Blood Kin Read online

I have the key hotly in my hand beneath the covers. I know the chef intended to stay awake to watch me, but his age got the better of him, and now he is snoring on his back like a pensioner, tempting flies. I wait for her signal, straining my ears, but all I can hear are the cicadas outside lamenting the lost heat of the day, until above their scratchy chorus a single bird-note rises, sweet and clear – it’s her. Within seconds I am at the door trying to coax the key noiselessly into its slot. Then I am outside in the dark, guardless corridor (who knows what she said to him?), using the wall to keep my bearings as I run down the three flights of steps to the courtyard, and there I find the door that she said would lead to the outer garden, and it does, and she stands before me in the dark, her hair gleaming, and takes my hand. I know I look like my brother right now, in the halflight, with my hair grown out and a thickly sprouted beard. An impostor.

  She leads me with quiet urgency through the garden, beneath a willow tree and around a batch of strange sculptures, to a car parked on an overgrown road that seems to lead nowhere. She pops the boot of the car and motions for me to get into it. Fear flits through me until I dismiss it, but once I’m curled in the darkness like a foetus it starts to course through me violently, and I think, why did I believe her? She thinks I’m a traitor, that I’m being kept here because of my loyalty to the President. The engine hums in time to my mind’s frenzy, then the car stops and I begin to imagine all the ways I could die, and I pray that the metal above my head does not pop open and betray me.

  She drives on, stopping again a few minutes later. The boot hinge squeals open. ’Sorry,’ she says. ‘But that gate is guarded. You can sit in the front now.’

  Looking up at her, at this woman whom I have just imagined killing me in all the ways my mind would let me, I want to be a child again, and I wish it were my mother hovering above me, about to put her cool, dry hand to my forehead and tell me I’m dreaming. I try to uncurl my legs to sit up, and for a panicked second I think I’m paralysed; then my legs obey and I sit up and hook them over the edge of the open boot and propel myself to the ground. We are on a dirt road, not far from the Summer Residence – I can see it lit up in the distance like a luxury ship at sea. I want to savour this, to think of it as freedom, but the adrenaline is still pumping too fiercely through my veins and I sit in the front seat uneasily, my legs twitching with pins and needles. The road slopes down towards the vineyards in the valley below, a twisted road that seems hazardous at night. The window is open and as we descend we drive through pockets of warm air trapped from the day’s heat, and emerge from them into cool air fragrant from the midnight opening of buds.

  ‘You’ll have to go back,’ she says quietly, her eyes on the road. ‘This is just so we can talk. I don’t have the physical strength to stop you from running, but he’ll find you again anyway, and then you won’t be kept in a room with white linen and silver fixtures.’

  I suspected this, and perhaps it’s why I’m not breathing this night air with as much relish as a free man should. She doesn’t speak again until we’re at the base of the valley and the gnarled stumps of the vineyards are silhouetted on either side of the road like paper cut-outs of dwarves linking arms.

  ‘Your mother…’ she says.

  I wait for a few seconds. ’She died last year.’

  The shape of an unlit farmhouse looms ahead of us.

  ’She blamed me, didn’t she?’ she says softly. ‘For what happened to your brother.’

  I laugh, my voice brittle. ‘No, actually. She blamed me.’

  She stops the car next to the farmhouse, rests her head on the steering wheel for a few moments, then leaves the car. She is still wearing her summer dress; I can see the hem faintly beneath her coat as she walks towards the house. Her calf muscles ball and stretch as she climbs the steps onto the veranda, then she pushes tentatively at the door and disappears inside.

  By the time I reach the veranda, she has re-emerged holding an unlabelled bottle of wine by its neck and a slim door wedge.

  ‘Think you can open this?’ she says, handing both to me.

