The Last Kings of Sark (24 page)

When he thought that, new thoughts followed. Broken, he must be broken, and reasons sprang out, flaring, wild, hard, like his left hand's fingers. It was because he'd swallowed chewing gum. It was because he'd bitten a girl at nursery once, and blood dotted out through her Aertex. It was because people near him broke. It was because everyone was breaking. It was because he had tried peanuts. J had heard of allergies, he knew about illness. He had seen programmes about these things on the television, had heard words when he was supposed to be sleeping. He imagined black lumps growing all over the inside of his body.

That was how his brain worked. If you could see the way his thoughts moved and grew, you'd talk of estuaries or trees, things that fork, and double, and double again. It did not help what his father had said. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

That night, J was sure he did not sleep for a single second. What he could see in his head felt as big as a cinema screen. He looked all around this space, from floor to ceiling, from curtain to curtain. If Pip had been there still, he would have seen his son's pupils dance beneath the surface of his eyelids.

There were lots of things happening, all at once. Here are some of the things J saw:

He saw his home burning. He saw it from outside, as if the bird feeder had become a camera. He saw licks of orange, and butane blue; charcoal clouds of smoke so thick they smudged out the windows. He saw the fire start from the kitchen, then he saw the fire start from his father's bed. Then he saw it start from his own head (that week at school, a classmate had, without such words, described spontaneous combustion).

He saw groups of teenagers – or, twelve-year-olds at least, older than him and twice as high – running along the road towards his house. They had white faces, then black faces and then their faces were a mixture of the two. He saw baseball bats in their hands, then huge curved swords, big guns and finally axes, blades flashing silver in the light of the street lamp.

He saw a snake at the bottom of his bed which turned into the type of spider that was poisonous. After that, it was a scorpion, and finally, it was a snake again, cold, wet, moving towards his knee in a stretched S.

He saw a man in a hood break into their house. The man climbed up the drainpipe and climbed in through the tiny window in their toilet. Then he put his hands round J's father's neck and killed him. When J looked again, the man in the hood
was
his father.

He did not sleep. He saw everything that he could.

In the morning, Pip went to wake his son.

It was often the other way round. Before his boy was born – after they'd decided, at the very last minute, on that very hot day in Paris, to give him the
chance
to be born – Pip imagined a young child leaping, bounding onto the parental bed. But this boy, their boy, would walk round to where Pip slept, alone now, and tap at the highest point of his outline, hoping to find a shoulder.

This morning, though, Pip went to wake his son. J had kicked off his duvet in the night, and his limbs, which had recently thinned, looked longer than the day before, and were French-plaited in the sheets. His mouth was slightly open, his bottom lip glazed.

Pip drew the curtains slowly, so as not to shock sleeping eyes with full sun. He felt that if Clémence had been here, that would be the kind of thing she would have done. He liked it when he felt that. Pip picked up the fallen duvet and held it out with high arms so it fell straight. He laid it lightly over J's feet, which were sole-to-sole, as if in prayer. Pip's hand was drawn by muscle memory, by magnet, to the boy's face and he stroked the highest part of his cheek. ‘He-llo,' he said in a conscious whisper. ‘It's been morning for ages.'

It was grown up, somehow, to be the one doing the waking. Pip was glad for moments like this.

At breakfast, Pip asked his son if he had slept well. J tried to pour himself cereal, but the box slipped and feather-light puffed rice skittered out across the table.

‘You were scared last night, weren't you? Before I tucked you in.'

J picked up the Rice Crispies he could reach and put them in a little pile next to his orange juice.
Look at his cheeks flush, look how he concentrates; such a sober child.
How odd it was, Pip thought, to talk of a child as sober.

‘It was good advice I gave you,' he said. ‘Last night. Wasn't it?'

Because he had never liked high-chairs, J had three extra cushions stacked on his seat. He was careful not to move too much because sometimes all the cushions slipped.

