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the bath in sandals, afraid of what we might catch barefoot, and washed each other with the handheld hose. There was no hot water. I tried to warm her under the sheets by lying stomach-down on her back, pressing her into the mattress. I had a cyst on the inside of my wrist, a small lump between the veins. She’d heard that cysts can be cured if you put extreme pressure on them, so, in the dark, I held out my wrist, closed my eyes, locked my jaw, and she pressed her finger as hard as she could against the cyst. It throbbed unbearably the rest of the night, but in the morning the lump was gone.

8     His chef
    It is Sunday. The crayfish will be crouched in their buckets waiting for me, the abalone will be tight as marble, piled on top of each other, contracted against contact, and it will take a while to soothe them. I touch the portraitist’s forearm to wake him and he starts and looks at me, hurt – he still hasn’t forgiven me for what I said about his wife. He walks like a pensioner to the bathroom, looking like he has aged overnight. I must try to avoid him or he will drag me down with him. I hear him gasp through the bathroom door, then the sound of his piss hitting the side of the bowl. He’s even started to urinate like an old man, in spurts.
    I do my own ablutions when he emerges, and find myself thinking about my wife –the Commander’s questions have put her back in my mind. I hope she has survived the coup, not for my sake, but what would my daughter do without having that structure in her life, of visiting her mother every day, brushing her hair and turning her in the bed, and arranging her flowers?
    That child. A few weeks ago she left her journal on the kitchen table. She had asked me for a recipe late at night – something basic, like how to make stock – and had scribbled it in the book and then gone to bed, leaving it closed on the table. Her journal began to call my name; it began to burn a hole in the table. I started cautiously, opening it at random and snatching bits of prose. Then I saw the page where she had listed names of men, three thick columns of them; men she had slept with. I stopped being cautious and read her journal like a book, from start to finish. In the morning she asked me what was wrong and said my face looked pinched and worn as if I’d heard that somebody had died in the night. I asked her if she had lost her self-respect and she knew immediately what I’d done. She asked me if I had enjoyed it, if I’d enjoyed the part about her trying to have sex in a swimming pool.
    In the death throes of our marriage my wife and I became frantic lovers, like hospital patients with third-degree burns on an adrenaline high in response to the pain. She slept with me in the morning even when she knew I had been with someone else the night before. After so many years of marriage, and a child, her body had rebelled and turned upon itself. The women I chose to spend my nights with had all the usual attractions for a man of my age, and my wife understood this. She went crazy only after I left her – it was my daughter’s boyfriend who had to knock down walls in the house.
    The barber is waiting for the bathroom when I open the door. He is letting his beard bloom unchecked and has avoided speaking to me since I prepared the paella (the Commander used his finger to sop up the last juices on his plate, which thrilled me). The portraitist is eating a tomato like a piece of fruit, whole, but I don’t touch my share of the bread and cheese. I’m craving fried prawn flesh, overcooked so that it begins to cream, the meat past the point of resisting. A knock on the door signals my release: it’s the same guard as yesterday, still in button-down shirt and loosened tie like a banker at the office at midnight. The portraitist and barber will stay in the room today – I did without kitchen boys on Sundays in the President’s apartment and I will do without them today.
    We walk in silence to the