Blood Kin (10 page)

I spent time at the President’s Summer Residence years ago, when my father was still obliged to cook for him on holiday. It is perched above the vineyards in the valley, a child’s dream with its courtyards and passages and sculpture garden. My mother and I were terrified to meet him, utterly intimidated. The first day he and his wife invited my father and mother to lunch with them, a generous gesture it seemed, but my mother suspected it was designed to boost the President’s wife’s ego more than her own. She said to me, ’She is going to rub my face in my inferiority the way you rub a puppy’s nose in its own shit,’ and she didn’t want to get dressed for the lunch because she didn’t know what she was going to say. We sat in her bedroom, like two naughty children, and she locked the door so my father couldn’t come in and drag her out, but as soon as he had abandoned her she began to feel guilty and put on the red dress she knew he liked and painted her lips and ventured out to the dining room. I heard the murmuring and scraping of cutlery on crockery stop in its tracks for a few seconds, presumably when she appeared at the doorway, and then continue as before, at a slightly higher volume because of the effort of pretending nothing had happened.

My mother and I would go for long walks down the winding road to the valley base, and wander between the rows of grapevines. I tasted wine for the first time there, at one of the vineyards, which was almost as momentous an occasion as my first kiss – my stomach burned and my head grew hot and my mother laughed at me all the way home because I had the hiccups.

My father never let me sit in the Summer Residence kitchen to observe him while he was working, but I spied on him several times, to try to understand what kind of magic he was doing in there with all those strange utensils and live creatures; usually he caught me and I would get a hiding and run to my mother, who would look at my father like he was a monster, and that would make my attempt worthwhile. The President and his wife were hopeless with me. I was a precocious little child, already full of big ideas and deep thoughts, but they would converse with me as if I were an imbecile. Once I bumped into the President in the sculpture garden; he had been watching me, silently, and I had been so immersed in pretending the sculptures were alive that I’d backed into him and screamed when he moved, thinking one of the statues had come to life. He looked at me strangely, bent down to my eye level, and said with a pause between each word, ‘Do… you… like… ice… cream?’ I ran away, more because I was offended by his question than from fear. His wife insisted on giving me a hug each time she saw me, and she would press me into her bosom and leave make-up on my clothes. When I grew older, I regaled the other children in my class with these stories of my intimacy with the President, and they gazed at me impressed. It created a definite aura – something so effective it was almost visible, like a halo – and I milked it for all it was worth; it was the most effective weapon in my arsenal in the war with other girls to attract boys.

I’m skirting the issue, but there were other children there too. The President’s kids, two of them: a girl who was years younger than me and a boy who was years older. Five years older. Come to think of it, the best evidence anybody could present of the President’s capacity for cruelty is his son, who must have learned it from someone. I know he’ll be somewhere safe – like my father, he is doggedly committed to self-preservation – but that doesn’t stop the need I feel for him burrowing its way into my gut like a parasite.

My mother stirs, finally, and asks me for some water, very politely, like I’m a stranger. It’s time for me to start drinking too.

3
   
His portraitist’s wife

I can’t deny I’m a magpie; I’ve always loved shiny things. Even when I was little my mother said I used to pick up anything in the street that gleamed and she would have to wrench my hand open to throw it away. I could spot a dropped coin from metres away. My favourite was the glimmering grains in the pavement concrete – I don’t know what they were, bits of glass that got mixed in with the concrete perhaps; at night the streetlights would make them dance as I walked and to my mother’s horror I would squat on the pavement and scratch at them, believing I could take them home. My grandmother had a wooden box full of jewelled buttons that I would spend hours polishing with a handkerchief and laying out in long, magical rows. So it was only natural that I moved on to bigger, better shiny things as I got older. Real jewels and rare metals, and crystal too. All my lovers knew they had to keep the magpie in me satisfied. And then I met my husband and renounced publicly all things glittering. But my father secretly kept me well stocked with my heart’s desires, and I still maintain it was worth it for the look on my mother’s face when she first met my husband at one of his exhibitions. The masterpiece was the shattered fragments of a raw egg that he had dropped from the tenth floor of a building onto the pavement below. My family was his only audience.

I don’t think about him much, even though I know he’s under the same roof. He made a fool of himself last week, calling down to me while I was exercising in the sculpture garden. He wants me to share this baby with him; ever since I fell pregnant he has been niggling away at me to include him, but it is none of his business, that’s how I feel. He had all kinds of tricks to try to feel a part of it: stocking the fridge with champagne, buying lemons, making hundreds of useless sketches to present me with when I’ve popped it out. After I told him I was pregnant, he observed me even more closely than before. I’d grown used to his constant scrutiny – not critical, but worshipping: smelling clothes I’d left behind on chairs, getting a jolt to his heart if he recognized my silhouette in the car in front of him, gazing at me from the bed with love in his eyes even when I was doing something ablutionary, like plucking my eyebrows. But he really turned it up a notch after the baby was announced and it threw me; I would turn around in the bath to find him staring at me silently, or wake in the middle of the night to see him watching my belly rise and fall in the dark. Before the baby, early in our marriage, I felt it was the kind of attention I deserved, that he was the only man who grasped my true worth, and I thrived under his gaze. I would even let him draw me naked. But there was something infantile about his obsession that made it quickly become tiresome.

