The Last Kings of Sark (10 page)

14

Three Fridays after Eddy left, he texted the house phone to tell us he was coming back. Sofi put the answerphone on loudspeaker and a jerky automated voice read out the message:

‘Home tomorrow. Bringing Caleb et al.'

‘Such a creepy voice,' Sofi said. ‘So
nasal.
And who's Al?'

Eddy had sent two messages, and at the end of the second the service de-abbreviated his LOL. ‘P.S. Chateaubriand pls,' the computer voice said. ‘Laughing Out Loud.'

‘I think he meant the love one,' Pip said. ‘Idiot.'

We had breakfast at lunchtime. Scrambled eggs Sofi-style, which were more of a condiment – half-egg, half-butter. I leaned back in my chair, stretched my arms out and took up space while there was still room.

Sofi's huge Nokia started vibrating on the table. It was Vaclav. She picked up and said, ‘Yeah. OK. Yeah.
Jiggaman!
' looking at me with good-news eyes. She hung up and said the Czech boys were going scalloping and wanted us to man the boat while they were in the water. Wo-man the boat, she corrected herself.

‘It's illegal,' Pip said. ‘Can I come?' He looked at me. We hadn't been to the study for nearly a week, but I was still teacher. I looked at Sofi, because she made the decisions.

‘You know what they say,' she said. ‘When the cat's away, the cheese will play.'

Pip chopped the rest of his scrambled eggs into a noughts-and-crosses grid of pieces and ate them with his fork, determinedly, quickly, happily.

We threw our things into Pip's school rucksack, and met the boys down at Creux harbour. Armin was carrying tanks down to a tied-up speedboat. Vaclav was standing up at the bow, wobbling because he was waving, and so was the sea.

Girls kissed boys, and boys bashed shoulders. Pip pointed out where he'd harbour-jumped and mangled his leg, and on that note we went down the wet steps and clambered into the rocky boat, a manoeuvre impossible to perform with grace. Something humiliating about it, like changing your shoes on the side of a street.

Vaclav, tipping the boat like old-fashioned kitchen scales, held his iPhone up to the sun. ‘Reception is crazy shit on island.' He'd googled ‘how to drive boat', and was waiting for an instruction video to load on
ehow.com
.

‘Dory boat, not dinghy boat. Is different.'

Vaclav asked if anyone had a pen and Pip got out his notebook. I went to take it, so I could be scribe, but he pulled it away and said it was private; he'd write. We all stared at the little iPhone screen.

The video was presented by an American man in wraparound sunglasses. You can see it if you go on the website. We couldn't, however, because of the glare of the sun. So Vaclav held the phone to his ear instead, screwing up one eye to show he was listening.

‘Turn on bilge blower, write! Write! Turn on bilge blower.' That was the only instruction he gave from the video. And when it was over he said, ‘What is bilge blower?'

‘And what is dead man's switch?' Armin cut in. ‘You find out dead man's switch?'

Vaclav looked at his phone, shrugged, and pushed off from the harbour wall. He said we'd manage, it couldn't be that hard, and we ad-libbed into the ocean, chipping past parked boats. Vaclav pointed to nowhere and said that was where we were going.

Sofi was chirpy and ran a finger through the sea, so it looked like we had a mini jet-skier beside the boat. Pip looked ahead with the same face he had when he was reading: concentrating, happy, lips which might be about to whistle. And Vaclav and Armin argued as they always did – unless that's just how Czech sounds.

When Pip corrected Sofi's pronunciation of scallops, she asked if she could see his hand, then bit it.

‘Why are we doing this, again?' she asked Vaclav.

‘Moonlight job,' he said. ‘Tourists. They love it. Love this fish.' We stopped at some sea he was happy with. He shook talc into his crotch and started yanking his wetsuit up in fistfuls. He handed me a radio in a waterproof sheath and said that the emergency channel was twenty. Teacher again; I held it tight.

They'd dropped a light-looking anchor, which led up to a bright orange buoy. It was tiny. ‘Young buoy,' said Sofi, then dunked it.

Vaclav took the red springy emergency break cord off his thigh and attached it to Sofi's, taking longer than seemed necessary. They put on masks and tanks with hisses of air and clanks of metal. I didn't want to think about whether they'd done it before, but Sofi asked. Vaclav said he had, when he was younger, in his uncle's swimming pool, and Armin had practised with the kit in their field.

