The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  There was a handsome, cross-eyed boy in yellow shorts, and lots of fat girls, fully clothed, one like a jellyfish, or melting ice cream, thick ankles poking out of a play tent. There were ribby children, and a family in black sitting at a fold-out table reading Terry Pratchett books. So much of life was there, and we wrote their stories, whole worlds for each of them.

  Sofi said if she could write like anyone, she’d write like Hemingway. The way I said ‘What?’ sounded snotty.

  ‘Pip said it was your favourite, Jew; he let me borrow. I read it when I couldn’t sleep. Laptop as a light. What did you think I was doing in Bonita’s garden?’

  I flicked the sand. I really had got most things wrong.

  * * *

  We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant because it was the only one that would serve us alcohol. Pip wasn’t good at hiding his sips, and we’d already been kicked out of a Bella Italia and a bar which had icy crates of oysters at the front. The lady in the Chinese restaurant looked at us suspiciously then said, ‘Want beer?’ When we said yes, she sent us ‘upstair’, singular.

  The light was very bright, and there was still tinsel up from Christmas, red as nail varnish. The only other people there were a silent couple, and two women with choppy hair and going-out tops, but the waiter’s face shone and bubbled with sweat.

  ‘Real-life Chinese though,’ Sofi said, pointing to one man in the corner. ‘Why do they have Braille on the edge of serviettes?’

  ‘They’re called napkins,’ I said, and she told me to rod off.

  The wine only came in litre pitchers. It was bright red, fridge-fresh, and the label was in Chinese. I’d never had Chinese wine before. Cheers. We looked at each other, each one, straight in the eye. Sofi reminded us that it was that, or seven years bad sex luck.

  I can tell you about what we ate. Crispy stuff, salty stuff, parcels, balls and sticky rice which held the shape of the bowls when you tipped it out. Sofi ordered far too much, but still ate her prawn tails. I hoped wine got on my lips and made them redder. We had scallops, so much smaller than the ones we’d smuggled. Pip finger-painted our initials on the window, which had fogged because of our heat. J + S + P, and then Sofi drew a heart around us.

  She couldn’t work out whether she liked someone else serving her, or not. She smiled a lot at the sweaty waiter and made me leave more of a tip than I had meant to. It was still light when we left the restaurant. It should have been dark, considering how much we’d drunk, and because sometimes it seems like you have to wait for the dark for things to happen.

  It was definitely too light for Pip to be sick. He said ‘just a second’ then ran to some railings. He tried to keep us away with one hand, and it came in three hot bursts. I touched his back, stroked it even, partly because I was glad it wasn’t me. He kept on saying he was sorry, and that he didn’t want to go home yet.

  ‘Don’t be a FLID,’ Sofi shouted. She really did shout it. ‘The night is young. Young, Pip. There will be no flagging.’ She handed him three bits of chewing gum.

  ‘You don’t get it,’ he said, holding onto the railings like he might drop to his knees. ‘I fucked myself.’

  Sofi turned to me, disappointment in her eyes: ‘Why does he still not know how to swear?’

  ‘No, I’m fucked,’ he said. ‘I am fucked. I fucked myself.’

  ‘You’re fine,’ I told him. ‘Just drunk.’

  ‘No. No.’ He was shaking his head. He took his hands off the metal bars and put his fingers in his ears as if to stop sounds from coming in and then brought his hands up to the inner corners of his eyes and pressed. ‘I’ve done something terrible.’

  ‘It’s Strongbow,’ said Sofi. ‘It couldn’t harm a baby, honest.’

  ‘The exams. I fucked the GCSEs up and I see it now.’

  ‘Pip,’ I said. I’d never met anyone as clever as him. ‘You really don’t have to worry.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I did it on purpose. I didn’t want to leave her.’

  Neither Sofi nor I said anything.

  ‘My mum. I didn’t want to leave her,’ he said again. ‘So I deliberately wrote rubbish. In the exams. I wrote all this rubbish. So Eddy couldn’t make me leave.’ His voice stopped working halfway through.

