Dazzle

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"There's a human in your heart of hearts,

Hiding true colours made you fall apart,

In the mirror you're a work of art,

But this is real life, real life."

‘Okay,’ Yeri said. She set her cup down on the table and placed her hands beside it as if she were about to deliver some prophetic truth. ‘You wanna know what I think?’

‘Not really,’ Joohyun said.

‘I think it’s a good idea, honestly.’

‘You don’t even own a record player.’

‘I know, but just think about it logically for a minute.’

‘I am.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘You want to spend five hundred thousand won on a vinyl collection.’

Yeri shrugged.

‘How many paychecks is that? In fact, don’t tell me. You don’t have to tell me. I already know. We work the same job.’

‘I’m just saying, I think it’s a great idea. Sure, I don’t listen to vinyls, but I could grab a record player at any time, right? And besides, you’re missing the point. They’re a hot commodity nowadays. People are snapping them up left right and centre. We’ve gotten to the point where even CDs are gonna be seen as a nostalgia thing, right? Everything’s streaming nowadays. So if CDs are considered old, what about records? They’re practically ancient history. And if I buy a bunch of them now, think about in two years’ time. Or five years. They’ll be worth double. Nobody’s producing vinyl in big numbers anymore. I could make a killing.’

‘Or you could look like an idiot with egg on your face.’

‘Could do,’ Yeri said. She picked up her coffee again and sipped and set it down. ‘Guess we’ll see. I still think it’s a good idea. I’m full of good ideas sometimes. Most of the time.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Why? You in a hurry or something?’

‘No,’ Joohyun lied.

‘It’s nearly five.’

‘Okay.’

‘Why do we do this?’

‘Do what?’

‘Hang out,’ Yeri said. ‘Like this. I mean, no offence of course, but today’s Saturday, you know? We should be doing something exciting. I see you five days a week as it is, and then I get time off and I come and see you again.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I know,’ Joohyun said. She glanced down at her own coffeecup, softly steaming, still warm. ‘I was just kidding.’

‘We should be with our friends.’

‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, you know. Other friends. Or something like that.’

‘This is easier,’ Joohyun said. ‘More straightforward. And I do see my other friends. So do you.’

‘I know. I’m just saying.’

Joohyun was quiet. The world had fallen a distant and dark red and it was bitterly cold and the days had not yet begun to lengthen again. They were playing gentle music over the café speakers. Acoustic melodies that reminded her suddenly of Wendy, strumming her guitar and singing in that voice that could melt caps of snow from the mountaintops. How right with the world it had sounded, sitting there listening to her in the mall. She picked up her coffee and sipped with a wince and set it back down again.

‘So,’ Yeri said, ‘what are you doing tonight?’

‘Nothing,’ Joohyun lied again. Perhaps it would have been to tell the truth but there existed something about her arranged night with Wendy that felt almost clandestine. Almost scandalous. It had taken her no more than five minutes once Wendy had disappeared to find out the location of the Old Ball bar and figure out a way to get there. Or three separate ways, by foot and by bus and by subway. It was a good half an hour in the opposite direction from her apartment. Yeri shifted in her seat and squinted at her. ‘Are you sure?’ she said.

‘Sure about what?’

‘That you’re not doing anything. You’re looking shifty.’

‘I’m meeting someone,’ Joohyun said. ‘Kind of.’

‘What? What do you mean kind of? Who are you meeting?’

‘Are you always this nosy? Who am I kidding? You’re always this nosy.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Welcome.’

‘So, who is it?’

‘Just someone,’ Joohyun said. She sipped her coffee again.

‘Is that all you’re giving me?’

‘You wouldn’t know her.’

‘Oh, so it’s a her? Cute.’

‘You wouldn’t know them. Better?’

‘Try me.’

She was quiet for a moment. The reality was that Yeri was as harmless with the truth as without it, so she said, ‘You remember that girl that came and played at the mall the other day? The one that came back and played yesterday.’

‘The one that you said had a beautiful face, you mean.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Yeah, I remember her. It was only, like, a day ago.’