‘I thought this PADIs was Irish thing, not Professional Association Diving or whatever,' Vaclav said, perched on the edge of the dory. ‘But I think this: you can try thing, and hope. And normally is working.' He touched Sofi for luck and threw himself, massive red scallop bag clipped to his waist, into the flat blue sea behind him. Armin kissed the back of his own hand, and followed his friend into the water.

Our job was just to stay near, to watch out for the coastguard if nothing went wrong, and to call for them if it did. Pip peered over the edge of the boat like he might swim after them.

I studied the sea on the other side and thought about how it looked the same from a plane and a boat, just on a different scale. Each wave was chipped at like a Stone Age spearhead, a thousand other waves inside it. Zoom out, zoom in, and there we were, the three of us, bobbing up and down near an orange dot. It was our table, but at sea.

The boat was suddenly too small and still. Sofi jumped up.

‘Fuck this waiting,' she said. ‘Feminism!' She zipped up her lifejacket and grabbed the wheel. She fiddled for a second, metal on metal, a tuk-tuk noise. Then there was a roar and we started moving. Jerkily, then incredibly fast. She screamed a ‘fuck' which rose in the air like the boat: with me and Pip sat at the back, it reared, violently, as if on its hind-legs. We were going unbelievably fast, and doing a boat wheelie.

It's funny where your mind goes at moments like that. I remember thinking,
This is where I die, this is where it happens.
And then this other thought,
Somehow I don't mind because here I am with you, by the sea, and we're together.

The problem was none of us could see where we were going. Sofi had abandoned the wheel, flinging her body across the bow to weigh it down. And I could see, our captain's eyes were closed.

That was when we flew over the biggest wave. Pip grabbed my jacket to keep me in the boat and Sofi gripped the rope on the bow so hard that later we saw she'd cut her hands. The wave threw us high into the air – so high we were flying – and the boat leapt out of the water like a fish. That realization that I was going to die tucked itself in again, calmly, lightly, as if it were a napkin.

But we landed with a bump (more than a bump, a bone-shaking slapdown, blue-brown bruises for weeks) and then kind of stopped. I could feel my heartbeat through my life jacket; it made the material move.

‘I forgot you could brake,' Sofi said. She turned around to us. Pip was still holding onto my jacket. ‘Forgot there was a brake. Soz. Sorry. Do you want a go?'

We were silent. Eventually I said I didn't know how.

‘So? Did it look like I did? Just
do
it.'

I got up and my legs felt like ropes. I went so slowly at first, the waves moved us more than the engines. I made us go in spurts, letting go of the accelerator every time I felt it work. Pip and Sofi were both sitting at the back now, looking at me. So I thought, fuck it, just
go,
chump. And that was when we nearly crashed into the ferry.

Sofi took the wheel back after that and we skittered like a stone thrown across the water, less vertically now, because, as with a lot of this, we'd worked out who had to go where for things to work.

By this time we'd been at sea for a while, and I hadn't been to the loo before we left. I shouldn't have mentioned it, because Sofi started singing ‘Let it flow like a river'. In the end I had to wee in an ice-cream tub which was kept in the boat for shovelling out water. Carte D'Or. But we said that ‘what goes on in the boat, stays in the boat', so Sofi peed in my pot afterwards. We offered it to Pip as well, but he said ice cream was a girls' thing. He held the Captain's wheel with one hand and peed off the stern, checking the direction of the wind, and checking to see if we were looking.

My hands got cold because I tried to wash them in the sea and the wind chews wet fingers. Sofi gave me some spare socks she had in her pockets to wear as gloves. We kept the boat away from the buoy so we didn't catch the Czech boys in our blades, and we drove in a tight little circle, round and round, because it made the sea go strange in the middle, like a flat and rippling jellyfish back.

‘Are they still cold?' Pip asked me. ‘Your fingers? Because I'll blow on them.' But just then the orange buoy ducked underwater, and seconds later Vaclav's head popped up.

They hadn't died either. All of us, I thought, we keep on not dying.

Vaclav rolled over the side, into the dory. He spat out his snorkel, grabbed Sofi, and kissed her between her nose and her cheek. He held her face for so long, he held his kiss. That happens when you don't die – you feel chosen; you want to talk a lot and touch people.

