The Outsider

by Emily Hourican

Genres: General Fiction; Marriage & Divorce; Siblings; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'A brilliant blend of sweeping satisfying family drama with a tense undercurrent of psychological thriller that hooks on and doesn't let go until [Hourican] delivers her last devastating page' Sunday Independent ' The Outsider is everything you could want from high-end commercial fiction - it's sharp, compelling, and full of keenly observed truths about human behaviour. Emily Hourican has always been an insightful, astute writer but this may be her best novel yet.' Louise O'Neill Two very different families ... One is loud, eccentric, rich and confident. The other is less sure of their place in life. On holidays in Portugal, a near-drowning brings the ten-year-old daughters, Jamie and Sarah, together and a friendship is formed. As the bond between the girls grows deeper, so too do the ties between their families and an unsettling closeness develops between two of the adults. Then, as Jamie begins to feel suffocated by the intensity of Sarah's friendship, cracks begin to show. What will it take to shatter the façade of friendship? The affair? The obsessive crush? And which family will be left whole? The Outsider is the compelling and unforgettable story of the complexity of friendship, marriage, hidden passions and teenage desire.

Release date: June 6, 2019

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 400

Sample

Algarve, Portugal, August 1998

Miriam watched the hat from behind her sunglasses, looking down along the length of her body with its covering of streaky tan and past the tips of her coral-painted toenails to keep it in sight. Blue and white, with a flap at the back to keep the sun from Sarah’s neck, it bobbed out there in the distance.

The hat moved slowly, around the edges of the pool. Sarah was playing safely, just as she had been told to.

Miriam lay back, thinking about the time when she would be actually tanned and could let the fake stuff fade away to nothing. She imagined the new skin that would emerge, smooth, glowing, the golden sheen that some of her friends came back with year after year from their trips to Spain, to Italy, France. Miriam and Paul hadn’t been away in years, not since Sarah, nearly twelve now, had been born.

‘Not this year,’ Paul always said, when she suggested it was time to take Sarah farther than Wexford or Cork. ‘We can’t manage it this year. Maybe next.’ He said it so often that Miriam had been surprised to get a different answer. A tentative ‘maybe’ that she had quickly turned into a ‘yes’ by finding them a deal, many deals. Deals on flights, on their hotel, the transfers, but only if ‘we do it now’.

And so they had two weeks there, beside the pool, a blank blue surface surrounded by pale green deckchairs, with tables discreetly positioned for drinks the hotel hoped they would buy to compensate for the deal they were on. Beyond the pool, the deeper, more changeable blue of the Atlantic beckoned and repelled at once.

Miriam squinted down her legs again, looking for the blue and white hat. There it was, still close to the edge in the shallow bit.

She felt hot and prickly and knew she was burning, but she wanted that tan so badly. The hat was now on the other side of pool and Miriam shifted slightly on her recliner to keep it in view. She wished Paul would come and take over the watching, but he had gone to talk to someone about golf; apparently if you started at the crack of dawn and promised to be finished by the time the big groups arrived there was a better rate.

Sarah could swim – Miriam had made sure of that, taking her for lessons every Thursday in the local pool, even though she always came away with a headache from the noise: a build-up of children shouting and splashing, instructors yelling, hemmed in by the glass roof and thrust back by the tiered concrete seats so that it concentrated into a violent ball. But her daughter wasn’t confident in the water – wasn’t confident anywhere – and Miriam knew well that she was liable to panic if out of her depth. Panic and flail and possibly sink, rather than staying calm and putting into practice what she had learned.

And so she watched as the little hat bobbed beyond her. But she observed the people around her too, comparing herself, her family, against them.

Most seemed to be English or German but she had heard one or two Irish voices. Paul had nudged her at breakfast that morning, jerking his head towards the centre of the room where a group sat in a beam of early-morning sunlight.

‘Luke, for god’s sake, stop it,’ the woman snapped in a voice that was surprisingly deep, with an unmistakably Irish accent. She seemed to make no attempt to lower her voice and Miriam wondered was she talking to her husband or to one of the four teenage boys who sat around her. None of them responded, so it was impossible to tell. There was a girl too, Miriam saw. About Sarah’s age, head bent over a bowl of exotic fruit, the same kinds – pineapple, melon, grapes – that Sarah was eating.

