I washed my face and every bit of it hurt. My life had disintegrated. I took out a towel and dried my face, then threw it by the bathroom door. I stepped on it carefully to dry the soles of my feet. The rough sensation of the towel underfoot brought me back to the present. Hae-jin was waiting for me.
When I got downstairs, Hae-jin was at the stove, checking the seasoning of the soup with a ladle. ‘What were you doing all this time? I thought you said you were starving.’
The table was set with a few side dishes, steamed egg in an earthenware pot, and a spoon.
I sat down and he placed a bowl of seaweed soup and rice in front of me. ‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘I just had ramen. I can’t eat right now.’
I looked down at my soup bowl, chock full of seaweed and beef with barely any broth. That was the way Mother served me soup; I was on a low-sodium diet per her sister’s direction.
‘You should be moved to tears,’ Hae-jin joked. ‘I made it all myself, just for you. With beef and seaweed that was already here, I mean.’ He sat in front of me with a cup of coffee. He was wearing a white shirt, a navy cashmere sweater Mother had bought him and a pair of jeans – dressed to go out.
I picked up a strand of seaweed and stuffed it into my parched mouth. It was hot and slippery but didn’t taste much like anything. He really should have seasoned it some more; what was he doing all this time with that ladle?
‘What did Mother say?’ Hae-jin asked.
I shrugged. ‘Her phone’s turned off. Maybe she’s praying.’
‘Yeah?’ Hae-jin cocked his head. ‘Or maybe she doesn’t realise her battery died.’
I nodded.
‘Then how are we going to reach her? We can call the retreat centre. Did she say where she was going?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll handle it. Let me eat first.’
Hae-jin opened his mouth, then closed it without a word.
I shoved another strand of seaweed into my mouth.
‘Eat some rice too,’ he said. ‘Don’t just eat the seaweed.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’
Hae-jin looked down at his sweater. ‘Yeah, to see someone from school.’
‘Where?’
‘Gimpo. He’s headed to Tokyo this afternoon. I have to bring him something.’
‘You should probably get going then,’ I said, taking care not to appear too eager.
‘I have time.’
Ah. I shoved more seaweed into my mouth.
‘Oh, did you hear?’
‘Hear what?’ I asked.
‘There was a murder around here.’
I looked up. The seaweed snaked down my throat. I swallowed it whole, my eyes watering. Murder? ‘Where?’
‘At the dock.’
‘The rest area by the sea wall?’
Hae-jin nodded. ‘On my way home I saw people up top, staring down. It was mobbed with police cars. So I stopped to take a look. You know how I am, I can’t help myself!’
Suppressing the urge to say, And? I spooned some rice into my mouth.
‘There was police tape by the dock. Apparently the person working the ticket booth found a body caught on the anchoring rope of the ferry this morning.’ Hae-jin paused. ‘They were saying it’s a young woman.’
I chewed before replying. ‘Just because they found a body doesn’t mean she was killed, does it? Could be suicide, or an accident.’
‘Yeah, but why would the police come out in full force if that was the case?’ Hae-jin paused. His mobile was ringing from his room. He practically threw his cup down to run and answer it.
I picked up a strand of seaweed, listening to him saying, ‘Yes, Auntie. Yes, yes. One second.’
He closed the door and I couldn’t hear anything else. Whatever was left of my appetite vanished. Auntie? Hae-jin was taking her call with the door closed. Had that ever happened before? I couldn’t remember. Probably not. Hae-jin wasn’t the type to talk secretively on the phone; he answered calls loudly and publicly as he thought it was the polite thing to do. That meant Auntie had demanded this behaviour, but what did she have to tell him?
I placed my chopsticks down. I thought back to my conversation with Auntie, in case there was anything I had said to her that was different from what I’d told Hae-jin.
Hae-jin came out of his room ten minutes later. He had his camera bag on one shoulder and was holding his parka.
‘Sorry for not keeping you company while you were having lunch.’ He said this apologetically, as though he watched me eat every meal every single day.
