Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  I hugged the guard, and he pulled away from me awkwardly and shifted his feet. I ran into the rose garden and rolled on the grass with delight and climbed on top of one of the statues and leapt from it into the darkness, and cried and wept and laughed until the guard pulled me up and told me to go back to my room. My back was wet with dew and my hand began to bleed from the rosebush thorns and my ankle felt strange from the way I landed and even my kidneys began to pulse their old warning, but I felt none of it as pain until I woke this morning in my bed and noticed the blood smears on my pillow and felt the thud, thud of my thickened ankle and the tension in my kidneys. And then I remembered I had a child, a tiny new baby boy, and it was rapturous to lie there with that precious, warm thought in my head and let my mind suck on it like a sweet under my tongue.

  I washed ritually before leaving the room this morning, as a private tribute to my wife. I wanted to cleanse myself of all my past sins and soaked in the bathwater for a long time to soften my pores so that they would release all their grime. The water was grey when I let it out. I combed my hair, trimmed my fingernails, shaved, and put on my last clean shirt. As I walked along the corridor overlooking the rose garden, I looked down and saw the bush I had damaged in my leap from the statue, and the grass I had flattened with my back. I walked slowly down the stairs, admiring the pattern of the iron banister the sun threw on the wall, and along the passageway to her door. Several guards were posted outside and stiffened when they saw me coming. One of them told me I could not see her in her bedroom, that I was to wait in the room where I painted the Commander’s portrait and that she and the child would be brought to me there.

  I have been waiting for over an hour in this room. The couch where I sat beside the President has been pushed against the wall, and several chairs have been brought in and placed in a semicircle around it, as if expecting an audience. I cannot understand why I have been forced to wait here to see her and the child. I hate thinking of her having to climb the stairs with the ache that she must have between her legs – surely she is weak and wounded and should be allowed to rest. The room is stuffy; the windows are closed despite the rising heat outside. I pull back the curtains and unclasp the latch and slide open the window, but there is no wind today to bring cool relief. The air hangs still and obstinate just outside the frame, refusing to move, and the valley shimmers colourlessly in the heat.

  I hear voices and go to the door impatiently. The President is being led by three guards down the corridor towards me, his hands bound in front of him, his jowls hanging as low as a wolf’s, his head droopy. He does not look at me as he shuffles into the room, nor when he is made to sit on the couch against the wall. The guards pay me no attention and ignore my questions. I start to feel dizzy, like a dog chasing its own tail, and go to the window again to breathe more deeply and try to slow my heartbeat. Fear grips my entrails again – they are already bruised from last night’s desperation, but the new fear is relentless; something is going horribly wrong, there is an arena being set up here before my eyes and I know I am going to be asked to witness something horrific and I feel sure it will involve the child. One of the guards stands next to the couch, the other slumps into one of the chairs facing him, the third leaves the room. More voices. The sweat is collecting in the small of my back now, my pulse is racing, the veins on my hands and arms are engorged.

  The President’s wife is led into the room, and as she sees her husband she pushes the guard away and stumbles to him and kisses his face and skull and puts her face in his lap and cries. He does nothing – he barely looks at her – and the guard pulls her off and makes her sit in one of the chairs facing the President. She blows kisses at him through her tears and whispers endearments to him, but he does not even raise his eyes.

  The third guard closes the door and clears his throat. ‘The Commander wanted to be here today,’ he says, glancing at the President. ‘But it seems he has been tied up in the city.’

  He pauses, looks slightly uncomfortable. I watch the sweat marks forming beneath his armpits, spreading against his shirt. Then he opens the door. My wife is standing outside, holding our baby. The child is naked, and she is barely clothed, in a nightdress that is transparent in the morning sun, and her nipples have leaked onto the front of the dress. I start to run towards her, but the guard steps in my way and holds me back, and as she takes an unsteady step into the room, the baby begins to squeal its hunger.

