Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  I know that a portrait is one of the trappings of power, that each one I painted increased the President’s control by a fraction; that the image of him, freshly rendered in oils, hanging in Parliament, had some value outside of itself, that it strengthened his legitimacy, and that it will do the same for this man sitting before me. The Commander’s slipper drops from his foot, revealing long, thin toes. He puts his hand into the back pocket of his trousers and emerges with a fistful of purple blossoms, jacaranda.

  ‘It’s not just me you’re painting,’ he says, his fist still clenched around the petals. ‘It’s us.’

  The President shows himself at the open door, flanked by guards. His head is held low; his jowls have lengthened and hang uneasily. He is wearing a purple dressing gown, tied with a knot at his thick waist. He shuffles towards the couch, and the Commander stands and throws the petals like confetti above his head. A few of them stick to his hair and shoulders, attaching themselves like barnacles to a rock, and he leaves them there, slumps onto the couch and then raises his head to look at me, his jaw steeled. The Commander sits jauntily beside him. For the first time I notice that his beauty is asymmetrical, that the halves of his face will have to be given separate attention. His profile seen from opposite sides would be different, like the two-faced gods of lore.

  I flip open my sketchbook to a blank page, trying not to look at the previous sketches, and with a stick of charcoal I shape them on the page. I start with the President: his face is familiar, comforting; the lines are known and expected. I can be honest with him; it is what he always demanded. Within these lines I find new signals his body has sent for imprint on his skin – wrinkles and spots and patches of dryness. All these I document. What stirs in me, as my hand follows its own instincts, is what stirred for his wife in the observatory with the burning lamps when her zip caught on her underwear: pity.

  14 His chef

  I open the freezer and remove an ice-filled plastic bottle with a red lid. On the counter is a bowl of ice cubes in fridge water; next to it the chilled pastry dough is slowly making its way back to room temperature. My grandmother would call me a cheat if she could see what I’m doing, but I’ve found a way to avoid the excruciating layering process (dough, butter, dough, butter, dough) – this batch took me just an hour last night – although I haven’t quite shaken the habit of rolling out the risen dough with an ice bottle or dipping my hands in the ice bowl whenever my fingertips become too warm. It’s not really even necessary to do it this early in the morning. Working in huge restaurant kitchens as a cog in a wheel cured me of most of my sentimental attachments to certain processes, but this one never died.

  Funny the things you see around here in the coldest hour of the night. The barber wasn’t in his bed when I left the room and from the kitchen window I saw the Commander’s wife crossing the courtyard barefoot, her sandals in her hand, her back hunched with the effort of trying to be quiet. Her hair looked like it had been tied up hastily, an attempt to hide its bushiness. Hair becomes bushy when someone puts their hands in it – the same used to happen to my wife. She depended on head massages before sex; her skull had erotic receptors that the rest of her body lacked. She would nudge her head up against my neck like a cat to remind me, then writhe and purr, and afterwards her cheeks would be bright pink and her hair nest-like from the added volume of the massage. I tried it on other women too, thinking it might be a secret weapon, but they became bored after a while and redirected my hands.

  I’m surprised at my lack of jealousy. Perhaps, finally, I have accepted my age and have begun to look at the desire of younger men indulgently, the way an old woman looks at a bride, not wanting to be back there again but still interested, still invested in the process and glad that other people have the energy to spend on it. She would have been my type, too, she would have made it difficult for me, would have extended the game, made me scour my imagination to find a way to entice her into my arms, just for a single night. That’s what no woman other than my wife understood: it was never about the sex. She knew she had to make our daily interactions into a game that interested me. She would approach then retreat unpredictably, leave for days without explanation, purposefully ignore me at parties and speak only to other men. I thought she enjoyed it, but it took its toll in the end, and eventually she pleaded insanity as a way out. Or perhaps – I’ve not thought of it like this before – could it have been her most ambitious game of all, to make me constantly search for her sane mind: now I’m sane, now I’m not? To make me woo her each time her sane mind disappeared and she had to be told who I was? She was very polite to me then, as polite as she always was to strangers – would try to make me feel at home in her wardroom, would invite me to help myself to tea or coffee, would ask me questions about my life and listen earnestly to my replies. Oh, I played along alright, it was fascinating to see if I could crack her open, get her to laugh and admit it had all been a game. She reminded me then of my daughter when she was very small, when she came with my wife to the airport to fetch me after I’d been away for a particularly long time. She obviously only faintly recognized me, and so she turned on all the charm her little mind could muster and sat in the back seat of the car next to me, entertaining me all the way home with stories about her friends and her pre-school and her pets.