I shoved my hands into my pockets casually. ‘So what did Auntie say?’
‘Hmm? Auntie?’ His mouth tightened. He averted his eyes.
‘Weren’t you just talking to Auntie?’
‘No…’ Hae-jin turned around to open the door to the porch. The back of his neck above his collar was turning red, which then spread to his ears. ‘It’s a woman who was one of the crew when we were shooting Private Lesson,’ he said, belatedly remembering which ‘auntie’ he had been speaking to. ‘We caught up a bit. It’s been a while, and we were on that island for three months.’
I leant against the door frame, wondering why he had given me so much detail.
Hae-jin slid his feet into his shoes and bent down to lace them up. He paused, then straightened up, holding something in his hand. ‘What’s this?’ He turned and handed it over.
I took it without realising what it was. An earring. A single pearl earring.
‘What’s that doing here?’ he murmured, looking over at my palm. ‘It’s not Mother’s, is it?’
It wasn’t Mother’s. Her ears weren’t pierced and she rarely wore earrings. She didn’t really go in for jewellery at all, in fact. The only thing she wore was the anklet she had had on last night. It went without saying that the earring wasn’t mine, either. Hae-jin had found it closer to the interior than to the front door; it couldn’t have rolled inside accidentally. Someone must have dropped it here.
Regardless of who or when, the earring didn’t look all that special. But the sensation of the smooth, round surface bothered me. More precisely, the déjà vu I felt when I touched it bothered me. It made my heart race. Where had I touched something like this before? When? I rubbed the round part with my thumb and looked at Hae-jin. ‘I’ll put it in Mum’s room. She’ll know what to do with it.’
Nodding, Hae-jin headed towards the front door. I put on slippers and followed him out. ‘When will you be back?’
‘Soon.’ He opened the door. ‘We should pop some non-alcoholic champagne or something. Even if we do the real celebration when Mother gets home.’
I stood in the doorway. The lift was already on its way down to the ground floor from the eighth floor. It would take a few minutes for it to come back up to our floor. It would be an awkward few minutes for Hae-jin, who wasn’t a good liar. He began to run down the stairs, raising a hand as he disappeared. It could have meant anything: I’ll be back soon, see you later, go back in, I have to run because I’m incredibly busy right now.
Hello started barking on the seventh floor. I looked down again at the earring in my hand. The tip of the post had dug into my palm. I picked it up between two fingers like a gemmologist and peered at it. It couldn’t have fallen off someone’s ear lobe, because the back was still attached to the post. It had to have been in a bag or a pocket before falling out, which meant that this someone would have to meet two conditions: she had come to our flat, and she wore earrings.
Could it be Auntie’s? I wasn’t sure if she had pierced ears, but she wore different earrings each time I saw her. I remembered a red gem that dangled like a teardrop, a crown stud against her ear lobe, a star that twinkled blue. Why wouldn’t there be a pearl among them?
Hello finally stopped barking. I closed the front door. I took my slippers off in the foyer and stepped back into the flat. I heard something strange, like a small pebble falling to the ground and rolling away. I remembered taking my hands ou
t of the Private Lesson jacket. Right here. Last night. I’d looked down for the sound and I hadn’t been able to pick up whatever it was that fell because Mother was right behind me. I opened my palm again and looked down at the earring. The back of my neck prickled. It couldn’t have been this…
The clock chimed. Two o’clock. I shoved the earring into my pocket. I felt jittery. My imagination was running away with itself again.
I went out to the balcony off the living room. I opened all the windows Hae-jin had closed. It still smelled like bleach everywhere. Blood and handprints were possibly still visible on the walls along the corridor upstairs, the walls of the stairwell and landing and parts of the living room, the top of the door frame to Mother’s room, the leg of the key cabinet in the corner, even on the family portrait. I glared suspiciously at the speck of blood that had splattered on the clock face. Had Hae-jin not noticed this? The guy who could see a fly hovering over the key cabinet from the doorway to his room?
