Blood Kin Page 9

  I don’t think about him much, even though I know he’s under the same roof. He made a fool of himself last week, calling down to me while I was exercising in the sculpture garden. He wants me to share this baby with him; ever since I fell pregnant he has been niggling away at me to include him, but it is none of his business, that’s how I feel. He had all kinds of tricks to try to feel a part of it: stocking the fridge with champagne, buying lemons, making hundreds of useless sketches to present me with when I’ve popped it out. After I told him I was pregnant, he observed me even more closely than before. I’d grown used to his constant scrutiny – not critical, but worshipping: smelling clothes I’d left behind on chairs, getting a jolt to his heart if he recognized my silhouette in the car in front of him, gazing at me from the bed with love in his eyes even when I was doing something ablutionary, like plucking my eyebrows. But he really turned it up a notch after the baby was announced and it threw me; I would turn around in the bath to find him staring at me silently, or wake in the middle of the night to see him watching my belly rise and fall in the dark. Before the baby, early in our marriage, I felt it was the kind of attention I deserved, that he was the only man who grasped my true worth, and I thrived under his gaze. I would even let him draw me naked. But there was something infantile about his obsession that made it quickly become tiresome.

  There is a calm that comes from thinking only about oneself; I would venture so far as to say it is the only true freedom. I discovered that early on, encouraged by my mother’s good example. Self-devotion – and by that I mean devotion to oneself – takes time to perfect, like all skills worth developing, and requires extreme discipline. I am grateful for the time I invested in the process now – in this situation it stands me in very good stead. I am not in the least bit concerned about my father or mother and their fate after the coup; they’re either lying murdered in their country house or they’ve flown their private jet out of the country and resettled in one of their meticulously decorated overseas houses. My mother was the type to fill a house with invaluable artwork and priceless furniture even when she had a small child (me) and then to lock me in my room as punishment if I destroyed anything accidentally during a slumber party. She never cooked a single meal – we had cooks, but she hardly used them; we would meet at a restaurant for most meals. She has an unfortunate stutter – it’s rumoured as a result of a childhood trauma, but she’s never told me about it – so despite her excellent breeding the only man who would marry her was my father, who was compensating for his disfigured face (an accident with hot oil when he was a child) by pursuing power as if it promised him deliverance, and perhaps it has, if they’ve murdered him.

  The President’s wife is in a room down the corridor; she is allowed to visit me every few days and bores me witless. It is unfortunate that we share the same name because she thinks it gives her the right to expect intimacy with me; she’s always trying to tell me secrets, whispering them conspiratorially even though nobody is listening, and then looking at me greedily when she’s done, expecting me to tell her mine. She dissolves into tears every time she mentions her husband, frets about her children even though they are safely ensconced overseas, asks me repeatedly if I think she’s looking old and then disappears into my bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. She pulls at various lobes and rolls and dangling bits so that her face smooths out and then when she lets go her skin creases like a discarded glove. I asked if she’d been allowed to see her husband and she said that she had, and then pulled her face into its coarse, secretive look and asked if I’d been allowed to see mine.

  ‘I chose not to,’ I said, just to shock her, and it worked.

  She put her hand to her breast, said, ‘Has something happened?’ and then stared pointedly at my stomach.

  I didn’t expect to feel this way about the child. I hated how pregnant women at garden parties would bond over the minutiae of their bodily functions as if they were a different species from the rest of us, and I imagined it would make me feel invaded, the baby like a tapeworm curled in my stomach, feeding off me. Instead, it felt like I was feeding off it, that it was my own private regenerator: my hair thickened, my skin glowed, my fingernails grew more robust; it even changed the way I slept so that my dreams were full of beautiful, restless detail. As soon as my stomach showed, women looked at me with quick envy and men couldn’t take their eyes off me. It is a strange, public trial, being heavily pregnant, being forced to walk around with proof of your sex act before you, visible to the world. Most of the time you can only guess what – if anything – other people are getting up to, but in those few months of exposure you know everybody knows what you did, and for a different kind of woman, not used to that kind of scrutiny, it must be excruciating. I suppose your skin betrays you too, in the end – it gives you away, despite your best efforts – but it discloses the dirty truth of what is about to happen to you (death) whereas pregnancy tells the seamy truth of what you did a few months before.

  I think the problem will come when it is old enough to speak. My mother believed I was born evil and had to be made good through severe discipline and by not paying me any attention so that I wouldn’t think I was entitled to anything, not even her love. She would drag me along with her to tea parties or committee meetings and leave me outside to play on my own in the garden, like a domesticated animal, where I would scratch around to find wild fennel to suck on like a sweet, or I would dig up bulbs and try to eat them like apples. My father says she was wonderful with me when I was a newborn – she loved that stage and craved it afterwards – but he refused to have another. She loved my wordless snuffling and simple needs, but it scared her when I grew old enough to talk, not because I could talk back, but because I might decide independently that I didn’t like her; so she acted first and decided she wouldn’t like me, and saved herself a lot of hurt. My father marvelled at me, and still does; not at the kind of person I am or at the things I’ve done, but at my intact, unmarked face – I think he didn’t fully believe that his deformity could never be passed down to me, and he would often call me over to his side when I was small, hold my face up to the light and turn it from side to side.

