Blood Kin Read online

  I miss the barber; I took for granted the pleasure that came from knowing that we were under the same roof, hearing the same night sounds, feeling the same cool wind from the valley. He’s no longer at the Summer Residence; of the three men in his room, only the portraitist has remained there, and that was by choice, because he was told his wife wouldn’t be released yet. I imagine the barber has either tried to make for our home village on the coast, or he is still on his way to the city – without the benefit of a motorcade it will take him much longer than it did me. My husband will employ him when he gets here – he said the trial haircut he gave him was magical, which struck me as a strange word to use. And of course he insisted that the chef come with us – he trusts him completely – and already he has the kitchens in working order again. He doesn’t serve us personally anymore, or at least he didn’t last night at dinner, and I even miss feeling his gaze – reverential, appreciative – on me between courses. It amused my husband, this wrinkled chef’s infatuation with me, and made me feel desired, desirable. He must have been attractive once, before his skin went stale and his belly ballooned, as tends to happen to men in old age. He often looked at my arm, trying to catch a glimpse of the scars on the inside of it, the ones he touched over the steaming pot and feels in some way that he owns. I am not proud of them, I would not go so far as to casually roll my arm over while he was presenting the dessert and let him see them, they are not a badge of honour nor a tool of titillation. The barber is the only one who knows what to do with them: show neither pity nor horror, let them neither increase nor deflect desire, but simply acknowledge their presence. I had to guide him the first time, on the balcony in the vineyards, but each time after that, when I managed to free him from his room and hide in a knot with him somewhere secret, he understood how to touch them. The chef must have noticed what was happening – he saw me that morning crossing the courtyard, but he has said nothing.

  My husband has proven fickle when it comes to the prisoners: the ones he feels have in some way proved their usefulness he has released, while others who are more closely implicated have remained in the Summer Residence. He likes having them there, the way a cat likes having a lizard to play with, with no intention of killing it, but perhaps severing its tail, safe in the knowledge that it can grow another. The photographs have been distributed throughout the city, blown up into macabre billboard posters, a decision I didn’t agree with. My husband says that now nobody has an excuse not to know.

  I can smell the sea on the wind. The promenade is usually wet with waves at high tide, the miles of concrete failing at their task to keep out the sea. The sea air is laced with something else too, the sweet smokiness of night-time cooking fires that reminds me of the rubbish tips back home which festered daily in the sun and bred over-sized wild flowers that opened in the evenings, masking the stink with their fragrance. It was a playground to me, each discarded object a wealth of future possibilities. After my parents died and I lived alone in the cottage, I decorated it entirely with things I’d found at the tips and restored to a state of usefulness and beauty: I sanded down wood, defogged glass, turned a stack of old iron wheels into a table, painted crates for chairs, used a car door as a desk. There were other people at the tips, usually making fires and digging around for food, which made it less desolate, but there was always an imminent danger that threw into relief my pleasure at getting home safely with my hoard. It was a solitary activity. My fiancé at the time – the barber’s brother – wanted to come with me; he said there were gangs at the tips who preyed on solitary females, but I refused. It was a necessary danger, vital to me: I couldn’t believe the joy that came from salvaging discarded things and making them my own.

  Once I found an old wooden wardrobe lying on its side, in ankle-deep rubbish, and managed to get it upright to force open the door. Inside was a thick grey coat, ideal for winter. I took it home and let it soak in soap in the bath for a few hours, but when I began to scrub the coat by hand, I could feel that something had been sewn into the silk lining, that something was wadded in there and rustling. I lifted the coat out of the water, unpicked the lining and gingerly peeled it back. Inside I found damp banknotes – hundreds of them – and a document from an earlier regime, something that looked like an identity card for a police force. The name on the document was illegible; it had bled from the bathwater. I lived off the banknotes for a year after that – like a queen, in fact, allowing myself all kinds of extravagant foods and luxury goods imported from overseas. I didn’t tell anybody about it, not even my fiancé – he would have told me to save the money, or to find the owner of the coat and somehow return it. I had to hide all evidence of my affluence (rare cheeses, good wine, aged meat) before he arrived for our pre-lunchtime trysts. He would come straight from the boat, reeking of fish, scrub his hands at the sink with scented soap, and then we’d sleep together as quickly as we could before he had to return home to his mother and younger brother for lunch. Only once he spotted an empty wine bottle outside my back door and looked suspiciously at the silver-inscribed label like it was a mortal enemy. All those secret, stolen pleasures – the rubbish tips, the treasure hoarding, the illicit sex – was it all to reclaim what was stolen from me? The right to two parents who would watch me ease my way into adulthood, who could mend my moral compass when I broke it, who could give me armfuls of love so that I wouldn’t have to search always for a man’s embrace? On the terrace, the city lights blur despite my refusal to cry or to let remorse get the better of me. I turn back into the darkened bedroom and crawl between the sheets, inching closer to my husband, nesting against his warm body.

