Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  ‘He was your half-brother. You have lost your half-brother.’ She moans loudly and pulls at her hair.

  ‘But the President?’ I whisper incredulously. She watches me closely, despite her tears.

  ‘He’s your father,’ she whispers back. ‘We thought it was best for you not to know. I promised your mother I would never tell you.’

  My insides contract into a breathless, timeless point of agony and then, just as suddenly, the pain is gone. She puts her hand to my stomach, but I don’t want her to touch me anywhere, I can’t bear her cloying fingers on me, and I push them off violently and kick at her to let go of my legs. Before I can stand up the white-hot pain paralyses me again and I squat on the floor and dig my nails into my knees to wait it out. In that time she manages to come around to me and crouches beside me, stroking my hair.

  ‘It’s starting,’ she says. ‘The baby.’

  As soon as the pain is gone I stand and run towards the door and hurl my fists against it, screaming to the guard to open it. As he opens the door, there is a liquid flush and suddenly I’m standing barefoot in a pool of water. He looks with horror down at my feet and then at my drenched dress and turns his face away. The President’s wife hobbles to me and screams at the guard, ‘Get somebody, can’t you see she’s going to have the baby!’ and he disappears gratefully, sprinting down the corridor. I push her aside against the post of the door, hoping that she will hit her soft head on the hardwood, but at that instant the pain debilitates me and I squat again by instinct to ease it and clench my eyes and ball my fists. She is still there when it passes and just the sight of her face makes me nauseous; I want to hurl out the contents of my stomach, of my entire body, leave them in a slop on the floor and peel off my skin like a cooked beetroot. And then I will be nothing but a membrane for things to pass through.

  Oh mother, you win. I underestimated you. You have a taste for deception, a taste I have inherited. How did it happen? Where were you? In the dunes? Beside the reservoir at midnight? On a blanket beneath the power lines? Did you feel your spine against the warm hood of his car on an abandoned road? Did you stutter when you whispered to him your desires, instructions, preferences? It was not love – I know that he is incapable of it. Did his hands look different when he was young? Were his fingers more agile, more insistent? Oh, the great art of it, the sidling up to father afterwards, reeking of another man. Did you lock your jaw stoically when you had to let father touch you to take the credit, the responsibility, ownership of me? No wonder he always examined my face under the lamp. He wasn’t marvelling at my unscarred skin, he was sniffing like a suspicious dog around a lamp-post, trying to figure out which was his piss and which was someone else’s, and whether I could be taken for granted as his territory. He was always gratified by my face – did he not see the strange size of my eyes or the foreign slope of my cheekbones? But his own face had been disfigured for too long for him to remember the geography of his own features, and there were always photographs of long-forgotten ancestors that could be brought out to account for these little discrepancies.

  I run into the sculpture garden with my thighs gliding smoothly against each other and my wet dress clinging to my legs. She follows me, tries to pull me back by my shoulder, but I slap her hand away and then I’m bent over again with the pain, the terrible wait, the anguish, a pain that banishes all sense of time. It passes – how long did it last? – and I realize she is rubbing my back, kneading my spine through my dress. I lash out at her sideways and keep running, searching, my eyes focused on the ground, warding off the next spasm of pain, trying to take as many heavy steps forward before it attacks again.

  We were on the deck, night-time, salt on the air. Corn on the cob. A dropped fork. We were in the forest behind the Residence in the dark. A monogrammed towel filched from the laundry closet. Someone lurking behind a tree nearby, watching. A desperate sprint away. A photograph left under my pillow. To provoke me, to invoke his power, to stir our desire. Sausage-spotted face above me, wrinkles, discolouration, panting. The President’s sagging belly, bandy legs. His old man’s hands. The aftertaste of submission. His terrifying ascendance.

