The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine … fine.’ Even quieter the second time. There are certain angles, lying in bed, that make it hard to speak.

  ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Kind of, Jude, I was sleeping.’

  ‘Would you meet me?’

  He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘I can come over, if you want,’ she adds.

  ‘No, no, don’t—’

  Jude hears the creak of the bed as Rookie gets up. ‘Hold on a second, I’m just going to – non, t’inquiete. Personne … personne. Une amie, seulement. Sorry … wait.’ She hears a door shut at his end. ‘Yeah, OK. I can talk now. Are you OK?’

  ‘You have a different voice when you talk to her,’ she says.

  ‘It’s French.’

  ‘No, not that. It’s … sugary.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘Comic Sans.’

  ‘Is this what you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘Not saying it’s bad, just funny.’

  ‘Is this what you woke me up to say?’ he asks, his voice changing again.

  ‘No. It isn’t. I’m sorry—’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘—for being a cock.’

  ‘You’re not a cock.’

  ‘Can we meet?’ she says. ‘Later?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘That’s not yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Caulaincourt,’ he says. ‘Caulaincourt. The café on the corner of Junot. Shouty barmaid.’

  ‘In an hour?’

  He thinks for a second about the girl in his bed. ‘Two?’

  ‘… OK,’ she says.

  ‘An hour and a half.’ He stops. ‘I can be there in an hour and fifteen.’

  ‘OK,’ she says again. Then ‘thank you’ but Rookie has already hung up.

  * * *

  That is when Jude starts to cry again.

  She had called him from the bath, and it’s got cold. The water is faintly green, faintly cloudy, but that’s more from soap than anything else. She’s scrubbed her legs until they are red raw and now there are tiny quenelles of her skin floating on the surface of the water. Before she called him, she watched her body through the bath. All of it distorted, vague waves making the straight lines of her legs shake. When she was on the phone, part of her thought: I don’t care if the phone falls. Drop it into the water and let yourself turn to silt.

  But she held the phone tight and, now Rookie is no longer on the line, she drops it onto the battered bathmat. Another thought cuts through her: this is fake depression, school depression, you can’t even do depression properly.

  * * *

  Rookie doesn’t shower. He spends the short time before he has to leave back in bed with his girl. Fifteen minutes of peace pressed against her sleep-skin. At the métro station, he jumps over the barrier and gets to avenue Junot in an hour and ten.

  Jude is already waiting, hair still wet. (Even though it’s short, her hair has always held onto water. If she gets caught in the rain, it takes hours to dry; one of the reasons it shines so much.) Her skin is bleached-looking, though, bleached-out. She’s wearing sunglasses. Both elbows are perched on a Formica table, and her cheeks rest on her palms.

  She offers him the chair opposite, thanks him for coming and asks if he wants a beer.

  ‘No,’ he laughs, quite genuinely. He’s let his beard grow, rusty red, and you can hear it rustle when he opens his mouth.

  ‘Old times’ sake,’ she says. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘I just woke up. Look at my hair.’ He bends towards her and points to his partings. He has three. ‘I’ve still got sleep in my eyes. Coffee first.’

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else then. I’ve been crying. Don’t look, but my eyes are red.’ She flashes her sunglasses to her forehead for a second. ‘All puffy. Can we walk?’

  ‘You look fine,’ he says.

  ‘Liar,’ she says. She tries to smile but on the way to her face it turns into two tears – perfect spheres which hold over her pupil and then drop heavily onto her cheek.

  ‘Come here,’ he says and stands her up with his hands. He wraps his arms around her. His arms meet each other sooner than he expects.

  ‘There’s nothing to you.’ He undoes his hug and puts his hands over her ribs. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here. I’m still here.’ She shifts her hands into her pockets, which breaks his grip. ‘I’m still here. Let’s walk.’

  For the first hundred yards of avenue Junot – a perfect curve, the beginning of a spiral – they say nothing. They walk uphill.

