He put his hand on my shoulder and left it there.
‘Harold, it was nice knowing you. But every time you make a pot, do not think of me. Do not think of anything. Don’t be a slave. Even of yourself.’
At that, I looked up, as if he had found my guilty secret, some abyss I could not fathom yet which was closer than skin. I had a singlet on, and his hands were on my flesh. He weighed on me like Atlas. But I let him. I bore his hand. Even though it burned with the kind of truth I wasn’t ready for.
8
Ben
‘Hey, mate!’
‘Ben!’
I’m walking along the street on this cool spring morning. The ghost gums seem to hold sway over Brunswick for the short time they can keep dawn and day together in the tepid blue-grey air. I haven’t had breakfast and I haven’t shaved – always a mistake. Not something that would happen to Do-yun, but it sure happens to me.
‘How about a coffee, Harold?’
He thinks I have a hangover. I don’t, but lack of sleep has the same effect. I shake my head slowly to give myself time, as if I’d never heard the word ‘coffee’ in my life.
‘I’ll take you to the best coffee place up the street. It’s quiet, cool, el cheapo, and the waitress is just too beautiful to face before breakfast, but if we keep our heads down and eat quickly, we can look at her after that.’
He waits for his answer, standing beside me, gazing at his shoes as if they were a landscape.
‘I’m thinking of returning to South Korea, Ben,’ I say quietly.
‘Really?’
He frowns.
‘Not before breakfast, surely? So how about that coffee?’
I look at my phone and realise that it’s 7 a.m. I got up around six to go for a walk. And I can’t remember where I’ve been.
He looks up and his open face closes, leaving me space, options and a slight sea breeze. It does smell very slightly of the sea on Lygon Street when there’s a southerly.
‘Thanks, Ben. Sure.’
As we walk up to El Mirage I have the time to realise how the name fits my present situation. We pass the old Arab owner of the Miramar Nut Shop, who I’m told stayed on at the Moroccan Soup Bar when they bought him out. He’s proudly alone in the newly renovated surroundings of Moroccan tiles, bar stools, tajines, shiny copper cookware and bold dishes of red peppers and spices.
Everything at El Mirage is the way Ben has described it: the waitress, the prices and the food. We sit at a right angle to each other, away from the music and the coffee machine, at the end of the high-backed wooden bench with cushions that lines the room right down to its left-hand corner. Ben orders the most gigantic breakfast he can read about. I order some corn fritters. We both have coffee, except that mine is a decaf. I observe all this as if I were observing my body from the ceiling of the café.
The food comes rather fast, and soon Ben is looking up at me while chewing energetically.
‘What’s going on, man? Why the rush to return to Seoul? Didn’t you say you’d lived there eighteen years? Haven’t you paid your tribute to Seoul?’
He smiles as if it could only be about a girl. I narrow my eyes and feel a grimace taking hold of my features. How can I tell him about Do-yun, Ha-yoon, Sung-ki? How can I tell him about Marylou? But I do. I tell him the whole thing. I haven’t spoken like this to anyone for years. I’m aghast at myself, as if I were behaving out of character, as if I were leaking, as if this were an obscene performance, but the story comes out with its hiccups and epiphanies, drawing itself from me like a tide, leaving me on the El Mirage beach, empty of Seoul.
He doesn’t say a word or ask a question, but his face is that of a friend and a brother. When there’s nothing left, I turn the spoon in my empty cup and the silence between us is cool, a silence you can be at home in.
‘How about you, Ben?’
Instead of proffering any comments on my smorgasbord, he answers straight away, easily, openly, with that open face of his that doesn’t hold back yet is somehow full of diffidence.
‘I’ve got this girl on my mind, of course. And my father … well, he’s on my mind too. He’s a criminal lawyer. He’s quite famous, actually. To tell you the truth, it’s a bit of drag to have a successful father. It makes you … not care, not give a shit about your future. As if you had a turbine on your back, as if he did all the worrying for you, as if you have nothing to prove because he’s proven everything.’
‘How old are you Ben?’
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘Twenty-nine!’
He looks about twenty-three, if that.
‘I’m thirty-six.’
‘At least you have a job, a passion, a vocation.’
‘Sunday potter? Unpublished writer of children’s books?’
He sits up on the bench with a jerk.
‘But at least you know. I’m just trying things.’
‘Have you been encouraged to try law?’
Ben ducks his head like a horse.
‘He can’t encourage me to do anything. I’ve slept on park benches a few times, but I’ve paid my way since I was seventeen. I changed my name by deed poll.’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
His smile is a smile of relief, as if my understatement were the true weighing of his relationship with his father. Pure distaste. Nothing more, nothing less. I remember my own father once making a boat out of a walnut shell. Gripping the edge of the white porcelain, I stood and watched it sail around the washbasin. However small, it was a real boat and, however tiny its passengers would have to be, it could sail. Yes, that’s what Ben’s smile is about. He can sail on his own. He can manage without that father of his, that father he doesn’t like and without whom he’s entire. I’ve never seen anyone smile quite like Ben – except Marylou, perhaps.