  I see the shears lying in the grass ahead of me. If I can just get there before the pain cripples me, but no, it hits again, a solid wall of it, and I crouch and dig my hands into the soil. When I open my eyes she is beside me again, and now there are men, and they see me staring at the shears and quickly they are removed, and here’s my husband running towards me, damn fool, and the guard is holding him back and he’s screaming. As though he knows what pain is. I will be dragged somewhere and will have to force it out. Perhaps there is another way to do it; I could hold back and not push when I’m supposed to and starve it of oxygen and keep its dirty soft skull lodged in me. Two guards hook their arms beneath my armpits and the President’s wife tries to hold my legs but I kick at her and manage to connect with her chin. She reels backwards, holding her face. Before the next contractions shunt me into oblivion I glimpse the almost-black blood streaming from her split chin.

  I should have known. He was a sick old man. Sick old men don’t just like young women – that wasn’t it after all. They like a little something extra, a bit of a twist, a cherry on top of their perversion. I hear a man shouting far off in the distance, and a woman howling faintly a long, long way away; there is a terrible weight in my head and on my eyes and a heaviness and fading.

  P A R T I I I

  1 His barber

  I have been summoned again, this time to the Residence on the hill, and now he wants to try something new: a lather and shave. It seems he trusts me enough to put a knife to his neck. I soak the blades in peroxide, sharpen them against each other, unwrap a new block of shaving soap from wax paper, trim the shaving brush of its matted ends, and put three drops of camomile oil in a bottle of distilled alcohol to dab at his cheeks and neck while they are still raw from the shaving. My assistant fusses around me with clean towels and a plastic apron. He is particularly clingy today and keeps asking me when I will be back, what time he should expect me, and should he keep me some supper? I ignore him, but kindly – he has not been the same since I was taken away and he had to hide from the looters in the backroom. I am thankful they could not force their way through and up into my bedroom; I could not deal with any more disorder. Just before I leave, I hold the tweezers in the open flame of a match to disinfect them in case the Commander wants his ear or nostril hair pulled.

  The district is quiet. It is the time of day when the heat makes movement uncomfortable and people close their windows because the air trapped inside kitchens and dark bedrooms from the morning is cooler than the hot wind now blowing in from the valley, and must not be contaminated. This wind makes me brittle and parched and although the sweat evaporates quickly from my back and forehead it brings no relief; even the juice of my eyes and the mucus in the back of my throat begins to dry up. I veer towards the seafront but the sea air just makes it worse, throwing its grit into my open wounds until I feel like a piece of salted meat hung up to mature. I welcome the pain the way only the guilty can, as if it will absolve me of my sins to be in hot discomfort. It is my brother I want to see me suffer and to watch closely how my eyes sting and my throat burns. He is haunting me. I feel his scorn as clearly as I feel my own blood beat, I sense his anger as close to me as my breath, I know his sadness the way I know hunger. I do not feel his presence beside me like a shadow – I feel inhabited by it, as if he looks with my eyes and feels with my hands. It is a figment, I know – brought on by my raging guilt and hallucinated willingly by my mind. But when he is within my head he whispers things to me from the deep insides of my ears so that they travel outwards and could be heard emerging from my lobes by somebody standing next to me. Over and over he whispers that I have failed him. It is the truth of it that is making me go mad.

  I came to the city to kill the President. I looked for a way to put my hands on him – to touch him every day as part of my job, to lull him with
my fingertips like a snake charmer hypnotizes with a flute, to pierce his inner circle of security through the deftness of my skill, perform for him an unalarming service, at its essence manual and thus reassuring. And I found that way, and put my hands on him, and every day I held the slim blade of the shaving razor to his throat and could not find the will to slit it (or perhaps will lets me off too easily, it was the courage I could not find). I feared the consequences too much to be able to take my revenge, to avenge your death, brother. I had not yet seen the detail of your disfigurement, the exact nature of the pain he ordered somebody to inflict on your face, the grotesqueness of your death, as I saw it blown up and plastered onto the window of my shop yesterday. But I suspect it would have made little difference: I am a coward, and I wanted to live more than I desired vengeance.

