The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  By the time I got to the bottom – the insides of my fingers burning – Sofi was standing barefoot on a big, bald rock. She was balancing on one foot, squinting. ‘If you stand right, and get your eyes right, you can see out to sea through that cave there, and this one here.’ The two caves out to the sea were wide, but they curved, and so you could only see out through slits, and only exactly where she was standing. Pip had showed her.

  ‘You have to align,’ she said. ‘There’s something pagan about it. Something … Mayan, I don’t know … One of those ancient things.’

  She stretched out her arms, and shut her eyes, her own ritual. Pip was wiping mud off his feet on a low rock, slick with algae. I could tell he was glad to have shown Sofi something she liked. I poked Sofi in the thigh and pointed to a flat, pigeon-grey rock, where someone had written ‘Spank me hard dady’ in permanent marker.

  ‘There’s your ritual,’ I said, and something about dyslexia.

  Sofi laughed – except it wasn’t quite a laugh – and then stepped down off her Mayan rock. We made our way through the slit on the right, and climbed up onto a rock platform right by the sea. It was flinty, and Pip said that when he was younger, Esmé used to bring him here.

  ‘Serious?’ Sofi said. ‘She took that rope?’

  ‘Yeah. We used to come and pretend this flint bit was a tile on a giant’s roof. That we were on top of everything.’

  We lay on our bellies, our tops pulled up so the bottoms of our backs were in the sun. Sofi got her chocolate orange out of my bag, battered now, and cracked it open on our rock. She ate it two pieces at a time, sucking first and then scraping the pieces back out of her mouth against her teeth. Her bottom lip was brown, and she coloured in the top, like lipstick, with a stubby segment of chocolate orange. Pip took his top off, shoulders pale and broad as a canvas, collarbone like an anchor. He sat cross-legged. He’d taken his notebook out of his back pocket and was writing in it, pretending not to listen to our conversation.

  ‘Would you rather your hand be stuck – for the rest of your life – in an unbreakable jam jar…’ (this was Sofi, every other word italicized) ‘… or that everything you ever eat again for the rest of your life taste of tuna?’

  ‘Tuna,’ I said.

  ‘So quick to answer! It’s not with mayonnaise, you know. It’s plain, tinned, tuna.’

  ‘Tuna.’

  ‘It’s in brine.’

  ‘Not being jam-jar-hand. It would wither.’

  ‘I know, but tuna … fuck.’ She looked out to sea, shaking her head.

  Sofi took these questions so seriously. We’d wake up in the morning and the first thing she’d say to me was that she’d changed her mind. She’d decided it would be better if her dad walked in on her and her dog, rather than vice versa. I’d be half asleep, and it would take a while to work out what she was talking about.

  ‘Fine,’ she said now. ‘The tuna. Fine. Maybe that’s better. But, would you rather – sleep with Armin – or the Ross man who has all the tractors?’

  ‘No more, Sofi, no more.’ Though there were always more. I suppose they were ways of asking the questions you wanted the answers to. I asked her if she’d ever been in love, and she said no.

  ‘I want to go to Paris,’ she said then, as if it was the logical step in a conversation about love. ‘Have you been? I so want to go.’

  I’d been there on a school exchange. We’d partnered with a convent but one of the nuns died while we were there and we didn’t get to go to Disneyland.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Bit overrated.’

  ‘Not for me. I’ve seen films, it’s perfect for me. La Haine. All of that.’

  ‘Sofi,’ Pip chimed in, looking up from his notebook, his shoulders red despite the suncream, ‘La Haine is about Algerian immigrants in tower blocks. We watched it for GCSE. It’s about murder.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. I like it whatever. Whatever. Look.’ She was holding a segment of chocolate orange between her fingers, using it firmly, like a teacher, as if it made her argument stronger. ‘I am going to Paris and none of you bastards can stop me.’

  ‘No one’s trying to,’ I said. ‘You’re having a fight with yourself. If you go, I’ll come and meet you under the Eiffel Tower one day.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. She softened. She realized the piece of chocolate orange was softening too, and that it was the last one, and she offered it to me.

  I shook my head about the chocolate. But about Paris: ‘Really,’ I said. She put the top of her forehead against my arm, and stroked me with it, like a cat, clumsily. Her head was so hot, you could almost feel the activity going on inside it. ‘I’ll be there, jam jar on hand, eating tuna, whatever.’

