Blood Kin Read online

  Perhaps that is not quite true. I was interested in politics long ago, growing up in a small family in the heart of the city’s Presidential District. My parents paid attention to the news the way most people notice the weather, absent-mindedly, and I used to try to shake them out of their apathy. But after I’d met my wife my world seemed to shrink wonderfully, so that I needed nothing more than to see her immersed in a bathtub, her body refracted by the water, or to watch her lift a screaming kettle from the stove in one graceful arc, to be deliriously happy. She is the kind of woman you can never get tired of, for she is secretive and has a vivid internal life that is opaque to me. To observe her while she was concentrating on something else – a book, packing a suitcase, tying her shoelaces – was to ache with wonder.

  She had her own reasons for choosing ignorance. Her father is a prominent farmer who owns the biggest prawn farm in the country and breeds sleek horses as abundantly as rabbits. He was wooed into politics just before we got married and became famous for using fire hoses instead of bullets to remove protesting students from a government building. People put his compassion down to his love of animals. His position meant the paparazzi attended our wedding as invited guests, and it was at his insistence that I got the job as presidential portraitist. The President had never been painted before, only photographed. My wife’s father, quietly horrified at her choice of husband, organized for me to spend a weekend with the President at his coastal villa, painting his wife and his children, who were old enough to sit still for a watercolour. His wife had the same ability as he did to withstand an artist’s scrutiny for hours, but she smelt like a fallen woman. The President sat in on part of her session and she became pert under his gaze, making me feel like a voyeur. Then she insisted I paint her husband too.

  The voice from the air vent moans a name: my wife’s name. It must be the President – his wife and mine share the same name although they are generations apart. I didn’t recognize his voice at first, but trauma will do that to a man.

  5 His chef

  Morning has broken. I throw aside the curtains and look out at the valley below, my wrists still faintly ringed from rope-burn, and slice the tomatoes, cheese and bread that have been left just inside the doorway, using the sill as a table. The tomatoes are the kind that smell of sugar, valley tomatoes; in the city they arrive bruised and insolent. I wonder if the supermarkets have anything left on the shelves – on my blindfolded drive to the mountains I could hear the sounds of rioting in the streets around me, and somebody punched a fist through the rear window of the car; the driver swerved onto the pavement to escape, and hit somebody, or something, but didn’t stop. Once we were out of the city, I could smell that the guards in the car were eating large chunks of matured cheese that should have been consumed in small and savoured doses.

  I tear the loaf into three and close my eyes to conjure up the smell of coffee. I open them to find the portraitist looking directly at me, his face harrowed. I saw him last night standing on his bed in the dark, fiddling with the air vent; I suspect he’s planning some kind of elaborate escape that will get him killed.

  ‘Do you know,’ he says quietly, ‘why you’re here?’

  The barber and I look at him sharply. These are the first words he’s uttered this morning.

  ‘Regime change,’ I respond. ‘We just got caught in the middle of it, that’s all.’

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said that so flippantly – he looks like he’s taken it personally. The barber fidgets as if he has an unbearable itch, then stands, takes his share of the bread, and eats it quickly.

  ‘They’re only leaving us alone because they don’t know what to do with us,’ I continue. ‘They can’t figure out where we fit in.’

  The barber closes the bathroom door and I hear him lower the toilet seat. My own bowels start to move in response. The portraitist has moved to the window and surprises me when he speaks again.

  ‘Why would they take my wife, then? How does she fit in?’

  ‘Pollution through association.’

  He turns to look at me, hurt. ‘But not my child. Not my unborn child.’

  That would be too far even for me to go, so I leave him to stare out at the fields below. There is nothing to do but get back into bed and wait for the barber to leave the bathroom.

