The Last Kings of Sark (15 page)

I picked up a cardigan, white, beigeish round the cuffs. It was soft in the way that meant it hadn't been washed for a long time. No starchiness. It smelt of her perfume, sprayed over a week or two. And deodorant, and maybe something more complicated and earthy, lightly in the stitches. It smelt like a whole day, nothing bad.

I got my things from the bathroom; could I take her shampoo, no. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw things I hadn't seen before. One more mole, footsteps of freckles, too much light; were those smile lines? I'd spent all summer glad I was older. But I didn't want to be older any more. I didn't want to change, I didn't want to leave.

When I got back to the house, it was just Eddy in the kitchen, sitting on Sofi's stool, a glass of nearly-black red wine on the cutting board.

‘Sorry about last night,' he said to the window. ‘Caleb can knock it back.'

He said the agency would pay me by bank transfer, and then he handed me a ⇔100 bill as a tip. It was green, with a tunnel on it. No Queen looking younger. ‘Not really the right currency for either of our countries, but it's the only cash I've got.'

I said I couldn't take it, but he said I had to. Before I put it in my pocket, he made me take another one. I didn't want money. He saw me look into the next room to see if they were there. No one.

He nearly let me leave before he chewed my name for the last time. ‘They've gone to pick you flowers, I'm told.'

‘Sofi?'

‘Sofi and Pip. They're going with you, apparently.'

All through life? was what I thought for a second. All of life, would they come with me for all of it?

‘To Guernsey with you, to say goodbye.'

I tried to say thank you, but he shook his head.

‘It's Esmé you have to thank. She can be very insistent. She said you worked hard while I was away.'

I looked down at my watch; the ferry was in five minutes.

‘Everything. We had everything when we were young like you.' I heard him put his glass down, but I couldn't turn around.

I pulled my suitcase over the grate, heavier than it had seemed when I arrived, and shut the door to our kitchen behind me.

They found me halfway down to the harbour. Pip took my bag, throwing it up on his shoulder, and Sofi took my hand. They'd picked me flowers in the rain: yellow, blue, purple-pink, fine petals, thick leaves. Sofi had put a lot of dandelions in her bunch. Pip said that if I threw them off the boat when we pulled out of the harbour, that meant I would come back. ‘It's a tradition,' Pip said. ‘You will come back, won't you?' I kept on wanting to cry. It came in waves, and waves, and waves. We stood on the stern of the
Sark Venture,
and the three of us waited to leave.

When we pushed off from the wall and pulled out of the harbour, I threw my flowers. They fell in an arc, a tiny rainbow. They fell at different speeds, falling apart.

The rain was slowing down, dotting, but stopping, and we stayed on deck. We passed our scalloping ground. I asked them to say goodbye to the Czech boys for me. We got further away from the island and saw the Farquart castle from a new side. I tried to take a picture on my phone but it didn't come out. I looked at my camera and I only had three photos. It was too late to take them now.

The trip to Guernsey only took fifty minutes, but by the time we'd got there, the rain had stopped. I was the only one with a bag and Pip and Sofi walked off in front. For a second I stood still because I felt I should let them go.

But Sofi turned around. ‘Keep up, for once. We're all going to have a cigarette on this bench. And no, Jude, you are not just having drags of mine. It still counts. It's just more annoying.' She'd bought the same brand as DJ Roger. Royals, the island cigarette. We took one each. She lit hers then swapped it with Pip's, who looked at the burning end the whole time he smoked it.

‘Finally,' Sofi said, ‘fresh air.'

27

It was exactly midday. The sun had won and was a perfect circle right above us in the sky. Sofi wanted to have lunch in a small café which did ‘compose your own' baked potatoes. It took me a long time to order. Sofi said if I didn't make a decision in five seconds she'd have a stroke.

When hers came, she said she might have got a bit overexcited. Prawns, baked beans, green olives, and on top of that, chilli con carne. ‘Not as bad as it looks, though. Want some?' she said, fork near my face. I felt in my back pocket to see if Eddy's money was still there and I said this was on me, all of this was on me. All I wanted was that, right at the end, everything would be golden again.

We needed a hotel. Esmé had made Eddy give Pip his credit card. It was Coutts, but Eddy wrapped it in a piece of paper which said ‘Do not go crazy'. We saw a B&B up a side street which had twins for £64 a night, triples for a tenner more. We decided to go for a twin. It was mostly Sofi's idea. ‘One of us'll just sneak in. This is what everyone does, trust.' I remembered Sofi telling me Bonita's was the first hotel she'd stayed in.

Sofi was smoking, so Pip and I went in. The lady at the desk was reading
Chat
magazine, which was open on some story about a man who ate his girlfriend's budgie. (Pip saw; I was trying to be relaxed, catch the woman's eye, be normal.)

She asked if we wanted a double, and I said no, a twin.

‘Only got doubles I'm afraid. Will that be OK for you and your…'

I looked at him, ‘… brother? My brother?'

He looked back at me. ‘It's up to you,' he said.

We took the key and went up to the room to drop my bags. The room was a huge assortment of patterns, on the quilts, curtains, bath mat.

‘Doesn't smell as bad as it looks,' Pip said, peeling back the duvet suspiciously and peering at the sheets.

After I'd dropped my bags, we went to find Sofi, and then the beach. We sat on the sand drinking Strongbow in warm cans. Sofi had appropriated one of Eddy's jumpers and was stretching it over her knees. I saw Pip notice for a second, and then just let his face relax. He drank, can held high as a telescope, then lay back on the sand, face angled at the sun.

‘Fuck all of it,' he said. ‘Sun: burn my eyes.'

Sometimes, there was something so beautiful about that boy. He was perfectly symmetrical. There were so many ways you could imagine following his face with your fingers. I watched the waves crash up the beach and then slide back down again. The cider turned us into waves too. We fell gently backwards; were caught. We were getting our last day of summer. We lay on that beach and I tried to take in every little thing.

There was water from a big pipe flowing down over the sand. It ran in ribbons, flaring, tapering, ribbed like unwrapped muscles. In the wind came different smells. Salt and vinegar, which I'd never understood on crisps, but did on that beach. Weed (not ours, though two twelve-year-olds in Ferrari T-shirts gave Sofi a drag), and also seaweed, green, sweet, sandy.

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.