‘Step on it,’ the woman said then, followed by something snappish about eggs. She had long dark hair and long brown legs and was wearing a frayed and faded denim skirt and a black vest top. She had pushed her chair back from the table and put one of her feet on the bottom rung of the chair beside her so that she sat at an angle to the table.

‘Foxrock-Fantastic,’ muttered Paul, leaning in to her. But Miriam didn’t think he was right.

‘Uh-huh,’ she muttered back. ‘West. Came up to Dublin to do nursing. Met a rich doctor, married him and never went home.’

It was a game they played – making up stories about the people they saw around them – to pass the time, but also, Miriam knew of herself and suspected of Paul, to make themselves feel better. Keep other people in their places; places Paul and Miriam allocated them, that were small and not too threatening.

The woman looked like the kind Miriam might need to work hard at making up stories about. There was something assured and definite in the way she moved and spoke that made Miriam feel that she herself wavered; a carefree indifference in that frayed denim skirt that made Miriam look at her own neatly ironed sundress without the satisfaction with which she had put it on. She wondered had the woman really just thrown on whatever clothes she had first seen, or had she worked for that impression, trying on and discarding other combinations? Miriam wished she knew the answer. It mattered to her.

She leaned in towards Paul. ‘Not a doctor. A lawyer. Barrister. The pompous kind.’

Sarah stayed at the edges of the pool as she’d been told, dipping in and out of patches of shade, even though she had her hat on, keeping obediently away from the sparkling centre where the water was deep and the sun shone hot and bright. Where she was, the water slapped the blue-tiled sides in greeting, high-five after high-five. She crept one hand over the other, inching along through the water’s thin resistance. She could swim, but she didn’t dare, not there, where everyone else seemed to cut through the blueness as if they belonged in it, shouting, splashing, jumping.

One girl was even turning handstands in the water, throwing herself down again and again, bottom up like a duck, then legs emerging straight up like two giant fingers held aloft, before she flipped over and righted herself, swooping back up to the surface with her eyes shut and water streaming from her face.

Sarah thought her name must be Jenny – she had heard a woman, her mother, shouting something at her at breakfast, something loud, but much less cross than you would expect from the loudness. ‘Step on it,’ the mother had called at her, down a table where everyone except the two of them had been boy or man; brothers and father, Sarah supposed. ‘I didn’t come all the way to Portugal to sit and watch people eating fried eggs.’

‘I’m eating fruit,’ the girl had said, not seeming to mind the shouting.

‘I didn’t mean you,’ the mother said. ‘I meant all these other people.’ She gestured around the room, didn’t seem to care who could see or hear her. ‘Come on, hurry up.’

‘Horrible fried eggs,’ one of the brothers said then. ‘Greasy and flat. No yolk.’

‘That’s the way they make them here,’ the father had said. ‘Be glad you get anything at all.’ He had shaken his newspaper as he said it, angry or joking, Sarah couldn’t tell.

She had been fascinated. Her own parents, when they spoke to each other in places like restaurants, did it in a whisper. They leaned close in, heads nearly touching, and said things quietly to each other. Sometimes they gestured with a shoulder or discreet inclination of chin or roll of eyes towards another table, and they often laughed at whatever it was the other had said, in a way that Sarah could see was a bit mean.

‘Never you mind,’ they said when she asked what they were talking about. As if she were too young, too little a part of them, to be told.

As she watched, the girl – Jenny? – pulled herself out of the pool in one go. She was wearing a navy two-piece, a bikini. Sarah knew her mother would never have let her wear such a thing. Even though really it was only a top and shorts, her mother would say it wasn’t suitable for a girl of eleven.

The girl had long messy blonde hair that fell down past her shoulders, nothing like Sarah’s neat square bob. The girl’s hair was thick and curly, with something of the glow of gold to it. It made Sarah think of the story of the Miller’s Daughter, only in reverse, as though the captive had gone backwards in her fear and confusion – the kind of thing Sarah could imagine herself doing – and spun gold into supple, shining straw.

