Seoul Survivors

by Naomi Foyle

  “Same same,” Jin Sok said. “Police come, need talk to. But Jae Ho buy you drink.”

  “Yes, what you drink?” Jae Ho inquired. As he reached to get the bartender’s attention, his linen sleeve brushed her bare arm. He was a little shorter than she was—most Korean men were—so she pulled up a stool to even the difference. His eyes exploring her face and breasts, he passed her a vodka and soda.

  “Blonde hair: nice. Look green in light,” he said.

  Jin Sok laughed, and she playfully punched him in the arm.

  Jae Ho nodded appreciatively. “Very violent girl. I like. How old you, Sy-duh-nee?”

  It was only the nine hundredth time she been asked that since she got off the plane from Vancouver. “Twenty,” she replied pertly, as if rapping his knuckles with a fan.

  “Ah, so young. You married?” Totally boring Korean question number two.

  She shook her head and waited for the inevitable cry of, “Why not?”

  But Jae Ho only raised his eyebrows, then said, “You brave girl come Korea all by yourself.”

  Sydney wrinkled her nose. “Oh, no—I came with a friend. Then I met Jin Sok.”

  “I saw her photo. Lipstick poster. Pow!” The photographer punched the air and Sydney wanted to hug him again. Just a week ago, celebrating her move, she had got pissed and tried to kiss him, but he’d just tucked her up on her bed-mat and gone to sleep beside her as if nothing had happened. In the morning he’d told her he was gay-celibate. “I had many boyfriend, Sy-duh-nee, many years. But now I want be monk: clean inside again.” She’d never felt so safe with anyone.

  “So, are you a house painter, Jae Ho?” she asked, plucking lightly at his spattered T-shirt. The fabric was thick, the best cotton, and a little damp with his sweat.

  “House paint?” he frowned. Jin Sok translated, chuckling, and poked his friend in the ribs. Jae Ho got the joke, and cuffed his hand away.

  “Oh, Sy-duh-nee get even! Good, good. No. Not house paint. This shirt famous in Gongjang. Is shirt I wore when I paint this.” Reaching under her, he swiveled her stool until she was looking at a square blue canvas on the wall behind her.

  The painting’s churning surface was divided in half by a thick black horizontal slash. Above and below this dividing mark there was something delicate, almost brocaded, about the texture of the paint that made Sydney want to reach out and trace its details with her finger. She stood up to take a closer look. Mingled within the blue brushstrokes were the imprints of long hairs, fragile wings of insects, dried petals and scraps of what looked like Korean hand-made paper, the kind Jin Sok had used in a shoot last week.

  Still thinking hard, she returned to Jae Ho. “It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s like . . . a trapped soul.”

  He turned to Jin Sok. “Sy-duh-nee very intelligence girl. Very beauty too.”

  She reached out lightly, fluttering her hand along his sleeve. “Komapsumnida, Jae Ho.” That was the formal way to say thank you. It suited her, now she was a professional model, out meeting artists in Seoul.

  It was nearly four o’clock when Damien and Jake got to Gongjang. Hailing a friend, Jake pushed onto the tiny dance floor. Damien bought a bottle of water and sat down on the sofa beneath the violent, inedible jam stain on the wall. Staring at that painting would really do a number on his head tonight. He was already half-regretting his decision to take Sam’s E.

  The music, however, was sublime: an insinuating mix of techno-trance and battery-acid jazz. The crowd was throbbing like a blood-blister, but thinning enough to let the dancers shine. As another wave of his E high warmed his sternum, Damien rose and sidled over to Jake. A blonde girl was dancing in front of him. He tried to side-step her and she turned to face him for a moment. The impact of her smile nearly knocked him off his feet.

  The room was wobbling, his head was spinning. It was like the girl had sucker-punched him, right back into that black funnel he’d spent years trying to scramble out of. His dad was there too, gazing at a parade of blonde girls swinging by, saying sadly over and over, That could have been our Jess, couldn’t it, Damien?

  NO, NO, IT COULDN’T, DAD, Damien had always wanted to shout. No girl Damien had ever met or seen—on telly, in a magazine, in real life, wherever—none of them could ever have matched Jessica; she was peerless. And she was never going to grow up either. She would be a little girl, always. If he did manage, on occasion, to pull her image out of that black hole he kept her in, she was unchanging, but ever-shining. Like a crystal. A hard star that would never burn out.

