The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  We went outside and stood in the cool, the boys rolling thin cigarettes with rough fingers. I tried to tell Sofi that all I’d meant was that I couldn’t cook.

  ‘You’re such a spoon. I don’t care, dude. And it’s true, you aren’t a cook.’ She kissed me on the cheek, ‘And you are clever.’

  She looked over at the boys, who were playing football with one of their shoes. ‘Isn’t Vaclav beautiful? Teeth are a bit funny, but his eyes. He must be a gypsy. I love that. What about Armin, for you … do you like him?’

  ‘The one who’s headering the shoe? No.’

  I said that he smelt, and she asked what I meant.

  ‘What do I mean by “smells”? I mean: he smells.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which smell has he got?’

  ‘All of them, Sofi. All the smells. Breath, armpit … hair…’

  She laughed at me and told me I was fussy.

  ‘But it’s not from exercising,’ I tried. ‘It’s dirt.’

  I went to the bar. Sofi stayed outside with dreadlocked Vaclav. When I came back with drinks she was telling him his eyes made her think of tequila and lime.

  ‘You want to drinking my eyes?’ he said. She had her hands on his forehead in order to inspect him. His eyebrows bushed out at the ends and fanned together at the nose and she patted them down with her fingers, then pushed him away.

  ‘Then we will drink tequila, the drink tequila,’ he said. ‘Tonight is birthday of the DJ. Who is Silver Fox. Who is Roger. Who is seventy-three. Who is wonderful DJ.’

  We finished smoking in the doorway (just for the breeze, the ban was flouted) then we moved inside. The others started dancing, except it was really just jumping and singing into each other’s faces. I sat on a stool, and tried to look as if it was a choice. My drink was already finished so Armin bought me another. Roger, DJ Silver Fox, was in the corner, nestled in a booth next to overflowing coat hooks. He looked fittingly formal in stonewash jeans, but with his striped shirt tucked in, under a shiny leather belt. His hair was blow-dried back into a low-rise Elvis, and he had Pied Piper hands – he pointed, and eyes followed. There were gold rings on most of his fingers.

  I was trying to edge away from a breathy conversation with Armin, when the music went dead and a woman started ringing a bronze bell by the bar. She was very short and kept shouting ‘Oi’. She’d turned it into two syllables. Oy-yuh. After several of those, she said it was Roger’s birthday. A group of boys ‘a-wooga’-ed. The short lady pulled out a box of Ferrero Rocher and presented it to Roger, and we all sang Happy Birthday. Sofi went over to join the fat girls at the thirtieth who were doing harmonies.

  After that, a chant started for another song. Vaclav and Armin shouted particularly hard, ‘Vun moh! Vun moh!’ Roger silenced the crowd with a ringed finger. A riff started up. I knew it from somewhere – grainy guitar, seesaw piano. Slow though, nostalgic in some way, but for something that hasn’t happened yet. Sofi came over to see if I was OK, and then the chorus came in. It was Semisonic, ‘Closing Time’: ‘I know who I want to take me home’. I’m sure everyone knows it, but still, I wish I could write down how a song sounds. The chorus soars somehow, it really does, and yet it’s still so sad. Sofi sat down next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. Boys in caps found girls to kiss, and a dog lapped up spilt beer. We stayed until the song was over.

  Sofi sang the chorus on the cycle home, just that line, her zigzag following the beat. She shouted that when she was drunk she could completely see in the dark. Then she screamed as her front wheel dunked into a pothole. When we got to a stretch of downhill she took her feet off the pedals, her hands too at one point, so she could stretch her limbs out into a star.

  You can’t imagine how dark it was. Thick ink black. It wasn’t like it is in cities, or anywhere in England. And there were the bumps and the hills and our borrowed bikes with shaky brakes. I’m not sure how we survived those bike rides home, when it was dark, and we were drunk. I think that maybe you come much closer to dying when you’re young than when you’re old. It’s just that you sail home safe somehow. I cycled behind Sofi, trying to keep up, trying to keep my distance, and I remember thinking there were so many ways in which cycling was like flying.

