by Sadie Jones
‘Look, Lewis!’ she said and she held her arms out wide. ‘We’re saved!’
The train got faster and she was a distant figure very quickly, but he waited until he couldn’t see her blue dress any more before he stopped leaning out of the window and went back against the wall of the carriage.
There was stillness and quiet; even with the fast train and the noise of it, it was very peaceful. He felt hot. He undid his sleeves and rolled them up, for coolness, not minding about his arm showing.
Kit stood on the empty platform and watched the train disappear. When it was gone she stood a while longer. Her body and her mouth felt the way Lewis had held her and the way he had kissed her and how hard it was and how gentle. She felt a different girl, but the same. She felt cherished. She knew it would hurt later, that he had gone, but now she had nothing but joy. After a while she heard cars arriving and the footsteps of the commuters as they came up to the platform, and Kit didn’t want to see anybody else, and she walked away from them and down from the platform by the small steps and into the long grass. She would walk back across the fields, slowly.
Lewis stood against the wall of the train until the guard came through to take his ticket. He was a tall man, old, and he walked with a limp, as if he had braces on his legs, and he looked at Lewis oddly, and Lewis couldn’t work it out for a while; he was used to people who knew him looking at him like that, but this man was a stranger. Then he realised how he must look, as if he had been in a war, with his face all messed up and his arm cut to pieces and smiling like everything was just right, like everything in the world was laid out for him. He supposed the man didn’t know how you could be damaged like that and be so pleased with it.
He showed the guard his ticket and tried to be polite so that he wouldn’t frighten him and then he went and found a seat. He didn’t think about it, he went straight to a seat facing forwards, so that he could see where he was going.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Clara Farmer and everybody at Chatto and Windus for their commitment to this book.
Thanks also to Caroline Wood for her confidence and loyalty, and to Jodi Shields for her belief in The Outcast in all its forms.
Love and thanks to my husband, Tim Boyd, my family, and to Becky Harris.
SADIE JONES lives in London. The Outcast is her first novel.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009
Copyright © 2008 Sadie Jones
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, a division of The Random House Group, London. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jones, Sadie
The outcast / Sadie Jones.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37545-2
I. Title.
PR6110.O54 O98 2009 823′.92 C2008-903695-6
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