October 2061.

She woke early in the morning to the sound of birds yapping at the end of the garden and went down in only her dressing gown to find them. From the livingroom window she could see them perched like lawn ornaments along the fence down the far end, each looking back at her in their own small and terrible way, yellowed gullets and black eyes. For all the time she stood there they made no more noise and soon they were gone again, divided back into the dim grey morning from which they had been delivered. In the cold hours there was no sun and she could hear faintly the waves crashing against the rocks and lapping up at the hard clay and running back into the water in no particular pattern like forces of a mechanism coming together and separating. It had not rained in the night but in that sky she knew it would and it would rain for a long time.

Irene was still asleep. She went up and brushed her teeth and washed her face and there she stood in front of the little mirror and in the grim blue of the overhead light she held up a hand to the glass and then the other as if in some inexplicable way or motion her reflection would not follow, as if in the glass some otherself existed opposite and individual of her own movement, as if on other plane. She looked so very rotten, so fed up. With the world, with other things aside. But only she could see it and only she was partial to the true nature of such a claim or delusion or what it may be and she stood there pulling the skin of her cheeks taut and pouting her lips and pushing her wet palms against her sockets and mouthing things strange and alien to herself to see if she was different, if she had changed. When she was finished she showered and dried herself off and changed and stood again where she had stood before, and stood so many other mornings. For how many years? And how many more? Inspecting herself in the mirror. What minimal use there was in such a task had evaporated a long time ago, eroded like everything else. Like all things did. All but her.

Quietly in the predawn light she made her way back downstairs and into the kitchen. The curtains were still drawn and a thin film of the morning passed through only a slight and for a moment she stood wincing and taking it in. It felt different for some reason. Like the day held some certain cosmic significance she and only she was cognizant of. She made herself a cup of coffee and opened the fridge and took out the boxed cake and opened it and placed it neatly on an old china plate and took it into the livingroom. She sat it down on the table and drank her coffee in silence. There she waited. It was more than an hour before Irene came down. She was wearing an old shirt much too big for her and she wore that same smile on her tired and weary lips, the same of instant and irredeemable youth, so obvious and flaunted and painful to witness.

She was old now. Her hair in its greyness was thinning and her temples laden with wrinkles and her face itself like a mosaic of age, like something left out in the rain. But she was still beautiful, still effortlessly pretty. She held about her every inch of the same grace Seulgi had known in her for almost fifty years and that would never change. Not with age or with anything. She was Irene through and through and that would always be just that. Just like that. Seulgi watched her stagger to the couch, still smiling. She did not need assistance but soon maybe she would and that hurt to think about. But she was Irene. She was always Irene. It was like the videos she had seen of old veterans being played songs from their childhoods, or from the war. How they would start dancing, their faces lighting up. How their entire demeanours so sapped by time would appear to change, if only for a minute, a single and fleeting moment, like stars put out in the dark. One day that would be Irene. And that was almost too terrible to think about.

‘Morning,’ Irene said.

‘Good morning.’

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a cake. For you. Happy birthday.’

She set her cup down and leaned over and kissed Irene on the cheek. Irene smiled again. In the age she closed her eyes whenever she smiled, a habit new to her. As if in contemplation of some greater thing with each smile, each bout of contentment. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice soft and quiet.

‘It’s fruitcake, since I know it’s your favourite.’

Irene took hold of the plate and turned it as if inspecting it. ‘I like the icing,’ she said. ‘Thanks for reminding me I’m seventy.’

‘I figured it was an important number.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Seulgi. ‘I just did. Is it not?’

Irene was quiet a while. ‘I don’t suppose I even know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it is.’

‘It wasn’t too difficult to get so I thought, why not?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

She kissed Irene again and excused herself to grab a couple plates. When she was in the kitchen and out of sight of Irene she just stood there watching the turning of the cold grim world through the small window above the sink. Not quite thinking of anything. Just observing the dry and heartless world entire. When she came back Irene was already eyeing a piece of the cake. ‘I was thinking,’ she said.

‘About what?’ Seulgi set to cutting the cake into small portions. She doled one out onto each plate and handed a fork to Irene and in quiet they ate while Irene spoke.

‘Do you remember when we first moved here?’

‘Most of it. Why?’

