The Last Kings of Sark (16 page)

She was still there. She looked at my lips, his lips, then eyes, lips, eyes, like she'd done a thousand times. I told her to come. I fell away from Pip to make space and leant against the wall. I held my hands out, my palms up.

She took them, and held them either side of me. Lips, eyes, lips; a decision and then she made it. She kissed me and I felt it behind my belly button. She let go of my hands and looked at hers. They were shaking. Mine stayed where she left them and I could feel my heartbeat in my fingers.

We needed Pip, so that it was all of us. We came back together. We kissed in a circle, one way, then the other. Then together, a tangle in the middle. Someone laughed. But it wasn't a laugh which said that it was funny and now the joke is over. We laughed and then the only thing we stopped was laughing.

Sofi crossed her arms down over her body and pulled off her top. She was wearing the same black bra she'd worn the night I arrived. She took my hand – my heartbeat in it, my whole heart in it – and put it to her. I pulled Pip with me. The lace on her bra was so thin. I looked at it, underneath it, felt it on my fingers and then felt her start to undo my jeans.

I wasn't thinking. What my lips were doing, where my hands were, I wasn't thinking. Pip was looking at my hand there, her hand here. We saw him swallow. Then Sofi started kissing him, and then I did, and with his own hands, he started undoing his shirt. I remember the sound of breathing – in-breaths, out-breaths, broken, louder. I remember finding sand, because it hides on you, and you find it later, when the sea is nowhere near.

Pip was still in his socks. We pulled them off, one each, then he pulled us both back to him, scared for a second that he had lost us. We took him back between us, we kissed him, we held tight.

I had seen these bodies before. But bodies are so different when you are allowed to touch them. Bodies are so different. Adam's apple, hard breasts and scars on hands. Pip had stubble. His body was harder; his shoulders smelled like milk and new shoes.

We had never seen Sofi blush before. But all across her cheeks she was rose-gold and we kissed her hard to make it last. She said things out loud, and she was the only one. She said sentences for both of us, and for all of us, and she was the one who had the words.

One or two I said back in a whisper, into her hair and into his neck. I pushed her hair aside to kiss her beneath her ear. There was the fruit and clean of shampoo, and salt, and I kissed them and said things into their skin.

So much skin, planes of it. Pip's white and taut as a sail, Sofi's, warmer than ours, a photograph of summer. Maybe it can never be equal. Maybe it just can't. But I do – even with everything – I do think it was. All this skin was ours and no one else's. We shared everything we had, and we all felt like the one being kissed.

28

We woke up in a hot, melted knot. But it wasn't uncomfortable, it really wasn't. Until we left that bed, nothing could be wrong. I tried to work out whose body was whose; whether it was a back against mine or a chest; if it was Sofi, or if it was Pip. Things we had done played against the inside of my eyelids. My legs off the edge of the bed, Pip behind Sofi, the tip of a tongue painting a line down the side of my neck, hands, so many hands. Flashes, sunspots. But when I looked straight at them, they disappeared.

We all woke up at the same time – or did I wake up last? It felt like we woke up at exactly the same time. Someone moves, imperceptibly, but the stick of sweat means you feel it. Someone thinks of your body, and you, and that also wakes you up. There are many forces at work the next morning.

All of me felt touched. Nothing that would ever show, but as though if I pressed myself I could feel where hands had been. The skin on my collarbone smelt of olives, from where kisses had dried.

Beautiful, fragile grace period. Even though the curtains were open and it was light by then, it would be night until it was broken by clothes or food or other people. We stayed under the covers, and arms and heads were kissed and circles drawn with fingertips. Sofi said good morning, a croak on the ‘morn', and then laughed. Pip's chest raised like it was laughing (my head was against it) but he didn't make a noise and then we were quiet again. His was a hard chest to lie on, and when it moved, it moved in bones. Our fingers walked around one another's bodies to say we hadn't done a bad thing. Be grateful for the grace period. You can tell yourself you kissed in daylight too.

I remember putting my hand on Sofi's stomach. I held it there. And I don't know why but I thought of the babies she would have. I held my hand over her stomach, and thought of all the other hands that would touch her, and Pip, I felt his hand on me.

Before we left the bed, we hugged like muscles in a heart.

