Blood Kin (14 page)

My husband makes for the trapdoor opening, pulls a step-ladder from the shadows, places it beneath the door, then grabs my hand and tells me to climb. I manage to use my arms to pull myself onto the farmhouse floor and my husband follows, and lets the trapdoor slam shut. Muffled, I hear the son begin to laugh, slow and luxurious laughter, designed to ring in our ears. My husband crawls to where I’m lying on the floor, rolls me over so that our weight is directly above the trapdoor, fits his body into my back, lifts my dress and rubs my stomach in small circles with his free hand. He buries his nose in my nape, inhaling the smell of my scalp, of my faint sweat. He clings to me like an infant animal clutching its mother’s fur, as if I were balancing on a tree branch high above the ground, being swayed by the wind, bearing his weight. Is it possible to shake off the child on your back? Would it have dug its claws into your fur too firmly to fall? Would it pull you down with it in its terror?

7
   
His barber’s brother’s fiancée

My father’s hair thinned early. One of my first memories is watching my mother massage olive oil into his scalp, believing – almost religiously, since she did it every evening – that it would slow the relentless retreat of his strands. It didn’t, and by the time I was old enough to ride on his shoulders it was difficult to get a grip on his smooth scalp, residually oily from years of massage. I don’t think he complained, though: I would watch his face closely while my mother stood above him, thinking it was some kind of ritual that all parents had to perform. He would close his eyes while she kneaded his head, keeping her fingers in one place as she moved his loose skin against his skull. He particularly liked his hairline being rubbed – as it faded, she would move closer and closer up his skull, but at the beginning his hairline was just above his forehead and she had to stand in front of him to get traction. The reverse ritual was that my father shaved my mother’s armpits for her; she said if she tried to do it herself she nicked the soft skin from not being able to see the blade. She would sit in the bath and he would crouch on the bathmat next to her, lather her armpit hollows and then hold each arm up in the air in turn as he slid the razor gently along her contours.

At breakfast today the chef insisted that we discuss the menu for the weekend at length, in private. My husband smirked at me across the table – he likes to watch the chef desiring me, he says – then finished his eggs and strode out of the dining room with that open-legged gait of his that is beginning to seem like a deliberate showcasing of his crotch, forcing people to acknowledge before anything else that he is a man, and a virile one at that. Last night I tried to delay getting into bed until he was asleep, but he was waiting for me like a crab in its lair, and dragged me into an embrace before I could stop him. It is terrifying that desire can rot into disgust, and so quickly too; it makes me deeply suspicious of my brain, that it could mislead me so willingly in the past, make me crave his hand pressing on my breast or probing my thighs. I wonder if all people consciously put themselves under a man or woman’s spell, and if the necessary precursor to desire is a blocking out, a suspension of disbelief, an overlooking of the things about that person that – when the spell is broken – make you wonder how you ever desired them at all. The spell can be broken even after somebody has died. When my husband first touched me, only months after my fiancé – the barber’s brother – had been buried, I was surprised he did not smell of fish. The spell was broken: I wondered how I had put up with fish-scales in my bed, on my skin, the fish-oil scent of my pillows, the salt in his hair. I must remember this, that one day I will look back at the barber and wonder how I could ever have touched him.

The chef followed me onto the balcony, where strong wind in the night had pulled a small palm from its pot. I knelt to pick it up and scoop the soil from the tiles and he knelt beside me, too close to me. His eyes searched for my scars greedily, then he took my arm and turned it to reveal the puckered circles, six of them. In the morning light the skin looked worse than usual, dark and purplish.

‘I brought something for these,’ he whispered. ‘It will help them heal.’

Without letting go of his grip, he used his other hand to dip into his apron, removing a small glass bottle filled with oil. I tried to pull away, but he gripped more tightly.

‘It will make them feel better,’ he whispered.

I began to get to my feet, desperate to wrench my arm free, and then his voice changed its tenor; it was no longer beseeching.

‘I know what you did,’ he whispered, slightly out of breath from the effort of holding me. ‘What you’re doing.’

I stopped struggling. He tentatively let go of my arm and I did not move it; it lay leaden on his lap, the scars on the inside of my forearm exposing themselves to him. He rubbed oil slowly onto them, anointing me, then he let me go. I did not know where else to go but to him, to the barber.

