The Last Kings of Sark (20 page)

‘The strawberries,' I say. I hold them out like a reason. They're from a place where strawberries are in season and the fruit is heavy. ‘We've still got the strawberries. We could go and wait under the willow.'

You ask the other person what a willow is in French.
‘Comme ça?'
he says, taking out an earphone, and pointing.
‘Un saule pleureur.'
A weeping willow, the same.

It's unspoken, but this sameness is taken as a sign and a yes and so we get up to go. We stand up easily, because our feet are already so much lower than our heads. You get to the willow first, and hold it open like a bead curtain. It's cooler under here. We've gone from grass to ground, the earth is dry as ash, worn-out brown with scuffed, twine-like roots. You say it's lovely here and I agree. You lay down the Carrefour bag, and this time the other person gets the handle.

We settle. I dust my hands off on your shorts (the chaperone is on the phone) and reach for a strawberry. A few feet away, there are two young men, a wooden chopping board between them. A Swiss army knife levitates halfway into a saucisson sec, and a quarter of camembert overflows its edges onto the wood. They are drinking a pale red wine and raise their glasses to us – a stained glass window to say welcome. They are both in soft shirts and one is wearing a country cap. I say I like his hat and he says
‘Merci',
and then, ‘Thank you'. He's heard we're speaking English.

I tell them they are perfect. ‘The breadboard, the hat, the wine. Just two of you.' (You put your finger on one of my back dimples, then.) ‘It's like a Marcel Pagnol novel.'

He laughs, tips his hat and asks if we'd like some cheese. He says it's spring camembert, that the milk is different, and so the cheese is special, sweeter, pours. He pulls the sword from the stone and cuts us two slices. Really, he says, we should eat it with honey, and maybe hazelnuts.

The man is right, the cheese is special. I shuffle down so my head is on the plastic bag and look through the fronds at the people outside our willow. A black man and a white woman, the wrong age for each other, rubbing noses, play-kissing. Two old men sitting on a bench, sharing
Le Monde.
Then us, under the willow. My head is against your thigh, you put your hand down and stroke my hair, and for a second, I shut my eyes.

I would stay like that for hours, but I open my eyes because something in the park changes. The air thickens, quickens – there is suddenly a different feeling.

A group of children has poured over the concrete crown of the slope and start to run, no, charge down through the picnics. Their shoes land heavily on unopened boxes of biscuits, they knock over plastic cups of wine and lemonade. They do not see barriers in bodies or blankets. They do not see barriers. And nobody can stop them, because they are quick, because they are small, because, for some, unplaceable reason, it is as if they exist on a plane that's not quite ours. There must be fifteen of them.

One running boy stops beside a family of three. He is perhaps the smallest of the gang. His arms are bone, his belly convex. A child slightly older pulls him on; the mother of the family holds her own son tighter.

‘Are they alone?' you ask me, American accent suddenly stronger. ‘Where's the adult?'

People are shouting because their babies' fingers have been trodden on. Other people stand to see what's happening. The chaperone peers out of the willow, fag dripping from his lip.
‘Mais putain, ils sont feraux,'
he says to us.

At first we watch the children like a play, from cheap seats at the back, but soon we realize that our willow is where gravity will take them.

There is one bigger boy who seems to be the leader. Still, he cannot be a teenager yet, he can't be older than twelve; his hips are hand-sized. But his skin looks scuffed – the type of dry and dusty that normally comes from working with bricks. Even in this heat, he is wearing two jumpers. The cuffs are dirty, and he's hooked a thumb through one of them.

The boy looks like he has recently grown, as if he still hasn't mastered the new length of his legs. And when he gets to the bottom of the hill, he comes into our willow, parting the wicker walls, and walks straight towards the men with the picnic.

They have their backs to him. The wild boy with the double jumper treads plainly, flatly, hard, on the spring camembert and grabs the cap off one of their heads.

The man jerks his head around to face the boy. He sees the hat in his hand, the stamped-on cheese, and the man grabs the knife next to it.

