PS: Thank you for giving me your email on departure. I’m writing this in an internet café. And you can answer me on the email address above. As you can see I have acquired my own gmail address.
I’m so relieved to hear from her that I sit down on the kerb and read her email over and over again. When I sit down lower in the street, especially in side streets like Weston Street, I can hear the birds, smell the earth and feel the trees, while the occasional car is relegated to a noisy passing shadow. They’re not half as real as my knees, as the root climbing out of its burrow, about to walk off with its trunk, branches and foliage. I’d forgotten trees were like that around here – a presence to be reckoned with. They stand there just like anybody else with their own troubles, decisions and destinations. Like me, taking stock of the fact she’s still in my life, as much a part of it as this tree root.
I can just see her here, wrinkling her nose to breathe in the Melbourne air. She wouldn’t wilt here – not that Marylou wilts anywhere, but here she would have a chance. Why do I think that? I who know nothing about her? Nothing about what brought her to where she is. And who has never had the guts to enquire.
I have the guts now.
I send off an answer, asking her for her phone number. Surely she has one. Of course, I never needed it before, but I do now. Telephones were not part of our connection – everyday chance meetings were part of our connection. I ask her straight out.
She sends me a number, less than five seconds later. We are back on track.
‘Marylou?’
‘Marlowe.’
An uneasy silence unearths itself.
‘Marylou, old thing, how are you? No bruises? Please tell me there are no bruises.’
‘I didn’t think it was possible to miss such a corny old fellow so much.’
‘Listen, why don’t you come down here?’
‘Down where?’ Her mind is obviously a blank.
‘Here. Melbourne. Australia. Come down, Marylou. Stop that racket. It’s not good for your health.’
‘What would I do down there?’
‘You could read.’
We’re both silent like kids in the enormous playground of the world. It feels like the perfect decision – nothing to take from it, nothing to add to it. Decisions are naked bones, anyway. There’s a lot of flesh and clothing attached to them, but the fact remains that what makes them is a pure yes or a pure no – a marrow of truth.
‘One can’t just read, Myshkin.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you need a job. And I only have that job.’
‘That’s not a job.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s something else, Marylou, something you do just to breathe or to forget or maybe to remember.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that, do we, Philip?’
I remember that she calls me Philip when her nose is out of joint. She’s never the kind of person who gets mad at you, she just resorts to changing her vocabulary, or calling you Philip instead of Marlowe. Somebody might have kicked the stuffing out of her, but there still doesn’t seem to be room for bitterness in her make-up. Irony is all she has the stomach for. In that way, she’s a bit like Do-yun. Neither of them has the energy to waste on non-essentials.
‘Nah, just come along.’
‘As simple as that, huh?’
‘Yeah, Marylou, as simple as that.’
I can hear her breathe, slowly, like a fish, like something frying in a pan, like a snail in its shell, like a child in its nightmare.
‘Okay.’ She pronounces the word carefully.
‘How long will it take you to get ready?’
‘Not long.’
‘How long, Marylou? This is not happening in a Tale of Genji time frame.’
‘Would tomorrow suit?’
‘Tomorrow would suit me fine. Do you need money for the ticket?’
‘I have my ill-gotten gains.’
‘We’ll manage. I have my own ill-gotten gains.’
‘Shall we hang up, Marlowe?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow.’
And she hangs up. That instant I start worrying that something will prevent her from coming, that some pimp or madam will do her in.
My legs are swallowing the distance between Weston Street and The Sea & Us. If Verity doesn’t rent me her spare room, I’ll buy Placido out. I’m full of plans.
When I charge into the shop, the bell doesn’t tinkle but seems to boom like a church bell.
Verity looks up. No Bernard. I sense a twinge of relief. There’s a woman at the counter paying for three lunches. I stand at the door and open it for her. She has a ridiculous perm and is dressed in a fifties outfit, with her handbag hanging stiffly on her arm. She nods at me as if she were the Queen of England.
