Chapter Text
Eve wakes up screaming.
She’s sweating and trembling. Her thin, damp t-shirt clings to her chest and stomach. Warm summer air pushes through the half-open window. Eve shivers despite the temperature.
Outside, the night is loud. Cars hoot and people yell in fast, unintelligible Korean. The too-humid, too-small room smells like fried fishcakes and tteokbokki, courtesy of the late-night vendors, their stalls set up just a few steps from the apartment building. In the distance, over the noise pollution and smear of human voices, Eve hears the ocean.
She sits up. Her back hurts. Two and a half months of sleeping on the floor mattress and her body still protests. She doesn’t know how everyone else does it. To be fair, it is a shitty mattress in a shitty spare room. She supposes she should feel grateful to her father’s-cousin’s-something for putting her up. Eve doesn’t feel much of anything these days.
What she is grateful for is the fact that Jin-hee is almost never around. From what Eve gathered, she has some job in tech and ends up spending most nights at her boyfriend’s place.
“My mother wouldn’t like it,” Jin-hee replied once when Eve asked why they don’t just move in together. “She doesn’t like Jung-suk. Says he is,” she paused, grappling for the English word, “bad influence.” Jin-hee shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He loves me. I love him.”
Eve felt something hot and corrosive bubbling up inside of her and swallowed to push it down. “Good for you,” she said and left Jin-hee to continue her 34-step skincare routine before bed.
At night, Eve walks through the streets of Sokcho like a ghost. She’s befriended the pimply-faced 7-Eleven cashier, the old woman who sells roasted chestnuts on the corner, and the owner of the bar down by the beach. The bar is usually frequented by loud expats drunk on soju and Sprite, but in the late hours of a Wednesday night, it’s just Eve, Min, and sad businessmen who don’t want to go home to their wives.
Min pours her another shot. She tells him she’s a spy on the run from the UK government and he nods conspiratorially.
She tells him she once shot a man in the head and he laughs as if she just told the world’s funniest joke.
“You are too nice to do something like that,” he says once he stops laughing. His cheeks are red and shiny.
“I’m not that nice.” Eve knocks back her soju.
Min gives her a full smile with crooked teeth. “Okay. Dangerous lady. Have you ever been shot?”
Eve’s stomach lurches. The scar on her back itches. She orders another drink.
It’s been eleven weeks since Eve left London. Eleven weeks since the rescue service pulled her tired, broken body out of the freezing water. She’d spent her first week in Korea crying and shitting herself as her body tried to fight off whatever disgusting bug she’d caught in the sewage-infested Thames.
Her first impulse was to die, to curl in on herself and evaporate in the ether. Existence felt harsh and bright and painful. She would close her eyes for long minutes and wait to just disappear. When a day passed and then two, it seemed like the moment had come and gone. And then there was that little voice inside her that said if she was going to die, it should have been out there, in the water…with her. Wouldn’t that have been poetic? Wouldn’t that have been the kinder thing? Maybe kindness was not something she deserved.
When breathing became something she didn’t have to force herself to think about, Eve half-heartedly considered revenge. But revenge had so many moving parts and she was so, so tired. She felt old and paper-thin like if she moved too quickly she’d tear and blow away.
Deciding on Korea didn’t come from some long, thought out, rational decision. She went because it was away, far enough away that perhaps she could disappear, even from herself.
Now Eve sits in a bar with sticky floors and too-loud 80’s music, willing her bones to forget the cold of the water. When she drinks, she faces away from the window. Away from the surf. She doesn’t like the ocean at night—dark and enveloping—a tomb of forgotten corpses. She drinks until they lock up and then she stumbles home, a shadow under orange street lights.
“Pretty lady!” A street vendor calls out when she goes by. “Where’s your husband?”
“Dead,” she calls back in slightly accented Korean.
She imagines shaving her head and shrouding herself in black. She’d make a terrible widow.
A memory rushes at her, unbidden and with a kind of violence. A hand on the nape of her neck, the creak of a camper van bed, the warmth of skin against hers. The whispered voice, “I love your hair.” Eve vomits in a side street next to a dark, boarded up grocery store.
“You scream in your sleep,” Jin-hee says when Eve saunters in at 6 am. She toes off her shoes and walks straight to the fridge. Jin-hee doesn’t care where Eve goes or what she does as long as she pays for half the groceries and stays in her room when Jun-suk comes over.
“Leg cramps,” Eve says by way of explanation as she digs out a container of leftovers and eats cold japchae straight from the Pyrex.
“Your life before was not good?” Jin-hee walks between her bedroom and the bathroom as she gets ready for work. Eve likes watching her. It’s fascinating to see someone play out this well-worn, normal routine. Like a flashback to a half-forgotten memory, Eve remembers croissants from the place on the corner, waiting for the tube, swapping lunches with Bill, and for a split second, misses the easy predictability of it.
Eve shrugs. “It was a lot of things.”
“My mother says you come here because you have grief sickness.” Jin-hee says this casually, toothbrush dangling from her mouth.
Eve crams noodles into her mouth and forces herself to swallow. The food churns in her stomach. “Something like that.”
