Blood Kin (16 page)

I walk along the corridor, keeping to the wall, counting the doors. At the third door on my right I stop: this is the bedroom. Of course he won’t be in there now, it is mid-morning and he’ll be out on official duties or doing whatever a new President does. The door is cracked open; maybe the maid is in there cleaning. The room is dark and empty; the blinds are still drawn but they flutter in the wind from the open sliding door onto the balcony. I push tentatively on the door and step inside the room. There is a poster draped across the bed – one of the mangled body ones – and clothes on the floor next to the door leading to the bathroom. Suddenly I hear a sound from the bathroom, a low whine like a dog in distress. I walk quickly across the room and out onto the balcony. The President’s son showed me a way to look into the bathroom from outside without being seen. I reach up to the air vent and remove the lid carefully, and put my eye to the gap.

9
   
His portraitist’s wife

Before I realized I was pregnant I was perturbed by a spate of strange shooting pains in different bones around my body – shins, spine, collarbone. Afterwards, when I was told I was expecting, I began to suspect that the pains were from the child gathering material for itself, leeching nutrients from me, digging deep into my bones to nourish its own. I also believed it was digging for something else, for knowledge of my own painful memories, deposits left by anger, pathways forged by fear, so that it could collect them and soak them up and thereby spare itself the pain of having to make its own mistakes. I resented its assumption that it could get away with it and sidestep misery so easily.

I want it out of me; I am sick of my lumbering, side-to-side shuffle that passes for a walk; I am tired of my swollen ankles and the dark stain down the centre of my stomach and the mask around my eyes and the incessant need to piss and waking myself with my own snoring because this baby is pushing something against my lungs and suffocating me. In the sculpture garden I still try to stretch, but it has become a comic routine so now I am simply walking in slow circles around the rose bushes. Glancing down, I notice a strange plant I haven’t seen before – a single glossy-green leaf like a sow’s ear pushed flat against the soil. I pull it out of the ground and find that its roots are surprisingly shallow and wispy. It reminds me of the desert up north where the winds are so strong the trees have grown with their trunks almost flat against the ground. I always found their prostration distasteful – it seemed to me the ultimate concession, literally bending over backwards to accommodate a stronger force. A cat lurks against the garden wall, rubbing itself against the bricks and I call it to me cheerfully, entice it closer, and then hit its flank as hard I can with the flat of my hand. It squawks and skitters away and over the wall. An old childhood trick I learned from my mother (she always preferred dogs).

I keep catching myself thinking about her against my will, probably because I’m about to become a mother myself, and the only model I have for this process is her. I dreamed last night that I had caught her stutter like a common cold and all the men I spoke to looked at me at first with pity and then not at all. This morning I woke with an extremely clear image of her in my mind, hovering above me at the beach with her face very close to mine, digging me into a sand motor car. And I could have sworn I caught a whiff of her night perfume in the garden just now, close to the wall, but then I saw the camellias growing thickly around the tap. She would come to kiss me goodnight before she and my father went out and I would hear her high heels clicking on the polished parquet and smell her scent before she’d even opened the door. Freshly bathed, in my nightgown, I would beg her not to go, or make her promise to kiss me again when she arrived home at the end of the night, and I told her I would know even if I was sleeping because she could kiss my cheek and I would find the lipstick mark in the morning. I never found a mark, but I would console myself that it had simply rubbed off onto my pillows in the night, or she had wiped it off herself after kissing me, not wanting to soil the linen.

And lately I have had the urge to be back at work, for the small, quiet frivolity of it, the open-faced superficiality, the detailed deception. I am tired of the burden of bearing another human being, the enforced earnestness of impending motherhood. I want to lather a square box with shaving cream and call it a cake, and dye a glassful of water with food colouring and call it wine, and put a chunk of dry ice at the bottom of a bowl of rice and call it steam. I’d like to paint grapes with clear nail varnish or cut chips out of polystyrene or spray moisture beads onto the side of a can. At work I mastered the art of showing no expression, appropriate given my vocation. I cultivated a habit of leaving a long pause before I answered any questions. The people I worked with gave me respect because of it, and because of who I am (or who my family is); they had a healthy respect for power and the privilege it confers.