‘I still remember how much of a buzz there was about the tourist industry at the time. I remember us talking about what it’d mean for getting a house here, something like that. We thought maybe the prices would be hiked way up in the next few years because of tourists all coming to the island. There were magazines and TV documentaries shot entirely about Jeju. As if it were some hidden wonderland or something. As if all the rest of the world thought only Seoul existed. Maybe they did. Maybe they still do. There was this big uproar about what the tourist industry would grow into and what it’d mean for the local economy and local jobs. I remember someone said on the news it’d be the most popular new destination in East Asia come 2030, or 2040.’

‘Yeah. I remember that. Or something like it.’

‘Well.’

‘Well,’ Seulgi said.

Irene ate her cake. ‘It never really happened like that, did it?’

‘I don’t suppose it did.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘No.’

‘Any theories?’

‘I haven’t really given it much thought.’

‘Me neither. Me neither. But it did get me thinking a little bit. About why that is, but mainly about what it means. Why it never really took off the way some people were expecting. And what it means for the people living here. Do they like it? Are they disappointed by it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone properly talk about. Are people even aware of it? It’s not like the tourism industry collapsed or anything. It just never took off. That’s how I see it anyway. Maybe they were wrong in the first place. About it taking off, I mean. Maybe their estimations were far too high. Jeju is supposed to be quiet, I think. Too many people ruin a place like this.’

‘Do you think it’s been ruined?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think it could be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Irene said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the authority to decide what’s ruined and what’s not.’

‘You’ve got your eyes. Your senses.’

‘I don’t believe that’s enough.’

‘What is?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ve never known you to be religious.’

Irene swallowed down another piece of the cake. She shrugged. ‘I don’t mean in any religious way,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know what exactly I mean. It’s a feeling I have. Like maybe it’s sacred or something.’

‘Maybe it is.’

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘You’re smiling like that.’

‘Like what?’

Irene nodded to her. ‘Like that,’ she said. ‘Like you do sometimes. What is it?’

‘I’m just smiling.’

‘Seulgi.’

‘You’re rambling again,’ said Seulgi.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I enjoy it. Your rambling. I just thought it was funny.’

To that Irene made no response. They finished their cake and Seulgi thumbed her plate away from the edge of the table. She sat there a minute just watching Irene. ‘What?’ Irene said.

‘Nothing.’

Irene laughed.

‘What?’

‘You know, it’s still crazy to me. It still doesn’t make any sense.’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘You.’

‘Me.’

Irene nodded. She set her own plate on the careful with great care, shaking fingers. Lacking all the deftness of Seulgi in her age. ‘Just you,’ she said. ‘Everything about you. Everything that you are. If you told me it again a thousand times I wouldn’t be able to get my head around it. You know, sometimes I set and I think about it and I realise I’m probably just as crazy as you for accepting it. Probably more so. You didn’t have a choice, being the way you are. I chose to stick with you. And I’m glad I did, don’t get me wrong. I’m so very glad I did. But it’s still strange. Still not quite proper.’

‘That’s how I’ve felt for a very long time,’ said Seulgi.

‘Longer than you’ve known me?’

‘Longer than I’ve known you.’

‘I sometimes wonder, if I could go back then, to when we first met, what I would’ve said if you had told me. If you’d have just come out with it for whatever reason when we were still there, still young, still at uni. Would I have believed you? Would I have laughed it off? I think honestly I’d have run a mile in the opposite direction thinking you were crazy and I’m not proud of that.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘No. But still. I’d never have this then. Not at all.’

‘That’d be it.’

‘Yes. That’d be it.’

They shared a held glance between them and there were no words yet there those eyes justified that silence, as if in the simple manner of such they were known immediately to one another and their intentions too, their true thoughts whatever they may be. As if they shared one common bond that could not be broken or erased or warped in any way by any thing or man or instrument of the world. Not even time. ‘You know what’s the craziest about it all?’ Irene said.

‘What.’

‘When I’m alone sometimes, I start drifting. And I start thinking, what if it’s all a dream? What if all of this, all of what I’ve done for the past forty-five years, maybe even longer – what if it was all one big dream? If it was all fake. False. I sometimes think about that. Think about it as a very real possibility.’

‘I suppose there’s no way to truly know.’

‘No.’

‘Crazy as it sounds.’

Irene smiled. ‘Crazy as it sounds,’ she said.

‘What would you do? If you know for real, what would you do?’

‘You mean, if it was a dream? If I knew that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well.’ Irene smiled again. In that Seulgi smile could see all the world and in her quivering waterfilled eyes all the history of one individual down to the basest elements, the rawest cores of emotion. All her life and her life’s work.

