I think I said, ‘Olives sound nice’. When we got to the kitchen, Sofi was already opening a huge glass jar with a knife. She plonked the jar down on the table undrained, and took a briny handful, dripping everywhere.
‘Fuck, man,’ she whispered to Pip, ‘she is not happy.’ He looked away.
There were two shut doors between us and the adults, but we heard their voices. It sounded like the type of shouting that makes faces change colour. Sofi ate olives, dripping, dropping. Pip chewed on a pit until it was dry, then eventually took it out and held it in his hand.
Then the shouting stopped. Eddy came downstairs. We heard him put his glass on the table. Pip looked as if he might get up, but none of us moved.
Eddy came into the kitchen to tell Sofi to set the table for three, and that’s how we ate: Eddy distracted, flexing his fingers, Pip silent, me smiling. Sofi brought out plates, and Eddy touched the rim to see if they were hot enough. We had lamb chops. Sofi ate hers in the kitchen; Eddy, when he’d sucked the juice from the bone, took Pip’s fat off his plate and ate that too.
After dinner, Sofi and I left the house together.
‘I’m not being funny,’ she said, ‘but this is a joke.’
‘I know. It’s from Debenhams. It really isn’t great on gravel.’ Wheeling my suitcase was difficult in the dark and stones kept on getting stuck in it.
‘Not the bag. The bag’s a bag. It’s this hotel thing. It’s a joke.’
I jerked at the handle and tried to keep up.
‘Share a room…’ she went on, ‘is he on crack? Don’t dare tell me there are no free hotel rooms in all of Sark. I don’t care if it’s a bloody island. Wanker.’
Eddy had come back into the dining room as Sofi was serving us dessert. ‘Just spoke to Bonita. No room at the inn, girls! But she says she gave you a twin, Sofi, so there’s a spare bed in yours. You two will have to bunk together. Back to school, eh?’ I smiled and said, ‘Oh yes of course that’s fine, fun even, I’m happy with anything.’ Sofi slapped a sponge pudding down in front of me and said, ‘Do you snore? Because it makes me psychotic.’
‘“Back to school?”’ she said now, writing speech marks with her fingers and a cigarette. ‘I went to a comprehensive. The only thing we shared were these.’ She ashed in the air. ‘Bonita’s lovely – Mexican or something – but her place stinks. Cold lamb. It smells like cold lamb in there. Mint sauce and flubby fat.’ She took a deep drag. ‘I hate cold lamb.’
I said mint sauce didn’t sound very Mexican, and Sofi told me not to worry, there was a piñata in the hall, and dried chillis in the bathroom. She threw the stub of her cigarette into a bush. ‘Listen, I’m sorry I’m being such a bitch. I’m not actually a bitch. It’s just this hotel thing is a joke. Also, I’m on my period and it’s like monsoon season down there.’
I tried to keep up with her but she walked so fast.
‘Whereabouts in Poland are you from?’ I asked.
‘Ealing. EA-ling. I told him Ealing. I grew up in Ealing. I’ve only been to Poland once, and I was six.’
I said Oh. I had said Oh lots of times. Perhaps it sounded like I was disappointed, which I honestly wasn’t. It was just that from the very beginning, something about Sofi, or simply Sofi herself, surprised me.
I was about to give up and start carrying my wheelie case like a baby when we finally arrived. I don’t know why people had been calling it a hotel. It was a house, a small one, with bad plastering and four faded gnomes in the garden. There was a red sign saying ‘La Casa Bonita’, and one of the gnomes was wearing a sombrero.
The front door was frosted glass with metal rims. Coronation Street stuff. Sofi already had the key, and she led me upstairs to a door with a brass ‘3’ on it.
‘Bienvenida,’ she said, ‘it’s the size of a fucking walnut.’
There were two single beds, a shared bedside table and little else – well, nothing else. ‘Wait till you lie down,’ Sofi said, flopping onto one of the beds, ‘they designed the mattresses for anorexics.’
The curtains were like doilies. ‘Dirty too,’ Sofi said, putting her little finger through an old cigarette burn. She smacked a daddy-long-legs dead against the wall with her other hand, nail varnish all chipped, then scratched off a dark smear from someone who’d done the same before her.
