The Last Kings of Sark (2 page)

There was a blond boy sitting on the wall a few metres away, watching the people get off the boat. His jawbone ran like a metal bar under his cheeks, and he was shifting it from side to side. I watched it make shadows on his face, and then I looked away, and looked for a man. Defoe would be fiftyish. I hoped he'd be holding a sign.

But when everyone had got off the boat, it was only me, fishermen in overalls and this blond boy left. Finally, I wondered if this was the son, and said, ‘Excuse me.' My voice sounded very high. He didn't look over. I said excuse me again, and then, when he turned around, I said, ‘You're not Pip, are you?'

‘Yes?'

‘Jude.' I went to shake his hand. ‘I'm Jude.'

‘No you're not.'

‘Yes…'

‘Jude the tutor? No. Jude's a man.'

I thought maybe I'd slipped through a rip and walked into the wrong world.

‘But I
am
Jude,' I said. ‘And you're – you say you're Pip? Edward's son?'

‘Eddy.'

‘Still…' I looked behind the blond boy for someone older. ‘Is he here?'

‘Yes, of course. He's waiting by the Toast Rack.' He said it like it was obvious.

All this time, he hadn't looked at me once. He focused on a point just left of my head, above my shoulder.

‘This way,' he said. He led me through a tunnel. The Toast Rack turned out to be a passenger carriage strapped to a tractor, like a seafront train, but farmier. Edward – Eddy – had one foot on it, making sure it didn't leave. I think he said ‘what the fuck' under his breath when he saw me, but when I got close, he said, ‘Right. Well – hello,' and gave me a kiss on both cheeks. We sat on red seats under a corrugated iron roof and the Toast Rack took us up the hill. Slowly, so slowly, much more slowly than I'm going now, but I want to get to the kitchen, and back to Sofi.

When we arrived at the house, she was there. She turned her music down, but not off.

‘If you're making a pot of coffee…' Eddy tried, but she said, ‘No,' blunt as a stone. ‘Only instant.'

Then, when Pip walked in, she pulled him to her, said, ‘
Shirt,
schmuck,' and tucked it deep in with her hand. He blushed so hard you could see it underneath his eyebrows.

We were in the kitchen, and I was still holding the handle of my suitcase. It felt like if you struck a match, all the air would catch.

‘I'm afraid Sofi's from
Poland,
' Eddy explained when we took our instant coffees through to the next room. She was also extremely pretty. Except pretty isn't the word – dirty blonde, dirty tan, denim-blue eyes. Her eyelashes were so long they touched her brows if she looked up, and her lips were so full that the only time I saw her in lipstick I thought she was joking. So, so, so, that was Sofi. Eddy, Pip and I sat in the sitting room, eating cake and not eating cake, and all of us could sense her next door.

Not feeling comfortable sometimes feels like being very cold. Individual parts of you can get warm but you're still cold, and your teeth feel hard and sharp as nails because all of you is clenched tight. I get cold a lot. But I did try; I smiled with my mouth and tried to make it reach my eyes.

Pip was silent, his Adam's apple poking out like a ring box. ‘Just be normal,' I want to be able to say to myself again, ‘it's
Pip,
you donkey.' But he wasn't Pip then. He was this strange creature, blond and bones, as tall as he was thin, who still wouldn't catch my eye. Eddy kept on trying to draw him into the conversation, saying his name with encouraging emphasis and punching his shoulder. But Pip just ate the icing off his cake and stared out the window. He looked like he'd cut his hair himself; it was long in different places.

My smiles worked better with Eddy. He was a man I'd already met in slices. Friends' dads, bosses, men in restaurants. He wore the uniform: navy polos meant for sailing, fat and buckled around their collar. His hair – straight and blond, the type of blond that rarely lasts into adulthood – was backing off his temples, but it was strong everywhere else, and so was he. He was so much sturdier than Pip. He had a slight belly, but expensive clothes and man's hands, signet ring squeezing his little finger. He settled into a bottle of Mâcon and talked to me about St Andrews. I'd just graduated. It was where his twin brother had gone; he didn't say how long ago.

‘Used to visit Caleb.
Terrorized
that place. Spilt a glass of red over some girl's dress and still ended up bringing her back. Stellar university.'

I told him about charity rugby on the beach and stockmarket drinking games. I praised his big house and he liked that.

