Chapter 13

Chapter 13

I tossed on the mattress all night and woke from sleep.

A night when, strangely, sleep would not go deep.

Sunday morning, unlike a weekday, was oddly quiet and languid.

Australia's own leisurely weekend, when even a large mart opens late and closes early.

The moment I opened the veranda glass door and stepped into the living room to wash, the noisy air of the living room cooled cold in an instant.

I gave a short laugh.

Because until a moment ago I had heard, beyond the glass, the sound of them whispering among themselves, trading information.

That meant this sudden silence was purely because of me.

'Tsk tsk.'

I ignored it and walked the narrow path blocked by the drying rack and luggage.

The movements of people who had slept in, gotten up to the morning, and were boiling ramen or chewing cereal stopped all at once.

Until yesterday the looks toward me had only been about 'an uncomfortable guy who gets tiring if you speak to him'.

But now they sent outright hostile and contemptuous looks, blatant and disgusting, hostility and contempt dripping.

Especially a few clusters of women students had the force to stick a knife in the back of my head right then.

'Well, I sent one fox off crying last night, so I understand the anger... truly disgusting.'

Bursting a dry laugh inwardly, I took those sharp looks in silence.

The look of the girl who would have whined exaggeratedly with a wounded face, and the obvious repertoire of the chicken-coop people who heard it, raged as if they had become apostles of justice, and chewed curses at me all night, were clear before the eyes like a video unwatched.

I acted calm, but in fact my insides were quite complicated and bitter.

Not simply because those young kids hated me.

Because even flying to a foreign country ten thousand li away, this chicken-coop share house was reproducing to the end the worst ill of Korean society as it was, and the ecosystem itself was creepy, uncomfortable, and a burden.

If those kids had come purely from the start, without thin calculation, like helpless younger siblings dropped on strange ground, what then?

I would have helped them willingly.

On weekends I would have put them in the car, taken them to a barbecue place, fed them meat to the full, helped them write a resume even in crude English, or if that failed mobilized my site connections and placed each of them in one decent Aussie job, and I had ample will to look after them warmly.

But their actions were different.

The moment they set foot on the wide continent called Australia, the first thing they did was gather in a cramped living room and divide Korean-style rank.

With Park Ji-hun, trying to reign using the age of twenty-eight as a weapon, at the center, they made a class of the weapon called information, and lined up under that paltry power and split up from down.

They led a group ostracism of me on the grounds I did not bow my head to an older hyung, and the moment they learned I had an Australian local friend and a decent car, they clung on casual, as if when had it been so, trying to suck the sweet.

Of course, not every kid here would be a villain rotten to the bone.

They were commendable youths who had left narrow Korea dreaming of a better future, and chosen the challenge called a working holiday, saying they would earn money themselves.

The fear a strange environment gives, and the helplessness of having to worry about next week's rent right away, may have made them shrink like this.

Because it could be their own desperate way of surviving.

But, even if the head understands, the chest could not accept that disgusting conduct whole.

On Australian soil, left in order to be independent oneself, an attitude of only scheming to grab someone else's pant leg and go easy.

Hiding behind the back of one who looks strong, making a faction, and coming with a false smile only when needed, trying to use others thoroughly — a thin calculation.

This shabby chicken-coop share house in central Sydney had degenerated into a well that scraped together and compressed only the worst faults Korean society has.

Washing my face in cold water, I hurriedly finished washing.

I could not sit enduring the air of this place.

Roughly wiping the water from my face, I hung a towel on my neck and flung the bathroom door wide.

Facing head-on the looks of the living room still glaring at me as if at a bug, I gave a short laugh as if to be seen, and turned my steps without regret to the veranda, my space.

While they gathered in this narrow living room, tearing each other down and only scheming to use others, wasting a precious Sunday, I think I should at least drink Sydney's clear air.

"Shall I ask our solo Miss Rosie to play again today?"

* * *

Right after Jeong-su dressed neat and disappeared outside the share house.

The front door banged shut, and the living room that had been holding its breath became Park Ji-hun's solo stage again.

He raised his veins as if angry, and began cunningly lumping people's anxiety and hostility into one.

"Did you just see that bastard's eyes? The way I see it, he's a hundred percent someone who caused an accident in Korea and ran. A normal bastard couldn't act that sickening toward fellow Koreans in a strange place."

