Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  He is five years older than me and was still a child himself when it all began. We were in the room at the Summer Residence with the framed puzzle of a dignitary on the wall – the pieces fitted tightly, but still the man’s face seemed cracked from the hundreds of slotted joinings. We lay together on the floor of the room – there was no furniture, or it was covered with sheets – and stared up at the picture, which bothered me: why was it a puzzle and not simply a painting? I wanted to get behind the glass and pull the smirking face apart into its constituent pieces; no matter how much to the left or right I moved, the eyes followed and fixed me with their stare. I could feel his skin against mine, our arms touching, and I tried to match his breathing – I held my breath until he breathed out, then waited for him to breathe in again. He took my hand and squeezed it very tightly, so tightly I gasped, then he told me to follow him.

  He kept squeezing my hand all along the corridor, across the courtyard, through the sculpture garden, and to the base of a thickly leaved, spreading tree growing closely against one of the bottom windows of the Summer Residence. He told me to climb the tree, but my fingers were numb from being gripped and I fell and shaved off a fine layer of skin against the bark. He laughed and pushed me against the trunk again, ordering me to climb. I managed to claw my way up and onto a branch, my new wound burning, desperate to please him. He lifted himself onto the branch next to me and cautiously parted the leaves so that we could see into the room through the window without being seen ourselves. At first I could see nothing but the reflection of the tree in the glass, then I saw something white moving inside the room, some kind of animal, and the animal separated into two, and I realized it was an entwined mass of naked human flesh. The President’s face came in and out of view as the mass rolled; the woman I did not recognize. I was transfixed by the violence of what they were doing. The President’s son moved his leg against mine on the branch. His breath was hot against my cheek, his breathing quickened as he watched.

  ‘I watch him often,’ he whispered. ‘He likes to hurt many women. He thinks nobody knows.’

  A strange ticking began in the base of my stomach, a nervous pulsing, and I began to feel thirsty. The son put his mouth against my neck and bit me slowly, clenching his teeth tighter and tighter until I yelped. Then he put one hand between my thighs and with his other he dug a fingernail into the open wound on my knee, keeping his eyes on the moving flesh inside the window. If I strained my ears hard enough, I could hear the woman inside moaning from pain. I tried to be silent, proud of my resilience, proud that he wanted to hurt me. It felt good.

  It still feels good; he is still my lover. I feel guilty because now I know that pain and pleasure are not meant to be paired, but it is too late to unlearn it, it has been burnt into my brain, gouged into my body. I have tried to resist him, but it is useless. In a drought, wild animals are driven mad by thirst and swarm to the sea against their instincts, drink sea water and then die a horrible death, leaving the beach littered with their bodies. I am perpetually mad with thirst for him; without him I will go even madder.

  In the thick of the Presidential District the debris is denser and there are the same gruesome posters plastered against walls and windows and even nailed into trunks. The avenue slopes up towards the gated entrance to the Residence, canopied by jacarandas. I approach the security booth with my best schoolgirl walk, looking innocent and apprehensive while the sweat threads its way down my back. The guard is on edge, his radio buzzes with barked commands that I can’t decipher, but he swallows my story and radios the kitchens to ask a busboy to fetch me at the gate. While I wait he shifts from foot to foot, looks at his watch nervously, and glances at my legs. I notice my stockings have laddered badly up the back of my knee and beneath my skirt. We wait in silence punctuated by men’s quick shouted orders on his radio.

  The busboy leads me through the gate and across the lawn towards the kitchen garden and then through a service entrance into the dishwashing gulley where three men stand side by side hosing food scraps off plates. One of them sees me and nudges the young boy to his side, and they both whistle and grunt at me as I pass. The busboy tells me to wait in the gulley while he fetches somebody who will interview me for a job. ‘Nothing fancy going,’ he says, ‘just peeling duty and the dishes.’ I peer through the porthole window in the swinging door into the kitchens. The room is steamy and filled with men dressed in white with plastic caps over their hair and bright red faces; with all the banging and clanging it sounds like a factory assembly line. My father would not be back here, though, unless to scream at somebody in fault.

  I clear my throat and shout at the dishwashers above the noise of the plates being piled in the sink, ‘Who is executive chef now?’

  The oldest man, wrinkled as a walnut, hears me and shouts back, ’Same as before.’

  Relief flows into my blood and through my veins, not just for my mother’s sake, but for my own. I have missed him, despite myself, I am still his little girl. I knew he would survive.

  A harassed man pushes at the swinging door wildly, spots me and says, ’Start tonight, trial week.’

  I turn to him and say coldly, ‘I’m not looking for work. I’m looking for my father.’

  Even this man must see the resemblance because he looks suddenly terrified and his eyes dart from my eyes to my jaw-line and back. The dishwashers have turned off their hoses to listen and now stand staring at me, their hands pink from the hot water.

  ‘He’s not here now,’ the man manages deferentially. ‘You can wait in the lobby, I’ll tell him you’re here.’