  I put them down on the wooden deck, push against the fly-screen and wait for my eyes to make sense of the dark room: there are barrels stacked against the wall and a tasting counter with wine bottles of increasing size, like Russian dolls that fit inside each other, arranged in a straight line. The spitting bucket is half-full and there are glasses with dirty rims – people must have left the farm in a hurry. I take two glasses and rub the rims and inner bellies with my shirt, then I fumble in the dark behind the counter and find a corkscrew next to a coil of foil shed by an already opened bottle. I take them out to the veranda, where she has pulled two cushionless deckchairs together. The cork crumbles as I twist it, and I have to push it into the bottle to clear the neck.

  ‘There’ll be bits of cork in it,’ I say as I pass her a glass. ‘Maybe I should have used the wedge.’

  She smiles and takes the glass by the stem. The wine is warm, red, gritty. I haven’t eaten since the soup we were given at four, and I feel the wine winding its hot path to my stomach.

  ‘Do you remember my father?’ she says. ‘You met him at the dock. He was on a fishing crew too, not the same as your brother’s. He and his twin sister were swimming in the surf when they were little, no older than ten, only chest-deep, when she was dragged out to sea by the current. He never came to terms with why he had been spared. He was sent to school the next day as if nothing had happened.’

  She drains her glass and holds it out to be refilled. I pour for her, fill her glass almost to the top.

  ‘Is that how you feel? Guilty?’ she says, pulling her legs up to her chest.

  ‘My brother chose to put himself in harm’s way,’ I respond.

  ‘Your mother didn’t see it like that.’

  I refill my own glass. ‘He was her first. She cherished him.’

  ‘And you?’

  ’She remembered my brother as a golden child. Everything I did seemed dull and heavy to her.’

  She holds out her glass again and smiles sheepishly, keeping her lips together – her teeth are porous and always blacken from wine; I know that from watching her drink in the kitchen with my brother when they were supposed to be babysitting me. When I hand her glass back to her she takes my hand and threads her fingers through mine. With my free hand I drink straight from the bottle.

  It must be eerie for her to see me as I am now, a grown man who looks like her dead lover. The last time she saw me I was still disguised by youth, had not yet found my proper form and face, had not yet realized my genes. I think of my uncle whose wife died when their daughter was only a baby. He had adored his wife, loved her absolutely, and then suddenly her liver packed in and he was left with the small child as his only reminder of her. As she grew older she began to look uncannily like her mother, and he found himself staring at her across the supper table, watching this girl become a long-dead woman in measurable stages before his eyes. It drove him crazy in the end; he began to think she had returned to him, and that he was twenty again and courting her.

  She whispers to me, tightening her hold on my hand. ‘Would you sit beside me?’

  I obey and she lies on her hip next to me and curls one leg across my stomach. I can feel the plastic slats of the deckchair cutting into my back; they must be cutting into her soft sides too. I lift her onto me, put my arms around the dent of her lower back to stop her from rolling off, stroke the inside of her arm, the soft skin that the sun never sees. The skin is puckered, and I hold it up to my eyes to understand it: six circles vie for space on her skin – an old scar, but not old enough to be from childhood.

  ‘Kiss them,’ she says into my ear. ‘Like he used to. When the wounds were fresh.’

  I kiss each circle in turn and the silken circles of my brother’s mobiles flash into my mind and then are gone. She is lucky to have escaped with so few scars. She sits on me, grips my hair, digs her fingers into my beard, strokes the soft skin on my chest – all th
e tactile markers that remind her of him. I feel I have no choice but to let her use my body like this, to give her one more night with him. I think of my mother dying in the hospital bed with its labelled linen, saying that I mustn’t speak, that I must just sit next to her with my long hair and my man’s body, looking like him. There is no relief when I pull out of her on the deckchair and she falls forward onto me, sobbing, her tears running into my ears and collecting there warmly. She cries until sleep comes.

  I wanted to work for the President, for the man who had killed my brother. I wanted to find a way to work for him so closely I could touch him daily, could have him briefly in my power. It wasn’t difficult for me to move to the city once my mother began her descent – she hardly noticed when I kissed her goodbye. We had become outsiders at the coast by that stage anyway; the crews never forgot what my brother had done and still couldn’t understand it. They thought it was frivolous to care about politics if you’re putting your body on the line every day at sea. Nobody asked me to take his place on the trawler when I came of age. So I took an early bus into the city with my suitcase tied to the rack on top amidst chickens and pockets of oranges and wooden rocking chairs and anything else that somebody was going to try to sell in the city.

