The Last Kings of Sark (13 page)

Your body feels hard when you come out of the sea, like your skin's been pulled tight. Skin of a drum. I had goose pimples all over, my breasts almost hurt. I looked down at my feet and I looked up to the sky. The wind blew the heat of the sun off us, but it couldn't blow away the light.

Sofi was lying flat on her back with her eyes shut and her wet head on my T-shirt. I lay down next to her, our damp heads touching. She opened one eye, said ‘hello', then shut it again, and said she just needed one moment to make sure she was going to stay alive and then we could talk. We lay silent and concentrated on letting the sun dry us.

She turned onto her side and faced me. Her waist dipped deep like a hammock, and she put one knee towards me, recovery position, to balance herself.

She looked me up and down – or left to right, rather, because we were lying down. I flicked a puddle of water out of my bellybutton, rested a hand there, and looked away.

She touched my hipbone and said, ‘Cold. You must be even colder than me.'

She licked her finger and ran it over her thigh then licked it again. ‘Salty. I think the sea is saltier here. It's drawn on me.' We were both scribbled with salt, but it showed up more on Sofi because she was darker.

She rolled in my direction onto her front. ‘So brown now. Look, when I lift up my arm, this bit' (it was her shoulder) ‘this bit turns to crêpe paper. I like that I've made my skin different.' She stretched both arms out in a dive and shut her eyes. I could feel her breathing. The beach was made of tiny, tiny, flinty stones. They'd stuck to the backs of her arms and legs and purpled like petrol in the light. Like scales. I told her that she looked like a mermaid, but I don't think she heard. She moved a tiny bit closer, said ‘Body heat,' and we lay next to each other, one face up, one face down, stone mermaids in the sun, breathing nearly at the same time.

I don't know if we fell asleep exactly, but time passed. I remember suddenly noticing my pants were wet, and my hair. The sun had gone in. Cold again. I dusted stones off Sofi's back to wake her up.

She turned over, and for a moment, both of us were too cold to put our clothes on. We leaned back on our elbows and watched the weather change. We saw it first over the sea, the rain. A paused, powdery curve, the air darker around it. If we'd stood up and watched, we would have seen it run towards us like a tiny, invisible army. But we both realized at the same moment how undressed we were, and reached for our clothes.

The rain had nearly reached the sand by the time we had our jeans on. We ran to the trees with our buttons undone, then ran through the woods, up to the bikes. The drops were so heavy it sounded like fingers were drumming a beat on the leaves.

What was amazing was that up where the bikes were, it wasn't raining yet. When we cycled up even higher, we saw that two different skies were tussling. I thought about flying over Sark on that first day, and how the sea on one side was black, and on the other pink-blue. I thought that's how it would look today, on one of my last days, too.

We turned away from the rain and cycled to the sun. It was right at eye-line, and we cycled into it. It pushed back towards us through leaves and trees and fences, making them look like they were burning. I wanted to say that this was the most beautiful time of day, and that I did, I did know what she meant about your soul feeling big, but Sofi said it first and so she said it for me.

When we were round the corner from the house, she stopped and told me she didn't want to go back. She didn't want to go back to the men and those boys and the salty, salty sauce she'd made, and she asked if we should run away. I wanted to say yes, but my head suddenly felt cold again, and I looked towards the house and saw the light of the kitchen through the window. I knew it would be warm there and easier. ‘Come,' I said and cycled off ahead of her into the drive.

Pip was alone in the kitchen, holding a bag of frozen bolognese sauce up to his eye.

‘Middle one's elbow. Right in the…' He stopped and shut his good eye, his nose crinkling as if it stung … ‘face.'

Sofi peeled away the bag. His eye-socket was purple, but maybe that was the cold. She padded her fingers over her own cheekbone, as if she'd be able to feel if it hurt on herself.

‘I can't play rugby,' he said, but he didn't look at me.

Sofi kissed it better and told him to put the frozen bolognese in a tea towel. I asked him where the men were.

‘The men,' he said. ‘The men have gone to the pub.'

