The Last Kings of Sark (11 page)

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
dan
druff,' 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.

I put my hands to my head as quickly as I could, and told her she wasn't allowed to look at me.

‘Don't be crazy!' she said, trying to pull my hands away. ‘It's dandruff.'

I'd curled into a ball by then and Sofi was genuinely fighting me, peeling at my fingers. She made a grab at a bit of hair just above my ear.

She said she'd got some, and inspected it on her finger. I tried to slap it out of her hand, but she stuck her finger in her mouth.

‘I don't care – it's normal, it's dandruff. I don't think it's disgusting. It's from you. How can it be disgusting if it's from you?'

I put my hood up and did up the drawstrings so all you could see of my head was from my eyes down.

She said she was only looking at my hair because she wanted me to cut hers. She pulled her fringe down, almost to her nostrils. ‘It's ratty. I thought we could have a beauty evening.'

I said dandruff wasn't beauty, and at exactly the same time, she said she meant cucumbers on the eyes.

‘We don't have any cucumbers.'

‘You know what I mean. A beauty evening.
Moisturizer.
Like girls are supposed to do.'

‘Like apes? Picking fleas off each other?'

She wanted to do her nails. I looked at her. She was not the manicure type. Her nails had a black hedgerow of dirt. She held her hands up to the light. It looked like she'd been digging without a spade. Then she folded her fingers into her palms, like she didn't want either of us to see them any more.

I demanded that we do it on her bed, because even though she tried to catch the bits of nail, each curve pinged off and got lost in the duvet. Peanuts were fine, I said, but not fingernails.

‘Yellow,' she said. ‘Smoking. Terrible. Wait. Do it again. Listen …
listen,
' she said, eyes wide, ‘every time you do it, it sounds like someone opening a Tupperware box.' It was true, there was this quiet hiss when you cut them. Her nails felt soft and air-pocketed under scissors, but they flew off hard, like bone boomerangs. When I'd finished, she ran her fingers over my face to show they didn't scratch.

Then I cut her fringe. She crossed her eyes, trying to see what I was doing. I thought about her forehead, the lightest lines across it, that it was frowning and that I could smooth it, but I just cut and caught the hair that fell in the palm of my hand. She asked if I wanted to keep a bit of it, to put in a locket. She told me I was cutting it wonky. She looked through her hair at me and said she was counting my eyelashes. I wondered if someone letting you touch their head means that you have got close to them. I wondered what any of it meant, or if it meant anything at all.

After that, she stood in front of the mirror, dusting her fringe from left to right and seeing if she liked it. I looked at her in the mirror and she looked at me. We both looked different backwards; I was about to say that I liked having two of her, but she said, ‘Oh
no
you look all skewiffy,' and that I was better in the flesh. She put her hands on my waist and turned me to her.

‘Better face to face.' We stood there for a second. It was just a second.

‘Daddy-long-legs,' I said, and leaned out of her hands to scoot one out of the window.

A bit after that, I came back from the bathroom in a thin tank top and pants, rather than pyjamas. I stood in the narrow alley between our beds, taking longer than necessary to set the alarm on my phone, not wanting her to look, but not wanting her not to see. And then, from behind me, from her bed, she said not to move.

‘Your legs,' she said.

I had my back to her, and for a terrible moment, I thought she was going to reach out and touch me.

She didn't though, and I finished setting the alarm, and climbed under the sheet. She stretched out her hand towards me, nails neat now, and turned off the light. Some time between the first night and that night, no light no longer meant silence.

There's something about people lying together in the dark. It fills in the lulls, colours in the gaps. Other things do too; background television, cutting carrots, a third person. But lying in the dark at night is the best. Everything you say could be said quicker in the light, where you are not allowed to look away and think about something else, or be quiet. But in the dark, there is so much to say. You talk all night. You can't see dandruff or chipped teeth or dappled skin. The camera is soft focus.

We talked the moon across the sky, in steep slopes and plateaux and stumbles. Then we slept. I'm not sure which one of us fell first.

17

I woke up in that way where your eyes are awake before you, and they are ready. I woke up to sun, because we hadn't shut the curtains. There was Sofi, naked, sheet off, face flat down on the pillow. The gilt square of the window broke on her pillow and spilt onto her shoulder. If I'd wanted to go from flat to standing, I could have done it in a single movement. I lay there, light.

Sofi woke with a ‘fuck'. And then yes, I remembered too, he was back today. A ball bearing rolled around the bottom of my belly.

‘And fuck –
fuck.
' She smacked her mattress. ‘I forgot to defrost the Chateaubriand. He told me Chateaubriand.' She rolled over, and buried her face in the pillow. ‘I'm going to have to put it in the microwave.
Fuck.
'

Sofi brushed her teeth with her finger, and I got changed on my bed. We cycled fast to Eddy's and Sofi didn't sing. When we got there, Pip had cleared all of the kitchen surfaces and said he wanted to make us eggs. ‘No time, no time for eggs,' Sofi said, reaching up to touch his face as she made her way past him to the vacuum cleaner. He turned to me, ‘Eggs?'