This time I ignore my own reflection in his shop window, where, glued to the outside of the cracked glass, is one of the posters the Party has pasted up throughout the city, on my husband’s orders. It cannot be coincidence. I have not seen this photograph before, this particular pattern of damage done to a face; it is his face – my fiancé, the barber’s brother – it is his face, but who would want to recognize it like this, who would want to attach themselves to it in any way? My husband must have hidden it from me, this photograph; he claimed there was no documentation of his death, that at least this small mercy had been granted. It is freshly applied, the glue is still wet in places, making bits of the poster translucent. I pull at the edge, hoping it will glide off smoothly, but it sticks and the thin paper tears. I put my face against the glass to peer inside. It is dark and empty, he is not yet here. Where did he say he lived? I don’t think he told me. I begin to scratch at the poster with my fingernails, ripping long shreds of it away from the glass, but not enough; it refuses to come off. A group of men further down the street look at me suspiciously, huddle more closely together, surveying the debris that surrounds them, littered down the street from the riots. I look around me frantically, spot across the street an abandoned chair with sturdy iron legs and force it against the glass; the existing crack sends out shoots, but doesn’t yield.

Somebody above me begins to shout and, afraid, I look up. It’s the barber, standing on a ledge above the shop, sleepiness banished by the violence of what I’m doing. He disappears, probably running to get downstairs to stop me. I swing the chair against the glass again and it varicoses but holds. Then he is next to me, and gently takes the chair from me, and folds me into his arms, my head turned away from the window. I feel his body stiffen as he sees the poster, but he holds me against him still.

‘Go upstairs,’ he says. ‘The stairs are through the back room.’

I obey him, tired of my own rage, and walk through the shop without looking back, aware of the bulbs fizzing around the mirror, and through the backroom where the bottled hair seems to press against the glass like large, captive spiders. Halfway up the stairway I hear the window shattering, throwing its splinters to the pavement, releasing the poster from its grip.

The barber’s room is small but ritualistically tidy. He must have made his bed after leaping from it only seconds ago; despite the urgency with which he must have known he had to act, he still managed to pull the cover straight, to flatten the pillows. The spices stacked against the wall beside the sink are colour-coded: from chilli to turmeric to saffron, down to the blue-tinged pepper. His belts are rolled into tight circles and propped in circular plastic holders, specially designed for the purpose. I pull open a drawer to find underwear folded neatly into perfect squares. Only now, seeing this, do I realize how the state of the shop downstairs must bother him, must eat away at his desire for order. I wonder if my body is pure enough for him, if my laxity about certain things bothers him, if he has to will himself not to pull my dress straight or untwist my stockings when I leave him, looking dishevelled, after we’ve been together.

‘I didn’t want you to see this,’ he says quietly, behind me, standing in the doorway. ‘The way I live. I thought it might scare you, put you off.’

I swallow and close the drawer. ‘You must have your reasons,’ I respond. ‘I’m only afraid I might not be clean enough for you. Not well ordered.’

He buries his face against my neck. ‘You purify me,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘You are my salve.’

‘As in salvation?’ I whisper back.

He doesn’t respond, but carries me to his bed and lays me upon it and the thought runs through my mind: I am an offering on a pyre, a sacrifice, soon I will go up in flames. He removes my dress, his own shirt. I notice his hand is bleeding, dripping blood onto his pristine bed cover; he notices my scars are inflamed, an angry crimson, and oily as if oozing. He kisses them softly, tastes the oil.

‘It’s just a balm,’ I say quietly, in justification. ‘A poultice.’

The face of his brother, of my fiancé, hovers above us like an apparition. I think of the poster torn to shreds by the shattered glass, or perhaps the pieces have clung to its back, a limp, heavy mosaic. The barber will want some proof that it is not his brother I’m imagining against my body. What can I give him this time, what small offering? I will give him possession, give him pity for his loss.

‘I’m so sorry about your brother,’ I whisper as he unclasps his belt.

Not my fiancé, but his brother. Put his loss first, dim my own, and hope he believes me, and it is true, at least for now: it is his face I want beside my own, his chest against my back, his feet curled beneath mine. He cries; it worked.