  The first job I found in the city was disinfecting implements and sweeping hair in a salon in the Presidential District. The barber gave me a small room to stay in above the shop, with a door out onto the roof from where I could see the Residence lit up at night. The President’s motorcade would regularly push itself through the narrow road the shop was on – seven black, shiny sharks in an unnatural school, none of them betraying the contents of their bellies. My guess was that the President always rode in the first one, unable to relinquish precedence even for his safety.

  One afternoon, as the motorcade was passing, I asked my boss who cut the President’s hair. He was smug and amused by the question, and answered, ‘I do, of course. He only takes the best.’ And there it was: the chance to be close to the President, to put my hands on him. The barber went up to the Residence whenever he was bidden, which was every day, as I discovered. I had seen him leave the shop each day, for a few hours, but had not bothered to wonder about it because it was to my advantage. I used that time to practise on customers – to spray and cut and lather and shave. He didn’t mind; in fact, he encouraged it because it freed him to do his presidential duty.

  What makes a barber better than all other barbers? I thought about this in the evenings, sitting on the roof looking up at the Residence, wrapped in a blanket, feeling my ambition burn in my gut. I could sense it there, like a living creature, crouched and focused. I was grateful sometimes for that dogged sense of purpose that kept me calm in a strange city in the confusion of youth. During the days in the shop, I would examine each man’s reactions to my movements. They would sit before me in the red swivel chair with its adjustable height lever, some looking businesslike, some looking sheepish. Many knew exactly what they wanted, many didn’t, but they didn’t expect pleasure, and that’s what I gave them – small, almost unnoticeable pleasures that they didn’t have to feel ashamed about receiving. I would brush my hand slightly against their necks as I fastened the cloth sheet; I would hold their jaws firmly between my hands as I stood behind them, looking at their faces in the mirror, appraising them; I would run my finger down their cheeks as I described what I was about to do. All businesslike, I must repeat – nothing obviously sensual about it – and the men didn’t know what it was, but when the haircut was over their whole bodies buzzed and they felt like a lobe of their brain had been hypnotized. Certain people have had that effect on me during my life – always somebody doing something meticulous, putting something in order. A teacher at school who made my brain tingle when she used a ruler to draw a line in my workbook; a stocktaker at the grocery store on every last Friday of the month, delicately piling tins of canned vegetables into neat rows.

  I persuaded some of the men, the ones I felt could take it, to have their hair shampooed while they were at the shop, before the cutting, and I massaged their scalps as they lay with their necks slotted into the ceramic basin. I found the lumps and dips on their skulls and rubbed them – the parts that curved out or in, that revealed pleasure points. And the cutting itself – so rapid, so crisp, like brisk magic when I got it right. Word spread, men began to ask for me even when the barber was present, and then one day the barber came back from the Residence and said the President had asked for me. This was my proof that the President had eyes everywhere, that even the smallest shift in preference at the barber salon in the district didn’t escape him. The barber was gracious in his defeat, but then he had no choice: the President had spoken.

