Free Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey Page B

attract then absorb light so that it is luminous one moment, black the next. Around her mouth, wine is smudged like blood. As she leaves the veranda she knocks over the empty wine bottle, propelling it on a suicide roll off the side and onto the tiles below.
    I follow her to the car and get into the passenger side obediently as she fights with the ignition until the motor splutters reluctantly into life, and we drive back along the dirt road, the stars already starting to fade, winding our way out of the valley. It is the coldest time of day, even in summer: the hour just before the sun reveals itself. I look at her bare legs, bumpy with cold. It used to fascinate me that my brother could casually hold his hand on her thigh beneath the table at supper with my mother and me. I would sneak peeks sideways at them – it was such a possessive gesture, but high enough on her thigh to be more than simply proprietary, and I would blush involuntarily each time I saw it, and they would laugh at me, not knowing the cause. To me, unschooled in intimacy, it seemed more daring – more charged – than if he had kissed her passionately in front of my mother.
    ‘You know about me and the Commander, right?’ she says, her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I’m sure the chef told you. I’m his wife.’
    Instinct makes me look at her ring finger, but there is no ring.
    ‘Congratulations.’ It comes out with bitterness, not what I’d intended.
    She looks at me with her thick-lidded eyes showing concern, perhaps interpreting it as a younger brother’s jealousy. ‘He was in the same camp as we were. Your brother respected him deeply.’
    Her long fingers on the steering wheel. Her smooth kneecap. The fat lobe of her ear. It is too much for me. ‘Who kissed your wounds when they were fresh?’ I ask. ‘My brother? Or the Commander?’
    Her pity dissolves visibly, she sets her mouth and jaw and we don’t speak again until she tells me to get into the boot. This time I welcome the crawl into the cramped darkness.

13     His portraitist
    Somebody must have fetched my old materials from my studio. The sight of these wrinkled metallic tubes, all half-squeezed, with their ends rolled tightly like slugs in distress, is not comforting. I think of the last time I touched them, the morning the President had changed colour and all the shades I’d mixed were wrong. My palette lies next to them, its surface thick from years of duty, and two canvasses are propped against the wall – I recognize them too, recognize the labour of stretching the canvas over the wooden frames and forcing staples into the spines to keep them tight.
    This is the room where the President sat crumpled on the couch, photographs thrown at his feet. The furniture has been pushed aside, leaving long streak marks on the dusty floorboards – all but the couch, which is centre-stage, facing my easel. I fiddle with the bolts on the multi-jointed legs, sliding the sections together until the easel has shrunk to the right height. It is marked with accidental paint – this process always leaves a trail of evidence. My sketchbook is here too, a large and persistent reminder of all I have done wrong, and shards of charcoal lie in the groove at the bottom of the easel. Someone is familiar with my methods.
    The Commander hovers at the door, uncertain for the first time, perhaps cowed by the tools of skill, of expertise, that surround me. He lopes into the room and settles himself on the couch, crossing his legs and letting one slipper dangle from his foot.
    I know that a portrait is one of the trappings of power, that each one I painted increased the President’s control by a fraction; that the image of him, freshly rendered in oils, hanging in Parliament, had some value outside of itself, that it strengthened his legitimacy, and that it will do the same for this man sitting before me. The Commander’s slipper drops from his foot, revealing long, thin toes. He puts his hand into the