Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  6 His portraitist’s wife

  The fool has chosen to stay here at the Summer Residence even though he’s been released along with the others. He woke me from blissful sleep this morning, banging on the door, screaming my name; I thought he was being chased by a pack of wild animals. The guard let him in, and he rushed in on me, threw himself on the bed and said, ‘My darling, I’m free,’ and immediately started rubbing my belly as if I had a stomach ache. He said they’d given him permission to take me on an outing and he wanted to take me down to the cellars where we went for my birthday, years ago. He’d heard that the vineyard is abandoned now – the owner is too afraid to return – but apparently the stacks of wine bottles are still there and we can help ourselves.

  ‘Not now, obviously,’ he said, gazing at my stomach, ‘but for later. When things are back to normal.’

  It comes as no surprise that I’m being kept on in captivity.

  He is looking gaunt and scruffy, but I have to admit there was a thrill of pleasure feeling his body next to mine on the bed. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been starved of physical contact from the outside – on the inside, of course, there is a constant bodily pressure from another being, but it is not enough. The President’s wife often suggests she and I should hug more, or give each other neck massages – ‘Touch,’ she says, ‘is healing’ – but I always refuse, saying the baby has made my skin hypersensitive and how could I hug her with this belly in the way? She has tried over and over to tell me about her own births – two children, when she was already quite old – in disgusting detail: dilation and fluid and excretions and contractions that I want nothing to do with. Mothers should learn not to ruin it for other women, but she can’t help herself, it’s her way of possessing childbirth, of making sure I’m on the outside. She does this in other ways, too, usually around money and social standing.

  Sometimes she forgets who I am – that I’m not just the portraitist’s wife – and starts pitying me my position. She doesn’t know that it’s an open secret in my family that the only reason the President married her was because she was wealthy enough not to embarrass him and ugly enough never to humiliate him with another man. My mother is the same age as she is – they were at school together, and their families used to holiday at the same coastal resort. She observed their courtship from close quarters. I think if my mother hadn’t stuttered she would have had a chance with the President; stuttering is more shameful than ugliness in their circles, because there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve worked out that my mother was already pregnant when she married my father. She was always enigmatic about their wedding date (they’ve never celebrated anniversaries), but I’ve a way with secrets and I always end up cracking them open like nuts. No wonder they say the truth comes in kernels. She says I was a honeymoon baby. My father was probably just grateful that she had let him be intimate with her and I don’t think he thought much about it.

  I was ten when the President’s son was born. I remember it vividly because at the resort that summer all the adults expected me to be excited to play with a baby, but instead I almost killed him. My mother walked in on me holding a large toy truck above his cot, ready to crush his skull, but she was strangely sympathetic afterwards, and I recall thinking that I should try it again to elicit similar understanding from her, so I pushed his pram off the veranda, onto the sand below. This time the President saw me do it, and he too was tender with me and didn’t tell anyone what I’d done and I wasn’t scolded or banished to my room. The baby didn’t cry for a week after that and I thought I had done them all a favour. My final experiment was to drop him on his head on the cool concrete floor of the beach cottage: I was holding him, cooing, and then threw him up in the air and pretended to try to catch him on his way down, but let him slip through my hands, slightly breaking his fall. I didn’t try anything again after that; even for me the sound of his soft skull hitting the concrete was sickening. He survived these trials, and I watched him closely as he got older, looking for evidence of my experiments, but the only aberration seemed to be that he crawled sideways before he learnt to go forwards. He went on to become a cruelly handsome boy, capable of anything – the thought has occurred to me that the only thing I knocked out of him on the concrete was his moral compass, and that would have been as useful to him as his appendix, or the vestigial nipples on his chest.

  The President only asked my father to go into politics when I got engaged to the portraitist. Perhaps he had been worried it would damage my chances of finding a spouse, or attract only the power-hungry like sharks who’ve smelt their next meal from far off. My father took to it like a fish to water, and transitioned seamlessly from making millions off animals (prawns, horses) to making millions off people (taxes, embezzlement). I had to travel in an armed motorcade to get to my wedding because there was a kidnapping threat at the time – the rebels, and God knows who else, had hit upon the unoriginal idea of taking rich kids hostage and demanding ransom. Sometimes I wonder if my mother would have paid it to get me back.

  I was glad to see my husband at the altar, if only because compared to the faces of old boyfriends in the crowd his had not yet collapsed from years of living excessively. It seeps into you, excess, through the pores of your skin like sweat going the wrong way, until you’re so bloated you’ve got only two choices: pop, or float like that until you die; most of us choose to float. One of them propositioned me in the coat room at the reception – his family also bred horses and he had turned out just like one: glossy, sleek-coated, arrogant. Out on the balcony trying to sober up, I bumped into another, and remembered feeling sick the first time I saw his feet – his toes curled like claws and were so uneven I wondered how he could walk, and sex with him was always prickly because he clipped his pubic hair with blunt scissors and it would leave me with a rash on my thighs.

