Blood Kin (11 page)

4
   
His barber’s brother’s fiancée

This morning my husband had already left the Residence by the time I woke up. Sleep lay heavily on me, an almost physical force pinning me to the bed, and I had to throw it off like an attacker and drag myself to the bathroom, feeling wounded, but briefly grateful that my husband never leaves the toilet seat up, as I’m entirely capable of sitting down without looking and feeling the hard, cold porcelain bowl hit against my bones instead of the flat safety of the seat. The day’s beauty revealed itself through the bathroom windows, an oppressive beauty, demanding some kind of worship of me, and left me feeling, once again, vaguely guilty. I dressed and went down to breakfast to find the Residence bustling with servants and party officials, all of whom greeted me ceremoniously. I know it will be all too easy to become soft here, to start to expect things: in the dining room, breakfast was laid out for me, a myriad of choices. As I ate, the swinging doors into the kitchens opened to reveal the chef, whom I was glad to see and invited to sit with me. He told me the kitchens were almost destroyed from looting, but slowly he was piecing things together again. He was perky and solid; the move to the city had blown new air into him like a blow-up toy. He stole a glance at my arm as I ate grapefruit.

I’ve spent the day walking through the Presidential District, watching people, seeing how shop owners have improvised with broken windows or missing doors so that they can keep trading despite the wreckage, and the mood is upbeat; groups have gathered under the few intact trees to share stories and borrow tools. I look at my reflection in a large, unbroken shop window, pretending to look at the wares behind it. My slimness always takes me by surprise; I suppose because of my height I don’t think of myself as small, but it is pleasing to see my narrowness: my body promises ascetic pleasure, not full-bodied. Somebody from within the shop stirs, thinking I’m interested in buying, and I change my focus and look beyond my reflection and into the shop.

A young man, a boy really, emerges at the door to my left and says, ‘I’ve never done a cut for a woman before… but I’d be happy to try.’

I look at the storefront: ‘BARBER’ it says, in thick gold letters. I look at the boy again, and he looks back at me open-faced – I don’t think he meant to offend me. I know this must be the barber’s shop, my barber’s shop. He said it was close to the Residence and that his assistant would probably still be hanging around it, unsure what else to do. I lift my hand, release my hair from its clasp, and follow him into the shop.

It is dark inside, and one can observe passers-by unnoticed – he must have seen me looking at myself. There are no wares in the windows other than a few sideways-sprouting potted plants, and the shop is tidy but bare. I can see that things have been pulled off the walls and not yet replaced and many of the bulbs embedded around the mirrors have burst their filaments or been smashed; others flicker in and out of consciousness – my reflection jumps out then recedes. The assistant wheels a high red chair to me and motions for me to sit down. He has a spray bottle filled with liquid and from a jar of milky water he lifts a pair of scissors with long blades and a thin-toothed comb.

‘I would wash your hair first normally,’ he says, nervously screwing the spray tip back onto the base, ‘but the basin’s cracked.’

I look over my shoulder at it and see that the crack has branched out like a lightning rod, splitting the basin into small shards that are still clinging to each other. He whips a plastic sheet over my front and ties it too tightly at my neck. The first squirt misfires and he hits me in the eye with the spray and then agitatedly wipes around my eye with a small towel, as if he’s hoping I won’t notice. A fine mist forms around my head as he works, and I feel my hair pull gently on my scalp. Each time the fickle light bulbs illuminate, the mist becomes gold. He begins to pull at the strands with the comb, but my hair knots around it and he curses under his breath.

‘I’m not used to hair this long,’ he says, embarrassed. ‘Men’s hair never knots.’

I smile at him in the mirror, then wince as he pulls at the comb. ‘Is this your salon?’ I ask, between tugs.

His eyes flicker at my reflection, as if he’s trying to see if he can trust me. ‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘The owner went missing during the… um…’ He trails off, unsure what to call it.

‘The coup?’ I offer.

He nods silently, frowning with concentration.

‘What’s he like, the owner?’ I ask as he attacks another knot.

