Yin Yang Tattoo (30 page)

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?'

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?'

‘Just a feeling.'

Emotion blurred her eyes. She swallowed it, and paused before answering.

‘I came down here to escape from Seoul for a few days, too.'

‘If you feel like talking about it – ' I left the sentence unfinished.

She forced a smile. ‘Don't tell me – you're not running to any sort of timetable either. Compared to your mess, mine's nothing, but I still don't know which way is up.'

I sat down. She would tell me in her own time.

‘Ten years ago, when I left to go to university in Canada, I was sick of Korea and tired of my parents' never-ending struggle in their funny little missionary world. I was a teenager, and I just didn't get it.

‘So in Vancouver I put all that behind me. I went apeshit – from one extreme to the other. Shed my virginity even before the jet lag wore off, so drunk I have no idea who the lucky guy was. Got into the whole party scene and spent four years drinking and smoking and popping pills while I scraped a degree in Finance.'

‘Just your run-of-the-mill student existence.'

‘I suppose. Then, very first interview after graduation, I walked into a job with a downtown brokerage. Perfect, I thought. Not for me, the missionary life of sufferance and self-denial. Inside a year I was in the Dealing Room, making obscene amounts of money. Huge bonuses, expense accounts, club memberships – the whole grubby shebang. Ski weekends in Aspen, canary yellow Porsche Cabriolets – two of them; I wrote one off, out of my mind on tequila. A string of messy relationships. Partying almost non-stop, with a personal trainer to keep me fit enough to handle ten-hour days of screaming down telephone lines to New York and London and Hong Kong and Tokyo.

‘I don't know how I managed it, but I lasted six years in that cesspit. I was never for a minute really happy, but in that screwed-up world, the illusion of contentedness is expressed in dollars, and I was making plenty of those.

‘About six months ago, something snapped, I walked away, and two days later I was on a plane. I hadn't been back to Seoul in nearly ten years.'

‘Knowing Vincent and Jemma, they welcomed you with open arms.'

‘Not so much as one word about the prodigal offspring.'

‘And that was six months ago?'

‘After a few weeks I drifted back into doing little things with the church, until I was at it almost full-time. It's unpaid, but that doesn't matter. I saw a few morons come away from years in a broker's seat with nothing but credit card bills and a terminal coke habit, but I wasn't one of them.'

I sipped at a bottle of mineral water, wishing it was beer, while Rose leaned back against the tree, finger and thumb kneading the middle of her forehead.

‘Compared to what you've – '

‘Don't go wishing for problems to compete with mine.'

She sighed. ‘I've enjoyed working for the church these past few months. Maybe it's what I needed after years steeped in materialist bullshit, but try as I might, I can't go along with the whole Christian thing any more. I can't worship God again any more than I can worship money.'

‘I bet your parents could come to terms with that.'

‘Maybe, but I've been going out with a lovely guy I met at the church, a missionary too, training to be ordained.'

Here we go,
I thought.

‘Last week he proposed to me.'

‘And Vincent and Jemma love the sound of that, do they?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘So what are you going to do?'

‘It's just that, well how the hell can I be in love with the guy?'

‘What's his name?'

‘Francis Kim. He was born in Korea, moved to Canada when he was a kid. He's a lovely guy but we hardly know each other so, almost overnight I'm in this old-fashioned dating situation with a guy who wants to marry me. Francis is so straight. He doesn't drink and if he's feeling really romantic he might hold my hand softly – but never without asking me first.'

‘So?'

‘Now I don't have a clue what way to turn. I'm in love with a guy who has hardly touched me. Maybe this is just another obsession to get me over the jadedness of the past few years.'

‘Why not just drag Francis into the sack and fuck his brains out?'

She gave me a withering look of the sort that women reserve for creatures of the opposite gender.

‘You just don't get it. It's not about sex. It is about having the guts to follow my heart instead of my fears.'

I had no answer to that.

‘There's more. Francis wants to stay in Korea, work for the church, help his own people. And I don't know if I can handle the idea of being my Mum.'

We packed up the remains of the picnic and headed down in silence, my conscience nagging at me the whole way. Rose was in a situation where her instincts cried out at her to follow her heart. I had never entertained such a thought in my life. I always figured that a conscience was a bit like the human appendix. Everybody had one, but it was surplus to requirements.

She made me realise just how casually I had disregarded Jung-hwa, not only this week, but ever since I broke up with her and moved back to London. In ten years I had written her a couple of letters, letting the lack of responses offer me the easy way out – either she wasn't interested, or she didn't merit the effort in the first place.

Since getting back to Korea I had revelled once again in wild and wonderful times with her, but in the last couple of days she was never foremost in my thoughts.