The hat is hostage. The audience is captive. The Buttes Chaumont goes silent. The slope takes an in-breath as one.

But the knife seems to mean nothing to the boy. He holds the stolen cap in his fist and kicks a dark cloud of dust onto their picnic. Even standing still, there is something odd about his legs. I wonder if he has been drinking. The skin on his face is different colours. You reach for my hand, and you hold it.

The man and the boy stand opposite each other, four feet apart. Sun and rain, they face each other.

‘TU N'EST QU'UN ENFANT!' the man shouts. You can see his face burn from here. The knife in his hand has a short blade, and is shaking slightly. ‘ELLE EST
OU,
TA MAMAN?'

They both hold for five more seconds. And all of this time, you hold my hand.

Then the child stamps his left leg forward as if he is about to charge.

He doesn't, though. He laughs, a laugh which doesn't come from his head or chest. Then he drops the hat, and runs.

The other children, all of whom had stopped to watch, follow their twelve-year-old leader. The tension is broken, the park bursts into applause. The children run on, run down, run to the gates, and disappear.

The words
sauvages
and
animaux
roll up and down the hill now. Tziganes. Roms. Did you see them? The children? They were children. They can't have been more than ten. No, ten years
old.
There were more than ten, they were everywhere.
‘Il faudrait tous les enfermer,'
are words said too.

For a while, we look to see if they'll come back. We also look to the sky. We still don't know if it will really rain. People are leaving, perhaps because of the undecided sky, perhaps because of the children.

But the sun holds and soon the normal sounds of the park come back. You'd let go of my hand as soon as your friend sat back down.

Adrenalin is making my blood feel thicker or thinner, one of the two; it has the same effect as the cigarette. I ask the man with the picnic if he's OK.

He tries to use his knife to cut a slice of saucisson. His hand is shaking even harder now. The man he's with takes the knife from him, cuts him a piece, feeds it to him and touches his face as he chews it. The cap is reached for, and pulled back into their picnic. They have an unopened goat's cheese and the man rolls it back and forth, from one hand to the other.

What is this day? I say something about the Brothers Grimm, and the tale where wheels of cheese are rolled down a mountain. You ask why I see everything through books and films and music. I want to say that it only happens when I'm with you. When I'm with people that I like.

We try to write a poem but the only paper we have is a pastel-coloured perfume advert ripped from a magazine, and rhymes don't come, so we talk about when we were young, and the best and worst things we've ever done. I tell you a story about the time I drove a speedboat, you tell me about doing work experience at your dad's shoe-heel business. You ask strange questions, like what side of my mouth I chew on. You say that you're interested in the small things. You notice that the chaperone is not listening and you change your mind and say ‘all things'.

At the end of the afternoon, we say goodbye to the men from another time, and leave the willow, strawberry leaves scattered where we were sitting.

You tell me not to pick them up. ‘They look like crowns when they dry. I like our mess.' And so I look at you, and I look at you, and see all the times this has happened before, and you look back, and then it's your turn. ‘What?'

Nothing. To leave, we walk slowly, even though it's downhill. Your shoes are on, mine are off, but raindrops have dried on the stone and cooled it down. Midges collect in the last staffs of sunlight, and the bins are built up with old picnics gathered up into plastic bags.

Out of the park and on the real road, the side by Botzaris, I hold your arm so I can put my shoes on. We kiss goodbye on the cheeks, and lightly because of the other person and because we think we'll see each other later. We make half-plans, you have half a finger on my wrist and write on it in half-moons. We are half-alone, and then –

‘Girls,' the chaperone says through his cigarette. He taps his watch.
‘Il faut qu'on aille là,'
and you let go.

‘Hey, Jude?' You say as you walk away. ‘Don't make it sad. You got stuff to do till we meet?'

‘I've got a thousand missed calls,' I tell you.

‘See you,' you say. I turn around to see if you look back, but if you did, I missed that too.

In the end, we do not see each other again that night. Instead, we drink too much in different bars with different people. Perhaps I knew that as soon as I walked away from you. The chaperone, the children. Nothing ever happens as you think it will.