She used words I hadn’t heard in ages. Revolting. No one really says revolting, and not so affectionately, or about a coat hanger. ‘But look, it’s just revolting,’ she said, pulling this puffy, pink thing out of the wardrobe to show me. ‘I wouldn’t even hang myself on that.’
She told me I could have the bed by the door because if a murderer broke in, it would be that bed they’d go for first. Then I unpacked, and she talked about Sark. She’d arrived five days before me. ‘Four hundred people, that’s sick. That’s one single year at my old college.’ She told me she was nineteen. She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of her bed, legs open, in a black lace bra.
I turned my face away but you couldn’t miss it. I folded my T-shirts in a pile without looking up. When it was time to change, I took my washbag to the bathroom and came back in pyjamas.
‘I just sleep in pants,’ Sofi said. ‘But unless I get hot, I’ll be under the sheet. So don’t worry.’
We got into bed. Sofi was right, they were terrible mattresses, terrible – bony, and about the width of a bench.
We lay flat on our backs, counting the cracks in the ceiling. ‘Sofi,’ I said then – I’ve written it in with an ‘f’ but she was still ‘ph’ in my mind at that point, which makes a difference. ‘Sofi,’ I said, ‘is Pip … all right?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is he … OK?’
‘Dunno, man. Been here less than a week. He’s sixteen, and he lives on an island. It’s not normal.’
‘But he’s not – dangerous?’
She took in a long, slow breath that sounded like she was smoking again. I checked to see she wasn’t. ‘Lonely, more. He’s just a kid. You’ll be fine, you’ve done it before, right?’
That was the problem. It was so quiet that when I shifted, we could both hear the sound of the sheets.
Sofi turned off the light without asking, even though it was closer to me. And because we didn’t know each other, that meant goodnight.
4
In the morning, Bonita gave us breakfast. Sofi had bacon, I had bran flakes. Bonita was how you’d expect her to be; round and smiley, with sausage fingers. The skin on her face had that pigment disorder where bits of it were darker than others, but her teeth were weirdly white for someone who was drinking cola first thing in the morning.
She came up behind Sofi and said, ‘You sleep nice?’ Then she kissed her on the crown. ‘Beautiful girl, Miss Sofi!’ she said to the room, though none of the other guests had come down yet. ‘And you,’ she turned to me with an open-faced smile, ‘you must be the Jude! Mr Eddy call me, but what can I do? Full up to the eyeball.’
She said she was sorry that our room was so small, and that John would fix the light. At the word John, a silver sliver of a man with elbow skin under his eyes, coughed and raised his hand in hello. Her husband. ‘Y chicas, you’re getting … oye John, como se dice? You’re getting kettle!’ She pronounced it kett-lay.
I couldn’t eat my bran flakes. Even though it was just us two, Bonita, and John with his crime book, it felt hectic in that breakfast room. I think it was the carpet. That kind of swirly pub carpet that makes your eyes go funny. The smell of fried bread swirled like the carpet and filled the room like the radio.
Sofi was quiet, even when Bonita brought her another bit of bacon on a fork, hand cupped underneath to catch the fat. ‘Not a morning person,’ Sofi said to me, spreading ketchup over bread with a finger. ‘Oh God, and we walked here last night because of your bag, didn’t we? Oh … pisser.’
Every morning after that, we cycled to work from Bonita’s. She let us borrow these two bikes: lilac-coloured, no suspension, dingy chains, an
d pedals your feet slipped off. But that first morning, we walked, and I saw Sark for the first time in daylight.
The sky was as white as this page, just so much brighter. You couldn’t look directly at it. I found it hard to look at anything. Sofi was not a good tour guide. She pointed out that the postbox was blue when I was already staring at it. It was just like the old red Royal Mail ones – a chess castle, but blue. We passed a woman with a gargoyle face and a huge sunhat, and scaffolding erected by E&G Builders (on closer look, Ewan and Glenn). We saw red garden apples, shiny as yo-yos and about the same size, left out in cardboard boxes on front steps for anyone to take. I heard people saying hello, mostly men, and mostly to Sofi, who was wearing tiny denim shorts. But it wasn’t like arriving on holiday, when you look at things so you can write them on a postcard, when you walk slowly. We were late and walking fast to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
‘You look a bit ill,’ Sofi said, when we got to Eddy’s gate. Her eyes floated over my face as if she were reading it. ‘Pasty,’ she said. ‘Don’t be scared.’
