Blood Kin (3 page)

7
   
His portraitist

We slept together for the first time in the afternoon. That was always her favourite time of day for sex – we would eat lunch on my balcony, drink a beer, and then lie on the bed, the heat and sleepiness in itself arousing. She didn’t want me to use any protection because she took her own temperature every morning and knew exactly when she was ovulating. She kept a small thermometer and a notebook beside her bed, and in the morning she’d sit up, her hair like a mane, and before she’d even opened her eyes she’d open her mouth and sit with the mercury beneath her tongue, waiting. Then she’d squint to look at the reading, write it down, and walk naked to the toilet. I loved how her thighs shuddered as she walked. She would stand at the basin, brushing her teeth, and mumble through the foam, asking me what I wanted for breakfast, or whether I was planning to work in the studio. I couldn’t answer, transfixed by the sight of her, her stomach separating into three bulges as she bent to rinse out her mouth. I wanted to communicate the extent of my love for her in those moments, but was afraid she would baulk at my neediness, or interpret it as something too consuming and try to resist.

One afternoon we used protection because her body temperature was a degree higher than normal, but it broke inside her; I felt the pressure give. We went to a clinic together, but I had to wait in the outside waiting room while she was let into the inner sanctum after being frisked. Security was tight. She came out after an hour, clutching a small booklet with two pills in it: one she had to take immediately, one in the middle of the night. When midnight struck, I didn’t even hear the alarm, and only woke when she shook my arm – she was on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor, searching in a panic for the pill she’d dropped in the dark. In our sleepy confusion we didn’t think to switch on the light. I leaned over the side of the bed while she scoured the floor with her hands, reaching into the gap beneath the skirting. Then she felt something and lifted it on her palm. The pill was tiny. She swallowed it and crawled back into bed and we held each other as if we’d just escaped certain death.

I’m waiting for the voices. The chef and the barber fell asleep long ago; they sleep like babies, guiltless. I have already removed the casing from the air vent above the bed. I’m trying not to think of how she looked at me from the courtyard.

‘Freedom… your life.’

Here they are. That is the Commander, I can recognize his voice now.

’Stay. power. better for everybody. Come to me then. talk about sacrifice.’

It sounds as if papers are being thrown onto the floor.

‘Have… witness.’

I hear the door slam, and then footsteps on the stairs. I hold my breath. Someone unlocks the door and a man pulls me soundlessly from the bed. I follow him docilely, barefoot down the stairs, wondering if I should have screamed to wake the others.

The Commander stands at an open door in a silk dressing gown made for a man and I remember what my wife looked like as she was taken out of the apartment. The President is shirtless, sitting on a couch in the middle of the room. It is strewn not with petals, but with photographs, hundreds of them upholstering the sides and patterning the floor at his feet. His face is broken in places, his nose swollen. He keeps his legs tightly together, his hands in his lap, and it is only as I get closer that I see that his wrists are still bound. It is dreadful to look at him, but my eyes can’t help sliding back to the sight. The man shuts the door behind me and locks it.

’Sit next to him,’ the Commander says to me. ‘Push some of those aside and sit on the couch.’

I look at the purple bloom on the President’s chest and imagine being winded by a fist, then I lift a handful of photographs and manage not to look at them as I put them on the floor.

The Commander sits in an armchair facing us. He props his feet on the coffee table between us and yawns. ‘This man sitting next to you, I want you to hand him one of the photos.’

I look directly at the Commander, feel with my left hand for a photograph without looking down, and put it on the couch next to the President. The Commander’s fatigue leaves him as I watch, the way a demon leaves a man possessed.

‘Look at the photograph.’ He pulls on his chin, fiercely coiled for attack.

Can I will myself not to see when my eyes are open? No. The man’s face in the photograph is a failed pudding, flabby and flecked with blood, his head making an obscene angle with his spine. After I’ve seen it, I turn to pass it to the President, forgetting his hands are bound.

‘Hold it for him, would you? Make his job a little easier.’ The Commander has leaned forward in his armchair.

The photo quivers in my hand – it must have a will of its own – and the President clears his throat, but says nothing. The Commander leans back in his chair, pensive. I let go of the photo and it drops with deadweight to the floor. The President lifts his chin as a warning, but it comes too late, and something connects with my torso at the level of my kidneys until they scream their trauma throughout my body. I cough and spit onto the photos pooled at my feet. I refuse to look behind me, but I can hear the henchman retreat to the shadows. All the blood in my body has left my brain, my tongue; it has been drawn to my kidneys to help them haemorrhage. I lick my lips. The pain has made me fearless. Until it passes, I care nothing about what they do or say to me.

