The Last Kings of Sark (23 page)

She tested him, in her head.
If he touches me on his way back from the toilet, it's true he loves me.
A few days before:
If it's him, not me, who breaks this hand-hold, it's him, not me, who will end this.

She would ask him if she had kissed him everywhere yet.

‘You already asked me that.' Creamy voice. Thick, spread.

‘Loads of times.'

‘Did you answer?'

‘Probably.'

‘What did you say?'

‘Probably. That's what I said.'

And no one had ever made him laugh like she did. She would push his face away with her hands, deciding he was laughing
at
her.

‘So what I thought it was
Maori
Poppins, so what? Easy mistake, it's not funny.'

‘It
is
—'

‘Not funny to laugh at me.'

He wasn't, he was. It didn't matter. Sofi made him laugh and no one had ever made him laugh like that.

‘It's not my fault,' she said. ‘I'm Polish.'

‘When it suits you.' He took her head, a planet in his hands, and clamped it into his chest. ‘Hear that heart?'

‘No.' Her voice dampened by his jumper. ‘You don't have one.'

‘It's for you. It beats for you. All of it's for you.'

‘You're not allowed to laugh when you say that.'

*   *   *

When they'd met at Beni's, both of them had just meant to be passing through. They called it a ‘way to' place. But both of them had stayed. Smoked, worked, walked. Spent so much time together, but like brother and sister, for over a year. At first, Sofi thought he was too
soft
to be sexy: his hair, his skin, his voice, all of it soft as felt. And Arthur thought she was too … too…? He didn't know what, now. They spent so long not fucking that they fucked for so long when they started, as if to make up for lost time. They were new again, it was new – new, confusing, tears by the sea, and fights by text – when they were allowed to see each other naked.

He had watched her like a film at first. Well-edited, smooth. It was like she moved in scenes – standing in a door frame, on tiptoes, hands reaching up to the top corners, gauze bra, naked everywhere else; pushing him into the loos on a quiet day at the bar, sucking him through his jeans. Scenes he could play and replay. The first time they had slept together, he could hardly get home. It wasn't butterflies in his stomach. It felt like a bird in there, beating its wings. He thought he'd walk in front of a car. He sat still in a café not far from where she lived and let his head explode with her.

Now he'd seen her breasts so many times they no longer shocked him. She'd plucked her eyebrows as they watched TV, marvelling at each thick hair's bulb – ‘Look, Ar! Like a plant bulb, an
onion
bulb' – and showing them to him. He had looked all around her face and seen everything that was wrong with it: pinker splashes where foundation faded, how the tops of her ears pushed forward slightly as if reaching for what he said. Her legs had got a little fatter; he'd met her mother. And all of this, all these things, had built up like seconds into a minute. That minute felt so full, so full he thought it would burst. It was love. Still is. So hard to know which one loved the other more.

*   *   *

Arthur would talk about ‘starting the day' to get them out of bed.

‘As if the day won't start without us. As if it's our responsibility,' she'd say. ‘We used to get up so late.'

‘Go out into the day. We need light.'

‘Open the curtains, I don't mind.'

‘I don't want other men to see you.'

‘I don't mind.'

‘We'll get scurvy here.'

‘I've got fruit.'

‘Bananas aren't fruit.'

‘They are.'

‘Potatoes. They're like potatoes.'

‘Fruit.'

‘You shouldn't eat so many.'

‘
Iron,
Arthur. It's good for you.' She pronounced the ‘th' in his name with an ‘f'.

‘Not iron. Potassium. It causes blindness. Come
on,
' he'd say. ‘The
day,
' like it was leaving. It was the only time when he pushed his voice.

Then she'd say ‘Fine', firmly, and find pants, back-crabbing on the bed to pull them up. She'd put makeup on (still not much, but more than she used to, more every year) and finish her hair before she reached for the rest of her clothes. Sometimes she'd have her shoes on, and a bag in her hand, ready to go, before she chose a dress to wear, or one of his shirts.