‘Well.’

‘Well what?’

‘She asked me along to a performance of hers tonight.’

‘What? Are you serious?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing,’ Yeri said. ‘What sort of performance?’

‘She said she was performing in a bar. And she asked me to come along. So I said yes.’

‘Where is this bar?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Relax, I’m not planning on coming or anything. But if I were—’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just no,’ Joohyun said.

‘Is it a date? Is that what this is?’

‘No, it’s not a date. I don’t even know if she likes— forget it. Whatever. Ignore I said anything. Just pretend I’m doing nothing tonight.’

‘Well in that case, what are you doing tomorrow night?’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘Just wondering. I’m not doing anything. Maybe we could hang out.’

‘You just can’t get away from me, can you?’

Yeri broke into a grin. ‘Guess not,’ she said.

‘I was just going to do some writing,’ Joohyun said. ‘Have a little bit of me time, you know?’

‘How’s that coming along, by the way? The writing, I mean. Not the me time.’

‘About as well as always. So, not very well at all. Feels like I’m going to be one of those writers doomed to telling people I’m an aspiring writer and not actually ever writing anything. I still can’t decide if I want to write poetry or novels, either.’

‘Why not both?’

‘I’d rather pick one I’m best at and focus on that. But the problem is I don’t know which one I’m best at. Or whether I’m actually any good at either of them. I’m starting to think I’m not. Maybe I should just give it up.’

‘Where would be the fun in that?’

Joohyun smiled softly. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said.

‘That’s me. Always right.’

She arrived just after seven on foot. It was almost exactly as she had imagined it, a dimly lit and smoky long room with the bar to the right and tables lined under the windows and down the middle of the aisles and a small stage right up at the front with a single microphone stand and a wooden stool in pale spotlight. A solitary thin amber chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling like a necklace. It smelt of beer and vaguely of smoke. Almost everybody there was twice her age and nobody seemed to pay her any attention at all.

She went on up to the bar and ordered a beer and sat at the far back table near the front window. Here it was much darker. The stars outside stuck tight in the sky and there was no moon. Joohyun set her beer on the table mat and pulled out her phone and checked the time and put it back again. Not thinking much at all. The truth was she didn’t know what to think and it was strange in a sense. Here she was, and what was this? If anything. She sipped her beer from a tall bottle with a grimace while people talked between themselves.

Her eyes never left the stage at the front. Wendy had said half past seven. At twenty past a man came out from somewhere backstage and adjusted the microphone downwards a slight and disappeared again. Joohyun drank. There was music playing faintly through the speakers and nobody on stage and still by seven thirty-five it was empty. She sipped her beer again. The man reappeared ten minutes later to fiddle with the microphone stand and looked out at the bar and nodded to nothing and went away again. If anybody cared that this makeshift stage was empty they never showed it. Only Joohyun.

Sat fiddling with the stem of her beer bottle she thought about the man with the microphone stand. The look on his face when he had changed the height of it and nodded and disappeared. What it could have meant. Her phone read 7:54. A soft pink haze wrapped up the night. She nudged her chair back and went up to the bar and ordered a second beer and sat again under the window. Canopied in the sallow moonlight like a watcher at a ghost fair. These similarly spectral patrons chattered on. A seventy-year old man with a flatcap, two elderly women, one with a walker, another man with no teeth. Ruder forms endured.

At exactly nine minutes past eight she finished the last of her second beer and went up to the bar again and leant half over and smiled politely at the bartender. He was a man about twenty-five and he looked at her and smiled and said, ‘Another beer?’

‘No, thanks. I was just wondering something.’

He looked at her and she continued.

‘Was there a woman supposed to be performing tonight? About my height, maybe a bit shorter. Blonde hair. Like, just above her shoulders. Her name is Wendy.’

‘I don’t know,’ the bartender said. ‘I just work here. Sorry.’

‘Is there anyone I can ask?’

To this he shrugged.

‘A manager or something?’