  A key scrapes at the door and it opens to reveal a man standing in the corridor, dressed as if he’s about to be taken sailing, in leather slippers that have become soft and oily at the places that rub against his heels, casual slacks, a dress shirt with the top four buttons undone. He is beautiful and I feel suddenly shy, but relieved to see the portraitist is also gaping. The barber chooses this moment to emerge from the bathroom, the toilet flushing noisily behind him. The man smiles, walks into the room and sits with his legs crossed on the couch facing the windows.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he says.

  He looks at us as if waiting for approval. I only manage to clear my throat and throw the bed covers to one side.

  ‘Your wife is safe,’ he says to the portraitist. ‘You needn’t worry about her, but you cannot see her until the child is born.’

  The portraitist’s face collapses with relief and fury and he swallows his tears.

  ‘I apologize for the unintended similarity of your situation to the children’s rhyme. What is it, butcher, baker, candlestick maker? Let me make it up to you by saying you can call me Commander. Equally ridiculous.’

  He laughs with his eyes only.

  I chanted that rhyme to my daughter when she was small, and it scared her witless. She couldn’t bear the thought of those men bound together, stranded. She came home from school a few weeks later and told me they’d read about how a long time ago men were punished for doing bad things: a man would be tied in a sack with a monkey and a poisonous snake, then dropped overboard, and the three creatures would kill each other before they drowned. She said it reminded her of that rhyme I used to sing, the one about the three men stuck in a tub at sea.

  ‘You won’t be harmed. Each of you has spent many years perfecting a skill; we want you to make yourselves useful.’ The Commander pauses, then looks directly at me. ‘I want you to prepare dinner for me, starting tonight. You can make a list of ingredients you need.’

  I am, despite myself, flattered, and my mind begins to whirr thinking of what I’ll need. The barber looks at me in surprise, then with something like wry recognition; the portraitist is still struggling with his tears. The Commander stands and leaves the room, walking like a man who has had many women.

  This week I will make for him what I learned to create first: pastry. My grandmother taught me. She would only come to stay with us in the hot months of the year and I loved her so much I would sneak into her room and sniff the dresses she left in the cupboard between stays – even now a wet facecloth reminds me of the smell of her stockings drying on the clothing rack. When I was about to get into trouble with my mother, I would run screaming to my grandmother, who would give me sweets instead of hidings. Pastry-making had to happen so early in the morning the summer sun hadn’t yet risen. The night before we would fill glass bottles with water and stack them in the icebox and the dough would be left to rise under a dishcloth in the pantry. She would wake me just before dawn. She’d knead the dough and then begin to flatten it using a frozen glass bottle as a rolling pin, keeping the dough cool so the butter didn’t melt too easily as it was rolled onto each layer. My task was to add new ice blocks to a bowl of water she dipped her hands into when they became warm and began to make the dough sticky.

  In the town where I grew up there was a chocolate factory, and when different winds blew I could smell different chocolates being made. The north-easterly carried the smell of peppermint. In my second year of school my class went on an excursion to the factory and we were allowed to descend on the hexagonal cardboard bins at the end of each conveyor belt carrying finished chocolates to their wrappers. These bins were brimful with rejects – warped chocolate bars that had gr
own tumours or blistered or become stunted – but we swore this only made them taste more delicious, and the primal allure of all things deformed induced us to dig into the bin up to our armpits. Before we left, one of the boys somehow stuck his hand in a chocolate blender – a large machine that looked like it could mix concrete – and lost his pinkie. The floor manager could barely disguise his contempt for the child for ruining the batch. I was fascinated with the image of his blood mixing with the chocolate, and with the knowledge that our small class was the only keeper of the horrible secret. For months afterwards I was convinced that brand of chocolate bar had taken on a rusty tinge.

  Tonight I will make the Commander paella. Paella only needs scraps of creatures, and I assume that is all that’s going since the coup. I am interested in poor people’s food: pizza, paella, minestrone, potato salad – these were all desperate creations, the end product of a search to make dregs of food palatable. One week when my father was unemployed we ate potato salad for every meal. Now it’s acceptable to serve it at official functions, spruced up with capers or cured ham. I once called in an order for a thousand servings of the stuff for the President’s summer banquet – a local potato farmer had his workers make it on the farm and the farmer drove it into the city in two trucks.