‘Well,’ said Seulgi.

‘If I knew I was in a dream? If this was all a dream?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d choose to never wake up.’

*  *  *

It wore her down more than she cared to ever admit. More than she ever would to Irene lest she worry about it, about her. In her years she had learned some painful truths about the nature of the impossibility of taming human emotion and of her own self and her own wellbeing but what was there she could do?

In the mornings each and every one she would turn and look at Irene lying there next to her. She was always asleep, always cold. And she always looked at peace. Her hair would spill out on the pillow about her head, thin and grey as webbing, and her pale and leathery skin in each dim grey dawn looked every day of seventy years old. One time she had turned over and heard nothing for a while and thought of the possibility that Irene had died in her sleep and she had cried for a long time and never thought of that again. Never even entertained the notion of it as anything more than a fable. She would turn in the cold dawns and listen to the wheezing of her breath in and out like an old pump, the soft bloodbeat of her old heart in her thin alabstrine chest, and she would sometimes cry then too.

She didn’t think it was depression. It was something more, something different and yet very similar. Sharing the same symptoms. A sort of chemical imbalance to her brain and equally inescapable. She didn’t know what caused it. Perhaps it was the thought of one day losing Irene. Or of being alone again. Or both. Perhaps it was nothing of the sort. Maybe in some way she was fed up of the world, of everything in it. Of herself. But it had been with her for a long time and it would not go away and after a while she had learned that there was no fighting it, not really, because you cannot beat what you cannot understand, and she would never understand herself because she should not exist at all. To understand herself would be dangerous to the extreme. Because there was no understanding of that which held no basis in reality in any instance.

Some days were worse than others. Some days were the worst of all. Some days she would lay in bed for most of the day and cry until she could smell the tears drying under her nose. Or when Irene was aware of her she would excuse herself to town and walk down to the caves when the tide was low. Here the old stone held grand impressions of the first humans, murals and ancient paintings stencilled onto the lime walls like children’s paperchains scissored into the very earth itself. And there in the shadow of the sea she would sit under the eternal tapestries of the forever lost and cry herself to sleep and sometimes she would shout her problems wail on wail into the enormous empty echo of the world and know that only the walls could here, and in that voiceless chamber of the atavistic and the hallowed only the spirits were suzerain and none could answer her. And in their silence she received all the answer she needed. Behold. I am afraid. And I am alone.

There were days where she felt nothing of those feelings at all. Not like a lightswitch being flipped, because they were still very much a part of her and very much there, somewhere below the surface, somewhere she could not find. It was more like the essence of a bad odour masked only temporarily, only for a fleeting moment. In all her years there was little she could do to control it. She had tried everything. But some things cannot be explained. She knew that better than anyone.

It hurt though. To look at Irene or to look away from her or when Irene was not even around. When she was alone or with Irene or with other people, when she was in a small group or a grand crowd. When she was anywhere. It was very much like being underwater, she thought. Those feelings day in and day out. Like trying to swim underwater in the middle of the ocean, in the very middle of nowhere. How different it felt, how immediately awful. There wasn’t much you could do about it. You could try and swim to shore but what was the use? You could swim your entire life and not find anywhere, just the cold and empty water around you. And all you would accomplish in the end would be to wear yourself out, to tire until there was nothing left to give, no energy in your legs, in your lungs, no fire in your eyes, and then what? You would succumb to it. You would be just another victim. And everyone else would just right there, barely out of reach. And they would look down on you and ask you why. Why you weren't swimming. Or why you were in the water in the first place. But they can't understand it unless they've been there themselves, unless they've felt it pulling them under. It's a force stronger than any gravity. So fighting against it in such a way holds no real solution nor does relying entirely on the support of those who have never been in the water, never felt what it was like to spend your entire waking life fighting for air. The real answer would be to ask yourself why you were underwater in the first place. Why you had been there for so long. Because you become so accustomed to the feeling of being submerged that you forget you were never supposed to be there at all. You were always supposed to be dry. Then one day you found yourself in the water, trying to swim back to that solace you once took for granted, and you can never get there. You're just swimming and swimming. But in that itself we decide our own fate. Our own meagre futures. It is unrealistic to expect to ever outrun our own pain. You can’t, after all, swim faster than the ocean. It makes no sense, is impossible. The water is all around you. The unfortunate and perhaps disheartening truth is that we never manage to swim to the shore, we never find the land we are always in search of. We never truly figure out how to escape the water. We just learn how to stay afloat.