  ‘I might be there too,’ suddenly, from Pip. ‘I’ve got family there. Mum’s side.’

  We had never heard him say the word mum before. It felt too easy a word for Esmé. He pressed his pen hard into his notebook.

  He mentioned his grandfather, and said a name that neither of us recognized.

  ‘Painter,’ he said. ‘Quite a famous one. But yeah, the whole lot go to the Sorbonne. Grandfather, great-grandfather. Uncles too.’

  ‘Just the men, then,’ I said.

  ‘And her. She went.’

  ‘Sorbonne sounds like sorbet,’ Sofi said.

  ‘Why do you need to go?’ This was me, practically at the same time. ‘Don’t you already speak French?’

  ‘Oui,’ he said, ‘but my accent’s terrible.’

  I nodded, though it didn’t need confirmation.

  ‘She says I get it from my dad.’

  ‘Well,’ Sofi looked back at him on his high rock. ‘I think that would be great, Pip. More the merrier. Us three. Pa-ree.’

  ‘It’s not like I just suddenly thought of it,’ he said to me. ‘She grew up there, in the sixteenth. I’ve thought of it before.’

  ‘Sixteenth what?’ asked Sofi.

  ‘Arrondissement,’ I said. I knew that.

  ‘I didn’t think it was century. Arrrr-ond-eess-mont!’ said Sofi, affecting Frenchness by stretching her top lip downwards. ‘I love it. I can’t wait to go. Baguettes, man. Reunion. Shitloads of wine.’

  Sofi bared her chocolate-orange teeth. She’d shifted and was lying on her back now, T-shirt shuffled up to her bra. She scrunched a bit of the orange tinfoil into a ball and balanced it on her stomach. She was using her hips to try to roll it into her belly button, like one of those pinball toys you get in a Christmas cracker.

  The little ball rolled in a wobbly path off her waist and she threw it into the sea. We both watched it go. There was more sea – golden-blue, but choppy, hard-looking – than when we first lay down. A lot more.

  ‘Pip,’ she said. His eyes were shut now, lashes flickering in the heat. ‘Oi, white boy. How do we get back up that cliff?’ She worry-burped, and blew it up towards the sky. He said we had to climb.

  ‘Fuck that for a bag of chips,’ she said. ‘I’m flying.’

  ‘No,’ Pip replied, as if it had been a genuine suggestion. ‘You can’t. The only way’s to climb. Or swim, maybe.’

  Neither of us liked his answer so we decided not to hear. The sun was coming in thick beams in the breeze and I asked it to blow me to sleep. I’d got to that stirry half-awake, when Sofi called my name. She’d wiped the chocolate off her mouth with my bag and was using both arms to do enormous waves. It was like breast-stroke, but standing up, and she jumped up in the air every time she brought her arms down. ‘It’s them,’ she kept on saying, ‘them’. It was the Czech boys: Vaclav and Armin, in a little red dinghy.

  They shouted ‘Sofya!’, and then ‘Judy!’. Pip started laughing when they said it a second time.

  ‘Judy’s – brilliant,’ he said. ‘Can I call you Judy from now on?’

  I said, sure, fine, and that I’d call him Pippa. ‘Your shoulders look like crayfish, by the way.’

  When the Czech boys got close enough, Sofi stuck out her thumb like a hitchhiker, then stuck out her
chocolate tongue. Vaclav jumped in the water to pull the boat close enough to us. He and Sofi kissed each other on the cheeks, three times, maybe even four. We got in, Pip last, carrying my bag and his leather notebook between his teeth.

  The boat wasn’t meant for five people. It sat low, very low in the water.

  ‘Why do you have a boat?’ Sofi asked, drawing finger tattoos on Vaclav’s forearm. ‘Are you pirates?’

  It was when Vaclav said they worked for Farquart & Fathers that Sofi’s hand dropped off his arm.

  ‘But Sofya, it’s not choice thing. It’s job – money thing. What you can do?’ He put his hands up in the air like he hadn’t fouled in football. ‘But I give you promise. Armin. Vaclav.’ He pointed. ‘Good men.’

