Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey Read Free Book Online

blotched with the effort of her grief.
    I am beginning to resent her accusations. ‘What did he do to my brother?’
    She has covered her face with two hands, blocking me out and everything I recall in her.
    ‘What happened to him?’
    She moves her hands, holds them out to me, to take my hands in hers. I relent, and she holds them, rubbing them with her thumbs, looking at me with pity. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ she whispers. ‘Of course you don’t. Why does nobody know ?’
    She pulls me towards her, nestles her head against my chest. I am taller than her, but only just, and she has to stoop slightly. Then she pushes me away as suddenly as she drew me to her, and steps away from me, remembering some forgotten propriety. She looks around us, looks down at her bare feet, feels with her hand for her collapsed hairbun. Fraternizing with the enemy. She glances over the railing, down at the people grouped below. Nobody is paying us any attention. She looks over her shoulder, her neck tendons diagonal for a second, as if expecting somebody to be lurking, eavesdropping behind the columns of the passageway, then she rubs the inside of her right arm compulsively. Whom is she conjuring?
    ‘He died in the mountains,’ she says quietly. ‘We were ambushed. We left the village to make a difference, to change things.’ She looks over her shoulder again, keeping her distance from me impersonal. She opens her mouth, takes a breath to relaunch.
    I have to interrupt. ‘I know he’s dead,’ I say, trying to keep my bile masked. ‘I got the letter. I suppose you saw him being buried.’
    She burns at this, catches alight like a holy bush in the desert. ’So you did know.’ Then she turns her back to me, lifts her hands to recoil her hair, and says softly, ‘Traitor.’
    She walks down the stairs, pointing each graceful foot before it lands. I watch her ease onto the courtyard grass, pick up her shoes with one hand, and merge with the shade boxing in the sunswept courtyard.

10     His portraitist
    ‘There she is,’ the man says, and pulls me behind a pillar so I’m not exposed.
    She is walking as fast as our child will let her around the small rose garden, forced by the narrow path to turn comically often. From this level, I can see her full head of hair from above, her parting straight until halfway back her skull where it veers sideways. The grey strands have gathered courage and refuse to be flattened into a ponytail; she doesn’t have her hair dye as an ally anymore. On Saturday mornings she used to look like a mad surgeon, emerging from the bathroom with two plastic gloves held up as if she were waiting for a nurse to remove them, and a showercap covering her hair, the dye coaxing the plastic red against its will. If she were careless, the rims of her ears would be slightly pink for days.
    To give birth in captivity. If I think too long about the position I’ve put her in, my mind begins to seize up like a crushed windpipe. She looks fine – healthy and vigorous – but what is the stress doing to our child, unseen? Coursing through her into the baby, a fatal kind of nourishment. Will they let us go once she has had the child? Why are they even keeping me here, insignificant player that I am? Why has he dragged me into this cycle of confession and witnessing? Stop. Stop it. My kidneys pulse in response; they have a muscle memory of their own.
    She has done another abrupt turn and is pumping her arms, propelling herself forwards, eyes level, face determined. Her breasts bob slightly from the motion, getting in the way of her arms on every backward swing. She stops and bends to touch her toes, stretches sideways, lifts her arms in the air. What would we be doing right now if none of this had happened? She would be sitting in the sun after her bath, topless, rubbing lemon juice onto her nipples – she said this prepared them for the onslaught of breastfeeding – the small potted palms on our balcony keeping this