  Each time I finished with the President I would return to my shop and my little room and swear to myself I would kill him the next day, and then I would clean fiendishly, and purge and purify myself by curling belts and folding caps and polishing buttons and putting jars upon jars of other people’s hair onto shelves according to the shade of their strands, from jet to nut to amber to auburn to pale gold. I was not always like this – before you disappeared I don’t remember ever feeling such a strong desire to scrub at my body in the bath until I bled, the way I would after each failed session at the Residence. She thinks I worked for him because I hated you for soaking up our mother’s attention like bread in water, that I wanted to groom and pamper the President in thanks for what he did to you. But how could I hate you for being our mother’s favourite? You were my god too, and a man cannot be jealous of a god. And then there is her, your first and only lover, whose body I now feel on top of me, whose hair falls into my mouth, whose legs curl around my back to pull me closer. I plead guilty, again, but hear me out: I love her the way you did, she is the only pure thing in my life. I cannot ever replace you and I will forever carry the burden of wondering if she closes her eyes when she feels me lower myself onto her and imagines it is you, but what we have done is the only good thing I have done in my life and I ask your forgiveness but I will not give her up. And now you must leave me alone, because there is nothing else I can do for you, and no way to atone – so leave me here at the City Residence gate and do not come back to me. I beg you.

  The guard radios somebody else when I tell him my purpose, receives confirmation, opens the side gate. I walk along the avenue up to the main entrance with my tools in a black carrybag like a doctor making a house visit. The Residence gardens have not changed – the same curt flowerbeds and clipped fruit trees and circumscribed trees – of course, what would one expect? Another guard at the front entrance to the Residence looks through my bag suspiciously, picks out the razor and holds it up to the sun as if to divine its purpose. He radios somebody, is told to let me in and reluctantly holds open the heavy door for me. The foyer is cool and dark and soothing to my eyes. I climb the staircase to the first floor, catching a whiff of my own odour from the effort of my journey and hastily brushing the sweat from my forehead into my hair to disguise it. Another guard stands before the bedroom door, expecting me, holding the door open, and he follows me into the room. I am determined not to look at the bed – their bed. I know it is on my left, at the periphery of my vision. But as I approach the bathroom I cannot resist its pull on my eyeballs and I turn my head to stare at it and wonder which side she sleeps on, and whether he waits until she is asleep to make his advances or demands succour in the fog of morning. When last did the servants change the sheets and pillow slips? Does she refuse him now? Does she have a choice?

  The Commander is waiting for me in the bathroom, this time on the chair I brought especially to the Residence the first time I groomed the President. It puts his head at the level of my chest so that when he leans back onto the headrest his neck will be exposed and will give me the best angle for a close shave. There is an excitement about him today, the impatience of a small boy awaiting a gift. It is early afternoon, but he is barefoot and in his bathrobe, with a faint white stain of dried toothpaste down the front of the lapel. He barely greets me, waves to the guard to wait outside the bathroom, and almost greedily puts on the plastic apron I hand him to keep the soap from dripping onto his chest. He closes his eyes and lies back expectantly with a deep sigh before I have even laid out my implements beside the basin. I look closely at his face and neck: the stubble is blue and some hairs have curled back on themselves and tried to burrow beneath his skin, ingrown and red. Small white scars stand out beneath the stubble, past injuries, self-inflicted – all men know the horror of slitting one’s own throat with a razor, no matter how small the wound or how little it bleeds. I notice things about him that I missed the last time: the yellow grease of ear wax hidden within the whorl of his ear, grey bristles venturing out of one nostril, a mole on his chin that has been sliced off so often by shaving it has become aggressively mutant. I wet the brush, massage it in tight circles against the soap until it foams thickly, then use the same circular motion with the brush against his skin, the cream lathering and growing in volume until his cheeks and chin and neck are covered by it.

  I hear the bedroom door open and a woman’s sandals clicking across the floor – her sandals, the sound of her dress swishing against her knees. Before I can turn to the doorway she is inside the bathroom, and the guard murmurs a greeting to her then turns away, and she looks at me with her eyes bright and sad as a small bird’s.