  All I knew about Farquart & Fathers was that they were rich. Pip clarified things later: absurdly rich. The family had just gone up from nineteenth-richest in the world to eighth. There’d been a boom in their pubs – the recession – and their funeral parlours had bought up Co-op.

  Armin held the tiller, and Vaclav did the talking. He told us they were handymen. Cash-in-handymen, Armin interjected (high-five with Vaclav). They’d found their job online, on a summer work website. They mowed the Farquarts’ lawns and sowed vegetables in their greenhouses. Then there were stranger things, like bringing back bundles of gorse to burn, and collecting sea glass from the beach to fill the driveway and make it shine.

  ‘They want to feel like they walk on diamonds,’ Vaclav said. Sofi’s fingers back on his arm now. ‘And this witch patch—’

  ‘Perch,’ Pip said, and explained that it was an old superstitious tradition, a stone plinth on Channel Island chimneys for witches to rest on mid-flight.

  ‘This witch patch or perch or whatever thing. They are putting one. But every wind it falls off. Five times, we’ve stick the patch back on.’ He slapped the back of his right palm against the palm of his left, the way Italians do. ‘Ten times! I say to Armin, witches too fat. Only thin witches from now, please.’ They high-fived again.

  When we got to the shore, the boys – all three of them – pulled the dinghy up onto the sand with me and Sofi still in it. We climbed out, kissed Vaclav and Armin goodbye and left them sitting on the edge of their red beached whale, lighting a damp spliff Armin had kept tucked behind his ear.

  As we walked, Pip told us the Farquarts were buying up half the island. He’d said he’d heard they were trying to import foreign cows and that there were rumours of an underground bunker. People on Guernsey were starting to call it Fark rather than Sark.

  That’s when I remembered the graffiti scratched into the toilet walls at the Mermaid: ‘Fark off!’ which I’d thought was just bad spelling. When we got to the Avenue, Pip told us to look. ‘This side Sark,’ and he pointed at the normal shops that we went to, ‘and that side Fark’: the Chelsea Bun bakery and restaurants with terraces, ye this, ye that, all new with old names.

  It was late by then, home time, and we left Pip by the blue postbox.

  ‘You’re sunkissed,’ Sofi said, and kissed him. ‘And kissed. And you’ve grown! Fuck, Jude – kiss him. He’s a giant. He’s grown in a day.’ Pip looked down and knocked the sand off his shoes against the bottom of the postbox.

  As we walked home, Sofi asked if I had ever been in love. I was glad we were walking. ‘Of course,’ I said, then when she said, ‘Really?’ said I didn’t know.

  Back at Bonita’s, our hostess was asleep, melting into the sofa in front of a Costa Rican telenovela. There were three empty cans of Coke next to her, one still dripping from the lip. She was snoring, making the most unimaginable noise. We’d heard it from the front porch and Sofi had gripped my wrist and dilated her eyes. When we got to our tiny room, we could still hear Bonita, in baggy chorus with husband John next door.

  ‘Fuck,’ Sofi said, head hammering against my arm. ‘Oh fuck. It’s like a fucking farmyard.’

  I started to laugh.

  ‘Oh but it just won’t do!’ She laughed too now, and when we laughed together, the light flickered. She kicked the wall with the side of her foot. ‘I said, I said. Didn’t I say it makes me psychotic?’ She explained: it was because there was no fixed beat, so you couldn’t set your heart to go in time to it. Like Pip’s metronome foot, for me.

  ‘My heart and my breathing. It fucks both of them up. Oh bugger off, Bonita,’ Sofi said as snores poured in. She lay in bed for a few minutes, wrestling with her sheets, laughing, then not laughing, then really, really not laughing. She got up and said she was going to the garden. She said she’d sleep outside. She took the laptop and watched films I suppose, the stripy sunlounger dragged close enough to the fence to steal next-door’s internet.

  There were a few nights when she ended up doing this, and although I saw her go I never went with her. It was night-time and night-time had rules. Even if I was perfectly awake – feet hot, then cold, thinking about Sofi outside, nothing between her and the sky – even if I was perfectly, perfectly awake, I just obeyed it.

  11

  Thinking about it, that was the only summer since I’d got a computer in my room that I didn’t check my emails.

  The laptop was mine, but it was thicker than the Bible and took three minutes and strange sounds to turn on. Sofi used it more than I did. Outside, at night, and sometimes outside in the morning, before we left for the house.