He looked at me, and I felt the shoulder hit his face. His cheekbone was so close to the skin. I wanted to touch it because that's instinct, isn't it, but I asked what time the others would be back, and went to lay the table in the dining room.

I was putting out the napkins when the youngest of Caleb's knobbly celeriac sons walked in. Jared, Jake, something that began with a J. He shook off his raincoat onto the floor.

‘Why are
you
doing the table?' he said. Such a gormless face. ‘Isn't that what the Polish girl's for?'

His lips were fat as pillows; wet and meaty. He walked past me and thumped himself onto the sofa, flicking on the TV in a single movement.

I put down the rest of the napkins and went to tell Sofi that they were back. Pip was stirring her sauce with one hand and using the other to hold the bolognese bag up to his eye. It was melting now, and water was dripping onto the floor. I thought of the brine from the olives on the first night, and even though it had started so thornily, I wished I could do it all again.

‘Did you two have fun?' Pip asked, and not even unkindly.

‘Yeah, it was nice. Got cold though.'

Just then the lighthouse siren sounded, and aftershave and male voices, all of it fighting, filled the house.

21

The first thing Eddy did when he came back from the Bel Air was tell his son to get out of the kitchen and get changed. Pip was still wearing his rugby clothes: shorts meant for a child and one of his dad's Hong Kong 7s T-shirts. There was mud on his legs but mostly they were blotchy from the cold (that was another thing about Pip: he never noticed if he was cold, hot, hungry or sitting in a way which would cut off his circulation unless you told him).

Eddy peered into the pan that Pip had been stirring, moving the spatula to one side as if it were a lid. His nose curdled, then he picked up the melting bag of bolognese.

‘And what the hell is this?' he said to me. ‘Get Sofi to deal with it. We have
people
here.' He went to the cellar to get wine for his carafes.

Sofi came back from the loo and I told her Eddy said she had to move Pip's eye-meat.

She looked at me like I was joking. ‘Why don't
you
do it? Shove it back in the freezer, it'll be fine.'

I told her I wanted to get changed for dinner. I was happy after our day by the sea; I had spare clothes in my bag, I wanted to look nice. It's strange how being happy can make you more obnoxious than almost any other feeling.

I came back down in a red dress. Eddy was lighting a fire using a whole pack of firelighters and one of the Farquart newsletters, and Caleb was talking about the new rugby pitch at Sherborne. Eddy was saying ‘Yah, yah,' a stroke for every sentence. It took him so long to light that fire.

I pretended to look at the books on the bookshelf, until Caleb tipped his oyster mouth in my direction.

‘Like the dress. Where did
you
school, Jude?'

I said it was just a small day school, Dad hadn't been a fan of boarding himself, but that one of my best friends at St Andrews (‘Oh, of
course.
Stellar university') had been at Sherborne and had played for the first fifteen. Caleb asked for a name. Then he did his own ‘yahs', said he knew the family and poured me some wine.

Sofi brought in some puff pastry balls. She held out the plate and Caleb's boys took huge handfuls. I tried to catch her eye but she kept it on the crumbs. She looked like a quiet girl. I went to take another sip of my wine and realized I'd finished it.

The youngest cousin was sent to the cellar to get all the other boys beers. Pip asked for another Minute Maid, and Eddy told him, for fuck's sake, to have a beer. I thought about Sofi, and how differently people can say ‘fuck'. I'd had two glasses of wine by then and the men had had three since I'd been there. There were six bottles lined up on the mantelpiece.

‘Esmé coming down?' Caleb asked.

Eddy shook his head, mostly with his jaw, don't talk about it.

‘Lads' dinner,' Caleb said then, looking at the wine. ‘Cheers to Sark.'

We all chinked our glasses. I looked to see if Sofi saw.

Pip had a beer in his hand but he hadn't opened the ring-pull. He asked me why the table was only set for eight. I told him Sofi wasn't eating with us obviously, peeling my little finger off my wine glass to point at Caleb and Eddy. They were talking business by the fire, glasses close.

Pip was silent for a second, then said, ‘Well, I'm going to help her bring stuff out.'

I said it was best not to, and that he should open his beer before his dad saw. I had a vol-au-vent and then another one, so I could tell Sofi I liked them.