After a while, Eddy brushed cake crumbs from the table onto his palm and said, ‘Listen. Before dinner, I'd better have a word with my wife. She's not very…' He finished his wine with his eyes on his son. ‘Like I said, we were expecting a chap, you see.'

‘Jude…' He said it like he was chewing it. ‘Never heard of a
girl
called Jude before.'

Just then, a woman appeared at the top of the stairs.

3

She was like a bird – dark, tiny, beautiful – straight away, beautiful – but she was wearing trousers which should have been tight, and her legs didn't fill them.

‘Esmé,' Eddy said. He stood up so fast it was like falling over in reverse. ‘This is my wife.'

She was staring at me. ‘And this is Jude,' he said. He stopped, and started again, different intonation. ‘Jude?'

Then Eddy said lots of things in one fast sentence: misunderstanding, didn't say on the CV, the agency's fault. Esmé was still at the top of the stairs and we were looking up at her like children. Pip was rubbing his hands over his face like smokers do when they can't have a cigarette. I wanted to say, please, I can just go home, let me slip out of the door, it's fine. In my head, I was begging.

‘Pip, take Jude into the kitchen and have Sofi get her some olives,' Eddy said before turning to go upstairs.

I think I said, ‘Olives sound nice'. When we got to the kitchen, Sofi was already opening a huge glass jar with a knife. She plonked the jar down on the table undrained, and took a briny handful, dripping everywhere.

‘Fuck, man,' she whispered to Pip, ‘she is
not
happy.' He looked away.

There were two shut doors between us and the adults, but we heard their voices. It sounded like the type of shouting that makes faces change colour. Sofi ate olives, dripping, dropping. Pip chewed on a pit until it was dry, then eventually took it out and held it in his hand.

Then the shouting stopped. Eddy came downstairs. We heard him put his glass on the table. Pip looked as if he might get up, but none of us moved.

Eddy came into the kitchen to tell Sofi to set the table for three, and that's how we ate: Eddy distracted, flexing his fingers, Pip silent, me smiling. Sofi brought out plates, and Eddy touched the rim to see if they were hot enough. We had lamb chops. Sofi ate hers in the kitchen; Eddy, when he'd sucked the juice from the bone, took Pip's fat off his plate and ate that too.

After dinner, Sofi and I left the house together.

‘I'm not being funny,' she said, ‘but this is a joke.'

‘I know. It's from Debenhams. It really isn't great on gravel.' Wheeling my suitcase was difficult in the dark and stones kept on getting stuck in it.

‘Not the bag. The bag's a bag. It's this hotel thing. It's a joke.'

I jerked at the handle and tried to keep up.

‘Share a room…' she went on, ‘is he on crack? Don't
dare
tell me there are no free hotel rooms in all of Sark. I don't care if it's a bloody island.
Wanker.
'

Eddy had come back into the dining room as Sofi was serving us dessert. ‘Just spoke to Bonita. No room at the inn, girls! But she says she gave you a twin, Sofi, so there's a spare bed in yours. You two will have to bunk together. Back to school, eh?' I smiled and said, ‘Oh yes of course that's fine,
fun
even, I'm happy with anything.' Sofi slapped a sponge pudding down in front of me and said, ‘Do you snore? Because it makes me psychotic.'

‘“Back to school?”' she said now, writing speech marks with her fingers and a cigarette. ‘I went to a comprehensive. The only thing we shared were these.' She ashed in the air. ‘Bonita's lovely – Mexican or something – but her place stinks. Cold lamb. It smells like cold lamb in there. Mint sauce and flubby fat.' She took a deep drag. ‘I hate cold lamb.'

I said mint sauce didn't sound very Mexican, and Sofi told me not to worry, there was a piñata in the hall, and dried chillis in the bathroom. She threw the stub of her cigarette into a bush. ‘Listen, I'm sorry I'm being such a bitch. I'm not actually a bitch. It's just this hotel thing is a joke. Also, I'm on my period and it's like monsoon season down there.'

I tried to keep up with her but she walked so fast.

‘Whereabouts in Poland are you from?' I asked.

‘Ealing.
EA
-ling. I told him Ealing. I grew up in Ealing. I've only been to Poland once, and I was six.'