  He gave me an early appreciation for aesthetics. My work later on, as a food beautician, was more about appearances, which is a perversion of aesthetics: making something seem what it is not. I fell into it – nobody decides to be a food beautician – but immediately liked the duplicity that is its basis: soap foam had to be scooped on top of beer, vegetables had to be lacquered, raw meat had to be sprayed brown (when cooked, it looks too dry and shrivelled for a close-up), plastic had to be melted to form cheese strands with just the right consistency. It was a world I could control and manipulate, that required meticulous attention to detail and an eye for deception. My husband took it far too seriously, told me that I was an artist like him, that the only difference between us was that the President wanted the truth and my boss wanted anything but. I didn’t need to work – despite the fallout over my marriage, even my mother wouldn’t have dared to question this right to leisure – but it amused me, got me out of the apartment and let me spend time on trivial details that comforted me with their smallness.

  I think I did once love my husband, right at the beginning. I say this as if I’m an old woman looking back on the vastness of my married life, but I feel that old sometimes, and I know what it’s going to be like before it even hits me. It might just be the lumpiness of pregnancy, the dragging, the slowing down, or the fact that you age twice as quickly once you’re married. After the initial bloom of it, the thrill of using those new words, ‘my husband’, it began to feel like I had hit a dead-end, ploughed straight into a solid wall, a dread sense of the complete shutting down of all possibility. From the earliest years of girlhood, it had been the dominant mystery in my life – whom would I marry? And when? – and suddenly it was solved, overnight, and the unseen force that had propelled me onwards all those years wilted. I think that’s why people stop caring when
they get old: there are no more mysteries to solve; you know what job you’ve chosen, whether you’ve had children, how many, girls or boys, what their names are, what childbirth felt like, where you’re living, how much money you earn, who your husband is, what he does, how often he makes love to you, whether your face wrinkled at the eyes or the mouth first. And then you get old enough to start putting pressure on younger people to solve their mysteries, because deep down you want them to suffer the same slow creep of boredom that you did.

  The Residence is quiet now. Most people seem to have left, or been moved. There is no sign of human presence around me except for the guard who sometimes coughs outside my door on his rounds. It is just me and this child within me who must know that it is almost time for it to emerge into this sick, sad world and fight to have its way.

  4 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  This morning my husband had already left the Residence by the time I woke up. Sleep lay heavily on me, an almost physical force pinning me to the bed, and I had to throw it off like an attacker and drag myself to the bathroom, feeling wounded, but briefly grateful that my husband never leaves the toilet seat up, as I’m entirely capable of sitting down without looking and feeling the hard, cold porcelain bowl hit against my bones instead of the flat safety of the seat. The day’s beauty revealed itself through the bathroom windows, an oppressive beauty, demanding some kind of worship of me, and left me feeling, once again, vaguely guilty. I dressed and went down to breakfast to find the Residence bustling with servants and party officials, all of whom greeted me ceremoniously. I know it will be all too easy to become soft here, to start to expect things: in the dining room, breakfast was laid out for me, a myriad of choices. As I ate, the swinging doors into the kitchens opened to reveal the chef, whom I was glad to see and invited to sit with me. He told me the kitchens were almost destroyed from looting, but slowly he was piecing things together again. He was perky and solid; the move to the city had blown new air into him like a blow-up toy. He stole a glance at my arm as I ate grapefruit.

  I’ve spent the day walking through the Presidential District, watching people, seeing how shop owners have improvised with broken windows or missing doors so that they can keep trading despite the wreckage, and the mood is upbeat; groups have gathered under the few intact trees to share stories and borrow tools. I look at my reflection in a large, unbroken shop window, pretending to look at the wares behind it. My slimness always takes me by surprise; I suppose because of my height I don’t think of myself as small, but it is pleasing to see my narrowness: my body promises ascetic pleasure, not full-bodied. Somebody from within the shop stirs, thinking I’m interested in buying, and I change my focus and look beyond my reflection and into the shop.

  A young man, a boy really, emerges at the door to my left and says, ‘I’ve never done a cut for a woman before… but I’d be happy to try.’

  I look at the storefront: ‘BARBER’ it says, in thick gold letters. I look at the boy again, and he looks back at me open-faced – I don’t think he meant to offend me. I know this must be the barber’s shop, my barber’s shop. He said it was close to the Residence and that his assistant would probably still be hanging around it, unsure what else to do. I lift my hand, release my hair from its clasp, and follow him into the shop.

  It is dark inside, and one can observe passers-by unnoticed – he must have seen me looking at myself. There are no wares in the windows other than a few sideways-sprouting potted plants, and the shop is tidy but bare. I can see that things have been pulled off the walls and not yet replaced and many of the bulbs embedded around the mirrors have burst their filaments or been smashed; others flicker in and out of consciousness – my reflection jumps out then recedes. The assistant wheels a high red chair to me and motions for me to sit down. He has a spray bottle filled with liquid and from a jar of milky water he lifts a pair of scissors with long blades and a thin-toothed comb.