The guard whistles for me to return to my room and it is a relief to sink into the bed and lift my feet onto the bedpost to try to drain the fluid from them. Even as a dancer my feet never hurt this much, this consistently, although I had terrible bunions growing like bulbs out of the sides of my feet and my nails would ooze after a big performance. I have started to crave space – this room is not exactly small, but as I’ve ballooned the ceiling has begun to bother me; it hangs so low and solid above me. I’ve been longing for my first apartment in the city, the one my father bought for me to live in at university – it was one of the city’s oldest buildings and had somehow survived despite being surrounded by slick new skyscrapers. There was a balcony from every sprawling room and high, canopied ceilings. I hung beads from doorways and painted the doors aquamarine and always had bowls of nuts and strange fruit lying around on side tables and window sills. I made one of the rooms into my studio – I lined the walls with mirrors and installed a long wooden bar along one side. With the doors onto the balcony open I could see directly into one floor of a glassed-in office block, the kind with fluorescent lighting and air conditioning no matter what the weather: a sterilized climate all year round. Men in suits would stand with their faces to the glass at lunchtime to watch me perform. When the dance was over, sweaty and heaving, I would look directly at them, acknowledge their presence. Some looked forlorn, others made obscene gestures, a few pressed their phone numbers writ large to the window.

There is a knock at the door and the President’s wife calls in her pearly-bright voice, ‘I’m coming in!’ The guard rolls his eyes at me before he closes the door behind her and locks it. She looks about her and pats her bushy hair and walks towards me shaking her head.

‘My poor dear,’ she says. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

Before I can move my legs she has sat down on a chair next to the bed, swung my feet down into her lap and begun to roll my left ankle while gripping the heel with her other hand.

‘And how was your little outing with your husband?’ she asks coyly, winking at me while she milks my foot like an udder. ‘I loved being… intimate when I was pregnant, especially with the first,’ she says suggestively when I don’t answer. ‘It made me feel so feminine, so rounded and, well, desirable, you know?’

She lifts my right foot entirely off her lap and begins to bang her palm against the heel, over and over. ‘But the stretchmarks are going to be horrendous. You’ll have to work hard to keep him interested.’ She tugs at each toe in turn, until the tiny bones click. Then she threads her fingers through the spaces between my toes and jiggles them violently.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say. ‘I wanted to wait until we were released but who knows when that will be.’

She is delighted at the promise of a confidence, and leans close towards me so that my feet push into the folds of her belly, licks her lips and says, ‘Oh, tell me.’

‘It’s about your son,’ I say, then pause and look out of the window wistfully. I will make her wait; I intend to enjoy her suffering. Her grip has become vice-like around my ankles and her eyes are bulging slightly.

‘He’s…’

I pause again and look down at my hands, then adjust my dress over my stomach, pulling on it to undo the creases.

‘Your son is dead. I saw his body at the vineyard.’

She falls forward onto my outstretched legs, clings to me about my knees, and sobs and moans and wails until the guard opens the door to see about the noise. He quickly closes it again at the sight of her thrashing about with grief. Her makeup drools onto my dress and my bare legs, but I can’t find the right moment to pull them away. Eventually she lifts her head, keeping her arms around my knees, and looks at me with her melted face.

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she sobs. ‘You don’t even know it is your loss too.’

My loss? Does she intend that in the patriotic sense, that we have all lost a good ’son’ of the country? I pat her head, reassuring her that no, it is most definitely her loss. She becomes impatient, and lets go of my legs and sits up.

‘There’s something I should tell you now,’ she says, sniffling, her mascara blurred like a black eye. She grips my feet again, pulls at my big toes nervously. ‘He was…’ She breaks down and weeps again.

I begin to feel alarmed, backed into an enclosure like an animal fattened for the kill.

‘He was your half-brother. You have lost your half-brother.’ She moans loudly and pulls at her hair.

‘But the President?’ I whisper incredulously. She watches me closely, despite her tears.

‘He’s your father,’ she whispers back. ‘We thought it was best for you not to know. I promised your mother I would never tell you.’

