We're celebrating Irish Book Week (which runs 18th - 25th October) with a series of choice extracts from outstanding new Irish titles - read an extract from Kevin Smith's new novel Injury Time below.
Businessman Fenton Conville has it all sewn up, coasting through life with his mates and his money in a sleepy Northern Irish village. Until, that is, he wakes on his fiftieth birthday to an unexpected solicitor's letter and a shocking allegation that could blow his world apart. In this sharp-eyed comedy of memories, middle age and long-buried mistakes, a privileged entrepreneur feels the chill winds of post-Brexit change in a society struggling to account for its past...
In the end, of course, it was all about the money. If he thought about it too much, it would make him sad: the husbands and wives, the brothers and sisters, the mothers, daughters, fathers, sons – at seething loggerheads forever over a few quid, a half-acre of land, a pair of chipped porcelain spaniels. (But who gets the family Bible?) He wondered sometimes how you were expected to maintain your faith in human nature. His own he knew to be in very poor shape. A tune popped into his head, a song about money – by the Flying somethings, Lizards, was it? – and he hummed it. Were the best things in life free? It depended, he supposed, on what you wanted.
What did Crawford Wylie want? In the beginning his goals were modest, and having just about scraped through every exam he ever sat, despite putting in the hard graft, this was prudent. Through his junior years, racking up countless billable hours for his yacht-owning masters, 'competent' was as high an accolade as he could expect. But he’d kept his head down and chipped away, and at the age of twenty-seven, by dint of luck and a tangential family connection, he came under the wing of Rex Bunting, a gent of great charm and fierce integrity, who had returned to his home town after a long career in London and set up a little practice to see out his days. Rex spent most of his time playing golf and flying light aircraft, leaving ‘young Wylie’ to mind the shop. Four years later the old boy crashed his Albatross 190 into a sea stack off the coast of County Clare, and that seemed to be pretty much that.
And yet. Taking over at the widow’s behest, Wylie set about expanding the client base and engaging new associates, eventually drawing from it a tidy income. He married, upsized to a handsome detached house near a golf course, procreated (two girls and a boy) and, by anyone’s standards, fulfilled the bourgeois contract. He drove a luxury German car and had a weekend cottage in the Antrim Glens. He experienced spells of faint, vegetal contentment.
Then, in the middle of his life, he had discerned, with much puzzlement and disquiet, a great emptiness within himself, a void that yawned, as it were, in the face of material enrichment. A voice came whispering to his mind that there must be something more. He turned, as many do, to self-improvement. First, physical fitness: he began running for (or away from – he was never quite sure) his life. He invested heavily in a home gym where he sweated and suffered for several long months in preparation for a marathon which, in the event, saw him staggering towards the finish line in urgent need of paramedical attention.
Next, the esoteric lures of the East: tantric yoga, tai chi, transcendental meditation. He even briefly toyed with Buddhism. This all passed. It turned out money was what he wanted all along. In fact, it became clear that he wanted a lot more of it. As the clock ran down, he found he desired, more than anything, consolidation, depth, surplus. His ageing soul was becoming hungrier, greedier; it agitated for excess of resources – a bigger, plumper cushion. And there was something else he wanted too.
Across the street Marty McCann, re-diagnosed with cancer three months back, had stepped out of The Inn for a smoke. Wylie noted his shocking pallor in the sunlight, his diminished bulk; thought, that’ll be a bit of paperwork before too long. Ye know not the day nor the hour, his granny had been fond of saying, keep watch! And there, going into the charity shop, was Johnny Baird whose mother had left him a million he didn’t even know she had, and what did he do with it? Nada. Tight as a shark’s arse at forty fathoms. Nearly a year getting the probate fees out of him and then only after he had the Fox twins pull the wee chancer over for a chat. Whites of their eyes in this game sometimes.
About to turn away, Wylie caught sight of a familiar figure waiting for the green man at the lights on the corner. Boy, he’d fairly put on the weight (at school he’d been a wiry scrum-half); quite a high colour on him too. Huh. Smiling to himself at the coincidence, Wylie returned to his desk and hoisted the stack of folders he’d been working on to the top of a filing cabinet. Back in his chair, he took a sheet of notepaper from the drawer, uncapped his pen and, with an involuntary twitch of his neck, began to draft a letter.
Dear Mr Conville,
I am writing to inform you of an allegation made against you by my client, that on the night of...
Injury Time is published by The Lilliput Press
