The Last Kings of Sark

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

  ‘Your breasts.’

  He’d put a finger in her belly button and pull her to him like that.

  ‘The day, you dick.’

  ‘My dick, then the day?’

  ‘You don’t like the word “dick”.’ She took his hand and pushed his strongest finger into a damp dip in her pants. ‘You think it’s too English … childish.’

  ‘I was playing with the words you gave me.’

  ‘Playing?’

  ‘Playing. Fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No one has ever – oh fuck – no, don’t … carry on … No one has ever…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just feel like – I mean – fuck – you’re the – I don’t know…’

  ‘Finish your sentences.’

  ‘So good.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘The best.’

  She would talk during – her hands everywhere, she’d touch him everywhere – which he found strange at first. It wasn’t talking like they do in things you see on the internet, or like other girls had tried.

  ‘You concentrate so much,’ she’d say when he was deep inside her. ‘I can see it in your eyebrows that you’re thinking.’ He’d kiss her to stop her looking at him. ‘Is it true that all boys think about Margaret Thatcher?’

  Sometimes he wanted to say ‘shut up’, but even in his head that sounded wrong and he’d see her nipples – pink beads, soft and hard at the same time – and say, ‘Your brother. I think about your brother.’

  ‘I don’t have one. Why do you have to be gross? Turn me over. Come. I want you to fuck me here.’

  After a year or two, they stopped counting. They didn’t know what to count from anyway.

  ‘First kiss,’ Sofi says.

  ‘You kissed Meryn after that.’

  ‘We all did. It was a party.’

  ‘Then you went home. I didn’t see you for a month.’

  ‘You told me you loved me.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You did. When you came to stay.’

  ‘You were telling me about Sark. About that girl.’

  A muscle in Sofi’s belly, thin and tight as a wire, contracts.

  ‘How strong it was.’

  ‘You said that was hot,’ she says.

  ‘It was hot. But it got me. I wanted to make sure you weren’t…’

  ‘Weren’t what?’

  ‘I wanted you to know how much I wanted you.’

  ‘Do you still feel that?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear my heart?’

  Now, in bed, alone together, his thumb follows the shape of a bikini. It’s February, the month furthest from the sun, but she has a tan-line all year round. Belly dark, breasts white, like she’d bent and dipped her front in bleach.

  ‘Not bleach,’ he says, kissing them. ‘Don’t say that. Milk.’

  They roll, return to their double-S. His back is so big in front of her. She puts herself in the middle of it, his shoulders at her hairline, her lips where his broadness begins to narrow, still thickly, into waist.

  ‘Your arms are like two of mine, maybe three.’ She sounds almost sad. ‘Hey, Arthur?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is this what life is?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are we grown up yet?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is this what we meant when we said “When I grow up”?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Had he said that? Had he thought it? He feels as if the bed has disappeared from underneath him. As if he is floating, static in the air.

  ‘Where do you think you’ll be in twenty years?’ she asks, blunt fingers resting on his ribs.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where do you think I’ll be?’

  ‘I don’t…’ Harder. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Which country?’

  ‘I…’ He stops. She blows on his back as he thinks. ‘Where do you want to be?’

  ‘Do I have children?’

  ‘Do you want them?’

  ‘I…’ She’s stopped blowing.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Yes,’ he decides. ‘You have children.’

  ‘Lots of them?’

  ‘Lots.’ Whatever it looks like, this is not a fast conversation. Between each sentence, the silence is such that they can almost touch it. He speaks even slower than he used to. All the boys she’s ever known talk more slowly now they’re men. ‘They’re healthy.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ She blows again. And then kisses his side. A line in slight curve. Orion’s Belt. The skin of his torso that will stay young. ‘Peter Pan. You’ll look good old though. You look good. Salt and pepper suits you. So handsome.’

  She pushes him back, until both shoulder blades are flat on the bed, and pushes her forehead into his chest. Both keep their eyes shut tight.