‘I don’t know. Sorry.’

She thanked him and went on back to her table and sat a while longer in the dark playing with her bottle on the table. She waited until half past eight. Then with great indifference in her heart she went on out into the cold and made for home.

There was something different about it.

She knew that. What she did not know was why, or how, and it was this that frustrated her more than anything. Stood in the little backroom trying to calm herself down and failing. The world growing smaller all the time. It hurt to breathe and her head hurt and the room was spinning and she wasn’t crying but she would be soon enough. Standing there and thinking: What the is wrong with you, Seungwan? Pull it together. Just pull it together.

It had just gone twenty-five past seven. She thought about what to do next and then she was crying. When she rubbed at her eyes her hands were cold and pale and trembling and she had bitten into her lip without even realising it and it tasted faintly of iron. Her chest felt tight and painful. The walls were closing in. Sitting with her eyes closed in a shoppingmall and playing was different to his because nobody cared then. They could come and go, take it or leave it. In essence she was playing to herself. Here was different. There was an envelope with two hundred and fifty thousand won in it on the dresser beside her and they expected something from her, small and insignificant as it ultimately was. Something that could not be delivered.

She spent a minute longer trying to compose herself. Then she picked up her guitar and hauled it into the bathroom across the hall and propped it against the sink and tried again to calm herself down. The most frustrating part was how aware of it she was, and how helpless. How nothing could be done. The medication could only go a certain distance. These were not painkillers or over-the-counter pick-me-ups. No bottles to carry around with her. No quick-fix NyQuil or anything of the sort. The only remedy in recent times had been alcohol, and sober as she now was, alcohol was too late to fix her for the night.

Her phone read 7:31. She was supposed to be on at 7:30. The reflection in the mirror looked no more her than something seen on the face of a lake, warped and red and blearyeyed. She opened her phone and stood a minute scrolling through the screens doing nothing. As if it might help her. Or pose for her some proper answer for her untimely predicament. But what was wrong with her was wrong all the way through her. After a while she picked up her guitar case and went on out and back through to the small dressingroom.

The concert promoter was stood at the far side of the room on his phone when she opened the door. He was a tall man in his forties and he had a look of quiet calmness about him and Wendy was glad for that because the first thing she said when she found it within herself to talk was, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t do this.’

‘Do what?’ he said.

‘I can’t perform tonight. I’m so sorry.’

‘What do you mean you can’t perform?’

‘Something’s come up,’ she lied. ‘Something urgent. A family emergency. I’m really sorry. I have to go.’

She had one hand on the door when he said, ‘Wait.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. The tears were there again and in some twisted and manipulative way she was thankful for that, because he would think she was telling the truth. That perhaps a member of her family had died or something. He said again, ‘Wait.’

She looked at him and bowed profusely in apology and said, ‘The money’s all still in there. I haven’t taken any of it. I’m really sorry about this. I hope I can perform again sometime.’

She didn’t stay to hear his response. Instead she carried her case out into the corridor and through the back entrance and out into the cold of the alleyway. A thin and cool wind blew. It smelt of cigarettes. She never even thought about Joohyun the barista. Standing on the street corner flagging down cabs until one stopped and she climbed in and paid with trembling hands and tried to still her wayward breathing. Even outside her apartment door, four floors up and entirely alone, did she pretend. Her hands fumbled with the key. She turned the lock and went in and set the guitar case down as fast as she could and only then did she allow herself to cry.

What made her cry worst of all was how common this had become in her life, performance gigs or not. Sat crying over something she couldn’t quite explain. And how could she hope to fix something unobtainable, fleeting? Just out of range of proper comprehension. This loneliness of the heart and body, this absent drifting. And then whenever she did anything even remotely challenging or out of her comfort zone it would all come crashing down. Her chest tightening and her hands trembling. Then came the panic attacks for real. That was what the medication was for. Fifty milligrams of sertraline as an anti-depressant once daily. Did it work? She didn’t know. Sitting there on the floor by her bed with her legs bunched to her chest and weeping into her knees she thought perhaps not at all.

