Blood Kin (7 page)

‘Kiss them,’ she says into my ear. ‘Like he used to. When the wounds were fresh.’

I kiss each circle in turn and the silken circles of my brother’s mobiles flash into my mind and then are gone. She is lucky to have escaped with so few scars. She sits on me, grips my hair, digs her fingers into my beard, strokes the soft skin on my chest – all the tactile markers that remind her of him. I feel I have no choice but to let her use my body like this, to give her one more night with him. I think of my mother dying in the hospital bed with its labelled linen, saying that I mustn’t speak, that I must just sit next to her with my long hair and my man’s body, looking like him. There is no relief when I pull out of her on the deckchair and she falls forward onto me, sobbing, her tears running into my ears and collecting there warmly. She cries until sleep comes.

I wanted to work for the President, for the man who had killed my brother. I wanted to find a way to work for him so closely I could touch him daily, could have him briefly in my power. It wasn’t difficult for me to move to the city once my mother began her descent – she hardly noticed when I kissed her goodbye. We had become outsiders at the coast by that stage anyway; the crews never forgot what my brother had done and still couldn’t understand it. They thought it was frivolous to care about politics if you’re putting your body on the line every day at sea. Nobody asked me to take his place on the trawler when I came of age. So I took an early bus into the city with my suitcase tied to the rack on top amidst chickens and pockets of oranges and wooden rocking chairs and anything else that somebody was going to try to sell in the city.

The first job I found in the city was disinfecting implements and sweeping hair in a salon in the Presidential District. The barber gave me a small room to stay in above the shop, with a door out onto the roof from where I could see the Residence lit up at night. The President’s motorcade would regularly push itself through the narrow road the shop was on – seven black, shiny sharks in an unnatural school, none of them betraying the contents of their bellies. My guess was that the President always rode in the first one, unable to relinquish precedence even for his safety.

One afternoon, as the motorcade was passing, I asked my boss who cut the President’s hair. He was smug and amused by the question, and answered, ‘I do, of course. He only takes the best.’ And there it was: the chance to be close to the President, to put my hands on him. The barber went up to the Residence whenever he was bidden, which was every day, as I discovered. I had seen him leave the shop each day, for a few hours, but had not bothered to wonder about it because it was to my advantage. I used that time to practise on customers – to spray and cut and lather and shave. He didn’t mind; in fact, he encouraged it because it freed him to do his presidential duty.

What makes a barber better than all other barbers? I thought about this in the evenings, sitting on the roof looking up at the Residence, wrapped in a blanket, feeling my ambition burn in my gut. I could sense it there, like a living creature, crouched and focused. I was grateful sometimes for that dogged sense of purpose that kept me calm in a strange city in the confusion of youth. During the days in the shop, I would examine each man’s reactions to my movements. They would sit before me in the red swivel chair with its adjustable height lever, some looking businesslike, some looking sheepish. Many knew exactly what they wanted, many didn’t, but they didn’t expect pleasure, and that’s what I gave them – small, almost unnoticeable pleasures that they didn’t have to feel ashamed about receiving. I would brush my hand slightly against their necks as I fastened the cloth sheet; I would hold their jaws firmly between my hands as I stood behind them, looking at their faces in the mirror, appraising them; I would run my finger down their cheeks as I described what I was about to do. All businesslike, I must repeat – nothing obviously sensual about it – and the men didn’t know what it was, but when the haircut was over their whole bodies buzzed and they felt like a lobe of their brain had been hypnotized. Certain people have had that effect on me during my life – always somebody doing something meticulous, putting something in order. A teacher at school who made my brain tingle when she used a ruler to draw a line in my workbook; a stocktaker at the grocery store on every last Friday of the month, delicately piling tins of canned vegetables into neat rows.

