Free The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee Page A

hadn’t fouled in football. ‘But I give you promise. Armin. Vaclav.’ He pointed. ‘Good men.’
    All I knew about Farquart & Fathers was that they were rich. Pip clarified things later: absurdly rich. The family had just gone up from nineteenth-richest in the world to eighth. There’d been a boom in their pubs – the recession – and their funeral parlours had bought up Co-op.
    Armin held the tiller, and Vaclav did the talking. He told us they were handymen. Cash-in-handymen, Armin interjected (high-five with Vaclav). They’d found their job online, on a summer work website. They mowed the Farquarts’ lawns and sowed vegetables in their greenhouses. Then there were stranger things, like bringing back bundles of gorse to burn, and collecting sea glass from the beach to fill the driveway and make it shine.
    â€˜They want to feel like they walk on diamonds,’ Vaclav said. Sofi’s fingers back on his arm now. ‘And this witch patch—’
    â€˜Perch,’ Pip said, and explained that it was an old superstitious tradition, a stone plinth on Channel Island chimneys for witches to rest on mid-flight.
    â€˜This witch patch or perch or whatever thing. They are putting one. But every wind it falls off. Five times, we’ve stick the patch back on.’ He slapped the back of his right palm against the palm of his left, the way Italians do. ‘Ten times! I say to Armin, witches too fat. Only thin witches from now, please.’ They high-fived again.
    When we got to the shore, the boys – all three of them – pulled the dinghy up onto the sand with me and Sofi still in it. We climbed out, kissed Vaclav and Armin goodbye and left them sitting on the edge of their red beached whale, lighting a damp spliff Armin had kept tucked behind his ear.
    As we walked, Pip told us the Farquarts were buying up half the island. He’d said he’d heard they were trying to import foreign cows and that there were rumours of an underground bunker. People on Guernsey were starting to call it Fark rather than Sark.
    That’s when I remembered the graffiti scratched into the toilet walls at the Mermaid: ‘Fark off!’ which I’d thought was just bad spelling. When we got to the Avenue, Pip told us to look. ‘This side Sark,’ and he pointed at the normal shops that we went to, ‘and that side Fark’: the Chelsea Bun bakery and restaurants with terraces, ye this, ye that, all new with old names.
    It was late by then, home time, and we left Pip by the blue postbox.
    â€˜You’re sunkissed,’ Sofi said, and kissed him. ‘And kissed. And you’ve grown! Fuck, Jude – kiss him. He’s a giant. He’s grown in a day. ’ Pip looked down and knocked the sand off his shoes against the bottom of the postbox.
    As we walked home, Sofi asked if I had ever been in love. I was glad we were walking. ‘Of course,’ I said, then when she said, ‘Really?’ said I didn’t know.
    Back at Bonita’s, our hostess was asleep, melting into the sofa in front of a Costa Rican telenovela. There were three empty cans of Coke next to her, one still dripping from the lip. She was snoring, making the most unimaginable noise. We’d heard it from the front porch and Sofi had gripped my wrist and dilated her eyes. When we got to our tiny room, we could still hear Bonita, in baggy chorus with husband John next door.
    â€˜Fuck,’ Sofi said, head hammering against my arm. ‘Oh fuck. It’s like a fucking farmyard. ’
    I started to laugh.
    â€˜Oh but it just won’t do! ’ She laughed too now, and when we laughed together, the light flickered. She kicked the wall with the side of her foot. ‘I said, I said. Didn’t I say it makes me psychotic?’ She explained: it was because there was no fixed beat, so you couldn’t set your heart to go in time to it. Like Pip’s metronome foot, for