  The Commander does not open his, but lifts an arm lazily as if to acknowledge her, and says, ‘We’re busy, darling. Did you really have to bother us?’

  She looks down at her feet, then walks quickly to the cupboard beneath the basin and kneels beside it. ‘I forgot something,’ she says, and rummages amongst the bottles and vials and boxes. ‘I’ll be quick.’

  I watch her hands as they search, so delicate, so assured. And then I see them: six new wounds on the inside of her left arm, raw and fresh, identical to the scars on her right, a sick symmetry of pain. The circles of flesh are raised and blistered. In places the wet scab has split and released clear liquid. She has not dressed them – they are unbandaged, untended, infected. She looks at me suddenly, closes the cupboard, and leaves the room empty-handed. I hear her opening a drawer in the bedroom. The Commander still has not opened his eyes.

  It is then that I lift the blade from beside the basin and split open his neck like a soft fruit until I reach his oesophagus. The blood seeps more slowly than I expected into the white foam and his head slumps forward until his nose rests against his sternum; his lips are pressed to his own collarbone. The foam is now frothy and pink.

  I pack up my utensils carefully, put each one in its proper place in the bag, rinse the knife, turn on the shower, and close the bathroom door quietly behind me.

  ’Showering,’ I say to the guard, and he nods and looks bored and wanders out onto the balcony. I walk slowly towards her, to where she sits at the edge of the bed, lift her left arm, turn it, kiss each wet wound softly, then take her hand and lead her gently out of the room. She looks back once, towards the bathroom, but grips my hand. I feel nothing but conviction. They are all the same, these men, and it is best to nip them in the bud.

  2 His portraitist

  I was not allowed into the room while my wife was in labour with our child. The guards let me wait outside the door, but the sounds of her agony fought their way beneath it and made me want to tear my ears from my head and rip my own stomach open if it could only ease her pain. The President’s wife was let in to be her midwife, with a napkin held to her chin that my wife had split open in the throes of her pain. She gave me a dark look as she passed me – the first time she has looked at me with anything but lust in her eyes. The thought that I had ever let her touch me, that our bare skins had ever slid across each other, made me sick. The labour took a day and half the night. The guards told me to sleep, but how could I while she moaned like a sick animal so close to me, thinking as each scream
faded that I had done this to her? I glimpsed her once, when the doctor called for more hot water and the President’s wife opened the door to receive it from the guard. She was lying curled up like a baby on the bed, mimicking the position our own child was in, with her knees drawn up to her stomach and her eyes closed and her mouth set in such grim determination I barely recognized her. The doctor was trying to swing her legs down and open and place her feet against the bottom of the bedstead, but she only clenched them more tightly together. It was only then that I began to worry about the child. Until then I had thought only of my wife, and longed for her pain to be over, whatever the consequences, but I saw the panic in the doctor’s face and fear for my child became a dull thudding in my gut.

  Night fell slowly. I felt the dusk’s beauty as an insult. I could see the rose bushes glowing and the statues’ shadows as they thinned and I saw my wife lying on the grass on her back with her legs in the air, stretching, and my love for her made me promise all kinds of things to myself, things I would never do again if she could only survive this, things I would do for her every day if she could endure. When the light had faded and the statues loomed like threats in the blackness I am ashamed to say that I would even have promised my firstborn to anybody who asked for it, if it would have guaranteed my wife’s survival. There is a crippling desperation to being a man when a wife gives birth. I did not realize how low I could be forced to stoop – that I could promise such an unnatural thing, to hand away my own flesh in a dank deal with the spirits of my mind. And then it wailed, a rattle-blood cry, a howl to the moon. I would never have believed a child that had just been through such trauma could have the lungs to yell its way into life like that.

  The President’s wife came to the door and spoke through it: ‘It’s a boy. She is fine, just exhausted. Go to bed now, you cannot see them until the morning.’