The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  On Sunday morning, every Sunday, she went for a long walk. She always left at eleven, and when we asked Pip why, he told us that it was her version of church.

  ‘Where does she go though?’

  ‘Just around.’

  ‘Around where?’

  ‘The island.’

  And she did. She walked almost the full perimeter of the island. Sometimes if we went out on a Sunday, we’d see her in the distance – near the powder blue hydrangeas of La Sablonnerie, or on the slopes down to Bec du Nez – and change our path. Sofi asked if we shouldn’t say hi, but Pip said it was best to leave her, that it was her way of thinking.

  ‘It’s weird though,’ Sofi said to me, when we were alone. ‘I always thought she was anachrophobic.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Scared of the outdoors. Space.’ When she said space, she made her eyes big too.

  ‘Ag oraphobic.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Even if we didn’t see her, I thought about Esmé on her walks. I imagined her not taking paths, and how small she’d be against the open fields. In my head, it was always windy, and she walked with her arms around her waist and her head dipped. The wind was almost strong enough to blow her over. I always felt a strange relief when she came home. I think we all did.

  She was important. Sofi didn’t smoke inside, because Esmé would have smelt it. We slept at Bonita’s and mostly observed mealtimes and washed up, because somewhere, there was Esmé. We used her when she was needed. It was Pip who mentioned Lord of the Flies.

  13

  By then, it was early August. My ticket home, three weeks to go, had been stuck to the fridge, but Pip had put it away in a drawer. Even with Esmé upstairs, the house felt open, ceilings higher, windows wider. And we were hardly ever there now. Esmé upstairs and home time in the drawer: we didn’t want to see any of that. The world was blond, the wind was warm. These were the days that were golden.

  Sofi made Pip do pull-ups on his old swing in the garden. Some days he didn’t wear T-shirts, and we all stopped wearing shoes until it got dark. One day, Esmé saw Pip in this state of undress.

  ‘What did she say?’ Sofi asked him.

  ‘She asked why I was naked.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘That I didn’t know where my clothes were.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just came out of my mouth.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘Gamins,’ he said, flatly. ‘Kids.’

  In the evenings we sat round dusty cardboard boxes of Chardonnay at the Mermaid: three litres, £18; wine as warm as the dance floor. Vaclav squirted it out into cups for us, once, twice, then straight into Sofi’s mouth, a slave holding grapes for an empress.

  There was the time Sofi saved DJ Roger from a girl who’d accused him of stealing her diamanté denim jacket. Sofi had a word with the girl and she left very quickly. I asked what she’d said.

  ‘I told you. I’m from Ealing. I’d take any of these island leprechauns.’ (She said it leper-corns.)

  Anyway, because she’d saved him, Roger invited us over to his house one afternoon. I told Pip to go and see if Esmé was OK, and Sofi and I, girls, went alone to Roger’s house. It was painted red, and named after a song from a Disney film.

  ‘See?’ said Sofi, when we were hovering outside the front door. ‘That’s what I mean. He has taste.’

  He had mounted plates of race horses and Malay sunsets, and a whole wall, skirting board to ceiling, of CDs.

  He asked if we wanted coffee, ran a ringed finger over necks of whisky bottles, plumped for Bell’s, and belly-flopped it out of the bottle instead of milk. He told us he used to run a nightclub in the cliffs called Bootsies, and he told us about the Sark Lark. ‘Taxes and that. Nominees. Plaques. People made their money. Weren’t nothing but for fun.’ He told us about human table football – ‘a little Sark tradition’ – where players’ arms were strapped to scaffolding poles. He spoke in exclamation marks and question marks, muffled by years of smoking Royals Red. When we left, he gave us cassette tapes, Now 19 and Now 21, the ages we were that summer, to take away with us.

  We were drunk by then, and went to the Island Stores for food to fight it.

  ‘Do you think they’ll know?’ Sofi asked. ‘Smell my breath.’ She did three short breaths from the back of her throat right in my eyes. ‘Can you smell I’ve been drinking?’

  ‘No, I can smell prawn crackers. Sofi, you can’t open them before you’ve paid.’