  ‘Do I have them?’ he says into her hair. He is not sure, but he feels a pain somewhere.

  ‘Yes. They’re just like you. Exactly the same, all Cornwall and lovely. I think they’ll be lovely.’

  Neither of them moves for a while. It is not that they are breaking up today, right now, as you read this. It is not the last time they will lie in a double-S in this bed, not at all. It might be years.

  They don’t need to say it, but they both know, that when they made each other older, they gave each other away.

  Borges in Bed

  It started with a line from Borges. Pip wasn’t sure if he had remembered it right. His son couldn’t sleep, and he was trying to help him.

  ‘Could you say it again?’ the boy asked. He was lying flat on his back, but his head was three inches off the pillow.

  The boy did not look comfortable. Pip could see tendons, cello strings too close to the skin, tugging at his son’s collarbones. Six years old. His bones are a third of the size of mine, they are as thin as sticks. For one thick second, Pip could not wait for the boy to grow. He would have folded up the next ten years of his life in order for the boy to be less breakable.

  ‘I don’t remember it exactly, J.’

  ‘But you just said it, Da.’

  Pip licked his thumb and used it to wipe off the snot which had dried in a small cobweb under the boy’s nose. ‘It’s something like…’ and he repeated what he’d said.

  J shut his eyes tight until they disappeared into folds of skin like stars. That’s where he’ll have wrinkles one day, Pip thought. He shuts his eyes so hard. J had clenched like that the first time he tried to swallow half a paracetamol, when the Calpol had run out. It hadn’t worked. ‘I’ve gone all closed at the back,’ he’d said, pointing to his throat. So Pip hid the pill in a buttered bread sandwich, and got his son to take it that way.

  J let his head lower back, slowly, into the pillow, as if he thought someone might have taken it from under him.

  This tiny child doesn’t trust anything, but he’s so small not to trust things. J had one leg outside of the duvet, and one underneath it. Three nights earlier, he had said, quietly, that one half of his body was always hot, the other always cold. Always the same sides. He asked his dad if that was OK, and then he asked if he was going to die.

  Now, this evening, he was silent. Pip felt his son’s breathing start to slow down, he saw the tide of the duvet change. The first few times he had seen this, it scared him. The words ‘peter out’ came into his head. He had never thought those words before, but that didn’t matter, they came to him now. What if his son’s lungs petered out? Peter out, peter out, I can’t bear it if he peters out. And he had shaken J awake.

  Then apologized when he realized nothing was wrong. Pip thought about his own breathing and his own heart, his own everything, when he fell asleep in the bigger bed next door. His body slowed down too.

  He let his son do the same now. He stroked J’s forehead to help him on his way, to show that he gave him permission to go. He would not be that kind of father, Pip told himself, not the kind who got in the way.
/>   Pip sat on the edge of his son’s bed. He could feel the long corner edge of the mattress through his jeans. He felt, for a moment, as if he were sitting on a tightrope. The light coming from the corridor led to the noise of the television. J said the sound helped him sleep, unless it was guns or bombs, when he preferred it if the volume was kept low.

  Pip kissed his son between the eyebrows, the weight of it pushing J’s head further into the pillow. When J was even smaller, Pip had held him in his arms the way he’d seen it done in films. Cradling. He would kiss J’s head again and again in tiny, staccato beats. He used to wonder whether he kissed him so much he would stop his hair from growing. Until he was two-and-a-half, J’s hair was nothing but a suggestion, see-through in sunlight. After that though, it turned blond, then brown, and it grew fast, now, on the weekends. Pip got up slowly and walked to the door. He pulled it to behind him, leaving the light on.

  In the small bed, J was not asleep. His left hand was flexed open as wide as it could go, as if each fingertip were trying to escape from the others. His right was clenched so tight his fingernails – they grew fast too – dug into his palm. When he realized how different his hands were, he let the force in each of them go. My left side and my right side, they never feel the same. It occurred to J that he might be broken.