The girl went to the diving board and Sarah watched as she dived off. It wasn’t that her dive was good – it wasn’t much of a dive, more a tumble – but that she did it without hesitation, and came up gasping but smiling, brushing water impatiently off her face with both hands. Sarah would have been terrified.

Sarah set off again, hand over hand, around the edge, wondering if they would go to the beach that day, the beach that could be seen from the end of the terrace: a line of brown that was the sand, then a thicker line of deep, sparkling blue. They hadn’t the day before – her parents had kept saying ‘later’ until finally they said it was too late, that they would go tomorrow, and wasn’t Sarah happy with the pool? She was, but it was boring, with no one to play with. Her mother just wanted to sit and ‘get a tan’, and her father spent all his time playing golf or fussing about when to play. At least at the beach, Sarah thought, there would be waves to jump over and sand to build into castles with moats, stones and shells to collect, not this going round and round the edges of a pool.

The shallow bit was full of babies and she hated the way their nappies filled up with water and hung soggy around their knees. And she felt that people stared at her in the shallows, wondering why she was there, why she wasn’t in the middle, being brilliant and diving for goggles and plastic wristbands like the girl in the bikini.

The pool filled up as more and more people finished eating and came outside. There were rubber rings and armbands and one boy with a blow-up crocodile big enough that he could lie right across it. They shouted and laughed and called to each other and in between the grown-ups swam up and down, some slowly with their heads far out of the water like turtles looking for land, Sarah thought, others fast, doing fancy crawls and seeming annoyed when one of the kids got in their way. Others again sat around the edges with their feet dangling in the water, chatting and swinging their legs. There were so many of them now that she couldn’t drag herself around the edge any longer because the interruptions to her hand-over-hand were too frequent.

The blue and white hat was still making its slow way around the pool and Miriam felt briefly guilty that she wasn’t the kind of mother who invented loud, exciting games, with water and stones and five different buckets. Probably the mother from breakfast was. Or at least the type to kick a ball or organise rounders. But it was so hard with just one – no whirling centrifugal excitement that could build and sweep everyone along. Just Sarah saying ‘OK’ quietly to whatever Miriam suggested.

The child preferred playing alone, Miriam told herself, making little families out of bits of sticks or leaves that she collected: a father, mother, daughter and siblings; always siblings. Sometimes a sister, more often brothers, giving them names and personalities. Often, she sucked the middle two fingers of her left hand, a habit left over from early childhood, between whispering her little plots and narratives, so that she looked much younger than she was.

Miriam went back to thinking about the things she’d seen in the market the day before. The heavy linen tablecloths embroidered in bright thread with gorgeous swirling patterns and knots of colour, the bold ceramic dishes in yellow and blue and orange. How she had longed to buy them, but Paul had said no, that they could barely afford the hotel and certainly couldn’t be going around buying plates and bowls, and, anyway, how would they get them home?

The hat was closer now and Miriam watched as it rose out of the water. She sat up to wave to Sarah, call her over to put a T-shirt on – the girl was so pale, ‘milk-bottle white’, as Paul said – then realised that it was the wrong hat. It wasn’t Sarah under the stripes, but a different girl, younger, dark-haired where Sarah was light, who hauled herself out of the pool even as Miriam watched and ran over to a woman with a baby on her lap and an untidy bag at her feet. Where was Sarah? Miriam scanned the water rapidly, wondering how long had she had the wrong hat in sight.

Only as she flicked her eyes from one side to the other did she realise how crowded the pool had become since she had been lying, sun-drugged, on the recliner. When Sarah had gone in, it had been an expanse of smooth blue broken by occasional groups. Now, it boiled, frantic with people. Swimming, laughing, splashing, shrieking, diving in and out of the water, crossing Miriam’s line of vision, shifting perpetually in front of her so that she saw only in snatches, not clearly, like trying to read a page that had been shredded. Not one of them was her daughter. Sarah’s pale shoulders, the pink swimsuit and the right blue and white hat were nowhere. Knowing she was looking too fast, not properly, eyes skipping from group to group, Miriam forced herself to slow down, go back, scan carefully.

