The Last Kings of Sark (6 page)

We took our wine to the bathroom and started doing our makeup side by side in the small mirror. Our heads were touching and she said we looked like Siamese twins. ‘Unidentical, obvy,' she added, taking a bit of my hair and holding it next to hers. Then she said my hair was the most beautiful she'd ever seen; that she wished her hair was the same colour, and that it made her think of guitars and pianos. The great irony of compliments: I felt so shy after that. I sat on the lip of the bath and let her do her makeup first. I didn't want her to see where I put my concealer, or if I held my face differently in the mirror.

When we came out, Pip was drinking milk from the bottle. He looked up, top lip tippexed, mouth slightly open. He asked us what we had all over our faces.

‘Makeup,' Sofi said. ‘It's supposed to be nice.'

I tried to look at my reflection in the window of the microwave. It might not have been a good idea to borrow Sofi's bronzer. Pip asked where we were going, and for a second I thought Sofi was going to invite him, so I said, ‘We're late! See you tomorrow, Pip. Don't give up with the Hemingway, it's worth it,' and we left him alone with his milk at the table.

‘It's much safer without a torch,' Sofi said to me by the lilac bikes, finishing the Mâcon from the bottle and frisbeeing it into a bush. ‘For me, anyway. I just look up. In the air. I can tell where the path goes from seeing the sky along the line of the trees.' She gave me her headtorch, ‘Take it,
take
it. Don't be gay,' and went first, zigzagging by the moon.

The paths seemed bumpier at night, but we were lucky because that afternoon it had rained, so the biggest potholes were filled with water and caught the light. I remember thinking they were like islands of water, and that on the path the world was in reverse: the sea was the land and the land was the sea. I had no idea where we were going, I simply followed the red bindi of Sofi's backlight, until she suddenly veered off into a brightly lit inlet, shouting, ‘Right! Right! The one you WRITE with!'

She cycled straight and shamelessly into a large crowd of people. When I saw them all, I got off my bike and started wheeling it, but Sofi stood up high on her pedals and cycled on, saying ‘beep beep', and then ‘ding-ding-ding' (she had a bell, but always preferred her voice). A path cleared, I followed her. We leant our bikes against an old oak tree at the back. Only when we were walking away did we see a girl in a sequinned top, skirt up, squatting beside it.

‘If she wees on mine, I
swear
…' Sofi said, looking back worriedly but not stopping. She took my hand and led the way to the door. It should have been £2 entry, but the man at the door – thinking about it, he might not have been a bouncer, he might have just been a man at the door – said we were pretty as princesses, and we went in for free.

I'd never been anywhere like the Mermaid. It was a tavern, but there were dogs in there, and children. It looked like a church hall, with pews round the edge, and plastic tables with metal tube legs, the ones you get in primary schools. There were women staring at empty pint glasses like crystal balls. There were age gaps, fringes, fat girls, shouting, lots of people kissing. Most of the couples looked wrong somehow, as if the whole club had been shaken up in a colander and only the oddest pairs had slipped through the holes together. Sofi bee-lined for the bar, parting the dance floor like Moses.

She asked for two double vodka and cokes, ‘big mother ones'. The barman had shoulders like a carthorse, and stubble that was almost teal. He poured our drinks from an enormous bottle into small glasses without ice. Sofi took a sip from both glasses to see which was stronger, then chose that. The bar curved in a semi-circle, and halfway round there was a wooden wall with a small arch through to a sort-of VIP area. The VIPs looked like they'd been there a long time. Resident alcoholics, cigarette smoke as a hairspray, unwashed T-shirts, unwashed women.

Sofi downed her drink and was sucking on an ice-cube when she dropped my hand and long-jumped into a man's arms. He swung her round in a circle by her waist, Liesl, but golden-haired.

‘Sofya!' he said. She took a big sip from his pint as two more men clambered to kiss her on the cheek.

I stood just behind her, holding my drink and her bag. Lemon. But then she turned back to me. ‘Sorry, sorry. Boys, this is
Jude.
' I remember how she said my name, how she pushed it at them, as if I was famous and they should have heard of me.

‘You are friend of Sofya?' asked the main one, the one with the dreadlocks.