  My husband was refreshingly dirty after all these well-groomed men – he purposefully didn’t brush his hair while he was at university, and for a while he refused to wear shoes, even in winter (he said he could grip the snow better with bare feet). He marvelled at my ability never to lose my balance on the iced-over roads and pavements, even in high heels. I told him I simply invented a new dance move every time I slipped. I was dancing seriously at the time, as supple as a snake, and my muscles righted themselves effortlessly if I made any sudden movement. He also marvelled at my freckled eyelids and would make me close my eyes under a streetlight in the snow, then kiss the lids, warming the sockets with his breath.

  I have tried stretching in the rose garden, but everything feels too tight, and even cross-legged I can barely push my knees to the ground. The President’s wife asked me the other day in what position I wanted to give birth and I said on my hands and knees, like a dog, again just to shock her, but she nodded wisely and said that’s what she had chosen, so I’m determined now to do it on my back, in the position that started all this in the first place.

  One of the benefits of age is that you learn to view your body as an asset instead of an enemy. I would be a better dancer now than I was when I was younger, baby aside. Back then I felt that my narrow shoulders and wide hips made me dance off-kilter, restricted me from true grace because the distribution of my flesh was wrong, and I would bore my eyes into the other dancers who were spindly, the way dancers should be, long and narrow like pencils, trying to find a flaw in their movements. Now I would use my weighted centre to make myself dance like a spinning top; I would do all kinds of things the hipless girls would envy. It would be for the other women, my performance, as most things in a woman’s life are. I have never looked at men from my seat in the theatre, or through the car window, or in an elevator, or at a restaurant – I look at the women and they look at me and we rank ourselves constantly according to what we see. In fact, it’s a wonder to me that men ever manage to get our attention when we’re all so busy looking at each other. In a dancers’ changing room you even give up disguising your glances or looks or stares and girls stand next to each ot
her in the full-length mirror and systematically calculate which of them has the better body. The one who loses usually has a prettier face, but that is no consolation.

  My husband is outside the door again, waiting for me. I have pulled on a dress and shaken out my hair and brushed my teeth. The guard unlocks the door and once again my husband rushes inside like a puppy and envelops me in an embrace made awkward by my stomach.

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ I ask him.

  ‘Your guard will drive us.’

  ‘What is this, a holiday camp?’

  He laughs. ‘The Commander probably thinks he made a mistake ever taking any prisoners. My theory is that they’re keeping you on here for your own good, for our baby’s good. We don’t know if any of the hospitals are even up and running yet.’

  I have my own theories, but I don’t share them with him. He takes my hand as we leave the room and strokes it as we walk behind the guard. The Summer Residence is strangely quiet; it seems that most of the party officials have returned to the city, and many of the doors to the rooms are open, with the linen stripped from the beds and in piles on the floor, waiting to be washed. The courtyard is empty.

  The car is parked just inside the Summer Residence gates. The guard lets me sit in the front seat and my husband perches in the back, sitting forward on his seat so that our heads are almost in a line. I reach into my handbag and the guard watches me sideways and seems relieved when my hand emerges with my lipstick and compact mirror. Something flits across my husband’s face – fear? guilt? – as I apply the lipstick (I can see him behind me in the compact), then the familiar doting look returns and he strokes my shoulder.

  The valley spreads below us, revealing more of itself with each turn of the road. I can’t see it from my room – my windows face the other way – so it comes as a surprise to remember it’s here below the Summer Residence. My family was invited to stay here by the President many times, but my mother always preferred the coast so we never came.

  ‘How are you, my love?’ my husband asks, trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘How is our baby?’

  There is a pleading tone in his voice that betrays him. He still thinks I’m angry at him for putting me in this position, and I will have to play along.

  ‘How do you think I am?’ I spit out. ‘I’m being held captive, for God’s sake.’

  He runs his hands through his tangled hair and bites his lip. I look down at the valley again, at the rows and rows of useless vines, untended, unharvested. It will take them years to recover and yield fruit again.

  We pass an invisible altitude marker and the air around us thickens perceptibly with heat; even the car seems to feel it and slows down, whining with the effort, and the sweat arrives without warning, making my dress stick to my belly in patches and my thighs cling to the car seat. My husband sweats at his hairline and a dark spot begins to form on his chest; the guard rolls up his sleeves as he drives and I notice that he holds the hot steering wheel with two fingers instead of a whole hand. At the base of the valley he speeds up and the vines fly by us in a green and grey blur. Heat waves have already begun to fuzz the outlines of things, and the farmhouse appears hazily ahead on the road, smaller than I remembered, but the last time we were here we were still in the selfish phase of being in love and anything that we did seemed grand and large and spectacular. We looked down on the people around us, pitying them their loveless existence; my husband talked the owner into taking us down into the cellars which were not open to the public, and he agreed because he envied our love and wanted to be a part of it in any way he could (or so we liked to think).

  There is no wind in the valley, so when I leave the car the sweat doesn’t dry or cool me down, but makes me more clammy. My husband follows me, after a short, under-his-breath chat with the guard. He must have asked him to stay in the car because the guard sits back down, leaving the door open, lowers his seat-back and stares out at the surrounding fields.

