Yin Yang Tattoo (2 page)

I nudge Bobby with one elbow, pointing with my chin.

‘Cavalry's here.'

He looks at me as if I have lost my marbles, I feign indifference, and he sneaks a streetward glance. Fanned out in a line are six more soldier boys in full cavalry uniform, black felt hats clasped gently to the fronts of starched shirts in the manner of the parading Orangeman and his bowler. One of the troupe solemnly aims a white-gloved hand towards the pharmacy at the corner of the Hill. Hooker Hill is busy enough even at this time of night to support its own drug store, and as four cavalrymen join an orderly line, the other two stand easy.

I am halfway there before Bobby can put his beer down. I try to melt into the surroundings while fumbling to check the light and fit a portrait lens. Bobby sidles past, and as he strikes up a conversation with one of the cavalry, I shoot frames sparingly, salivating at the aroma from mobile food stalls that every night roll into place just as darkness falls. Edging around, I can tie the stalls into the frame. Incongruous background, delightfully confusing context, and right now it smells like heaven. Deep-fried tempura vegetables. Chestnuts roasted in a hand-spun drum of shiny black stones. Ramyun noodles with processed cheese and pungent kimchi, the staple preserved cabbage Koreans eat with everything. Pig trotters served whole on Agent Orange melamine plates. Sliced fatty pork and marinated beef cuts broiled with whole garlic cloves in shallow pans over fiery coal briquettes, and dipped in a paste of sesame oil and coarse salt grains.

On a ragged line of wooden stools sit mostly young Korean women, stuffing food into brightly-painted faces. A distracting mix of whores, waitresses and young middle-class things on the run from the rig„id mainstream of Seoul society.

‘We're the 7th Cavalry, man,' says the guy with the buzzcut so short I can outline the bone structure of his small head with its selection of faded scars. Evidence perhaps of a rural childhood spent tumbling from tractors and trees. ‘The 7th's got history, we was once the mounted Cavalry, and go back all the way to General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn – 'cept now we're a tank regiment.'

‘No shit,' says Bobby, straight-faced, ‘Little Big Horn, eh?'

I switch to wide-angle, and move in closer.

‘Damn right. And the word is them limpdicks from Osan Air Base, goddamn chopper jockeys, they're sayin they're gonna kick some 7th ass. ‘Can you believe that shit?'

‘Woah,' I say. ‘No way the 7th takes that from anybody.'

‘Damn right. Those assholes show their faces on the Hill tonight, they're fuckin' dead meat. R'you from England?'

I nod. Close enough. A cavalryman from Potatochip, Idaho, won't be too interested in my views on Scottish nationalism.

‘What's with the camera?'

I give him the friendly, can't-harm-you look. ‘Just something I do. No offence, soldier.'

‘None taken, Sir.'

Sir. He calls me
Sir
.

‘Anyway, man,' says Bobby, quickly. ‘Protect that heritage, right?'

We leave the cavalryman picking lint from his hat and head uphill towards the Cowboy Club.

‘Got to piss,' says Bobby.

‘I'll see you in there.'

I sit back on the ledge of a shop window full of baseball caps bearing trademark-infringing replica emblems of just about every American professional sports team I never heard of. A Korean beauty floats past in a cloud of perfume. She is in her mid-twenties, expensively-dressed in shiny black satin, unrestrained nipples drawing rapid, eccentric circles in the gleaming fabric of her sleeveless top. Hair in fashionable corkscrews pulled back in a thick haft, streamer-like tendrils tumbling from her temples. I spotted her in the food alley a few minutes before, slurping noisily at a steaming bowl of noodles.

She is headed for the Cowboy Club.

I judge my run to perfection so that I am just in time to pull the door wide, step back, and bow deeply like a nightclub doorman.

‘Oh-so-u'ship-shi-yoh,' I say.
Welcome.
Very formal.

‘Koh-muh we-yo,' she says, a familiar, almost insolent
‘Thanks'
. With a smiling backward glance she enters the crowded club, where the bass-heavy sound system shakes the entire room, empty glasses shimmying condensation trails across beer-splashed table-tops. B.B. King belting out a slow croon version of the Ivory Joe Hunter classic,
Since I Met You Baby.