‘I work with her,' I said, because I didn't know what we were.

‘You're cook like Sofya?'

‘Oh no, no. No, I'm a tutor.'

‘What is tutor?'

‘She teaches,' Sofi said. ‘She's very clever. Not like a cook.'

Which wasn't what I meant, but I couldn't explain because it was too loud and smoky. The song changed and a group of potato-faced ladies at the next-door table started singing along and bashing the beat with their fists on the table. They were sat under silver bunting which said ‘Happy 30th!', but they looked much older than that.

We went outside and stood in the cool, the boys rolling thin cigarettes with rough fingers. I tried to tell Sofi that all I'd meant was that I couldn't cook.

‘You're such a
spoon.
I don't care, dude. And it's true, you aren't a cook.' She kissed me on the cheek, ‘And you are clever.'

She looked over at the boys, who were playing football with one of their shoes. ‘Isn't Vaclav beautiful? Teeth are a bit funny, but his
eyes.
He must be a gypsy. I love that. What about Armin, for you … do you like him?'

‘The one who's headering the shoe? No.'

I said that he smelt, and she asked what I meant.

‘What do I mean by “smells”? I mean: he smells.'

‘Which one?'

‘What?'

‘Which smell has he got?'

‘
All
of them, Sofi. All the smells. Breath, armpit …
hair
…'

She laughed at me and told me I was fussy.

‘But it's not from exercising,' I tried. ‘It's
dirt.
'

I went to the bar. Sofi stayed outside with dreadlocked Vaclav. When I came back with drinks she was telling him his eyes made her think of tequila and lime.

‘You want to drinking my eyes?' he said. She had her hands on his forehead in order to inspect him. His eyebrows bushed out at the ends and fanned together at the nose and she patted them down with her fingers, then pushed him away.

‘Then we will drink tequila, the drink tequila,' he said. ‘Tonight is birthday of the DJ. Who is Silver Fox. Who is Roger. Who is seventy-three. Who is wonderful DJ.'

We finished smoking in the doorway (just for the breeze, the ban was flouted) then we moved inside. The others started dancing, except it was really just jumping and singing into each other's faces. I sat on a stool, and tried to look as if it was a choice. My drink was already finished so Armin bought me another. Roger, DJ Silver Fox, was in the corner, nestled in a booth next to overflowing coat hooks. He looked fittingly formal in stonewash jeans, but with his striped shirt tucked in, under a shiny leather belt. His hair was blow-dried back into a low-rise Elvis, and he had Pied Piper hands – he pointed, and eyes followed. There were gold rings on most of his fingers.

I was trying to edge away from a breathy conversation with Armin, when the music went dead and a woman started ringing a bronze bell by the bar. She was very short and kept shouting ‘Oi'. She'd turned it into two syllables. Oy-yuh. After several of those, she said it was Roger's birthday. A group of boys ‘a-wooga'-ed. The short lady pulled out a box of Ferrero Rocher and presented it to Roger, and we all sang Happy Birthday. Sofi went over to join the fat girls at the thirtieth who were doing harmonies.

After that, a chant started for another song. Vaclav and Armin shouted particularly hard, ‘Vun moh! Vun moh!' Roger silenced the crowd with a ringed finger. A riff started up. I knew it from somewhere – grainy guitar, seesaw piano. Slow though, nostalgic in some way, but for something that hasn't happened yet. Sofi came over to see if I was OK, and then the chorus came in. It was Semisonic, ‘Closing Time': ‘I know who I want to take me home'. I'm sure everyone knows it, but still, I wish I could write down how a song sounds. The chorus soars somehow, it really does, and yet it's still so sad. Sofi sat down next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. Boys in caps found girls to kiss, and a dog lapped up spilt beer. We stayed until the song was over.

Sofi sang the chorus on the cycle home, just that line, her zigzag following the beat. She shouted that when she was drunk she could completely see in the dark. Then she screamed as her front wheel dunked into a pothole. When we got to a stretch of downhill she took her feet off the pedals, her hands too at one point, so she could stretch her limbs out into a star.