There is a calm that comes from thinking only about oneself; I would venture so far as to say it is the only true freedom. I discovered that early on, encouraged by my mother’s good example. Self-devotion – and by that I mean devotion to oneself – takes time to perfect, like all skills worth developing, and requires extreme discipline. I am grateful for the time I invested in the process now – in this situation it stands me in very good stead. I am not in the least bit concerned about my father or mother and their fate after the coup; they’re either lying murdered in their country house or they’ve flown their private jet out of the country and resettled in one of their meticulously decorated overseas houses. My mother was the type to fill a house with invaluable artwork and priceless furniture even when she had a small child (me) and then to lock me in my room as punishment if I destroyed anything accidentally during a slumber party. She never cooked a single meal – we had cooks, but she hardly used them; we would meet at a restaurant for most meals. She has an unfortunate stutter – it’s rumoured as a result of a childhood trauma, but she’s never told me about it – so despite her excellent breeding the only man who would marry her was my father, who was compensating for his disfigured face (an accident with hot oil when he was a child) by pursuing power as if it promised him deliverance, and perhaps it has, if they’ve murdered him.

The President’s wife is in a room down the corridor; she is allowed to visit me every few days and bores me witless. It is unfortunate that we share the same name because she thinks it gives her the right to expect intimacy with me; she’s always trying to tell me secrets, whispering them conspiratorially even though nobody is listening, and then looking at me greedily when she’s done, expecting me to tell her mine. She dissolves into tears every time she mentions her husband, frets about her children even though they are safely ensconced overseas, asks me repeatedly if I think she’s looking old and then disappears into my bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. She pulls at various lobes and rolls and dangling bits so that her face smooths out and then when she lets go her skin creases like a discarded glove. I asked if she’d been allowed to see her husband and she said that she had, and then pulled her face into its coarse, secretive look and asked if I’d been allowed to see mine.

‘I chose not to,’ I said, just to shock her, and it worked.

She put her hand to her breast, said, ‘Has something happened?’ and then stared pointedly at my stomach.

I didn’t expect to feel this way about the child. I hated how pregnant women at garden parties would bond over the minutiae of their bodily functions as if they were a different species from the rest of us, and I imagined it would make me feel invaded, the baby like a tapeworm curled in my stomach, feeding off me. Instead, it felt like I was feeding off it, that it was my own private regenerator: my hair thickened, my skin glowed, my fingernails grew more robust; it even changed the way I slept so that my dreams were full of beautiful, restless detail. As soon as my stomach showed, women looked at me with quick envy and men couldn’t take their eyes off me. It is a strange, public trial, being heavily pregnant, being forced to walk around with proof of your sex act before you, visible to the world. Most of the time you can only guess what – if anything – other people are getting up to, but in those few months of exposure you know everybody knows what you did, and for a different kind of woman, not used to that kind of scrutiny, it must be excruciating. I suppose your skin betrays you too, in the end – it gives you away, despite your best efforts – but it discloses the dirty truth of what is about to happen to you (death) whereas pregnancy tells the seamy truth of what you did a few months before.

I think the problem will come when it is old enough to speak. My mother believed I was born evil and had to be made good through severe discipline and by not paying me any attention so that I wouldn’t think I was entitled to anything, not even her love. She would drag me along with her to tea parties or committee meetings and leave me outside to play on my own in the garden, like a domesticated animal, where I would scratch around to find wild fennel to suck on like a sweet, or I would dig up bulbs and try to eat them like apples. My father says she was wonderful with me when I was a newborn – she loved that stage and craved it afterwards – but he refused to have another. She loved my wordless snuffling and simple needs, but it scared her when I grew old enough to talk, not because I could talk back, but because I might decide independently that I didn’t like her; so she acted first and decided she wouldn’t like me, and saved herself a lot of hurt. My father marvelled at me, and still does; not at the kind of person I am or at the things I’ve done, but at my intact, unmarked face – I think he didn’t fully believe that his deformity could never be passed down to me, and he would often call me over to his side when I was small, hold my face up to the light and turn it from side to side.

He gave me an early appreciation for aesthetics. My work later on, as a food beautician, was more about appearances, which is a perversion of aesthetics: making something seem what it is not. I fell into it – nobody decides to be a food beautician – but immediately liked the duplicity that is its basis: soap foam had to be scooped on top of beer, vegetables had to be lacquered, raw meat had to be sprayed brown (when cooked, it looks too dry and shrivelled for a close-up), plastic had to be melted to form cheese strands with just the right consistency. It was a world I could control and manipulate, that required meticulous attention to detail and an eye for deception. My husband took it far too seriously, told me that I was an artist like him, that the only difference between us was that the President wanted the truth and my boss wanted anything but. I didn’t need to work – despite the fallout over my marriage, even my mother wouldn’t have dared to question this right to leisure – but it amused me, got me out of the apartment and let me spend time on trivial details that comforted me with their smallness.

I think I did once love my husband, right at the beginning. I say this as if I’m an old woman looking back on the vastness of my married life, but I feel that old sometimes, and I know what it’s going to be like before it even hits me. It might just be the lumpiness of pregnancy, the dragging, the slowing down, or the fact that you age twice as quickly once you’re married. After the initial bloom of it, the thrill of using those new words, ‘my husband’, it began to feel like I had hit a dead-end, ploughed straight into a solid wall, a dread sense of the complete shutting down of all possibility. From the earliest years of girlhood, it had been the dominant mystery in my life – whom would I marry? And when? – and suddenly it was solved, overnight, and the unseen force that had propelled me onwards all those years wilted. I think that’s why people stop caring when they get old: there are no more mysteries to solve; you know what job you’ve chosen, whether you’ve had children, how many, girls or boys, what their names are, what childbirth felt like, where you’re living, how much money you earn, who your husband is, what he does, how often he makes love to you, whether your face wrinkled at the eyes or the mouth first. And then you get old enough to start putting pressure on younger people to solve their mysteries, because deep down you want them to suffer the same slow creep of boredom that you did.

The Residence is quiet now. Most people seem to have left, or been moved. There is no sign of human presence around me except for the guard who sometimes coughs outside my door on his rounds. It is just me and this child within me who must know that it is almost time for it to emerge into this sick, sad world and fight to have its way.