I told her I wasn’t, I just got cold easily. I said I was fine, twice, in case she didn’t believe me. I tried to smile and she opened the gate.
Pip – odd, eye-avoiding Pip – had done something to his hair. He’d slicked it back with water, I think. You could see the shallow dents of his temples.
‘Sofi, I don’t want eggs this morning,’ he said as she pulled open the walk-in fridge. ‘I had toast already.’
‘What colour?’ she asked.
‘What colour what?’
‘Toast. What colour toast did you have?’
‘Brown.’
‘With what on?’
He thought for a second.
‘Nothing.’
‘Not even butter?’
‘No.’
‘Gross. Doesn’t it get stuck to your mouth? What have you done to your hair?’ she said, combing back into place with her fingers. ‘I’m making you eggs.’ I watched her with him and she was just so easy. She put her hands where she wanted to. Pip still hadn’t looked me in the eye once, but there she was, touching his head. We sat at the table and waited for his eggs. Sofi was singing. She didn’t have a nice voice – pitch was a problem – but it kind of jangled like bangles on a wrist. What did she sing that first day? I don’t remember any more. But she had a thing for Tina Turner, and also drum and bass. Pip’s eggs came, scrambled to smithereens, and he ate them very slowly, clenching his eyes with every swallow as if each mouthful was a burr.
Sofi left the room and then there was silence. Fork on plate, sips of tea – louder than I wanted them to be – but silence, really. I was wearing shoes, but my toes bit the sole the way they do with loose flip-flops at the beginning of summer.
Finally, when Pip was done – apart from a curve of crust and a few pellets of egg – he took me through to the study.
‘We have to do it in here,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to open the curtains, though, because the sun gets in my eyes.’
It was a dark room that smelt of books and unbeaten cushions. The ceilings seemed lower than anywhere else in the house. Pip pushed his hair back off his face again.
‘You look smart today,’ I told him. It tasted wrong as soon as I’d said it. Smart is such a dad’s word.
He ruffled his hair out again, the way that Sofi had done. He shuffled in his chair, sat awkwardly, couldn’t get comfortable. Still, his back was straight for a sixteen-year-old. He wasn’t at all small. Even at the beginning of summer, his shoulders were wider than the chair’s, it’s just that he was sunken somehow. The mast and sails were there, but there was no wind.
I asked him to tell me exactly what he wanted to learn from me. I had a vague idea we’d write ‘objectives’ on a piece of paper. We could draw tick-boxes next to each one; the path through summer would be set.
‘I don’t know. This was Eddy’s idea. I don’t need a tutor.’ He touched the top buttons of his shirt as if their being done-up was proof of this.
My face replied without me asking it to.
‘I’ve never had teachers before,’ he continued, ‘and I’ve been fine.’
‘“Teachers” doesn’t just mean the teachers you get at school,’ I said. I was speaking in sound bites and barely knew where they came from.
‘I don’t need anyone,’ he said, but as soon as he said it, it seemed to both of us like such an impossible thing to feel that we moved on.
This time, he talked to my forehead. He told me he’d just done his GCSEs: four days a week at Sark School, but on computers mostly, in a room with no working windows. The majority of lessons were online for students over fifteen, on video feeds from schools in England and the States. He said they went too slowly and he hated American accents.
I later learned that when Pip chose to speak, he sometimes spoke very fast, like no one had ever let him speak before, so he was going to take his chance. This was one of those times. I asked him about his friends, if they were leaving Sark at the same time as him, if they were going to the same school. He said they had all left a long time ago.
‘There are only three children my age at Sark School.’ He was so tall, I found it strange when he said children. ‘And the other two, they’re not exactly…’ He touched his temple. ‘They have special classes and stuff.’ He looked at the heavy curtain, a square halo of sun pushing through at its edges.
Was he excited about leaving the island after the summer? He picked at the arm of the sofa. Scratch, flick, scratch flick. Had he visited the new school he was going to be going to in England? He shook his head. The seconds stretched.
‘What does Eddy think I have to learn?’ he asked eventually.
