‘This will make you feel better, Marylou. Helicrysum and Cistus,’ she murmurs.
I walk to the window as Verity applies the stuff on the front and back of Marylou’s body. I hear a moan as she’s being turned over. Verity gives her some pills to swallow and levers her back down onto the pillows.
‘There, you should feel more comfortable now.’
But Marylou seems to have been swallowed by silence.
‘There, there,’ says Verity, as if everything has been explained to her. I move towards them. We are both standing above the girl in the bed and we must seem to tower over her. I kneel down and kiss her cheek.
‘Old lady, you have a good sleep.’
Marylou’s hand crawls out of the quilt and I hold it as gently as I can. I look at the room, as if the walls have moved away or moved closer, as if the ceiling is higher or lower – something has changed, something as frightening as an earthquake. Pain. Violence. I feel it in her hand, I feel it in the walls, and I don’t know how to take her away from it. Verity seems different too, and when we exchange a glance, we know we are both different. That something has gone from, or returned to, The Sea & Us. Maybe it’s the ground beneath our feet.
It feels as if now we have all cooked fish and chips, all made pots, all been beaten up by pimps.
I whisper: ‘We’re off, Marylou. You sleep. I’m right next door. Just call if you need anything. I’ll come in and check your six from time to time.’
I can see the tears sliding down her temple onto the pillow. I wipe them with my thumb. We tiptoe out.
Verity and I stand in the corridor outside. I don’t know what to say. She looks up at me.
‘She’ll be all right, Harold. No need for a doctor – only rest and care.’
She doesn’t ask me any questions, just tiptoes down the stairs, and I’m suddenly so happy that husband of hers never added her to his list of victims.
14
The Sea & Us
THE NEXT MORNING, after a shower, I grab some clothes with the idea of foraging down the street for some breakfast. Waking up in The Sea & Us is one thing; finding one’s way into the day is another. As if everything lying at the bottom of your personal ocean, all the ligan and derelict, has loosened itself and floated to the surface. Somehow you have to find your way back to consciousness and get down those stairs, as if reality were just that step further than in other places. Until I reach the last step I’m not even sure if Marylou is really there or if I’ve imagined it all.
The shop isn’t open yet. Verity is standing behind the counter, wiping the perfectly clean sink with luxurious efficiency. When she looks up she doesn’t stop, just slows down a fraction. People walking up and down the street seem to float across the glass window, instead of really existing on the other side.
‘How is she?’
I snap out of it. There’s something else, too. Violence has also entered the shop and the shop has recognised it. It’s not only upstairs. I can feel it down here just as potently.
I reach the last step and answer her.
‘I don’t know, Verity. I haven’t been in to see her yet. She was okay when I checked on her during the night. She hadn’t budged. Probably wasn’t able to.’
Verity abandons all pretence of cleaning and clears her throat, as if thoughts have been queuing in the hallway of her mind all night. The pictures of the ocean she has all around the shop stand like portraits of ancestors around us. Waves tipped with foam, waves crawling low on beaches, cresting waves, white, quivering towers. The photos are beautiful. I realise that I’ve never looked at them properly. Verity clears her throat.
‘It’s no use thinking she’s tripped down the stairs. Someone has done this to her. We’ve got to take pictures, Harold. She may need a record of those bruises.’
‘What?’
Verity stands with the dishcloth in her hands as it were some proof of her argument.
‘How long have you been away? Eighteen years? You can’t just stay forever in Australia, you know. For one thing, she’s not going back, is she? Not if we can help it, at any rate. Right? And for that she’ll need a different visa – maybe a refugee visa. What she has now will not last for ever.’
‘Right.’
I realise that I haven’t thought of anything. The window of opportunity seemed so slight. I just concentrated on that. And Verity has no idea that Marylou is a mountain to move. I look at the picture of a mountainous wave in front of me.
‘Well, the worst job was getting her here, Verity,’ I say, slightly huffily. ‘You have no idea …’
Verity lays her hand on my arm.
‘I know. I would have acted in the same way. But now you’ve got her out, we have to have a good think.’
Her hair is pinned back, more severely than usual. There’s a clean anger about her. The issue is simple and straightforward, as far as she’s concerned: visa, immigration, residency.
For me, it’s as complex as my eighteen years in Seoul. When I first moved into Marylou’s street three years ago, I met her in a life that seemed welded to her – a ‘blind alley of circumstance’. I saw her at work. And I saw her beaten up a few times – though I never saw her as bad as she is now. I knew instinctively that she bore with me as long as I didn’t meddle, as long as I stayed on the sidelines. A bystander, a Myshkin, a chum. I was wary and I trod slow. Our unspoken deal was that this was a household pain, not to be considered too closely.
Verity is unencumbered by such scruples. And perhaps that’s just what’s needed now. But Marylou’s past will always be part of the equation for me. As soon as she gets body and soul together, I know she’ll refer to her beating as she would to a bad haircut, something you can’t do anything about until it’s grown out. But has she grown out of it? I’m hoping she has. Though I’m also hedging my bets. Verity has folded her arms and all the waves seem to be her able seamen, ready to jump from their frames to force me into some kind of action.
