Blood Kin (6 page)

My daughter’s face and my own are unnervingly similar. Male beauty does not translate well to a female; she has a hardness about her jaw and I always half-expect to find stubble pushing its way through her pores. But she still attracts men, especially the ones who don’t know what they want. My own rule was to treat women like stations on a radio: if you listen to one for too long, who knows what you’re missing on the next bandwidth? The cloying ones fell to pieces, of course. And my wife did too, in the end.

There is a shifting in the low shrubs beneath the balcony and the Commander’s wife emerges from the overgrown path, her eyes already raised to my level. Was she looking for me? My old heart wants to believe it. She has changed out of her uniform and now wears a summer dress that pulls slightly over her hips, and her hair has been released from its coil. She smiles at me with restraint and calls, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I stand and lean on the balcony, glad that I’d unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt before she arrived.

‘I’m making pastry at four in the morning, while it’s still cool enough for the butter to stay firm. Care to join me?’

She reaches down to fix her sandal strap and when she lifts her head again her smile fades beneath my gaze – she is looking at something behind me. I turn and see the barber standing in the doorway, looking down at her with sleep still rising warmly from his head. He comes forward and leans on the rail next to me.

She pulls at her dress where it clings and looks at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I had no right.’

He rubs the back of his head and clears his throat. ‘But perhaps you do.’ He glances at me as if I’m eavesdropping.

I look back at him obstinately, my arms firmly on the rail, but she looks at me imploringly until I sigh loudly and walk back into the room, a word flitting around in my head: cuckolded. Cuckolded. I sit on my bed facing the window and see the barber, really see him, for the first time. He’s dark and vital, with veins that expose the strength of his blood and hair that flows from his head like the fountain of youth itself. But there’s something crumpled about him, about the way he walks and the sound of his voice, as if he’d been crushed when he was small and never recovered. He reminds me of my daughter, that’s what it is – it makes me want to reach out to him and to despise him at the same time.

It’s silent on the balcony – what kind of game are these two playing? I lean sideways and peer around the open door. He is holding an apple with a note tied around it with masking tape, greedily ripping the tape with his teeth to release the note from its fruity prison. Ingenious. And what would the Commander think about all this? The barber reads it quickly, then nods agreement to her. I listen to her sandals click against her feet as she walks away. Such small things can summon desire.

My fingers smell of garlic and coriander, years’ worth of the stuff. The barber comes inside.

‘Lucky boy,’ I say to him. ‘Midnight tryst planned? Well done.’

He ignores me. It’s hard to think of myself as an old man. My daughter said that to me the day before I was brought in here. ‘You’re an old man,’ she said. ‘You will die soon. I don’t know if I will miss you.’ People don’t realize what it’s like to age when you’re beautiful, to feel like you reached your peak when you turned forty and every day since that day you’ve become just a small bit uglier. A less attractive man has nothing to lose when he ages. As an older man, I am still handsome, but there is an invisible line that I’ve crossed: my body’s done a dirty deal with gravity and my hair has given up the ghost once and for all. It’s not the wrinkles, it’s things you’re never told to expect – having to piss five times a night, discovering that your calf muscles are disintegrating against your will, leaving you bandy-legged, watching the spider veins cast their purple webs across the backs of your knees, waking up with your eyelids sealed together because your eyes can no longer self-lubricate. And now this: desire that exists without proof. All this shutting down must have a purpose. I think what my daughter was implying is that it’s meant to encourage reckoning and accounting. Moral reckoning.

OK then, let’s reckon. I don’t believe my wife was ever really mad. I think mental illness is a luxury most people can’t afford. Even after her psychiatrist had persuaded me to put her in an institution, I would sneak into the gardens and look through the window into her room on the ground floor, always half-expecting to catch her doing something that would prove she was pretending. I never really thought about what that something would be – maybe she would be on the phone to our daughter, laughing and chatting normally? Or she would be doing yoga in her striped legwarmers, on her mat on the floor, with sweat beading gently at her hairline, and her face focused and calm? The disappointment each time I found her sleeping in her bed or staring at the television or sitting on the low armchair rubbing her hands would start deep in my gut and work its way up to the back of my throat where it gagged me.