  She said that shops brought out the worst in her. That it was ‘all those aisles’. So we went and sat on the bench outside, the bench between two phone booths. We watched kids count coins in their palms, then buy sugar cigarettes. We sat in the kind of happy silence where you feel you’re talking.

  ‘An apple,’ Sofi said, after a while, ‘an apple of all things.’

  ‘I like apples.’

  ‘Is it even nice though?’

  ‘Well … no, not this one.’

  ‘I can see. It’s onion-y.’

  She tried to touch it.

  ‘It’s floury, isn’t it?’ She retched. ‘Crapple!’ she said, and stuck her tongue into her lassi to get the last drops out. ‘Do you think I’ll make it to Paris, Jude?’ she asked, licking her top lip then looking straight at me.

  I could tell she wasn’t looking at the surface of my eyes, but somewhere deep behind them. She had this way of looking at you so intently that you had to look away. I did.

  ‘And Pip. Pip said he might go for a whole year. That would be cool. Do you think that would be cool?’

  The thought of Pip getting to be alone with her, far away, felt like heat. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. My voice see-sawed, intentionally unsure.

  ‘A year’s a bit long,’ she agreed.

  ‘And you and him … there. It just might be a bit weird. It’s fun here. But there, and afterwards, it would – it wouldn’t be the same. It would be like some kind of photocopy.’ I paused. ‘Bad photocopy,’ I added, to make sure.

  She went to put her wrappers in the grey street bin a couple of metres away. When she came back, she seemed to be thinking about what I said. The tips of her eyes looked unhappy.

  ‘Of course you’ll get there,’ I said. ‘You’ll get to Paris. And I’ll come. Of course I will.’

  We went to the post office and fiddled with the kitchenware they sold, one-person Le Creusets and skewers for corn-on-the-cob with patterned handles. We had to leave when they said Sofi was trying to shoplift a notebook (she said she was just putting it in her pocket ‘to see if it fitted’).

  After that, we went to church. It appeared to be empty so Sofi put her arms in the air and walked up the aisle singing ‘Calypso Carol’. That was when a woman popped up from behind the altar with a yellow duster in her hand. Sofi sat down very quickly in a pew and pretended to be praying.

  ‘No worry,’ said the woman from the altar. ‘Nice to see young people. Day trip?’

  ‘No,’ Sofi said, letting her prayer hands fall. ‘Here for the summer. Working for a family.’ She said Eddy’s surname.

  The woman went back to dusting for a second. ‘The mother – yes, the mother used to go to the other church, I think.’ She said there were two churches, this was Anglican, but there was a Methodist one too.

  ‘Do you lot fight?’ Sofi asked.

  The woman laughed. No. And actually, she said, the two churches came together at the end of every summer for a service on the sea. She told us this year’s was soon, and we should come. We said we would, and Sofi apologized for walking in singing the Christmas song.

  * * *

  One time, back at the house, when the three of us were sitting in the garden, backs propped against Eddy’s big shed, Pip asked what my dad did.

  ‘Why her dad?’ Sofi shouted. ‘You’re so medieval.’

  ‘No I’m not. She just said that “all dads want a shed” so I was thinking about dads.’

  ‘Sex-ist,’ Sof
i said anyway, and raised her hand as if she were going to hit him. He flinched away from her – a sprinter ducking to cross the finishing line, the stock image of fighting siblings.

  ‘He’s like your dad,’ I cut in. ‘In business.’

  In business was true, but they were in very different tax brackets. My dad wore a suit. Eddy’s collar was always undone. ‘Neck’s too fat,’ my dad would say about men like Eddy.

  ‘Insurance. That kind of thing,’ I finished.

  ‘And your mum?’ Sofi said.

  ‘She worked at the same company as him. That’s how they met.’

  ‘Nice,’ Sofi said, chewing on a pen, though it wasn’t that nice. ‘My parents met at language school. In Dover.’

  She paused, but we could see from her face that she wanted to continue.

  ‘He took her to France on the ferry. Calais. The bright lights. And that was it, he proposed right there.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Swear down. At an Italian restaurant, just like that. Wham bam, thank you man.’ She dusted off her hands and smiled and her bottom lip got a tiny bit stuck on her teeth.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ I said.