Nothing. She went back again, even slower, checking sizes, shapes, colours for the familiar, the correct, form: No. No. No.

At what point, she wondered, already standing up, would she start to scream? To run and wave her arms and shout ‘My daughter!’ ‘My daughter!’ She began to walk, but slowly still, pulling against the frantic thump of her heart that urged her to go faster, ready to stop and smile once she caught sight of Sarah’s earnest little face, creased into the expression of wary concentration the child brought to everything she did.

She saw the lifeguard, the only one who seemed to be on duty, at the farthest end of the pool, chatting – of course – to a girl in a high-cut hot-pink bikini. Around them stood more young men, also laughing, stomachs taut, shoulders back. In the pool, a kid with a blow-up crocodile was trying to stand up on it and wobbling madly. Beside him, two men threw a gaily striped ball back and forth between them.

Not one of them would have noticed if her daughter had slipped quietly below that boiling surface. Sarah, Miriam knew, would not make a fuss. Would not thrash and scream, would be too embarrassed to draw attention to herself even if she needed that attention to stay alive. That small and shuttered face would simply dwindle, falling further and deeper, fading into the empty wet.

Miriam started to run.

Sarah squinted upwards, even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to look at the sun in case it burned her eyes. She wanted to see if the sky was still entirely blue – everyone went on about how great that was, but Sarah found the never-ending blueness of it made her upset. Imagine if everything was reversed suddenly and you had to live there, she thought. There would be nowhere to hide, no bit of anything – no cloud, no mist or fog – to pull around yourself. It was like a desert, where the stretched-out yellow of sand became blue, and just as pitiless. She wanted to get out of the pool, go to her mother, but knew that there was nothing to do there either. She had already finished the three books she’d been allowed to bring with her.

‘I’ll swim underwater to the steps,’ she decided, ‘then I’ll get out.’ She needed to earn her release from the pool, where she knew she should be enjoying herself but wasn’t. If she managed to make it to the steps, it would be OK to go and sit beside her mother for a while. Then maybe it would soon be dinnertime.

She pulled her goggles over her eyes, even though they were loose and let in water, and slipped under the surface. The knocking-out of noise was wonderful. It wasn’t gone completely, but it slid into a dim background boom that was more like waves crashing on a beach than the sharp screaming and shouting when her head was up above the surface. She ducked up and down a few more times, liking the contrast: sharp, dim, sharp, dim, then set off, avoiding the thrashing legs around her, weaving through columns of bubbles, tumbled white and frothy. Down here, the pool was cool and mysterious. A place where things moved at different speeds, where something strange might approach, then swerve away, as if she had a protective force-field around her.

Sarah swam, trying to kick her feet like a dolphin tail, neat and together, in case that propelled her faster, more smoothly, along.

She blinked at the water that snuck in around the not-tight-enough edges of her goggles, then closed one eye as that side filled nearly completely.

She reached the steps, shiny metal in all that blue, with her lungs bursting, and had reached a hand for the lowest rung, when someone jumped between her and it and spun her around, and when they were gone and she reached out again, she found she didn’t know where the rail was that she could grip onto and pull herself up. Her goggles were so fogged and filled with water that no metallic gleam came to her through them. She spun again in case she saw something that would tell her what to do but there was nothing, only deeper fog. Around her on every side were legs and bottoms in togs, a cage of thrashing limbs, but she couldn’t see the edge of the pool, the place where water might end and the air she needed could be found. She turned more frantically now, trying to understand where was up and where was down and her heart was throbbing too big and too slow inside her as if there wasn’t room for it and it must burst; her lungs were hurting, searching through the little air they had for something they could use and there was nothing, just the stale bits already squeezed of oxygen and used up.

