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The one missing a feeler has died in the sink. They begin to scream. ‘Did the man who kept watch on you before ever help you cook?’ she asks.
    ‘He never offered.’
    ‘Neither did I.’
    ‘You had blood on your hands. You couldn’t refuse.’
    ‘Crayfish shit. Not blood.’
    I reach for her hand across the pot. She lets me hold it briefly, then pulls her arm back.
    ‘The steam. It’s burning me.’
    I notice neat circles of discoloured flesh on the inside of her forearm. Six small circles in a row, the skin creased and stretched.
    Behind me, a man clears his throat – the Commander. He is standing just inside the kitchen, next to the pantry. Does it matter if he saw? His beauty makes me feel ashamed and I look down at my hands, the hands of an old man – too many years of using them to make my living. She has turned to wash her hands in the sink again. The Commander approaches, picks a prawn from the oil and dangles it, waiting for it to cool, then peels the prawn with one hand, removes the head and chews.
    He reaches out his hand to her, ‘Come, darling, let us seat ourselves.’
    They leave through the swinging doors, her arm through his. I take off my apron and hat and carry through two platters and a plate of cut lemons. He immediately sets about using his long fingers, dipping bits of flesh into a pot of melted butter, squeezing lemon with gusto, de-shelling and digging for the most succulent bits of the creatures. I hunch at the kitchen counter and chew on a few secretly hoarded cooked prawns. They are as I wanted – creamed past the point of resistance.

9     His barber
    The portraitist has asked the man who brought us bread and tomatoes if we can go for a walk in the courtyard. Why he wants to walk is beyond me since he has been struggling just to get to the bathroom and back and when he stands from sitting, he keeps one hand on his belly and uses the other, palm spread, to support his lower back like a pregnant woman. The man surprised us by agreeing, but he said he’d follow behind us a few metres, keep an eye on us. The chef has scuttled off sideways like a scavenger to attend to his crustaceans.
    My pyjamas cleave to me like a second skin, filthy, and my beard is encroaching on virgin territory. We leave the room like an old married couple going to church, the man trailing us at an uninterested distance. The portraitist shuffles along the corridor next to me.
    ‘What is it?’ I ask him. ‘Why are you walking like that?’
    He looks at me as if he’s surprised I noticed. ‘Lower back. Must have pinched a nerve in my sleep.’
    ‘There are exercises you can do, you know – to release it. I’ll show you back in the room.’
    We turn the corner into the passage that opens onto the courtyard below. It is full of people. We lean on the railing and look down at the tops of their heads; many of them are women, sitting in small groups, bucolic in the late morning light.
    ‘Party officials,’ the man who has been trailing us says. ‘They arrived last night.’
    He has joined us at the railing, and leans a little too far out over his arms, ogling the women. The portraitist, too, stares at each woman like a hungry man. At first I wonder that his eye could be roving so soon, but then I realize that he is only staring in the hope that one of them will be his wife. No wonder he was so desperate to get out of the room – he wants to find her, or see her, or glimpse her. I turn my eyes back down to the courtyard. Something is not right: I find that each person I look at seems to jolt some recollection in my mind, to reignite some memory pathway.
    ‘Every person I see looks vaguely familiar,’ I say to the portraitist softly. ’Should that worry me?’
    ‘In a strange place, your brain does things like that,’ he says. ‘Seeks out familiarity. A survival tactic.’
    Perhaps. I have almost accepted his explanation when I see her – not vaguely familiar, but intimately known: my brother’s