  But now, here, in front of him, Jessica had blossomed back into flesh.

  Her face fixed in a tight expression of private intent, the blonde slowly rotated her hips. Her hair was streaming down her naked back, and an alto sax cajoled sweat and honey from her limbs. Then, as the music built up momentum, she started head-banging and her glinting hair filled the air. She was Jessica, grown up; Jessica concentrating; Jessica dancing; Jessica shutting out the world.

  As Damien stared, a Korean skinhead moved in close to the blonde and raised his sculptured arms above his head. As if feeding off each other’s energy, they twisted and touched, grooving, shimmying, shaking, bumping hips.

  A dancer pushed past Damien to the bar, jolting him out of his trance. He reached into the sea of bodies, wrenched Jake off the dance floor and pressed his mouth to his friend’s ear. “Jake, that girl, right there, see her?”

  “Yesh, mate, I shee her, oh by Jove, I shertainly do,” Jake slurred.

  “Do you know her?” Damien tried not to shout.

  “Good grief! Itsh my maiden auntie!”

  “No, really, is she a friend of anyone’s?” He didn’t care that he sounded desperate.

  “I wish; I can but wish.” His eyes rolling around like marbles, Jake beamed down the cleavage of a girl in front of him.

  Feeling ridiculous, Damien let go of his friend, but Jake moved in closer. “Looksh like she’s got a boyfriend, old chap. Shome of them do go native, y’know.”

  “She just looked familiar, that’s all,” Damien muttered.

  Jake clapped him on the back. “She’sh a model, goofus. She’sh on all the VidAds. In gold make-up? You must’ve sheen her a million times.”

  He peered at her again through the crowd: yeah, Jake was right, she was the GrilleTexTM girl. He just hadn’t recognized her without the gold leaf plastered all over her face.

  Fuck it—minor celebs, who needed ’em? And what was the point of meeting her, anyway? Why risk getting himself wound up over Jessica all over again? Since he’d got into the swing of things in Seoul he’d had just one dream about her and then nothing, nada, no more screaming in his head, no more vast empty feelings in his gut . . . And really, he was happy to let things stay that way.

  He let Jake pull him back onto the dance floor as the model and her Korean boyfriend hugged and headed over to the bar.

  As the night wore on the music segued from Nu-Destruction tinged with soul to disco dipped in cream. All Damien wanted to do was lose himself on the dance floor, but it felt as if he were hypnotized: he just couldn’t stop watching the blonde model flirt with her Korean friends. Okay, she was younger than Jessica would be now, but she was his sister to a T: everything from the tip of her nose to the angles of her elbows. That was Jessica bossing the boys about; Jessica singing along to a pop song; Jessica hugging the huge white teddy bear on the stool underneath the speaker. Like a record stylus skidding out of control, Damien’s mind lurched between the nightclub in front of him and a distant place he’d once called home.

  With a start, he realized he was crying. Crying? This was too much—this wasn’t normal. He was on E, for fuck’s sake; he was supposed to feel ecstatic. But he was sweating now, a burning, freezing sweat that dripped sour sizzling droplets down his chest and into his stomach. His stomach. Oh no—oh yes—

  Damien barged into the men’s bog, elbowed aside a Korean surf-punk and spewed up into a sink. The jet of vomit seared the back of his th
roat, but instantly his head felt clearer and his stomach light as air. He rinsed his mouth out, then the sink, and stared at himself in the mirror. Christ, Day, don’t go psycho on me now. Breathe. That’s better. Take a chill-pill. Breathe.

  Back in the club, the skinhead and his friends were propping up the bar by themselves, watching the blonde as she returned to the dance floor alone. Calmly, Damien wove his way back to the sofa to find his bottle of water. The blonde was about twenty, he reckoned. She was very cute, but she had a boyfriend. And it wasn’t her fault she looked like his dead twin sister. He had to leave her well alone.

  “Hey, Dames, wanna share a cab home?” Jake slurred in his ear, and yeah, it was probably time to go. But then an ancient, way-too-loud Blur song sawed the air in two and the blonde was prancing right in front of them, promising to do all the boys . . .

  “That’s your cue, buddy,” Jake snickered.

  “Nah,” Damien muttered, but Jake gave him a wicked sidelong smile and a shove.

