They’d dropped a light-looking anchor, which led up to a bright orange buoy. It was tiny. ‘Young buoy,’ said Sofi, then dunked it.
Vaclav took the red springy emergency break cord off his thigh and attached it to Sofi’s, taking longer than seemed necessary. They put on masks and tanks with hisses of air and clanks of metal. I didn’t want to think about whether they’d done it before, but Sofi asked. Vaclav said he had, when he was younger, in his uncle’s swimming pool, and Armin had practised with the kit in their field.
‘I thought this PADIs was Irish thing, not Professional Association Diving or whatever,’ Vaclav said, perched on the edge of the dory. ‘But I think this: you can try thing, and hope. And normally is working.’ He touched Sofi for luck and threw himself, massive red scallop bag clipped to his waist, into the flat blue sea behind him. Armin kissed the back of his own hand, and followed his friend into the water.
Our job was just to stay near, to watch out for the coastguard if nothing went wrong, and to call for them if it did. Pip peered over the edge of the boat like he might swim after them.
I studied the sea on the other side and thought about how it looked the same from a plane and a boat, just on a different scale. Each wave was chipped at like a Stone Age spearhead, a thousand other waves inside it. Zoom out, zoom in, and there we were, the three of us, bobbing up and down near an orange dot. It was our table, but at sea.
The boat was suddenly too small and still. Sofi jumped up.
‘Fuck this waiting,’ she said. ‘Feminism!’ She zipped up her lifejacket and grabbed the wheel. She fiddled for a second, metal on metal, a tuk-tuk noise. Then there was a roar and we started moving. Jerkily, then incredibly fast. She screamed a ‘fuck’ which rose in the air like the boat: with me and Pip sat at the back, it reared, violently, as if on its hind-legs. We were going unbelievably fast, and doing a boat wheelie.
It’s funny where your mind goes at moments like that. I remember thinking, This is where I die, this is where it happens. And then this other thought, Somehow I don’t mind because here I am with you, by the sea, and we’re together.
The problem was none of us could see where we were going. Sofi had abandoned the wheel, flinging her body across the bow to weigh it down. And I could see, our captain’s eyes were closed.
That was when we flew over the biggest wave. Pip grabbed my jacket to keep me in the boat and Sofi gripped the rope on the bow so hard that later we saw she’d cut her hands. The wave threw us high into the air – so high we were flying – and the boat leapt out of the water like a fish. That realization that I was going to die tucked itself in again, calmly, lightly, as if it were a napkin.
But we landed with a bump (more than a bump, a bone-shaking slapdown, blue-brown bruises for weeks) and then kind of stopped. I could feel my heartbeat through my life jacket; it made the material move.
‘I forgot you could brake,’ Sofi said. She turned around to us. Pip was still holding onto my jacket. ‘Forgot there was a brake. Soz. Sorry. Do you want a go?’
We were silent. Eventually I said I didn’t know how.
‘So? Did it look like I did? Just do it.’
I got up and my legs felt like ropes. I went so slowly at first, the waves moved us more than the engines. I made us go in spurts, letting go of the accelerator every time I felt it work. Pip and Sofi were both sitting at the back now, looking at me. So I thought, fuck it, just go, chump. And that was when we nearly crashed into the ferry.
Sofi took the wheel back after that and we skittered like a stone thrown across the water, less vertically now, because, as with a lot of this, we’d worked out who had to go where for things to work.
By this time we’d been at sea for a while, and I hadn’t been to the loo before we left. I shouldn’t have mentioned it, because Sofi started singing ‘Let it flow like a river’. In the end I had to wee in an ice-cream tub which was kept in the boat for shovelling out water. Carte D’Or. But we said that ‘what goes on in the boat, stays in the boat’, so Sofi peed in my pot afterwards. We offered it to Pip as well, but he said ice cream was a girls’ thing. He held the Captain’s wheel with one hand and peed off the stern, checking the direction of the wind, and checking to see if we were looking.
My hands got cold because I tried to wash them in the sea and the wind chews wet fingers. Sofi gave me some spare socks she had in her pockets to wear as gloves. We kept the boat away from the buoy so we didn’t catch the Czech boys in our blades, and we drove in a tight little circle, round and round, because it made the sea go strange in the middle, like a flat and rippling jellyfish back.
