hadnât fouled in football. âBut I give you promise. Armin. Vaclav.â He pointed. âGood men.â
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. Thereâd been a boom in their pubs â the recession â 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). Theyâd found their job online, on a summer work website. They mowed the Farquartsâ 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.
âThey want to feel like they walk on diamonds,â Vaclav said. Sofiâs fingers back on his arm now. âAnd this witch patchââ
âPerch,â 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.
âThis witch patch or perch or whatever thing. They are putting one. But every wind it falls off. Five times, weâve stick the patch back on.â He slapped the back of his right palm against the palm of his left, the way Italians do. âTen times! I say to Armin, witches too fat. Only thin witches from now, please.â They high-fived again.
When we got to the shore, the boys â all three of them â 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. Heâd said heâd 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.
Thatâs when I remembered the graffiti scratched into the toilet walls at the Mermaid: âFark off!â which Iâd thought was just bad spelling. When we got to the Avenue, Pip told us to look. âThis side Sark,â and he pointed at the normal shops that we went to, âand that side Farkâ: 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.
âYouâre sunkissed,â Sofi said, and kissed him. âAnd kissed. And youâve grown! Fuck, Jude â kiss him. Heâs a giant. Heâs grown in a day. â 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. âOf course,â I said, then when she said, âReally?â said I didnât know.
Back at Bonitaâs, 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. Weâd 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.
âFuck,â Sofi said, head hammering against my arm. âOh fuck. Itâs like a fucking farmyard. â
I started to laugh.
âOh but it just wonât do! â She laughed too now, and when we laughed together, the light flickered. She kicked the wall with the side of her foot. âI said, I said. Didnât I say it makes me psychotic?â She explained: it was because there was no fixed beat, so you couldnât set your heart to go in time to it. Like Pipâs metronome foot, for