  I stop struggling and watch her walk slowly towards the President. Her face seems fleshless; her eyes do not seek me out. She reaches him and kneels before him, her knee bones cracking against the hard floor, and lays the baby in his lap. I see its face for the first time: its forehead is vast, its eyes are too close together.

  ‘Your son,’ she says to him, then she spits in his slack face.

  3 His chef

  I told him anyway, even after what she let me do to her in their bathroom; I told her husband what she and the barber had been up to, lurking in the bushes, seamy looks, sly desires; that she would come home smelling of him and corrupt their sheets with his stench. He had no idea – how he could have missed it is beyond me, but perhaps my sense of smell is more acute after so many years of infidelity. I can always smell another man on a woman, beneath the soaps and lotions and perfumes they use to mask it. That barber was too quick for him, it seems – but not quick enough, however. The guards outside rounded the two of them up like a pair of startled cattle, hustled them into the back of a van and drove them to the old revolutionary graveyard in the mountains. I gave particular instructions for them to be killed in just the fashion his brother was. I like the symmetry of it.

  Why they left through the front door and walked straight into the trap confounds me – if the barber knew of the Commander’s plan to capture him, and killed him because of it, why did they not escape through the back? There were no guards there, and she would have known the way out. The Commander’s guard only realized what the barber had done hours later, when the Commander’s shower had seemed to go on for ever, when the steam was so thick in the bedroom he could barely see his own hand before his face, and he risked all censure and opened the bathroom door cautiously, despite receiving no permission to enter. My men acted quickly to stem any protests, but there were not many, just confusion. It was worth the trouble it took to gain their loyalty these past months. They knew the Commander favoured me, that I had been his eyes when he could not see; they liked that I had no previous political experience (they are ignorant of the tyranny of an executive chef in his kitchens), that I would bring attention to detail (the exact placement of garnish on a plate) and respect for due process (mincing, grating, blanching) to the position. It has been a smooth transition.

  I’ve moved into the master bedroom already, and the bathroom has been mopped and bleached, and the balcony door has been left open to air out the room, but I asked that the sheets not be changed. I wanted to sleep for just one night on her side of the bed, with my nose against her pillow. I am sorry to lose her, but she would not have taken kindly to my betrayal, and, in time, there will be others – other women, other betrayals.

  My daughter was still here when it happened. She had come to find me at the Residence, pretending to be searching for work. I sent her back to the home when the Commander’s body was discovered, fearing violence, but it turned out to be an unnecessary precaution and I sent word for her to pack her bags and leave her mother in the home (the bill will be paid) and arrange her things in the bedroom furthest down the hall from mine, with the view of the seafront. I have promised her that her little lover can move in here too, if we can find him – the President’s son. She was horrified that I knew about it, but I didn’t read her diary for nothing. It will take some explaining to my men, but he can always pretend ignorance, shock, horror, and so forth, about what his father did – the children can usually get away with it, and my men will accept it and he can move in and they can continue their strange affair under my roof. It amuses me that she be
comes more like me each day.

  She moved into the Residence today. When I saw her I could sense she was trying to restrain herself, to withhold some emotion, but she failed and ran towards me with tears streaming down her face, and jumped into my arms with her hands around my neck and would not let go. She tries so hard to hate me, to deny to herself that we are more similar than she would like, but there is too much of me in her to resist it. She sobbed into my shoulder for a long time.

  I felt such tenderness for her suddenly and I remembered the weight of her head against my neck when she was a tiny baby. It was a shock to me to have a baby daughter: I was surprised at how sorry I felt for all the terrible things I had done to women in my life – they were baby daughters too, once, and their fathers had held their soft heads against their necks and wished feverishly to protect them from all harm, if only for a moment – and I had paid their wishes no attention and used them in ways to make a father’s blood run cold.

  The compunction didn’t last long. In this kind of place, it rarely does.

  Huge thanks to my editor, Sarah Castleton, and to Toby Mundy, Karen Duffy and Daniel Scott at Atlantic Books. I’m also deeply grateful to Sarah Chalfant, Charles Buchan and Edward Orloff.