‘Are they still cold?’ Pip asked me. ‘Your fingers? Because I’ll blow on them.’ But just then the orange buoy ducked underwater, and seconds later Vaclav’s head popped up.
They hadn’t died either. All of us, I thought, we keep on not dying.
Vaclav rolled over the side, into the dory. He spat out his snorkel, grabbed Sofi, and kissed her between her nose and her cheek. He held her face for so long, he held his kiss. That happens when you don’t die – you feel chosen; you want to talk a lot and touch people.
‘Fifties! Hundreds!’ he shouted. ‘Look at all this fucking fish!’
Pip helped Armin heave up a net bag full of dirty white shells, chinking like china. The Czech boys undid the screws on their tanks and let out the rest of their air with a hiss.
We couldn’t go back to Creux harbour, because there were fishermen sitting on the wall. We had too many scallops to sneak them up the stairs in our pockets, and it wasn’t scallop season. Like Pip had said, it was illegal and we’d have been reported. We saw the fishermen from a distance – scallops themselves in beige and orange oilskins – and backtracked to Dixcart. Sofi was put on the bow, a golden figurehead, and I sat to the side, freezing cold with her socks on my hands.
Vaclav dropped us off when the water was knee-height. Pip carried the scallop bag from underneath, like a huge, breakable baby, and an air tank under the other arm. He asked if I wanted a piggyback.
‘You’re light,’ he said. ‘I could take you.’
But I said I’d be fine and waded through the water and up the beach. I was so cold I could only look at Pip’s feet in front of mine and follow them. My toes were hard, squeaking together like marbles. All I remember is cold, wet salt. You always associate salt with dry, but it can be the wettest thing too.
We got to the boys’ field and drank tea outside their tents with our salty lips, which changed the beginning and the end of each mouthful. My lips and knees were blue. My bikini top was still wet. I was trying to put myself in the sun, but it wasn’t getting through. I shut my eyes and saw filaments, a leaf that’s gone like lace, and willed the sun to warm me.
My fingers felt bigger from holding my tea so tightly. The others didn’t seem to be cold; they were talking, and eating Penguin biscuits. Sofi was playing with Vaclav’s feet, even though his toes were hairy, and he was telling us more anecdotes about the Farquarts.
‘They are putting big family crest on everything. On plates, on helipad, on knob on the door.’
They also wanted their cooks to prepare all their food (smuggled scallops, Jersey beef) in a gorse-burning oven, but the chef couldn’t get it any hotter than seventy degrees, so he’d bought a secret Calor gas stove, which he hid behind a sack of potatoes.
‘They say is traditional, but it fucking stink, this gorse fire,’ Armin said. ‘We say no for us thank you, no no. Calor gas please. Or microwave oven.’
Vaclav said they got paid £100 a week. If I hadn’t been so cold I would have laughed but he wasn’t joking. At least they were getting full board.
‘Full board. They are laughing. What is this? Not even cardboard.’
‘It’s shit, man,’ said Pip, and then, quickly, ‘not your tent, I don’t mean your tent, just the situation. The situation’s shit.’ And he went back to doodling in his notebook.
I wanted to say, ‘You never swear, Pip; you don’t say man’, b
ut I was too cold. Even though the sun was on us, I had goosebumps all down my arms, and tiny little hairs, standing up and beckoning.
Vaclav and Armin were making wicker baskets to sell on the Avenue, and with the leftover willow they made twisted crowns for the three of us. Mine was too big, so Pip swapped.
‘Have mine,’ he said, coming over and putting it on my head. ‘Coronation on a campsite.’
Sofi’s was too big too, and kept on slipping down over her eyes. She couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t really understand, but it was something to do with Armin’s cowlick. She said she’d never heard that word before.
Finally, she noticed that I wasn’t saying anything. She touched my hand and said how cold it was, then asked if I wanted to go home. I said I was OK, unconvincingly, meaning to be unconvincing, rubbing my hands together; Russian winter. When we left, the boys gave us a plastic bag full of scallops.