I concluded that he hadn’t. If he had, he would have said something, something like ‘What did you do, slaughter a pig in here?’
I rummaged around in the emergency kit and found the hydrogen peroxide. The half-litre container was about two thirds full. I emptied the air freshener out of its spray bottle and poured the hydrogen peroxide inside, then began to methodically spray everything, starting with the doorway of Mother’s bedroom. White foam grew like mould everywhere that had been splattered with blood. I wiped those spots with toilet paper, then flushed the used bits of paper down the toilet. I moved on to the key cabinet, table, stairs and upstairs hallway, checking carefully for blood.
I dragged my mattress downstairs and swapped it with Mother’s. The bloodstains weren’t going anywhere, but I thought it made sense for Mother’s traces to be returned to her room. Who knew if it would be one night or more, but it didn’t feel right to sleep on her blood. Thankfully the mattresses were the same size. As I spread the cover out on her bed, I stiffened.
I don’t know where he went.
Mother’s voice. She sounded calm and refined, as though she were reading out loud from a book – her journal. That was where I’d seen that sentence. It was also something I’d been asking myself all day. Where had I gone? What had I done for two and a half hours?
I know I saw him.
What came after that? I couldn’t remember. Was it I’m cold or I’m scared, or maybe I’m terrified? It was definitely one of the three.
I began to shiver when I stepped out of Mother’s bedroom. It was freezing in the living room. I closed all the windows and cast a final glance around the room to see if I had missed anything. Everything was clean. I ran upstairs. I settled in front of my desk and took out the journal. I hadn’t been entirely correct, but I hadn’t been completely wrong, either. It wasn’t one of the three; it was all of them.
I’m cold and scared and terrified.
It made sense that she would be cold. Last night was rainy and it was the middle of winter; it would be strange if she wasn’t cold. But scared and terrified? Those weren’t the kind of feelings she would have had without reason. She wouldn’t be scared of her own son, would she? Sure, she might have been disapproving of whatever I’d been doing, but she wouldn’t have been terrified. So that had to mean that the ‘him’ she had seen wasn’t me.
‘There was a murder around here.’ That’s what Hae-jin had said. ‘They were saying it’s a young woman.’
Was that it? Did she witness the young woman being killed? Where could that have been? The docks? The sea wall? On the footpath along the river? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the body would reach the dock. Dongjin River flowed between the two districts of the city, and the floodgates opened at the mouth of the harbour from midnight to one in the morning. The woman could have been killed and pushed in the water at just the right time, when the water that had been trapped all day surged into the ocean, following the enormous current sweeping downriver.
I heard something behind me, like a stick scraping the wooden floor. It sounded like the swing creaking in the wind. I got up and opened the blinds. Somehow it had become evening. The pergola light was still on and Mother was sitting on the swing. Her hands were laced together and propped on her stomach, her head was tilted up, as though looking at the dark sky. She looked like she was just taking a little break. Her white dress fluttered as the wind rocked the swing. Her bare feet dragged on the deck floor. The wound across her neck gaped open like a red mouth, like the Joker.
You really don’t remember? the Joker asked.
I knew I was seeing things, but I found myself speaking out loud. ‘Remember what?’
You saw it too, the Joker said.
‘Saw what? When? Where?’
The conversation ended the way it always did, with the delusion not responding. But I remembered the odd images that had danced past my eyes. The yellow light of the street lamp, the dark shadows of the river that rushed and swirled below my feet, the crimson umbrella bowling along the road, the tarpaulin flapping in the wind.
The back of my neck prickled. These images didn’t have anything to do with the ferry dock or the crossing by the sea wall. The lamps along the sea wall had LEDs that gave off crisp white light, and there was no building site covered by tarpaulin. The ocean was on one side of the wall, and on the other side was the road by the riverbank, lined with blocks of flats and buildings. So the only place where water could be swirling below my feet would be the road along the river. I didn’t know exactly where on that street, but it probably wouldn’t mean much even if I could figure it out. These images must have been what I’d seen right before my seizure; I’d had similar experiences before.