  The first time I cut the President’s hair was in his own bathroom, a cavernous room with tiles stretching away as far as I could see. Two bodyguards escorted me through the Residence and then stood just outside the open bathroom door, ears pricked. There was a faint tremor in the President’s hand when he greeted me. The bathroom lights did not flatter him – I hadn’t realized he was so old. He was already smartly dressed for an evening function and he wanted his haircut to be so fresh the other men would be able to smell it, like cut grass on a warm evening. He sat on a plush armchair before the mirror, so low it made me lose my bearings briefly – I hadn’t thought to bring one of the high chairs from the salon, and it meant that everything I did that evening was hunched. I bent over him to cover his shoulders with a cloth sheet and fastened the clasp at his neck, held his jaw between my hands, tilted his chin up and down and side to side. I sprayed his hair with faintly scented water and the drops spread finely across his strands. I cut briskly, with comb and scissors, and saw him lulled by the order and rhythm of the snipping, and used a razor along the nape of his neck and at the edge of his hairline. Then I whisked off the sheet, not letting a single cutting fall onto his suit. He was pleased, and the next time he let me shave and pluck him too. It was then that I began to convert my room above the salon into my glass box. At the end of my day’s work at the City Residence, I longed for a sense of purity. I needed to purge myself of my guilt at not doing what I had come to the city to do. That’s when I started sleeping with the window open, removing street clothes before I sat on the bed, and keeping the things around me – socks, glasses, belts – in rigid order; it was part of the purging.

  She stirs. The sky is slowly preparing for dawn. She lifts her head, confused, and then stands quickly when she sees my face and pulls her dress back over her hips. Her long hair has fuzzed around her face and tangled its way down her back, and each strand seems to attract then absorb light so that it is luminous one moment, black the next. Around her mouth, wine is smudged like blood. As she leaves the veranda she knocks over the empty wine bottle, propelling it on a suicide roll off the side and onto the tiles below.

  I follow her to the car and get into the passenger side obediently as she fights with the ignition until the motor splutters reluctantly into life, and we drive back along the dirt road, the stars already starting to fade, winding our way out of the valley. It is the coldest time of day, even in summer: the hour just before the sun reveals itself. I look at her bare legs, bumpy with cold. It used to fascinate me that my brother could casually hold his hand on her thigh beneath the table at supper with my mother and me. I would sneak peeks sideways at them – it was such a possessive gesture, but high enough on her thigh to be more than simply proprietary, and I would blush involuntarily each time I saw it, and they would laugh at me, not knowing the cause. To me, unschooled in intimacy, it seemed more daring – more charged – than if he had kissed her passionately in front of my mother.

  ‘You know about me and the Commander, right?’ she says, her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I’m sure the chef told you. I’m his wife.’

  Instinct makes me look at her ring finger, but there is no ring.

  ‘Congratulations.’ It comes out with bitterness, not what I’d intended.

  She looks at me w
ith her thick-lidded eyes showing concern, perhaps interpreting it as a younger brother’s jealousy. ‘He was in the same camp as we were. Your brother respected him deeply.’

  Her long fingers on the steering wheel. Her smooth kneecap. The fat lobe of her ear. It is too much for me. ‘Who kissed your wounds when they were fresh?’ I ask. ‘My brother? Or the Commander?’

  Her pity dissolves visibly, she sets her mouth and jaw and we don’t speak again until she tells me to get into the boot. This time I welcome the crawl into the cramped darkness.

  13 His portraitist

  Somebody must have fetched my old materials from my studio. The sight of these wrinkled metallic tubes, all half-squeezed, with their ends rolled tightly like slugs in distress, is not comforting. I think of the last time I touched them, the morning the President had changed colour and all the shades I’d mixed were wrong. My palette lies next to them, its surface thick from years of duty, and two canvasses are propped against the wall – I recognize them too, recognize the labour of stretching the canvas over the wooden frames and forcing staples into the spines to keep them tight.

  This is the room where the President sat crumpled on the couch, photographs thrown at his feet. The furniture has been pushed aside, leaving long streak marks on the dusty floorboards – all but the couch, which is centre-stage, facing my easel. I fiddle with the bolts on the multi-jointed legs, sliding the sections together until the easel has shrunk to the right height. It is marked with accidental paint – this process always leaves a trail of evidence. My sketchbook is here too, a large and persistent reminder of all I have done wrong, and shards of charcoal lie in the groove at the bottom of the easel. Someone is familiar with my methods.

  The Commander hovers at the door, uncertain for the first time, perhaps cowed by the tools of skill, of expertise, that surround me. He lopes into the room and settles himself on the couch, crossing his legs and letting one slipper dangle from his foot.