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

think they’re only here for the summer.’ The dad had dark curls and he was laughing – his laugh big, coloured, kind – at something his son had said. Pip’s head was tilted as he looked at them in his concentrated way. He looked slightly sad. ‘They look nice though. That’s the thing, most of the people young like me only come here for a few weeks.’
    Pip took us further onto Little Sark, past a place called Cider Press Cottage. The sign was a shiny slice of trunk; the words carved using the sun and a magnifying glass. Sofi was worried Pip would burn, so she rubbed suncream into his neck. She played a three-note piano on his moles and then blew on his skin to dry it. He didn’t even say thank you, he just bounded ahead, looking back to check we were following every few paces.
    When it got too brambly, and too steep, we left the bikes and used our free hands to pick blackberries.
    â€˜You won’t have them yet,’ Pip said to me, ‘in the countryside where you’re from. They won’t be ripe.’
    â€˜We get them from Sainsbury’s.’
    â€˜Oh, right, well … we get them early. Microclimate.’
    I used my thumb and forefinger like chopsticks, one berry at a time. Sofi plunged a hand in, and groped. She didn’t get many and said it was because she was from the city. Pip told her to look behind us; there were always more blackberries if you looked back in the direction where no one walked. He said that every path was more walked-down in one particular direction, which confused him, because if you walked one way, wouldn’t you have to come back?
    Perhaps not. We had just reached a precipice; sixty feet high, a jagged drop.
    There was a rope which ran from where we were all the way to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, studded at various points on the way down, pinned under boulders or tied round rusty metal loops. The rope was waterlogged green from old rain. Sofi gave it a tug.
    â€˜Seems all right.’
    I wish she’d given us more than ‘all right’, but she’d already taken off her flip-flops and tucked them between her teeth. Sofi went first, and Pip followed her down the rope, both of them doing this sort of poor man’s abseiling.
    â€˜Don’t put the string between your legs!’ Sofi yelped. ‘It’s gnarling up all my ovaries.’
    Why had I brought such a silly bag? Nothing in there was mine. It had Sofi’s chocolate orange, Sofi’s cigarettes, her suncream. I took hold of the soggy rope, taut from the hands of the other two, and headed over the edge.
    By the time I got to the bottom – the insides of my fingers burning – Sofi was standing barefoot on a big, bald rock. She was balancing on one foot, squinting. ‘If you stand right, and get your eyes right, you can see out to sea through that cave there, and this one here.’ The two caves out to the sea were wide, but they curved, and so you could only see out through slits, and only exactly where she was standing. Pip had showed her.
    â€˜You have to align, ’ she said. ‘There’s something pagan about it. Something … Mayan, I don’t know … One of those ancient things.’
    She stretched out her arms, and shut her eyes, her own ritual. Pip was wiping mud off his feet on a low rock, slick with algae. I could tell he was glad to have shown Sofi something she liked. I poked Sofi in the thigh and pointed to a flat, pigeon-grey rock, where someone had written ‘Spank me hard dady’ in permanent marker.
    â€˜There’s your ritual,’ I said, and something about dyslexia.
    Sofi laughed – except it wasn’t quite a laugh – and then stepped down off her Mayan rock. We made our way through the slit on the right, and climbed up onto a rock platform right by the sea. It was flinty, and Pip said that when he was younger, Esmé used to bring him