  2 His chef’s daughter

  She hasn’t shifted her position for four hours. I keep note of these things because I have to. I’ve been sitting in the low armchair, reading, and she’s been sitting in the hard-backed chair she likes, with her hands in her lap, looking at the clock on the wall. I think she likes the symmetry of it. If I look at her for too long my face starts to burn, the heat a harbinger of such sadness that I have no choice but to ignore it. Watching a parent like this, watching her stare at a wall for four hours, forget she has a daughter, lose all interest in my life, is not something I would wish even on my father. I don’t know how to deal with this excess of emotion so I shelve it, knowing it will come out later, when I drink myself to the point of being vulnerable.

  It has been a month now since the coup. I was with my lover when it happened, lying drowsily next to him, grateful for his presence as I slipped out of sleep. We heard distant, constant gunshots and then people streaming out of buildings into the street. He got up and pulled aside the curtain and said they were all gazing up at the Presidential Residence, chatting as if it were a street picnic. It was festive, come to think of it – I lay in the bed feeling excited, as if it were a snowy day and I didn’t have to go to classes, or the electricity grid had crashed for the whole city and nobody could go to work. I think we all secretly like those kinds of mini-catastrophes that let us off the hook for a few hours or days, that let us guiltlessly shirk routine. I didn’t worry about my father’s safety when we heard gunfire, though I knew he was in the Residence kitchens, and I’m still not worried, even though we haven’t heard from him since then. I’ve been observing him since I was old enough to walk and I know he’ll do whatever it takes to survive.

  Unfortunately people always say I look like him. When I was a little girl, and too young to know any better, I took it as a compliment, but later on I noticed how people looked embarrassed after they’d said it, when they realized I might be offended at having a man’s features. I’ve spent far too much time in front of mirrors, wishing parts of myself away – I remember mirrors I’ve used in my life the way other people remember men they’ve slept with, that’s how intimate I’ve been with them. I can recall precisely which ones distorted the size of my nose, which ones showed skin blemishes during the day with the sunlight streaming into my room but not at night by lamplight, which ones made my legs lo
ok longer, which ones unfailingly depressed me, which ones gave me hope. So many half-truths. If I could somehow get a composite image of all these reflections, maybe I would know the whole truth about my own face and body. The mirror in my mother’s en-suite bathroom is of the depressing variety, by day or by night, no matter which angle. I even tried standing on the edge of the bathtub to get a different view of my legs in the reflection, but the verdict was no better than when I balanced on the toilet seat. Ironic, considering this is meant to be a place where you go to feel better about yourself, or, in her case, to remember who you are and why you went crazy. When she takes a look at herself in that mirror she probably won’t want to remember, but she’s older and must have negotiated a truce with her body long ago, laid down the hatchet, raised the white flag, whatever she had to do to achieve an uneasy peace. I look forward to that time in my life, when I can blame the stretchmarks on a baby and not on my own inconsistencies, although I do remember asking my mother once how old she expected her face to look every time she glanced at the mirror, and she said eighteen. I asked a lot of people the question after that, and they all said eighteen. My mother said she sometimes got a shock if she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and caught a glimpse of her face; she said it was like finding an intruder in your house, so she stopped turning on the bathroom light and that’s when she had her bad fall. Split her head open. That’s unrelated to the madness, which was the result of a different kind of splitting: a marriage falling apart.

  After my initial excitement about the coup, I realized I had to come here to her, to protect her if there was any trouble. My lover and I dressed quickly and I packed a bag of clothes and some tins of food, and he walked me to the home through the crowded streets. Word had spread fast. One of the bars was handing out free beer and shots with a hastily sprayed, multicoloured sign hung over the entrance: ‘Brace yourself for the revolution!’ The owner of a cake shop had set up a trestle table in the street and was handing out cream pies for people to throw at an effigy of the President. Things got stranger and more serious in the days that followed; my lover fled the city – he said he had no choice, given who his father is – and I moved into my mother’s room permanently. I still feel that I can’t leave her in the home alone with things so uncertain. I prefer to call this place a home; it makes it sound as if she’s simply been put in an old people’s home before her time and not in an institution. It’s not really an institution, just a care facility, an expensive one, but there’s no denying the fact that she’s mad. Yesterday I occupied myself for over an hour thinking about all the different ways you can say that she is crazy: off her cracker; in the loony bin; lost the plot; lost her marbles; loopy; gone bananas; lost her mind; bonkers; stark, raving mad. I guess that means it must have happened to a lot of people. My father paid the bill, blood money, with his fat salary from the President. The management hasn’t yet received payments for any of their guests this month, with all the changes, so we’re OK for now, but I hope he starts paying up again soon otherwise they’re going to kick her out.