  Eventually, she found that the strongest signal could be reached from within the flowerbed, and so fashioned a chair from the toughest branches of a large lavender bush. She used to touch the screen – jab her finger at it and make dents – and she said it was because she was used to her parents’ new television.

  The way she typed made me laugh. From her purple throne, she balanced the laptop on her knees. Then she typed so fast and aggressively it looked as if she was galloping.

  ‘But where are you trying to go, Sof?’ I’d ask her.

  Tappity, tappity, tap, tap. Elbows up as if to hold reins.

  ‘To the end of the internet?’

  She didn’t reply.

  I wondered who it was she wrote to and what she said about the island, if she ever even mentioned it, or me, at all.

  That day, I told her to pass the laptop over. I was curve-backed on the sunlounger. It may have crossed my mind that she’d leave her inbox open and I’d be able, at least, to look across the subject lines.

  ‘It suits you,’ she told me when I had it in my hands. ‘You look very modern.’

  The screen was set to BBC News.

  ‘It’s the news you read?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s rude not to have it open,’ she said. She was chewing something.

  I scanned the page. It had been so long since I’d thought about the rest of the world that I was out of date with all the storylines. The proper nouns – politicians’ names, ceasefires, celebrities – looked like a different language.

  Most of my emails were from eBay and Amazon. Deals of the day, low insertion fees, lots of them. I looked down the bolded lists for names that meant more.

  There was one from my father:

  Is it going OK? Family’s not the Farquarts, is it?

  Not much to report here. The council is still trying to close down the library.

  Love Dad

  and a longer one – two actually – from my mum, signed from both of them. She was doing a lot of yoga and had an American teacher who was apparently a guru. She said she’d photocopied my graduation certificate and sent it to all the aunts. She was the only person I knew who still used Xs with Os. I marked it as unread and imagined I’d reply later.

  The last email I looked at was from a boy called Seb who’d been in my halls at university. He’d taken me to a Thai restaurant in our final year, and it turned out he was very reactive to spice. I’d told too many people about the way he’d poured the wine until it reached the rim of our glasses. It had been a bit awkward since then.

  Hey.

  I heard from Dan that you were spending the summer on Sark
? I’m in Jersey, we’re visiting my grandma. It’s a bit dull if I’m honest. I’d kind of like a night out. I thought maybe I could come say hi? I looked at ferries.

  Hit me back,

  Sx

  ‘Your face has gone funny,’ Sofi said.

  ‘No it hasn’t.’

  ‘Do you have a rash?’

  ‘Just this boy I know wants to come to visit.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yeah. For a night out,’ I laughed.

  ‘OK, but is he hot?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. He’s ginger.’ I looked down at what he’d written. ‘He put “Hit me back”.’

  ‘He sounds nice. I like gingerbread.’

  ‘You can’t have it. He’s not coming.’

  ‘Is lavender edible, by the way? For eating?’ It was already in her mouth.

  I slammed the computer shut without replying to the email. I never did to anyone, and we left for the house, nearly three hours late, with small bunches of lavender tucked behind our ears.

  12

  So where was Esmé in all of this?

  In a way, she was the rain that you forget. If Sofi asked about her, I told her not to; it was best to block the blackbird out.

  Pip took up the tray and Badoit alone. ‘It’s just sometimes,’ he’d say when he came down. But that summer it was nearly always. She stayed upstairs, alone, in the dark. Once, when Pip thought we were outside doing back crabs in the garden, we heard him come down with a bag of clanking bottles.

  ‘There’s something in the water,’ Sofi said one evening when we were getting ready for the Mermaid, ear by ear in the bathroom.

  ‘There’s always something in the water on islands.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ (index finger to the ceiling) ‘Her water.’ She mimed drunkenness by crossing her eyes.

  I finished my mascara and said that it was none of our business.

  During the day, at our round table, when one of us talked too loudly (Sofi), the other two would point to the ceiling. Esmé’s bedroom was directly above us, and a finger to the sky became shorthand. Esmé above was a strange crown, though not exactly a thorned one. She made us quieter, but she also made so many things funnier, the way it is in school assemblies, when you know you’re not allowed to laugh. And we were not stupid. All of it – the morning rosé, the sunburn, our laziness – all of it felt safer with some sort of parent around.