‘Well, what do you think, Harold?’
‘Verity, you ask her. I can’t take pictures of her …’
Outside the window I can see the sun coming out, a tentative guest on this day where the weather is the least of our concerns.
‘Her bruises will heal. She’s young. Then there’ll be no proof.’
‘Some bruises never heal.’
‘Don’t go all philosophical on me, Harold.’
She gives the sink one last wipe and looks up at me at the same time. I can feel all this wiping is a pretext. The light is slightly weird in the room – this public place that is having its private moment.
‘Does she want any breakfast?’
‘I was going out to get some for her.’
‘Well, I’ve got a tray ready if you want …’
I grin at her.
‘Thanks, Verity.’
She goes back into her rooms, saying over her shoulder: ‘I’ll just put the coffee on and the toast. May I bring it up?’
‘Let me check if she’s awake.’
I run up the stairs and open Marylou’s door a chink. She doesn’t stir, but I hear her.
‘Marlowe?’
I walk in. She’s in exactly the same position, flat on her back, the way you would lie in a canoe without a paddle. I crouch near.
‘How did you sleep, old lady?’
I know that somewhere in her is the energy to walk out of here, the same energy that got her onto that plane. For the time being, though, it has left her. She doesn’t look for her paddle, because there isn’t one there.
‘Like the dead. I only woke when I moved.’
‘Did you move around a lot?’
‘No chance of that.’
‘Do you remember Verity from last night? She’s determined to bring you your breakfast. Shall I let her?’
Marylou looks pained.
‘Myshkin, tell the good woman to bring me my breakfast.’
‘Being beaten to a pulp, hopping on a plane, lying like one dead hasn’t drummed it out of
you, has it, Marylou?’
She doesn’t smile, but I can see it in her eyes. I extend my hand to her and shake her slim fingers carefully. One has the feeling that they hurt too, as if they were the last reaches, the last estuary of her pain. This effort at humour seems to have exhausted her. Her eyelids close. I don’t open the curtains, because there aren’t any, and I go back down to Verity, who’s standing there with her tray.
‘I think she’s a bit better, but it could be just a wild effort rather than the real thing. She’s a feisty creature.’
Verity nods in agreement, as if she’d sorted that one out for herself already. Her expression reminds me so much of my mother, Liběna, that I blink.
Once, as a kid, I fell down some stairs into a cellar. The door had been left open and the dark place seemed to drag me down into itself. It held onto me, and for a minute I thought the world I’d been in for such a short while had gone, and that I’d be in that cellar forever. That’s how I feel about Liběna. Months go by without my giving her a thought, and then suddenly I’m down in her cellar again.
I catch up with Verity on the stairs. She’s nudging the door open with her foot.
‘Marylou, this fellow here says you are up for some breakfast. How about it?’
She’s still lying quite motionless and Verity puts the tray down on a chair to help her up. But as soon as she touches her she stops.
‘Nah, it’s still hurting too much, isn’t it? I’ll just feed you little spoonfuls, shall I?’
I see tears slipping out of Marylou’s eyes. She and Verity both ignore them, and I turn to look out at the street. But as I stare through the glass a reflection seems to swim between me and the street – Liběna’s face, as if she were pain’s inevitable companion.
I hear a chuckle. Verity is kneeling by the bed and Marylou is swallowing tiny mouthfuls and sips between her swollen lips.
‘I never thought I’d spoonfeed a girleen like you. More likely to be the other way round.’
Another chuckle. The treatment seems to be working. I don’t realise yet that this is the start of a strange new life.
15
Dew
VERITY GOT HER photos. Marylou is putty in her hands. This morning she’s sitting in an easy chair I found at the Brotherhood.
‘Is there anything Verity could ask you that you wouldn’t do?’
‘It must be the Irish accent.’
Marylou looks happy. I’ve never seen that particular expression on her face before. And then I realise that she just looks safe.
I’ve been back to the workshop and made a few bowls. Soon Marylou should be back on her feet too. Verity has launched the visa process. She has a stack of documents and has taken over the whole thing. I’m tired, as if spent by my effort to get Marylou down here – one single email. But nobody at The Sea & Us seems to rank effort in that way. I feel as if I engaged invisible armies, countless foot soldiers, far-seeing generals, divisive ministers. Or maybe I just believe this to reassure myself.
Marylou’s face has nearly returned to itself. Sometimes when I look at her I feel we could still be in Seoul. She’s exactly the same person – whether here in Brunswick, or over there. In fact, it feels like wherever we are, we’ll still be in our Spitfires.
In South Korea I wondered why her life there didn’t seem to affect her, as if it were all happening to someone else, a ‘someone’ she was attending to as best she could. I realise, as I sift through my memories of her, that she always appeared to be a benign observer for whom nothing was at stake, like some visiting vizier to this strange world, to which she lent herself with no investment and no return. Even pain lay upon her like some trick of the light, casting a shadow without implicating her person. She rarely alluded to her work, and when she did it was to speak of her clients with a sad awe, a hide-away courtesy, as if they were immigrants at some distant frontier post where she was a minor customs official, secretly facilitating their entry from some troubled territory.