For a moment I wonder if Marylou wouldn’t do very well over here. I would never divulge her line of work to Ben, but somehow I feel he detects something fishy about her life, something difficult, and he’s more than usually tentative with his questions about her.
He’s also very interested in Ha-yoon, whom he calls ‘the sexpot’. The term feels vaguely sacrilegious, and I realise how sex and Ha-yoon have become sacred, unalloyed mysteries where I hardly dare to tread. Maybe that’s part of her charm for me.
Ben interrupts his munching.
‘So why would you return? Wouldn’t you be in exactly the same situation?’
He’s right, of course. I squirm.
‘But it’s about the pottery. I can’t bear overstepping myself. That pot is sold now. Over my head. I can’t believe that crazy price didn’t discourage them. Selling the pots wasn’t the only option. Verity was quite ready to house them.’
‘Harold …’
He takes a breath after pronouncing my name, as if it engages him in some sort of time travel.
‘Harold, what if your pots were quite different from Do-yun’s? What if they were ready? Maybe you don’t have to be seventy to sell pots. Maybe each person has a different timetable for showing stuff, or for doing anything.’
He smiles sheepishly when he says that. And I can see how he has unwittingly reminded himself of his own quandaries.
‘It’d be under false pretences. I’m not ready. But I agree with you about the mystery of each individual timetable.’
‘Not ready in Korean terms or on your own terms?’
‘I have no terms.’
He chuckles.
‘Never thought I’d meet a guy who was crazier than me.’
We look at each other with that wicked look drunks have when they know they’re going to go on drinking no matter what. Except this is breakfast and I’m ordering my third decaf.
‘I’d better have one of your decafs too. I feel so wired you could plug a phone into me.’
He asks me more about Marylou. I can see he’s interested. Of course her looks, as I’ve described them, have captured his imagination, but also her self, her presence easing its way i
nto our conversation, as if she were on the verge of walking through the door – perhaps because that is what I would like her to do right now. As if she were able to free herself that easily from circumstance, from absence, and even from description.
Then I realise that I can’t contact Marylou, except perhaps through the soup vendor.
‘Why don’t you ask her to come here? You’re not going back anyway, are you?’
Suddenly I find that I won’t after all.
9
Libĕna
BEN JUMPS TO his feet. He has to rush off to the Brotherhood. He slaps his share of the bill on the table, shakes my hand and is gone. I get to see the waitress alone. She stands in front of me and Ben’s point is amply proven. She is stunning, with honey-coloured hair and skin and a neat figure. The song playing on the speakers seems to be about her. All good songs seem to be about the girl you’re with, even if she’s only bringing your bill. There’s something athletic about her, but a sweetness too. I leave when she turns away to take someone else’s order. I haven’t chatted with her, just thanked her and left a tip. I’m for The Sea & Us for a shower and a shave.
Then, walking back in the soft spring light, with its new soundless warmth, as if the cars were driving on the velvet promise of summer, it comes to me at last: all this going, this arriving, this painting, this cleaning, this pot-making, this Ben, this Verity, can no longer disguise the fact that I’ve lost her. Completely. She’s gone, even if I’m the one who’s left Seoul. The pain of it is alive and fresh as if it has just happened again – a bitter burning in my groin, in the back of my throat, inside my bones. She’s gone. I’ll never see her again. My three years of love. Ha-yoon.
Sometimes I imagine her walking with Do-yun in the street, leaning in to him like a plant listening to Bach. This is more real than my memory of her body, more real than her moaning, more real than the way she twisted this way and that, as if she were looking for the light with her eyes closed. In that closeness, as I see it now, she was absent, not with me at all, not like this, not like the way her steps sewed themselves into Do-yun’s. That image feels truer than any memory. Ha-yoon extends her affection sexually – but her love was for Do-yun. Even my love was for Do-yun. He was the lynchpin.
There was no suggestion of her backing down when she saw I wasn’t going to set foot in Do-yun’s house. It never crossed her mind to leave Seoul with me. And she has my email, hasn’t she? It’s been a month now, and I’ve heard nothing. I wonder if she’s back in bars to deal with the sexual side of things again.
But all I can see is Ha-yoon looking up at Do-yun’s cultivated face, his fine skin taunt on his bones, his strong features, his long eyelashes, and his eyes that scan the street with mild interest, seeming not so much to smile at the world as to encompass it within his benevolent gaze.
As I walk slower and slower up Lygon Street, I know that Ha-yoon is and has always been in love with, and in awe of, her seventy-year-old husband, and that what she felt for me was something very different. And then I remember her sitting by the Cheonggyecheon Stream at my side and my thoughts go full circle. I wonder if I’ll ever put her to rest. Ha-yoon is my ‘cloud of unknowing’ that spares me other, darker thoughts … Maybe, after all, I was using her, too.
I speed up to reach The Sea & Us and shake my head free of thinking. The shop is still closed and I lock the door behind me. Verity must be curled up in her den reading, or gardening in her sunny courtyard. I climb the grimy stairs two by two. I can’t wait to have water falling over me. Ha-yoon used to say that I don’t really shower but just stand there like a horse being hosed down.
