The Last Kings of Sark (7 page)

‘It's so funny how you watch me,' she said. ‘Is it that you want some?'

‘No,' I said quickly. ‘No, not at all. It's just that you've got green all over you. How did you get it on your forehead?'

She lifted up her T-shirt high to wipe her whole face. ‘Better?'

After that, we cycled to the Coupée. It's this teetering path between Big and Little Sark – ninety metres long, ninety metres high, three metres wide. You're not allowed to cycle over it so we walked our bikes. Right in the middle, Sofi asked me what held it up, and how it could be so thin, and so high, when the huge, heavy sea was clapping it from either side. I told her to stop taking her photo and walk quickly to firmer ground. Like planes staying in the air, it's best not to think about it mid-flight.

It was our first time on Little Sark. It was different, a bit like Scotland is to England, bleaker, with bracken, gorse and purple flowers. You had more the sense you were on an island – that king-of-the-castle thing – and that cliffs were near, wherever you were. The strangeness was more concentrated. We passed a boot-brown man sitting in his doorway, dipping carrots into a red pot of Saxa salt. And the people walking through fields together … you couldn't imagine how they'd ever met, even less become friends, lovers or whatever they were.

It was uphill for a while after the Coupée and we cycled slowly. Sofi used her left hand to push down her knees and make it easier. She changed colour even on that one bike ride. When we got off our bikes, she was golden. She held a croissant against her leg at breakfast the next day, and they were the same colour, they really were. But anyway, we walked to the furthest edge of Little Sark, arms paperchained. We kicked rocks and picked flowers, and we didn't say much. I worried that she'd notice, and think I had nothing to say. But then – on a bench, looking out onto Guernsey – she put her hand up to my chin and kissed me right on the jaw. She said that she was happy, so happy Eddy had gone, and that she loved the sea.

She told me she got these bursts of happiness, that sometimes her whole soul – did she believe in souls? she wondered for a second – but yes, her whole soul felt like it was too big for her body and she had to touch someone.

She was covered in sun. It seemed to put a spotlight on her. And I wanted to stay sitting on that bench with her until the wood was cold. I looked at the sea, then Sofi again, and I didn't know what I could possibly say, so I said that we had better head back.

10

We got used to life without Eddy very quickly. The sky was bluer when we left Bonita's, first at ten, then soon ten-thirty. Sofi turned showering into an art form, the floor into a floodplain. We left with wet hair and it dried on the ride.

I dipped with Pip into the dark of the study, but we always came back out into the kitchen.

‘Shall I do the lessons then?' Sofi asked. ‘You want to learn how to cook?' She took one of Eddy's white shirts from the laundry and put it over her head like a ramshackle chef's hat. ‘
Fine.
If Esmé comes in, I'm teaching you how to be me.'

She told us how to use the weight of the eggs, rather than the number, to measure out the other ingredients for cakes. She said you could tell how cooked a piece of steak was by comparing its firmness to a place on your own hand. ‘I never get that right though,' she said. Occasionally, she'd suddenly get irrationally protective: ‘Not a chance! I can't give you freeloaders
all
my secrets.'

One day, halfway through a demonstration of how to make breadcrumbs by bashing a bag of bread against the table leg, Sofi accused Pip of looking at her funny.

‘He's looking at me funny. Why's he looking at me funny?'

Pip put his head straight. He'd been looking at her from an angle, more with his left eye than his right. He did the same to me sometimes when we were in the study.

He mumbled something.

‘What do you mean “death”?' She almost shouted. ‘Is he trying to curse me?'

‘Deaf,'
he clarified. ‘Deaf in my left ear. Just a bit.'

After that we switched seats so that we were always on his hearing side.

We ate lunch lying on our fronts on the croquet lawn, or round the kitchen table on days when it was too hot. After lunch, Pip would get tired, which Sofi decided was because he was growing. As soon as he was asleep, I'd say there was no point in staying and we would escape and leave him. We went to the Venus Caves, and lay in uncut grass which stayed erect in the gap between us, like a little fence. We walked to a cliff edge over Derrible Bay – the sea ahead spread like a jewelled carpet – and sat in the wind, feet dangling.