  ‘It’s not summer any more,’ Jude says, pointing up to the trees. The leaves are starting to become stiff. In the flushes of summer, their fullness stops the sun from reaching this pavement, but daylight has returned to Junot. Jude has been inside for too long. Even with sunglasses on, she has to shield her eyes to look up to the sky.

  ‘Again,’ she says. ‘It keeps on leaving and nothing’s ever changed.’

  ‘It doesn’t keep leaving…’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘That’s too much.’

  ‘It’s what it feels like. I think about what happened last month and I ask myself if it feels like a whole month ago. It never does. I do the same with years. It goes so fast. Two and a half years I’ve been here, and you, three. And what have we done?’

  ‘Stuff. We’ve done stuff.’

  ‘None of it matters.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Don’t you think we’ve wasted it? You don’t think about time like I do,’ she says.

  They’ve just arrived at their Spanish square. Jude sits down.

  ‘That used to be my line,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t smile like that.’

  He nudges her over, and they sit on their bench in silence.

  Jude has tissues – loo roll – tucked into her sleeve the way a mother does to an infant. ‘Did I ever tell you why I came to Paris?’ she says.

  ‘You were madly in love.’

  She looks at him blankly.

  ‘Madly in love with me.’

  She has to laugh at that.

  ‘No? No, I know. To do that dossy French course at the Sorbonne.’

  ‘No. Well, yes, that too. But part of it was to honour some – it feels so stupid when you say it – some promise I’d made to someone. Someone I – felt I, I don’t know, loved or something.’ She looks at her tissue. ‘It’s so stupid.’ Her words are breaking down.

  ‘It’s not stupid.’

  ‘Didn’t I ever tell you that?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t think she ever came. Even if she did, I never saw her again.’ Jude’s eyes look as though she has been rubbing them. ‘And now there’s the American girl and all the rubbish in between.’ Tears cross her cheeks, cross each other. ‘You think it’s funny, but it’s confusing, Rook.’ Her voice is breaking now. ‘And it’s sad. It is sad. It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘Not embarrassing. You’re lovely. I always thought you were lovely,’ he says, hand on her denim knees. He can say this now because he’d said it before, not just once, and all that was over. So far away it felt impossible. It amazed him how strongly, how consumingly the body could feel something, but that, if it is not returned, perhaps even if it is, one day that feeling just … melts. At times it frustrated him, at times he saw it saved him: why is it we can only really say what we feel when we don’t feel it any more? ‘That’s the problem. That’s your problem. You never see the people that wanted you. Want. You know what I mean.’

  Her knee is so small under his hand.

  ‘Then why do I only like the ones I can’t have?’

  He takes his hand away.

  ‘I used to think that,’ he says. ‘Think that it was only people I couldn’t have. The girls who already had boyfriends. My mum’s friends. I was in love with one of my mum’s friends. Black girls who passed me in the street. Impossible girls. You.’
He stops what he’s saying and looks up at her then with fondness. Such fondness. In front of him is a face he has loved. His eyes seem to tip down rather than up when he looks at her like that. ‘But it’s not true.’

  ‘It’s not a choice to be like this,’ she says. ‘It’s the way it happens.’

  ‘It is a choice.’

  ‘Not.’

  ‘It’s the torture of it, Jude. You like the minor keys.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘The nearlies and could-bes.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The maybes.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘It’s what a teenager does.’

  They look at each other.

  ‘You’re not a teenager any more.’

  She says he doesn’t have to tell her that.

  Rookie looks away. Jude looks at his hair. She thinks how different red is from orange. His hair is the red of foxes, the red of bloodwood. It has a different texture to all others, red hair. There’s something about his moustache that reminds her of a sea creature.