Even pain makes me think of her. The night we spent in a run-down guesthouse on holiday, where we stood in the bath in sandals, afraid of what we might catch barefoot, and washed each other with the handheld hose. There was no hot water. I tried to warm her under the sheets by lying stomach-down on her back, pressing her into the mattress. I had a cyst on the inside of my wrist, a small lump between the veins. She’d heard that cysts can be cured if you put extreme pressure on them, so, in the dark, I held out my wrist, closed my eyes, locked my jaw, and she pressed her finger as hard as she could against the cyst. It throbbed unbearably the rest of the night, but in the morning the lump was gone.

8
   
His chef

It is Sunday. The crayfish will be crouched in their buckets waiting for me, the abalone will be tight as marble, piled on top of each other, contracted against contact, and it will take a while to soothe them. I touch the portraitist’s forearm to wake him and he starts and looks at me, hurt – he still hasn’t forgiven me for what I said about his wife. He walks like a pensioner to the bathroom, looking like he has aged overnight. I must try to avoid him or he will drag me down with him. I hear him gasp through the bathroom door, then the sound of his piss hitting the side of the bowl. He’s even started to urinate like an old man, in spurts.

I do my own ablutions when he emerges, and find myself thinking about my wife –the Commander’s questions have put her back in my mind. I hope she has survived the coup, not for my sake, but what would my daughter do without having that structure in her life, of visiting her mother every day, brushing her hair and turning her in the bed, and arranging her flowers?

That child. A few weeks ago she left her journal on the kitchen table. She had asked me for a recipe late at night – something basic, like how to make stock – and had scribbled it in the book and then gone to bed, leaving it closed on the table. Her journal began to call my name; it began to burn a hole in the table. I started cautiously, opening it at random and snatching bits of prose. Then I saw the page where she had listed names of men, three thick columns of them; men she had slept with. I stopped being cautious and read her journal like a book, from start to finish. In the morning she asked me what was wrong and said my face looked pinched and worn as if I’d heard that somebody had died in the night. I asked her if she had lost her self-respect and she knew immediately what I’d done. She asked me if I had enjoyed it, if I’d enjoyed the part about her trying to have sex in a swimming pool.

In the death throes of our marriage my wife and I became frantic lovers, like hospital patients with third-degree burns on an adrenaline high in response to the pain. She slept with me in the morning even when she knew I had been with someone else the night before. After so many years of marriage, and a child, her body had rebelled and turned upon itself. The women I chose to spend my nights with had all the usual attractions for a man of my age, and my wife understood this. She went crazy only after I left her – it was my daughter’s boyfriend who had to knock down walls in the house.

The barber is waiting for the bathroom when I open the door. He is letting his beard bloom unchecked and has avoided speaking to me since I prepared the paella (the Commander used his finger to sop up the last juices on his plate, which thrilled me). The portraitist is eating a tomato like a piece of fruit, whole, but I don’t touch my share of the bread and cheese. I’m craving fried prawn flesh, overcooked so that it begins to cream, the meat past the point of resisting. A knock on the door signals my release: it’s the same guard as yesterday, still in button-down shirt and loosened tie like a banker at the office at midnight. The portraitist and barber will stay in the room today – I did without kitchen boys on Sundays in the President’s apartment and I will do without them today.

We walk in silence to the kitchen, along the balconies that give onto the central courtyard. The Summer Residence is bustling like a hotel on a Friday morning. Men and women group in the courtyard, on benches and around picnic tables. I have not seen women here before. They too are in similar after-hours workwear – slacks and pencil skirts and sleeveless knitted tops, sensible shoes. One of them glances up at me and smiles, making me feel alive. I would like to add her to my album. I wonder if my house has been left intact, if the album is still on its shelf in my bedroom: in it I have a photograph of every woman I have pursued. It’s the old kind, with plastic sheets over adhesive backs that have lost their glue over the years, and the photos have started to escape the plastic film holding them down, to creep off the pages. This is what old age does to a man: even past conquests want to escape you. My daughter used to beg me to get it out, to tell her the tale of each woman as a bedtime story. Bedtime stories indeed. I would tone it down for her when she was younger, make each woman the heroine of our romance, give her details about their dresses and perfumes and how they wore their hair. Later she became shrewd and probing. She wasn’t content with fairytales, she wanted to know who these women really were and how I had seduced them. Her first boyfriend was regaled with tales from the album – she invited him to my place for dinner and brought out the album when I brought out the coffee. ‘Tell us the stories, Dad,’ she said. ‘Start from the beginning.’ It only strikes me now that my daughter could easily have asked if I’d lost my self-respect.