‘Next time,' Pip had asked me, ‘could you take me? There are some places I'd like to show you. I could come.' But when he fell asleep after lunch, I didn't wake him.

The following day, however, he said the same thing in front of Sofi. He wanted to show us Little Sark. I said we'd already been a hundred times. His face fell, so Sofi said, ‘We love it though, let's go again. Vaseline,' and she reached into her pocket and dabbed some on his lower lip.

Pip didn't have a bike, so he ran along behind ours. Because of the way his spider legs moved – knees to the sky – it looked like he was pedalling too.

The afternoons were different with Pip. He knew which one was Jersey and which was Guernsey. He told us that the Coupée was a wind trap, and that, during the most terrible storms, kids from Little Sark used to have to crawl across on their bellies to get to school. He answered Sofi's question about it staying up: it was ‘an isthmus'. And the beach we'd looked at, the one that curved between the cliffs like the in-between-toes of a webbed foot, was called Grand Grève. We sat looking out at its white bay, and he told us other things: about the silver mines at Port Gorey; and that Sark was the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. He paused.

‘In 2008,' he finished.

Sofi said she'd guessed. She bit a fingernail. ‘So who's the king?'

‘No king,' Pip said. ‘He's called a Seigneur,' and he told us how the Seigneur ‘semi-rents' the island from the Queen for £1.79 a year.

‘
Cheap
skate!' Sofi said. ‘That's the price of a cup of tea in Costa. What jokers.'

She asked Pip if everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody. Pip said he didn't know, and then, ‘mostly'.

‘Like them, for example. Do you know them lot?' She pointed, using her elbow for subtlety, at a family having a picnic down below us on Grand Grève, a father and three sons. The youngest two – one olive-oil blond, the other rustier – were filling their pockets with shells and having competitions to see how far they could throw rocks into the sea. The father and the oldest son had deckchairs, and looked like they were giving the stone-throwers marks for each shot. The wind was strong enough to make each stone fly in a bow-shape.

‘Bend it like Beckham!' Sofi yelled then, subtlety forgotten.

‘Them? The Millers? No,' Pip said. ‘I think they're only here for the summer.' The dad had dark curls and he was laughing – his laugh big, coloured, kind – at something his son had said. Pip's head was tilted as he looked at them in his concentrated way. He looked slightly sad. ‘They look nice though. That's the thing, most of the people young like me only come here for a few weeks.'

Pip took us further onto Little Sark, past a place called Cider Press Cottage. The sign was a shiny slice of trunk; the words carved using the sun and a magnifying glass. Sofi was worried Pip would burn, so she rubbed suncream into his neck. She played a three-note piano on his moles and then blew on his skin to dry it. He didn't even say thank you, he just bounded ahead, looking back to check we were following every few paces.

When it got too brambly, and too steep, we left the bikes and used our free hands to pick blackberries.

‘You won't have them yet,' Pip said to me, ‘in the countryside where you're from. They won't be ripe.'

‘We get them from Sainsbury's.'

‘Oh, right, well … we get them early. Microclimate.'

I used my thumb and forefinger like chopsticks, one berry at a time. Sofi plunged a hand in, and groped. She didn't get many and said it was because she was from the city. Pip told her to look behind us; there were always more blackberries if you looked back in the direction where no one walked. He said that every path was more walked-down in one particular direction, which confused him, because if you walked one way, wouldn't you have to come back?

Perhaps not. We had just reached a precipice; sixty feet high, a jagged drop.

There was a rope which ran from where we were all the way to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, studded at various points on the way down, pinned under boulders or tied round rusty metal loops. The rope was waterlogged green from old rain. Sofi gave it a tug.

‘Seems all right.'

I wish she'd given us more than ‘all right', but she'd already taken off her flip-flops and tucked them between her teeth. Sofi went first, and Pip followed her down the rope, both of them doing this sort of poor man's abseiling.

‘Don't put the string between your legs!' Sofi yelped. ‘It's gnarling up all my ovaries.'