  My fingertips are getting too warm. I plunge them into the icy fingerbowl and then grip the solid bottle and keep rolling out the dough as evenly as possible, then use the rim of a glass to cut out even rounds and place them gingerly on an oiled baking tray. I seem to have lost my appetite. Normally I would pick at the ingredients as I go, using the excuse of quality control, so that by the time the meal is served I am already full, but since the seafood brunch I haven’t eaten a morsel of the food I’ve prepared.

  I have a feeling the Commander will be moving to the City Residence soon. He’ll have to, to control the city and take up the full reins of power. The kitchens will be in disarray, probably looted and trashed, and it will be difficult re-establishing my supply lines. One thing I hope has been stolen is the linen, always over-starched so that it was heavy and sullen and scratchy to touch, and always made my eyes puff up and my fingers swell. That was in the days after I’d run away from home, when I was nothing but a busboy, clearing dirty plates and laying bright white tablecloths and making sure the cutlery was correctly spaced. Much later, when I’d been made sous-chef, I sent my mother some money for the bus fare to the city, but she didn’t come. I am a self-made man, I used to say to myself whenever the guilt about abandoning her began to creep up on me. A self-taught chef. I used to wonder why they called it blind ambition because I know my eyes were wide open while I clawed my way up.

  15 His barber

  The red wine is taking its revenge today; since I woke my brain has felt tender and my body bruised, and there is a purple welt across my back from the slats of the deckchair. But stronger even than the dry pinch behind my eyes is this longing to be with her again, at any cost; right now I believe I would even disguise myself as him, wear his clothes, speak with his lilt, if it meant she would lie next to me once more and thread her fingers through my hair. She does not realize the power of her grace. It has always transfixed me. At least I have that to lay at her feet: fidelity.

  The chef had a good look at me while I was in my bed this morning. He came back from the kitchens smelling of butter and yeast and stopped next to my bed for a long time. I pretended to be asleep, but I could sense his eyes searching for clues, and the wine stains on my lips probably gave me away, the woolliness of my hair, or the stench of last night’s liquor hanging above my bed, or her scent just beneath it, the quiet smell of her hair and body. He took a deep breath and eventually shuffled away from the bed into the bathroom and stayed there for a long time.

  The tools of my trade have just been miraculously delivered to the room by one of the guards – they must have broken into my shop to get them and terrorized my poor assistant to find out what I would need to groom the
Commander. With this scene pounding in my head it is not an easy task to pick out a pair of scissors and a comb from the tangle that has been thrown into the bag, but it must be done – he is expecting me. The portraitist came back from his session yesterday sucked dry like an old lemon, with bits of paint all over his hands making them look diseased, and fell into bed without a word. He is a thin man who seems to have nourished himself mainly on his wife, and without her he is dissolving. Even the bony structures holding up his face have collapsed. When I crept back in early this morning, he shot up in his bed with his face towards me for a few chilling seconds, until I realized his eyes were closed and he was still asleep. He lay back down again very stiffly like somebody being lowered into a coffin, then he cried softly in his sleep and this morning he had a faint pattern of salt on his cheeks.

  The guard thumps on the door to tell me to hurry up, so I grab my few utensils and wait for him to unlock the door. He walks beside me along the corridor around the courtyard. I look down at the square of grass and wish I could stand at the railing and look down on her again as she turns her face to the sun. The guard grunts and motions with his head to the stairwell and I realize that this is the first time I am going up and not down. The next floor is identical to ours, but with a guard outside every room – it is unnerving, but of course the desire begins to burn within me to know who is behind each door, what secrets are they guarding? And beneath that desire is a slight deflating – logic has told me that we are not the only prisoners, but to have the proof before me is still a small disappointment, a generalizing of our experience. Are they all being roomed in threes? Or are only the harmless ones put together and the real threats kept on their own to prevent plotting? Perhaps it’s to my advantage that he thinks of me as harmless.