  He points through the service door to the main entry to the Residence, where guards bristle on the stairway. All four men watch me walk away across the gardens and towards the stairs. I take them two at a time and get to the top out of breath. The guard seems to think I’m a servant because he pays me no attention – I suppose he saw me leave the kitchens – so I walk through the door and into the quiet, carpeted lobby, and sit on a chair with a leather studded seat in a dark corner and fold my legs.

  From here I can see into the dining room on my left and into a large meeting room (long reflective wooden table, important chairs) on my right. This is the official part of the Residence, the part that is for public living. The curving staircase before me leads to the bedrooms and bathrooms and reading rooms tucked away from scrutiny on the next floor. At the base of the stairs is a small pile of what looks like debris – a folded pram and a plastic packet bulging with junk; the cleaners must not yet have thrown it away. Who is living here now? I haven’t followed the papers; I don’t even know who organized the coup. Who sleeps in the President’s bed? Does he have a wife?

  The lobby is so quiet I can hear faint sounds of metal being sharpened, crockery being piled, a man shouting a joke, from the kitchens behind the dining room. My curiosity wells like strong hunger. Even though I know nobody is in the room, I look around me suspiciously and over my shoulder and around the corner as far as I can see. Then I stand quickly and walk up the stairs confidently, like I’m meant to be there. I can always say I got lost – first day on the job, that kind of thing. Although if my father’s relationship with the last President is anything to go by, he will probably be a solid favourite already and able to talk his way out of anything, even his daughter snooping around the Residence. After days cooped up in the home with my mother, I wouldn’t mind a little adventure – I’ve always liked to see the earthly trappings (underwear on the floor, toothbrush in the basin, tabloid on the bedside table) of people in power, probably as a result of what I saw through the window with the President’s son in the tree. It becomes addictive.

  The stairs are carpeted and muffle my steps. I remember the way to the bedroom from the time the President’s son gave me the grand tour of the Residence while his parents were out and we lay on a bed and he pretended to be his father (distorted his eyebrows, scrunched up his mouth) and lay on top of me, suffocating me until I kicked him to get a breath of air, then beg
ged him to cover me again. There were foundation stains on one of the pillows, and on the sheets halfway down the bed there were cryptic stains, vaguely oily.

  I walk along the corridor, keeping to the wall, counting the doors. At the third door on my right I stop: this is the bedroom. Of course he won’t be in there now, it is mid-morning and he’ll be out on official duties or doing whatever a new President does. The door is cracked open; maybe the maid is in there cleaning. The room is dark and empty; the blinds are still drawn but they flutter in the wind from the open sliding door onto the balcony. I push tentatively on the door and step inside the room. There is a poster draped across the bed – one of the mangled body ones – and clothes on the floor next to the door leading to the bathroom. Suddenly I hear a sound from the bathroom, a low whine like a dog in distress. I walk quickly across the room and out onto the balcony. The President’s son showed me a way to look into the bathroom from outside without being seen. I reach up to the air vent and remove the lid carefully, and put my eye to the gap.

  9 His portraitist’s wife

  Before I realized I was pregnant I was perturbed by a spate of strange shooting pains in different bones around my body – shins, spine, collarbone. Afterwards, when I was told I was expecting, I began to suspect that the pains were from the child gathering material for itself, leeching nutrients from me, digging deep into my bones to nourish its own. I also believed it was digging for something else, for knowledge of my own painful memories, deposits left by anger, pathways forged by fear, so that it could collect them and soak them up and thereby spare itself the pain of having to make its own mistakes. I resented its assumption that it could get away with it and sidestep misery so easily.

  I want it out of me; I am sick of my lumbering, side-to-side shuffle that passes for a walk; I am tired of my swollen ankles and the dark stain down the centre of my stomach and the mask around my eyes and the incessant need to piss and waking myself with my own snoring because this baby is pushing something against my lungs and suffocating me. In the sculpture garden I still try to stretch, but it has become a comic routine so now I am simply walking in slow circles around the rose bushes. Glancing down, I notice a strange plant I haven’t seen before – a single glossy-green leaf like a sow’s ear pushed flat against the soil. I pull it out of the ground and find that its roots are surprisingly shallow and wispy. It reminds me of the desert up north where the winds are so strong the trees have grown with their trunks almost flat against the ground. I always found their prostration distasteful – it seemed to me the ultimate concession, literally bending over backwards to accommodate a stronger force. A cat lurks against the garden wall, rubbing itself against the bricks and I call it to me cheerfully, entice it closer, and then hit its flank as hard I can with the flat of my hand. It squawks and skitters away and over the wall. An old childhood trick I learned from my mother (she always preferred dogs).