‘You were out like a light after that,' Pip said. ‘Weren't you? It's a good thing to remember.'

And he said that sentence from Borges, or something like it, again.

J did not want to hear. He tensed his ears to fill them up with the sound of the blood moving in his veins. It sounded like the sea, when you stood at the end of a pier. Pip poured milk into his son's bowl.

He felt good after that. There were moments when he thought he might not be doing so badly. He was young to be a father – both he and Clémence had been so young; it was how young they were that people always talked about, and then, now … but he was making it work. Would make it work. Twenty-four was a fine age, surely? In his throat, coffee turned to hope.

‘I'm like your dad and your brother, both at the same time, aren't I?' he said.

J did not know what it was like to have a brother, and so he didn't know what to say.

‘We can be like brothers too, if you like?' Pip noticed every time he asked J a question. It felt stupid at times to ask questions of someone so small.

‘If you like,' the boy repeated. With the back of his spoon, he squashed soft Rice Crispies into the side of his bowl.

Someone else's mother rang the doorbell then, to pick up J and drive him along the Uxbridge Road to school. Pip said, like he said every day, that it was very kind of her.

*   *   *

At school that day there was only one point, when they watched a cartoon in class, that J forgot about what his father had said. When he remembered though, it landed at the base of his stomach, and in his head, between his ears, high up, fizzing, on top of everything. In the afternoon, J locked himself in a low-walled toilet cubicle for nearly twenty minutes, until the teaching assistant came to check that he was OK.

After school, the same someone-else's mum took J to her house, which smelt of radiators, sweets and stock cubes. He didn't like her son much, but he liked the lady and thought she smiled a lot for how old she was. He asked her how old she was exactly, and she said thirty-two.

J said his mum was those numbers too, if you took the three and the two and swapped them round. He said that was the age she'd stopped at, and he added that she was French, as if that might explain it. The lady didn't know what to say after that, so she brought J a toy to play with. It was meant for someone younger than him. J sat on the sofa until his father came to pick him up.

*   *   *

It had been nearly four years since the accident.

They – Pip, Clémence, J (a baby then, face the size of a palm and body wrapped in triple blankets) – had been driving to the south of France to visit Eddy and Esmé's new house.

The motorway made the baby cry, so they'd switched to smaller roads. The hedges all looked the same, they hardly passed villages. They were late, they were lost. Clémence was angry with Pip for not having satnav, and the back of Pip's neck burned at the thought of disappointing everyone.

Eventually, he pulled into a layby, and Clémence crossed the road to ask an old man for directions. The man walked with a stick and his back curved forward in an echo of its handle. His white jumper was stained. He seemed friendly. Pip watched them through the window: the man pointed with his stick at first, then with wide, arthritic hands. Clémence nodded with each new point, then Pip saw her say
‘merci'
with a slower bow of her head. She'd turned back to the car, and ducked to see him through the window. She'd smiled, and mouthed ‘See?' Pip had played this scene in his head a thousand times.

A second later, Clémence turned to wave goodbye to the man, and stepped into the road. The car – a car that nobody saw coming – dragged her body nearly twelve metres.

To see it silent, it almost looked like the car had brushed her away. Brushed, swatted, it looked that easy. But that said nothing of the sound. Of bones and metals; of soft meeting hard and becoming unrecognizable. The brake was more violent than the impact.

The nearest hospital was in Paray-le-Monial, and Pip and the baby had waited there, red seats in a plastic corridor, nurses stopping now and then to stroke J's head and offer milk and tea. The families had arrived the next day. Clémence's father came up from Marseille, Eddy and Esmé arrived, grey-faced, in a taxi. The doctors told Pip many times that what he remembered from those moments might not strictly be true – that the mind contorts things after trauma – but he knows he shouted at his parents when he saw them. Shouted and shouted until he could feel spit falling from his mouth. He only stopped when the baby started crying too.

They spent three days in a bleak hotel near the hospital, then nearly a week in Paris to make what Eddy called ‘arrangements'.

