Free Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey Page A

expect pleasure, and that’s what I gave them – small, almost unnoticeable pleasures that they didn’t have to feel ashamed about receiving. I would brush my hand slightly against their necks as I fastened the cloth sheet; I would hold their jaws firmly between my hands as I stood behind them, looking at their faces in the mirror, appraising them; I would run my finger down their cheeks as I described what I was about to do. All businesslike, I must repeat – nothing obviously sensual about it – and the men didn’t know what it was, but when the haircut was over their whole bodies buzzed and they felt like a lobe of their brain had been hypnotized. Certain people have had that effect on me during my life – always somebody doing something meticulous, putting something in order. A teacher at school who made my brain tingle when she used a ruler to draw a line in my workbook; a stocktaker at the grocery store on every last Friday of the month, delicately piling tins of canned vegetables into neat rows.
    I persuaded some of the men, the ones I felt could take it, to have their hair shampooed while they were at the shop, before the cutting, and I massaged their scalps as they lay with their necks slotted into the ceramic basin. I found the lumps and dips on their skulls and rubbed them – the parts that curved out or in, that revealed pleasure points. And the cutting itself – so rapid, so crisp, like brisk magic when I got it right. Word spread, men began to ask for me even when the barber was present, and then one day the barber came back from the Residence and said the President had asked for me. This was my proof that the President had eyes everywhere, that even the smallest shift in preference at the barber salon in the district didn’t escape him. The barber was gracious in his defeat, but then he had no choice: the President had spoken.
    The first time I cut the President’s hair was in his own bathroom, a cavernous room with tiles stretching away as far as I could see. Two bodyguards escorted me through the Residence and then stood just outside the open bathroom door, ears pricked. There was a faint tremor in the President’s hand when he greeted me. The bathroom lights did not flatter him – I hadn’t realized he was so old. He was already smartly dressed for an evening function and he wanted his haircut to be so fresh the other men would be able to smell it, like cut grass on a warm evening. He sat on a plush armchair before the mirror, so low it made me lose my bearings briefly – I hadn’t thought to bring one of the high chairs from the salon, and it meant that everything I did that evening was hunched. I bent over him to cover his shoulders with a cloth sheet and fastened the clasp at his neck, held his jaw between my hands, tilted his chin up and down and side to side. I sprayed his hair with faintly scented water and the drops spread finely across his strands. I cut briskly, with comb and scissors, and saw him lulled by the order and rhythm of the snipping, and used a razor along the nape of his neck and at the edge of his hairline. Then I whisked off the sheet, not letting a single cutting fall onto his suit. He was pleased, and the next time he let me shave and pluck him too. It was then that I began to convert my room above the salon into my glass box. At the end of my day’s work at the City Residence, I longed for a sense of purity. I needed to purge myself of my guilt at not doing what I had come to the city to do. That’s when I started sleeping with the window open, removing street clothes before I sat on the bed, and keeping the things around me – socks, glasses, belts – in rigid order; it was part of the purging.
    She stirs. The sky is slowly preparing for dawn. She lifts her head, confused, and then stands quickly when she sees my face and pulls her dress back over her hips. Her long hair has fuzzed around her face and tangled its way down her back, and each strand seems to