Ji-hun folded his arms, circled the living room, and raised his voice.

"What, he draws one rattling junk car and hangs with an Australian woman a bit, and thinks he's become something. Hey, are Aussie bosses fools? Work a site with a mannerless mind like that and in under a week it's the neck, straight. Watch. Before long he'll be begging us to save him and sitting out on the street."

At Ji-hun's agitation the women students and the men students with no sense played along.

Having made Jeong-su a public enemy and perfectly seized the mood of the living room, Ji-hun casually checked the clock, then sent a look to two men students sitting on the sofa, Seong-min and Gi-cheol.

"Seong-min, Gi-cheol. Come into the room a moment."

At Ji-hun's call the two men students followed straight into the master room.

A sealed space cut off from the noise of the living room.

The two, who had slept in the same room every night and heard Ji-hun's Australia tales mixed with bluff, already held infinite trust toward Ji-hun.

"Hyung······. We've set our minds."

"Me too. I'll go trusting hyung too."

Looking at the two speaking with expectant eyes, Ji-hun perched slanted on the bed and showed the smile of a kind, experienced neighborhood hyung.

"Yeah? You've set your minds for sure?"

"Yes. We'll go up to Bundaberg."

"Hey. If it's because of me, you don't have to. There are lots of Korean jobs in the city too."

At that the two looked at each other and sighed deep.

"We took resumes and went to Korean jobs too, and they pay too tight."

"No! It's the same work anyway, does it make sense they pay less only to Koreans?"

Ji-hun lifted the corner of his mouth and laughed as if deliberately pitying.

"That is so. You didn't come all the way to Australia just to wash dishes or clean at a Korean restaurant and go. That only fattens Korean bosses' bellies. Stuck in the city using only Korean every day, what's different from Korea? If you came to Australia you have to have a proper local experience."

At the plausible cause of more experience, the two men students' eyes glittered.

Not missing the gap, Ji-hun began letting down a sweet rope.

"Going to a farm early and settling like a real working-holiday person is a hundred times better. There, foreign kids from Europe and South America are everywhere. Bump bodies with them, sweat and work, and on weekends barbecue together and drink beer, and English grows much faster than in the city. And a farm is a thorough ability system, so money sticks hard for the work you do, and if you only match the season you can make big money all year without rest."

"True. We think pulling out that way soon is right too."

The two, perfectly possessed by the fantasy of a bigger world and a romantic working holiday.

Looking at them asking earnestly, Ji-hun cheered thinly inwardly and grinned.

"Of course. You're special younger brothers who share a room with me, so hyung will place you at the grape farm that makes the most money and has the most foreign friends. Pack your bags right away."

"Then do we have to give a fee separately?"

Ji-hun waved a hand.

"A fee? Come on, between us. Later, go to the farm, make a lot of money and your English grows, and buy hyung a meal."

At the perfect line of a gracious eldest, Seong-min and Gi-cheol bowed again and again and poured thanks.

After the two left the room with faces full of swollen hope that they would fully taste Australia's real experience, Ji-hun, left alone beyond the door that shut with a clack, took a thick notebook from under the bed.

In the notebook, people's names, and beside them unknown percent numbers, and amounts, were written packed.

The names of Seong-min and Gi-cheol just now were newly added there too.

Park Ji-hun.

His identity was not merely a meddlesome, kind neighborhood hyung who had come on a working holiday first.

He was a labor broker who coaxed clumsy beginner working-holiday people, just over from Korea and thirsty for experience, sent them to farms on the rural outskirts, and took the money.

A leech parasitizing at the very bottom of the Australian working-holiday ecosystem, sucking the blood of compatriots.

He had been a recruiter for a Korean contractor.

* * *

That night, the pleasure quarter of Kings Cross in Sydney, where flashy neon signs flashed.

Ji-hun and his colleague Tae-sik took Seong-min and Gi-cheol, soaked in the fantasy of farm life, around Australian brothels and strip clubs and fed them drink to the dregs.

Because prostitution is legal in Australia, it was entertainment with nothing for them to shrink from.

The two naive young men, minds taken by a stimulating deviation tasted for the first time, came to rely even more on the sturdy eldest brothers who paid it cool.

The more so, their loyalty and fantasy only rose.

