The Last Kings of Sark (26 page)

‘Who are you?' J asks Sofi, this time holding out the nectarine.

‘Uh…' For some reason, she stares at the things in her arms. Children have a way of getting to the heart of things. ‘That's a hard question.'

Pip steps in and takes the nectarine from his son. ‘We knew each other when we were young.'

‘I'm Sofi,' she says to the boy. ‘I knew your father when he was a boy.'

‘Not a
boy,
' Pip says.

‘A bit a boy.' Sofi's never understood why people shake their head in disbelief. But that is what she is doing now. ‘Fuck, I'm so happy to see you. See him. Really I am. I didn't … How
are
you? What are you doing? You look…'

‘I'm good. We're good. We have a new place. It's really nice. Isn't it nice?' Pip angles towards his son.

‘My room is bigger now. Do
you
have a big room?' J says to Sofi.

‘What about you?' This is Pip, again. ‘You look – you're like … black.'

‘Holiday.'

‘You look great.'

They're smiling at each other.

‘That bar,' he says.

‘Terrible bar. I mean, great bar. It was a fun time. It was bad for me.'

They're smiling at each other, but somehow smiling
on
each other too. It's the type of smile that changes the spacing of the air and it's strange. Because yes, they are looking to see how many years have passed, and how. But they are also looking at each other and seeing themselves as if no time has passed, seeing themselves as they had been, as everyone has been, so much younger.

In one of Sofi's smiles, she says sorry – both of them feel it – for the last time they saw each other.

Then, ‘It was just the Isle of Wight,' she says.

‘What?'

‘It was the Isle of Wight I could see. From Le Havre. When it was really clear – on a really clear day, I looked out and I thought it was Sark. I liked that. But it was just the Isle of Wight.'

The queue is moving fast now. They can see how much time they have left together, and with each step it gets shorter.

Pip's son asks Sofi what Tampax are. Before she can answer, she is at the front of the queue. She bends forward slightly and lets all the things in her arms drop onto the conveyor belt. The check-out boy stares at her with a slightly open mouth. As she finds the cash, she takes out a business card. She keeps it between two fingers as she gets her change, then she hands it to Pip.

‘You have to call me,' she says. And this time, she means it.

He doesn't have time to look at it properly before he slips it in his pocket. He wants to know what she does. He notices that the card is matte white, has beautiful lettering. She's wearing a jacket that looks expensive. Her smile is wrapped up in lipstick but it's real again. She is a proper woman. She looks like you could say hello to her. He imagines that were she to sit in the window of a café, men would come in to it just to pay for her coffee.

She's just been given her receipt. She has her bags in her hands. ‘Call me,' she says again. It feels right that she would kiss him on the cheek, but the child is in the way.

‘Bye bye, little one,' she says, and they both say ‘bye' back.

She has nearly left the shop when Pip calls after her.

‘Sofi,' he says.

She turns. She is standing right in the way of the electric doors. They start to close, then reopen, start to close then reopen. Limbo. The sun is setting and the only part of the sky they can see is cool moon yellow.

‘Do you want to come for dinner? We live just there.' He points in a curve, which means ‘down the road'.

‘What are you going to have?' she asks. She pretends to take a look at what he's buying even though she's too far away to see.

‘Lasagne. Peas? Kids' food. I don't know. We bought bread.'

She nods.

‘It's just the two of us. Me and him. There's enough. Enough lasagne. Now this one's decided he is only going to eat –' he turns to his son, ‘broccoli.'

‘Chocolate,' J says. He's looking at the rings on Sofi's fingers. Loads of them: red, turquoise. There's something about her he likes, something easy about her. She's happy and she's not even trying.
She's cool,
J thinks.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘Yes, OK. I would like that.'

‘Great,' he says. The sticky boy at the till is waiting for Pip to enter his PIN. ‘That's great.'

Pip realizes his chest has been tight, like there was a hand inside, gripping it. As a woman decides not to leave them, the hand lets go.