  ‘Kind of like mine,’ Pip said. Then, when we turned to him, ‘Kind of.’

  ‘They met in Dover?’

  ‘No. No, but France…’

  ‘Really?’ Sofi said tentatively, catching my eye.

  ‘What?’ Pip said. ‘It’s a nice story, actually. Eddy tells it at dinner parties.’

  ‘Fuck off, do you have dinner parties here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But with other people?’

  ‘Yes. No. Well, we had a couple. I remember a couple when I was younger.’

  ‘Anyway, go on—’

  ‘They were children when they met.’

  Sofi made a face.

  Pip shut his eyes and swallowed, ignoring her. ‘In the mountains behind Nice. Eddy’s family had their holiday home next door to where Esmé grew up. They were neighbours. Every summer, they were neighbours. You know the big photo in the conservatory with two children picking olives?’ We nodded. ‘That’s them.’

  ‘They’re tiny,’ I said.

  ‘Is Eddy the one without any teeth?’

  ‘Yeah. No teeth. Anyway, Eddy’s dad sold the house. The way Eddy tells it, he only found out when they spent the next summer in Greece. He says he tried to kill his father by dunking him in the pool.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Not really. He was twelve.’

  ‘But what happened to Ez?’ Sofi demanded.

  ‘He wrote her letters.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘No, really. For years. She wrote back. I’ve seen them, the letters. Hundreds, a whole box. What’s strange is you can see how the handwriting turns grown up.’

  We were still sitting down but Pip had stood up and he lightly kicked at Eddy’s shed with his heel. ‘They met again when – I think he was nineteen and she was seventeen? And well … voilà.’ With his voilà – his English voilà –- he raised his arms to gesture to the garden, the house, the marriage. His voice, which had been upbeat, anchored. ‘I don’t know if they knew each other at all, really. Not at all. I think she was still a kid.’

  * * *

  That night we rode out to the Czech boys’ field. Pip ran beside the bikes, faster than before, using the backs of our seats to push us uphill whenever it got steep. The field was quite far from the thatched Farquart castle but there were still signs warning about guard dogs, in English, French and another language which looked textspeaky, with lots of apostrophes. ‘Sercquiais,’ Pip said. ‘Wankers.’ (That word was a gift from Sofi.) ‘No one local speaks it.’

  The boys had made a shaky wooden table out of old oyster crates for their poker games. Sofi and I lay on the grass nearby with our shoes off. There wasn’t a single cloud, and Sofi wasn’t used to the stars.

  ‘It’s not like I’m a rabbit, stuck down some little hole. There are stars in Ealing. They just don’t look like this.’ It was so dark, but if you looked hard enough at any piece of black you could find a star. She tried to find the ‘bit’ of sky which was her favourite, but it kept changing. She pointed her way through the whole universe, and neither of us had seen stars like that.

  * * *

  What else happened? All the stories stack up on top of one another and the pile is so thick I can’t see most of them. I climbed a tree for the first time in years. The three of us sat in its catapult and smoked rollies the thickness of a thumb. We cycled in the wind and it didn’t matter what we said because the wind threw our words into the next-door fields. I remember the smell of shells; the sound of seagulls, tractors, horses. Pip took us to navy-black caves and showed us how to jump into where the water rushed. I went last, but I did go. I cut my hands on sea anemones, and I wanted the scars to stay, like rings.

  Sofi kissed me on my cuts and told me to look at Pip. ‘His neck. He’s got a man’s neck. Aren’t we doing well?’

  Sofi taught him how to sew and made him ‘power bowls’ of bananas and nuts. He ate without wincing; his ankles were less thin. He had freckles now, messy stars on his cheekbones, dots on his lips. He gave Sofi piggybacks without blushing, and he could look at me straight. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, and got good at looking; good looking.

  If it rained, sometimes we would go back to peristalsis, and osmosis, and all those ‘ises’ I was supposed to teach, but Pip knew it all already. And besides, it never rained.

  The grass was warm enough to lie on in cotton and there was sugar in my coffee. We left Esmé her tray and Badoit, and took crisps and cans of sweetcorn for clifftop picnics. We drank Eddy’s good wine from the bottle as the sun burnt into the sea. I don’t know if the sun tricks you into feeling things, or if it makes you see things more clearly. But that’s what I mean when I said it was golden. Our skin got darker and our hair got lighter, and summer passed like sand through our fingers.

