by Ron McMillan
Thumb on the green button, I read the number flashing on the small display. Jung-hwa’s mobile.
‘Jung-hwa? Are you OK? Has he gone?’
‘Let’s take your questions in order, shall we? No, it’s not Jung-hwa. Yes, she’s fine, thank you, sound asleep, in fact. And no, you prick, I am right here.’
Schwartz.
‘What’s wrong? Don’t tell me that for the first time in your miserable existence you’re stuck for words?’
‘Any misery going around is of your making.’
‘Good for you. The slightest little thing goes wrong, and somebody else has to get the blame. You got yourself into this mess, remember.’
‘Slightest little thing? Like cutting a young woman to bits?’
‘Life goes on, man. Can’t turn the clock back.’
‘Screw you, Schwartz. I’ve heard enough.’
‘No. Wait. Where are you now? My guess is you’re still in Seoul.’
He was fishing.
‘Does it matter where I am?’
‘We could meet and talk.’
‘Give me a break.’
‘I’ll come alone. We can help each other, trade.’
‘Trade punches, maybe.’
‘What about the video tape?’
‘Christ, you too? You just don’t get it, there is no video tape.’
‘Now who’s taking who for a fool. Meet me. Maybe we can help each other out.’
I let the silence stretch for a few seconds:
‘My location, my terms.’
‘No problem.’
‘I see one face in the crowd I don’t like, I’m out of there.’
‘You have my word.’
Like I could take that to the bank.
‘Han Il Kwan restaurant,’ I said.
‘Myoung dong, right? Between Midopa department store and the Cathedral?’
‘Twelve-thirty.’ I hung up and switched off the mobile. Along the pier, the fisherman resumed his attack on the net, muscles gleaming with sweat and speckled with salty dust rendered warm-earth brown by the rising sun.
From a tight curve of rocks and discarded scallop shells in the lee of the harbour wall I picked up a handful of pebbles and launched them, one at a time, at a soft drink carton that bobbed in the tide. Once or twice I came close, but with every miss I became ever more exasperated, my efforts increasingly erratic. I threw and threw until the sinews in my shoulder began to complain.
Schwartz was still after a video tape that he could not be sure existed, and the only satisfaction I could derive was from sending him on a wild goose chase through one of the country’s busiest restaurants in the grips of the lunchtime rush.
I watched one last stone rip through the water’s surface three feet from the unaffected target and turned to find Rose so close she could have reached out and touched me. Twenty feet of rocks and shells stood between us and the nearest pathway.
‘How the hell did you manage that? I didn’t hear a thing.’
‘Grow up with three older brothers, you develop any number of survival skills. You were so far gone, a herd of elk could have snuck up on you. I thought I’d take you up on that offer.’
‘Offer?’
‘Last night, you mentioned a walk.’
‘Last night you didn’t seem very keen.’
‘I had a lot on my mind.’
You and me both.
‘When do you want to start?’
‘Meet you in an hour at the yogwan?’ She spoke over her shoulder as she glided towards the footpath, creating barely a rustle.
‘I’ll see you there,’ I shouted at her back.
At the village’s cramped little supermarket I bought mineral water, bread rolls, cheese, fruit and biscuits. Back at my room I loaded them into a daypack and slipped the purple mobile into the belt pouch beside my camera.
I stepped outside to find Rose relaxing on the same bench that I had collapsed onto a couple of hours before.
‘This way.’ I pointed to a path that left the south end of the car park.
I did this walk a couple of times with Jung-hwa. A few minutes of steep pathway wound a tight line through a stand of pine trees until we broke out onto a miniature patch of open farmland clinging to the hillside. On a muddy ridge that enclosed a terraced plot half the size of a basketball court, an infant sat on his heels, five thousand years of ancestral impassiveness already writ plain on his stoic young features. He watched a grizzled little man work a wooden plough pulled by an ox, man and beast struggling across deeply rutted soil. We stopped beside the boy and sat on our heels. The child leapt to his feet and treated us to a deep, respectful bow. He nervously tongued a gritty stripe of dried snot that occupied his upper lip.
We waved to the farmer who waved back, seemingly unsurprised by two foreigners popping up at his remote workplace.
Rose dipped into her backpack and came out with a gleaming slice of water melon. She had to coax the boy to take it, but when he did, his face shone with pleasure, and soon shone with water melon juice as he attacked the bright red fruit. The man left his ox in mid-field and walked towards us, and the boy came over all shy again until Rose once more did the backpack trick and presented the man with a melon slice. His weathered face broke into an even white smile as perfect as anything you ever saw on a toothpaste box.
I listened to Rose converse easily with the kid and his father until the Dad went back to his ox and we walked on. We turned inland onto a narrow wooded path that quickly became little more than a goat trail through dense vegetation. Tiny gaps in the foliage teased us with glimpses of startling coastal views, until at last we crested a mini-summit and shed our packs.
The rocky perch gave us 360-degree views that stretched for miles. Inland to the north, thick foliage held off ever-spreading tendrils of agriculture. To the west and east, pitted stony coastlines surged and dived from sheer precipice to rock-peppered shoreline. To the south, a hillside draped in a hundred shades of green tumbled over an invisible cliff-edge into a blue-white seascape dotted with rocky outposts too tiny to be called islands, large enough to support a few hardy trees and little else.