‘Verity!’
‘What’s up? Don’t have kittens all over my fresh fish.’
‘Verity, I need another room.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’
‘Can I rent the room next to mine?’
‘Of course you can. Have you got a friend coming?’
‘More like family.’
‘Family! Holy Mary, Mother of God!’
I have hit the Irish nerve.
She fossicks under the till and hands me a key.
‘Here.’
I climb up the stairs and gingerly open the door to the left of mine. The room is smaller and has no landing; its bathroom consists of a washbasin of homeopathic proportions and a shower and toilet elbowing each other for space. Surprisingly, it’s not that dirty. I can clean up and move my stuff in here and give my room to Marylou. Placido’s door on the other side of the corridor is just where it always was, and I wonder where he’s disappeared to. I haven’t seen him for days.
I go down again and fix Verity up for the rent, then rush upstairs for a new spring clean. After this I’ll go and buy another bed. I’m as organised as a train timetable.
When I reach the Brotherhood, just before it closes, I find another memory foam mattress but no bed. There’s no Ben either, and only a wispy female volunteer, listlessly hanging clothes on the racks. I pay and haul the thing over my shoulder and over my head. She tries to delay me, proposing a delivery, but I wave all her offers away. I’m as tall as my height suddenly, and a mere mattress feels lighter than a feather.
On the street, everything seems to be rocking. I, the uncool, regretful Czech, am no longer uncool and regretful. I’m full of Brunswick sunshine and I’m the guy who is going to haul Marylou out of there.
Everything I do feels easy and efficient – a bit like leaving Seoul, except that this time it feels the other way round: a homecoming. It doesn’t even feel strange to think this.
Now the only thing to do is to make sure she comes. I email her:
Old Chum, give me your arrival time and choose Tullamarine
Airport. Don’t worry about the time. Any time will do.
But there’s no answer.
I leave the computer open on my bed in my new room. In the recesses of my mind I know I’ll paint it too, but that’s for later. I start waiting for her response. I’ve forgotten to tell her that flights from Seoul land in Sydney. I send her another email.
I could come and meet you in Sydney. I can be wherever you need me.
And I’m here. I’m here waiting.
11
Sung-ki
THE BAD DAYS in Seoul, the days when I felt like a shit, making love to another man’s wife, the ‘mother of his three children’, while giving English lessons to aseptic kids who planned to study in American or Australian universities – someone who did ‘pottery’ like housewives take on ‘creative writing’ or tapestry – those bad days, I would find myself walking out to find Sung-ki. Actually, I never seemed to find him; he always found me.
He would walk up quietly, his face a bed of wrinkles where his happy expression lay curled up. He was as small as a child, and as nimble as one. Only his eyes seemed
centuries old. He scraped a living by selling small looking glasses, which he pushed around Seoul on a cart. They were of every shape and form and every one of them seemed to be responsible for reflecting its portion of the world. He didn’t speak a word of English and we’d soldier on in my Korean. The strangest thing about Sung-ki was the way one always seemed to bump into him when one was at a loss or in trouble.
I didn’t know where he lived and hardly knew anything about him. He was one of those people whose openness was like all those little looking glasses, always mirroring, always giving, and receiving nothing. One could imagine his death as simply a folding up of himself, disappearing into his innumerable wrinkles, stepping back into one of his looking glasses – leaving only his twinkling cartload behind. But one day, a few weeks before I left Seoul, I discovered that he had a grandchild – a little girl called Iseul. His eyes closed when he pronounced her name, as if his eyelids were folding over his memory of her. Yet he never seemed to spend time with this granddaughter. He never referred to any shared outing and I never saw them together. Still, she glowed in his eyes, in his gestures when he spoke of her.
He seemed to live on the streets. At least, I never heard mention of anywhere else. He was so short and I was so tall that I always sat down next to him on a stool to be able to hear him, because he spoke in nearly a whisper, and this seemed to make for longer conversations. Little by little, our differences were worn away, as a beach on whose sand you tread is ground into familiarity.