Well past midnight, the long-distance bus terminal at Sydney Central Station.

Seong-min and Gi-cheol, the drink and excitement not yet gone, shouldered huge backpacks the size of their own bodies and got on the Greyhound bus heading for Queensland.

"Hyung Ji-hun! Hyung Tae-sik! If we really make a lot of money at the farm, later we'll treat you big for sure! Thank you!"

Toward the two little ones hanging on the window waving until the bus left, Ji-hun and Tae-sik showed the kindest smiles in the world and waved back.

Soon the Greyhound bus, pouring a heavy engine sound, left the terminal, and only after the bus's red tail lights had fully disappeared into the dark did the false smiles come clean off the two faces.

"Aigu, stupid bastards."

Tae-sik cracked his stiff neck this way and that and let a thin sneer.

"They don't even know washing dishes in the city is heaven, and their road of suffering is clear, breaking their backs picking tomatoes and grapes under the blazing sun."

"Heh heh, I know."

Ji-hun took a cigarette from his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, lit it with a lighter, and blew smoke long.

"You have to run nonstop twenty-four hours to Bundaberg, and probably before they even arrive at the farm their backs will feel like snapping in the bus, and it'll be a dying taste."

"Still, they prepare the lodging to stay in well."

"Heh heh. Do they know we skim a commission off the share-house rent?"

What these ones did was not illegal.

A contractor is plainly a legal job, and gathering people to work is not illegal either.

It was not that they had sold the two off to some uninhabited island, and if they went they would suffer, but work themselves to the bone on a farm and they could clearly make money.

That was why the two could be this upright with themselves.

The reason they did not take an introduction fee directly was that, once there, they skimmed a set ratio as commission from the share-house rent and the pickup fee that commuted them to the farm every day.

That alone was earnings fat enough to live in the city.

In a word, Ji-hun and Tae-sik were recruiters who gathered people in the city and sent them toward the farms.

Unlike Ji-hun, snickering and spitting cigarette smoke, a deep shadow soon fell on the face of Tae-sik standing beside him.

He glanced around and opened his mouth in a worried voice.

"But hyung, will it really be all right? I think Hyung Andy will be terribly angry. We didn't fill the head count assigned this time. We were supposed to pick up at least five and send them up, and if he knows we sent only two, a stream of curses will fly."

When the name Andy, the head manager overseeing the Korean contractors, came from Tae-sik's mouth, Ji-hun's brow crumpled hard.

He mussed his hair irritably and spat on the ground.

"Haa······. Fuck. I know."

Ji-hun nervously sucked the cigarette smoke hard and blew it long into the air.

"Because of that son of a bitch Han Jeong-su, nothing works, really. Ordinarily I would have crushed the clumsy kids hard, burned the mood, and swept them all and sent them. That bastard chewed the mood to pieces in the middle and played, and the kids' factions split. In a situation like this, how do I pull more."

At Ji-hun's fierce anger Tae-sik too twisted his face vicious.

"Fucking bastard. He's not even some lone wolf, he should have just stayed stuck quiet, and he shows off like mad, really! I could die from hating the look of that bastard, can't we just quietly jump him? Beat him a few times roughly and he'll tuck his tail on his own?"

Tae-sik's brutal proposal.

But Ji-hun shook his head at once and irritably threw the butt on the ground and ground it out.

"Crazy bastard, think a bit before you speak. Does that bastard's build look like a guy who'll crumple from one hit? He'll rush like mad, no need to look, and then if the police come for assault, what will you do? Don't you know our visa periods are over and we're illegal stayers? Get caught by the police and it's deportation without mercy. Clumsily jump him, you and me, and we can't even gather our bones, and only we get fucked."

Tae-sik clicked his tongue and clenched his fist as if resentful.

Ji-hun put a new cigarette in his mouth again and glared at Sydney's dark night street with eyes gone cold.

"For a while treat that bastard as an invisible person. Anyway from the look of him he seems to have some money, and he'll get a job soon, and then he'll find a rent himself and leave. We just curse that bastard like now, and coax the kids left in the chicken coop well, and that's enough."

Deep night in Sydney.

The bus to hell, wrapped in a sweet fantasy, had already left for Queensland, and the brokers' sinister plan to swallow the naive youths of the chicken-coop share house coiled more poisonous in the dark.

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