If I skip my morning shower, darkness can gain a hold over me. I start thinking of the worst things, even those intimate terrors of childhood that seem to edge their way back in – like Liběna. It begins quite benignly with the memory of the day I left her forever: the relief, the lack of guilt that nothing could impinge on, not even her quiet dignity, her courteous despair. Then, when the triumph of being eighteen and free from her at last returns to wash over to me, the rest comes back too … And wherever I am, whatever I’m doing – except for pottery – I am subject to Liběna all over again.
The nights when I knew the door would open, just a second before it really did. Her white flesh floating into the room, ominous, her bare feet, ominous, her hands, pulling back the quilt, ominous, the room filling itself with cold – a different kind of cold. Then, as the sheets parted, shifted, like another door into night, the pall of her naked, warm embrace, of her body cupping mine entirely, of the darkness inhabited by her light scent, by her silence – such a different silence to that of my empty bedroom. Not a whisper, not a sound – only, after a few minutes, her regular breathing. The naked mother breathing innocently against me was a vacuum of unease, a plummeting fall. I felt caught, punished inside myself for feeling a strangeness and a terror that had no name and that the word ‘sex’ later on would never quite fill.
Then, before dawn, she would stir and climb out of my bed shrouded in the same silence – the same nakedness, the same step – and walk out of my room and back into her own.
I’ve never asked myself questions, I’ve never spoken of this to anyone alive. This is what I have come back to, this haunting of childhood. Like that walnut shell, it would never stop, never reach the shore, but sail, sail around the white washbasin.
After a few weeks of this I had a brainwave. I bolted my door. Simple, easy. My link to her was severed – nothing she did or said could touch me again. I bought myself earplugs and stopped even hearing the rattle of the doorknob in the middle of the night. Triumph was total, unexpressed, subtle and thorough. I would look at her during the day as she gradually gave up trying to communicate her love to me, as she gradually relinquished me to my own autonomy.
Simple words, simple things existed again. The world stopped being eerie and I never felt lonely, because loneliness, for me, was being with her.
I towel myself carefully and step into clean clothes. I hop down the stairs. I always feel strangely better when I’ve faced it, remembered it in its detail, as if it were a Bluebeard room that needed to be aired so it could return to its shadow land, reduced in proportion, like the beheaded toys, the despised Scrabble boards, the old cricket bats, the rusty harmonicas – ligan objects lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed, and have to be on the odd occasion, before they start encumbering the whole bloody place.
Verity pops her head out of her den. I feel my feet stop, as if suspended.
‘Where are you going to on this bright morning? Still want to store your pots with me?’
‘Hi, Verity. No, I don’t, actually. I think they’re going. Would you like one for yourself ?’
‘A pot?’ she says, as if she were saying, ‘A kangaroo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come in for a decaf, young man.’
We grin at each other.
Her place is spotless as usual. The worn, waxed honey of the table has a pot of decaf coffee and two cups. Homemade brown bread, chestnut honey of the liquid sort, jam. We sit down. The light from the skylight is full on her face and I catch my breath.
‘What’s ailing you, Harold?’ She narrows her eyes.
‘You remind me of someone, Verity.’
‘Do I?’ She seems particularly placid and noncommittal.
I drink my decaf black. She grinds it herself and the smell fills the room. She sips her cup thoughtfully.
‘Strange, we both have to stick to decaf. Are you a poor sleeper too?’
‘Verity, why do you never go upstairs?’
‘Harold, who do I remind you of ?’
I know there comes a time in a friendship when you have to come clean, a time when it will grow thin if you don’t. Verity and I might be the kind of friends who can’t just shoot the breeze.
‘You remind me of my mother, Verity.’
‘Is the conversation so bad that he has to compare me to his mother?
’
‘The conversation’s never bad with you, Verity. I mean it. You’re her spitting image. A doppelgänger.’
‘Well, it could be worse.’
‘No, it couldn’t.’
‘I see.’
She just sits there and asks me no more. Then her head jerks towards the shop and the stairs behind the closed door.
‘He used to live here, the man I was married to. We used to live up there. He’s in prison now.’
I wait, holding my cup near my lips without drinking, my eyes on her face. She scratches the side of her neck, expressionless.
‘It was more than thirty years ago. He’s still in prison. He raped half a dozen women and killed the last one. I had no idea. He slept in my bed for five years. And I had no idea.’
We can hear the bell tinkle. Someone wants some fish and chips.
10
An Email
I HEAR THE BARK on my phone telling me I have an email. I’ve chosen barks in my settings. The other noises are awful.
When I see who it’s from I feel like barking myself.
Dear Old Kiddo,
The streets are the same, the bloody streetlights are the same, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. You can come back any time you like, Old Chum, it’s all here waiting for you. The soup vendor asks about you and I have no news to give him.
Also there is a lack of your unwieldy presence, I must admit. Why did you have to break the unreliable organ? I have not been overworked with the weather being so bad and have got a lot of reading done.
I went to see the moon jar again, by the way. It’s the only thing that doesn’t look quite the same.
Marylou.
The Sea & Us Page 6