  Normally in life you can say it’s OK. You can say it’s OK and mean it. What do you say to someone when it’s not? Neither of us said anything.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave her,’ he said again, taking his hands away from his eyes. When he said, ‘But now I think … now I think it would be good,’ he sounded exactly like a child.

  In my head, I heard the sentence he’d said to me on the first day in the study, and I heard it differently: There is no point in you doing this.

  ‘It will be OK,’ I said. I pushed the future tense at him. I thought if we both believed it – if we all believed it – it would be true. ‘It will be. It has to be. There are ways.’ I looked to Sofi because I wanted to see her nod, and she said what we needed was more cider.

  Young Pip. He waited outside when we got more Strongbow from a newsagent. He took a swig, gargled with it, then spat it into a rubbish bin. He asked if it would stop him from thinking, and we said yes. We drank the rest on a bench underneath a street light, until we got too cold and went to heat up in an arcade. We shared the last cigarette outside a fish and chip shop, and said we’d smoke our next one together in Paris. We will, we said. We had tequila shots with slices of orange and coffee in a bar where the drinks were blue. Everybody looked at Sofi. ‘And you,’ Pip said. It was true; they looked at all of us. It was as if the light was shining on us, and only on us. Or maybe we were the light.

  Pip said we shouldn’t worry, that he’d fight for us if we needed him. We had another tequila, and then one more. I paid with the green note. We realized it was a full moon. And we played bingo, didn’t we? I remember coloured balls, twangly music, being the only people shouting (all the time, for every number). We didn’t win, but the others danced. No, I did too. We were definitely dancing. Someone took my picture.

  We walked back to the hotel as one person, bumping legs, arms round one another. Sofi sang ‘I know who I want to take me home’ – just that line, badly, but again and again.

  We fell into the room making noise. But it was so much stiller in there than it had been on the streets that we fell silent.

  I never thought it would be me who went first. But Pip, he turned to me in the sudden nothing after all the lights, and said, ‘Jude?

  ‘Jude. When it’s over – when the summer’s over – can I go? Will she … will she be OK if I leave her?’

  I had spent the whole summer pretending I had the answer. I didn’t have any answer. But he looked to me, again. And so I kissed him.

  He almost pulled away – I felt it in his face – but then he didn’t. His lips didn’t move at all at first, like they were in shock. And then he kissed me back. As I turned my face to find Sofi, his lips left a line across my cheek.

  She was still there. She looked at my lips, his lips, then eyes, lips, eyes, like she’d done a thousand times. I told her to come. I fell away from Pip to make space and leant against the wall. I held my hands out, my palms up.

  She took them, and held them either side of me. Lips, eyes, lips; a decision and then she made it. She kissed me and I felt it behind my belly button. She let go of my hands and looked at hers. They were shaking. Mine stayed where she left them and I could feel my heartbeat in my fingers.

  We needed Pip, so that it was all of us. We came back together. We kissed in a circle, one way, then the other. Then together, a tangle in the middle. Someone laughed. But it wasn’t a laugh which said that it was funny and now the joke is over. We laughed and then the only thing we stopped was laughing.

  Sofi crossed her arms down over her body and pulled off her top. She was wearing the same black bra she’d worn the night I arrived. She took my hand – my heartbeat in it, my whole heart in it – and put it to her. I pulled Pip with me. The lace on her
bra was so thin. I looked at it, underneath it, felt it on my fingers and then felt her start to undo my jeans.

  I wasn’t thinking. What my lips were doing, where my hands were, I wasn’t thinking. Pip was looking at my hand there, her hand here. We saw him swallow. Then Sofi started kissing him, and then I did, and with his own hands, he started undoing his shirt. I remember the sound of breathing – in-breaths, out-breaths, broken, louder. I remember finding sand, because it hides on you, and you find it later, when the sea is nowhere near.

  Pip was still in his socks. We pulled them off, one each, then he pulled us both back to him, scared for a second that he had lost us. We took him back between us, we kissed him, we held tight.

  I had seen these bodies before. But bodies are so different when you are allowed to touch them. Bodies are so different. Adam’s apple, hard breasts and scars on hands. Pip had stubble. His body was harder; his shoulders smelled like milk and new shoes.