After we left each other, the air lay heavy as a blanket. I decided to think that it wouldn't rain, so that it might. All it needed was a chance.

Métro

They are going to take the métro. Pip suggested they meet at KFC.

‘Mais non,'
Clémence had said (she was glad this was on the phone and he couldn't see her).
‘Kentucky, non. C'est pas correcte, ça.'

Instead, she'd said, the fruit shop, the one where the pigeon flew out from the pineapples.

‘The night we made the ratatouille?'

‘'Touille,'
she corrected, and soon after that he'd hung up.

But the fruit shop it was, and now Pip was waiting for her, summer freckles muddying the bridge of his nose, his hair freshly cut, looking at his watch, lightly bouncing on his back heels. He knows which door she'll come from – seriously though, there is somewhere they need to be and she is nine minutes late now – and finally, it opens.

It's the middle of the day, burning, and Château Rouge is busy. Dark men sell charred sweetcorn, darker men sell denim leggings. It's so crowded at the top of the stairs to the métro that RATP men in mint green uniforms have blocked it off and let the crush through in short bursts. There is a lot of pushing.

So yes, it's true that it's busy, but Pip can see her: she is not trying, she is not walking quickly. A taxi stutters to let her cross in front of it, but she waves it on, and waits. She's pretending she hasn't seen him, eyes anywhere but straight ahead. When she's close, she takes out her phone, looks like she's reading a text, smiles. She makes it obvious; she knows what she's doing.

Just as she looks up, Pip looks down. He has stopped bouncing, and is scuffing the back of his heel now, as if he's trodden in something.

‘No pigeons this time,' he says when she gets close, pointing behind him.

‘What?'

‘I said, no pigeons this time. In the fruit shop. No pigeons.' Occasionally, he forgets she's French and speaks too quickly. ‘No pigeons,' he repeats,
‘pas de pigeon,'
and this time he vaguely flaps his arms.

‘Oh.'

‘We're late, we should go.' He wishes he hadn't done his bird impression. ‘It's hot today. Are you OK? How are you?'

‘I'm fine … tired.
Crevée.
' Clémence raises her shoulders with each word, but they are already so high. He can see the tension in her neck. She always used to get pain there, and he would smooth the knots as she sat on his lap on the métro. Pip moves to touch her but stops himself, and puts his hand back in his pocket.

‘Yeah. Me too. Tired. You look great though.'

‘Beaming?' she says. She says it ‘bimming'. ‘You get a tan?'

‘I went to the sea for a day.'

‘Chez toi? Sercq?'

‘No. Le Havre. To see an old friend.'

‘It looks OK. Good. Bronzé is good for you.'

Pip looks at Clémence and thinks how her face could only be French. The nose of someone who could give speeches, eyes that made him swallow, hair that she wrapped into a bun that fell out as she walked. The fineness of her frame, the fineness of it all. A month ago, maybe two, when everything had still been going well, Pip had emailed his father a picture of her. Eddy took three days to reply. When he did, it was with the word ‘beautiful'. Pip was glad his father had chosen this word and not another. Attached to Eddy's reply was a scan of a photo of Esmé from before Pip was born. Pip had not replied, but looking at Clémence in front of him now, and remembering the photo of his mother, he had to admit there was a slight similarity. Almond eyes, he had always got stuck on almond eyes.

‘We should walk to Line 2,' he says. ‘Too many people here.'

And so they go down Boulevard Barbès. It's lined with shops, but the street itself is where the selling happens. Sim cards, mangoes, chants of malboro-malboro. When they were together, Pip's arm would be around her. She had been his, and they would leave her alone. There are few rules in Barbès, but that is one of them. Now that they are not touching, men try to sell her perfume and cigarettes and say she is
ravissante,
or worse, as soon as she has walked past.

‘Doesn't it bother you?' Pip says when they are on the platform.

‘Quoi?'

‘The men. All of it. I could have hit them.' He could have, but he didn't. ‘I wish you didn't live round here.'