Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Blood Kin

  Ceridwen Dovey’s debut novel, Blood Kin, is being published in fourteen countries. She grew up in South Africa and Australia, and now lives in New York City.

  First published as a trade paperback in Great Britain in 2007

  by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Ceridwen Dovey 2007

  The moral right of Ceridwen Dovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 84354 658 0

  eISBN: 978 1 84887 262 2

  Designed and typeset by Richard Marston

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London wc1N 3JZ

  For Ken, Teresa and Lindiwe

  CONTENTS

  Part I

  1 His portraitist

  2 His chef

  3 His barber

  4 His portraitist

  5 His chef

  6 His barber

  7 His portraitist

  8 His chef

  9 His barber

  10 His portraitist

  11 His chef

  12 His barber

  13 His portraitist

  14 His chef

  15 His barber

  Part II

  1 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  2 His chef’s daughter

  3 His portraitist’s wife

  4 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  5 His chef’s daughter

  6 His portraitist’s wife

  7 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  8 His chef’s daughter

  9 His portraitist’s wife

  Part III

  1 His barber

  2 His portraitist

  3 His chef

  P A R T I

  1 His portraitist

  He came every two months for a sitting. Always early in the day, usually on a Friday, when he still had something vital in his face from the week’s effort, but a mellowness in his eyes from the knowledge it was almost over. In the late spring, the fallen jacaranda blossoms lay luminous on the pavement outside at that time of day, and his assistant would scoop them up by the handful and strew them over the couch where he sat, or lay, or lounged for each portrait. Regal purple petals. Made him feel like a king.

  I always mixed my palette before he arrived. I knew the shade of his skin, the hue of his hair, the pinkness of the half-moons in his nails. After he’d arrived, and was seated, I’d adjust the colours slightly, according to his mood: if it had been a bad week, his skin tone needed more yellow; if he was feeling benevolent, I added a daub of blue to the white for his eyes. He said having his picture painted was his only therapy.

  I would start with a charcoal sketch of his face. I was ruthless about detail, and documented each new wrinkle or discolouration or sausage spot, but this is what he wanted – in his very first sitting, I flattered him on the canvas, and he threatened never to return, so the next time I painted him as he was, and it pleased him. You would be surprised what can happen to a face in two months. One day I’ll bind together all the surviving charcoal sketches and make a flipbook that jolts single frames into action when thumbed quickly. The flipbook’s action will be the ageing of the President.

  The oil portraits used to take me exactly six hours. He would decide on his pose, and when he had settled into it his assistant blotted his face oil with foundation and, on days when the President looked particularly tired, added some authority to his eyes with eyeliner. He had an uncanny ability to sit still for hours. At the end of each session, before the paint had even dried, his assistant collected the portrait to hang next to the flag in Parliament, so that the portrait in Parliament was always the most current, and the outdated ones were distributed to dignitaries to hang in their homes.

  2 His chef

  The President’s favourite meal was Sunday brunch, when I would do a fresh seafood platter for him and serve it in the private dining room in his city apartment; not even his family joined him for this meal. We established a comfortable routine over the years. The guard would let me into the apartment at 9 a.m. I brought all the ingredients, uncooked, with me, and prepared the meal in his own kitchen, as quietly as I could, so as not to wake him. I had equipped the kitchen to meet my needs and did tasks there that I had long abandoned doing in the main Presidential Residence kitchens, things like disembowelling crayfish using their own feelers, destoppering sea snails, beheading prawns. These are normally jobs for lowly kitchen boys, but in his quiet kitchen on a Sunday I grew fond of doing my own dirty work – I communed with an earlier self that way, remembered my own humble beginnings; it reminded me of my respect for processes, the satisfaction of peeling and chopping and mincing and grating, all the myriad ways one can put a culinary world in order. I can’t deny the pride I felt knowing that each item I prepared in that kitchen would nourish the President.

  As soon as I arrived, I would place the live abalone on the floor of the pantry. They were always tense from being transported and had to calm down before I could kill them, otherwise the flesh would be tough. I would leave them there until everything else was almost ready, then creep up on them and hit them on their soft underbellies with the end of a rolling pin. If they sensed me coming they contracted like a heart muscle and were wasted.

  3 His barber

  The President was meticulous about his facial hair, same with his ear and nostril hair. He insisted that I use tweezers to dig deep into his orifices to root out the hair at its source, which inevitably inflicted pain, and he swore and threw things against the wall to cope, and afterwards panted like a dog in heat (I secretly suspected he liked it). He had a daily late-afternoon appointment with me in preparation for evening functions. His hair grew fast and blue and by the end of each day his stubble showed its colour, but the ear and nostril ritual I performed only weekly. Like all men, the President’s favourite part of the session was the lathering – the brush I used was soft but firm, and the shaving soap lathered easily with moisture, needing little encouragement. I made small circles on his lower face until the soap foamed. I know it felt good.