29

My flight home to England was at 11.15. It was difficult to imagine times like that existed. Fifteen minutes past; there was no point in anything apart from what had just happened.

I was the one who left the bed and broke the spell. I got dressed in the bathroom and I couldn't look in the mirror. When I came out they were sitting on the bed. They stood up together, bed sheets like loose togas. I kissed them goodbye. I pushed so hard into that kiss. I pushed sorry, goodbye and everything into that kiss. I wanted them to feel it when I had gone.

I left the hotel. I can't say I was walking because it wasn't walking, it was floating, or falling, not walking. The wind hit me. I could feel where the wind started and I stopped.

Then somehow I was in a taxi. Again, I wanted red lights, zebra crossings, things that get in the way. I thought of fog and faulty engines. I was sure that something would happen. God would intervene; I'd held my hands to God.

Right until the moment when I felt the wheels of the plane start to pick up speed on the tarmac, I believed I would not leave them.

But I left the island on a normal plane, blue seats, not leather, no kisses; just stewards selling scratch cards. What I found so hard was that there were all these people, all these other people, who didn't know any of the things that had happened. Men with shaven heads, kids with colouring-in kits, and no one understood that the world had changed.

A young boy in the seat next to me tugged at his belt to look out of the window. I looked over his shoulder and there she was, Sark. I saw it – her – from above, as Sofi had. I saw it all, swollen green in a sea of gold.

I did not know when we would go back there. Or if, when Pip did, he would ever leave.

Maybe it doesn't matter. As long as it ends where it began, with leaves, and light coming through them. With the sun. Sun on Pip, and sun on Sofi. The sun on all of us, when we were young, when we were kings.

2

Then he would reflect that reality does not tend to coincide with forecasts about it. With perverse logic he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Faithful to this feeble magic, he would invent so that they might not happen, the most atrocious particulars.

Borges, from ‘El Milagro Secreto'

Beni and the Kids

Benigno Ciampa was like a fat Fagin. Except he wasn't Jewish. He was half-Italian, half-Indian, a third Scottish and a quarter Kilburn. That added up to more than one person, but, like he said himself, he had enough room.

Sofi met him in a midnight-blue restaurant. She hadn't been in the city long. She'd met a man in a park and he'd invited her for dinner, but when she turned up at the restaurant there was this fat guy at the table too. He had a huge veal escalope on his fork, and he talked to her in French. Sofi couldn't look him in the eye. It wasn't just that he was fat, he had a hole in his cashmere. It was one or the other, she thought, you can't do both.

She apologized for her French. ‘Oh no,' she said. ‘No.
Moi, je parle pas. C'est un peu
 … shit.'

‘You're Scandi,' he said.

‘No, just blonde.'

‘Too pretty to be English.' His eyebrows – both of them – rose when he smiled.

‘NHS dentists are good now,' Sofi said. She shook her hair out of a ponytail. ‘Poland,' she conceded. ‘By way of Ealing.'

He told her he was from Kilburn, a bus ride away. ‘Same difference though,' he said. ‘North London. High street. Both of them the whole world in mini.' He had a bit of crumb on his beard.

‘True,' said Sofi and she told him about a fight she'd seen in Benny Dee. ‘That was like a world war.' She thought for a second. ‘Actually, that time they were mainly Irish. But I think
I
started it.'

Beni laughed and swallowed the last, heart-shaped bite of his escalope. ‘I liked Kilburn.'

‘Why did you leave?' she asked him. ‘Why did you come here?'

‘This place. This is mine. Restaurants.' And he called out for cheese.
‘Mais pas de bleu!'
he shouted, then turned back to her, patting his belly. ‘I find it a bit rich.'

Sofi was twenty-one then, just turned. The money she'd earned from Sark had long run out. She'd worked for a while at JJB Sports but got fired when she did a handstand and landed on a customer. ‘Normally it's
fine,
' she told her parents. ‘Promise. But this time, this time I hit a kid.' She told them she wanted to go to Paris. When she said she'd work at the Moulin Rouge if she had to, they finally agreed to call a second uncle who lived in Le Havre. He'd moved there after France won the World Cup. He was on his second wife, and, more importantly, his second pint when he got the call; he agreed to let Sofi stay until she found her feet. This was her second week.