  When we got back to Bonita’s, Sofi took a handful of peanuts from the big bag in the hall meant to refill the bird-feeder. She said she needed it more than the birds did, and sat on my bed in her bra, throwing each nut up and catching it (mostly not catching it) in her mouth.

  ‘What about Vaclav?’ I asked a couple of moments after lights-out. ‘Why didn’t you kiss him?’

  ‘No, I did, but he had the most terrible erection. Too big. Monstrous.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I lay there silent, and I could hear my heartbeat in the pillow.

  She must have had a few peanuts left, because she threw one at my head.

  ‘Goodnight, Jude,’ she said. ‘Nice night, Jude.’

  When I woke up, my bed was full of soft white peanuts, in halves now, with bits of their red papery sheaths flecked all over the sheets.

  9

  It wasn’t a conscious decision that everything would change when Eddy went away. That first morning both of us blamed the night before.

  I didn’t wake up until Sofi shook her hair out post-shower and it felt like it was raining.

  ‘Teefed your shower gel,’ she said. ‘Nice. Minty.’ She smelled her arms, knelt down next to me, swept my hair off my face like a curtain and said good morning.

  It was already midday. The sky was blue but there had been another storm in the night after we’d gone to bed and our bike seats were sopping. Sofi whipped out a tampon from her bag and used it to wipe hers down.

  ‘Do you want yours done too? There’s room in here,’ she said, making the tampon swing like a pendulum, waterlogged only on one side.

  The paths were sodden, but Sofi pedalled fast, mud flaring out in a flamboyant V-shape from her tyres.

  When we got to Eddy’s, I barely stayed in the study with Pip at all. We were supposed to be doing triangles – equilateral and isosceles and how the sides and angles related to each other. I was looking at the textbook, trying to read fast so I knew what I should be saying, but the paragraphs were just fuzzy blocks.

  I was sure I looked hung-over. My face had that kind of gelatinous sheen, a bit like pregnant belly before an ultrasound. I must have looked odd somehow because Pip kept on looking at me.

  ‘What?’ I asked, finally.

  The answer to that is normally ‘Nothing’, but Pip said, ‘What?’ back. And so I said it again, and for a moment, we just swapped ‘Whats?’.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, in the end. ‘But it’s hypotenuse. You keep on saying hypothesize. It’s different.’ He put his lid on his pen, then took it off again. ‘Was it fun?’ he asked. I shrugged.

  At 1.15, I told him we were done. We went back to the kitchen, Sofi’s kingdom.

  We had lunch on the sofa, with the telly. Sofi had made Pip so much pasta she had to serve it in a salad bowl. She sat down in between us, with the remote.

  ‘Sofi’s choice,’ Pip said. And then he leant over and prodded me, ‘Sofi’s choice … like the book?’

  I told him to start eating before it got cold. Sofi put on Jeremy Kyle, but, pointing up to Esmé, turned the volume right down. She moved off the sofa to watch it on her knees, right by the screen, leaving a dip in the seat between us from where she’d been sitting.

  After all the pasta, Pip said he was tired. He was going to stay inside, but Sofi forced him out into the light for vitamin C.

  ‘E,’ I said. ‘It’s definitely E.’ And she said ‘B, E, C, A, Z’ – the sun was good for it all.

  * * *

  We had all been in the house too long. In a way, it became its own island on an island. I looked out of the window at Pip asleep on the lawn now, post-prandial, his face still for once. His leather notebook was making a tent on his chest, rising slowly every time
he breathed in.

  The sun must have been almost exactly above the house, because it wasn’t coming in through the windows. We needed to be outside too, so I told Sofi to be careful not to make too much noise, and we pushed our bikes over the grass past Pip and left.

  We cycled by signs, but mostly by Sofi. She said that even after five days she could picture Sark from above, and that was as good as having a map. We stopped at the Island Stores and Sofi bought an avocado. She had it on a bench, biting off the top, peeling it like an orange and eating it like an apple.

  ‘It’s so funny how you watch me,’ she said. ‘Is it that you want some?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, not at all. It’s just that you’ve got green all over you. How did you get it on your forehead?’

  She lifted up her T-shirt high to wipe her whole face. ‘Better?’