  He staggered into the blonde’s arms. She pushed him off her. They made eye-contact. Her glance punched him in the heart, but she just kept grinning and twirling, and behind him, Jake cackled with laughter.

  The tight weave of the crowd had loosened and all those remaining in the nightclub were able at last to survey the spaces between each other, to assess the multiplicity of ways that emptiness could shift and loop and morph. Blur drowned in the oceanic currents of deep house, and the music, impure and never simple, at last attained a lustrous peace. As Damien danced with the blonde, a monumental black man, a techno-titan, shimmied around them, birthing new worlds of music and movement from the drops of sweat he wiped from his brow. A lean Korean taunted the room, two green Glo-sticks never still for a moment in his hands. A posse of skateboarding dudes kept the flow above and below, while an Indian woman in a tight black and white dress brandished her cigarette like a torchlight of approval.

  Chucking up had been the best thing he’d done in weeks. Damien’s high was subliminal now. He lifted his bottle of water to his lips and the blonde stretched out her hand—to request a sip or to drench herself with the whole thing; he didn’t care. She tipped her head back too quickly, spilling water down her chin, then she smiled and rolled her eyes and wiped away the shining liquid with the back of her hand.

  “Thanks,” she mouthed, and he recovered sufficiently to smile back as she waved him goodbye, slipping back through the crowd to her barstool and her three creepy friends. Then Jake was pulling at his sleeve: time to go. Yeah, while he was still glowing, floating, radiating love, charged with awe at the amazing powers of a Universe that resurrected people, brought them back to you in all their beauty and glory. His panic ten minutes previously felt like a million years ago. And now it all made sense, why he’d dreamed about Jessica, why she’d followed him on to that Han Air flight. She’d been telling him to watch out—he was destined to meet this girl.

  It was six-thirty and Sydney was out on the street again, blinking in the woozy light. Jin Sok flagged a taxi and offered her a ride, but she knew where she was and her flat was only ten minutes’ walk away. He kissed her goodbye, jumped in and was gone.

  Savoring the sight of the cotton-puff clouds in the east, she stopped for a moment on the steps of a designer clothing shop. She was just about to move on when someone slid an arm across her shoulders and stuck a small, stiff thumb in her mouth.

  Her heart pounding, she twisted around. Jae Ho was behind her, chuckling. “I sorry, Sy-duh-nee. I frighten you?”

  “No,” she lied, adrenalin racing through her body. But he wasn’t threatening her. He was Jin Sok’s friend, his eyes twinkling as he watched her recompose herself, and as she jutted out her chin and assessed his stance in return, she felt the shock to her system transform into the slow burn of interest.

  He looked good in the daylight. Fit and alert. Impulsively, she stroked his T-shirt. His stomach was broad and hard beneath the soft cotton. Laughing, he grasped her wrist and dragged her hand down to his groin; she gasped, and pulled away. He let go. Held her gaze. It was a dare. She reached for his thumb, pulled it to her mouth and bit the firm tip.

  “Ni-suh, Sy-duh-nee,” he approved, pulling her to him by the waist. “So bad girl.”

  “Bad girl? Me?” She dropped his hand and placed her palms on his shoulders, her breasts skimming his chest.

  “I watch you dance,” he whispered hoarsely. “You very much alive in your body, I think.” He pushed her back a little, frankly admiring her, and she felt something secret loosen between her legs. “And you have very detailed mind,” he continued, nudging her into the doorway of the shop.

  “Here?” They were only partially hidden from the boulevard, but he reached into her dress, grappled with her bra and coaxed out one of her breasts. Her knees buckled.

  “Ahh. You smell Summer Passion.” He bent his head to suck greedily on the puckered nipple.

  She closed her eyes, moaned and gripped his shoulders. She wanted him to take all her weight, lift her from the ground, into his arms.

  “Here?” he urged, his other hand kneading her bottom, fingers inching down toward her wet panties. “You cannot come to my house, Sy-duh-nee. I married.”

  He was getting taller, she was getting shorter, curling into his chest. He was kissing her neck. But . . . “You married?” she repeated stupidly, pushing him away. Of course he was; he was Korean, after all.

  “I married, but I want free.” He cocked his head and pressed his groin against hers. “What you think? Do you want sex?”

  Yes she did, she did want sex, quite badly as it happened. “We can go to my place,” she said. “I live round the corner.”

  “Solo?”

  “Ne, solo.”