She reached out and grabbed at a leg, an ankle, belonging to one of the people sitting on the edge. Behind the leg, so that the heel drummed against it, was the hard end-wall of the pool but Sarah no longer knew what to do to make that something she could use. The wall was there, but she didn’t understand how to reach it, or what to do if she did. She was lost, down there in the sly blue where bodies thrust themselves in front and behind her without warning. She couldn’t tell which way she was meant to go. Where was up? How could she get to it? The water held her as surely as if it were made of a million tiny transparent hands.

The owner of the leg kicked her off and she grabbed again, desperate now, knowing that she didn’t have time, couldn’t afford the shame that stopped her from asking things of strangers, not even a biscuit of a friend’s mother in a strange house. Knowing that if someone didn’t solve the spinning in her head and pluck her up, then she would drift slowly down and down, like a plaster come unstuck from a grazed knee.

Another hard kick of the leg and she was shaken loose and this time she was falling to where the pool floor sloped towards the deepest middle, where even the boom from above was more silent and the thrashing and swishing of water was less. Where it was smoother and thicker and more difficult to pull against and so she didn’t try, just let herself fall as the water wanted her to fall, slowly, quietly, bumbling along the bottom into the drifting well of the deepest point.

And then a hand grabbed at her, missed, grabbed again and hooked around the shoulder of her swimsuit and pulled. Weightless still, she rose upwards as surely as she had fallen downwards and then her head broke the surface and she gulped in air desperately, all the panic that had melted away as she fell to the bottom rushing back over her so that she made a ragged gasping sound that was fear as much as the need for air. She was tugged towards the side so that she could hook an arm over the pool edge, but she couldn’t let go the hand that had grabbed her, squeezing it so hard the owner flinched and pulled away, then scrabbled at her goggles, tearing them from her eyes as if they were connected to the pool bottom and might try to drag her down again.

‘You don’t need to squeeze my hand off.’ It was the girl from breakfast, from the diving board, the girl in the navy bikini. Sarah didn’t understand what she was saying because of course there was a need. She looked around, for her mother, for someone to whom she could cry and shudder and tell the tale of how she’d nearly died. There was no one, except the incurious, and this girl.

‘Lucky for you I’m good at diving,’ the girl said. Sarah couldn’t answer, could still only gasp, as the thrumming noise in her ears settled from frantic to subdued and she fought the urge to vomit.

‘You did need help, didn’t you?’ the girl asked.

‘I nearly drowned,’ Sarah managed to say, the enormity of this fact like the slap of a wet towel.

‘I thought so,’ the girl said happily. ‘You grabbed hold of my brother’s leg and he thought you were messing. I thought you were too, but then when you did it again, I thought you might not be.’

‘You saved me.’ Sarah said it wonderingly, because she had been saved. Because it was this girl who had saved her.

They stared at one another, standing in the shallows, both considering. Then the girl turned, as if to go. Sarah thought quickly how to keep her. She wasn’t sure she could bear it if the girl left, back to her somersaults and her diving and her brothers, while Sarah went back to creeping round the pool. She imagined them bumping into one another later, maybe in the restaurant, and the girl looking away from her, embarrassed by the memory of Sarah’s plight and her own heroics.

‘Sarah!’ Her mother’s voice cut through the screams and yells, as it always did, no matter the competition it faced, hitting Sarah’s ears as surely as something aimed from a catapult. ‘Sarah!’ She was standing by her deckchair, waving urgently. Sarah waved back and the girl turned to look. ‘Come here,’ her mother’s voice came to her, insistent.

‘Better go,’ the girl said with a smile.

‘Come with me?’

‘OK.’

Sarah couldn’t believe it was that easy – that she had asked, that the girl had said yes.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jamie. Janine, really,’ she made a face, ‘but Jamie. You?’

‘Sarah.’

‘Race you.’

Paul saw his wife sit up, suddenly, and lean forward, hand to her forehead, palm down, shading her eyes as she stared eagerly in front of her. He started to walk faster – she seemed alarmed – and broke into a run when he saw her stand in a sudden movement, sweeping the broad straw sunhat off her head and start forward urgently, at speed, but even as he reached her, she had slowed, then stopped.

‘Everything OK?’ He tried to sound casual, didn’t want her to know that he had seen fear in her movements. Didn’t want the people on the chairs around them to feel justified in their eager curiosity.

