March 2066.

The last time she had spoken to someone other than Irene for more than a minute or two had been maybe a decade ago. Anything longer would have been dangerous. There comes a point where people begin to remember faces, perhaps after the third or fourth time they see you, and at such a point any sort of recognition is tethered to that appearance. At a distance any changes might not be noticed but over time they become more obvious. Age is the greatest factor in all things. Age affects each and all equally, no matter how unequal it may first appear. But not Seulgi. Never Seulgi. So after a long time those people would come to recognise Seulgi and soon they would see that she had not changed at all, not since the first time they had met her, and then perhaps in some way she could tell them some sort of a lie, some comic joke to mask who she really was. But there would come a time where people would start asking questions. And that would be a time she would have to leave forever, and take Irene with her. And that was out of the question. At least now.

*  *  *

She lay there counting the spiral flakes of paintwork in the ceiling and listening to the soft rush of the wind outside with her hands folded on top of her chest and soon she was almost crying. Through the rain on the window still freshly fallen the whole world looked like something vaguely melting. A distortion of no particular shape of colour held in that singular image. Of other worlds aside. She lay there for a long time and she would not look at Irene but she knew that Irene was awake, still watching her. A long time ago she would have said something already. Would have taken Seulgi’s face in her hands and made her turn over and lay there awake until Seulgi would have told her what was wrong. But in her years she had grown quiet, introspective. When she spoke it was briefly, and with the sort of content smile that indicates a general acceptance of the state of one’s life and their place within it, a calm understanding of the future and what it still holds. And an unspoken celebration of the past, to always be remembered somehow, no matter what.

‘Seulgi.’

She did not turn or look at Irene and it took every morsel of energy she could muster to fight back the tears and stay the shuddering of her jaw. As if it would give her away. As if Irene didn’t already know. As if Irene hadn’t in their fifty years together come to know everything about Seulgi.

‘Seulgi. Look at me.’

When she spoke it was in a soft and small voice, a voice that seemed to have retreated into the back of . A voice worn thin and sick and tired of the world. A voice satisfied entirely with itself. ‘Seulgi,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Seulgi turned to her. Any worry she expected to see in that gaze of Irene’s was not there. Just a great and painful tenderness. A meek glimmer in the pale and slender moonshimmer. She looked so very small, so frail, the leathery skin stark white in the sallow light and just above her shawl the hard and bony outline of her collarbones very clear against her alabstrine chest. Like an old statue. Or a porcelain doll from a time long past, left in some state of extreme disrepair. Slowly she held out a thin and weak hand. She held her palm to Seulgi’s cheek, so small and shaking ever so slightly. That smile never faded. Not even for a second.

‘I’m sorry,’ Seulgi said.

‘Don’t be.’

‘I don’t know what’s come over me.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘For what?’

By now she was crying. ‘For everything,’ she said, weeping against Irene’s touch. ‘I should have never ruined your life. I should’ve never done that. I should’ve let you live. Let you grow old with someone. Let you experience everything together with someone else. Let you love and let you be loved like you deserve. Like I couldn’t ever give you.’

‘Seulgi.’

‘I’m sorry. Oh God I’m sorry.’

‘Seulgi. Look at me.’

‘I’m so sorry Irene.’

When she looked at Irene through her tears Irene was still smiling. She appeared not unlike someone about to impart a great wisdom. With her thumb she wiped a tear from Seulgi’s cold cheek. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop crying.’

‘Irene.’

‘No. Stop it. I don’t want to hear it.’

Seulgi went to speak and Irene stopped her. ‘I said I don’t want to hear it, okay? I don’t want to hear any of that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Nothing at all. Do you think I’ve spent all these years wishing I was with someone else? Or that I’d done something else? Or do you think as I got older I’d change my mind? That I’d realise I’d wasted my life or something? You’re wrong. There’s never been anyone else. Never been anyone I’d ever want to spend my life with except you. You’ve been everything to me. You’ve been my world entire. Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve seen – I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. You know what?’

Seulgi didn’t respond. Irene wiped at her cheek again. ‘Do you know what?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve had the time of my life with you. The time of my life.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Don’t cry. Okay? Don’t cry.’