Before I leave, I ask to see my jar of hair again. He is dubious, worried that I find it perverse, but he does not remember that I, too, am a hoarder, or perhaps his brother never told him about my treasure-hunting. I appreciate this instinct in him, the urge to sweep up strands and bottle them; I would have taken it even further and transformed them into something: a woven floor-mat, a curtain tie-back, a wig. I am surprised to feel jealous of the women’s hair that he has collected that is not mine – it gives itself away because the long hair coils against the jar; the men’s is short and stacked. He hands me my jar and I pull out a single thick hair: how strange that this was loosened from my scalp in the course of silent desire, not wanting to wake his mother and brother, and forgotten on the pillow for this man beside me to collect the next morning in his foraging. My fiancé went grey from the shock of being captured in the mountains – surely a fibre that can change its own colour is alive? Why does wet hair freeze as hard as an icicle in the winter, but does not snap in two? Why do strands jingle against each other like metal if they are dead?

‘Do you remember,’ I say to him, ‘the bits of china in the dry earth around your house?’

He looks suddenly shifty, worried that I will forsake him for the memory of his brother.

‘I never knew how old they were, if they were newly dumped or had been exposed by the wind after many years,’ I continue. ‘I collected some of them. I once managed to piece together a whole tea cup with a delicate handle.’

He relaxes; he sees I am simply confessing my own taste for collecting.

‘I saw one of your rubbings once,’ he says shyly. ‘My brother showed me. It was a life-sized silhouette of a knight with crest and armour. From an old gravestone.’

The thrill of making those! Stealing into churches in the late afternoons, before the bustle of evening service, with a roll of cheap paper and a hunk of charcoal, and rubbing away like my life depended on it. The lines at first didn’t make sense and I would despair, but gradually the details appeared, filling out the figure: a breastplate, a spear, a scroll, pointed metal foot armour. My hands and face were black when it was done. The church disapproved, of course – they said it was equivalent to desecration – but I had each one framed and hung above my bed.

‘And your cowrie shells, he showed me those too.’

Smooth and tight as a baby’s fist.

The barber kisses me goodbye; watches me leave from the backroom. The shop is draughty now. I step through the empty window instead of using the door. On my way back to the Residence, along the seafront promenade that leads right into the Presidential District, I collect things, my scavenging instincts reawakened. It is calming, the slow process of perusal, and the streets are full of treasure overlooked by looters. The whole city has been turned into a rubbish tip to dig through; the sandy soil has been forced to loosen its clutches on the bits and pieces that have sunk into it over the years and disappeared. The concrete slabs along the seafront have been shattered, the shards push against each other like tectonic plates, revealing soiled underbellies. In one recess I find a glass bottle with the stopper intact. It is green like ice in evening light, soft and cloudy from being rolled by the sea. I wish impulsively there was a note inside it, but of course there isn’t, just a faint sweetness like an old woman’s perfume. The base of the bottle is thick, sturdy: glass and tar are liquid, they thicken at the bottom over time. Women too.

Beside the railing overlooking the sea, I see a folded baby’s pram, the old-fashioned kind with four wheels and a hood. It is upholstered in corded velvet, the pile still plush but drenched by the sea. I unfold it with force – the salt has already begun to rust the joints – and find inside the carriage a thin mattress and fronded blanket. What are babies’ heads meant to smell like? Mothers always say their napes smell milky, distinctive, like a puppy’s breath, addictively sweet. I would not know. If I were to give birth in nine months’ time, I would not know who the father was. Would a different father mean a different nape-scent?

I think about what the barber asked me when we lay together in his bloodied bed, the cover dirty and twisted. I could sense him restraining himself, forcing himself to let the pillow lie skew on the floor, to leave his clothes in a tangled puddle. He asked about my husband, ‘the Commander’, he called him. Was I in love with him? What did I see when I looked at his face? I told him the truth, that I’m afraid of him, that I’ve been afraid for some time now, even before the coup. I had not seen the President’s face up close until he was captured and put in a room in the Summer Residence, and when I saw him for the first time I saw my husband as he will be when he is an old man: haggard, greedy, lustful. At first his zealousness was attractive, but now, months after the coup, I have learned to pay attention to what he is a zealot about, and sadly, it seems it is as unoriginal as power. In turn, I asked the barber what makes him feel so dirty, so tainted. ‘What do you think?’ he replied, without archness.