One night, when I was checking on Marylou in her sleep, she was murmuring to herself that there was always the ‘red bath solution’. It took me a few seconds to understand that she meant slitting her wrists in a tub of warm water. I didn’t shake her. I didn’t wake her up. I didn’t reason with her. I didn’t expostulate. I just kneeled next to her and held her with my cheek against hers. I held her and held her and tried to put all my understanding into my holding.
I imagine that for Marylou the unbearable is no longer acceptable. She has a plan. It may be the end of all her plans, her last resort, but at least her capacity to move is still there – the Korean philosophy of han in action: that when you reach a sadness too great for tears, that is where you somehow find hope. Surely this is the moment when her life can swing the other way, if only she can find the right equinox. And I feel that, for Marylou, the right equinox might be now.
I’m sitting against the wall on a rolled-up blanket. We’ve been silent for a while, as we can be sometimes when we sit together, often before I leave for the workshop or return from it. She leans over and taps my knee.
‘Myshkin, I’ve got to start thinking of a job.’
I’m prepared for this. I knew it would come sooner rather than later. She’s one of those people who seem filled with an invisible task to perform, who are relieved to be on their knees cleaning someone’s floor, or carrying their heavy luggage, or living the life Marylou has led, so that task, that burden, no longer weighs so heavily upon them.
‘First, Verity won’t let you out of her sight until she knows you’re fit enough to play squash. Second, you can’t work until you’ve got the right visa.’ I realise how much Verity is part of this fight to keep Marylou safe and how much I have come to rely on her. We’re shoulder to shoulder on this – keeping the gang out of trouble.
‘I could work in the black. I can’t sit here forever being a dead weight on the pair of you.’
I sigh.
‘Marylou, the gang isn’t ready for that yet.’
And I realise that by ‘the gang’ I no longer mean only Marylou and me, but the three of us. The Sea & Us is fast becoming for me something like the ‘Only connect’ of Howards End.
She shakes her head.
‘Another month?’ I propose.
‘I can start by looking for stuff on the net.’
I sigh.
‘I think you deserve a break.’
She takes a breath.
‘Any news of Ha-yoon?’
‘Nope. I think that horse has bolted, Marylou.’
She winces and I know it’s not her bruises.
‘Are you okay about it?’
I look outside to the street, where a tram is trundling past and ringing ding-ding. But all I can see is Ha-yoon sitting by the Cheonggyecheon Stream – waiting for me.
‘She just dug herself into me, Marylou.’
‘I know.’
‘Did it ever happen …’ I interrupt myself on purpose.
‘No, nothing like that, nobody like that. Other things. When I was a kid, in particular.’
She’s never mentioned anything of this sort before. I look up at her, but her eyes are on Lygon Street. Old Lygon Street, how many people stare at you, seeing things other than you? I strain not to ask Marylou anything. I’m conscious of her story, of the thickness of it, dogging every one of her footsteps – how the haunting won’t stop, how she’ll find boulders in her porridge for years to come. She lifts her head a little.
‘I had a stepbrother in Los Angeles. He was older than me. He was my stepfather’s son. We didn’t have a drop of blood in common. He would come into my room and rape me. I didn’t know it was that. I was about seven or eight.’
Neither of us says a word anymore. It’s there. It doesn’t move. What happened to her is happening all over again. And we can’t do anything about it. But we are together this time. It doesn’t make it any less awful. For once she doesn’t downplay anything, just sits there, with her hands cradled in her lap. This kind o
f thing, I realise, is beyond the person it happens to. It’s part of all of us. Like Hitler is part of all of us. We can’t just be anti-fascists, or bemoan Trump. This is something that resides in our silence and our solitude, beneath the skin, in the soul where it’s hard to fish out, hard to face and hard to share. When it is shared, its presence is omnipresent. It takes up all the room and changes our world. We lose our handles, our composure, our facades and our personas. We have no more codes. We’re bare, alone with each other, in that glaring human solitude.
That is how we are, anyway, Marylou and I, on this spring morning on the Lygon Street of our friendship, that home in time where we both think we can survive, at least for a while.
She turns her head at last.
‘Pretty grotty, isn’t it? You probably thought you’d reached the pits with me, eh?’
She says this quietly and the words stay there between us, unobtrusive yet persistent. I baulk at telling her about Liběna. Mainly because I know that it doesn’t compare to a little girl being raped, not in a hundred years. But somehow I feel the need to approach this territory, not to stay outside it – to be with her in that darkness. So that she’s no longer alone in it.
I bite my lip. I can’t get this wrong. We’re together in this. In some strange way we must have been from the start. As if our meeting harnessed old energies, took them into account, brought them into the light – just by the fact of our connection.
‘Marylou, this is nothing compared to what happened to you, but my mother, Liběna, would come into my bed at night, stark naked, and hold me. I didn’t know what was happening either. I was nine. It was just after my father had walked out on her. After weeks of this, I finally locked my door. For months I would hear the handle rattle in my sleep, but she eventually stopped coming.’
‘Is this the first time you’ve ever told this to anyone?’
The Sea & Us Page 9