‘The
day,
' she'd say. But now it was him. He wouldn't have moved. He'd be watching her.

‘Your breasts.'

He'd put a finger in her belly button and pull her to him like that.

‘The
day,
you dick.'

‘My dick, then the day?'

‘You don't like the word “dick”.' She took his hand and pushed his strongest finger into a damp dip in her pants. ‘You think it's too English … childish.'

‘I was playing with the words you gave me.'

‘Playing?'

‘Playing. Fuck.'

‘What?'

‘No one has ever – oh
fuck
– no, don't … carry on … No one has ever…'

‘What?'

‘I just feel like – I mean – fuck – you're the – I don't know…'

‘Finish your sentences.'

‘So good.'

‘I don't know what you're saying.'

‘The best.'

She would talk during – her hands everywhere, she'd touch him everywhere – which he found strange at first. It wasn't talking like they do in things you see on the internet, or like other girls had tried.

‘You concentrate so much,' she'd say when he was deep inside her. ‘I can see it in your eyebrows that you're thinking.' He'd kiss her to stop her looking at him. ‘Is it true that all boys think about Margaret Thatcher?'

Sometimes he wanted to say ‘shut up', but even in his head that sounded wrong and he'd see her nipples – pink beads, soft and hard at the same time – and say, ‘Your
brother.
I think about your brother.'

‘I don't have one. Why do you have to be gross? Turn me over. Come. I want you to fuck me here.'

After a year or two, they stopped counting. They didn't know what to count from anyway.

‘First kiss,' Sofi says.

‘You kissed Meryn after that.'

‘We all did. It was a party.'

‘Then you went home. I didn't see you for a month.'

‘You told me you loved me.'

‘I did not.'

‘You did. When you came to stay.'

‘You were telling me about Sark. About that girl.'

A muscle in Sofi's belly, thin and tight as a wire, contracts.

‘How strong it was.'

‘You said that was hot,' she says.

‘It
was
hot. But it got me. I wanted to make sure you weren't…'

‘Weren't what?'

‘I wanted you to know how much I wanted you.'

‘Do you still feel that?'

‘Didn't you hear my heart?'

Now, in bed, alone together, his thumb follows the shape of a bikini. It's February, the month furthest from the sun, but she has a tan-line all year round. Belly dark, breasts white, like she'd bent and dipped her front in bleach.

‘Not bleach,' he says, kissing them. ‘Don't say that. Milk.'

They roll, return to their double-S. His back is so big in front of her. She puts herself in the middle of it, his shoulders at her hairline, her lips where his broadness begins to narrow, still thickly, into waist.

‘Your arms are like two of mine, maybe three.' She sounds almost sad. ‘Hey, Arthur?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Is this what life is?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Are we grown up yet?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Is this what we meant when we said “When I grow up”?'

‘I don't know.' Had he said that? Had he thought it? He feels as if the bed has disappeared from underneath him. As if he is floating, static in the air.

‘Where do you think you'll be in twenty years?' she asks, blunt fingers resting on his ribs.

‘I don't know.'

‘Where do you think
I'll
be?'

‘I don't…' Harder. ‘I don't know.'

‘Which country?'

‘I…' He stops. She blows on his back as he thinks. ‘Where do you want to be?'

‘Do I have children?'

‘Do you want them?'

‘I…' She's stopped blowing.

‘It doesn't matter. Yes,' he decides. ‘You have children.'

‘Lots of them?'

‘Lots.' Whatever it looks like, this is not a fast conversation. Between each sentence, the silence is such that they can almost touch it. He speaks even slower than he used to. All the boys she's ever known talk more slowly now they're men. ‘They're healthy.'

‘I'm glad.' She blows again. And then kisses his side. A line in slight curve. Orion's Belt. The skin of his torso that will stay young. ‘Peter Pan. You'll look good old though. You look good. Salt and pepper suits you. So handsome.'