  ‘I would wash your hair first normally,’ he says, nervously screwing the spray tip back onto the base, ‘but the basin’s cracked.’

  I look over my shoulder at it and see that the crack has branched out like a lightning rod, splitting the basin into small shards that are still clinging to each other. He whips a plastic sheet over my front and ties it too tightly at my neck. The first squirt misfires and he hits me in the eye with the spray and then agitatedly wipes around my eye with a small towel, as if he’s hoping I won’t notice. A fine mist forms around my head as he works, and I feel my hair pull gently on my scalp. Each time the fickle light bulbs illuminate, the mist becomes gold. He begins to pull at the strands with the comb, but my hair knots around it and he curses under his breath.

  ‘I’m not used to hair this long,’ he says, embarrassed. ‘Men’s hair never knots.’

  I smile at him in the mirror, then wince as he pulls at the comb. ‘Is this your salon?’ I ask, between tugs.

  His eyes flicker at my reflection, as if he’s trying to see if he can trust me. ‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘The owner went missing during the… um…’ He trails off, unsure what to call it.

  ‘The coup?’ I offer.

  He nods silently, frowning with concentration.

  ‘What’s he like, the owner?’ I ask as he attacks another knot.

  ‘He always treated me well,’ he responds. ‘I started off just sweeping and cleaning, ordering stock, that kind of thing, but then he taught me some things and let me work with customers when he wasn’t here, when he was up at the Res…’

  He stops abruptly, catching himself, and glances at my reflection again, to see if I’m listening.

  ‘Was he good at what he did?’ I ask, ignoring his slip-up.

  He has managed to get my wet hair into long, separate, knot-free strands and is now brandishing the scissors. His face lights up.

  ‘Men came from all over the city to him. He didn’t turn anybody away. Sometimes there would be a queue out onto the pavement.’ He points to my hair. ‘How much?’

  I shrug. ‘Just a trim. Straighten it out.’

  He begins to snip, not in layers, but straight across the edge of my hair, using the comb occasionally to measure the next cut against the one he just made. I let him work in silence. In the mirror I see a man pause outside the shop, peer through the window and then rummage through his pockets. Not finding anything, he keeps walking.

  It still makes me uncomfortable to have my hair cut by someone other than my mother; to have a stranger perform a task that is so intimate – cutting the very fibres that grow from your head – is somewhat vulgar to me, distasteful. I always wonder how people long ago could let their servants bathe them, scrub their backs and pour clean, hot water over their naked bodies to rinse afterwards. Once a hairdresser pointed out that I had a patch of dry scalp near my hairline, and I was so indignant that I never went back to her – she had broken the unspoken contract never to make a judgement of me when I was at my most vulnerable, letting a stranger look at my scalp. My mother’s haircuts were unpredictable (I never knew what my hair would look like afterwards), but they were safe because she wasn’t a stranger. After she died I tried to teach myself to cut my own hair but it made me too sad and I would end up staring at myself in the mirror and crying. Not for long, because crying is not designed for doing alone, and tears soon dry up unless there is a witness to them.

  They were simple people: my father was a fisherman like all the men in the village and my mother was a fisherwoman, unlike all the women in the village. She’d been doing it for years before they got married, but she wasn’t militant about it; she didn’t demand to be allowed to fish, she was simply too good at it for them to refuse her, and meek enough that they couldn’t feel threatened. She and my father always worked on separate crews after I was born, just in case, but that one day his crew was desperate for another member and she took a chance and went out with them. They drowned together; the survivors said that they were last seen clinging to each other in the water. It probably made them sink
faster, the double weight. I expected that losing them would make me stronger, that I would grow hard and self-reliant with time, the way wood eventually becomes stone-like with age, but instead it created a need in me for a man, just one, who would make me his first priority; friends weren’t good enough – they had obligations to too many people. A lover alone could ward off the loneliness enough to let me function, to venture out into the world.

  My fiancé, the barber’s brother, was my first lover. The most difficult time of the day for me after my parents drowned was the early afternoon, those no-man’s-land hours after lunch, when the light is too stark for shadows, and drowsiness made me desperate. I worked from home then, making baskets and decorated bags for the market, and he would come back to my flat after he’d eaten at home, telling his mother he had to return to the docks. I depended on him coming; it was always such a relief when I heard him let himself in at the door and come straight to me as I lay on the bed. We wouldn’t undress, it was not the time for it and we’d already let desire run its course during his morning visit. We simply lay there and I would beg him not to let me fall asleep because my grief fed off afternoon sleep and I would wake up disoriented and listless. He was a bulwark against my sadness. Later on, at dusk, when he had gone, I would see the indent his head had left on the pillow next to me, a small reminder of his presence, that he had been there, that somebody in the world knew about me and my life and its detail. As I’ve grown older the time of day that I find most depressing has changed; now it is the mornings, but I suppose that is not unusual – for most people waking up reminds them of things they’d rather forget.