  14

  Three Fridays after Eddy left, he texted the house phone to tell us he was coming back. Sofi put the answerphone on loudspeaker and a jerky automated voice read out the message:

  ‘Home tomorrow. Bringing Caleb et al.’

  ‘Such a creepy voice,’ Sofi said. ‘So nasal. And who’s Al?’

  Eddy had sent two messages, and at the end of the second the service de-abbreviated his LOL. ‘P.S. Chateaubriand pls,’ the computer voice said. ‘Laughing Out Loud.’

  ‘I think he meant the love one,’ Pip said. ‘Idiot.’

  We had breakfast at lunchtime. Scrambled eggs Sofi-style, which were more of a condiment – half-egg, half-butter. I leaned back in my chair, stretched my arms out and took up space while there was still room.

  Sofi’s huge Nokia started vibrating on the table. It was Vaclav. She picked up and said, ‘Yeah. OK. Yeah. Jiggaman!’ looking at me with good-news eyes. She hung up and said the Czech boys were going scalloping and wanted us to man the boat while they were in the water. Wo-man the boat, she corrected herself.

  ‘It’s illegal,’ Pip said. ‘Can I come?’ He looked at me. We hadn’t been to the study for nearly a week, but I was still teacher. I looked at Sofi, because she made the decisions.

  ‘You know what they say,’ she said. ‘When the cat’s away, the cheese will play.’

  Pip chopped the rest of his scrambled eggs into a noughts-and-crosses grid of pieces and ate them with his fork, determinedly, quickly, happily.

  We threw our things into Pip’s school rucksack, and met the boys down at Creux harbour. Armin was carrying tanks down to a tied-up speedboat. Vaclav was standing up at the bow, wobbling because he was waving, and so was the sea.

  Girls kissed boys, and boys bashed shoulders. Pip pointed out where he’d harbour-jumped and mangled his leg, and on that note we went down the wet steps and clambered into the rocky boat, a manoeuvre impossible to perform with grace. Something humiliating about it, like changing your shoes on the side of a street.

  Vaclav,
tipping the boat like old-fashioned kitchen scales, held his iPhone up to the sun. ‘Reception is crazy shit on island.’ He’d googled ‘how to drive boat’, and was waiting for an instruction video to load on ehow.com.

  ‘Dory boat, not dinghy boat. Is different.’

  Vaclav asked if anyone had a pen and Pip got out his notebook. I went to take it, so I could be scribe, but he pulled it away and said it was private; he’d write. We all stared at the little iPhone screen.

  The video was presented by an American man in wraparound sunglasses. You can see it if you go on the website. We couldn’t, however, because of the glare of the sun. So Vaclav held the phone to his ear instead, screwing up one eye to show he was listening.

  ‘Turn on bilge blower, write! Write! Turn on bilge blower.’ That was the only instruction he gave from the video. And when it was over he said, ‘What is bilge blower?’

  ‘And what is dead man’s switch?’ Armin cut in. ‘You find out dead man’s switch?’

  Vaclav looked at his phone, shrugged, and pushed off from the harbour wall. He said we’d manage, it couldn’t be that hard, and we ad-libbed into the ocean, chipping past parked boats. Vaclav pointed to nowhere and said that was where we were going.

  Sofi was chirpy and ran a finger through the sea, so it looked like we had a mini jet-skier beside the boat. Pip looked ahead with the same face he had when he was reading: concentrating, happy, lips which might be about to whistle. And Vaclav and Armin argued as they always did – unless that’s just how Czech sounds.

  When Pip corrected Sofi’s pronunciation of scallops, she asked if she could see his hand, then bit it.

  ‘Why are we doing this, again?’ she asked Vaclav.

  ‘Moonlight job,’ he said. ‘Tourists. They love it. Love this fish.’ We stopped at some sea he was happy with. He shook talc into his crotch and started yanking his wetsuit up in fistfuls. He handed me a radio in a waterproof sheath and said that the emergency channel was twenty. Teacher again; I held it tight.