  ‘We always fall in love in patterns,’ he says. ‘Not even in patterns. With patterns. The people are – sometimes I think the people are completely irrelevant. This American girl you like. If she turned up right now and said you were the love of her life, do you think you’d still feel like you feel now?’ He looks at her. He’s trying to read her face like music. ‘Wet eyes, wet hair, all … wet with love?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude blows her nose very loudly. ‘Yes, I think I would. I do.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘That’s not fair … You can’t tell me off for not changing and then tell me I’ll never change.’

  ‘It’s not just you. It’s society. All of us. It’s fucked up.’

  She manages to laugh again, a light laugh at him. ‘You were lovesick a minute ago. What happened to you?’

  ‘I don’t like seeing you like this,’ he says. He scratches at a sparse part of his beard.

  Jude says sorry.

  ‘It’s not your fault. I just … This girl. Does she even know? Have you said something this time?’

  A pause. ‘We slept together. We’ve been sleeping together.’ Those were not the words he expected. He doesn’t know why it still feels hard to hear them.

  ‘So?’ he says, quickly. ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Have you actually told her how you feel?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Human brains,’ he says. ‘They’re so simple, Jude. No one ever knows unless you say it.’

  That’s when the noise breaks into their conversation. It’s an 8-bit version of Chet Baker. It’s Jude’s phone, from inside her bag. She takes it out.

  ‘Fuck.’ She stares at it. ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Which her?’

  ‘The American.’ The way she is sitting has changed completely. ‘She never calls me. What do I do? It’s her.’

  ‘Answer it, you weirdo.’

  ‘I don’t – I don’t know.’ She’s looking at her phone like she’s never seen it before. ‘Oh fuck. Fuck.’ She turns the phone to face him. ‘She’s hung up. What do I do now?’

  ‘She’ll call again.’

  ‘She has a boyfriend. I don’t know.’

  ‘Just call her back.’

  Before she can, Chet Baker sings again.

  ‘It’s her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Jude reaches out and touches her friend’s temple. A raised vein, heat, soft. He shuts his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I will. I’m going to take it.’

  Jude leaves Rookie on the bench, and walks away to speak; the only word he manages to hear is a shy, but solid, ‘hello’.

  Less, Loss, Other Words that End in S

  If you were to see them, you would not guess that they are breaking up. They are in bed, alone together; so it’s not very likely you would see them at all.

  They have shifted down the sheets, the pillows above their heads, like clouds. They lie like the letter S, twice. Sofi is the first, Arthur is the second. He can feel the tops of her knees push, bone hot, into the backs of his.

  The differences between them, how small she is, the length of her hair, strike him again and again. Extraordinary thing, he thinks, that I can lift, whole, off this world.

  It’s Sofi who called it their double-S. She said she didn’t like the term ‘spooning’, thought it sounded metal, cold. She made a joke about once being in a three-piece cutlery set. That wasn’t cold, she said, so far from cold, so she could understand it even less. ‘Double-S,’ she says now, again, ‘like at the end of kiss.’

  ‘Shush. With as many S’s as you like. You talk and talk.’ Arthur zips her lips with a finger; they break open and she takes his finger between her teeth.

  It is not clear – and never really has been – which of them likes the other more. There are things that other people look for, then things that count.

  Sofi still cannot believe how handsome he is, and tends to say so, stopping him in front of shop windows and talking to his reflection. ‘Classically perfect’ is the sound bite she’d come up with, and stuck to.

  She likes to kiss the side of his body under his arms. Skin never got used there. ‘This is where we’ll never get old,’ she would say. She re-drew his tattoo. She wished she could scratch him, lightly, along the padded outlines of his ribs, but she bit her fingernails. It was the only way that she could keep them clean. She left the faintest grazes only when her teeth hadn’t made a clear cut.

  She liked the places he was hard where she could never be hard: his chest, solid in soft squares around the bumpy haloes of his nipples; his bum, ‘wrong word for it,’ she said, so firm she could knock on it like a door and did. The other place he got hard.

