Blood Kin (15 page)

I leave my hoary treasures at the base of the stairs in the City Residence. As I climb the stairs I think about the lake on the far northern border of the country, where I have always wanted to go. Legend has it there is a plane, a bus and also a helicopter at the bottom, all from tragic accidents, now slowly growing barnacles. A scavenger’s dream. I let myself into my bedroom cautiously, as if expecting someone to be waiting for me. The shades are drawn and my eyes adjust slowly. Across the bed – my side of the bed – someone has draped the same poster that I have beneath my fingernails, the head perfectly positioned on my pillow. I know my husband did this; his descent into tyranny has begun. I run to retch into the toilet bowl and find the lid is up; another man has been here, has lifted the lid to piss. Behind me in the mirror I see the chef, and I know what he has come for, and what knowledge he has to make me give it to him. He starts by kissing my inner arm slowly, one kiss for each scar.

8
   
His chef’s daughter

On their own, in isolation, each of my facial features is acceptable: if I cover my nose and mouth with my hands and stare only at my eyes, I see two perfectly fine ovals looking back at me, one could even call them sultry. If I cover my nose and forehead and stare at my lips, they are bud-like, fleshy, pink. But taken all together something is not right; as an ensemble my face is a failure, and it will only get worse with time. For a fancy-dress party a few months ago I drew exaggerated black lines in the corner of my eyes to make them seem feline, but the effect instead was an anticipation of crow’s feet and it surprised me to realize that I will become even uglier as I age. Standing at the basin brushing my teeth, I glance down at my pale, stocking-sheathed feet and think, this is what they will look like when I am dead.

The bill has still not been paid, and yesterday the manager told me he would have to kick out my mother if he does not receive payment by the end of the month, so I’m finally forced to go searching for my father at the Residence. I’ll have to pretend to be looking for work as a kitchen girl so I can at least get into the kitchens and find out if he’s still there. I kiss my mother’s forehead goodbye: she has dried food around her mouth and her chin is gristly with the beginnings of old woman’s whiskers. I can’t bear to watch her eat anymore – the sound is the worst part of it, the damp mastication. Last night she somehow got food on one of her eyebrows and in her hair. All of a sudden, I have a strong urge to suck my thumb, to find a spot on my pillow that smells gamey (of my scalp and spit and night breath) and lie with my nose against it and my thumb against the backs of my front teeth. Childish impulses, but perhaps it is from being around my mother for too long: she has reverted, so why shouldn’t I?

I walk towards the Presidential District, wondering if it will be renamed. Already it is hot and dry outside; days like this remind me of the story my mother always used to tell, of drying my freshly washed but still damp nappies in seconds by holding them outside the window of a moving car in the dead-heat of midday. It is early; the city streets are empty except for the men at the roadblocks, who lounge on the pavements smoking and make sucking sounds when I cross onto the other side of the street to avoid them. They are armed – their trousers bulge with their weapons. I regret wearing stockings in this heat, they scratch at the sweaty parts, at the backs of my knees, my feet, at the small of my back. I veer towards the seafront for the relief of the cool air off the sea. The Residence looms above the city from its perch at the summit of the hill. I used to be able to see it from my bedroom window in our last house and at night it would glitter with the hundreds of camera flashes fired off by tourists visiting for the view of the city lights from the top; all those photographs of the same thing, so many albums stuffed with the same memento.

The paragliders are up already, throwing themselves off the hill into the morning thermals, hovering about the rocky outcrops like giant butterflies. Every time I see them I almost will them to fly into the rockface or land in the sea, just to know what it would look like. I once climbed up to the ledge they jump off and suddenly came eye to eye with one of them – he, a human cocoon, hovering, airborne, and me, landlocked; it was like coming face to face with an alien creature. Things must be back to normal if they’re out again – they are like weather vanes that way; their launching place is closed off to them in times of stress, to keep people away from the Residence. The sea is two-toned and calm this morning, and the line marking the edge of the reef is crisp. Cats twine around each other at the rubbish bins along the seafront, one lurches out of a bin as I pass. The sea has washed away some of the debris left here after the looting, and the pavement is wet and dark with bits of coagulated rubbish stuck against the wall keeping out the sea.