  “Is artist style,” he said, pinching her nose. He rearranged her clothes. He held her hand all the way home.

  13 / Passion Show

  His flight got in at eleven a.m., but Johnny didn’t bother to call. Sydney would be crashed out in bed with her sexy clubbing clothes still on; he figured he’d just crawl in beneath the covers and give her a rude awakening. Then he’d whisk her back out to the airport for an evening flight to Thailand. He had a suite booked at the Phuket Hilton to start, then they’d head to a smaller island. Man-o-man, he needed some sex on the beach.

  In the black cab from the airport back to Itaewon he fired off a few quick self-congratulatory emails from his MoPho—it couldn’t hurt to remind people there was only one Johnny Sandman, only one key operative capable of dealing with every last bullet point on the agenda. Even Kim had to admit that no one else in Asia could have co-ordinated PAT. The multiple bribes necessary to ensure the smooth completion of Project Aid Truck had required every ounce of his considerable political and administrative expertise, but thanks to months of his bullying, account-laundering and string-pulling, thirty North Korean women had now been smuggled across the Chinese border to Beijing, taken from their villages in the false bottoms of International Aid trucks. Not one had been lost in the border crossings, where summary execution was always the outcome of capture.

  And who’d flown out to meet and greet? Who else but Johnny Sandman? he thought, pressing Send for the fifth time. Certainly no one from that bunch of lousy pen-pushers and conference junkies had volunteered: no one else in fucking ConGlam or GRIP ever got off their asses and out into the field—except Kim, of course. That must be why she hated him so much. Territorial bitch. Well, the Doc couldn’t get on his case about any aspect of this trip—in fact, even she would have to give him a little, heh heh, PAT on the back. For thanks to his logistical genius and considerable personal charm, arrangements were now in place for thirty happy peasants and their medics to travel on to a safe house in Kyonggi-do, an hour south of Seoul—a place he himself had sourced, if he recalled correctly.

  He had also, he informed his boss in LA, gained the trust of the surrogates. With his clean-cut features and dirty-blonde hair Johnny Sandman was the Hollywood face of their new future, a
nd in this role of Western hero he had overseen the tiniest details of their care. Two of them had pneumonia, but wouldn’t touch pharmaceuticals—they said it would be bad for the babies—so expensive herbalists had been engaged. Another woman needed major dental work, which had had to be booked. The rest of them had traipsed around the hotel after him, giggling behind their hands whenever he cast them as much as a stray glance. By the time he’d shown them the video, the ladies were all Silly Putty in his hands. Beijing might have been a hassle at times, but it had also been a golden test of Johnny Sandman’s new powers of Empathy and Persuasion.

  Admittedly, the success of the trip did away with his last excuse for not bringing Sydney into the picture yet, and it was way too late to find another girl now. He’d been thinking positive, though, during the long nights in that crap Beijing hotel. They hadn’t been getting on too bad lately. Okay, she wasn’t quite as down and dirty in the sack as he liked, but a guy could always play away occasionally. And sure, she’d been driving him crazy with her moods and sulks ever since she got that OhmEgo job, but between the OxyPops and his anger transformation techniques he’d managed to soothe things over—those training sessions with Andrew Beacon had been worth every red cent ConGlam had paid for them.

  The taxi was crossing the river. He switched off his MoPho and leaned back in his seat. Things were on track. Johnny Sandman was moving on up. And what a journey it had been.

  Of course he’d been furious when they’d ordered him to go to Vancouver for the Moving from Anger to Passion course—what kind of a hokey dumbass did they take him for? The Sandman didn’t sit around discussing his shitty childhood with a bunch of no-hoper losers, no fucking way—but the head honchos had been firm on this matter. They didn’t want him to “lose his edge,” they’d said; not lose his cool quite so often or so dramatically. He’d been pissed when they’d alluded to the Incident—which they knew was really just “Natural Exuberance”—but then, just as the fumes were seeping out of his nostrils, they’d thrown in the sweeteners. He’d get a big bonus if he brought the Queen of the Peonies back with him—the Doc was demanding a girl with no social network in Seoul, so he could see it made sense to recruit her in Canada. Plus, if he came back to Korea with Beacon’s certificate he’d get not only the raise but a new title: Head of Korean Operations. He’d be doing the same shit as before—schmoozing, grooving and opening up new markets—but with a hefty pay increase, and the responsibility of overseeing the two new projects for a minimum of five years.