  When he thought that, new thoughts followed. Broken, he must be broken, and reasons sprang out, flaring, wild, hard, like his left hand’s fingers. It was because he’d swallowed chewing gum. It was because he’d bitten a girl at nursery once, and blood dotted out through her Aertex. It was because people near him broke. It was because everyone was breaking. It was because he had tried peanuts. J had heard of allergies, he knew about illness. He had seen programmes about these things on the television, had heard words when he was supposed to be sleeping. He imagined black lumps growing all over the inside of his body.

  That was how his brain worked. If you could see the way his thoughts moved and grew, you’d talk of estuaries or trees, things that fork, and double, and double again. It did not help what his father had said. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  That night, J was sure he did not sleep for a single second. What he could see in his head felt as big as a cinema screen. He looked all around this space, from floor to ceiling, from curtain to curtain. If Pip had been there still, he would have seen his son’s pupils dance beneath the surface of his eyelids.

  There were lots of things happening, all at once. Here are some of the things J saw:

  He saw his home burning. He saw it from outside, as if the bird feeder had become a camera. He saw licks of orange, and butane blue; charcoal clouds of smoke so thick they smudged out the windows. He saw the fire start from the kitchen, then he saw the fire start from his father’s bed. Then he saw it start from his own head (that week at school, a classmate had, without such words, described spontaneous combustion).

  He saw groups of teenagers – or, twelve-year-olds at least, older than him and twice as high – running along the road towards his house. They had white faces, then black faces and then their faces were a mixture of the two. He saw baseball bats in their hands, then huge curved swords, big guns and finally axes, blades flashing silver in the light of the street lamp.

  He saw a snake at the bottom of his bed which turned into the type of spider that was poisonous. After that, it was a scorpion, and finally, it was a snake again, cold, wet, moving towards his knee in a stretched S.

  He saw a man in a hood break into their house. The man climbed up the drainpipe and climbed in through the tiny window in their toilet. Then he put his hands round J’s father’s neck and killed him. When J looked again, the man in the hood was his father.

  He did not sleep. He saw everything that he could.

  In the morning, Pip went to wake his son.

  It was often the other way round. Before his boy was born – after they’d decided, at the very last minute, on that very hot day in Paris, to give him the chance to be born – Pip imagined a young child leaping, bounding onto the parental bed. But this boy, their boy, would walk round to where Pip slept, alone now, and tap at the highest point of his outline, hoping to find a shoulder.

  This morning, though, Pip went to wake his son. J had kicked off his duvet in the night, and his limbs, which had recently thinned, looked longer than the day before, and were French-plaited in the sheets. His mouth was slightly open, his bottom lip glazed.

  Pip drew the curtains slowly, so as not to shock sleeping eyes with full sun. He felt that if Clémence had been here, that would be the kind of thing she would have done. He liked it when he felt that. Pip picked up the fallen duvet and held it out with high arms so it fell straight. He laid it lightly over J’s feet, which were sole-to-sole, as if in prayer. Pip’s hand was drawn by muscle memory, by magnet, to the boy’s face and he stroked the highest part of his cheek. ‘He-llo,’ he said in a conscious whisper. ‘It’s been morning for ages.’

  It was grown up, somehow, to be the one doing the waking. Pip was glad for moments like this.

  At breakfast, Pip asked his son if he had slept well. J tried to pour himself cereal, but the box slipped and feather-light puffed rice skittered out across the table.

  ‘You were scared last night, weren’t you? Before I tucked you in.’

  J picked up the Rice Crispies he could reach and put them in a little pile next to his orange juice. Look at his cheeks flush, look how he concentrates; such a sober child. How odd it was, Pip thought, to talk of a child as sober.

  ‘It was good advice I gave you,’ he said. ‘Last night. Wasn’t it?’

  Because he had never liked high-chairs, J had three extra cushions stacked on his seat. He was careful not to move too much because sometimes all the cushions slipped.