Pooled candle wax and spent matches and names scratched in stone marked a flat rock as the obvious picnic spot. I set my backpack down.
‘Ready for something to eat?’
‘Thirsty.’
‘I brought mineral water.’ I opened my bag.
Droplets splashed in the dust at my feet and I looked up to see a six-pack of beer dangling from Rose’s hand.
‘Freshly cut fruit and cold beer? You can join me on walks anytime you like. Got anything else I could really use?’
‘Just the one more thing, Alec.’
Alec. My stomach folded in on itself. She put the six-pack on the rock and dipped two fingers into the breast pocket of her cotton blouse. They re-appeared holding something pen-like, slender and black, silver lettering along its side.
‘You could use this.’
She placed it in my hand. The lettering was in Korean, a brand name that meant nothing to me, and towards one end was a pen-like cap. I pulled, and it came away – long, thin, inky and brush-like. Mascara.
‘You forgot about the eyelashes.’ She pushed a cold beer into the crook of my arm. I popped the seal, drained half the can, edged sideways until my legs hit the flat rock, and sat, waiting. Rose took her cue:
‘Yesterday, when I saw you at the yogwan and later at the restaurant, I was certain I knew you from somewhere.’
I recalled that she had vaguely reminded me of someone, too. Perhaps we did see each other in a Seoul taxi line.
‘And then there was the bullshit about your accent.’
I looked away.
‘My brother married a Glasgow woman, and if your home town is more than a few miles from hers, I’ll be surprised. But you told me you were Irish. And after you left me in my room last night I took my first good look at yesterday’s Herald.’
I was rumbled.
�
��At first I was scared witless, until I realised none of this explained where I knew you from. But when I read the story, I called my parents, and the penny dropped.’
This made no sense. After she discovered I was a murder suspect, she spoke to her folks then volunteered to accompany me on a stroll up a lonely hillside?
I sucked the last of the beer from the can. ‘What do you mean the penny dropped?’
‘Yesterday, I was Rose, right?’
‘Don’t tell me you were lying, too?’
‘I never did tell you my full name. It’s Rosemary Daly.’
Rosemary Daly. Korea. Canadian. At last, pennies of my own began to fall into place. When I flew into Korea for the first time in 1989, I sat next to a family of Canadian missionaries. At first I mistook them for Americans, but they soon put me right. Mum and Dad and four kids. Three boys and a girl. Grow up with three older brothers, you develop any number of survival skills.
The Dalys, the Christian Dalys, as I always thought of them. I was the newcomer to Korea and they were the experts, fluent in Korean, completely at one with a culture that I had yet to experience. Rose’s father Vincent and I shared a passion for photography, and like all photographers we also shared a love of the equipment involved. He proudly showed me his latest acquisition, a sturdy Canon SLR in its stiff leather ‘never ready’ case, and pulled out a pocket album of family portraits taken during their period of leave in Canada; three generations of loving extended family beautifully photographed at ease in an Ontario suburb. They were about as far as they could get from the few remaining blurry Instamatic shots of my dysfunctional childhood in Central Scotland.
Over the following months and years I saw Vincent and Jemma regularly, usually with the family in tow, other times alone. They were always delighted to see me and never showed a moment’s discomfort over the chasm that separated their evangelical Christianity and my unspoken but avowed atheism. We always managed to keep in touch, and though I hadn’t seen them in over ten years, they still sent me Christmas cards. Sometimes I even sent one back, usually around the middle of January. I looked around me at the beauty of Haekumgang, and another element fell into place: about a year after we met on final approach to Kimpo Airport, they recommended a quiet get-away holiday spot on the south coast. Geoje Island, Haekumgang fishing village. That was the start of several visits in the company of Jung-hwa to the very place where we stood now.
I had a vision of their youngest that day in an airliner on final approach for Seoul, a freckled pre-teen, squirming restlessly in her seat, shy and giggly and with tooth braces and long tight braids that she twirled endlessly between her fingers.
‘You’re Rosemary Daly?’
Chapter Twenty-nine
OK, so we hardly knew each other, but at least we had some history, which is more than your average two strangers perched above a rocky shoreline on the southern edge of Korea could say. Until now, in the absence of lust, a natural state of reserve had chilled our curiosity, a reserve now shed like an unwanted layer of clothing.
Soon the makings of a picnic covered the middle of the flat rock, which was big enough for us to sit cross-legged, looking over the food at the coastline and the sun swept ocean.
‘Don’t want these to go warm on us.’ I reached for a fresh beer.
‘Not much chance.’ She popped the ringpull on one of her own. ‘Mum and Dad told me all about it when I called, so are you going to explain what is going on?’
‘Do you mean ‘Did I do it’? If you really needed an answer to that one, you wouldn’t be sitting here.’
‘I might be trusting my instincts.’
‘Dad would love that.’
‘His instincts, too. He is certain you’ve got on the wrong side of someone powerful, and now you’re a convenient scapegoat. Add to that the crush I’ve had on you ever since I was eleven years old, and yes, I’m betting you didn’t do it.’