The first woman I slept with was the least attractive of them all; in the photo her knees are fat and dimpled. We skimmed over her, to get to what I like to call the model years. Two years, many models; I had just begun to grasp the power of making women feel wanted. The first woman I spotted from my car. At a red traffic light I stopped next to her and looked across, and at the next light I stopped behind her, noticed her left brake light wasn’t working, wrote down her licence number, and called up the traffic department that afternoon pretending we’d had an accident so they would give me her name. I found out where she lived and sent her flowers that evening with a note attached: ‘Your left brake light is broken. Call me.’ Within two days we had dinner plans. In the photo she is dressed in satin for a shoot.

Much further on in the album is my wife. I decided to marry her on a Saturday evening, at a dangerous time of the day when the light was so beautiful I wanted to prostrate myself and offer a sacrifice to it. I’d taken her to an afternoon movie and came out of the theatre feeling vulnerable; afternoon movies have always done that to me, something about whiling away two hours of my life in a darkened room when it is still light outside. I drove her home but couldn’t find a space right outside her apartment, so I parked further down the road and walked her to the gate, a picket fence, about knee-high, shielding a tiny garden from trespassers. I don’t remember if we kissed goodbye. I had almost reached my car when I heard her shout my name; as I turned I saw her leap over the picket fence and run towards me in her boots, and when she got to me she jumped and hooked her legs about my hips and her arms behind my neck, and kissed me with such passion I decided to marry her.

I learned about sex from animals – chickens, to be precise – like most poor boys. My mother, harried, asked me to go out to the coop to get some eggs one morning when the sun was high and I was less than twelve years old. I pushed the gate open and stood in the chicken run, to discover the cock in a compromising position with a hen. I shut the gate again quickly behind me and crouched beside them in the sunlight. He paused for a while, watching me suspiciously with one lidless black eye, then reanimated himself, setting the flap of loose skin below his chin in motion. This went on until my mother screamed from inside for the eggs, but I couldn’t drag myself away; his movements were mesmerizing. But it wasn’t the sex that made me keep those photographs of women, in fact I’ve never enjoyed sex much. When we decided to have a child, my wife had to plot ways to lure me into bed more often. One afternoon I was outside mowing the lawn, shirtless, the cut grass sticking to the sweat on my back, and she called for me, promising cold lemonade. A ruse, it turned out: she was ovulating.

The ingredients I asked for are waiting for me in the kitchen, some of them still alive. The crayfish butt against the sink wall and each other in slow motion, their long limbs finding no tenure on the metal. The prawns are grey and succulent, with foetus eyes, and the sea snails have withdrawn into their shells and stoppered them against violence. A fish has already been skinned, gutted, de-boned and quartered, its flesh pearled and pink. There is garlic, eggs, butter, herbs by the bunch, mayonnaise, olive and groundnut oil, and a sack of lemons. Basic, but seafood is best with little adornment. The man takes his leave of me. The Commander has begun to trust that I will not put ground glass in his omelette.

I will start by deep-frying the fish in a pan half-full of groundnut oil. My sous-chef used to believe it was his responsibility to start with the creatures that were still alive, to put them out of their waterless misery. It was excruciating to him that abalone had to be left for hours to relax before they were ready to die. I doubt he survived the gunshot. When they dragged me out of the kitchen, he was lying face-down on the floor at the service exit, his blood around him. I cannot say that I was glad of this, but I know that he had been biting at my heels like a small, yapping dog, hoping to tire me so that he could bring me down. The President told me one Sunday morning in his apartment, through a mouthful of crabcake, that he was ready for a change. I interpreted it as a warning and the next morning in the Residence kitchens the sous-chef could smell I felt threatened. My fear of usurpation rose off me in waves and it encouraged him.