We sat down – Caleb clicked his fingers until napkins were on laps – and Sofi brought out dinner. She hadn't warmed the plates. Eddy felt the rim then cracked his knuckles. The men were served first. Sofi gave me fewer carrots than anyone else and too much béarnaise, even though she knew I didn't like it. The boys got served last, piles of potatoes, and the J child scraped his sauce off with his fork.

‘Start before it's cold, boys,' Eddy said, finger back testing the rim. ‘Sofi, the red on the left please.'

The Chateaubriand was overdone. The boy who didn't want the sauce held his beef up on his fork and said his knife wouldn't cut it. Sofi was sent for sharper ones.

I wasn't used to red. Boys drank red. I could feel it in my head, thicker, heavier, downwards rather than up. I kept on remembering that I was leaving – soon, so soon I would be leaving. I let them fill my glass. Each new bottle meant a swirl and a sniff. I followed suit. I remember one in particular – the fourth I think – that got caught in my throat.

‘Fourteen percenter. Lovely little Chilean.' Eddy passed the bottle to Caleb who looked at the label and stroked the shoulder of the bottle like it was a body.

There were pools of conversation. The younger boys down one end, talking about a girl called Possum. Eddy and Caleb, sparring over coalition governments and fees for school ski trips. Pip in the middle. The dads asked me questions about interviews for Oxford, and exeat weekends. We drank more, and more, and more.

I do remember most of it, but it did become sticky. Some bits of that meal clot together and I can't pull them apart and say exactly which order they happened in. But at the same time, everything was slowed down. When Sofi came in to clear the plates, they – we? I don't know – looked her up and down, the movement of our eyes stuttering like the motion in a flick-book. A steak knife slid off a plate and clattered to the floor and Pip tried to get it for her. Caleb stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Sofi bent down, skirt tight, and Caleb breathed in like he'd taken enough air for everyone. He had his hand on the wine bottle again.

‘It must be hard,' he said to Eddy, filling up his own glass, ‘to control yourself with something like that around.'

Pip looked at me, his eye itself bruised now, but I looked down to the tablecloth, and took my dessert spoon in my hand, like a kind of talisman. Let it wash over you, I wanted to say to him, why can't you ever let things wash over you?

A bit later, Sofi brought out strudel. That hadn't worked either. Burnt top, soggy bottom, and whatever knife she'd used had broken it up rather than sliced it into pieces. She served the younger boys first; she poured their cream for them. She didn't want to come up to our end of the table, you could tell. When she put the last bowl down in front of Caleb, he held his heavy fingers over hers.

‘Absolutely delicious,' he said, looking at her, each syllable lasting too long. She pulled her hand away and we started eating.

It was the wine, or madness – both – but somehow, I thought it was going OK. It was a Saturday, I was still imagining we'd go to the Mermaid. I ate the appley bits of the strudel, left my pastry. Sofi, Sofi. I said I was going to the loo so I could find her.

The rain had eased off for a moment, and she was sitting on her smoking step in the garden.

When I got close, she told me my teeth were purple. She stubbed out her cigarette before it was finished so I couldn't have a drag.

‘Can I sit?' I said.

‘It's dirty. You'll get shit on your nice clean skirt.' She was wearing the same clothes, damp still, that she'd worn to the beach.

‘Dinner was nice.'

‘It was shit, Jude. The whole thing was shit.'

‘I liked the vol-au-vents.'

‘Really?'

‘They were nice.'

‘Really? Are you
really
going to come out here like all that shit is OK?'

I told her to stop saying shit.

‘I live in Ealing. I just didn't think these –
things
existed any more.'

I wanted to change the subject so I said she smelt of Grand Marnier.

‘Oh fuck off, Jude, with your wine-face teeth. You were…' She didn't know what word to use so she tensed up all her fingers. ‘You're someone else with them.'

I started to feel something in the pit of my stomach then. It was the wine, but more than that.

‘Fucking
private
schools.'

‘Public schools.'

‘I don't
give
a shit. I know you'll think I'm even
stupider
but I didn't know it was like that. That you all knew each other and had these words and are just so fucking
different.
'