‘Beni,' she said to the fat man, helping herself to one of his cornichons, ‘any chance I could get a job?'

*   *   *

She started the next day. Not at that navy restaurant from the night before, but up the road, a diner in a former printer's shop, white and windows, on a curved corner. ‘Le Paris, it's called,' Beni had said. ‘Snowdome winters, greenhouse summers. Lovely place, lovely kids. You'll never leave.'

When Sofi turned up, an Australian girl was waiting for her at a table at the back, underneath a map of the world, about to eat a burger.

‘Sit down,' she told Sofi. ‘Make yourself at home. Have a chip. Oh
fuck,
' she said then. ‘Fuckin' igg's not cooked.'

‘The what?'

‘The igg. It isn't cooked.' She opened her burger and hooked some albumen over one tine of her fork. It rose – slick, translucent. ‘Sri Lankans can't cook iggs.'

‘I can cook,' said Sofi. ‘I've been a cook.' She'd been expecting something like an interview and wanted to use some of her answers.

But the Australian laughed and said, ‘D'you speak Tamil? You don't wanna go in the kitchen. It's hotter than sex and they get about two bucks an hour. Just when you're getting a burger, right? Don't go for the Sixpence. Take a nice, safe Classique.'

So Sofi ended up behind the bar, or serving tables. After a few hours she decided she liked it better than cooking. She cut her hands less, couldn't burn drinks. And she tried them all, each one of them, before they went out.

That first day, Sofi went home with six euros in fifty-centime pieces and smaller. Her hands smelt of coins, and even though it was in the wrong direction, she went back to her uncle's flat via the sea. At tea, her uncle was paint-speckled and his wife picked flicks of white off his arms with her fingernails. They asked her how it went.

‘Yeah,' she said, though that didn't match the question. There were things she felt that she couldn't put into a sentence yet. Suddenly, at Beni's, she was with people who were like her – who spoke first and fast, and who touched her before she touched them – and she did not know what that meant. ‘Yeah,' she said. ‘It was different.'

The next day, and for many days after that, Beni came to oversee at Le Paris. He'd tuck himself into a corner, in a hat, with an English breakfast and a glass of claret. He left the beans – it was the sauce he liked, not the ‘pellets' – but never the claret. He was proud of the new coffee machine, and would take time to clean it, frequently, with a paintbrush.

He introduced Sofi to everyone. ‘Sheyna, this girl's a hardworker. It's in her heritage. Look at her nails. Ground to the bone. Be like a sister to her. Treat her best. I mean it. Upset her and I'm docking your pay.' And Linus. ‘Linus, tell this girl she's beautiful. She is, isn't she? Golden girl. Tell her again. Linus is going to build me a boat from the very best Norwegian wood, aren't you Linus?' Everything and everyone had something best about them.

And this is how it was: they (everyone but the Sri Lankans in the kitchen) got paid in tequila and tips and by tricking the till. They ran up and down wide spiral stairs with too-full trays, and everyone who worked there was young. There was Sam, who smiled, had eczema, drank wine until it purpled his teeth. Meryn, the Australian from the first day, rising intonation, never wore a bra, stole a potato skin each time she served a portion. She told everyone she only slept with black men, but disproved this whenever she was drunk. There was Leonardo, a beautiful Argentine revolutionary in white T-shirts, and his girlfriend Graça, so tiny they called her ‘Tiny'; unreliable, aggressive to customers. She'd come here on Erasmus and wore the prettiest dresses.

There were others too, so many. Le Havre was like that. Those who stayed the longest said the rest came and went with the weather. There were dreadlocks and old denim, shared sunglasses, freckles, lots of accents, heights, smokers. There was a boy from Cornwall with a tattoo of a triangle, and he was the one Sofi liked best. He reminded her of sand and beaches. He had a broad back and a broad accent. ‘Like clotted cream,' he said. His name was Arthur, after some long-ago Cornish king. He had a shaven head, but even his stubble seemed soft.

There were people who might have been rich where they came from, but for that moment, in that place, all of them were poor. They were equal. ‘Onion rings,' Meryn would say, ‘the great democratizer.' Ealing, and other things, felt far away. And for a while, life at Beni's was what, from the films, Sofi had imagined being this age would feel like.