Having been failed by my own flesh, and those of my flesh, what else can an old man turn to except power to shore himself up, or at least proximity to power? We all know power and desire couple effortlessly.

12
   
His barber

She had tucked the key beneath the tape around the apple when she threw it up to me on the balcony. A poison-green apple, like the kind we used to grow in the back garden of my mother’s house. She remembers them, of course. It was a small miracle that anything could push its way through that ground, so sandy it couldn’t be called soil. The fruit always tasted salty; perhaps the water table had been contaminated by sea water. There was a mulberry bush in the back too, a thriving plant that unfurled leaves textured like the surface of a brain, and my brother and I fed those to his silkworms until he swapped the worms for marbles with a boy at school. We would dare each other to put a worm on our tongue and see who could bear the soft, blind wriggling the longest – once he swallowed one by accident and examined his stool meticulously the next day to see if it would emerge alive. He cut out small shapes from cardboard – stars, hearts, circles – and put them in the silkworm box that he’d punched repeatedly with a knitting needle so that the worms could breathe; slowly they spun according to his demands, desperate for something to attach their silk to, and then he hung these silken shapes from a mobile above his bed. If he gave them beetroot leaves they spun dark-pink thread instead.

I have the key hotly in my hand beneath the covers. I know the chef intended to stay awake to watch me, but his age got the better of him, and now he is snoring on his back like a pensioner, tempting flies. I wait for her signal, straining my ears, but all I can hear are the cicadas outside lamenting the lost heat of the day, until above their scratchy chorus a single bird-note rises, sweet and clear – it’s her. Within seconds I am at the door trying to coax the key noiselessly into its slot. Then I am outside in the dark, guardless corridor (who knows what she said to him?), using the wall to keep my bearings as I run down the three flights of steps to the courtyard, and there I find the door that she said would lead to the outer garden, and it does, and she stands before me in the dark, her hair gleaming, and takes my hand. I know I look like my brother right now, in the halflight, with my hair grown out and a thickly sprouted beard. An impostor.

She leads me with quiet urgency through the garden, beneath a willow tree and around a batch of strange sculptures, to a car parked on an overgrown road that seems to lead nowhere. She pops the boot of the car and motions for me to get into it. Fear flits through me until I dismiss it, but once I’m curled in the darkness like a foetus it starts to course through me violently, and I think, why did I believe her? She thinks I’m a traitor, that I’m being kept here because of my loyalty to the President. The engine hums in time to my mind’s frenzy, then the car stops and I begin to imagine all the ways I could die, and I pray that the metal above my head does not pop open and betray me.

She drives on, stopping again a few minutes later. The boot hinge squeals open. ’Sorry,’ she says. ‘But that gate is guarded. You can sit in the front now.’

Looking up at her, at this woman whom I have just imagined killing me in all the ways my mind would let me, I want to be a child again, and I wish it were my mother hovering above me, about to put her cool, dry hand to my forehead and tell me I’m dreaming. I try to uncurl my legs to sit up, and for a panicked second I think I’m paralysed; then my legs obey and I sit up and hook them over the edge of the open boot and propel myself to the ground. We are on a dirt road, not far from the Summer Residence – I can see it lit up in the distance like a luxury ship at sea. I want to savour this, to think of it as freedom, but the adrenaline is still pumping too fiercely through my veins and I sit in the front seat uneasily, my legs twitching with pins and needles. The road slopes down towards the vineyards in the valley below, a twisted road that seems hazardous at night. The window is open and as we descend we drive through pockets of warm air trapped from the day’s heat, and emerge from them into cool air fragrant from the midnight opening of buds.

‘You’ll have to go back,’ she says quietly, her eyes on the road. ‘This is just so we can talk. I don’t have the physical strength to stop you from running, but he’ll find you again anyway, and then you won’t be kept in a room with white linen and silver fixtures.’