  The farmhouse is deserted. Vandals have passed through and gutted it quite neatly, removing everything possible from the walls and floors so that the rooms have a pleasing, empty simplicity. My husband gets onto his hands and knees in the backroom, searching for the ridge in the floorboards that will betray the trapdoor’s opening. It is well camouflaged, just like last time – the owner said if we could find the opening he would take us down to the cellars and I fell to my hands and knees to search that time too. My husband finds the ridge and pushes on it to release the catch; it works, and he looks up at me joyfully, then pulls open the trapdoor and drops down into the darkness of the cellar. After a few seconds a dim light appears beneath the floor – he has located the light switch, and his head re-emerges in the hole.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says. ‘You’ll make it – and I’ll catch you if you fall.’

  I ease myself onto the edge of the hole and then jump forwards into it, but I misjudge the distance and end up knocking him over and landing on top of him, winding him with my stomach. He starts to laugh and wheeze, trying to get breath that his laughter immediately steals from him again. I can’t help laughing too, even though my wrist is throbbing painfully. As he writhes and wheezes he keeps holding me on top of him with his arms firmly around my back. Eventually he catches his breath and gazes up at me. I can feel his blood pulsing at various points in his body: at his neck, in his stomach, in his hands. He is warm and soft and he will forgive me for anything. He kisses me, his lips wet from laughing, and after so much time it is almost as exciting as kissing a stranger. I feel desire unfurl in me, starting at the base of my stomach, unobstructed by the baby, shooting around my body.

  As I sit up to pull my dress over my head I notice a movement behind one of the barrels, a quick blur of colour that stands out from the pinkish wood. My first thought is cats – they’re everywhere in the valley, stray ones; you never see dogs here – but then my heart quickens with anger as I realize it is a human being, hiding behind the barrel, a silent but willing witness. My husband is lying on the cool floor, motionless, smiling with his eyes shut, enjoying the feel of my legs around him. I grip his arm with an urgency that makes him open his eyes, nod with my head to where I can see a shoe sticking out from behind the barrel, and motion to my husband to stay quiet. I lift myself off him and he springs upright, ready to defend me. He tiptoes to the barrel and then throws himself around it onto the intruder. They roll onto the floor, and he manages to pin the man beneath him with his legs, a perversion of the position we were in moments before. The man gives way easily and looks up at us with a familiar face: it’s the President’s son, the one I dropped on his head as a child.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says my husband, bewildered.

  ‘I’m hiding,’ he says. ‘I’ve been down here since the coup. I thought nobody would find me here.’

  My husband releases him from his grip and leans against a stack of barrels.

  ‘Are you looking for a place to hide?’ the son asks scornfully.

  ‘No,’ says my husband. The son looks at my face and then down at my belly. He licks his lips. He is holding something behind his back. He licks his lips again, staring at me.

  ‘I know what you did,’ he spits at me. His tongue darts in and out of his wet lips.

  ‘What I did, you mean,’ my husband says. ‘What I did.’

  The son lunges at me with a spoke, something he must have pulled from an abandoned bicycle wheel, but I anticipate this and step behind a tower of barrels and push the topmost one. The barrel is empty but heavy enough still to inflict pain when it hits him, crushing his foot, and he slides to the ground and sits cross-legged, cradling his leg, his pulpy flesh held together by the shoe.

  My husband makes for the trapdoor opening, pulls a step-ladder from the shadows, places it beneath the door, then grabs my hand and tells me to climb. I manage to use my arms to pull myself onto the farmhouse floor and my husband follows, and lets the trapdoor slam shut. Muffled, I hear the son begin to laugh, slow
and luxurious laughter, designed to ring in our ears. My husband crawls to where I’m lying on the floor, rolls me over so that our weight is directly above the trapdoor, fits his body into my back, lifts my dress and rubs my stomach in small circles with his free hand. He buries his nose in my nape, inhaling the smell of my scalp, of my faint sweat. He clings to me like an infant animal clutching its mother’s fur, as if I were balancing on a tree branch high above the ground, being swayed by the wind, bearing his weight. Is it possible to shake off the child on your back? Would it have dug its claws into your fur too firmly to fall? Would it pull you down with it in its terror?

  7 His barber’s brother’s fiancée

  My father’s hair thinned early. One of my first memories is watching my mother massage olive oil into his scalp, believing – almost religiously, since she did it every evening – that it would slow the relentless retreat of his strands. It didn’t, and by the time I was old enough to ride on his shoulders it was difficult to get a grip on his smooth scalp, residually oily from years of massage. I don’t think he complained, though: I would watch his face closely while my mother stood above him, thinking it was some kind of ritual that all parents had to perform. He would close his eyes while she kneaded his head, keeping her fingers in one place as she moved his loose skin against his skull. He particularly liked his hairline being rubbed – as it faded, she would move closer and closer up his skull, but at the beginning his hairline was just above his forehead and she had to stand in front of him to get traction. The reverse ritual was that my father shaved my mother’s armpits for her; she said if she tried to do it herself she nicked the soft skin from not being able to see the blade. She would sit in the bath and he would crouch on the bathmat next to her, lather her armpit hollows and then hold each arm up in the air in turn as he slid the razor gently along her contours.