‘Fifties! Hundreds!' he shouted. ‘Look at all this fucking fish!'

Pip helped Armin heave up a net bag full of dirty white shells, chinking like china. The Czech boys undid the screws on their tanks and let out the rest of their air with a hiss.

We couldn't go back to Creux harbour, because there were fishermen sitting on the wall. We had too many scallops to sneak them up the stairs in our pockets, and it wasn't scallop season. Like Pip had said, it was illegal and we'd have been reported. We saw the fishermen from a distance – scallops themselves in beige and orange oilskins – and backtracked to Dixcart. Sofi was put on the bow, a golden figurehead, and I sat to the side, freezing cold with her socks on my hands.

Vaclav dropped us off when the water was knee-height. Pip carried the scallop bag from underneath, like a huge, breakable baby, and an air tank under the other arm. He asked if I wanted a piggyback.

‘You're light,' he said. ‘I could take you.'

But I said I'd be fine and waded through the water and up the beach. I was so cold I could only look at Pip's feet in front of mine and follow them. My toes were hard, squeaking together like marbles. All I remember is cold, wet salt. You always associate salt with dry, but it can be the wettest thing too.

We got to the boys' field and drank tea outside their tents with our salty lips, which changed the beginning and the end of each mouthful. My lips and knees were blue. My bikini top was still wet. I was trying to put myself in the sun, but it wasn't getting through. I shut my eyes and saw filaments, a leaf that's gone like lace, and willed the sun to warm me.

My fingers felt bigger from holding my tea so tightly. The others didn't seem to be cold; they were talking, and eating Penguin biscuits. Sofi was playing with Vaclav's feet, even though his toes were hairy, and he was telling us more anecdotes about the Farquarts.

‘They are putting big family crest on everything. On plates, on helipad, on knob on the door.'

They also wanted their cooks to prepare all their food (smuggled scallops, Jersey beef) in a gorse-burning oven, but the chef couldn't get it any hotter than seventy degrees, so he'd bought a secret Calor gas stove, which he hid behind a sack of potatoes.

‘They say is traditional, but it fucking stink, this gorse fire,' Armin said. ‘We say no for us thank you, no no. Calor gas please. Or microwave oven.'

Vaclav said they got paid £100 a week. If I hadn't been so cold I would have laughed but he wasn't joking. At least they were getting full board.

‘Full board. They are laughing. What is this? Not even cardboard.'

‘It's shit, man,' said Pip, and then, quickly, ‘not your tent, I don't mean your tent, just the situation. The situation's shit.' And he went back to doodling in his notebook.

I wanted to say, ‘You never swear, Pip; you don't say man', but I was too cold. Even though the sun was on us, I had goosebumps all down my arms, and tiny little hairs, standing up and beckoning.

Vaclav and Armin were making wicker baskets to sell on the Avenue, and with the leftover willow they made twisted crowns for the three of us. Mine was too big, so Pip swapped.

‘Have mine,' he said, coming over and putting it on my head. ‘Coronation on a campsite.'

Sofi's was too big too, and kept on slipping down over her eyes. She couldn't stop laughing. I didn't really understand, but it was something to do with Armin's cowlick. She said she'd never heard that word before.

Finally, she noticed that I wasn't saying anything. She touched my hand and said how cold it was, then asked if I wanted to go home. I said I was OK, unconvincingly, meaning to be unconvincing, rubbing my hands together; Russian winter. When we left, the boys gave us a plastic bag full of scallops.

The walk back felt very long. I shuffled it, jaw locked. At one point Sofi put her arm around my shoulders and told Pip to do the same. They cocooned me, but as a kind of a joke rather than a ‘this is necessary', and after five steps they broke away.

I ran the shower boiling before I could bear to take off my clothes. I got in with toes like rocks and when the water hit them it felt like dropping ice-cubes into a hot drink. I let the water run over me, arms crossed over my chest, and still felt cold. I thought of school trips to swimming pools; of the wind when we were on the boat with the engine off. I thought of Sofi touching Vaclav's feet.

It was as soon as the cold set in, sitting on the boat with socks on my hands, that I had remembered. Eddy was back tomorrow, and in three days I'd be leaving.