  After that, we cycled to the Coupée. It’s this teetering path between Big and Little Sark – ninety metres long, ninety metres high, three metres wide. You’re not allowed to cycle over it so we walked our bikes. Right in the middle, Sofi asked me what held it up, and how it could be so thin, and so high, when the huge, heavy sea was clapping it from either side. I told her to stop taking her photo and walk quickly to firmer ground. Like planes staying in the air, it’s best not to think about it mid-flight.

  It was our first time on Little Sark. It was different, a bit like Scotland is to England, bleaker, with bracken, gorse and purple flowers. You had more the sense you were on an island – that king-of-the-castle thing – and that cliffs were near, wherever you were. The strangeness was more concentrated. We passed a boot-brown man sitting in his doorway, dipping carrots into a red pot of Saxa salt. And the people walking through fields together … you couldn’t imagine how they’d ever met, even less become friends, lovers or whatever they were.

  It was uphill for a while after the Coupée and we cycled slowly. Sofi used her left hand to push down her knees and make it easier. She changed colour even on that one bike ride. When we got off our bikes, she was golden. She held a croissant against her leg at breakfast the next day, and they were the same colour, they really were. But anyway, we walked to the furthest edge of Little Sark, arms paperchained. We kicked rocks and picked flowers, and we didn’t say much. I worried that she’d notice, and think I had nothing to say. But then – on a bench, looking out onto Guernsey – she put her hand up to my chin and kissed me right on the jaw. She said that she was happy, so happy Eddy had gone, and that she loved the sea.

  She told me she got these bursts of happiness, that sometimes her whole soul – did she believe in souls? she wondered for a second – but yes, her whole soul felt like it was too big for her body and she had to touch someone.

  She was covered in sun. It seemed to put a spotlight on her. And I wanted to stay sitting on that bench with her until the wood was cold. I looked at the sea, then Sofi again, and I didn’t know what I could possibly say, so I said that we had better head back.

  10

  We got used to life without Eddy very quickly. The sky was bluer when we left Bonita’s, first at ten, then soon ten-thirty. Sofi turned showering into an art form, the floor into a floodplain. We left with wet hair and it dried on the ride.

  I dipped with Pip into the dark of the study, but we always came back out into the kitchen.

  ‘Shall I do the lessons then?’ Sofi asked. ‘You want to learn how to cook?’ She took one of Eddy’s white shirts from the laundry and put it over her head like a ramshackle chef’s hat. ‘Fine. If Esmé comes in, I’m teaching you how to be me.’

  She told us how to use the weight of the eggs, rather than the number, to measure out the other ingredients for cakes. She said you could tell how cooked a piece of steak was by comparing its firmness to a place on your own hand. ‘I never get that right though,’ she said. Occasionally, she’d suddenly get irrationally protective: ‘Not a chance! I can’t give you freeloaders all my secrets.’

  One day, halfway through a demonstration of how to make breadcrumbs by bashing a bag of bread against the table leg, Sofi accused Pip of looking at her funny.

  ‘He’s looking at me funny. Why’s he looking at me funny?’

  Pip put his head straight. He’d been looking at her from an angle, more with his left eye than his right. He did the same to me sometimes when we were in the study.

  He mumbled something.

  ‘What do you mean “death”?’ She almost shouted. ‘Is he trying to curse me?’

  ‘Deaf,’ he clarified. ‘Deaf in my left ear. Just a bit.’

  After that we switched seats so that we were always on his hearing side.

  We ate lunch lying on our fronts on the croquet lawn, or round the kitchen table on days when it was too hot. After lunch, Pip would get tired, which Sofi decided was because he was growing. As soon as he was asleep, I’d say there was no point in staying and we would escape and leave him. We went to the Venus Caves, and lay in uncut grass which stayed erect in the gap between us, like a little fence. We walked to a cliff edge over Derrible Bay – the sea ahead spread like a jewelled carpet – and sat in the wind, feet dangling.

  ‘Next time,’ Pip had asked me, ‘could you take me? There are some places I’d like to show you. I could come.’ But when he fell asleep after lunch, I didn’t wake him.