Sung-ki didn’t giggle like other old Korean men when talking of women or sex; maybe his love for his granddaughter had made him like that. Also he never drank soju like the other older guys you saw in bars, sitting in a row, all together, a bit like the way Mediterraneans sit in fishing villages, or Englishmen in their clubs, a male huddling as a protection against destiny, against fear or even death. Sung-ki didn’t seem to need such a protection, as children don’t when they haven’t been warned about things or been abused in some way. He spoke of his granddaughter, Iseul, with reverence. I wonder if there isn’t always someone in our lives we can’t quantify, can’t get our head around, can’t properly name to ourselves, and every time we refer to that person we are lit up from within. Iseul was like that for Sung-ki, and this made me feel that something was warped about my own way of loving.
He’d looked after Iseul until she was five or six, and then her mother, his daughter, had met an American and went to live in Los Angeles. From one day to the next, all his kin vanished. He was still working then, a modest teaching job but an honourable one, and perhaps he could have earned enough for a plane ticket. But he ‘fell’. He used the word literally. He could do nothing. He let things drift at the school. He lost his job. Soon he had no salary and no place to live. It happened in the space of a few weeks. At this point, he twisted his head round and looked at me. We were both sitting on stools, his story between us like a living thing. I felt without being told that this was the first time it had seen the light of day. Companionably, he whispered my name: Arold. Then he sighed, peering into his past through the traffic.
He had ended up living on the street. Many years passed, more than ten, perhaps fifteen, and then one day he saw her: he recognised his granddaughter, Iseul. There was no mistaking her – she was like a spring day, he told me, of her mother’s life.
She had grown but she had lost nothing of who she’d been as a child. She was still Iseul. But he had not run to her. He had not called out her name. He had not even touched her sleeve in passing. He’d fallen too low. And so he stayed hidden, unobtrusive, a ghost in rags. I realise that I tend to think of Sung-ki when I’m worrying about something.
I’m still sitting on my bed, with my computer open beside me, and these images of him are skidding around in my brain because I’m afraid Marylou won’t come. Something in me knows I’ve got to save that kid. We met soon after I moved to my new room in Seoul, three years ago, about the time I hooked up with Ha-yoon. And now this last-minute stroke of genius has acquired the momentum of a tidal wave – a tidal wave that has to drag her out of Seoul and away from her life there. I may be acting on intuition, or on a whim, but that need to get her out has been gnawing at me for months. Of course, being in Seoul myself and in a parallel addictive sort of situation ruled out any such plan at the time. But something in me was waiting for the right opportunity, and now it has come.
I remember the first time I saw her. She didn’t look a fraction different from the way she looks today. She’s a bit like the Moon Jar, in that respect. I check the screen again. No emails. She’s probably getting herself sorted. I hope she’s not in some kind of trouble. Can she walk away just like that? Should I have gone over there and got her? Should I have left with her?
Why am I haunted by a close past, as if it happened years ago, as if I took a wrong turn, as if I didn’t listen to what was obvious? Why didn’t I ask her to come? Perhaps she would have accepted, and she would be out of there now, no longer standing in that street. When I think of the job she’s thought up for herself, it doesn’t figure. But maybe it was her rite of passage, her deal with some Cerberus that kept her out of a private hell.
I start thinking of Sung-ki again. Once he told me that problems are like guests – you have to discover why they have come. If only I could walk out into the street and bump into him. In his stillness he would immediately know that something was wrong. We would sit next to each other and things wouldn’t be solved, necessarily, but they would suddenly rest in a middle distance, where I’d see them in their true form.
Once I told him about Ha-yoon in vague terms, without giving her a name. A married woman, whom I loved. He nodded and seemed sad. His sadness was strangely comforting. The things that were wrong about my love for her were there still, but somehow they were lifted, freed from darkness. Love, he whispered, is inevitable, it’s like the shroud, it falls from heaven.