  For me, the satisfaction was in de-lathering. I would sharpen my knife in front of the President, and he would wince from the sound, but he never opened his eyes to look, which could be interpreted as a sign of either cowardice or bravery. Then I would take his head firmly between my hands and tilt it backwards. This was the moment I waited for each day: with a brisk twist of my hands, I could have snapped his neck, slit his throat with a knife-flick, but I did neither. I would start at the bottom of his neck with the blade and glide it slowly upwards, watching the stubble mingle with the foam.

  Every evening the floor of my shop would be covered with hair. Hair is an extension of self – I believe it has power. When I looked at the hair of so many people lying tangled on the floor, it was like seeing earlier selves and
discarded personality tics made manifest, so I never threw it away; my assistant swept it into a heap then bottled it to keep on shelves in the backroom.

  4 His portraitist

  I was forbidden by the President to paint any other person’s portrait. This was the condition on which I was initially commissioned – he said my eye was always to be fresh for his face – and I agreed because the fee I received meant I needed to do no other paying work and could paint as I used to, when I was a student: only for myself and anybody who chose to be my audience.

  My wife was the first to choose to be my audience. I had painted furiously for several months at university and hired out an industrial basement to exhibit my work. I was proud and believed good art speaks for itself, so I didn’t advertise or print flyers or put an announcement in the student newspaper about the exhibition. But I hadn’t seen friends during my painterly hibernation and my professors weren’t sure that I still existed. Nobody came. I sat in the basement and drank the beer I’d bought alone. She appeared at the door (looking for a toilet, she told me years later) towards midnight – her shoulders narrower than her hips, her hair undyed, her collarbones drawing my eyes like magnets. I opened her a beer and let her browse my work while she sipped. She took a long time over my drawings, paying them attention they weren’t used to in a room of oil paintings, slinking in and out of the pools of light thrown on each one, cocooned in her sequined slip. Eventually she went to the toilet at the back of the basement.

  ‘It’s not flushing,’ she said. ‘The handle is broken.’

  At least, I thought, something of her will be left when she leaves. Later, after I’d fallen in love, everything about her – clipped nails she’d left in a jagged pile on the floor, her morning breath, her week-old underwear in the laundry basket – became a clue to her chemistry, and I began to believe that I could possess it, could possess her, if I were vigilant enough to collect all the clues. When she’d left the basement I stood above the toilet bowl and inhaled like a dog. I wet my finger and lifted a sequin from the floor.

  My wife was also in the business of aesthetics – she was a food beautician, her speciality: hamburgers. She told me that they only ever film the front half of a burger; the back half looks like a construction site. She painted soft wax onto buns, placed individual sesame seeds strategically, and once sifted through two hundred lettuces to find the perfect frilled salad leaf to spray with silicon. The worst part about it, she always said, was watching an actor bite into the burger, having to smile full-mouthed with the wax starting to congeal on the roof of his mouth. She kept a special bucket for them to spit out what they’d chewed as soon as the camera stopped rolling.

  One evening, dressing for dinner, she held up a photograph on a cardboard box from a pair of sheer stockings she’d just opened; a picture of a pair of legs in tights, the limbs long and beautiful.

  ‘Do you think she has nice legs?’ she asked me, and before I could respond said, ‘You know that she is a he. All stocking models are men.’

  She always warned me that things are not what they seem.

  Now she is eight months pregnant and it kills me that I can’t see her. Her hair had mushroomed thickly, her tummy was so taut that her belly button left an indent on anything she wore, and her nipples had spread like a pink stain across her breasts, claiming space. When they took her she only had time to put on her dressing gown. Her hair was still wet.

  I should have known, at the last sitting, that something was wrong. The President had changed colour – every fibre of him was a tone I hadn’t mixed on my palette before – and he scratched around on the settee like a fussy poodle making its nest for the night and wouldn’t sit still. He brought his bodyguards up to the studio when normally they waited in the foyer of my apartment building, and his assistant even forgot to collect the petals.

  My wife was in the bath, the first ritual of her day, lying dead still, with just her belly protruding, and watching the baby’s movements ripple the water. She could lie there for hours, transfixed.

  The bodyguards were shot with silenced guns. They simply crumpled where they stood, like puppets a child has lost interest in. The President’s assistant, without a word, opened my wardrobe, stepped into it and closed the mirrored door behind him quietly. It was only then that I saw them: two masked gunmen, slick as spiders, with their weapons trained on the President. I dropped my palette and raised my hands in supplication. I could hear my wife murmuring in the bathroom.

  They motioned for me to move to the President’s side. I sat next to him on the couch, our shoulders touching, with one gunman behind us, while the other moved towards the bathroom door.