I’d settled on a conclusion but it didn’t feel great. I felt as though I’d had a glimpse of the road to hell. A hunch, something ominous, was closing in on me. My mind yammered on like a woodpecker. That can’t be right! Why would you remember meaningless scenes? There has to be something in those images. Something cold and scary and terrifying. Did I see something last night? I suddenly remembered a man singing in the darkness. The song about a girl he couldn’t forget; about her walking in the rain.
I was growing more and more confused. Instead of answers, thousands of questions were piling on top of one another like scrap metal. I closed the blinds and threw myself down in the chair. Something sharp stabbed in my inner groin. The pearl earring. I pulled it out from my pocket and grabbed my mobile. I opened a browser and typed in some key words: Gundo young woman body.
There were a few hits. I opened the first link, a Yonhap News item.
Young Woman’s Body Discovered by Gundo Sea Wall Dock
Today, around 8 a.m., a woman’s body was discovered at the ferry dock by the sea wall in Gundo, Incheon. Police said that a ticket office employee discovered the body caught on a mooring rope. The deceased was determined to be B- (age 28) of Flat A in District Two. Police sources said that the possibility of homicide was high; the body had been damaged by a sharp object. The National Institute of Scientific Investigation will conduct an autopsy and the police are questioning potential witnesses.
The other articles were along the same lines, as though they had been written from the same news release, with similar words and sentence structures. They consistently reported the identity of the dead woman, her address, that her body had been damaged somehow, and where she had been found. I suddenly thought of Yongi’s, the stand selling sugar pancakes near the crossing by the sea wall. Maybe the owner of the stand knew what had really happened.
A few metres from Yongi’s was a spiral staircase that went down to the docks, where there was a rest area. There was only a single snack stand down there, but quite a number of people came by during the day on their way to the ferry. The popular oar ferry transported tourists from the sea wall and the marine park, and at weekends the queue went all the way up to the wall. Yongi’s was in the prime commercial area, where you could see all the people on the dock and along the bicycl
e path, and all the comings and goings from District Two. The gossipy owner would be more useful than the CCTV installed at the traffic lights, since he greeted passers-by and knew the area like the back of his hand. He would have enjoyed a surge in popularity today, what with the police and curious bystanders visiting his stand.
I took a pair of sweatpants and a blue parka from the wardrobe and slung a towel around my neck to complete the look. I put my mobile, the entry card for the building’s front door, a single 5,000-won bill and the pearl earring in my pockets, then ran downstairs. It was 6.07 p.m. If I was lucky, I would be back before Hae-jin returned. I had to confirm something before putting the earring on Mother’s desk: whether the clattering and rolling sound had had anything to do with it, and if it was related to what Mother had seen last night. There was no guarantee that Mr Yongi would give me what I wanted, but he was the one person who might have information. If my luck held, I might even be able to make it down to the dock to look for further evidence.
I put on my usual running shoes, still covered in mud, and took the lift down. Outside, I began to walk quickly. There were three ways to leave the complex of flats: the main gate, which faced the majority of the buildings in the neighbourhood, most of which were still under construction; the rear gate, which was closest to our building; or a side gate that brought you out by the walking path on the road behind Gundo Elementary School. Just like last night, I began to run once I got to that road.
About five hundred metres from the side gate was where you met up with the road along Dongjin River. Further on took you to the crossing by the sea wall, then came the entrance to the marine park, and just on from that, the bridge and the observatory. It was the perfect route for a run. There was even a bicycle path between the sea wall and the observatory, used by runners or walkers, usually in the early morning or early evening.
Of course I had been running regularly since we moved here. It reminded me of swimming: you sprinted forward as fast as you could towards the end. It wasn’t bad: you could look at the river and then the ocean. I liked how my heart would leap and buck like an angry lion when I didn’t have many opportunities to feel that way, or even to feel excited, tense, nervous or angry.
The Good Son Page 10