Why had I brought such a silly bag? Nothing in there was mine. It had Sofi's chocolate orange, Sofi's cigarettes, her suncream. I took hold of the soggy rope, taut from the hands of the other two, and headed over the edge.

By the time I got to the bottom – the insides of my fingers burning – Sofi was standing barefoot on a big, bald rock. She was balancing on one foot, squinting. ‘If you stand right, and get your eyes right, you can see out to sea through that cave there, and this one here.' The two caves out to the sea were wide, but they curved, and so you could only see out through slits, and only exactly where she was standing. Pip had showed her.

‘You have to
align,
' she said. ‘There's something pagan about it. Something … Mayan, I don't know … One of those ancient things.'

She stretched out her arms, and shut her eyes, her own ritual. Pip was wiping mud off his feet on a low rock, slick with algae. I could tell he was glad to have shown Sofi something she liked. I poked Sofi in the thigh and pointed to a flat, pigeon-grey rock, where someone had written ‘Spank me hard dady' in permanent marker.

‘There's your ritual,' I said, and something about dyslexia.

Sofi laughed – except it wasn't quite a laugh – and then stepped down off her Mayan rock. We made our way through the slit on the right, and climbed up onto a rock platform right by the sea. It was flinty, and Pip said that when he was younger, Esmé used to bring him here.

‘Serious?' Sofi said. ‘She took that rope?'

‘Yeah. We used to come and pretend this flint bit was a tile on a giant's roof. That we were on top of everything.'

We lay on our bellies, our tops pulled up so the bottoms of our backs were in the sun. Sofi got her chocolate orange out of my bag, battered now, and cracked it open on our rock. She ate it two pieces at a time, sucking first and then scraping the pieces back out of her mouth against her teeth. Her bottom lip was brown, and she coloured in the top, like lipstick, with a stubby segment of chocolate orange. Pip took his top off, shoulders pale and broad as a canvas, collarbone like an anchor. He sat cross-legged. He'd taken his notebook out of his back pocket and was writing in it, pretending not to listen to our conversation.

‘Would you rather your hand be stuck – for the rest of your life – in an unbreakable jam jar…' (this was Sofi, every other word italicized) ‘… or that everything you ever eat again for the rest of your life taste of tuna?'

‘Tuna,' I said.

‘So quick to answer! It's not with mayonnaise, you know. It's plain,
tinned,
tuna.'

‘Tuna.'

‘It's in
brine.
'

‘Not being jam-jar-hand. It would wither.'

‘I know, but tuna …
fuck.
' She looked out to sea, shaking her head.

Sofi took these questions so seriously. We'd wake up in the morning and the first thing she'd say to me was that she'd changed her mind. She'd decided it would be better if her dad walked in on her and her dog, rather than vice versa. I'd be half asleep, and it would take a while to work out what she was talking about.

‘Fine,' she said now. ‘The tuna. Fine. Maybe that's better. But, would you
rather
– sleep with
Armin
– or the Ross man who has all the tractors?'

‘No more, Sofi, no more.' Though there were always more. I suppose they were ways of asking the questions you wanted the answers to. I asked her if she'd ever been in love, and she said no.

‘I want to go to Paris,' she said then, as if it was the logical step in a conversation about love. ‘Have you been? I so want to go.'

I'd been there on a school exchange. We'd partnered with a convent but one of the nuns died while we were there and we didn't get to go to Disneyland.

‘It's OK,' I said. ‘Bit overrated.'

‘Not for me. I've seen films, it's perfect for me.
La Haine.
All of that.'

‘Sofi,' Pip chimed in, looking up from his notebook, his shoulders red despite the suncream, ‘
La Haine
is about Algerian immigrants in tower blocks. We watched it for GCSE. It's about murder.'

‘That's what I
mean.
I like it whatever. Whatever. Look.' She was holding a segment of chocolate orange between her fingers, using it firmly, like a teacher, as if it made her argument stronger. ‘I am going to Paris and none of you bastards can stop me.'

‘No one's trying to,' I said. ‘You're having a fight with yourself. If you go, I'll come and meet you under the Eiffel Tower one day.'