  She tested him, in her head. If he touches me on his way back from the toilet, it’s true he loves me. A few days before: If it’s him, not me, who breaks this hand-hold, it’s him, not me, who will end this.

  She would ask him if she had kissed him everywhere yet.

  ‘You already asked me that.’ Creamy voice. Thick, spread.

  ‘Loads of times.’

  ‘Did you answer?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Probably. That’s what I said.’

  And no one had ever made him laugh like she did. She would push his face away with her hands, deciding he was laughing at her.

  ‘So what I thought it was Maori Poppins, so what? Easy mistake, it’s not funny.’

  ‘It is—’

  ‘Not funny to laugh at me.’

  He wasn’t, he was. It didn’t matter. Sofi made him laugh and no one had ever made him laugh like that.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m Polish.’

  ‘When it suits you.’ He took her head, a planet in his hands, and clamped it into his chest. ‘Hear that heart?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice dampened by his jumper. ‘You don’t have one.’

  ‘It’s for you. It beats for you. All of it’s for you.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to laugh when you say that.’

  * * *

  When they’d met at Beni’s, both of them had just meant to be passing through. They called it a ‘way to’ place. But both of them had stayed. Smoked, worked, walked. Spent so much time together, but like brother and sister, for over a year. At first, Sofi thought he was too soft to be sexy: his hair, his skin, his voice, all of it soft as felt. And Arthur thought she was too … too…? He didn’t know what, now. They spent so long not fucking that they fucked for so long when they started, as if to make up for lost time. They were new again, it was new – new, confusing, tears by the sea, and fights by text – when they were allowed to see each other naked.

  He had watched her like a film at first. Well-edited, smooth. It was like she moved in scenes – standing in a door frame, on tiptoes, hands reaching up to the top corners, gauze bra, naked everywhere else; pushing him
into the loos on a quiet day at the bar, sucking him through his jeans. Scenes he could play and replay. The first time they had slept together, he could hardly get home. It wasn’t butterflies in his stomach. It felt like a bird in there, beating its wings. He thought he’d walk in front of a car. He sat still in a café not far from where she lived and let his head explode with her.

  Now he’d seen her breasts so many times they no longer shocked him. She’d plucked her eyebrows as they watched TV, marvelling at each thick hair’s bulb – ‘Look, Ar! Like a plant bulb, an onion bulb’ – and showing them to him. He had looked all around her face and seen everything that was wrong with it: pinker splashes where foundation faded, how the tops of her ears pushed forward slightly as if reaching for what he said. Her legs had got a little fatter; he’d met her mother. And all of this, all these things, had built up like seconds into a minute. That minute felt so full, so full he thought it would burst. It was love. Still is. So hard to know which one loved the other more.

  * * *

  Arthur would talk about ‘starting the day’ to get them out of bed.

  ‘As if the day won’t start without us. As if it’s our responsibility,’ she’d say. ‘We used to get up so late.’

  ‘Go out into the day. We need light.’

  ‘Open the curtains, I don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t want other men to see you.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘We’ll get scurvy here.’

  ‘I’ve got fruit.’

  ‘Bananas aren’t fruit.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Potatoes. They’re like potatoes.’

  ‘Fruit.’

  ‘You shouldn’t eat so many.’

  ‘Iron, Arthur. It’s good for you.’ She pronounced the ‘th’ in his name with an ‘f’.

  ‘Not iron. Potassium. It causes blindness. Come on,’ he’d say. ‘The day,’ like it was leaving. It was the only time when he pushed his voice.

  Then she’d say ‘Fine’, firmly, and find pants, back-crabbing on the bed to pull them up. She’d put makeup on (still not much, but more than she used to, more every year) and finish her hair before she reached for the rest of her clothes. Sometimes she’d have her shoes on, and a bag in her hand, ready to go, before she chose a dress to wear, or one of his shirts.

  ‘The day,’ she’d say. But now it was him. He wouldn’t have moved. He’d be watching her.