I persuaded some of the men, the ones I felt could take it, to have their hair shampooed while they were at the shop, before the cutting, and I massaged their scalps as they lay with their necks slotted into the ceramic basin. I found the lumps and dips on their skulls and rubbed them – the parts that curved out or in, that revealed pleasure points. And the cutting itself – so rapid, so crisp, like brisk magic when I got it right. Word spread, men began to ask for me even when the barber was present, and then one day the barber came back from the Residence and said the President had asked for me. This was my proof that the President had eyes everywhere, that even the smallest shift in preference at the barber salon in the district didn’t escape him. The barber was gracious in his defeat, but then he had no choice: the President had spoken.

The first time I cut the President’s hair was in his own bathroom, a cavernous room with tiles stretching away as far as I could see. Two bodyguards escorted me through the Residence and then stood just outside the open bathroom door, ears pricked. There was a faint tremor in the President’s hand when he greeted me. The bathroom lights did not flatter him – I hadn’t realized he was so old. He was already smartly dressed for an evening function and he wanted his haircut to be so fresh the other men would be able to smell it, like cut grass on a warm evening. He sat on a plush armchair before the mirror, so low it made me lose my bearings briefly – I hadn’t thought to bring one of the high chairs from the salon, and it meant that everything I did that evening was hunched. I bent over him to cover his shoulders with a cloth sheet and fastened the clasp at his neck, held his jaw between my hands, tilted his chin up and down and side to side. I sprayed his hair with faintly scented water and the drops spread finely across his strands. I cut briskly, with comb and scissors, and saw him lulled by the order and rhythm of the snipping, and used a razor along the nape of his neck and at the edge of his hairline. Then I whisked off the sheet, not letting a single cutting fall onto his suit. He was pleased, and the next time he let me shave and pluck him too. It was then that I began to convert my room above the salon into my glass box. At the end of my day’s work at the City Residence, I longed for a sense of purity. I needed to purge myself of my guilt at not doing what I had come to the city to do. That’s when I started sleeping with the window open, removing street clothes before I sat on the bed, and keeping the things around me – socks, glasses, belts – in rigid order; it was part of the purging.

She stirs. The sky is slowly preparing for dawn. She lifts her head, confused, and then stands quickly when she sees my face and pulls her dress back over her hips. Her long hair has fuzzed around her face and tangled its way down her back, and each strand seems to attract then absorb light so that it is luminous one moment, black the next. Around her mouth, wine is smudged like blood. As she leaves the veranda she knocks over the empty wine bottle, propelling it on a suicide roll off the side and onto the tiles below.

I follow her to the car and get into the passenger side obediently as she fights with the ignition until the motor splutters reluctantly into life, and we drive back along the dirt road, the stars already starting to fade, winding our way out of the valley. It is the coldest time of day, even in summer: the hour just before the sun reveals itself. I look at her bare legs, bumpy with cold. It used to fascinate me that my brother could casually hold his hand on her thigh beneath the table at supper with my mother and me. I would sneak peeks sideways at them – it was such a possessive gesture, but high enough on her thigh to be more than simply proprietary, and I would blush involuntarily each time I saw it, and they would laugh at me, not knowing the cause. To me, unschooled in intimacy, it seemed more daring – more charged – than if he had kissed her passionately in front of my mother.

‘You know about me and the Commander, right?’ she says, her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I’m sure the chef told you. I’m his wife.’

Instinct makes me look at her ring finger, but there is no ring.

‘Congratulations.’ It comes out with bitterness, not what I’d intended.

She looks at me with her thick-lidded eyes showing concern, perhaps interpreting it as a younger brother’s jealousy. ‘He was in the same camp as we were. Your brother respected him deeply.’

Her long fingers on the steering wheel. Her smooth kneecap. The fat lobe of her ear. It is too much for me. ‘Who kissed your wounds when they were fresh?’ I ask. ‘My brother? Or the Commander?’

Her pity dissolves visibly, she sets her mouth and jaw and we don’t speak again until she tells me to get into the boot. This time I welcome the crawl into the cramped darkness.

13
   
His portraitist

Somebody must have fetched my old materials from my studio. The sight of these wrinkled metallic tubes, all half-squeezed, with their ends rolled tightly like slugs in distress, is not comforting. I think of the last time I touched them, the morning the President had changed colour and all the shades I’d mixed were wrong. My palette lies next to them, its surface thick from years of duty, and two canvasses are propped against the wall – I recognize them too, recognize the labour of stretching the canvas over the wooden frames and forcing staples into the spines to keep them tight.