Sofi points to the pavement just outside. ‘I'll wait,' she says.

3

For a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. I turned again to the house … as if we ourselves had left but yesterday.

Daphne du Maurier,
Rebecca

Going Back

I went back for you too.

That was the first thing I wrote, and afterwards, I wrote over the words again and again until they became like nests on the page and lost their meaning. For a short while, I did not know what to write after that. Just this – I went back for you, for both of us, for all of us, everyone, it depends how you see it. I didn't feel that I was alone.

I went for one day, and all the way to the coast, I went by train. No plane, no pilot, no Badoit. I wanted to go back slowly. If you look at the trees along the tracks, trains go fast, but if you look out far, sometimes it feels like you could be walking. And I went back from the other side too: France.

I've been spending a fortnight in Normandy with my other half. We met in France and so we try to go back every year for our anniversary. It's not beautiful from the bigger roads, but they half-timber houses and it's famous for Bayeux mint chews and the brightest paintings of sea skies and yacht steeples. Cider comes in wine-size bottles with champagne corks. I think you'd like it.

A friend of ours has a place here, in a town with weekend homes and crazy golf. The roofs are pinched and gothic, but there are snatches of the sea from the kitchen window and enamel tiles of turquoise swallows on the gateposts. Next to our bed, above a bare bookshelf, there's a map of Europe. It's the type of map that pretends to be old – countries' edges drawn in calligraphy, zigzags in dark blue for the sea, the same, the zag just sharper, in green for mountains. The paper's dip-dyed in tea, and I was looking at it, following borders and beaches, and suddenly I saw how close I was. I found our island and put my finger on it, covered it completely.

I knew I had to go, and said that. Just with my lips at first, and then the words became sounds and felt so loud in the room. I heard them as if someone else said them. We were leaving Cabourg in a week, and I felt, as people say they feel, that if I didn't go now, I never would. That evening, we went for dinner at the Grand Hotel – Proust's hotel, they call it. He featured a lot on the menu. Madeleines for each course, a savoury tilleul sorbet as a palate cleanser. Just before dessert, I said I had to go away. Just for the day. When I said where, I think it was understood. Lives are long, and when you love someone you let them keep the parts that came before you. Our knees knotted together under the table. We ended the meal with Calvados, I paid. I looked up timetables, woke up first, and set off for Sark before breakfast.

The train to St Malo – just one carriage, shaky on the tracks – was dark red with dusty seats, and when I arrived I had an hour before the ferry. Another time, I would like to stay longer, or go with less in my head. I wonder if you ever went to St Malo? The sand is the colour of brushed teeth, and the boats look expensive. The ferry from there to Guernsey was fast, new, neutral. Called a ‘Condor', which I thought was a strange choice.

St Peter's Port seemed higher than it had been before. Real estate is booming and it was crowned with sky-high cranes and between them tall spires – I hadn't noticed all the churches last time we were there. The houses on the hill were all white but faced the sea at different angles, which changed the way each one threw back light.

I had a cappuccino at a port front café and they made it with a heart in the foam. It was one of those days when the sky is enormous. Warm to look at, biting to be in. There wasn't a cloud and the sun burnt white. It looked more like the moon, and it was cold enough to feel the air wherever it touched your skin. It made you want to breathe deeply. For a while, after I'd finished my coffee, I watched a young couple on a bench – maybe one of the benches we'd sat on – on the stretch of pavement outside the café. They were dressed for different weathers; the girl in a sundress and shoes that might go see-through in the rain, the boy in a children's-book blue beanie and a jumper thick enough to turn a boy's body into a man's. I could not work out whether they were in love, or friends, or brother and sister. The boy smoked, the girl stole drags, how their hands met was like a dance.

(I am sorry for the detail. It's just that I want to tell you everything. I want you to have been there with me.)

For the off-season, the
Sark Belle
was full. That's what the ticket woman said, anyway. ‘Sark for you too?' she said, cheek fat with chewing gum. ‘Whole world's heading there today.' She blew a bubble as she counted my change.

