The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  We were always slightly better after eating, when the food had been cleared. Before it came, we didn’t know what it would be; when it came, we might not like it. While we were eating, there were the noises, and the way that you can suddenly zoom out and find it strange to use metal things to bring food up to your mouth. Too intimate, embarrassing. We spilt things.

  After lunch, another lesson in the study. Those I remember with my nose, the dust and the dark. Pip drew a diagram of a cell which was better than the textbook’s, and I drank coffee till it coated my organs.

  Occasionally Pip would ask me questions, but it was never about what he was supposed to be learning. How old are you? – Young for my year. But old enough. What is your surname? Have you been to Sark before? Do you have a brother? Husband?

  I stalled, and then, soon, it would be supper, inside at the dinner table. Outside, inside, both were far too cold. ‘Cold spell,’ Eddy said, flicking his barometer with his finger as if he could change things. I counted beats with my teeth to try and make the meal pass. There were tall heavy cabinets, with feet which dug into the carpets. I imagined them falling over onto us. The air was heavy with the weight of having nothing to say. I don’t know if I wanted Sofi there, or if I didn’t. Would she have broken the ice or made it thicker? Either way, it was clear that she wasn’t invited.

  She made it easier for all of us by pretending it was her choice. ‘Wouldn’t want to sit with you anyway. Conversation round that table is dry as Ryvita. Dryvita. Not into it.’ I know this wasn’t true because later she told me she didn’t like eating alone, that she found it harder to swallow. But she’d lay the table and bring us our food, and clear our plates, and prod Pip for leaving his carrots, and then eat in the kitchen, stool pulled up to the work surface, with her dirty white headphones in just one ear in case Eddy called out for anything.

  ‘She’s the help,’ Eddy said, when Pip asked if we should invite her in for dessert.

  ‘Isn’t Jude helping us too?’ Pip replied. I didn’t like the way he said ‘helping’.

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. Anyway, Sofi’s … Sofi’s Polish … She understands.’

  Eddy turned to me, his hand with the signet ring held out for confirmation, and I smiled.

  5

  That second night, we came home to a kettle. ‘Kett-lay!’ Sofi sang as we walked into the walnut. ‘Love a kett-lay.’

  Bonita had left us two mugs and a Sandwich Spread jar, rinsed out and refilled with instant coffee. We’d been given caster sugar too, in an old curry pot with the label half scratched off, and there were teabags, loose, on the side. A handwritten note said ‘tea and coffea’, and Bonita had done some sort of origami with our towels. I think they were supposed to be swans, but Sofi lifted hers up by its long neck and said, ‘She’s done us turkeys! Such a gangster.’

  Sofi sang songs I didn’t know and dry-brushed her teeth for about fifteen minutes. I went to the bathroom on the corridor, and got changed in there too.

  ‘They say you live for seven years longer if you floss, you know,’ she said proudly. She wasn’t flossing (she didn’t even own any floss), but she was happy, so I didn’t point it out.

  ‘Night night, private dancer,’ she said. And then, pants only, half-in and half-out of the duvet, she reached over towards me and turned off the light.

  When I woke, it was my second morning on the island and I wanted to see it. I got out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Sofi, who’d cast off her covers overnight and was lying on her side with an arm taco-ed between her breasts. I put my trainers on and eased the bedroom door open slowly, because slowly means quietly. I made my way to the front door. The corridors already smelt of hash browns. Outside, the sky was soupy, but there was so much sun waiting behind it, I had to look down. Nearly every day started off like that – a bright white blanket. It took until eleven for the sun to burn off the clouds, or to catch their corners and turn them apricot.

  Bonita’s lawn was overgrown. The gnomes were waist-deep, and the dew got through to my socks. Once out the gate, I ran along a limestone road until I found a wooden signpost, shiny cream, place name and distance painted on in green. There were four arrows, and I chose the ‘Window in the Rock’ because it sounded like the name of a painting.

  I say ‘road’, but that’s not really right. Sark was scribbled with these long straight golden paths which ran thin between fields or along sparse rows of houses. Most were tree-lined, but the trees – they changed with the farmer – had grown up and bowed until they met at the top. Some of them reminded me of the driveway to Mandalay, but when I said this to Sofi, she said she didn’t like Robbie Williams.