‘He always treated me well,’ he responds. ‘I started off just sweeping and cleaning, ordering stock, that kind of thing, but then he taught me some things and let me work with customers when he wasn’t here, when he was up at the Res…’

He stops abruptly, catching himself, and glances at my reflection again, to see if I’m listening.

‘Was he good at what he did?’ I ask, ignoring his slip-up.

He has managed to get my wet hair into long, separate, knot-free strands and is now brandishing the scissors. His face lights up.

‘Men came from all over the city to him. He didn’t turn anybody away. Sometimes there would be a queue out onto the pavement.’ He points to my hair. ‘How much?’

I shrug. ‘Just a trim. Straighten it out.’

He begins to snip, not in layers, but straight across the edge of my hair, using the comb occasionally to measure the next cut against the one he just made. I let him work in silence. In the mirror I see a man pause outside the shop, peer through the window and then rummage through his pockets. Not finding anything, he keeps walking.

It still makes me uncomfortable to have my hair cut by someone other than my mother; to have a stranger perform a task that is so intimate – cutting the very fibres that grow from your head – is somewhat vulgar to me, distasteful. I always wonder how people long ago could let their servants bathe them, scrub their backs and pour clean, hot water over their naked bodies to rinse afterwards. Once a hairdresser pointed out that I had a patch of dry scalp near my hairline, and I was so indignant that I never went back to her – she had broken the unspoken contract never to make a judgement of me when I was at my most vulnerable, letting a stranger look at my scalp. My mother’s haircuts were unpredictable (I never knew what my hair would look like afterwards), but they were safe because she wasn’t a stranger. After she died I tried to teach myself to cut my own hair but it made me too sad and I would end up staring at myself in the mirror and crying. Not for long, because crying is not designed for doing alone, and tears soon dry up unless there is a witness to them.

They were simple people: my father was a fisherman like all the men in the village and my mother was a fisherwoman, unlike all the women in the village. She’d been doing it for years before they got married, but she wasn’t militant about it; she didn’t demand to be allowed to fish, she was simply too good at it for them to refuse her, and meek enough that they couldn’t feel threatened. She and my father always worked on separate crews after I was born, just in case, but that one day his crew was desperate for another member and she took a chance and went out with them. They drowned together; the survivors said that they were last seen clinging to each other in the water. It probably made them sink faster, the double weight. I expected that losing them would make me stronger, that I would grow hard and self-reliant with time, the way wood eventually becomes stone-like with age, but instead it created a need in me for a man, just one, who would make me his first priority; friends weren’t good enough – they had obligations to too many people. A lover alone could ward off the loneliness enough to let me function, to venture out into the world.

My fiancé, the barber’s brother, was my first lover. The most difficult time of the day for me after my parents drowned was the early afternoon, those no-man’s-land hours after lunch, when the light is too stark for shadows, and drowsiness made me desperate. I worked from home then, making baskets and decorated bags for the market, and he would come back to my flat after he’d eaten at home, telling his mother he had to return to the docks. I depended on him coming; it was always such a relief when I heard him let himself in at the door and come straight to me as I lay on the bed. We wouldn’t undress, it was not the time for it and we’d already let desire run its course during his morning visit. We simply lay there and I would beg him not to let me fall asleep because my grief fed off afternoon sleep and I would wake up disoriented and listless. He was a bulwark against my sadness. Later on, at dusk, when he had gone, I would see the indent his head had left on the pillow next to me, a small reminder of his presence, that he had been there, that somebody in the world knew about me and my life and its detail. As I’ve grown older the time of day that I find most depressing has changed; now it is the mornings, but I suppose that is not unusual – for most people waking up reminds them of things they’d rather forget.

‘How do you like it?’ asks the assistant, standing back from me to look at his handiwork.

He picks up a mirror and holds it behind me with a flourish, so I can see the back of my head in the wall-mirror. There’s nothing much to see, other than my hair ends in a rigidly straight line and already starting to frizz slightly as they dry. Something else catches my eye in the mirror, a man whose shape has become familiar, pausing outside the shop, looking at it critically, tracing a faint crack in the glass with his finger.

‘Don’t you like it?’ the assistant says, worried.