  ‘You were out like a light after that,’ Pip said. ‘Weren’t you? It’s a good thing to remember.’

  And he said that sentence from Borges, or something like it, again.

  J did not want to hear. He tensed his ears to fill them up with the sound of the blood moving in his veins. It sounded like the sea, when you stood at the end of a pier. Pip poured milk into his son’s bowl.

  He felt good after that. There were moments when he thought he might not be doing so badly. He was young to be a father – both he and Clémence had been so young; it was how young they were that people always talked about, and then, now … but he was making it work. Would make it work. Twenty-four was a fine age, surely? In his throat, coffee turned to hope.

  ‘I’m like your dad and your brother, both at the same time, aren’t I?’ he said.

  J did not know what it was like to have a brother, and so he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘We can be like brothers too, if you like?’ Pip noticed every time he asked J a question. It felt stupid at times to ask questions of someone so small.

  ‘If you like,’ the boy repeated. With the back of his spoon, he squashed soft Rice Crispies into the side of his bowl.

  Someone else’s mother rang the doorbell then, to pick up J and drive him along the Uxbridge Road to school. Pip said, like he said every day, that it was very kind of her.

  * * *

  At school that day there was only one point, when they watched a cartoon in class, that J forgot about what his father had said. When he remembered though, it landed at the base of his stomach, and in his head, between his ears, high up, fizzing, on top of everything. In the afternoon, J locked himself in a low-walled toilet cubicle for nearly twenty minutes, until the teaching assistant came to check that he was OK.

  After school, the same someone-else’s mum took J to her house, which smelt of radiators, sweets and stock cubes. He didn’t like her son much, but he liked the lady and thought she smiled a lot for how old she was. He asked her how old she was exactly, and she said thirty-two.

  J said his mum was those numbers too, if you took the three and the two and swapped them round. He said that was the age she’d stopped at, and he added that she was French, as i
f that might explain it. The lady didn’t know what to say after that, so she brought J a toy to play with. It was meant for someone younger than him. J sat on the sofa until his father came to pick him up.

  * * *

  It had been nearly four years since the accident.

  They – Pip, Clémence, J (a baby then, face the size of a palm and body wrapped in triple blankets) – had been driving to the south of France to visit Eddy and Esmé’s new house.

  The motorway made the baby cry, so they’d switched to smaller roads. The hedges all looked the same, they hardly passed villages. They were late, they were lost. Clémence was angry with Pip for not having satnav, and the back of Pip’s neck burned at the thought of disappointing everyone.

  Eventually, he pulled into a layby, and Clémence crossed the road to ask an old man for directions. The man walked with a stick and his back curved forward in an echo of its handle. His white jumper was stained. He seemed friendly. Pip watched them through the window: the man pointed with his stick at first, then with wide, arthritic hands. Clémence nodded with each new point, then Pip saw her say ‘merci’ with a slower bow of her head. She’d turned back to the car, and ducked to see him through the window. She’d smiled, and mouthed ‘See?’ Pip had played this scene in his head a thousand times.

  A second later, Clémence turned to wave goodbye to the man, and stepped into the road. The car – a car that nobody saw coming – dragged her body nearly twelve metres.

  To see it silent, it almost looked like the car had brushed her away. Brushed, swatted, it looked that easy. But that said nothing of the sound. Of bones and metals; of soft meeting hard and becoming unrecognizable. The brake was more violent than the impact.

  The nearest hospital was in Paray-le-Monial, and Pip and the baby had waited there, red seats in a plastic corridor, nurses stopping now and then to stroke J’s head and offer milk and tea. The families had arrived the next day. Clémence’s father came up from Marseille, Eddy and Esmé arrived, grey-faced, in a taxi. The doctors told Pip many times that what he remembered from those moments might not strictly be true – that the mind contorts things after trauma – but he knows he shouted at his parents when he saw them. Shouted and shouted until he could feel spit falling from his mouth. He only stopped when the baby started crying too.