  We had never seen Sofi blush before. But all across her cheeks she was rose-gold and we kissed her hard to make it last. She said things out loud, and she was the only one. She said sentences for both of us, and for all of us, and she was the one who had the words.

  One or two I said back in a whisper, into her hair and into his neck. I pushed her hair aside to kiss her beneath her ear. There was the fruit and clean of shampoo, and salt, and I kissed them and said things into their skin.

  So much skin, planes of it. Pip’s white and taut as a sail, Sofi’s, warmer than ours, a photograph of summer. Maybe it can never be equal. Maybe it just can’t. But I do – even with everything – I do think it was. All this skin was ours and no one else’s. We shared everything we had, and we all felt like the one being kissed.

  28

  We woke up in a hot, melted knot. But it wasn’t uncomfortable, it really wasn’t. Until we left that bed, nothing could be wrong. I tried to work out whose body was whose; whether it was a back against mine or a chest; if it was Sofi, or if it was Pip. Things we had done played against the inside of my eyelids. My legs off the edge of the bed, Pip behind Sofi, the tip of a tongue painting a line down the side of my neck, hands, so many hands. Flashes, sunspots. But when I looked straight at them, they disappeared.

  We all woke up at the same time – or did I wake up last? It felt like we woke up at exactly the same time. Someone moves, imperceptibly, but the stick of sweat means you feel it. Someone thinks of your body, and you, and that also wakes you up. There are many forces at work the next morning.

  All of me felt touched. Nothing that would ever show, but as though if I pressed myself I could feel where hands had been. The skin on my collarbone smelt of olives, from where kisses had dried.

  Beautiful, fragile grace period. Even though the curtains were open and it was light by then, it would be night until it was broken by clothes or food or other people. We stayed under the covers, and arms and heads were kissed and circles drawn with fingertips. Sofi said good morning, a croak on the ‘morn’, and then laughed. Pip’s chest raised like it was laughing (my head was against it) but he didn’t make a noise and then we were quiet again. His was a hard chest to lie on, and when it moved, it moved in bones. Our fingers walked around one another’s bodies to say we hadn’t done a bad thing. Be grateful for the grace period. You can tell yourself you kissed in daylight too.

  I remember putting my hand on Sofi’s stomach. I held it there. And I don’t know why but I thought of the babies she would have. I held my hand over her stomach, and thought of all the other hands that would touch her, and Pip, I felt his hand on me.

  Before we left the bed, we hugged like muscles in a heart.

  29

  My flight home to England was at 11.15. It was difficult to imagine times like that existed. Fifteen minutes past; there was no point in anything apart from what had just happened.

  I was the one who left the bed and broke the spell. I got dressed in the bathroom and I couldn’t look in the mirror. When I came out they were sitting on the bed. They stood up together, bed sheets like loose togas. I kissed them goodbye. I pushed so hard into that kiss. I pushed sorry, goodbye and everything into that kiss. I wanted them to feel it when I had gone.

  I left the hotel. I can’t say I was walking because it wasn’t walking, it was floating, or falling, not walking. The wind hit me. I could feel where the wind started and I stopped.

  Then somehow I was in a taxi. Again, I wanted red lights, zebra crossings, things that get in the way. I thought of fog and faulty engines. I was sure that something would happen. God would intervene; I’d held my hands to God.

  Right until the moment when I felt the wheels of the plane start to pick up speed on the tarmac, I believed I would not leave them.

  But I left the island on a normal plane, blue seats, not leather, no kisses; just stewards selling scratch cards. What I found so hard was that there were all these people, all these other people, who didn’t know any of the things that had happened. Men with shaven heads, kids with colouring-in kits, and no one understood that the world had changed.

  A young boy in the seat next to me tugged at his belt to look out of the window. I looked over his shoulder and there she was, Sark. I saw it – her – from above, as Sofi had. I saw it all, swollen green in a sea of gold.

  I did not know when we would go back there. Or if, when Pip did, he would ever leave.