It was almost an hour before the knock at the door came. Wendy just sat there. It came again. Then she heard the handle click and depress and glanced at her phone and realised it had been nearly fifty minutes since she’d text Seulgi and told her very briefly what had happened. She heard the door open and close again and soft footsteps on the hallway linoleum and then Seulgi there in the bedroom door. The sight of her was enough to make Wendy cry again. Just how good she was. How very understanding.

Seulgi never said anything. She was carrying a shoppingbag in one hand and she smiled gently and came and scooted up next to Wendy and sat beside her in silence with her legs pushed up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them and her head leaning back against the bed behind them. Wendy took one look at her and wiped her eyes and began to cry again.

‘Hey,’ Seulgi said. ‘Don’t do that, ya big idiot. Don’t go crying on me now.’

‘I didn’t know what to do.’

‘I know.’

‘I just clammed up. I couldn't breathe properly. I just lost it.’

‘Seungwan. I know.’

‘I didn’t want to leave,’ Wendy said. She lay her head on Seulgi’s shoulder and Seulgi brushed a hair out of her face and smiled and said, ‘It’s okay. Happens to the best of us.’

‘Not like this.’

‘It’s okay. Sometimes these things will happen. It’s perfectly fine.’

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing is wrong with you.’

Wendy just sat there. What reply she could give was mired by the truth that there certainly was something wrong with her. Seulgi pulled up the shoppingbag and took out two cans of apple cider and held one up for Wendy. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Might cheer you up a bit. Got them on the way over.’

‘You should be at your party.’

Seulgi peeled the cap off her can and shrugged. ‘Was boring,’ she said. ‘Too many people I didn’t know. Too many people being stuffy and stuck up. I’d rather be here instead.’

‘Sure.’

‘I mean it.’

Wendy tried to smile. Slowly it came to her. Sequestered away in this private universe wherein all that existed, for a short time, was her and Seulgi. They drank off their cider in comfortable silence. Sat appreciating the slow solitude of it all. Wendy stretched her legs out in front of her and set the empty can down and said, ‘I let someone down tonight.’

‘What?’

‘There was someone I invited along to watch me perform. A—’ she paused. Then she said, ‘A friend of mine. I asked her to come along. And then I didn’t even bother showing up and singing.’

‘Don’t say it like that.’

‘It’s true.’

‘And it’s not your fault. Not at all. I’m sure they’ll understand.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Who is this friend?’ Seulgi said.

‘She’s not even that. Just someone I met a couple times. She works at this coffee place at Noon Square.’

‘Where you were busking the other day?’

Wendy nodded. ‘She said I had a beautiful voice. And a beautiful face.’

‘Oh,’ Seulgi said, laughing. ‘That one.’

‘Yeah. I don’t think she meant it, though. Think she just meant to say voice.’

‘I’m sure she’ll understand. If you explain it to her.’

‘What am I supposed to say?’

To this Seulgi made no reply. They sat a while longer. Seulgi shifted her legs about and looked at Wendy with a childlike smile that lit up her whole face and said, ‘You fancy getting drunk and watching a movie? Like we used to do at uni?’

‘Depends on the movie.’

‘Something awful. The worse the better, you know?’

‘Like we used to do, you mean.’

‘Yeah. How about The Room? Or, like, Sharknado.’

It was Wendy’s turn to smile, so small and pure. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll hook my laptop up to the TV.’

‘We don’t have any ice cream, though. Might have to go grab some.’

‘I’ve got some.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course.’

‘Cookie Dough?’

Wendy nodded. ‘I keep it in case of emergencies,’ she said.

‘That’s such a good idea,’ Seulgi said with a little smile. Wendy just looked at her. Holding it together in a capsule of her own making. Knowing that moments this tender and nostalgic were few and far between and rarer still would they become as they grew older, wiser, busier. But the future exists out of reach of all knowing. It cannot otherwise be claimed. For now there is only ice cream and cheesy movies by drunken nightlight.