*  *  *

She sat there on the beach feeling the breeze against her face and after a while she was nearly crying again. In those long days of spring she had become somewhat of a lachrymose. There were times she couldn’t stop herself. Standing there at the counter preparing dinner or coming out of the shower on a morning or in the supermarket buying groceries and then suddenly on the verge of tears. Like something inside her had become terribly wrong in the past few months. Or the past few years.

The evening had come in fairly cool. There was a silent wind and the only sound she heard was the careful shudder of the waves down along the shore. Soon the tide would be in. In the cold she watched scarlet light flicker in the terminal meridian of the sun there at the very bottom of the sky and there she watched it arc and spiral over the water, against the cliffs, incandesce on the golden face of the sand like something bubbling with heat, burn against the coming galaxies and hold back the stars, shine in the caves and the streets and somewhere against their house and over the fields and the threadbare spine of the black mountains silhouetted against the gorstian outline of Jeju quivering in the cold dusk, but not there. Not quite where she sat. As if all the world were alive but her. Perhaps in some way that was right. Perhaps she was deserving of it.

She dipped a hand into the sand. Felt it run between her fingers. For a moment she imagined Irene. She imagined a scenario unlike any she had ever imagined before, like a dream coming to her from some other side of life, and in this dream her life up until that very moment was playing in reverse, like a tape rewound, and in this same dream she saw herself from some outer place like a spirit looking in on the corporeal world, and she was there in the livingroom of their house, and there at the grocery store, and tending to Irene, and sitting up at night on the beach and listening to the great silence of the world, and ordering a drink at the bar, and then another, and another three, and then like something unravelled at the seams each moment like the dream itself reversed, so that she was undrinking each drink and unmeeting each person, so that there alone on the beach her tears were back into her eyes as if by sorcery, so that she was slowly removing herself from Irene’s tender touch, from the feeling of her hand on Seulgi’s face, on the feeling of her dry and cracked lips, and each beautiful and timeless smile seemed to be sapped away from Irene’s face so that all that remained was a terrible neutrality, a nothingness of appearance, a void barren entirely of emotion and unreadable, and she was moving along this timeline at a great speed, so that in a single instant she was outside again, and when she turned around Irene was there in the doorway, her posture slightly straighter, her eyes with an alien energy to them, a glimmer still b with life, and then she was inside, and it was a bright and warm morning, and Irene’s hair was still that raven black, and her face still smooth and untouched by the greed of time, and still each smile becoming nothing, each hand leaving Seulgi’s cheek, Seulgi’s face, Seulgi’s s, leaving Seulgi entirely cold and alone and empty and unloved, and then they were there at the front of the aisle, and the man she could still remember with his book of vows and his priest’s uniform was unmarrying them, telling them in rapid incoherence that they had once been joined forever more and now were just two souls there embarking on a journey back into the past, and then they were somewhere else and it was not Jeju but Seoul, and they were in amongst the crowd, there by the side of the Han River watching the fireworks, the hot streams of glycerine get back out of the exploding sky like confetti pulled into a vacuum, and they were suddenly holding hands, and Irene was no longer old and grey but young and so painfully beautiful, and they were sat side by side in a little dorm room and they were laughing and sharing a bottle of wine between them and telling each other stories in reverse, until at last they came to an introduction in which they untold each other their names and unshook their hands and unsmiled those smiles and Seulgi with her backwards footsteps retreated out of the room and into the outer dark and there like a pilgrim at the shores of some new and untouched mystery she was alone again, and there was nobody she could turn to or talk to and no Irene because in this nightmare Irene did not exist in her life and had never existed in the first place, and all that remained was her, there, forever. Alone and afraid.

She sat thinking about that for a long time in the cold. Until it was dark and starless and the tide was in. Then she rose and made her way back up the hill and home.

*  *  *
 

Immediately and without doubt she knew something was wrong but why she had no way of telling. She opened the door and stepped in and out of the cold and without taking off her shoes she called upstairs and went up. There was no reply. The TV was on. She called Irene again to no response. She went into the livingroom. The TV was to something she didn’t recognise. She stood there in the lightless space of the room not really knowing what she was seeing at first, or not believing it. As if choosing to live momentarily in some other delusion that was better. Irene was lying slumped against the couch. She looked at first to glance to be dead. Her skin had gone pale and lay ajar and when Seulgi called to her she didn’t respond. She just lay there.

Oh God, Seulgi said. Oh Jesus God no.