  I keep catching myself thinking about her against my will, probably because I’m about to become a mother myself, and the only model I have for this process is her. I dreamed last night that I had caught her stutter like a common cold and all the men I spoke to looked at me at first with pity and then not at all. This morning I woke with an extremely clear image of her in my mind, hovering above me at the beach with her face very close to mine, digging me into a sand motor car. And I could have sworn I caught a whiff of her night perfume in the garden just now, close to the wall, but then I saw the camellias growing thickly around the tap. She would come to kiss me goodnight before she and my father went out and I would hear her high heels clicking on the polished parquet and smell her scent before she’d even opened the door. Freshly bathed, in my nightgown, I would beg her not to go, or make her promise to kiss me again when she arrived home at the end of the night, and I told her I would know even if I was sleeping because she could kiss my cheek and I would find the lipstick mark in the morning. I never found a mark, but I would console myself that it had simply rubbed off onto my pillows in the night, or she had wiped it off herself after kissing me, not wanting to soil the linen.

  And lately I have had the urge to be back at work, for the small, quiet frivolity of it, the open-faced superficiality, the detailed deception. I am tired of the burden of bearing another human being, the enforced earnestness of impending motherhood. I want to lather a square box with shaving cream and call it a cake, and dye a glassful of water with food colouring and call it wine, and put a chunk of dry ice at the bottom of a bowl of rice and call it steam. I’d like to paint grapes with clear nail varnish or cut chips out of polystyrene or spray moisture beads onto the side of a can. At work I mastered the art of showing no expression, appropriate given my vocation. I cultivated a habit of leaving a long pause before I answered any questions. The people I worked with gave me respect because of it, and because of who I am (or who my family is); they had a healthy respect for power and the privilege it confers.

  The guard whistles for me to return to my room and it is a relief to sink into the bed and lift my feet onto the bedpost to try to drain the fluid from them. Even as a dancer my feet never hurt this much, this consistently, although I had terrible bunions growing like bulbs out of the sides of my feet and my nails would ooze after a big performance. I have started to crave space – this room is not exactly small, but as I’ve ballooned the ceiling has begun to bother me; it hangs so low and solid above me. I’ve been longing for my first apartment in the city, the one my father bought for me to live in at university – it was one of the city’s oldest buildings and had somehow survived despite being surrounded by slick new skyscrapers. There was a balcony from every sprawling room and high, canopied ceilings. I hung beads from doorways and painted the doors aquamarine and always had bowls of nuts and strange fruit lying around on side tables and window sills. I made one of the rooms into my studio – I lined the walls with mirrors and installed a long wooden bar along one side. With the doors onto the balcony open I could see directly into one floor of a glassed-in office block, the kind with fluorescent lighting and air conditioning no matter what the weather: a sterilized climate all year round. Men in suits would stand with their faces to the glass at lunchtime to watch me perform. When the dance was over, sweaty and heaving, I would look directly at them, acknowledge their presence. Some looked forlorn, others made obscene gestures, a few pressed their phone numbers writ large to the window.

  There is a knock at the door and the President’s wife calls in her pearly-bright voice, ‘I’m coming in!’ The guard rolls his eyes at me before he closes the door behind her and locks it. She looks about her and pats her bushy hair and walks towards me shaking her head.

  ‘My poor dear,’ she says. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

  Before I can move my legs she has sat down on a chair next to the bed, swung my feet down into her lap and begun to roll my left ankle while gripping the heel with her other hand.

  ‘And how was your little outing with your husband?’ she asks coyly, winking at me while she milks my foot like an udder. ‘I loved being… intimate when I was pregnant, especially with the first,’ she says suggestively when I don’t answer. ‘It made me feel so feminine, so rounded and, well, desirable, you know?’

  She lifts my right foot entirely off her lap and begins to bang her palm against the heel, over and over. ‘But the stretchmarks are going to be horrendous. You’ll have to work hard to keep him interested.’ She tugs at each toe in turn, until the tiny bones click. Then she threads her fingers through the spaces between my toes and jiggles them violently.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say. ‘I wanted to wait until we were released but who knows when that will be.’

  She is delighted at the promise of a confidence, and leans close towards me so that my feet push into the folds of her belly, licks her lips and says, ‘Oh, tell me.’

  ‘It’s about your son,’ I say, then pause and look out of the window wistfully. I will make her wait; I intend to enjoy her suffering. Her gri
p has become vice-like around my ankles and her eyes are bulging slightly.

  ‘He’s…’

  I pause again and look down at my hands, then adjust my dress over my stomach, pulling on it to undo the creases.

  ‘Your son is dead. I saw his body at the vineyard.’

  She falls forward onto my outstretched legs, clings to me about my knees, and sobs and moans and wails until the guard opens the door to see about the noise. He quickly closes it again at the sight of her thrashing about with grief. Her makeup drools onto my dress and my bare legs, but I can’t find the right moment to pull them away. Eventually she lifts her head, keeping her arms around my knees, and looks at me with her melted face.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she sobs. ‘You don’t even know it is your loss too.’

  My loss? Does she intend that in the patriotic sense, that we have all lost a good ’son’ of the country? I pat her head, reassuring her that no, it is most definitely her loss. She becomes impatient, and lets go of my legs and sits up.

  ‘There’s something I should tell you now,’ she says, sniffling, her mascara blurred like a black eye. She grips my feet again, pulls at my big toes nervously. ‘He was…’ She breaks down and weeps again.

  I begin to feel alarmed, backed into an enclosure like an animal fattened for the kill.