  I went out this morning to get milk and tea bags and found people grouping around posters that had been glued to walls like theatre bills, horrific images that are blown-up photographs of mangled people. The new government has already begun its propaganda push, it seems. I didn’t hang around or try to edge my way to the front of the crowd; there is a delicate line between knowing too little (ignorance) and knowing too much (perversity), and around me in the little group people were panting, whether from horror or excitement I couldn’t tell. My father probably knew it was going on – he was close enough to the President in a non-political capacity for the President to confide in him the way one confides in one’s plants while watering them on a sunny balcony. He’s not the grovelling type, though, my father, that’s why men in power like him – they recognize themselves in him, utterly committed to one man alone: himself. On my way back to my mother, I stopped at the university campus with its stuccoed buildings built in imitation of something grander, and it reminded me of the President’s Summer Residence. The campus was deserted except for a few homeless people who had broken into one of the classrooms to take shelter from the fighting and were trying to build a fire with broken-down bookshelves. I was secretly hoping that university life would continue unaffected, that the bell jar of academia would have protected my routine there. I had grown stronger in my first semesters there – I could feel it as palpably as weight gain – and was beginning to contemplate embarking on the search for the end of the string that could lead me to untangle the knot that is my life as my father’s daughter, as my lover’s woman, as my sick and absent mother’s child. Now I feel I have lost sight of where that end is and will never find it again.

  I spent time at the President’s Summer Residence years ago, when my father was still obliged to cook for him on holiday. It is perched above the vineyards in the valley, a child’s dream with its courtyards and passages and sculpture garden. My mother and I were terrified to meet him, utterly intimidated. The first day he and his wife invited my father and mother to lunch with them, a generous gesture it seemed, but my mother suspected it was designed to boost the President’s wife’s ego more than her own. She said to me, ’She is going to rub my face in my inferiority the way you rub a puppy’s nose in its own shit,’ and she didn’t want to get dressed for the lunch because she didn’t know what she was going to say. We sat in her bedroom, like two naughty children, and she locked the door so my father couldn’t come in and drag her out, but as soon as he had abandoned her she began to feel guilty and put on the red dress she knew he liked and painted her lips and ventured out to the dining room. I heard the murmuring and scraping of cutlery on crockery stop in its tracks for a few seconds, presumably when she appeared at the doorway, and then continue as before, at a slightly higher volume because of the effort of pretending nothing had happened.

  My mother and I would go for long walks down the winding road to the valley base, and wander between the rows of grapevines. I tasted wine for the first time there, at one of the vineyards, which was almost as momentous an occasion as my first kiss – my stomach burned and my head grew hot and my mother laughed at me all the way home because I had the hiccups.

  My father never let me sit in the Summer Residence kitchen to observe him while he was working, but I spied on him several times, to try to understand what kind of magic he was doing in there with all those strange utensils and live creatures; usually he caught me and I would get a hiding and run to my mother, who would look at my father like he was a monster, and that would make my attempt worthwhile. The President and his wife were hopeless with me. I was a precocious little child, already full of big ideas and deep thoughts, but they would converse with me as if I were an imbecile. Once I bumped into the President in the sculpture garden; he had been watching me, silently, and I had been so immersed in pretending the sculptures were alive that I’d backed into him and screamed when he moved, thinking one of the statues had come to life. He looked at me strangely, bent down to my eye level, and said with a pause between each word, ‘Do… you… like… ice… cream?’ I ran away, more because I was offended by his question than from fear. His wife insisted on giving me a hug each time she saw me, and she would press me into her bosom and leave make-up on my clothes. When I grew older, I regaled the other children in my class with these stories of my intimacy with the President, and they gazed at me impressed. It created a definite aura – something so effective it was almost visible, like a halo – and I milked it for all it was worth; it was the most effective weapon in my arsenal in the war with other girls to attract boys.

  I’m skirting the issue, but there were other children there too. The President’s kids, two of them: a girl who was years younger than me and a boy who was years older. Five years older. Come to think of it, the best evidence anybody could present of the President’s capacity for cruelty is his son, who must have learned it from someone. I know he’ll be somewhere sa
fe – like my father, he is doggedly committed to self-preservation – but that doesn’t stop the need I feel for him burrowing its way into my gut like a parasite.

  My mother stirs, finally, and asks me for some water, very politely, like I’m a stranger. It’s time for me to start drinking too.

  3 His portraitist’s wife

  I can’t deny I’m a magpie; I’ve always loved shiny things. Even when I was little my mother said I used to pick up anything in the street that gleamed and she would have to wrench my hand open to throw it away. I could spot a dropped coin from metres away. My favourite was the glimmering grains in the pavement concrete – I don’t know what they were, bits of glass that got mixed in with the concrete perhaps; at night the streetlights would make them dance as I walked and to my mother’s horror I would squat on the pavement and scratch at them, believing I could take them home. My grandmother had a wooden box full of jewelled buttons that I would spend hours polishing with a handkerchief and laying out in long, magical rows. So it was only natural that I moved on to bigger, better shiny things as I got older. Real jewels and rare metals, and crystal too. All my lovers knew they had to keep the magpie in me satisfied. And then I met my husband and renounced publicly all things glittering. But my father secretly kept me well stocked with my heart’s desires, and I still maintain it was worth it for the look on my mother’s face when she first met my husband at one of his exhibitions. The masterpiece was the shattered fragments of a raw egg that he had dropped from the tenth floor of a building onto the pavement below. My family was his only audience.