The walk back felt very long. I shuffled it, jaw locked. At one point Sofi put her arm around my shoulders and told Pip to do the same. They cocooned me, but as a kind of a joke rather than a ‘this is necessary’, and after five steps they broke away.
I ran the shower boiling before I could bear to take off my clothes. I got in with toes like rocks and when the water hit them it felt like dropping ice-cubes into a hot drink. I let the water run over me, arms crossed over my chest, and still felt cold. I thought of school trips to swimming pools; of the wind when we were on the boat with the engine off. I thought of Sofi touching Vaclav’s feet.
It was as soon as the cold set in, sitting on the boat with socks on my hands, that I had remembered. Eddy was back tomorrow, and in three days I’d be leaving.
I turned the shower up as far as it would go, and let the water run all that away. It took nearly twenty minutes until I felt that my body was all in one piece, and could move again.
15
When I came out of the bathroom, Pip and Sofi were doing something to the scallops on the kitchen table. ‘It’s called shucking,’ she said, ‘I read about it.’ She was using scissors again.
‘It’s my first time.’ A shell broke open like a cracked tooth. ‘Fuck, there’s a load of skank in that one. Worst so far. Look, Pip.’
He peered in. He was holding loo paper over his hand. ‘Cut myself on the first one,’ he explained.
My face felt too clean, as if all the makeup I’d ever worn had gone. I was worried I looked very young, but at least I wasn’t cold, so I asked to open the last one.
‘You sure, Judy?’ she asked. And I told her to shut up, rat, and give me the scissors.
We were no good at shucking. Sofi asked me if we were supposed to keep the orange bits or ditch them. I had no idea, so I said the orange was the best bit. I was about to say something about Pip being all punchy-army with the Czech boys, and to be girls v. boy for a bit, but then he said thank you.
‘For letting me come. It was cool…’ He started a few sentences, but didn’t finish any of them. ‘I had a cool time. Those boys are nice. I don’t know many boys, actually. So thank you for letting me come.’ He was still wearing his wicker crown.
Sofi took him into a headlock hug and said something about the word cool not being cool if you say it eight times but apart from that he was a lovely boy. The table was a jigsaw of shell shards and mangled scallops, a slop of orange, a slop of cream. I asked what we were having for dinner.
‘Not them bastards,’ she said. ‘The sea-snot’s butters.’
Pip asked what ‘butters’ meant.
She told him that when he got to his new school, and people said words he didn’t know, he couldn’t ask. ‘You just have to start saying it yourself. Act, mate. You’ve got to act.’
‘Potato smileys and baked beans,’ Sofi said then. Twice, an incantation that might make them appear. Kids’ food, she said; we were kids and we were going to have kids’ food. Teacher, cook, we were all acting.
‘We don’t have that kind of stuff,’ Pip said.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Secret supplies.’
She added extra oil to the tray she baked the smileys on, and cooked the beans until they were dry. We sat down at the table. Not in Sofi’s kitchen, but at Eddy’s table, the adult one. All three of us and just the three of us, with polystyrene plates and a proper fork each.
‘Fuck – me,’ Sofi said after her first bite. Each word sounded like scooping out ice cream. ‘Stodge. I love stodge.’
She was sitting at the top of the table, in Eddy’s seat, just that bit higher than anyone else’s. ‘It suits me up here. What do you think, Pip?’ No reply. She was wearing a potato smiley as a ring, her little finger through the eyehole. ‘Ketchup?’ she asked, holding the bottle up and Jackson Pollock-ing her plate.
After dinner, we had choc-ices. They were more ice than choc, the paper-wrapper wet and see-through, but Pip finished mine, and after that there were Maltesers. We aimed them into one another’s mouths. Sofi lay back on the table, feet on Eddy’s throne, and blew Maltesers up from her lips so it looked like they were levitating.
I’m not sure why I decided to go to the bathroom upstairs, but for some reason I did, and I ran up there, light on my feet. Sofi was doing a back crab on the table now, with just her right hand, and then just her left, and I could hear Pip laughing.
I washed my hands and looked in the mirror. All my makeup gone – young, yes, but that was fine, tonight. I remembered what Sofi had said about guitars and pianos and so I put my hair down, and started back to the dining room.