This is the room where the President sat crumpled on the couch, photographs thrown at his feet. The furniture has been pushed aside, leaving long streak marks on the dusty floorboards – all but the couch, which is centre-stage, facing my easel. I fiddle with the bolts on the multi-jointed legs, sliding the sections together until the easel has shrunk to the right height. It is marked with accidental paint – this process always leaves a trail of evidence. My sketchbook is here too, a large and persistent reminder of all I have done wrong, and shards of charcoal lie in the groove at the bottom of the easel. Someone is familiar with my methods.

The Commander hovers at the door, uncertain for the first time, perhaps cowed by the tools of skill, of expertise, that surround me. He lopes into the room and settles himself on the couch, crossing his legs and letting one slipper dangle from his foot.

I know that a portrait is one of the trappings of power, that each one I painted increased the President’s control by a fraction; that the image of him, freshly rendered in oils, hanging in Parliament, had some value outside of itself, that it strengthened his legitimacy, and that it will do the same for this man sitting before me. The Commander’s slipper drops from his foot, revealing long, thin toes. He puts his hand into the back pocket of his trousers and emerges with a fistful of purple blossoms, jacaranda.

‘It’s not just me you’re painting,’ he says, his fist still clenched around the petals. ‘It’s us.’

The President shows himself at the open door, flanked by guards. His head is held low; his jowls have lengthened and hang uneasily. He is wearing a purple dressing gown, tied with a knot at his thick waist. He shuffles towards the couch, and the Commander stands and throws the petals like confetti above his head. A few of them stick to his hair and shoulders, attaching themselves like barnacles to a rock, and he leaves them there, slumps onto the couch and then raises his head to look at me, his jaw steeled. The Commander sits jauntily beside him. For the first time I notice that his beauty is asymmetrical, that the halves of his face will have to be given separate attention. His profile seen from opposite sides would be different, like the two-faced gods of lore.

I flip open my sketchbook to a blank page, trying not to look at the previous sketches, and with a stick of charcoal I shape them on the page. I start with the President: his face is familiar, comforting; the lines are known and expected. I can be honest with him; it is what he always demanded. Within these lines I find new signals his body has sent for imprint on his skin – wrinkles and spots and patches of dryness. All these I document. What stirs in me, as my hand follows its own instincts, is what stirred for his wife in the observatory with the burning lamps when her zip caught on her underwear: pity.

14
   
His chef

I open the freezer and remove an ice-filled plastic bottle with a red lid. On the counter is a bowl of ice cubes in fridge water; next to it the chilled pastry dough is slowly making its way back to room temperature. My grandmother would call me a cheat if she could see what I’m doing, but I’ve found a way to avoid the excruciating layering process (dough, butter, dough, butter, dough) – this batch took me just an hour last night – although I haven’t quite shaken the habit of rolling out the risen dough with an ice bottle or dipping my hands in the ice bowl whenever my fingertips become too warm. It’s not really even necessary to do it this early in the morning. Working in huge restaurant kitchens as a cog in a wheel cured me of most of my sentimental attachments to certain processes, but this one never died.

Funny the things you see around here in the coldest hour of the night. The barber wasn’t in his bed when I left the room and from the kitchen window I saw the Commander’s wife crossing the courtyard barefoot, her sandals in her hand, her back hunched with the effort of trying to be quiet. Her hair looked like it had been tied up hastily, an attempt to hide its bushiness. Hair becomes bushy when someone puts their hands in it – the same used to happen to my wife. She depended on head massages before sex; her skull had erotic receptors that the rest of her body lacked. She would nudge her head up against my neck like a cat to remind me, then writhe and purr, and afterwards her cheeks would be bright pink and her hair nest-like from the added volume of the massage. I tried it on other women too, thinking it might be a secret weapon, but they became bored after a while and redirected my hands.