My insides contract into a breathless, timeless point of agony and then, just as suddenly, the pain is gone. She puts her hand to my stomach, but I don’t want her to touch me anywhere, I can’t bear her cloying fingers on me, and I push them off violently and kick at her to let go of my legs. Before I can stand up the white-hot pain paralyses me again and I squat on the floor and dig my nails into my knees to wait it out. In that time she manages to come around to me and crouches beside me, stroking my hair.

‘It’s starting,’ she says. ‘The baby.’

As soon as the pain is gone I stand and run towards the door and hurl my fists against it, screaming to the guard to open it. As he opens the door, there is a liquid flush and suddenly I’m standing barefoot in a pool of water. He looks with horror down at my feet and then at my drenched dress and turns his face away. The President’s wife hobbles to me and screams at the guard, ‘Get somebody, can’t you see she’s going to have the baby!’ and he disappears gratefully, sprinting down the corridor. I push her aside against the post of the door, hoping that she will hit her soft head on the hardwood, but at that instant the pain debilitates me and I squat again by instinct to ease it and clench my eyes and ball my fists. She is still there when it passes and just the sight of her face makes me nauseous; I want to hurl out the contents of my stomach, of my entire body, leave them in a slop on the floor and peel off my skin like a cooked beetroot. And then I will be nothing but a membrane for things to pass through.

Oh mother, you win. I underestimated you. You have a taste for deception, a taste I have inherited. How did it happen? Where were you? In the dunes? Beside the reservoir at midnight? On a blanket beneath the power lines? Did you feel your spine against the warm hood of his car on an abandoned road? Did you stutter when you whispered to him your desires, instructions, preferences? It was not love – I know that he is incapable of it. Did his hands look different when he was young? Were his fingers more agile, more insistent? Oh, the great art of it, the sidling up to father afterwards, reeking of another man. Did you lock your jaw stoically when you had to let father touch you to take the credit, the responsibility, ownership of me? No wonder he always examined my face under the lamp. He wasn’t marvelling at my unscarred skin, he was sniffing like a suspicious dog around a lamp-post, trying to figure out which was his piss and which was someone else’s, and whether I could be taken for granted as his territory. He was always gratified by my face – did he not see the strange size of my eyes or the foreign slope of my cheekbones? But his own face had been disfigured for too long for him to remember the geography of his own features, and there were always photographs of long-forgotten ancestors that could be brought out to account for these little discrepancies.

I run into the sculpture garden with my thighs gliding smoothly against each other and my wet dress clinging to my legs. She follows me, tries to pull me back by my shoulder, but I slap her hand away and then I’m bent over again with the pain, the terrible wait, the anguish, a pain that banishes all sense of time. It passes – how long did it last? – and I realize she is rubbing my back, kneading my spine through my dress. I lash out at her sideways and keep running, searching, my eyes focused on the ground, warding off the next spasm of pain, trying to take as many heavy steps forward before it attacks again.

We were on the deck, night-time, salt on the air. Corn on the cob. A dropped fork. We were in the forest behind the Residence in the dark. A monogrammed towel filched from the laundry closet. Someone lurking behind a tree nearby, watching. A desperate sprint away. A photograph left under my pillow. To provoke me, to invoke his power, to stir our desire. Sausage-spotted face above me, wrinkles, discolouration, panting. The President’s sagging belly, bandy legs. His old man’s hands. The aftertaste of submission. His terrifying ascendance.

I see the shears lying in the grass ahead of me. If I can just get there before the pain cripples me, but no, it hits again, a solid wall of it, and I crouch and dig my hands into the soil. When I open my eyes she is beside me again, and now there are men, and they see me staring at the shears and quickly they are removed, and here’s my husband running towards me, damn fool, and the guard is holding him back and he’s screaming. As though he knows what pain is. I will be dragged somewhere and will have to force it out. Perhaps there is another way to do it; I could hold back and not push when I’m supposed to and starve it of oxygen and keep its dirty soft skull lodged in me. Two guards hook their arms beneath my armpits and the President’s wife tries to hold my legs but I kick at her and manage to connect with her chin. She reels backwards, holding her face. Before the next contractions shunt me into oblivion I glimpse the almost-black blood streaming from her split chin.