“Hmm,” Jin-hee looks her over and Eve can only imagine what she sees. A sad, slightly drunk, middle-aged woman with unwashed hair wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes. “There is a temple by Seoraksan. You know the mountain? You should go. Light the—“ she makes a swirling gesture with her finger and Eve says,
“Incense.”
“Yes. Light the incense and think of the one you lost.” Jin-hee slips on a cardigan before heading to the door. “But first take a shower, okay?”
She leaves Eve in the empty apartment. Early morning sun washes into the small kitchen and Eve throws the plastic food container into the sink before going to close all of the curtains. Outside, the world wakes up.
Eve takes two Benadryl and hopes she’ll sleep until night.
______
It’s a perfect day for hiking. The air is sweet and the weather balmy. The last time Eve was outside a city was the strip of country road somewhere between Inverness and London. She runs her tongue over chapped lips and scowls at other people on the path. They walk by with their sticks and boots and their stupid floppy sun hats and look back at her in her soft sneakers, jeans, and unzipped rain jacket.
“You will be too hot in that,” Jin-hee had called after Eve as she left, but Eve was distracted by the notification that had just popped up on her screen.
Need to talk. Call me when you have a chance. Hope you’re well.
- M
She hadn’t spoken to Martin since before. She wondered if he knew about… Eve read it twice and then deleted it.
Halfway to the temple, a burly man with a grizzled beard and a backpack the size of a fridge stops her.
“You should put on some socks,” he says in a nasal, Australian accent. “The snakes here are no joke.”
Eve tries for a polite smile, but her mouth barely moves. “I’m okay, thanks.”
He looks her up and down with beady eyes. “You sure? I’ve got a pair to spare if you need ‘em.”
He reaches out faster than she can pull away. Hairy, meaty fingers close around her wrist. “You know, one bite and you’re—“ he clicks his fat tongue against his teeth.
All it takes is a small shove. The momentum from the heavy backpack does the rest. Eve curls her wrist out of his grip before she launches him backwards, down the rocky trail. He lets out a grunt of surprise and rolls a few times before colliding with a German tour group. Eve hears them shriek and then someone yells for a first aid kit.
She turns from the chaos and continues up the mountain, her fingertips tingling from where they connected with his chest.
The temple is beautiful, colourful and crowded. Eve allows her jacket to slip off her shoulders and walks around with her face to the sun. She sits on the edge of one of the stone steps and watches a sea of dark-haired people mill in and around the temple courtyard. Somewhere behind her there’s a squeal and she turns to see a pasty young man twirl his partner in the air. The woman pretends to fight, but she’s leaning into him, and then she’s laughing.
Eve swallows back a sour taste. She wonders if she should have eaten before she started up the mountain. She looks around, searching for a cart selling walnut pastries. There must be one around somewhere. She can smell the sugary, doughy scent and her stomach grumbles.
Instead of a cart, her eyes land on the tall, slim figure in the centre of the courtyard. The woman’s back is turned, with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to one side. Her long, blonde hair falls past her shoulders. She’s wearing a Chanel backpack that looks like it cost as much as Eve’s plane ticket.
The world narrows and darkens at the edges and Eve’s heart scrambles to her throat. Three choked syllables push past her lips. “Villanelle?”
Eve stands and the woman turns.
Her face is wrong. Her hair is wrong. Everything, everything is wrong. It’s not Villanelle. Of course it isn’t. How could she be here, alive in streaming technicolour, when she only exists inside of Eve’s head now.
Eve pushes past the throng of people, past not-Villanelle, past the stupidgrosssmiley couple, past nameless, faceless strangers who will never know what it’s like to exist every fucking day while half of your what—? Heart? Soul?—is rotting somewhere in a filthy river in London. God, it’s so dramatic and still so, so true. And she’s shaking now, standing in an empty corner where the sandy courtyard meets the forest
“I don’t know how to do this,” she says out loud to the trees. Her voice is cracked and unrecognisable. It’s someone else’s voice, someone else’s body. Eve thinks maybe she died in that frigid water after all. This can’t be living, can it? This can’t be right.
It’s almost dark by the time she gets back to the flat. Jin-hee is nowhere to be found. Eve strips and steps into a hot shower. The water pressure is shit, but it does the job. She dries off, eats a roll of tuna kimbap and decides that the next day might be a good day to off herself. She’ll do it somewhere nice, she decides. Not in the apartment for Jin-hee to find her. Maybe she’ll go back to the temple. It’s on a mountain. If she keeps walking she’ll get to a cliff at some point. And then it’s just a matter of taking enough steps.
Eve falls asleep wondering if Min from the bar will miss her.
Her phone buzzes at 2:47 am with a new text from Martin. Eve squints against the bright screen and almost immediately deletes the message before noticing the picture.
Not sure if you knew, is all it says.
Eve taps on the photo and it fills up her screen. It’s taken from a bad angle as if the photographer—Martin, she assumes—was halfway around a corner. Still, the quality is crystal clear.
It shows a hospital room and a woman standing over a bed, her back to the door. Eve recognises the woman. Pam. Pam in the room…talking to someone.
She squints and zooms in, her fingers trembling. In the hospital bed, attached to a drip and some other complicated-looking machine is a pale, blonde figure.
For the second time that day, Eve’s lungs expand with just enough air to breathe the word, “Villanelle.”