I suspected this, and perhaps it’s why I’m not breathing this night air with as much relish as a free man should. She doesn’t speak again until we’re at the base of the valley and the gnarled stumps of the vineyards are silhouetted on either side of the road like paper cut-outs of dwarves linking arms.

‘Your mother…’ she says.

I wait for a few seconds. ’She died last year.’

The shape of an unlit farmhouse looms ahead of us.

’She blamed me, didn’t she?’ she says softly. ‘For what happened to your brother.’

I laugh, my voice brittle. ‘No, actually. She blamed me.’

She stops the car next to the farmhouse, rests her head on the steering wheel for a few moments, then leaves the car. She is still wearing her summer dress; I can see the hem faintly beneath her coat as she walks towards the house. Her calf muscles ball and stretch as she climbs the steps onto the veranda, then she pushes tentatively at the door and disappears inside.

By the time I reach the veranda, she has re-emerged holding an unlabelled bottle of wine by its neck and a slim door wedge.

‘Think you can open this?’ she says, handing both to me.

I put them down on the wooden deck, push against the fly-screen and wait for my eyes to make sense of the dark room: there are barrels stacked against the wall and a tasting counter with wine bottles of increasing size, like Russian dolls that fit inside each other, arranged in a straight line. The spitting bucket is half-full and there are glasses with dirty rims – people must have left the farm in a hurry. I take two glasses and rub the rims and inner bellies with my shirt, then I fumble in the dark behind the counter and find a corkscrew next to a coil of foil shed by an already opened bottle. I take them out to the veranda, where she has pulled two cushionless deckchairs together. The cork crumbles as I twist it, and I have to push it into the bottle to clear the neck.

‘There’ll be bits of cork in it,’ I say as I pass her a glass. ‘Maybe I should have used the wedge.’

She smiles and takes the glass by the stem. The wine is warm, red, gritty. I haven’t eaten since the soup we were given at four, and I feel the wine winding its hot path to my stomach.

‘Do you remember my father?’ she says. ‘You met him at the dock. He was on a fishing crew too, not the same as your brother’s. He and his twin sister were swimming in the surf when they were little, no older than ten, only chest-deep, when she was dragged out to sea by the current. He never came to terms with why he had been spared. He was sent to school the next day as if nothing had happened.’

She drains her glass and holds it out to be refilled. I pour for her, fill her glass almost to the top.

‘Is that how you feel? Guilty?’ she says, pulling her legs up to her chest.

‘My brother chose to put himself in harm’s way,’ I respond.

‘Your mother didn’t see it like that.’

I refill my own glass. ‘He was her first. She cherished him.’

‘And you?’

’She remembered my brother as a golden child. Everything I did seemed dull and heavy to her.’

She holds out her glass again and smiles sheepishly, keeping her lips together – her teeth are porous and always blacken from wine; I know that from watching her drink in the kitchen with my brother when they were supposed to be babysitting me. When I hand her glass back to her she takes my hand and threads her fingers through mine. With my free hand I drink straight from the bottle.

It must be eerie for her to see me as I am now, a grown man who looks like her dead lover. The last time she saw me I was still disguised by youth, had not yet found my proper form and face, had not yet realized my genes. I think of my uncle whose wife died when their daughter was only a baby. He had adored his wife, loved her absolutely, and then suddenly her liver packed in and he was left with the small child as his only reminder of her. As she grew older she began to look uncannily like her mother, and he found himself staring at her across the supper table, watching this girl become a long-dead woman in measurable stages before his eyes. It drove him crazy in the end; he began to think she had returned to him, and that he was twenty again and courting her.

She whispers to me, tightening her hold on my hand. ‘Would you sit beside me?’

I obey and she lies on her hip next to me and curls one leg across my stomach. I can feel the plastic slats of the deckchair cutting into my back; they must be cutting into her soft sides too. I lift her onto me, put my arms around the dent of her lower back to stop her from rolling off, stroke the inside of her arm, the soft skin that the sun never sees. The skin is puckered, and I hold it up to my eyes to understand it: six circles vie for space on her skin – an old scar, but not old enough to be from childhood.