I am longing for my lover, the President’s son, as usual, craving him guiltily, and to stave off my longing I pinch the thin skin above my knuckles with my fingernails until it bleeds. It is the places that are usually never touched that can generate unexpected pleasure, mostly just from the surprise of it: heels, the flesh between thumb and forefinger, the front-side of a thigh, the inside of an elbow, pressure put on the half-moon of a fingernail. They can also generate unexpected pain, but I can no longer tell the difference. I could blame him, of course, but it would be like blaming God for creating me, for giving me this face, these legs, this stomach. I prefer to blame my father. He is, after all, the one who gave me a taste for cruelty – although he likes to inflict and I have been trained to endure. I can’t bear to think of my lover holed up somewhere, in hiding, without me. Where could he have run to? I would know if he were dead; it would be sweet release and despair.

He is five years older than me and was still a child himself when it all began. We were in the room at the Summer Residence with the framed puzzle of a dignitary on the wall – the pieces fitted tightly, but still the man’s face seemed cracked from the hundreds of slotted joinings. We lay together on the floor of the room – there was no furniture, or it was covered with sheets – and stared up at the picture, which bothered me: why was it a puzzle and not simply a painting? I wanted to get behind the glass and pull the smirking face apart into its constituent pieces; no matter how much to the left or right I moved, the eyes followed and fixed me with their stare. I could feel his skin against mine, our arms touching, and I tried to match his breathing – I held my breath until he breathed out, then waited for him to breathe in again. He took my hand and squeezed it very tightly, so tightly I gasped, then he told me to follow him.

He kept squeezing my hand all along the corridor, across the courtyard, through the sculpture garden, and to the base of a thickly leaved, spreading tree growing closely against one of the bottom windows of the Summer Residence. He told me to climb the tree, but my fingers were numb from being gripped and I fell and shaved off a fine layer of skin against the bark. He laughed and pushed me against the trunk again, ordering me to climb. I managed to claw my way up and onto a branch, my new wound burning, desperate to please him. He lifted himself onto the branch next to me and cautiously parted the leaves so that we could see into the room through the window without being seen ourselves. At first I could see nothing but the reflection of the tree in the glass, then I saw something white moving inside the room, some kind of animal, and the animal separated into two, and I realized it was an entwined mass of naked human flesh. The President’s face came in and out of view as the mass rolled; the woman I did not recognize. I was transfixed by the violence of what they were doing. The President’s son moved his leg against mine on the branch. His breath was hot against my cheek, his breathing quickened as he watched.

‘I watch him often,’ he whispered. ‘He likes to hurt many women. He thinks nobody knows.’

A strange ticking began in the base of my stomach, a nervous pulsing, and I began to feel thirsty. The son put his mouth against my neck and bit me slowly, clenching his teeth tighter and tighter until I yelped. Then he put one hand between my thighs and with his other he dug a fingernail into the open wound on my knee, keeping his eyes on the moving flesh inside the window. If I strained my ears hard enough, I could hear the woman inside moaning from pain. I tried to be silent, proud of my resilience, proud that he wanted to hurt me. It felt good.

It still feels good; he is still my lover. I feel guilty because now I know that pain and pleasure are not meant to be paired, but it is too late to unlearn it, it has been burnt into my brain, gouged into my body. I have tried to resist him, but it is useless. In a drought, wild animals are driven mad by thirst and swarm to the sea against their instincts, drink sea water and then die a horrible death, leaving the beach littered with their bodies. I am perpetually mad with thirst for him; without him I will go even madder.

In the thick of the Presidential District the debris is denser and there are the same gruesome posters plastered against walls and windows and even nailed into trunks. The avenue slopes up towards the gated entrance to the Residence, canopied by jacarandas. I approach the security booth with my best schoolgirl walk, looking innocent and apprehensive while the sweat threads its way down my back. The guard is on edge, his radio buzzes with barked commands that I can’t decipher, but he swallows my story and radios the kitchens to ask a busboy to fetch me at the gate. While I wait he shifts from foot to foot, looks at his watch nervously, and glances at my legs. I notice my stockings have laddered badly up the back of my knee and beneath my skirt. We wait in silence punctuated by men’s quick shouted orders on his radio.