  6 His barber

  I called my home the glass box. It meant I could never throw stones, just like the proverb warned. I designed containers for everything so that things could be neatly tucked away and not clutter the surfaces. In my bathroom drawer, I had customized compartments for my toothbrush, floss, facewash, deodorant, razor. In my bedroom cupboard I kept my caps and glasses colour-coded and had small hollows for each belt to fit into, once rolled. I’ve never liked lying down on my bed in my street clothes, even with my shoes off (I believe it pollutes my sleep), I always leave a window open at night, no matter how cold it is, and I can’t bear leaving my home for a long trip if there is any dirty linen or clothing in it. If I know I have to go away somewhere for a while, I lay out the clothes I’m going to wear, take off the clothes I’m wearing, put them in the washing machine with my sheets and walk around naked until it’s almost time to leave. That’s why I was naked when they took me: ready for my trip, about to put on my clean travelling clothes, and next thing there was a man in my laundry pointing a gun at me.

  The chef has given me the task of washing a bucketful of mussels; I have to check that each one is firmly shut – if it has opened in the bucket it is dangerous to eat and I’m supposed to throw it out. The portraitist is de-boning fish. We are the chef’s kitchen boys for the night and the chef is transformed; he has completely lost himself in the logistics of preparing a meal and is cackling like a smug housewife over a pot of rice. The kitchen is as large as one would expect in a summer residence used primarily to entertain. We were escorted here by two men – armed, but dressed like they had just got back from the office. The chef couldn’t resist telling them the menu for the evening, but they didn’t respond. Somebody had managed to find fresh seafood and every other item on the chef’s ingredient wish-list, and it was waiting for us in the kitchen in paper bags. He was like a small child on his birthday, going through the bags gleefully; then he did a quick spot-check of the kitchen equipment and found it all to his satisfaction. The two armed men have stayed in the kitchen, perched on kitchen stools with their backs against the wall, watching that we don’t poison the food.

  ‘I’ve worked here before,’ the chef says, stirring the rice. ‘Many years ago. I came with my wife at the time, and we spent a month living in one of the suites. I experimented on the President – pushed his tastes, fed him wild meats, foreign fruit. He liked that I pushed him. Most people around him wouldn’t dare.’

  He takes the knife from the portraitist and fillets a fish effortlessly.

  I find three mussels, still in a hoary clump, that have opened in the bucket, and throw them aside. The odour of raw fish reminds me of my brother, of what he would come home stinking of at lunchtime. He was older than me by ten years, and, sitting at the round table in the kitchen with my mother, eating crustless sandwiches and telling her about my morning at school, I would smell him coming before I heard the door slam. He would wash off stray fish scales from his hands at the tap outside and rinse and remove his boots, and come into the kitchen in wet socks. My mother would hover about him like an anxious bee about the queen, ladle out a hot lunch she had cooked, ask about his catch. He left so early in the mornings the gulls weren’t even awake and went out on a borrowed trawler for the nine hours it took to catch enough fish to make a living. If we were lucky he would bring a bunch of small fish for our supper, but my mother never asked him outright, we just waited to see if he would volunteer them from his canvas bag once he had eaten lunch. At school in the afternoon I could still smell him on my pencil case and sometimes on my hands if he had agreed to play aeroplanes.

  It broke my mother when he disappeared. I was older then, and not paying anybody but myself much attention. I hadn’t even really registered his absence. It was only when she sat down one lunchtime and put her head on the table and wouldn’t eat anything that I realized he hadn’t eaten meals with us in over two weeks. For a long time we thought he had eloped with his fiancée – she disappeared with him – but I couldn’t understand why none of his crew had come to tell us. They avoided us at the market and at the dock. My mother stopped getting dressed in the mornings.