  I ran past the school, and tried to imagine Pip there but couldn’t. It looked like the kind of place you’d have a barn dance: big, wooden, mormon-y, but with rugby posts outside. I ran past a restaurant called Hathaway’s, where rain had poured smeary pinstripe onto a chalk sign saying ‘Kidz eat 4 free’. I saw a woman on a tractor, and I wondered if my hair would go like hers when I got older; turn to wire, fall differently.

  The Window in the Rock wasn’t far, along a smaller path, through closer shrubbery, and then a clearing, a cliff edge, and a huge sign saying DANGER. Behind the sign there was a massive rock with a human-sized hole which looked like a giant bead, and opened out onto gunmetal sea and an archipelago of high rocks.

  This was the Window and I walked into it, arms up in case I needed them, but not touching the sides in case they were dirty. I remember not being able to work out whether I felt very big, or very, very small. Scale is a strange thing on islands. I wanted to scream or make some sort of noise to fill the space and say I had been there, but no sound came.

  Sofi was still in bed when I got back, sheets tangled around her ankles. She was lying in a cross like Jesus, breasts to the ceiling. I remember thinking that you shouldn’t be scared of someone if you’ve seen them asleep, and that it wasn’t true. I went to have a shower and used Sofi’s shampoo (Palmer’s, cocoa butter), then my own conditioner so she wouldn’t know.

  I remember that shower – that particular time I had a shower – because it was when I learnt to use the tap, to jam it with a hairbrush so it stayed on full, and I checked that the brown rings upriver from the plughole were rust and nothing worse. It really is just the first few days that I can still see this clearly, from start to finish, full-length and in order. After that, it became showers, lunches, everything plural. But I can give you those first days whole. They are self-contained and I can hold them, because everything was new and nothing had melted into shorthand. Beginnings are always slower.

  6

  It was at lunchtime of the second full day that Esmé reemerged. Sofi had been taking Esmé’s meals up to her room, Pip following behind with a bottle of Badoit he’d get from the drinks cabinet. They would swap places on the landing so that he was the one who knocked. Then, after we’d eaten downstairs with Eddy, Pip would go up to collect Esmé’s tray. The plates always returned untouched, looking like glossy display meals at Japanese restaurants. The night before this one, I’d come out of the loo and seen Pip putting a chunk of Esmé’s chicken in his mouth and hiding rice under a napkin before he took the tray down past Eddy. The only thing Esmé ever wanted was more water, and Pip would run back up, bottle of Badoit in hand.

  That lunchtime I heard Pip talking to Sofi as she composed Esmé’s tray.

  ‘Just give her less,’ he said. ‘Smaller portions.’

  ‘They are small. Look, I’m not going to cut a new potato in half.’

  Pip was trying to get a look at the plate.

  ‘I mean, is it me?’ Sofi went on. ‘My cooking? What does she normally eat?’

  ‘I don’t know. Things I make. Like eggs … or … other things I make. She’s not always like this.’ He pushed past Sofi and made for the potato. ‘Just cut it in half.’

  But this time when they went up with the tray, they came back with it too.

  ‘She says she’s coming down,�
� Sofi said, shrugging her lips. I stood up. Pip started cleaning the table with a cloth, putting down an extra knife and fork, and checking them for dust like a waiter on a trial shift.

  Esmé was wearing black again, and her legs looked like pipe cleaners. That was what I saw at a glance, because I didn’t know if I was actually allowed to look at her. I also didn’t know where to put my hands. So I stood behind the chair I’d been sitting in and touched my napkin, stopped touching it, picked it up again, put it down. She walked to the table. Eddy was still in his office and Pip had gone to get her water. I looked at where he’d be through the walls, as if that might make him come back quicker.

  We were alone. ‘Hi,’ I said, but really it could have been any one-syllable noise. She said ‘Hallo’ back (French accent, padded on the ‘h’) and then sat down. It didn’t look like it was very easy for her to pull the chair out.

  ‘Do you mind if I—?’ I was starting to say when Pip came back in with a big glass of Badoit for her. I tried to catch his eye. ‘Is it OK if I—?’ He nodded yes, but he was looking around the room as if trying to check for anything Esmé wouldn’t like. So I looked around too, except I didn’t know what to look for.