  We cross to the other side of the floor and then climb another small staircase that curls around itself onto the top floor. There is only one entrance on this floor, a large wooden double door. The man standing outside unlocks it and lets us through into a room that I see immediately is the master bedroom, with a wall of glass through which there is a panoramic view of the entire valley, and even further – the City Residence is visible from here, a doll’s house from this distance, and at night they must be able to see it lit up on its hill within the city.

  ‘Quite a view,’ says the Commander from an armchair against the wall. ‘Our President certainly liked to keep an eye on things. His things, mostly.’

  He stands, smiles languidly and wanders towards me with his hand outstretched. He is impeccably dressed, with a crisp line down the middle of each trouser leg and a collar as stiff and white as ice. I shake his hand because I have no choice, and he grips my elbow while we shake, an added intimacy. The guard opens a door behind us leading into the bathroom. One of these walls is also glass, revealing its own view of the valley, and the rest of the walls and the ceiling are covered with mirrors, even the floor, which gives the strange sensation of walking on water that has frozen over and could crack and give way at any step. The basin, toilet and bath do not obstruct the complete view of oneself in the mirrors as they are not built against the walls but in the centre of the room, little pods of gleaming steel. They too reflect: I can see my body truncated in the surface of the bath. The Commander is amused by my unsteady walk across the mirrors and laughs with the guard as I pick my way towards the basin.

  ‘We need a chair,’ I say quietly. ‘A high one, preferably.’

  The guard leaves and returns with the armchair the Commander had been sitting in. It is so low I will have to bend almost double to see what I am doing, but I position it beside the basin, facing the solid wall of mirror. ‘Please…’ I say to the Commander, and hold out my arm to the armchair like a butler ushering in a guest. He smiles and sits and crosses his legs and shakes out his gently curling hair, watching himself in the mirror. The guard hovers at the door, a few steps away from me, his eyes trained on me. I lay out the necessary items from my bag along the edge of the bath, in the order I will use them, then with a graceful arc I throw the soft plastic sheet over his front and clip it at the back of his neck so that no part of his clothing is exposed.

  ‘I will be shampooing?’ I say tentatively to the Commander.

  He nods assent. I never ask a man if he would like a head massage with his shampoo, I simply do it. If you ask they feel embarrassed for saying yes – a man is not meant to chase sensual pleasure of that sort, they like to think a haircut is a brisk, businesslike transaction, something as necessary and as banal as flossing. I test the water with the inside of my wrist to make sure it won’t burn him, roll a towel to place at the edge of the steel basin, and then gently rest the back of his neck on it, so that his head is lolling back slightly into the basin. I guide his head beneath the tap so that the water just catches his hairline and barely wets his skin. The hair strands darken and clot with the water; he will feel the slight weight of them pulling away from his head, uncreasing his forehead, and the warmth will spread like a tide across his skull to the back of his brain. I turn off the tap, leave his head in the basin, squeeze shampoo onto my palm and lather it. It will feel slightly cold against his warmed-up scalp, invigorating, and the hair will foam and become smooth against his skin.

  I start with my fingertips at his hairline, working the gel into the roots along the edge of his forehead, and then just above his ears, his temples. Then I hold one hand against the top of his head and with the other in a soft fist I lather the underside of his skull, the lobe that protrudes just above the nape. I vary the pressure and motion and move slightly upwards over the lobe and to the flowering of the skull bone, where it makes its bulbous departure from the neck, and I stay here for a long time, rubbing with the flat of my palm against it, solid and circular. He keeps his eyes closed, but I notice his breathing becomes more pronounced and the artery at his neck reveals itself like the path left by a tunnelling creature. I check the water again against my wrist, then let it run warmly down from his hairline, watching the soap lose its clutch on his hair and leave the strands glossy and viscous. I lift another towel and place it in the basin beneath his head, then lift the edges and rub against his scalp quickly and with pressure, and tie it at his hairline so that he has a turban knotted at his forehead.