The door was too easy to open. Another hand had pulled it from outside: I walked out of the bathroom and straight into Esmé. People say this too often, but it was like seeing a ghost. We both started, our faces fell, we backed away, and in exactly the same way. We mirrored each other like inkblot butterflies.
‘Sorry,’ I said, so English, eyes falling flat to the floor, and skirting past her to get out of her way. Both of us were still for a second. Downstairs, Sofi was singing Sisqo’s ‘Thong Song’, and Pip was still laughing, and you could hear them, clear as day, from Esmé’s corridor. ‘Sorry,’ I said, a second time.
Esmé went into the bathroom and clicked the door shut behind her.
I ran down the stairs, back to our table.
‘I just saw her.’
‘Shit,’ said Sofi, and froze. She’d decided to smoke inside tonight as a special treat. She was perched on the edge of Eddy’s chair, flicking her ash in his christening cup. ‘She’s not coming down, is she?’
Pip walked over to the stairs to look up.
‘She’s so thin,’ I whispered to Sofi.
She looked at me. ‘You’re not exactly Pie-man.’
‘She’ll ill,’ I said. ‘I’m not ill.’
‘But is she coming down?’
I said I didn’t think so, she looked like she’d been in bed. But then, because of the ash, and because of Esmé, Sofi remembered Eddy was coming home. She swung down, feet slapping to the floor, said ‘Ballsacks’ and covered her face.
‘Tomorrow. He’s coming back tomorrow.’
She stabbed her fork through her polystyrene plate. Pip started picking up empty Malteser packets from the table. He crushed them in his hand. None of us said anything for a moment.
‘Do you – do you girls want to stay here tonight?’ He couldn’t look at us. ‘Last night before he’s back, and everything.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think Sofi’s tired,’ which wasn’t a lie, because she’d just flopped her head onto my shoulder. I tried to hold it stiff, higher than it normally was, so I’d be good to lean on.
‘Tired,’ she repeated, a sad, single note, then lifted her head off me. She said she was going to the loo. While she was gone, Pip found one last Malteser in a bag. ‘There was one left behind,’ he said and he offered it to me. It had melted slightly in his palm, so it’d lost its shine and stuck rather than rolled.
‘You have it,’ I told him.
We left Pip – did we leave him with the
washing up? The burnt baked-bean pan, I think we did – and walked with arms round each other to the bikes, our hips banging like bottles in a bag. ‘Cycle for me?’ she asked, but then she got on, pedalling more slowly than usual, but still in front, following long lemon curves with the moon on her back.
16
When we got to Bonita’s, Sofi sat motionless on her bike. She said she couldn’t be bothered to get off. We both sat there for a second, in a two-girl bicycle queue, in the dark, on tiptoes in our seats. What was it? The sun, the wind; the water, being scared, cold, Eddy, that all this would end. These things were heavy on us.
Then Sofi said ‘Blackberry’ and reached out for one in Bonita’s bush. And with that, she toppled over: very slowly, entirely complicit, like we were watching ourselves in a short film with an inescapable ending. When I helped her up, she kicked the bush for making her fall, and then the bike, and then held her hand out to me, fingers lightly spread, so I could hold it. We wandered up the garden path, past the sunlounger she sometimes slept in, past the gnomes.
Bonita was asleep on the sofa. Her head had slunk to one side, and her cheek was resting on multiple chins. We slap-footed into our tiny bedroom and flopped onto my bed.
‘Every time. Every time I forget how hard these things are,’ she said. We didn’t move for a while, we just lay there, flat on our backs; knees hooked over the edge, our sides next to each other, like two tectonic plates.
I was looking up at the ceiling, but I realized, out of the corner of my eye, that Sofi was looking at me. At least I thought she was. You think you can tell when someone is looking at you, but it’s so easy to imagine it. I tried to see if I was right without turning my head, but it hurt and my nose got in the way. She was definitely looking at me.
‘You have dandruff,’ she said. What was weird was she said it so softly, and kindly, as if she was telling me she liked the shape of my eyes.
The Last Kings of Sark Page 8