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

though,’ she said. Occasionally, she’d suddenly get irrationally protective: ‘Not a chance! I can’t give you freeloaders all my secrets.’
    One day, halfway through a demonstration of how to make breadcrumbs by bashing a bag of bread against the table leg, Sofi accused Pip of looking at her funny.
    â€˜He’s looking at me funny. Why’s he looking at me funny?’
    Pip put his head straight. He’d been looking at her from an angle, more with his left eye than his right. He did the same to me sometimes when we were in the study.
    He mumbled something.
    â€˜What do you mean “death”?’ She almost shouted. ‘Is he trying to curse me?’
    â€˜Deaf,’ he clarified. ‘Deaf in my left ear. Just a bit.’
    After that we switched seats so that we were always on his hearing side.
    We ate lunch lying on our fronts on the croquet lawn, or round the kitchen table on days when it was too hot. After lunch, Pip would get tired, which Sofi decided was because he was growing. As soon as he was asleep, I’d say there was no point in staying and we would escape and leave him. We went to the Venus Caves, and lay in uncut grass which stayed erect in the gap between us, like a little fence. We walked to a cliff edge over Derrible Bay – the sea ahead spread like a jewelled carpet – and sat in the wind, feet dangling.
    â€˜Next time,’ Pip had asked me, ‘could you take me? There are some places I’d like to show you. I could come.’ But when he fell asleep after lunch, I didn’t wake him.
    The following day, however, he said the same thing in front of Sofi. He wanted to show us Little Sark. I said we’d already been a hundred times. His face fell, so Sofi said, ‘We love it though, let’s go again. Vaseline,’ and she reached into her pocket and dabbed some on his lower lip.
    Pip didn’t have a bike, so he ran along behind ours. Because of the way his spider legs moved – knees to the sky – it looked like he was pedalling too.
    The afternoons were different with Pip. He knew which one was Jersey and which was Guernsey. He told us that the Coupée was a wind trap, and that, during the most terrible storms, kids from Little Sark used to have to crawl across on their bellies to get to school. He answered Sofi’s question about it staying up: it was ‘an isthmus’. And the beach we’d looked at, the one that curved between the cliffs like the in-between-toes of a webbed foot, was called Grand Grève. We sat looking out at its white bay, and he told us other things: about the silver mines at Port Gorey; and that Sark was the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. He paused.
    â€˜In 2008,’ he finished.
    Sofi said she’d guessed. She bit a fingernail. ‘So who’s the king?’
    â€˜No king,’ Pip said. ‘He’s called a Seigneur,’ and he told us how the Seigneur ‘semi-rents’ the island from the Queen for £1.79 a year.
    â€˜ Cheap skate!’ Sofi said. ‘That’s the price of a cup of tea in Costa. What jokers.’
    She asked Pip if everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody knew everybody. Pip said he didn’t know, and then, ‘mostly’.
    â€˜Like them, for example. Do you know them lot?’ She pointed, using her elbow for subtlety, at a family having a picnic down below us on Grand Grève, a father and three sons. The youngest two – one olive-oil blond, the other rustier – were filling their pockets with shells and having competitions to see how far they could throw rocks into the sea. The father and the oldest son had deckchairs, and looked like they were giving the stone-throwers marks for each shot. The wind was strong enough to make each stone fly in a bow-shape.
    â€˜Bend it like Beckham!’ Sofi yelled then, subtlety forgotten.
    â€˜Them? The Millers? No,’ Pip said. ‘I