You can't imagine how dark it was. Thick ink black. It wasn't like it is in cities, or anywhere in England. And there were the bumps and the hills and our borrowed bikes with shaky brakes. I'm not sure how we survived those bike rides home, when it was dark, and we were drunk. I think that maybe you come much closer to dying when you're young than when you're old. It's just that you sail home safe somehow. I cycled behind Sofi, trying to keep up, trying to keep my distance, and I remember thinking there were so many ways in which cycling was like flying.

When we got back to Bonita's, Sofi took a handful of peanuts from the big bag in the hall meant to refill the bird-feeder. She said she needed it more than the birds did, and sat on my bed in her bra, throwing each nut up and catching it (mostly not catching it) in her mouth.

‘What about Vaclav?' I asked a couple of moments after lights-out. ‘Why didn't you kiss him?'

‘No, I did, but he had the most terrible erection. Too big.
Monstrous.
'

‘Oh,' I said. I lay there silent, and I could hear my heartbeat in the pillow.

She must have had a few peanuts left, because she threw one at my head.

‘Goodnight, Jude,' she said. ‘Nice night, Jude.'

When I woke up, my bed was full of soft white peanuts, in halves now, with bits of their red papery sheaths flecked all over the sheets.

9

It wasn't a conscious decision that everything would change when Eddy went away. That first morning both of us blamed the night before.

I didn't wake up until Sofi shook her hair out post-shower and it felt like it was raining.

‘Teefed your shower gel,' she said. ‘Nice.
Minty.
' She smelled her arms, knelt down next to me, swept my hair off my face like a curtain and said good morning.

It was already midday. The sky was blue but there had been another storm in the night after we'd gone to bed and our bike seats were sopping. Sofi whipped out a tampon from her bag and used it to wipe hers down.

‘Do you want yours done too? There's room in here,' she said, making the tampon swing like a pendulum, waterlogged only on one side.

The paths were sodden, but Sofi pedalled fast, mud flaring out in a flamboyant V-shape from her tyres.

When we got to Eddy's, I barely stayed in the study with Pip at all. We were supposed to be doing triangles – equilateral and isosceles and how the sides and angles related to each other. I was looking at the textbook, trying to read fast so I knew what I should be saying, but the paragraphs were just fuzzy blocks.

I was sure I looked hung-over. My face had that kind of gelatinous sheen, a bit like pregnant belly before an ultrasound. I must have looked odd somehow because Pip kept on looking at me.

‘What?' I asked, finally.

The answer to that is normally ‘Nothing', but Pip said, ‘What?' back. And so I said it again, and for a moment, we just swapped ‘Whats?'.

‘Nothing,' he said, in the end. ‘But it's hypote
nuse.
You keep on saying hypothesize. It's different.' He put his lid on his pen, then took it off again. ‘Was it fun?' he asked. I shrugged.

At 1.15, I told him we were done. We went back to the kitchen, Sofi's kingdom.

We had lunch on the sofa, with the telly. Sofi had made Pip so much pasta she had to serve it in a salad bowl. She sat down in between us, with the remote.

‘Sofi's choice,' Pip said. And then he leant over and prodded me, ‘Sofi's choice … like the book?'

I told him to start eating before it got cold. Sofi put on
Jeremy Kyle,
but, pointing up to Esmé, turned the volume right down. She moved off the sofa to watch it on her knees, right by the screen, leaving a dip in the seat between us from where she'd been sitting.

After all the pasta, Pip said he was tired. He was going to stay inside, but Sofi forced him out into the light for vitamin C.

‘
E,
' I said. ‘It's definitely E.' And she said ‘B, E, C, A, Z' – the sun was good for it all.

*   *   *

We had all been in the house too long. In a way, it became its own island on an island. I looked out of the window at Pip asleep on the lawn now, post-prandial, his face still for once. His leather notebook was making a tent on his chest, rising slowly every time he breathed in.

The sun must have been almost exactly above the house, because it wasn't coming in through the windows. We needed to be outside too, so I told Sofi to be careful not to make too much noise, and we pushed our bikes over the grass past Pip and left.

We cycled by signs, but mostly by Sofi. She said that even after five days she could picture Sark from above, and that was as good as having a map. We stopped at the Island Stores and Sofi bought an avocado. She had it on a bench, biting off the top, peeling it like an orange and eating it like an apple.