  It was incredibly awkward, as awkward as that word is spelled, two w’s and a k, bramble round the tongue. It was the first time I felt relieved when Eddy joined us.

  ‘Soup. Cracking. Chicken?’ (It was cauliflower.) ‘Never mind. Warm. Warming. Boy been good today, Jude? Got past two plus two?’ He laughed, and got soup on his shirt. He only looked at Esmé when she wasn’t looking at him, which is what I was like with everyone. Pip looked at his mother, though, watched her stir her soup. His back wasn’t straight for once; he put his head down, so it was the same height as hers.

  She was so thin – just bones pushing against skin – that I wondered if it hurt her to sit on a hard wooden seat. It’s not that it stopped her from being beautiful, but her cheekbones were even more deeply carved than Pip’s. A line drawing of a bird in flight.

  Sofi brought out cold meats for the main course. Charcuterie, parma ham, fleshy piles of rillettes. It was all too pink, too close to animal. Eddy talked for us all, Eddy ate for us all. He spread butter on half gherkins; he asked for ice-cubes in his rosé.

  Esmé spoke only once, to Pip. ‘T’en veux plus?’ she asked him, while using her fork to safeguard the last bit of mortadella before Eddy reached for it. Pip said no, so she let Eddy take it. I could almost feel the workings of my watch, the seconds falling like the slowest drip.

  After lunch, I asked Sofi to put the kett-lay on, so I could sit at the round table in the kitchen. Hers – and it did become hers: the knife marks she left from chopping without a board, the way she lay across it and power-napped after breakfast – was such a different table. I wanted to tuck myself under it like it was a bed, or place my head on it, like a pillow. She made me tea with too much sugar, but I was happy there with her.

  ‘Batty, isn’t it?’ she said, blowing into her tea.

  ‘Esmé?’

  ‘Families in general. Batty, the lot.’

  She put an ice-cube in my Earl Grey too (‘to cool it down cos you don’t have milk’), but after a few short sips, I had to go back to the study, and Pip.

  Neither he nor I mentioned Esmé, but she might as well have been in the corner, soundlessly stirring her soup. It seemed impossible that before lunch Pip and I had laughed together (about the ‘psss-SHING’ noise Sofi made when she sneezed); impossible. I made him do a past paper – AS level Biology – and he did it in a quarter of the time, and got every answer right. ‘Even more retarded than the GCSEs,’ he said. After that, he sat doodling in his notebook. There was no sound apart from nib scratches. He used his fountain pen to colour in one of his fingernails. I pretended to read the back of a book in French and willed Sofi to sneeze again and bring us her light.

  Halfway through the afternoon she did. She burst in, a short wooden spoon holding her hair in a bun, and said it was Friday, Eddy was on a clay shoot, and I was to come with her to the Avenue. I didn’t even ask Pip, I just said yes, and she kissed me on the centre of my forehead and pulled me out of the house to the lilac bikes Bonita had lent us.

  I can see her now, three metres ahead, her dress skirting in the wind, her wheels carving out a zigzag. She was very, very bad at cycling – that afternoon, she nearly crashed into a tractor with the number-plate ROSS 3 – but I can still see her, even now, cycling in front of me, cycling faster, looking back to check that I was still behind her.

  The Avenue was Sark’s high street. Except it wasn’t a high street in any real sense, just a short string of shops and cafés, all low-rise and wooden, difficult to date or place. It made me think of Australia (I had gone there with my parents once, on what they called the ‘last family holiday’) although the voices here were French, Spanish, German, and ones from faraway Europe that I couldn’t properly identify.

  We wove through on the bikes. There was a NatWest, with purple hydrangeas in the front garden, and monkey-puzzle trees with fronds which u-bent like the necks of monsters. The souvenir shops spilt out onto the street, all selling the same hats – faded caps with ‘Sark’ sewed on, straw trilbies. Then beach-town necklaces and rusty racks of postcards that looked like they’d been dipped in tea. There was a new bakery being built out of wood, varnished like a Chelsea bun.

