THE ISLAND
R.J. Price
To visit Richard's author page, please click here.
This is a novel about the end of the world. Or, at least, somebody thinks it is the end of the world. And it's the story of how one man tries to deal with it, and with a very querulous little girl, and with his wife, and his past, and his future too (if there is one) on a desperate drive across London.
Praise for The Island
‘Understated yet devastating, controlled yet unpredictable – The Island is a story of rare qualities that many writers aim for and few achieve. Read it – it’ll be one of the most beautiful nightmares you’ll ever have.’ Toby Litt
'Richard Price explores the intersecting worlds of children and adults with a wild joy and sadness reminiscent of Salinger. Here Price’s lyric gifts are refined further towards the quintessence. A well-nigh perfect short novel.'
Bill Broady, author of Swimmer and Eternity is Temporary
About R.J. Price
Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Renfrewshire, southwest of Glasgow. He was educated at Napier College, Edinburgh, where he studied journalism, and at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he studied English and Librarianship. He has a PhD on the works of twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn. An acclaimed poet, his poetry collections include Lucky Day, shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry prize, and Rays, a collection of love poems. His linked short stories, A Boy in Summer, revisit the half-rural half-urban communities of his childhood. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London.
To listen to an interview with Richard for Radio Teesdale, click here.
An extract from The Island
When he got to the public phone the grey display flickered Emergency only.
He returned to the café.
Where was Jas?
Five minutes and where was Jas?
Just at the condiments stand.
She came back with some capsules of creamer and a pair of plastic stirrers. She added the creamer to her milk with some alacrity, vigorously stirring it with one of the tiny oars in each of her hands. A human blender, Gray thought.
‘Do you want me to get you some? It’s free, Dad.’
‘It’s not really milk, you know. Or cream.’
‘It’s free! Do you want me to get you some as well?’
‘You don’t have that stuff with milk!’
‘It’s fine! It’s not delicious!’
‘I don’t want any.’
‘It’s fine!’
‘I’m fine!’
‘Try some! They’ve got packets of sugar, too.’
She spread a dozen or so packets of sugar across the table and spilt a little opened creamer. A very white globule rested on Gray’s silver mobile phone, which he noticed had been moved to Jas’s side of the table.
Gray began to feel self-conscious, embarrassed.
The thin man looked across at them with a look that seemed to say, ‘A joke’s a joke.’
Gray also noticed a couple he had not noticed before. They were sitting together on a bench seat. They were wearing matching pink and white tops whose legends shared the single phrase between them: “Neither One Thing…” “…Nor The Other.”
They looked in Gray’s direction and he thought they had an expression that said, ‘We both feel a bit let down by that sort of behaviour.’
‘You read too much into things,’ Linda would say to him, gently, whenever he worried aloud.
‘It is a kind of intelligence,’ he’d once replied.
‘Come on, Jas, finish up now.’
Jas drank up. He picked up his phone and they moved off. He noticed a surveillance camera swivel in their direction.
Gray thought they’d better think about a snack for car rations. He let Jas command a trolley and follow her gaze into the slopes of organised fruit. Red, green, yellow: he liked the idealism of the simple colours, internet-perfect. As an information professional he also had no faith in them.
‘You read too much into everything,’ Linda would have said again. She’d have smiled with a smile they shared between them, just between them. Linda and Gray, Linda and Gray, Gray and Linda. She’d have bitten into a Golden Delicious, or a Cox’s Pippin.
Star-fruit, Gray thought, as they moved out of the section.
Star-fruit, star-fish, and the human sign of a star: stylisation a way of being, the simplified life. He stretched his arms high and splayed his legs out. Jas didn’t see him, he couldn’t hold this pose for ever. He relaxed, caught up with her.
They found themselves among jams. Some of the jars had labels Gray had not seen since his childhood. Jas wanted to put a damson jar into her trolley but he wasn’t in the mood for memory.
‘There’s bound to be a place for just sandwiches.’
As he said this a fire alarm began to sound, in electronic pulses. Most shoppers stopped what they were doing and looked around to see what it meant. Gray did the same, but took Jas’s hand. After just a few seconds a woman’s voice crackled, soared and swooped on a tannoy.
‘This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Will you please leave your shopping and go calmly to Assembly Point – to Assembly Point.’ She stopped and then appeared to find a text from which to read. ‘Will you please leave your shopping and go calmly to Assembly Point B, positioned at the rear of the car park, where our fire marshals will meet you.’
Gray and Jas followed the half-disgruntled, half-excited crowd out of one of the fire-exits. Some shoppers brought their trolleys with them and Gray hoped Jas wouldn’t see there were free 3-D spectacles with the family packs of Coco-Pops. One lens red, one lens green: the representation of distance.
‘Come on, Jas, back to the car.’
The roundabout was congested with cars exiting from the supermarket car park. Father and daughter walked easily within the standstill. Gray thought how the armour and technology of modern warfare was its greatest weakness, its own weight and sophistication so easily turned against itself: disabled, exploded or pointed back at its suddenly appalled directing powers.
They found their way back to the terrace of ex-shops they had passed on the way to the supermarket. Some windows were covered with a wash of white paint, but newspapers seemed the best concealers.
As the car park came into view Gray could see that one of the cars shielding the yellow car from view had gone. When they got closer Jas cried out, ‘Dad, we’ve got a stripe!’ Gray could see that someone had taken a rock, or perhaps a key, and scratched a near-perfect line along one side.
‘Interesting,’ he said, finding himself imitating his elder brother’s methodical way of handling the unexpected. He should hardly be feeling emotional about damage to a car that many, he thought, might judge did not precisely belong to him. With this sense of annoyance, hidden with a borrowing from Andrew’s reserve, he now had to recognise that he’d grown possessive about the little car.
‘Maybe it’s a go-faster stripe,’ he said, philosophically. ‘You know, like those on track-suits.’
We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of The Island.
