Last night he pinned me under him, knees prying my legs open. He didn’t have a face; it was pixelated like the faces of passersby in news reports. Out of my body, I watched the figure pump into my mannequin. My feet sinking into the ground like quicksand. I was not the only person in the room. Kit was leaning against my washing machine, watching us, his jaw set in a harsh line. And standing next to the out-of-body Jade was David Reuben, laughing like a crazed hyena. I could see through walls, and in the building hallway, Adele was knocking, holding a bag of takeaway.
I sat bolt upright at four in the morning, cold from the damp sweat that soaked through my T-shirt. I didn’t go back to sleep for fear of reliving. I put my phone on flight mode and paced. Two hours later, I couldn’t bear this gnawing feeling any longer. I woke my parents up by switching the boiler on. The water was hot. Scaldingly hot. I sat under the shower until my skin was red raw. I reached for the pack of Korean washcloths, small squares of abrasive material. And then I scrubbed. Scrubbed as if my skin were a stain I could blot out. Toxins seeped from me. Tears and snot and sweat and blood. The expanse of my skin expelling in unison. Omma tried to enter—the concept of knocking was absurd in this household—but I’d bolted the door.
My parents continued to tiptoe around me this morning. After Baba had picked me up from the station, Omma met us at the door, holding out a blanket that she draped over my shoulders before they silently led me inside. I crawled into bed and lay my head in Omma’s lap, while Baba sat on the edge, watching us. Not one word was spoken as I clutched at my mother as if she were sand slipping through my fingers. As I untethered from the world, succumbing to the disbelief and terror pouring out of me. And all she could do was hold me as huge, full-throated sobs heaved from my chest. Because that’s what parents do, right? Try to mend a heart they didn’t break.
Perhaps they thought the stress of the job had worn me weak, or that Kit and I had had a fight. But no questions were asked. It’s strange how parents show their love. With Kit, I was an audience member in a theater production of enviable family interactions. On his twenty-fifth birthday, Angie covered the Campbell house with streamers made of pastel-colored tissue paper, two huge gold helium balloons—a 2 and a 5—nudged against the ceiling, a lemon meringue pie with twenty-five candles sat on the dining table, and a mound of presents in the fireplace. Whenever Kit was troubled by something, it was all hands on deck: Angie would call, text, email her advice; Ian would put him in touch with an old university friend: Bertie, he can help you out.
Omma and Baba were raised in a different world, without the luxury to dissect and analyze their feelings on each and every topic. They kept their emotions compacted deep within themselves, where they hardened. Solidified into granite. In Korean, South Korea is called Han-guk. North Korea is called Buk-han. The Korean language is called Han-geul. Seoul is sliced by the Han River. The concept of “han,” the base word that identified something as Korean, was the expression of grief. Of sorrow and injustice and rage and bitterness. My mother would say she felt han when the insurance business went under. Han accumulated, rather than lessened, through generations—a form of collective inheritance. Just like our hair that had the sheen of a fresh brew, or our chestnut eyes, open wounds were passed down too.
Omma taught me a saying: 도를 닦다. It had many loftier interpretations, but as a child, I could only grasp its literal meaning: to clean a road. I pictured her on her hands and knees, her weight pressing into sharp gravel, thanklessly washing something that would inevitably remain dirty. The expression was used to convey enduring hardship, to describe situations in which unpleasant circumstances were weathered, in the pursuit of something better. Omma and Baba were both raised in postwar eras in which their infant republics took their first, unstable steps into democracy. Omma was a student when she joined a protest against military-backed dictatorship. She was in the throng of civilians that armed soldiers descended upon, opening fire. With the sole purpose of merciless quashing. Baba was harvesting hazelnuts as soon as he could walk, under the type of sun that smoldered all below it. His living memory was one of constant, relentless labor.
My parents have been cleaning roads all their lives. There was a responsibility to them to live a happy, fulfilled life. To make their adversity worthwhile. So, when Omma held me while I cried, how could I tell her that this world she had worked so hard to survive in had let me down?