  The following day, however, he said the same thing in front of Sofi. He wanted to show us Little Sark. I said we’d already been a hundred times. His face fell, so Sofi said, ‘We love it though, let’s go again. Vaseline,’ and she reached into her pocket and dabbed some on his lower lip.

  Pip didn’t have a bike, so he ran along behind ours. Because of the way his spider legs moved – knees to the sky – it looked like he was pedalling too.

  The afternoons were different with Pip. He knew which one was Jersey and which was Guernsey. He told us that the Coupée was a wind trap, and that, during the most terrible storms, kids from Little Sark used to have to crawl across on their bellies to get to school. He answered Sofi’s question about it staying up: it was ‘an isthmus’. And the beach we’d looked at, the one that curved between the cliffs like the in-between-toes of a webbed foot, was called Grand Grève. We sat looking out at its white bay, and he told us other things: about the silver mines at Port Gorey; and that Sark was the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. He paused.

  ‘In 2008,’ he finished.

  Sofi said she’d guessed. She bit a fingernail. ‘So who’s the king?’

  ‘No king,’ Pip said. ‘He’s called a Seigneur,’ and he told us how the Seigneur ‘semi-rents’ the island from the Queen for £1.79 a year.

  ‘Cheapskate!’ Sofi said. ‘That’s the price of a cup of tea in Costa. What jokers.’

  She asked Pip if everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody. Pip said he didn’t know, and then, ‘mostly’.

  ‘Like them, for example. Do you know them lot?’ She pointed, using her elbow for subtlety, at a family having a picnic down below us on Grand Grève, a father and three sons. The youngest two – one olive-oil blond, the other rustier – were filling their pockets with shells and having competitions to see how far they could throw rocks into the sea. The father and the oldest son had deckchairs, and looked like they were giving the stone-throwers marks for each shot. The wind was strong enough to make each stone fly in a bow-shape.

  ‘Bend it like Beckham!’ Sofi yelled then, subtlety forgotten.

  ‘Them? The Millers? No,’ Pip said. ‘I think they’re only here for the summer.’ The dad had dark curls and he was laughing – his laugh big, coloured, kind – at something his son had said. Pip’s head was tilted as he looked at them in his concentrated way. He looked slightly sad. ‘They look nice though. That’s the thing, most of the people young like me only come here for a few weeks.’

  Pip took us further onto Little Sark, past a place called Cider Press Cottage. The sign was a shiny slice of trunk; the words carved using the sun and a magnifying glass. So
fi was worried Pip would burn, so she rubbed suncream into his neck. She played a three-note piano on his moles and then blew on his skin to dry it. He didn’t even say thank you, he just bounded ahead, looking back to check we were following every few paces.

  When it got too brambly, and too steep, we left the bikes and used our free hands to pick blackberries.

  ‘You won’t have them yet,’ Pip said to me, ‘in the countryside where you’re from. They won’t be ripe.’

  ‘We get them from Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘Oh, right, well … we get them early. Microclimate.’

  I used my thumb and forefinger like chopsticks, one berry at a time. Sofi plunged a hand in, and groped. She didn’t get many and said it was because she was from the city. Pip told her to look behind us; there were always more blackberries if you looked back in the direction where no one walked. He said that every path was more walked-down in one particular direction, which confused him, because if you walked one way, wouldn’t you have to come back?

  Perhaps not. We had just reached a precipice; sixty feet high, a jagged drop.

  There was a rope which ran from where we were all the way to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, studded at various points on the way down, pinned under boulders or tied round rusty metal loops. The rope was waterlogged green from old rain. Sofi gave it a tug.

  ‘Seems all right.’

  I wish she’d given us more than ‘all right’, but she’d already taken off her flip-flops and tucked them between her teeth. Sofi went first, and Pip followed her down the rope, both of them doing this sort of poor man’s abseiling.

  ‘Don’t put the string between your legs!’ Sofi yelped. ‘It’s gnarling up all my ovaries.’

  Why had I brought such a silly bag? Nothing in there was mine. It had Sofi’s chocolate orange, Sofi’s cigarettes, her suncream. I took hold of the soggy rope, taut from the hands of the other two, and headed over the edge.