ever told Emma that he was going to history talks, omitting to mention Debbie’s presence. He told himself this was an innocent oversight, in no way to be taken as an admission of anything untoward, and told her casually that Debbie, whom he worked with, was one of the key organisers. Emma remembered her from the year below her at school.

‘Oh, my God, Velma?’

‘Debbie.’

‘Short, with glasses?’

‘Shortish.’

‘I’m not saying she’s a dwarf, Colin, I’m saying she’s a short girl with glasses. That’s why we used to call her Velma, from Scooby-Doo.’

‘I think the kids do too, although it won’t last long. She wears contacts now.’

‘So she’s still banging on about local history?’

‘That’s a bit harsh. I find it quite interesting. It’s very layered, the Island – Neolithic sites, fortifications from the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, German bunkers from the Second World War.’

‘Stop! You’re sending me into a coma.’

‘You don’t mind us being friends, though?’

‘God, no, she could do with a few.’

His friendship with Debbie had continued to bloom, until he’d been plunged into a tailspin of guilt and panic when Emma had spotted her at a school social function at the end of the last summer term.

‘Velma’s sexed herself up a bit. Trying to look more like Daphne.’