I wrestled with telling them. Of course I did. I hadn’t until now because the pieces of the jigsaw were unassembled. I wanted a clear path to a conclusion; I didn’t want to have to jump to it. Until now, the gap in memory was twinkling: a pool of hope that maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Now it was a dried-up desert. After my shower I got dressed and emerged. My parents didn’t notice me watching them from the hallway. Omma was fretting over a lost receipt in the depths of her handbag. She popped a sticky rice cake into her mouth and chewed as she flipped the bag over and shook it out. Baba was on the sofa, his laptop on the coffee table, illegally streaming a Galatasaray game. GOOOOOOOOOL! The commentator cheered. Baba threw both hands in the air and did a celebratory boogie. He came up behind Omma, wrapping his arms around her chest, and kissed her vigorously on the cheek, buoyantly singing his football team’s chant. I observed this oasis they’d created. It scared me to tell them. To fill their sanctuary with such poison. I physically ached at the idea of inflicting that pain on them. The kind of pain that only a parent can feel when someone hurts their child and there’s nothing that can undo it.
As soon as Omma noticed me, she whisked into action. Plates of food because aga, you’ve lost weight, layers draped on my shoulders because aga, you look cold. They didn’t ask what brought me to their door in tears, and I couldn’t share. I turned away from the food, instead quietly returned to my room. Omma watched me retreat. I knew her insides hurt with worry. But she didn’t have any words.
I need to tell someone. On impulse, I started dialing.
“Sup.” The rich timbre of Adele’s voice was like a port in a storm.
“Hey,” I managed. I didn’t know what I’d planned to say. I shared so much with Del. I’d tell her if I had thrush and needed some Canesten. We’ve sent each other links to the best vibrators on the market. She would drop everything in a moment for me. And yet the words jarred in my throat.
“Bro, where’d you get to yesterday? You never came back to our office.” I could hear the jackhammer of construction behind her.
“Had to run to a meeting with Genevieve,” I lied. “Was calling to see if you fancied getting some food?” I lied again.
“Can’t, sorry, seeing Gabby.”
“A second date!”
“I dunno, man, I like this one.”
I could hear Del’s giddiness and her glee was infectious. We blabbered on the phone while Adele made her way to her date spot. I clung to her voice, to the upward inflections of her accent.
“Okay, I’m here, I gotta go.”
“Okay!”
There was a beat, filled with everything I left unsaid.
“I love you, buddy,” Adele finally said and hung up, as my tears free-falled down my cheek, sploshing onto my lap.
I sat on my creaky single bed. I’ve lain here countless times, on this mattress that has molded to the shape of me. I picked up my phone and started to message Kit. I typed and deleted and typed and deleted.
Hey, are you free today?
I really want to talk to you…
Can we hang out tonight?
Having a rubbish day…
I need to tell you something.
Can I call?
I miss you.
I threw my phone on the bed in frustration. Words typed in iMessage were too trite to transmit what I needed to say.
Do I know what I need to say?
I kept typing.
I kept deleting.
I tried calling but chickened out before the first ring, jamming the end button with quivering fingers.
Before Kit, I’d never been in a relationship. It was all new to me, but I knew things were going well when, a fortnight after our first date at the Coach House, he invited me to his family cottage in Norfolk with his friends. His crew were there before I arrived. The “cottage” was a five-bedroom, Grade II listed property set on eight acres of prime sea-view land. I spent some of my student loan on two tennis lessons before I came, just in case. The brisk North Sea wind reddened my cheeks and matted my hair with salt. When I arrived, Kit and two of his friends, Leo and Ollie, were sitting around the banquet-style table, drinking wine.
“So glad you could join us, Kit hasn’t shut up about you for days,” Leo began, as Kit protested. “Where did you say you were from, Jade?”
“London.” I said with a nod.
“Whereabouts?”
“South.”
“Like Richmond?”
“Near there,” I said, “kinda.” Omma used to joke that Richmond was a portmanteau of “rich” and “diamond,” given its population. Morden was not near there.
“Where did you go to school?” Ollie asked as Kit topped everyone’s glasses up.
“London, too,” I said. They all laughed. Not unkindly, but as if I had said something completely endearing. I laughed along. Kit walked around the table to take the seat next to mine and held my hand. The dinner strolled on through the evening. Kit kept getting up to make old-fashioneds. I loved watching him. Other boys had ripped cuticles and nails that were bitten raw. His hands were clean, with spirit-level straight fingers. He was manipulating a twist in an orange peel and wiped it around the rim of the whiskey glass before dropping it in. The cocktails got sloppier as the hours turned. We learned that Ollie’s family cat was called Merlot because she whined a lot as a kitten. Leo told us about a girl he knew who tipped back so many oysters at the summer ball that she actually cut the corners of her mouth! Yah, like a Glasgow smile only more civilized. Kit and Ollie fell into each other, laughing, and I laughed too. In the early hours, I took myself off to bed. The windows to the master bedroom were open and I could hear the waves in the distance. I heard the conservatory doors open, the boys’ voices mingling underneath.