‘Fine.’ She smiled at him. ‘I couldn’t see Sarah for a moment, but I see her now.’ She lay back down, arms stretching above her head, seeming relaxed, although he could see a pulse twitching in the hollow of her collarbone, and the red flush across her chest seemed more than just the heat of the day.

They tried to hide from each other how much they worried. Not that either was in any doubt about how the other felt, but in case the open admission of their fears, the naming of these constant terrors – of loss, accident, injury, abduction – should let them loose to roam too freely.

‘She’ll be fine,’ they said to each other when Sarah climbed something, walked along the top of a wall, sped downhill on her bicycle. They smiled when they said it, to show they were at ease with these most usual dangers of childhood, but they were not. Their only child had been too long awaited, had remained too resolutely without brother or sister, for either of them to be other than anxious, for her safety, her happiness. Her self.

‘Where is she?’ Paul asked now, casually, trying to follow the line of his wife’s vision.

‘Over there.’ She pointed. ‘She seems to have made a friend.’

Paul looked to where she was indicating, to where Sarah balanced at the edge of the pool, facing a girl with long blonde hair. The girl was tanned and sturdy where Sarah was pale and thin.

‘Great,’ Paul said. They both pretended that that, too, was normal. ‘What have you been doing?’ he asked, easing himself onto the recliner beside her. His shorts, baggy khaki ones that Miriam had bought him barely a week ago, embarrassed him, the way they showed his knees when he sat down. Standing, they were OK, coming almost to his calves, but sitting, they rode up and he had to confront the hard red roundness of his knees that looked, to his eyes, somehow obscene.

‘Reading, dozing. It’s so gorgeous here. This is the life.’ She stretched out and Paul admired the compact leanness of her, the way not an inch of spare flesh crumpled the line of her body. She worked hard at staying fit, with the same driven intensity she brought to everything – an ordered house, the smooth emptying and filling of fridge and freezer, timely arrivals and departures – and before which nearly everything fell into place. Miriam was good at getting what she wanted. Only more children had eluded her, frustrating that ability she had to want so hard that all barriers gave way.

They had wanted and hoped, both of them, for years, until eventually, in the face of a never-ending No, the determination of Miriam’s pursuit had been turned aside, onto the house, her hair, her figure, Sarah’s clothes and activities. And when Paul tried to find the words to ask if she was sad, to tell her that he was, in ways he didn’t really understand, she had made it difficult, assuming an attitude of cool efficiency that he did not dare to disturb.

He reached a hand out now and placed it, flat, on her bare stomach. She moved to shrug him off. ‘Too hot.’ But she smiled, in a way that made him think of later, of the cool dimness of their hotel bedroom, the casual anonymity that was so much more of a turn-on than the crowded familiarity of home.

‘Sure you’re not burning?’ he asked. ‘The sun is very hot. The guy at the clubhouse said it was hotter than usual this week. And your shoulders look a bit red.’ It was the wrong thing to say – he knew it as soon as the words left his mouth. She turned away from him, turned her face right away so that she faced the other side of the terrace and all he could see was her ear and the set of her jawbone. She got up, still not looking at him, and called, ‘Sarah!’

He saw their daughter turn immediately, as if Miriam had yanked at a thread that connected them.

‘Sarah, come here.’ Sarah said something then to the blonde girl, and both of them hauled themselves out of the pool and ran over.

‘This is Janine.’ Sarah gestured, drops flying from her wet arm, to the girl beside her, then fell silent and stared at the ground where puddles were forming from the water that dripped down her thin legs. The girl smiled, at Paul first, then at Miriam.

‘Hi.’ She grinned at them both and did a kind of half-wave. ‘Jamie.’

Why had she said ‘Janine’, like someone who didn’t know her? Why had she not said ‘Jamie’, like a friend? What would it mean, Sarah wondered, for when they met again later? Would the girl treat her like someone who called her Janine?

She hadn’t seemed to mind. Had corrected Sarah in a friendly way, then answered politely when Sarah’s parents asked her so many questions that . . .