You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I approached the sliding door and peeked through. She was standing outside, holding her mobile phone, my slippers on her feet, facing the pergola. Her reddish-brown hair rustled in the wind. Her narrow shoulders were quaking. I could tell she was agitated; what should she do?

Meanwhile, Mother was sitting on the swing in the pergola, looking up at the sky, her Joker lips wide open, tapping the deck with her toes. Her white nightgown fluttered in the breeze. She didn’t look half bad; that is, if anyone else could see her.

Auntie tucked her hair behind her ear. I stared at her, half pleading and half threatening: it’s not too late. Please come back inside. She turned to the pergola and moved towards it, putting a foot on the first paving stone. She moved to the second one. She paused on the third. She raised her mobile and looked at it for a while. Maybe she was trying to decide whether she should call the police or keep looking around.

I meanwhile was trying to decide if I should call her in or go outside. My future would be determined by which I chose. Confess or flee. The former appealed to my reason and the latter to my instinct. Either way, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. There was no room for compromise. I was running out of time. I had to decide during the time she crossed the remaining five paving stones. I watched her, whispering for her to turn back. Or maybe I was whispering to myself. I did wait for as long as I could and give her as many chances as possible. The only thing I did wrong was getting fooled by ‘honest’ Hae-jin and leaving the flat for a few minutes.

Finally Auntie stepped onto the pergola and stopped in front of the table. I looked away for a moment to take my padded vest off. I put it on my desk. I took the razor out of the desk drawer. I moved across and opened the sliding doors, feeling lighter. The wind was blowing loudly now. My bare feet touched the cold, hard stones and something odd happened. Mother, who had been swinging non-stop since yesterday, began to vanish. She contorted, crumpled and melted like a rubber doll on fire. Soon even her melted form disappeared in a wisp of dark smoke, and her toes, scratching the floor of the pergola, finally stopped their lengthy performance. The squeaking stopped. A leaf settled gently on the empty swing.

Auntie also disappeared. She was no longer standing by the table with her back to me. She was prey, treacherous prey at that, which had frightened, agitated, soothed, and forced Mother to ruin my life. My body began to quieten down. My head stopped throbbing and my breathing and heart rate slowed. The knot in my stomach vanished. My senses sharpened. I could hear her frightened, damp, rough breaths, even though there was still a few metres separating us. The world had offered her up, defenceless, and everything had opened up and filled with possibility.

I stepped onto the second paving stone quietly, but I didn’t care if the prey heard and turned around. She’d have to notice me at some point, and I was excited to see her expression when she did. What would she say? What would she do? Would she attack me? Run away? Scream?

I paused on the last stone. Only one footstep separated me from the pergola, but the prey still didn’t look back. She was so focused on the problem in front of her that she hadn’t detected my presence. She was frozen, standing still, not even breathing. Just like the girl two nights ago.

Finally she began to breathe again. She reached out to the table, touched the edge and stepped back, startled, as if she’d touched something hot. She seemed certain about what she’d find inside. I folded my hands behind my back. I was going to have to wait until she saw me or found Mother.

She was working herself up to it. She slid her mobile into her back pocket and stepped forward, put both hands against the edge of the tabletop and pushed. With a heavy groan, the table opened. She stood still for a moment. Or maybe it was longer than a moment.

I knew what she was seeing. First she would see clear plastic, a sack of fertiliser, a hoe, pruning shears, a trowel, a saw, empty planters and small pots, coiled rubber hose, a blue tarpaulin. Maybe a few drops of blood. I’d washed the tabletop but I hadn’t bothered with the inside; I hadn’t had time and I hadn’t expected someone to be looking at it so soon. She leant against the edge of the table and took things out with both hands, moving fast. The clear plastic, the sack of fertiliser, the saw, the hose. She bent over again and shoved a hand in. I heard the tarpaulin being removed. She gasped. Her hair fell forward. Her shoulders began to shake and she started breathing loudly. She had probably come face to face with the Joker. Maybe she’d met her eyes the way I had yesterday in the living room. If she had turned to look at me before she moved the tarpaulin, I would have given her some advice: take out the pots first, that’s the feet.

The prey swayed as though she couldn’t feel her legs. She managed to straighten up, gripping onto the edge of the table. She let out a moan. She took her phone out of her pocket, but it slipped out of her hand and fell hard onto the floor, dividing into two pieces and scattering in separate directions. The main part flew over to the swing, and the battery landed by my feet.

She went to the swing first and picked up the metal case, then turned around to look for the battery and came face to face with me. Her frantic gaze stopped at my eyes. She actually looked almost confused. The phone slipped out of her hand again.

I flicked the razor open behind my back. ‘What are you doing?’

The prey shook her head, her mouth tight as she spotted what I was holding.

I picked the battery up from in front of my feet, my eyes still fixed on hers. ‘Weren’t you going to call the police?’ I stepped onto the pergola.

She jerked backwards, her eyes glued to the razor in my right hand. A sound came out of her mouth. Maybe it was a moan? Or a scream? Whatever it was, it was the sound of terror made by someone who sensed her fate.

I felt sad. It would have been so nice if she could have felt like this sixteen years ago. If she’d cared just a tiny bit about that boy’s life, this day wouldn’t have come. We wouldn’t be standing here like this. But it was too late now, although it would have been too soon then.

‘It’s okay. Go ahead and call.’ I held out the battery and stepped towards her again.

She shook her head and retreated further.

‘Go on. Call them and tell them everything. That you took on the treatment of a nine-year-old psychopath sixteen years ago and fooled him into believing he was epileptic. That you medicated him with God knows what. That you manipulated his every movement like he was a lab rat. That you stopped him from doing what he truly wanted, and then one day, he really did go batshit crazy and killed his mother, and now he’s about to kill you.’ I took a large step forward. ‘I said tell them, you cunt.’

The prey stepped back again, but her slipper got caught in a crack and she teetered, flinging her arms out to grab something before falling backwards off the pergola on to the stone floor. Instantly she had created two metres of distance between us. She didn’t let this small chance go. She leapt up and ran sobbing and screaming towards the steel door to the stairwell. I caught up with her quickly, grabbing her short hair and yanking it back. The prey let out a piercing sound, the last thing she would utter on this earth. ‘Yu-min…’

A dark forest was opening within me. Time slowed. I watched the movement of my hand holding the prey’s head back, the blade running along the taut skin under the jaw, the neck opening like a zipper and the blood spraying in all directions like a machine gun, the red bullets coating the floor. A sticky warmth covered my face.