‘No, it’s fine, of course I like it,’ I say, trying to smile, stealing another look at the reflection of the man outside. The assistant follows my eyes and then turns to look at the man himself. He drops the scissors, rushes outside and throws his arms around the man’s neck, almost lifting him off the ground. He really must have believed the barber was dead. The barber smiles down at him, listens patiently as words begin to pour out of the assistant’s mouth in relief. The assistant follows him into the shop, then remembers me and falls silent. In the time it takes the barber’s eyes to adjust to the darkness of the shop, I manage to untie the plastic sheet around my neck, pull it aside and step down from the high chair. My damp hair clings to the back of my shirt.

‘Leave us, will you?’ he says, and for a horrible second I think he’s talking to me until the assistant slowly takes his wallet from the counter and lopes out of the room, stealing a backwards glance at us. The barber moves towards me, lifts me under my arms and places me back onto the high chair. He swivels the chair so that I’m looking at my reflection again in the mirror. A bulb fizzes, then blows. He stands behind me and looks for a long time at me, using the mirror as our medium, perhaps afraid of what will happen if we look directly at each other, using his reflection as a decoy so he can see if I’m going to shoot at it mistakenly or lay down my arms. There is an accusation in his eyes – one that has lingered since our first night together, that I cannot dispel no matter what I say to him. He scans my face for any sign that I am searching for someone else, perhaps blurring my eyes so that the shape of his jaw changes slightly, or that his hair curls a little less. He has shaved off his beard and he rubs the fresh stubble with his hand, as if inviting me to protest, to ask him to grow another, so that the resemblance to his brother is maintained. I notice a small mole above his lip and a faint scar at the base of his chin and will myself to remember them: they are his own private markings, they are what his body alone saw fit to do to his skin. I reach up my hand without turning to look at him, using the mirror to locate the scar, and trace it with my fingertip. I have passed his test: he swivels me around to face him, kissing me as he lifts me from the chair, and I curl my legs around his hips. He carries me to the door to the backroom, nudges it open with his shoulder, and closes it again with his foot, where the darkness is complete.

Before I leave, he says he wants to show me something, and fumbles on the wall in the dark for the light switch. A bare fluorescent bulb dangles from the ceiling, starkly outlining rows and rows of shelves, extending from wall to wall like stacks in a library. At first I don’t see what’s on them, absorbed in smoothing out my skirt to rid it of creases. I look up to see him holding out a small glass jar to me, filled with something fibrous and dark, and around me on the shelves are hundreds of glass jars, all containing different shades of the same matter.

‘These are yours,’ he says. ‘I collected them from my brother’s pillow the mornings after I knew you’d climbed through the window and slept there.’

The jar is full of hairs, thick ones that I recognize immediately as my own. I take down another jar from the shelf and find it is filled with stubble and short hair, probably a week’s worth of clippings from the shop floor, swept up and bottled.

‘Good thing nobody got in here,’ he says, surveying the shelves. ‘Can you imagine what it would look like if they had?’

5
   
His chef’s daughter

My mother always spoke about making love in rapturous terms. She was first obliged to tell me what it was when I was five and went to find her when I heard the telephone ringing late at night. My father thought I was an intruder and jumped up naked from the couch in attack mode, and my mother quickly put on her dressing gown and steered me back to bed, promising they would explain everything in the morning and hoping I would forget all about it. At first light I arrived on their bed, woke them, and demanded an explanation. After they’d told me that they were ‘revealing their true love to each other’ I cried bitterly, thinking that I wasn’t good enough for them and they were betraying me by making another baby. My mother told me that for years afterwards she was worried I would be scarred for life by the experience of seeing my father jump up naked, ready to punch me.

But she never told me that sex can be for fun, or for pleasure, or that it can be a tool of manipulation, or that it can be a way to mark important moments in your life that have nothing to do with the other person. I had to find all that out for myself. Who it was with the first time wasn’t important – it was all about me. I cried afterwards and he thought that he’d hurt me, but they were proud, self-indulgent tears. My mother didn’t know for years afterwards; by then her radar must already have started going haywire, because she certainly knew instinctively when I got in the car after my first kiss at a party, my cheeks burning.