  ‘You can lift your head now,’ I say very quietly. He obeys.

  The cutting itself is over in a few minutes, my scissors and hands flitting like butterflies about his hair, gently guiding his head in the direction I need it with two fingers on opposite sides of his jaw. The bits of wet hair drop heavily to his shoulders or slide down onto the sheet fanned about him on the armchair. He keeps his eyes closed, perhaps worried about the scissors so quick and close about his pupils. I unclasp the sheet and throw it off him before he has opened them, and he jumps slightly with the surprise, then looks down at his clothes for stray hairs. There are none; I have made sure of that. For a moment he looks sheepish, embarrassed to have felt such pleasure at the hands of another man, wondering if the guard noticed. They all look like that at the end. The trick is simply to ignore them at this point, motion with your head to the assistant at the till, remind them it is a cash transaction, no more, no less, and with relief they remember and sternly but quickly pay their bill and leave without a backward glance at you.

  P A R T I I

  1 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  We are now installed in the City Residence, and as I try to fall asleep on our first night here already the guilt is crouching at the back of my mind. What struck me while I was carrying my suitcase up the staircase earlier today is that after the shock of a forced changing of the guard, the follow-up processes are in themselves rather insignificant. Human beings dispose of each other, set themselves up in the place of the deposed, and then go about their daily tasks: you shave at the ex-President’s basin, examine yourself in his mirror, pack your old socks in his underwear drawer. That in turn made me think about contamination, and whether a bad person leaves behind bad things in his
space, excretes badness like foul air: can you catch it like a cold? I watched my husband – the Commander, he calls himself now – sitting on the edge of the bathtub, waiting for the bath to fill, and as he submerged his body in the water, I thought of the President lying in that same tub and his pores against the same marble. When he climbed into bed next to me, his skin still warm and fragrant from the bathwater, I didn’t want him to touch me.

  He wanted to carry me across the threshold of the President’s bedroom in his arms when we arrived, but I told him it was a sick joke and, unnerved, started unpacking my clothes into the cavernous wardrobes. The bedroom has a view out over the city from the balcony: you can see as far as the sea and the stunted palms dotting the concrete parking lots from the one side, and from the other the mountains are visible. The air is oppressive, as it always is in the city at this time of year. You forget the heat when you’re up in the mountains the way you forget what pain feels like as soon as it’s over; memory sieves out pain, dulls it with time, an essential trick to condemn us to repetition. As we wound our way down from the Summer Residence, I could see the pollution bowling through the city, a hot soup of toxins, and my ears popped, taking me by surprise – I hadn’t realized how high up we’d been. It felt, in truth, like a descent into hell, but I couldn’t tell my husband that. He was excited, this was what he’d been waiting for: reclaiming space, in the name of freedom. The city had been secured with very little violence and we’d been told that the people simply wanted to get on with their lives.

  I can’t sleep. He has lost himself in his dreams, and mumbles each time he turns over. I walk out to the balcony to watch the heat rising from the city, from the pavements and the tops of buildings and swimming pools, making the lights flicker more violently. The Residence is perched at the top of the highest ground in the city, lording it over the rest of the Presidential District. The guards, from habit I suppose, have closed off all the roads around it for the night, forcing late-night commuters to give it a wide berth. The District is quiet, relieved that the sun has abandoned its siege. There are signs of struggle – the blackened lobby of a hotel, sandbags layered where glass once was, a stairway that leads to nothing, roads with pieces of concrete levered from them by explosions, looking like hunks of black ice floating in a frozen river in late winter – but mostly the city hums on oblivious to the changes. I can’t decide if that is right or wrong, but I’m disappointed regardless; I had imagined, I suppose, that we would be welcomed like homecoming heroes, feted and applauded, and have roses flung at our vehicle. But still nobody will believe what the President did, and even if they do, the rumours will soon fly that we will do no better.