Plenty of Korean women come to Itaewon for a night out, but seldom alone. I don't make her for a whore or a bargirl, so maybe she is here to meet some lucky bastard.

The Cowboy is a ramshackle hovel, one of the few low-rise hold-outs yet to be razed and replaced with multi-storey buildings coated in pink tiles. Its long history is written in multiple extensions, walls covered here in split log, there in dark green Formica sheets. Tables are of battered pine, chairs of rust-blistered chrome with herniated foam spilling from faded red fabric.

The crowd is the norm for Itaewon, half Korean women, half Western men. Few blacks, but that's more to do with the music than anything else, since this is not their scene. The Sunshine Club, only yards down a nearby alley, is almost exclusively black, jammed with loose-limbed giants wearing David Bowie suits and jewelled earrings that have to disappear before they return to Base.

As usual in Itaewon, the Cowboy Club has no Korean men – and nobody complaining about it. Put them in a situation where alcohol flows and their women don't toe the local line, and the only possible outcome is trouble. It's a cultural thing.

A small central floor is peppered with couples dragging their feet to the slow blues number. A crowd hovers nearby, impatient for something more up-tempo.

I look over to the DJ's booth, where Myong-hee sits hemmed in by three walls of tattered LP sleeves and CD cases, a huge selection of albums filed alphabetically and tended with loving care. At the counter in front of her, Bobby is flicking through the dog-eared school notepad that is the handwritten list of available albums. I catch his eye and he fires me a self-conscious wink. He has been trying to get into Myong-hee's knickers for months. He and half the Western population of Seoul.

I know that the B.B. King track is on vinyl when it jumps and squeals in pain. This happens often in the Cowboy, since the turntables are only a few feet from a misshapen toilet door whose every judder sends the needle skating across the long-playing record. It is the bane of Myong-hee's professional life, but she smoothly switches decks and we get the opening bars of The B52s' ‘Rock Lobster', surely a request of Bobby's; I see him smiling at her. The new track brings the crowd to life and the dance floor to heaving over-capacity, faces sparkling in tiny squares of light from a battered, old-fashioned ball of mirrors.

Miss Black Satin is now near the tall bar, still alone. She turns and casually scans the crowd, her gaze faltering as it passes over me. Promising.

My linguistic skills are near-exhausted, but I'm not about to give up on them just yet.

‘An-yong hassimnika,' I bow again. ‘Ne irrum-un, Alec imnida.'
Hello. My name is Alec.
Very polite.

Without a word she accepts my outstretched hand. Her grip is warm and confident, her long nails painted a lustrous charcoal grey. I try not to stare, and fail miserably.

She doesn't tell me her name, and I pretend not to notice.

‘Mo joo-shi ley-oh?' I wish for
Would you like a little something from the bar
? but have to make do with a quite abrupt
What do you want
? At least it raises a hint of a smile.

‘Gin-tonic, juseyo.'

At the bar I order from Miss Hwang, who looks over my shoulder and gives me a subtle smile of approval. The staff at the Cowboy are very protective of their regulars, and Miss Hwang sees no threat from the lady in black.

I hand the gin and tonic to the one with no name, and she tips her head in silent thanks. I'm playing tennis with an opponent who has no racquet, but still the bloody ball keeps coming back at me.

‘Irrum-i moueyo?'
What's your name?
At least I might score marks for persistence.

Her eyes crease, and she reaches into a tiny beaded bag for a packet of
Sol
cigarettes. In a society with old-fashioned ideas about chivalry you never know when a light can come in handy, so I am in there before she finds her own lighter. In the glare of ultra-violet strip lights her dark red lipstick turns the shining black of the heroines of early talkies. Her nose has the perfection of line that comes only from the cosmetic surgeon's scalpel, but the eyes are her own, elongated tear-drops rimmed with heavy black liner. She draws hard on the cigarette which, tugging at her lower lip, comes away crimped with dark red semi-circles. She stretches her head back and blows a stream of smoke straight up towards big fans that circle lazily in the toxic fog. Around her slender neck is a single fine gold chain. I am desperately trying to think of something clever to say when she leans towards me, a draught of sweet perfume cutting through the foul smoke from her
Sol
.