  We cycled straight to the Island Stores, and leant our bikes on the dusty kerb opposite. The shop was rectangular, white, paint on roughcast. The window was a mosaic of flyers for open gardens, dog-walking, and the annual Service on the Sea. I stood outside for a second, but Sofi wafted me in with her shopping list.

  The shop was subtitled ‘supermarket’, which was aspirational, as it was about the size of a classroom. There was a newspaper stand (all a day old – current affairs ferry-lag), sliced long-life bread, then chest freezers full of black forest gateaux and polythene packs of wontons. Sofi went straight to dairy and filled her trolley with eggs. ‘Sark’ was written in blue biro on the cartons, all capital letters apart from the r.

  ‘I was here last week,’ she said, leaning on the push bar of the trolley so her feet came off the ground. ‘My first day. Everything’s changed.’ She pointed at the girl behind the till. ‘She had tips, last week…’

  ‘You have to tip in shops here?’

  ‘No, you spacker. Purple. Purple tips. Like she’d dipped the ends of her hair in bog bleach.’

  She went from that to hummus. ‘Hummus?’ She picked up a pot. ‘Last week they didn’t even have onions. Eastern bloc, man. Or whatever wartime. Rationing days. There was about one thing on each shelf…’ She broke free from me and trolley-scooted up the aisle. ‘Fuck me! Herbs!’ She pierced a packet of fresh tarragon with her little fingernail and smelled it through the bag. ‘It’s for the tourists, isn’t it? I love herbs.’ She was talking very loudly, which could have been embarrassing, but when you’re beautiful, and do what you do with the confidence of the sun, no one seems to mind.

  Sofi was a hedonistic shopper. She didn’t look at labels, she didn’t deliberate, she just threw things into the trolley, denting tins, bruising apples. She ate grapes as she weighed her onions, and told me to get biscuits.

  I walked round. I liked looking at the prices, because they were impossible to guess. Golden Syrup in that tricksy green-gold twenties tin, by Royal Appointment, for £1.37, and then right next door, glacé cherries in a thin plastic pot, £8.31 or something silly.

  ‘If you’re going to take a fortnight choosing, at least get two packs,’ she said when I came back. ‘Rich Tea? That’s bread, not a biscuit. Rich Tea? Oh pisser.’ And she sent me to get cleaning products instead.

  Sofi had no sense that heavier things should go at the bottom of a trolley. She started the shop with eggs, and crowned the load with huge two-litre bottles of full-fat milk. When we got to the till, she paid in British fifties and Jersey pound notes, forest green and with the Queen looking younger. We cycled back to Eddy�
�s with bags in our baskets and balanced on our handlebars, Sofi in front, faster, wobbly, and me in her slipstream. It would often be like this.

  7

  I can’t tell you when ‘we went’ became ‘we would go’. There isn’t an exact number of days which pass before something becomes a routine; six, perhaps; maybe a week.

  We would get up. Sofi would shower, and dart back to the tiny room naked, towel on her head, one arm half-holding her breasts (‘as a sports bra, not a shield’). I’d go into the bathroom after her. The floor would be soaking and I’d have to stand on the loo seat to put my socks on. The mirror would still be steamy. Sometimes I wouldn’t wipe it, because we didn’t wear makeup in the day, and I thought it was better not to look.

  Sofi would go ahead to the house to make breakfast and I’d say I’d eat at Bonita’s, though I never did. It felt forced talking to Bonita without Sofi. She’d say something like ‘Miss Sofi left early this morning,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, she was wearing a really nice top,’ and that would be it. So I’d skip breakfast and arrive in time for Pip’s lesson. Sofi would bring us coffee in the study. Pip took it milky, and Sofi would ‘cappuccino it’ with Cadbury Highlights and a heart-shaped cookie cutter.

  Pip frowned when he was working, and rubbed at his lips (they got dry because of this, and Sofi gave him her Vaseline, which she applied with her own finger). His foot metronomed the floor. I’d make him stop because the speed changed, so you could never relax into it.

  More and more often we started to spend time with Sofi in the kitchen, We’d bring our work with us, past papers and lists of equations. Sofi’s clattering and swearing and singing made just enough noise for us to concentrate. She called the kitchen her office. The cupboards were red, and she wiped the doors meticulously clean, even though inside there was soy sauce on the spines of spice racks and crumpled curls of garlic paper.