Dark Matter | JJK

19. The Nowhere People

Even when she was a little kid, Petra wondered if she would ever grow up to become as pretty as her mother.

Glancing at the smudged bathroom mirror every dawn, her adolescent finger would trace the contours of her face, noting how she had inherited – unlike her brothers – almost none of Mrs Gordon's illustrious features. No deep-set umber eyes, no heart-shaped cheekbones, no plump rosy lips, no silky black hair.

It was only today that she realised how transient beauty was in the face of adversity.

Standing at the door, her mother's gaze bordered on being annoyed and puzzled, the kind of face she would make when someone interrupted her in the middle of something seemingly important. She stood at the door in a beryl blue dress that stopped just short of her ankles, her feet clad in worn slippers and her hair – now thin and frizzy – tied in a small bun at the nape of her neck. Dark circles lined the underside of her eyes like lilac half-moons. Her skin was clear but wrinkled, sagging slightly with the weight of what she held within.

Even as Petra stood for what felt like a lifetime at the doorway, still as a statue, she did not not expect her mother to place her portly, wrinkled hands on the sides of her face, gentle as a bird's feathers. She did not expect her mother to smile with honey-tinged affection dancing in the dips of her eyes, and swoop her daughter right in her arms. 

Guilty.

"It's been over a year, Petra," Mrs Gordon said, her chin resting on the girl's shoulder, her voice tinged with a kind of reluctant longing that she found difficult to identify. "Why didn't you ever come visit?"

Her hands hovered above her mother's back, hesitant, lost. Somewhere beyond the porch, ecstatic children giggled while playing tag.

"H-how've you been, eomma?"

Mrs Gordon pulled away, still grinning, overwhelmed. "I'm fine, more or less. Better, now that you're here. Now quick, quick, get inside!"

But even as she slowly withdrew her feet from her sneakers and placed them on the rusted metal shoe rack, the thin thread twined around her heart, knotted with the beads of her resistance, threatened to snap in two. The house was just as she remembered it – the drawing room a ho-hum cluster of two dull red, sagging couches placed before a TV set as old as Petra herself, the Oakwood dining table peppered with stubborn scratches of tiny fingernails, and an overhead chandelier whose dusty glass flowers reflected the myriad of colourful crayon scribblings on the greyish walls.

What left her utterly shell-shocked, however, was her father's figure sitting in his armchair by the window.

Within all the recesses of her memory of this place, the most clear was that of Mr Gordon slumped back in the very same armchair by the scratched window with the day's edition of the Korea Herald in his hands. It was always the Korea Herald. No other newspaper in Korean would ever be proffered the fortune to be brought home by him. Having had the upbringing of a British father, Mr Gordon liked to hone his skills of the language by reading the city's only English newspaper daily, and sometimes, on the better light-hearted days, reading it aloud to his children in the most fluent accent one could find in the neighbourhood.

Petra hated that newspaper. It was why her father always chose to spend his quality time reading rather than driving her to the park or her friends' birthday parties. Why he would get so engrossed in the communal riots in the country that he would forget to pick her up from school.

Why when she disclosed to him the news of her selection into SNU, it didn't faze him in the least.

Today, however, her father sat in his armchair without the day's edition of the infamous newspaper in his hands, without his pair of horn-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose. When he turned his head towards the sound of footsteps at the entrance, tears pricked the back of Petra's eyes.