You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I flipped forward and looked at the most recent records again, from December 2016. She had written on the 6th, 7th, and 9th. They were all about me. Was the whole binder like this? If so, it would be fair to call it a record of my every movement. I shuddered. Why did she take these notes? Was it so that she could report to Auntie everything I did and said without forgetting anything? Why did she have to keep it all written down?

Tuesday 6 December

He’s not in his room. He’s started going out through the roof again. It’s the first time in a month.

Wednesday 7 December

Second day in a row. I was waiting but I missed him.

Friday 9 December

I don’t know where he went. I looked for him until 2 a.m. but I couldn’t find him. I know I saw him. I’m cold and scared and terrified. Now

Hello is barking. He’s back.

Three things were true. Mother had followed me. She and I had met somewhere. The thing that had made her cold and scared and terrified had occurred between 12.30 and 2 a.m. Ominous and incomprehensible blank spaces loomed between the sentences. I couldn’t work them out, at least not right now.

I turned to November.

Monday 14 November

He went out through the roof. I didn’t expect it – everything was fine the last few months. If I’d gone out when Hello started barking I would have caught him.

Something made me open his drawer and check on his pills. There are exactly eleven days’ worth left. Does that mean he’s taking them like he’s supposed to?

I picked up my desk calendar and flipped the page forward to check the date. I had placed small dots on the days from 11 to 15 November. That was when I stopped taking the pills for the oral exams; it was the second time since August. Instead of popping a pill in my mouth at each meal, I flushed it down the toilet. That was the best way to keep everything straight and not get caught. But it was clear that she suspected I wasn’t taking them, and she’d drawn that conclusion from the fact that I’d gone to the roof – another action out of my usual pattern of behaviour. That meant that she knew those two actions were linked. Maybe there had been a precedent that led her to that conclusion.

I thought carefully about possible precedents. Nothing remotely plausible came to mind.

Tuesday 15 November

I feel like I’m playing hide-and-seek with the wind. I ran out when Hello started barking but I didn’t see him. The security guard by the back gate said nobody had gone by in the last thirty minutes. Same thing at the main gate. I tried the side gate and bumped into Hae-jin, coming home from work. No Yu-jin.

So Mother followed me all the time. Why? Sure, she retained absolute command over my life, but it still didn’t seem normal. Most mothers didn’t tail their sons just because they left the house in the middle of the night, unless they were insane or they had a good reason to. The security guard at the back gate must have known about her abnormal obsession. Maybe everyone who lived in our building knew about the widow who wandered around the neighbourhood looking for her son. But unlike last night, on 15 November she probably didn’t go all over the place, since she had bumped into Hae-jin.

I wasn’t sure if the dates matched up, but I did remember seeing Hae-jin in the street a few weeks ago, probably around then. It was late, and I was running towards the sea wall along the footpath by the river. Near the First Dongjin Bridge, I heard a phone ringing in front of me.

‘Yes, I’m on my way home,’ said a voice.

I could pick that voice out in a street filled with a hundred people talking in a hundred different voices. Hae-jin. Should I say hello? Then he’d ask what I was doing out at this hour. If I told him I was going for a run, Mother would hear about it and I’d be giving her a new reason to nag me.

‘No, no, that’s okay,’ Hae-jin said, about ten metres in front of me. His dark shadow appeared out of the fog.

I swiftly hid behind a street lamp, in the tight gap between the lamp post and the railing along the riverbank. It wasn’t a bad place to hide; it was dark back there with the neck of the lamp stretching out toward the road, and I imagined I had some cover from the fog coming off the river. He was far away enough not to see me.

‘Yes, I’ll be in Sangam-dong by two tomorrow.’

I stood facing the river as I listened to Hae-jin’s voice pass behind me. I watched the water sluicing towards the floodgates and had a sudden urge to pee. There was no way he could see my face; it was dark, my back was towards him, and I was wearing a mask and a hood, my head ducked low. I did worry that he would catch the words Private Lesson stitched on the back of my jacket, though.

I didn’t like the fact that I was hiding in the shade of a lamp post, hunched over in case he recognised me. I wasn’t a criminal on the run. Why was I so worried? God. Why couldn’t he leave? Just leave already, please?

Eventually he did. When I couldn’t hear his footsteps any longer, I continued on my way. What would have happened if I’d said hello to him that night? Would Mother have stopped following me? But what had she been worried about specifically? Why was she so anxious?

The next page wasn’t October. She had skipped two months.

Tuesday 30 August

The boys came back from Imja Island close to midnight. They weren’t planning to come back until tomorrow. Yu-jin was sweating in a Gore-Tex jacket in this heat. Just looking at him was suffocating. There was a cut on the back of his hand and I thought I saw a bruise on his head. His hair was plastered with sweat.

Could he have stopped taking his meds again? He couldn’t have… could he? Did he have a seizure?

She must have written ‘could he’ as a safeguard against being wrong. Because when we stepped inside the house, I knew she’d figured it all out the moment her gaze landed on my forehead. Her question, ‘What happened to your face?’ made it clear she’d had her suspicions confirmed.

But I didn’t want to do all the work for her. ‘I banged into the ferry as I was getting on.’

She looked at me flatly. ‘And why are you wearing a jacket? It’s so hot.’

I looked down at myself. Why was I wearing this again? My mind scrambled for an answer. To cover the scratches and bruises I got when I had my episode. ‘Hae-jin gave it to me. You always say it’s good manners to use a gift right away.’

Hae-jin was sitting on the couch, taking his socks off, pretending to concentrate so hard on that very important task that he couldn’t possibly pay attention to our conversation. He was uncomfortable with my lie, and also how a memento from his very first shoot had somehow become a gift for me. He was also uneasy with Mother’s mood.

Mother didn’t dig further. After I retreated upstairs, she probably asked Hae-jin: was that really what happened? Hae-jin would have said yes. I trusted that he would have remained firm even when she asked a few more times, even if his expression betrayed him. The unconfirmed truth would have floated around Mother’s mind: ten years ago his whole life was turned upside down because he arbitrarily stopped taking his meds. There was no way he could have done it again. Or could he have?

Was that why she attacked me last night? Maybe she couldn’t keep looking the other way when I went out through the roof. Or maybe there was some other issue. I guess I could understand her exploding like that. Goodness knows how she was able to keep it under wraps until yesterday. Mother being who she was, it made more sense for her to stop me at the very beginning rather than follow me around secretly and observe me for four months.