Maths and science, I said, were the subjects his father had stressed. I’d bought books off Amazon and tried to read them. Long division, X and Y chromosomes; there was so much I’d forgotten.
‘Look, I’m not trying to be rude,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want to waste your time. Honestly. You have to believe me. There is no point in you doing this.’
‘English?’ I tried. It sounded like my last breath.
‘You probably don’t even like books…’ he said, turning away to the heavy velvet curtain.
That was when I said, ‘I do, I do, I do,’ lots of times and very fast.
And that was when he looked up, and looked me in the eye.
‘You do?’
I did like reading, it was true; I liked the idea of reading. ‘I’m a great fan of Proust,’ I said.
‘You are?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. I read it a couple of summers ago.’
‘The first one?’ That’s what I’d read. Most of it anyway, before I’d left it on a bus.
‘No, the whole Recherche. It was Esmé’s.’
I was nodding.
‘I also like Borges,’ he went on.
‘Yes,’ I said. The name was familiar. ‘Excellent choice.’
‘Only in translation, so far. I don’t always like magic realism but I do like Borges. What do you think of Ficciones?’
‘Hemingway?’ I segued, ‘I like Hemingway.’ I had A Moveable Feast in my bag; I’d had it on my lap in the plane. It was a second-hand Penguin copy with an orange spine. I’d been carrying it around for a while, put it on the table when I sat in cafés.
Pip said he hadn’t read Hemingway. I said he should, because he was really good. I think I even said he was one of my favourite writers. I got out the book and showed him the cover.
That was when Sofi burst in without knocking and called us into the kitchen for cake. I found myself wanting to say ‘Pip and I both like reading,’ so she knew we hadn’t been sitting there silent, but I was perturbed by the size of the slice of cake she’d cut for me.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘and it’s not even nice. Fucking put salt instead of bicarb. And I was so lonely I also made quiche.’ She said it ‘quish’ and put a tablespoon of cake in her mouth. Two chews in, she puffed out her che
eks and reached for the kitchen roll. ‘Oh fuck, it’s rank. No one eat it.’
I should say now that Sofi doesn’t come across quite right on the page. Writing it down, it’s not accurate. She did say ‘fuck’ a lot, but she said it lightly, like a laugh. It felt right when she said it. ‘Do you know what it is?’ she told me later, when we were standing close to each other over pink drinks at Dixcart Hotel’s karaoke night. ‘It’s because I can’t help looking at people’s lips when they talk to me.’ It was true, she’d look at your lips, even to see if you were listening. Anyway, right now she was rubbing at hers with kitchen roll and glugging my water.
‘Ah, cake!’ said Eddy, walking in, red polo shirt spotted with sweat rings. He had a bagged-up tennis racket in his hand and took a swing at an imaginary ball. ‘Six–three. Too easy.’ He clasped Pip’s neck with his hand, which was supposed to be affectionate. ‘Do you play?’ he asked me, and then, before I could answer, ‘Cake. Lovely. Lemon?’
‘It needs icing,’ Sofi said quickly, taking it away and putting it under a silver meat cover in the corner. ‘And it’s almost lunchtime. You can have a beer instead.’
There were days when Sofi’s abruptness would make him bristle, but Eddy had just won his game, so he laughed, unbuckled his hand from Pip’s neck and took his beer into the shower with him.
We ate lunch in the front garden, under a gazebo to the left of the croquet lawn. There was a slight slope, so Eddy looked a lot taller than Pip or me, who sat side-by-side opposite him, careful not to bump hands reaching for the salt. Sofi brought out a dish of hams; Eddy took most of it onto a plate with his spoon. I ate slowly. I composed small mouthfuls on my fork, held it up to my mouth then put it down again. I bade my time until the plates were cleared. I looked at other people’s food, the quiche crumb on Eddy’s lip, Pip’s face when he swallowed, a wasp circling the salad bowl. The sun hit the table but the gazebo kept our heads in the shade.
Those first meals, I remember that the food tasted as if it had come straight from a fridge. The water made my glass mist, and the tomatoes were so cold they hurt my teeth. It’s coldness I remember. Eddy asked me how the first lesson had gone, and we talked about Pip as if he wasn’t there. When Sofi brought coffee, I said thank you without looking at her.
The Last Kings of Sark Page 2