I hold a thermometer in a cup of hot water, then dip it in the oil. It is ready for the fish. I coat each fillet in flour and pepper and slip it gently into the pan; when the pieces rise to the surface I will know they are ready. I turn from the stove to attend to the prawns. The woman I noticed in the courtyard has entered silently and is standing next to the sink, watching the crayfish. She turns to me, smiling. Her pencil skirt compacts her lower body beautifully. Her arms are bare and tapered.

‘Are you always this cruel?’ she says.

I am stirred by her. Stirred to desire. ‘They can’t feel pain. Haven’t you heard of the gutted shark that took its own insides as bait?’

‘I know they scream as they die in a pot of boiling water.’

‘Just trapped air being released from their shells,’ I respond.

She looks back down at the struggling crayfish. The fish pieces have begun to surface, browned. I take a slotted spoon and lift each one out and onto crumpled absorbent paper towel, which darkens around each oily piece. I keep my back to her, feeling watched.

‘Are you here to make sure I don’t poison the Commander?’ I say archly.

She doesn’t answer.

‘It would be easy, you know. I could forget to disembowel the crayfish, undercook the fish, use opened mussels in the soup. Don’t think I haven’t considered it.’

Her silence persists, forcing me to turn around and look at her again. She has lifted a crayfish by the carapace and broken off its feeler; it squirms and searches the air tentatively with a pincer. She finds its anus and inserts the feeler smoothly. The creature contracts. Then she pulls it out again in one movement and the intestinal tube comes out casing the feeler. The shit is green.

‘I usually wait for them to die before I do that,’ I say. ‘Even if they can’t feel pain.’

This is true. I have never disembowelled a live crayfish.

She drops the crayfish back into the sink and soaps her hands rigorously. When she turns to face me again, I see traces of some faint disappointment.

‘Did you know that crayfish have a grain of sand in their brains that gives them their bearings?’ I ask her. ‘That’s how they know up from down. A supplier told me he once put a metal filing in a crayfish’s brain, and a magnet at the bottom of the tank, and the crayfish swam upside down until it died.’

She steps away from the sink and perches on a kitchen stool near the swinging doors, the same place the two men sat the night I made paella. Her pencil skirt forces her to cross her legs. Her ankles are slim and veined and even her closed-toe shoes can’t detract from the elegance of her feet. She looks the other way, uninterested. The water is boiling, I drop the sea snails into the steaming pot, and they immediately begin to scream – at first silently, a whine so high-pitched only a dog could hear it, then descending to a moan designed for the human ear. They rattle in the pot against each other’s shells and after a few minutes they give up and their stoppers first float to the top, then sink to the bottom. When I drain them they clatter into the sink – the side that was attached to the creature is smooth, with a blue copper swirl, the other side is stuccoed and prickly.

I select a sharp knife, get a grip on a stunted boiled sea snail and slice it finely. It pares off firm and grey.

‘Where have all the women come from?’ I ask.

She doesn’t answer until I’m forced to twist my head to see if she is still in the kitchen. She has her hands above her head, twirling a sausage of hair around itself into a bun, the faint line of a muscle showing in her upper arms.

‘There are new men here too,’ she says. ‘We’ve been keeping order in the city – trying to stop looting, getting services running again.’

‘And now that’s been achieved? Does order reign?’

She pauses and tucks a wayward hair behind her ear. ‘To a degree.’

I begin to crush garlic cloves with coarse salt, pressing them with the flat of the knife against the board until they yield, then turn to paste. ‘What’s it like out there? What are people doing? Are houses intact?’

She laughs and stands. ‘You mean, is your house intact?’

I smile conspiratorially, take a frying pan down by its handle and cover the base with oil. She walks towards me and I hand her the pan, and the garlic and sea snail on a wooden board. ‘Fry this until it becomes opaque.’

She takes the handle, finds a spatula and hovers over the pan solicitously until the garlic releases its scent into the oil. ‘People are confused. Many had chosen not to know about the President’s crimes.’

I look at her inquisitively.

‘Of course you don’t know,’ she says. ‘Convenient.’

I notice small pieces of grass clinging to her back and flecking her hair. She must have been lying outside in the sun this morning.

I have the rolling pin in my hand – it is time to creep up on the abalone and surprise them with a death blow. She watches me walk the length of the kitchen towards the darkened pantry; I tiptoe the last few steps for dramatic effect and then crouch above them. Three I kill before they contract, but the last realizes what is coming and stiffens. I will have to throw it out.