I hoped she would be right, but the world that got on the ferry was the wrong one. An American family boarded just behind me, and sat close. They had never been to Sark before, and called it Sark Island. You'd have hated it. Every time, Sark Island. Is it big, Sark Island? Will there be other children (this was the child speaking) on Sark Island? I felt, then, this bizarre, buried sense of ownership. I wanted them to know that I had been there before. The dad had creases from an iron on his jeans. They talked about planes flying over the island, how high in the air they have to stay for it to be legal. Either it's changed or they got it wrong. I turned to them, and the son, they only had one, had his mouth open in an ‘O'. He was at the age when you stare. The father noticed, smiled an apology without looking at my face, and lifted the child up away from me and onto his denim lap.

The crossing was gentle. Sailors from the Sark Shipping Company walked around in pale blue shirts and smiled at people. Seagulls bobbed in the open water, or congregated on certain rocks, a hundred white heads keeping each other warm. The wind, and there wasn't much – it was the air itself that was cold – was behind us. We could see the boat's motion in a circle around us, but after that, the sea looked smooth and shiny as a mirror, face to the sky.

I realized that what I was scared of most was blankness, that it would mean nothing. That I had let my eyes rest on memories too many times for them to still touch me. (The man on the other side of me kept on sniffing. He was reading the Bible, and he had a gnarly cauliflower of tissue pressed into the page as a bookmark.) I tried to work out if I was afraid that the island would have changed, or more afraid that it might have stayed exactly the same and that I had changed. Constants are comforting, terrifying, both. The Bible man sneezed and said sorry into his tissue.

That was when the little boy with no brothers or sisters ran to the window and said he could see it. Sark Island.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. Here, to you, and on a ‘to do' list too. It was a ‘to do' list that didn't make sense. Things from the future, things I'd done already. I just didn't want to see the island from the distance, flat and far, like a postcard, because it had already become that.

People talk about edges. Being on them, taking them off. I felt at that moment that I knew exactly where the edge was, and that it was beside me. Close to my skin. I don't know. Nostalgia is one of the hardest things to write down. Even the word – it tangles. Perhaps the only way it can exist outside the body is in music.
New Scientist
says that music is the closest thing to time travel. I read it in someone's loo once. Everything that happens in between the first and last time you hear a song concertinas into nothing. In your head it's the first time again, but everywhere else it isn't. That's the sad thing: everywhere else it isn't. And it feels like a tugging at the base of your stomach.

As the ferry neared the island, it crossed the stretch of water where the three of us once threw flowers. I think I remembered the spot right. It was at the last moment where the land still looked like we could reach out and touch it. I imagined our flowers lying on the floor of the seabed. I imagined them whole, and that they had kept their colours, because what they'd promised was true. The boat pulled closer to the harbour.

Honestly, I think I half expected to see Pip leaning on the seawall. I wondered if he'd be even taller, if he'd still be blond. I wondered if the island was somewhere time was trapped and if everything would start all over again. I saw him in a thick pea-coat for winter, I saw him reading, I saw him in my head, but only in my head, lots of ways. The man next to me must have stopped holding his tissue because suddenly the wind caught it and blew it up into the air. It passed in front of us like a tiny cloud, paused, then disappeared. The
Sark Belle
docked. Heavy ropes were tied and the sides of the boat leant on Uniroyal tyres and old barnacles.

I walked with the American family, the Christian with a cold, and all the rest of the world headed to Sark that day, through the harbour tunnel. Algae on the walls, diesel in the air. There ahead of us was the Toast Rack. I think it was the same one, just a bit rustier, as if the toast had burnt. It took us up the hill slowly, a soft jerk with every gear change. The American woman shut her eyes, breathing out through her mouth, fingers pushing on her husband's stocky knuckles as if they were her own pressure points. We got off at the top of the Avenue. Monkey tails still dipped green and muscular into the gardens of NatWest. The other trees were getting their leaves back. There must have been a flash heatwave a couple of weeks before because some of the buds had blinked through early.