I turned away as casually as I could. My eyes glazed over with the threat of tears, blurring the scenery for the second time that day. Until now I had been carrying all this around in my own head, sharing it with no-one.
That she had a crush on me all those years ago was news to me, too.
‘The whole shitty tale?’
‘If you want to tell it.’
‘It’ll take a while.’
‘I’m not running to any kind of a timetable here.’
So I poured it all out, from being in debt in London to being on the run in Korea, and everything in between. Miss Hong. Chang, Martinmass and Schwartz. And Jung-hwa. Fuck. Jung-hwa. Here I was paralysed with self-pity because I had been keeping all of this to myself but, only a couple of days before, Jung-hwa had already played Rose’s role, hearing me out, concern and alarm written all over her lovely face. Alright, so she only got an edited version – but I had managed to forget telling her even that much. Jung-hwa hadn’t appeared in my thoughts in hours, despite the abortive phone call this morning. What that told me, I didn’t want to know.
I told Rose about the interrogation and beating I had undergone in the police station. I showed her the still-angry bruises, yellowed rainbow streaks wrapping my abdomen. I even told her about the video camera and the tape I had stashed with Mr Cho, and about Schwartz’s continued interest in the tape, never mind that he could not be sure it existed. She frowned.
‘What’s the story there?’
‘Schwartz and the tape? I wish I knew. Maybe, same as the police, he is desperate for something that ties me in with Miss Hong.’
‘And he expects you to give it up?’
‘Doesn’t make a lot of sense, I know.’
I explained how Jung-hwa warned me that Schwartz had told her I was never going to get out of this one, never going to be paid for the assignment, and explained how I had slipped away from the police tail, sold some equipment and fled town.
I picked up the last of the beers.
‘Are you sorry you asked?’
‘You couldn’t have made it up if you tried.’
‘I wish I had.’
‘But at least you know what you’re up against. So do you have a plan?’
‘A plan?’
She lowered her chin, compressed her neck into her shoulders and spoke in a comical deep voice: ‘A man with no plan, is a man going nowhere.’
I got it right away. She was mimicking Vincent, a bear of a man with a window-rattler of a laugh and a bottomless store of homespun aphorisms.
‘I haven’t got that far yet. I just got out of Seoul to find some breathing space.’
‘I know that feeling,’ said Rose, her face falling. I remembered she had said something similar last night. She had things on her mind, too, but after my days of weary solitude I wasn’t quite ready to give up the spotlight.
‘I know I’ll have to go back sooner or later, but first I want to try and get some things working in my favour – instead of Alec Brodie versus the whole bloody country. Yesterday I telephoned an idiot at the British Embassy and told him about the GDR scam. He is pretty tight with Martinmass, but he will still have to do something, because I told him I have written it all down and sent it to the Press and to his bosses in London.’ Which reminded me. I had not yet posted the letters that I had sat up half the night writing.
‘That’s a start.’
‘But?’
‘But it’s not enough. In the meantime, Chang and the rest of them will continue to manipulate things to suit themselves, and will do anything to safeguard the GDR. You have to get back at them directly.’
‘Without ending up in jail over Miss Hong.’
‘Or ending up like her.’
We let the conversation slip away from the edge of the gloom to our experiences in Korea in years gone by when things were in many ways startlingly different. She told me a story from a few years before I arrived. Then President Chun, Doo-hwan was an army general boosted into dictatorship by military coup, and who sat back in the reflected glow of a booming economy that he had nothing
to do with creating. Like all dictators he was unable to resist painting his presidency in glowing colours, at times even literally. Rose told me of a grandly orchestrated occasion when he formally opened the massive re-development of the Han Riverbanks. Chun made an imperious boat trip up the river as if to claim credit for the feat of engineering as his very own, and it was, of course, live on television, cameras in helicopters hovering overhead.
The huge expanses of new riverside parkland had yet to grow vegetation, and the proud leader couldn’t possibly preside over a river flanked by twin broad strips of brown mud. When the helicopters rose and the cameras panned out, the parkland on each river bank was a sea of lush green. Except it was a make-shift sea, mile upon mile of riverside submerged under millions of gallons of green-tinted water. While Chun’s moment of glory was broadcast around the country, half the population of Seoul sneered into their soju. In Korea, then as now, things were often not quite the way they seemed.
We dissolved in escapist laughter and I lay back on the rock, head cushioned by my rucksack, closed my eyes and savoured a rare moment of contentment.
I can fall asleep anywhere, so it was no surprise when I popped out of slumber and looked at my watch. I had been out for maybe ten minutes. Pushing myself up onto one elbow, I saw Rose a few feet away, sitting cross-legged on the dusty ground, leaning against the trunk of a wiry tree, looking out to sea.
I went over and sat on my heels just out of her line of sight. It was a while before she turned to look at me. I spoke gently:
‘Want to talk?’
‘About what?’
‘Well, you heard me out, and I was glad of it.’
‘So now it’s my turn?’
‘Only if you want.’
‘How do you know I have anything to tell?’