The busboy leads me through the gate and across the lawn towards the kitchen garden and then through a service entrance into the dishwashing gulley where three men stand side by side hosing food scraps off plates. One of them sees me and nudges the young boy to his side, and they both whistle and grunt at me as I pass. The busboy tells me to wait in the gulley while he fetches somebody who will interview me for a job. ‘Nothing fancy going,’ he says, ‘just peeling duty and the dishes.’ I peer through the porthole window in the swinging door into the kitchens. The room is steamy and filled with men dressed in white with plastic caps over their hair and bright red faces; with all the banging and clanging it sounds like a factory assembly line. My father would not be back here, though, unless to scream at somebody in fault.

I clear my throat and shout at the dishwashers above the noise of the plates being piled in the sink, ‘Who is executive chef now?’

The oldest man, wrinkled as a walnut, hears me and shouts back, ’Same as before.’

Relief flows into my blood and through my veins, not just for my mother’s sake, but for my own. I have missed him, despite myself, I am still his little girl. I knew he would survive.

A harassed man pushes at the swinging door wildly, spots me and says, ’Start tonight, trial week.’

I turn to him and say coldly, ‘I’m not looking for work. I’m looking for my father.’

Even this man must see the resemblance because he looks suddenly terrified and his eyes dart from my eyes to my jaw-line and back. The dishwashers have turned off their hoses to listen and now stand staring at me, their hands pink from the hot water.

‘He’s not here now,’ the man manages deferentially. ‘You can wait in the lobby, I’ll tell him you’re here.’

He points through the service door to the main entry to the Residence, where guards bristle on the stairway. All four men watch me walk away across the gardens and towards the stairs. I take them two at a time and get to the top out of breath. The guard seems to think I’m a servant because he pays me no attention – I suppose he saw me leave the kitchens – so I walk through the door and into the quiet, carpeted lobby, and sit on a chair with a leather studded seat in a dark corner and fold my legs.

From here I can see into the dining room on my left and into a large meeting room (long reflective wooden table, important chairs) on my right. This is the official part of the Residence, the part that is for public living. The curving staircase before me leads to the bedrooms and bathrooms and reading rooms tucked away from scrutiny on the next floor. At the base of the stairs is a small pile of what looks like debris – a folded pram and a plastic packet bulging with junk; the cleaners must not yet have thrown it away. Who is living here now? I haven’t followed the papers; I don’t even know who organized the coup. Who sleeps in the President’s bed? Does he have a wife?

The lobby is so quiet I can hear faint sounds of metal being sharpened, crockery being piled, a man shouting a joke, from the kitchens behind the dining room. My curiosity wells like strong hunger. Even though I know nobody is in the room, I look around me suspiciously and over my shoulder and around the corner as far as I can see. Then I stand quickly and walk up the stairs confidently, like I’m meant to be there. I can always say I got lost – first day on the job, that kind of thing. Although if my father’s relationship with the last President is anything to go by, he will probably be a solid favourite already and able to talk his way out of anything, even his daughter snooping around the Residence. After days cooped up in the home with my mother, I wouldn’t mind a little adventure – I’ve always liked to see the earthly trappings (underwear on the floor, toothbrush in the basin, tabloid on the bedside table) of people in power, probably as a result of what I saw through the window with the President’s son in the tree. It becomes addictive.

The stairs are carpeted and muffle my steps. I remember the way to the bedroom from the time the President’s son gave me the grand tour of the Residence while his parents were out and we lay on a bed and he pretended to be his father (distorted his eyebrows, scrunched up his mouth) and lay on top of me, suffocating me until I kicked him to get a breath of air, then begged him to cover me again. There were foundation stains on one of the pillows, and on the sheets halfway down the bed there were cryptic stains, vaguely oily.