“Jade…” I made out Kit saying. “She’s Kyriakos’s star pupil.”
“More like your star pupil,” Ollie snorted. “… conflict issues?”
“It’s not like I’m her teacher,” I heard Kit say, “or breaching… power. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Did you or did you not,” I think it was Leo speaking, “pass on your essays, though?”
My ears perked up. Kit had left a binder of his essays outside my room the week earlier, but it had not yet been opened. I hadn’t wanted to give him the satisfaction of recycling his work. Not that I needed to. I couldn’t make out what Kit said in response.
“So no bloody wonder she’s his star pupil!” Leo and Ollie laughed.
“Tell you what, lads,” Kit spoke, “there’s something about her I love.” Love?! Did he say he loved me?! My heart could have soared straight out of the window to him. I was drunk and ecstatic and he was in love with me! “She’s not like the other… not like… so stressful…”
I strained against the window frame to hear. The water crashed in between his words. The pool glimmered in the moonlight. “… refreshing… independent.”
Why did I think of that weekend in Norfolk now? It was years ago. But there was something in that memory that made me hesitate to call Kit. I thought about the conversations we had in the early days about his exes. The obligatory airing of pasts. Sizing up previous lovers, gauging whether any feelings lingered, the natural questioning of why me and not her? What fell into the unacknowledged abyss was that all of his exes were my physical antithesis. Iterations of rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, waiflike blondeness. Kit meant it as a compliment when he said that I was different, unique. But different from what?
I asked why his past relationships had failed, and Kit had commented that it boiled down to “wanting different things.” He said his exes’ expectations of a relationship were different from his. His voice was laced with pity because it was clear they wanted more from him than he was willing to give. What immediately followed was the direct comparison to me. I’ve never been with someone so independent. We have our own thing going on, he said. I had glowed with a familiar validation. Omma and Baba also marveled at how lucky they were with their little girl who looked after herself without complaint when they worked long days and nights.
Omma’s favorite Korean expression was collect dust and make a mountain. Its meaning was close to “little by little” or “day by day.” In every relationship, we gather the tiny cues of condition. Morsels of expectation. Until they build mountains between people. I took care of myself. I was the autonomous, self-sufficient, career-driven woman to my boyfriend. That’s why he loved me. He broke up with other women for not fulfilling that role. Today wasn’t the day to change that.
It occurred to me that there was one person I could speak to. Who I felt an unusual kinship with. Who existed in a vacuum and for whom I didn’t need to be anything or anyone. The first few minutes on the phone were filled with mundane questions. I just need to speak to her.
“Hello, are you still there?” The voice on the line cut through after a hold tone.
“Hi, yes, I’m still here.”
“Brilliant, I’ve booked you in for tomorrow evening—you’ll have Kathy.”
“Sorry,” I interjected, “but I asked to see Andreea? She knows my history.”
“Sweetie, Andreea unfortunately doesn’t work with us anymore.”
“That’s okay.” I reached over for a scrap piece of paper and a pen. “Please, could you let me know which clinic she’s moved to?”
The receptionist paused.
“Andreea has gone home, love. Back to Romania.”
The bright orange lifeline was being pulled back to shore, leaving me stranded in the water. I was kicking, treading water. I needed her.
“What? Why? Why would she do that?”
The voice on the line coughed. “It’s just Brexit, isn’t it? Taken its toll on all the migrant staff. She weren’t happy here—all her friends had left.” I barely heard the words this lady was saying, zoning in on the sound of her chewing gum sticking to her teeth as she spoke. “It’s been a bloody nightmare round here. The NHS is understaffed as it is, and they only bloody go and make the Europeans feel unwelcome.”
“I see.”
“I’m part Cypriot myself. Got a British passport, so I’m not worried, but my husband doesn’t—makes you feel stressed, doesn’t it?”
I stared at the floor. “Listen, I’ve got to go now—”
“Well, did you want that appointment with Kathy booked in?”
“No, no, I’ll ring back. Bye.”