Two hours pass before I finally get up and check Marylou’s room to see if everything is still looking welcoming. I sanded and varnished the floorboards a few weeks ago, and the window is twinkling with clean light. The bed is made, there is a lamp on the bedside table and I found a soft carpet for her feet.
I stand in her room thinking about this seriously. Being with Marylou, I realise, could be very different in Melbourne. Over there she could hide behind her line of work, and I could hide behind Ha-yoon. I know this whole venture might become hideously embarrassing – I know that perfectly well. Yet I don’t have a skerrick of a doubt that it is the right thing to do.
This isn’t a romantic love, but it is love all the same. And love, as Sung-ki would say, is like the shroud.
12
The Kid in Verity’s Queue
WAITING FOR SOMETHING always makes it feel kind of unreal to me. So I’m dumbfounded when Marylou’s email does appear on the screen, as if her arrival never really left the realm of the impossible. In Seoul I had the feeling that she was fixed there forever – as old as the hills and as young as a morning breeze. Even hating Seoul as she did, dreaming of elsewhere, using another culture’s codes, speaking its language like a native, reading its books, did nothing to change the fact of the matter: she was incapable of moving – like a mountain, like the Titans who’ve never really disappeared, but still bear witness to what is happening on the earth. Deep in her subterranean certainties, which had nothing flotsam, jetsam, ligan or derelict about them, Marylou was a mountain.
Why then had it been so easy?
It seems to me that on one level we are men, women, identities, addresses, professions, illnesses, families, belongings, talents, or lack thereof, but we are also old, very old energies. Some of us are rivers, cleaning the joint; some are counters, measuring everything. Others are mountains, like Marylou, guarding the world – guarding those who approach her and helping them. I wonder why I think that, and I realise that with her I was plainly busy being Harold. If I were a stream, I would have gushed along the rocks, if I were a spider I would have worked dil
igently at my web, if I were me I would do pottery and relax in her company, because there I could breathe and be utterly that guy who didn’t have to worry about the past anymore, or his uncomfortable height, or his mother, or his belonging to the lost world of Czechoslovakia, but just someone breathing by her mountain side.
I wouldn’t have thought of moving Marylou any more than I would have considered buying a plane ticket for the Dobongsan mountain overlooking Seoul. When I left South Korea, asking her to leave with me would have been a token gesture, just to show her that I was still watching her six. I hated her job, of course, as we called it the few times we couldn’t avoid mentioning it. As much as the idea of whisking her away was appealing, something larger than the two of us made my intentions puny, my protectiveness wispy and ineffectual. I was sobered, silenced by something tough and resilient. There was nothing I could say or do, in any way. Some people belong to the mist, some people are pledged to disappearance. These thoughts come to me now. They weren’t conscious then, of course. But now that her chance of choosing life has come at last, the whole conundrum rises as clear and sharp as the letters in her email.
I’ll be on the KLM 2450 11pm flight Friday from Sydney – if this still suits you, Marlowe …
It feels like a chance in a million, like those South American flowers, described by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, which bloom every twenty-five years. I answer on the spot:
I’ll be there, Marylou. With bells on.
After adding the address of The Sea & Us, just to be sure that she knows where to go in case there’s a mix-up, I remember that when this twenty-five-year bloom appears, the whole plant dies. But I firmly put Roberto Burle Marx out of my mind. There’s something about being too superstitious. I sit there in a state of strange, shocked relief. Then, to take a breather from my own presence, I decide to get moving. I’ll clean and paint the stairs.
I must ask Verity’s permission first. She’s in the shop, a queue of people in front of her. Her gaunt face is smiling at a small boy. He has combed blond hair that makes him look like a miniature businessman, but his appearance is otherwise pretty ragged: shorts of a nondescript colour and a brown T-shirt that is the exact shade of compost. I concentrate on them for a while.
The Sea & Us Page 7