‘Don't you dare call it that,' Pip had said. ‘It's a fucking funeral.' When he had to tell Eddy a second time, he grabbed his father by the neck of his jacket in a café on rue Montorgueil. He'd held a finger, hard, up to Eddy's face. In his grief, Pip was fearless, and seeing grief, Eddy conceded.

It seemed everyone agreed that Pip should go back to his parents' house with the baby, and so he let himself be led.

‘Juste pour l'instant,'
Esmé had said. ‘Till you find your feet,' Eddy added, by email.

His parents' new house was big and old, and had a lot of land. When Pip had been there for a week, he called his father.

‘Where the fuck have you sent us?'

‘Provence.'

‘How will she ever get better if you won't let her live anywhere normal?'

‘She likes it there. It's where she grew up. Where
we
grew up.'

‘It's in the middle of nowhere.'

‘It's not too far from the airport.'

‘She doesn't fucking drive.'

‘It's a big house. A lovely big house.'

‘She's alone in it.'

‘Not with you there.'

‘But I'm not staying. I can't stay.'

‘It'd be good for her.'

‘You're so full of shit. There's no way I'm going to let him grow up ten miles from the nearest village.'

‘Look, Pip—'

‘I'm not going to do that to him.'

‘I have a meeting now.'

‘Bullshit.'

‘And you've got a fucking tongue on you. Your mother never brought you up like that.'

‘No.
You
did,' and by the time Pip added ‘you prick' Eddy had hung up.

*   *   *

Two months later, on one of the weekends when Eddy was home, he commented on the length of Pip's hair.

‘You're not looking after yourself,' he said, and he suggested that perhaps Pip should see the same doctor as Esmé had.

Esmé ended dinner abruptly. She took Eddy into the next room. The next day Eddy made calls. A few calls. Three or four. He got a job for Pip at an accounting firm. ‘Entry level, but not bad. Big place. Lots of room for progression. Easy. London. They're going to have the intern find you a flat.'

Pip had cut his hair, and packed their bags, and so it was, and here they were.

*   *   *

That night, J could not eat much of his dinner. It was fish fingers. They had been done on the grill, and for slightly too long. When he cut them open, the rectangles of fish had shrunk inside their cases, It looked like there was glue around them, like they'd been stuck in. He thought of papier mâché. The peas were plump at first, but now they were cold they had wrinkled into raisins.

Pip never thought that he would be hungry at this time – it was seven, though meant to be six-thirty – but often ended up accidentally eating with his son.

‘Dip it in the ketchup,' he said, mid-mouthful.

‘I think I'm full now.'

‘It's nice with the ketchup.' Pip picked up a second fish finger, dunked it in the red and put it in his own mouth. There was something about eating food which had cooled that made him even hungrier. ‘Peas are good in the ketchup too. You can mix them in,' he said, and he did.
Kids' food,
Pip thought.
Baked beans, smiley faces. It tastes of things not being complicated.

J said he'd finished.

‘After tea, do you want to do some drawing together?' Pip asked. Until recently, he'd forgotten how much he'd liked drawing when he was a boy.

‘I thought you said we called it “dinner” at our house.'

‘After dinner then.'
He remembers all of the things I say. How is this possible? I made this boy, I made him.
‘Have you finished?' He took a spoonful of his son's peas. ‘Do you want to draw then?'
Stop asking him questions.
‘You like drawing, you're good.' Draw with the kid, Pip told himself, if you think that's a good idea.

‘No,' J said. ‘Can we watch a film? Or just me. Can I watch a film? You don't have to watch it if you don't want to.'

Films stopped you from thinking. Pip said yes and after he had finished J's peas, and rolled the last fish finger up in a slice of bread, he turned on his laptop, and angled it so that they could both see the screen. They didn't have a television.

‘What about…?' Pip said the name of a film.

‘Is it long?'

‘What do you mean, is it long? Do you mean is it good?'

‘Maybe.'