I said Oh. I had said Oh lots of times. Perhaps it sounded like I was disappointed, which I honestly wasn't. It was just that from the very beginning, something about Sofi, or simply Sofi herself, surprised me.

I was about to give up and start carrying my wheelie case like a baby when we finally arrived. I don't know why people had been calling it a hotel. It was a house, a small one, with bad plastering and four faded gnomes in the garden. There was a red sign saying ‘La Casa Bonita', and one of the gnomes was wearing a sombrero.

The front door was frosted glass with metal rims.
Coronation Street
stuff. Sofi already had the key, and she led me upstairs to a door with a brass ‘3' on it.

‘Bienvenida,' she said, ‘it's the size of a fucking walnut.'

There were two single beds, a shared bedside table and little else – well, nothing else. ‘Wait till you lie down,' Sofi said, flopping onto one of the beds, ‘they designed the mattresses for anorexics.'

The curtains were like doilies. ‘Dirty too,' Sofi said, putting her little finger through an old cigarette burn. She smacked a daddy-long-legs dead against the wall with her other hand, nail varnish all chipped, then scratched off a dark smear from someone who'd done the same before her.

She used words I hadn't heard in ages. Revolting. No one really says revolting, and not so affectionately, or about a coat hanger. ‘But look, it's just
revolting,
' she said, pulling this puffy, pink thing out of the wardrobe to show me. ‘I wouldn't even hang
myself
on that.'

She told me I could have the bed by the door because if a murderer broke in, it would be that bed they'd go for first. Then I unpacked, and she talked about Sark. She'd arrived five days before me. ‘Four hundred people, that's sick. That's one single year at my old college.' She told me she was nineteen. She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of her bed, legs open, in a black lace bra.

I turned my face away but you couldn't miss it. I folded my T-shirts in a pile without looking up. When it was time to change, I took my washbag to the bathroom and came back in pyjamas.

‘I just sleep in pants,' Sofi said. ‘But unless I get hot, I'll be under the sheet. So don't worry.'

We got into bed. Sofi was right, they were terrible mattresses, terrible – bony, and about the width of a bench.

We lay flat on our backs, counting the cracks in the ceiling. ‘Sofi,' I said then – I've written it in with an ‘f' but she was still ‘ph' in my mind at that point, which makes a difference. ‘Sofi,' I said, ‘is Pip … all right?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Is he … OK?'

‘Dunno, man. Been here less than a week. He's sixteen, and he lives on an island. It's not normal.'

‘But he's not – dangerous?'

She took in a long, slow breath that sounded like she was smoking again. I checked to see she wasn't. ‘Lonely, more. He's just a kid. You'll be fine, you've done it before, right?'

That was the problem. It was so quiet that when I shifted, we could both hear the sound of the sheets.

Sofi turned off the light without asking, even though it was closer to me. And because we didn't know each other, that meant goodnight.

4

In the morning, Bonita gave us breakfast. Sofi had bacon, I had bran flakes. Bonita was how you'd expect her to be; round and smiley, with sausage fingers. The skin on her face had that pigment disorder where bits of it were darker than others, but her teeth were weirdly white for someone who was drinking cola first thing in the morning.

She came up behind Sofi and said, ‘You sleep nice?' Then she kissed her on the crown. ‘Beautiful girl, Miss Sofi!' she said to the room, though none of the other guests had come down yet. ‘And you,' she turned to me with an open-faced smile, ‘you must be the Jude! Mr Eddy call me, but what can I do? Full up to the eyeball.'

She said she was sorry that our room was so small, and that John would fix the light. At the word John, a silver sliver of a man with elbow skin under his eyes, coughed and raised his hand in hello. Her husband. ‘
Y chicas,
you're getting …
oye
John,
como se dice?
You're getting kettle!' She pronounced it kett-lay.

I couldn't eat my bran flakes. Even though it was just us two, Bonita, and John with his crime book, it felt hectic in that breakfast room. I think it was the carpet. That kind of swirly pub carpet that makes your eyes go funny. The smell of fried bread swirled like the carpet and filled the room like the radio.

Sofi was quiet, even when Bonita brought her another bit of bacon on a fork, hand cupped underneath to catch the fat. ‘Not a morning person,' Sofi said to me, spreading ketchup over bread with a finger. ‘Oh God, and we walked here last night because of your bag, didn't we? Oh …
pisser.
'