You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I concluded that he hadn’t. If he had, he would have said something, something like ‘What did you do, slaughter a pig in here?’

I rummaged around in the emergency kit and found the hydrogen peroxide. The half-litre container was about two thirds full. I emptied the air freshener out of its spray bottle and poured the hydrogen peroxide inside, then began to methodically spray everything, starting with the doorway of Mother’s bedroom. White foam grew like mould everywhere that had been splattered with blood. I wiped those spots with toilet paper, then flushed the used bits of paper down the toilet. I moved on to the key cabinet, table, stairs and upstairs hallway, checking carefully for blood.

I dragged my mattress downstairs and swapped it with Mother’s. The bloodstains weren’t going anywhere, but I thought it made sense for Mother’s traces to be returned to her room. Who knew if it would be one night or more, but it didn’t feel right to sleep on her blood. Thankfully the mattresses were the same size. As I spread the cover out on her bed, I stiffened.

I don’t know where he went.

Mother’s voice. She sounded calm and refined, as though she were reading out loud from a book – her journal. That was where I’d seen that sentence. It was also something I’d been asking myself all day. Where had I gone? What had I done for two and a half hours?

I know I saw him.

What came after that? I couldn’t remember. Was it I’m cold or I’m scared , or maybe I’m terrified ? It was definitely one of the three.

I began to shiver when I stepped out of Mother’s bedroom. It was freezing in the living room. I closed all the windows and cast a final glance around the room to see if I had missed anything. Everything was clean. I ran upstairs. I settled in front of my desk and took out the journal. I hadn’t been entirely correct, but I hadn’t been completely wrong, either. It wasn’t one of the three; it was all of them.

I’m cold and scared and terrified.

It made sense that she would be cold. Last night was rainy and it was the middle of winter; it would be strange if she wasn’t cold. But scared and terrified? Those weren’t the kind of feelings she would have had without reason. She wouldn’t be scared of her own son, would she? Sure, she might have been disapproving of whatever I’d been doing, but she wouldn’t have been terrified. So that had to mean that the ‘him’ she had seen wasn’t me.

‘There was a murder around here.’ That’s what Hae-jin had said. ‘They were saying it’s a young woman.’

Was that it? Did she witness the young woman being killed? Where could that have been? The docks? The sea wall? On the footpath along the river? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the body would reach the dock. Dongjin River flowed between the two districts of the city, and the floodgates opened at the mouth of the harbour from midnight to one in the morning. The woman could have been killed and pushed in the water at just the right time, when the water that had been trapped all day surged into the ocean, following the enormous current sweeping downriver.

I heard something behind me, like a stick scraping the wooden floor. It sounded like the swing creaking in the wind. I got up and opened the blinds. Somehow it had become evening. The pergola light was still on and Mother was sitting on the swing. Her hands were laced together and propped on her stomach, her head was tilted up, as though looking at the dark sky. She looked like she was just taking a little break. Her white dress fluttered as the wind rocked the swing. Her bare feet dragged on the deck floor. The wound across her neck gaped open like a red mouth, like the Joker.

You really don’t remember? the Joker asked.

I knew I was seeing things, but I found myself speaking out loud. ‘Remember what?’

You saw it too , the Joker said.

‘Saw what? When? Where?’

The conversation ended the way it always did, with the delusion not responding. But I remembered the odd images that had danced past my eyes. The yellow light of the street lamp, the dark shadows of the river that rushed and swirled below my feet, the crimson umbrella bowling along the road, the tarpaulin flapping in the wind.

The back of my neck prickled. These images didn’t have anything to do with the ferry dock or the crossing by the sea wall. The lamps along the sea wall had LEDs that gave off crisp white light, and there was no building site covered by tarpaulin. The ocean was on one side of the wall, and on the other side was the road by the riverbank, lined with blocks of flats and buildings. So the only place where water could be swirling below my feet would be the road along the river. I didn’t know exactly where on that street, but it probably wouldn’t mean much even if I could figure it out. These images must have been what I’d seen right before my seizure; I’d had similar experiences before.

I’d settled on a conclusion but it didn’t feel great. I felt as though I’d had a glimpse of the road to hell. A hunch, something ominous, was closing in on me. My mind yammered on like a woodpecker. That can’t be right! Why would you remember meaningless scenes? There has to be something in those images. Something cold and scary and terrifying. Did I see something last night? I suddenly remembered a man singing in the darkness. The song about a girl he couldn’t forget; about her walking in the rain.

I was growing more and more confused. Instead of answers, thousands of questions were piling on top of one another like scrap metal. I closed the blinds and threw myself down in the chair. Something sharp stabbed in my inner groin. The pearl earring. I pulled it out from my pocket and grabbed my mobile. I opened a browser and typed in some key words: Gundo young woman body .

There were a few hits. I opened the first link, a Yonhap News item.

Today, around 8 a.m., a woman’s body was discovered at the ferry dock by the sea wall in Gundo, Incheon. Police said that a ticket office employee discovered the body caught on a mooring rope. The deceased was determined to be B- (age 28) of Flat A in District Two. Police sources said that the possibility of homicide was high; the body had been damaged by a sharp object. The National Institute of Scientific Investigation will conduct an autopsy and the police are questioning potential witnesses.

The other articles were along the same lines, as though they had been written from the same news release, with similar words and sentence structures. They consistently reported the identity of the dead woman, her address, that her body had been damaged somehow, and where she had been found. I suddenly thought of Yongi’s, the stand selling sugar pancakes near the crossing by the sea wall. Maybe the owner of the stand knew what had really happened.

A few metres from Yongi’s was a spiral staircase that went down to the docks, where there was a rest area. There was only a single snack stand down there, but quite a number of people came by during the day on their way to the ferry. The popular oar ferry transported tourists from the sea wall and the marine park, and at weekends the queue went all the way up to the wall. Yongi’s was in the prime commercial area, where you could see all the people on the dock and along the bicycle path, and all the comings and goings from District Two. The gossipy owner would be more useful than the CCTV installed at the traffic lights, since he greeted passers-by and knew the area like the back of his hand. He would have enjoyed a surge in popularity today, what with the police and curious bystanders visiting his stand.