Free Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey

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.
    ‘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