She pushes him back, until both shoulder blades are flat on the bed, and pushes her forehead into his chest. Both keep their eyes shut tight.

‘Do I have them?' he says into her hair. He is not sure, but he feels a pain somewhere.

‘Yes. They're just like you. Exactly the same, all Cornwall and lovely. I think they'll be lovely.'

Neither of them moves for a while. It is not that they are breaking up today, right now, as you read this. It is not the last time they will lie in a double-S in this bed, not at all. It might be years.

They don't need to say it, but they both know, that when they made each other older, they gave each other away.

Borges in Bed

It started with a line from Borges. Pip wasn't sure if he had remembered it right. His son couldn't sleep, and he was trying to help him.

‘Could you say it again?' the boy asked. He was lying flat on his back, but his head was three inches off the pillow.

The boy did not look comfortable. Pip could see tendons, cello strings too close to the skin, tugging at his son's collarbones.
Six years old. His bones are a third of the size of mine, they are as thin as sticks.
For one thick second, Pip could not wait for the boy to grow. He would have folded up the next ten years of his life in order for the boy to be less breakable.

‘I don't remember it exactly, J.'

‘But you just said it, Da.'

Pip licked his thumb and used it to wipe off the snot which had dried in a small cobweb under the boy's nose. ‘It's something like…' and he repeated what he'd said.

J shut his eyes tight until they disappeared into folds of skin like stars.
That's where he'll have wrinkles one day,
Pip thought.
He shuts his eyes so hard.
J had clenched like that the first time he tried to swallow half a paracetamol, when the Calpol had run out. It hadn't worked. ‘I've gone all closed at the back,' he'd said, pointing to his throat. So Pip hid the pill in a buttered bread sandwich, and got his son to take it that way.

J let his head lower back, slowly, into the pillow, as if he thought someone might have taken it from under him.

This tiny child doesn't trust anything, but he's so small not to trust things.
J had one leg outside of the duvet, and one underneath it. Three nights earlier, he had said, quietly, that one half of his body was always hot, the other always cold. Always the same sides. He asked his dad if that was OK, and then he asked if he was going to die.

Now, this evening, he was silent. Pip felt his son's breathing start to slow down, he saw the tide of the duvet change. The first few times he had seen this, it scared him. The words ‘peter out' came into his head. He had never thought those words before, but that didn't matter, they came to him now. What if his son's lungs petered out?
Peter out, peter out, I can't bear it if he peters out.
And he had shaken J awake.

Then apologized when he realized nothing was wrong. Pip thought about his own breathing and his own heart, his own everything, when he fell asleep in the bigger bed next door. His body slowed down too.

He let his son do the same now. He stroked J's forehead to help him on his way, to show that he gave him permission to go. He would not be that kind of father, Pip told himself, not the kind who got in the way.

Pip sat on the edge of his son's bed. He could feel the long corner edge of the mattress through his jeans. He felt, for a moment, as if he were sitting on a tightrope. The light coming from the corridor led to the noise of the television. J said the sound helped him sleep, unless it was guns or bombs, when he preferred it if the volume was kept low.

Pip kissed his son between the eyebrows, the weight of it pushing J's head further into the pillow. When J was even smaller, Pip had held him in his arms the way he'd seen it done in films. Cradling. He would kiss J's head again and again in tiny, staccato beats. He used to wonder whether he kissed him so much he would stop his hair from growing. Until he was two-and-a-half, J's hair was nothing but a suggestion, see-through in sunlight. After that though, it turned blond, then brown, and it grew fast, now, on the weekends. Pip got up slowly and walked to the door. He pulled it to behind him, leaving the light on.

In the small bed, J was not asleep. His left hand was flexed open as wide as it could go, as if each fingertip were trying to escape from the others. His right was clenched so tight his fingernails – they grew fast too – dug into his palm. When he realized how different his hands were, he let the force in each of them go.
My left side and my right side, they never feel the same.
It occurred to J that he might be broken.