  It was on my birthday that the letter arrived. It was from him, but had been posted almost a year before, and he had written only one sentence: ‘Taken captive political prisoner we’ll be fine.’ That letter lit a fire beneath my mother and she went visiting – old friends, close family, vague family, ex-girlfriends – until she had pieced together a patchwork of possibilities. It turned out he and his fiancée had been active in some kind of underground resistance movement. His fishing crew had never approved, said he was asking for trouble. The second letter arrived two months later. It wasn’t from my brother. The writer, anonymous, told us that my brother’s body had been buried in the mountains. The writer said he – or she – was sorry.

  The chef has put on full serving gear that he found in the pantry, even the hat, which makes him look like he has dough rising slowly on his head. My task during the meal is to pour the water and wine for the Commander, but the portraitist refuses to serve him and says he’ll wait in the kitchen. The chef alone will serve the food. He uses his shoulder to bump the swinging doors into the dining room and walks ceremoniously towards the Commander, who is seated at a small, square table in the centre of the room. The long dining table has been moved aside and a single place is set. The Commander smiles at the chef and smirks at me dutifully carrying a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice. The cork is so stubborn I am tempted to put the bottle between my legs and pull on it, but instead I put it under my arm and tug. The chef places a napkin on the Commander’s lap with flair. My job is done; I leave the room.

  The portraitist is standing at the kitchen window, staring down into the courtyard. He is in agony: I have never seen an emotion made so manifest.

  ‘My wife,’ he says. ’She’s here. She’s being kept here. I saw her in the courtyard.’

  I place my hand on his shoulder gently. ‘Is this not a good thing? You know she is being looked after. You know where she is.’

  He turns to me and, before I can move away, has put his head against my chest. His grief spreads across my shirt, heating it.

  ‘I called to her from up here. I opened the window and called down to her. She was alone, sitting on that bench. She looked up at me like a stranger, then she stood and walked away.’

  I imagine I know why she did this, something about the pollution thing the chef said to him this morning. I pat his head awkwardly, but I am no good at consoling. When he shifts his head I move away towards the swinging doors to listen to what the Commander is saying to the chef. His fork makes scratchy music against his plate.

  ‘You have excelled yourself.’


  The chef murmurs deferentially. The scraping stops, the plate has been licked clean.

  ‘And do you have a wife?’ The Commander asks this the way one would speak to a small child, with bored patience and no expectation of a reply.

  If the chef is surprised, his voice doesn’t betray him. ‘Ex-wife. Haven’t seen her for months.’ He stops, uncertain how much the Commander is willing to listen to.

  ‘Ah. Why did you divorce?’

  The chef pauses. ’She went crazy,’ he says, his tone ironic. ‘Became obsessed with energy flow. Made me knock down three walls in our house because she said they were blocking peace lines.’

  The Commander laughs loudly.

  7 His portraitist

  We slept together for the first time in the afternoon. That was always her favourite time of day for sex – we would eat lunch on my balcony, drink a beer, and then lie on the bed, the heat and sleepiness in itself arousing. She didn’t want me to use any protection because she took her own temperature every morning and knew exactly when she was ovulating. She kept a small thermometer and a notebook beside her bed, and in the morning she’d sit up, her hair like a mane, and before she’d even opened her eyes she’d open her mouth and sit with the mercury beneath her tongue, waiting. Then she’d squint to look at the reading, write it down, and walk naked to the toilet. I loved how her thighs shuddered as she walked. She would stand at the basin, brushing her teeth, and mumble through the foam, asking me what I wanted for breakfast, or whether I was planning to work in the studio. I couldn’t answer, transfixed by the sight of her, her stomach separating into three bulges as she bent to rinse out her mouth. I wanted to communicate the extent of my love for her in those moments, but was afraid she would baulk at my neediness, or interpret it as something too consuming and try to resist.