*  *  *

The lid of the styrofoam coffeecup sat neatly between her legs. She stirred the coffee absently, watching it pool and conform and split against the cream as if dissipating, a thin brown film around the rim. She watched the steam coil and spiral from the mouth of the cup with little interest. She had little interest in anything anymore.

The walls were whiter than she expected. It was the first time in longer than she could remember that she had stepped foot inside a hospital. A nurse came past with a clipboard in hand but she did not look down at Seulgi nor did Seulgi look up from her coffee. Three more nurses passed silent. A doctor in white overalls came out of one of the rooms and then a number of patients and another nurse and all the while she sat there stirring her coffee and listening for anything but there was nothing. Just a dim ringing her ears had taken on. Soon she was crying again.

About half past eight a doctor with thin grey hair and a pencil moustache told her it would be best if she went home and got some sleep. She said she wasn’t going to leave Irene but the doctor with great consternation and the sort of calm pity that comes only with years of similar experience told her Irene was going to be there for some time. Maybe a week or more. He told her again that such dedication to remaining there was admirable but ultimately would result in nothing good. Only in exhausting herself. In doing the opposite of what Irene would want. When he was gone she broke down crying again and it was a long time before she stopped.

She saw Irene twice in the week. The first time she made a joke about being too old for hospitals and Seulgi had to excuse herself to cry again. The second time Seulgi brought her a bowl of soup and she complained it was too salty and Seulgi laughed at her. Irene being Irene.

Four days later the doctor caught her in the waiting room half an hour before she was allowed to go in. He pulled her to the side and told her she might want to sit down. His hands were sweaty and there was sweat on his brow and he took off his glasses twice to clean them against the fabric of his undershirt. He asked her politely what her relationship to Irene was and Seulgi said she was her granddaughter. She told him to tell her what exactly was wrong and after a moment which in its singularity felt eternal he told her the cause of her fainting was trivial but they had felt something more serious was wrong hence the tests, hence the waiting time. Then he told her softly he was sorry and that she had pancreatic cancer. Finally he told her that it was terminal.

‘How long?’ she said.

He said maybe three months.

*  *  *
 

It was oddly calm. A sort of tranquillity in the air that was uncountable, unreachable. Some abstract notion of peace impossible to properly explain. A soft wind blowing in the garden, in the street. Leaves from the old oaks tumbling along the sidewalk like debris blown up in a storm. The evening sun sat low against the horizon like a gold coin quaking in the warmth and the black figure of the mountains looked like crumpled paper in the thin dusk and there was a finality to that day as exists in no other thing that was immediate and painful. Like the closing of some unique day come the very last of the red sun.

‘It’s so pretty,’ Irene said. Her voice had grown so thin and hoarse it was barely audible at all and her skin had taken on a sort of jaundice and she was so thin it was alarming.

‘Yeah,’ said Seulgi. ‘Yeah it is.’

They were sat at the end of the garden side by side and Seulgi had been crying quietly for a long time. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. She moved her hand over Irene’s in Irene’s lap and Irene held it there as if to do otherwise would be to lose it forever. To never feel Seulgi there again. Seulgi turned to her. She was so different, so unlike Irene. So painful to even witness. But she was still the same somewhere there. Somewhere inside. Somewhere forever lodged internal that she would never be rid of her. This integral part of Irene, this beautiful and brilliant design that Seulgi had fallen madly in love with so long ago. Somewhere deep inside. She watched Irene for a long time but Irene would not look back. She studied the sunrise in silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Seulgi said.

‘Stop it.’

‘I am.’

‘I said stop it.’

She looked at Irene as if deciding what to do next and after a moment she was quiet again. The hands against her own felt cold and bony and fragile, as if any minute they would shatter in her gentle grip. ‘You know what?’ Seulgi said.

‘What?’

‘I think we should go somewhere. Together.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Wherever you want to go. Wherever at all.’

‘Like where?’

‘Wherever makes you happiest.’

Irene turned to her at last. She was smiling so bright she looked for a moment to be twenty-seven again, to be young and full of joy and life and to have loved Seulgi for the first time. To be so very much in love with the world. ‘Anywhere that makes me happiest,’ she said.

‘Anywhere.’

And with that same and final smile she turned back out to the horizon. Her eyes were wet.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I think I’m exactly where I need to be.’