  Maybe it doesn’t matter. As long as it ends where it began, with leaves, and light coming through them. With the sun. Sun on Pip, and sun on Sofi. The sun on all of us, when we were young, when we were kings.

  2

  Then he would reflect that reality does not tend to coincide with forecasts about it. With perverse logic he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Faithful to this feeble magic, he would invent so that they might not happen, the most atrocious particulars.

  Borges, from ‘El Milagro Secreto’

  Beni and the Kids

  Benigno Ciampa was like a fat Fagin. Except he wasn’t Jewish. He was half-Italian, half-Indian, a third Scottish and a quarter Kilburn. That added up to more than one person, but, like he said himself, he had enough room.

  Sofi met him in a midnight-blue restaurant. She hadn’t been in the city long. She’d met a man in a park and he’d invited her for dinner, but when she turned up at the restaurant there was this fat guy at the table too. He had a huge veal escalope on his fork, and he talked to her in French. Sofi couldn’t look him in the eye. It wasn’t just that he was fat, he had a hole in his cashmere. It was one or the other, she thought, you can’t do both.

  She apologized for her French. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘No. Moi, je parle pas. C’est un peu … shit.’

  ‘You’re Scandi,’ he said.

  ‘No, just blonde.’

  ‘Too pretty to be English.’ His eyebrows – both of them – rose when he smiled.

  ‘NHS dentists are good now,’ Sofi said. She shook her hair out of a ponytail. ‘Poland,’ she conceded. ‘By way of Ealing.’

  He told her he was from Kilburn, a bus ride away. ‘Same difference though,’ he said. ‘North London. High street. Both of them the whole world in mini.’ He had a bit of crumb on his beard.

  ‘True,’ said Sofi and she told him about a fight she’d seen in Benny Dee. ‘That was like a world war.’ She thought for a second. ‘Actually, that time they were mainly Irish. But I think I started it.’

  Beni laughed and swallowed the last, heart-shaped bite of his escalope. ‘I liked Kilburn.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’ she asked him. ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘This place. This is mine. Restaurants.’ And he called out for cheese. ‘Mais pas de bleu!’ he shouted, then turned back to her, patting his belly. ‘I find it a bit rich.’

  Sofi was twenty-one then, just turned. The money she’d earned from Sark had long run out. She’d worked for a while at JJB Sports but got fired when she did a handstand and landed on a customer. ‘Normally it’s fine,’
she told her parents. ‘Promise. But this time, this time I hit a kid.’ She told them she wanted to go to Paris. When she said she’d work at the Moulin Rouge if she had to, they finally agreed to call a second uncle who lived in Le Havre. He’d moved there after France won the World Cup. He was on his second wife, and, more importantly, his second pint when he got the call; he agreed to let Sofi stay until she found her feet. This was her second week.

  ‘Beni,’ she said to the fat man, helping herself to one of his cornichons, ‘any chance I could get a job?’

  * * *

  She started the next day. Not at that navy restaurant from the night before, but up the road, a diner in a former printer’s shop, white and windows, on a curved corner. ‘Le Paris, it’s called,’ Beni had said. ‘Snowdome winters, greenhouse summers. Lovely place, lovely kids. You’ll never leave.’

  When Sofi turned up, an Australian girl was waiting for her at a table at the back, underneath a map of the world, about to eat a burger.

  ‘Sit down,’ she told Sofi. ‘Make yourself at home. Have a chip. Oh fuck,’ she said then. ‘Fuckin’ igg’s not cooked.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The igg. It isn’t cooked.’ She opened her burger and hooked some albumen over one tine of her fork. It rose – slick, translucent. ‘Sri Lankans can’t cook iggs.’

  ‘I can cook,’ said Sofi. ‘I’ve been a cook.’ She’d been expecting something like an interview and wanted to use some of her answers.

  But the Australian laughed and said, ‘D’you speak Tamil? You don’t wanna go in the kitchen. It’s hotter than sex and they get about two bucks an hour. Just when you’re getting a burger, right? Don’t go for the Sixpence. Take a nice, safe Classique.’