‘It's a pleasure to meet you, Alec. You may call me Miss Kim.'

In English.

I can't hide my surprise. She tosses back her head and laughs aloud, and gleaming white teeth, a little uneven, reflect on shiny-black lips.

 

 

Part Two: A police station in central Seoul, fifteen years later.

 

I would be in trouble if I had to use these two goons to disprove the cliché that Orientals all look the same. Their hairlines and high cheekbones and square bony jowls are sawn from the same jig, and I can only tell them apart because one of them stands six inches taller. Big Cop exchanges nods with Small Cop. Here we go.

I back away until my arse runs hard against a table that holds the middle of the room. It doesn't move, and I glance down. The table and four chairs are bolted to the floor. The room is formed of painted metal and dusty concrete, with one tiny barred window, nearer ceiling than floor, drawing a hard-edged beam of sunshine alive with dust particles. Cobweb-strewn strip lights glare from behind paint-blistered gratings.

Big Cop moves. I retreat, like a boxer feeling for the ropes, except I am feeling for a rough wall with hands cuffed in the small of my back. Big Cop lurches and I lift one shoulder and duck, but it is too little too late. Meaty hands flash high – and somewhere behind my eyes a bomb goes off. Searing pain sets tears rolling down my cheeks, and I spin and rebound off the wall. Big Cop's hands remain high, and I understand why my head is full of jet-engine roaring and my balance is in shreds. He does it again. Cupped hands slam over unprotected ears, trapped air fires white-hot pain through eardrums, legs dissolve and I crash to the floor. I don't bother trying to get up.

Eager hands clamp onto my wrists to pull them high behind me, and I scramble to my feet, shoulders on the verge of dislocation, head forced forward and so low that, through my legs, I can see Big Cop grin. Wrists flop free, my head pops up, a closed fist hooks deep into the pit of my stomach – and I am back on the floor.

Face down on the concrete, I make out the scrape of footsteps, and brace myself. Somebody unfastens one cuff and grabs my wrist in a brutally simple martial arts hold. Every muscle and nerve from thumb to shoulder screams in agony, and I join the chorus. The cries still echo around the room when the cuffs are locked again, this time in front of me, through the back of a chair. A rough shove sits me down facing the wrong way, the back legs of the chair between my knees. The door to the corridor clatters open and a uniformed officer arrives carrying thin telephone books under one arm.

The blows to my ears and solar plexus have me in tears, but I am almost certainly unmarked. The phone books can only mean more of the same.

I try to stand, but they push me down. From his pocket, Small Cop pulls long strips of double-sided Velcro. I use the stuff to rig heavy lighting equipment. It's cheap, versatile, and with enough of it, you could stick a Catholic to a Belfast Protestant. In a few seconds, my ankles are pinched painfully against the angle-iron chair legs. Small Cop tries to stand tall next to Big Cop and on cue, each rolls his telephone book in a two-handed tennis grip.

They take turns at driving them into my kidneys. The first strikes blow the wind from my lungs, cutting short my screams, and they continue with such regularity that re-gaining my breath is impossible, lungs receding in protection of aching organs. Spasms twist my insides and shoot down my legs, opening me up to bouts of head-spinning nausea. Before long the contents of my stomach spew over my arms. The bastards never miss a swing.

It lasts maybe a few minutes, but feels like hours, and in the end, the signal to cease only comes when my guts let go in a rasping gastric splutter.

‘Aigoo,' says a voice leaden with disgust. ‘Dong neo-seo.'
He's shit himself.

Shoe heels clack on concrete, and the door to the corridor slams closed. Pain jags spark through me like short-circuits, and my legs flap uncontrollably against the restraints. Minutes later, the tremors recede enough for me to gingerly open one eye to confirm that I am alone. Vision bubbles and my head spins and my stomach convulses in a fresh onslaught of brain-swelling dry retches.

I am in a police station, thousands of miles from home. Nobody knows I am here, and the cops are holding nothing back. Bad enough, but it gets worse. They have yet to ask me even one question.