  ‘Please.’ I only realized later that I whispered this. ‘Please. Not her.’

  He opened the door and for a few seconds stood watching her. I could see into the room from the couch. She didn’t turn her head; she thought it was me. The gunman lifted her roughly from the bath in one movement and she stood naked, barefoot on the bathroom floor, screaming my name.

  ‘Put on your dressing gown,’ I whispered. ‘Behind the door. Put it on.’

  The silk clung to her and darkened around her breasts and stomach as she clutched the gown strings around her waist. The gunman forced her to walk in front of him, and as she approached me and the President sitting on the settee she dropped to her knees. He pulled her up again just as she was reaching out her arms to me. I strained for hers, but she only managed to grasp the President’s hand. She screamed my name but clutched his hand, then she was gone, forced down the stairs and out of the foyer. The assistant wasn’t discovered. I wonder if he is still hiding in my closet.

  Now we are being held prisoner in one of the guestrooms of the President’s Summer Residence – me, his chef and his barber – in a room too high above the ground to contemplate escape. We each have a bed with virgin linen so white I feel guilty sleeping in it, and there is an en-suite bathroom with silver fittings. A man brings bread, water, cheese and tomatoes to our door in the mornings and soup in the evenings. I haven’t seen my wife since the day they took us, almost a week ago.

  I was the first prisoner to be left in the room. They blindfolded me and the President in my apartment, forced us into a vehicle, and drove into the mountains – I know those spiralling roads too well to be fooled; the air thins and you start to drive faster from light-headedness, to overtake and stay for longer than you need to on the wrong side of the road. Those roads bring out the death wish in people. The President and I leaned into each other as the driver took the corners; his body is more pliable than I imagined.

  We were separated at the Summer Residence – our blindfolds were removed and he was led away into the building, which I recognized immediately from postcards and magazine spreads; it was declared a national monument last year. I was led up many flights of stairs to the bedroom and left alone. The chef was brought in the afternoon, straight from the President’s kitchens, where they were in the middle of making zabaglione for lunchtime dessert. His sous-chef was shot because he tried to sneak out of the delivery entrance, and the kitchen boys had stood gaping as the masked gunman bound the chef’s wrists and blindfolded him. He still had dried egg on his hands when he arrived, and immediately ran himself a bath and sat in the bathroom with the door closed for a long time. The barber only arrived at dusk. He’s taken the whole thing quite badly, and eventually talked himself to sleep.

  From where I stand on the small balcony, I can see the valley below dimly in the moonlight, the only fertile ground in the country. It must be a new agricultural trend, to farm in circles – the fields are separated into massive green polka dots with a slice of yellow cut out of them, which makes them look like they are devouring each other. My wife and I came wine-tasting in the valley for her birthday, years ago. There were only two vineyards and the wine was close to awful, but once we were in the valley basin we felt newly created. It was summer and the hot air had collected at the bottom, and as we descended the mountain road to the valle
y base we peeled off layers of clothing; another layer for each drop in altitude, until we were almost naked and sweating and even the bad wine was soothing. The vineyard owner took us on a tour of the cellars and told us the monks had used underground caves to store their wine for hundreds of years, but gradually the caves were forgotten until a farmer out with a pack of hunting dogs stumbled upon one of the openings. He grandly revealed cobwebbed caskets of the original monks’ wine, rendered undrinkable by years of imprisonment within glass; my wife persuaded him to let us smell it and it seemed to burn the hairs within my nostrils.

  The chef is snoring like a stalling motor boat. Something else is bothering me, though, some noise of distress beneath the night sounds from the room, men’s voices playing hide-and-seek. I trace them to the air vent above my bed, and stand on the mattress with my ear against the cold metal mesh.

  ‘Did you… hundreds of… list them… their names?’

  I pull on the mesh cover. It comes out of the wall, leaving the vent gaping in the darkness. The voices seem to be travelling upwards from the room beneath me.

  ‘List each order… spare… burden… is my condition.’

  Another man’s voice disguised with pain rises to me and dissolves into grunts to ward off new blows to his stomach – or so I imagine, from his breathing. A door slams and a man heaves, his solar plexus in spasm.

  I have avoided thinking about why I am here. I have never paid attention to politics; if I am exempt from one thing as an artist, surely it is knowing what my government is doing. Much more interesting to me than the puny stirrings of student revolutionaries was how to transform a thought into an image, how to paint the sky without using blue, how to get perspective wrong on purpose. My wife and I made it a rule never to listen to the news. ‘It’s all relative anyway,’ she would say, imagining that politicians do to their actions what fast-food advertisers do to their burgers. It seemed purer to know nothing than to glean bits of information thrown to us like chum to sharks. We didn’t even own a television set.