And there it was. Staring at me with its beady black eyes and cocking its head to one side, like it was trying to tell me something. A crow. No more than a few metres away.
He’ll be looking for food, I thought to myself. He’ll start digging through the earth with his beak. You won’t find worms there, I wanted to tell him. They’ll be too far down in winter. And the insects will be huddled together in dark places under rocks, or crevices behind loose pieces of bark, waiting for spring to come and wake them properly.
“You’d make a good meal yourself,” I whispered. “My grandmother would strip the feathers from you and put you in a pot. And you’d taste good. And I could stick your feathers inside my clothes to keep warm.”
But he just carried on staring – a black stain, a threat, an omen.
He hopped sideways, stretching out his wings, the feathers glistening oily blue and green, and he flapped upwards, veering towards me and cawing, a raw, harsh, grating noise that stripped through the air and screamed in my ears. His wings were so close to me that I could hear their beating and feel the change in the air as they blotted and flickered out the light, my eyes squinting against the flashing, my arms raised to protect my face.
I crouched down, tucking my face into my chest and stretching my arms over my head. For a moment I thought I felt his claws on my head, pulling at my hair, and I imagined him lifting off into the sky and taking me with him. And for a moment I didn’t feel threatened by him or scared of him. I felt something entirely different. Like an understanding, or a need, a sense of urgency.
But as suddenly as he had arrived, he was leaving again, and I stood up, stared into the blue sky scattered with dark clouds, watched his black form and his flapping wings ease away from me, his voice cawing out all the while, like he was screaming at me.
I stepped back inside. “Did you see that?” I asked. But four sets of eyes met mine with blankness. I sat back down. “There was a crow.” I waited for some reaction, a question from Mother maybe, or an intake of breath from Grandmother. But nothing. And I realised the stares were blank because of the silence they had thrown themselves into as I came back into the house.
They had wanted me out of the way. They had needed me out of the way. But what had they been talking about?
I slurped the last few spoonfuls of thin porridge from the bowl, and still nobody said a word; the silence was as frosty as the air.
Had they been arguing? Shouting at each other in hissed whispers? Maybe, I thought, they knew, somehow, that I’d told Sook about my dream, about what Father had said to me. Maybe they were too angry to speak to me.
But, I reminded myself, Sook sneaks food to me, he meets me, he cares about me. He won’t say anything. And I can tell them that, when they start shouting at me. I can trust him.
As I took my empty bowl to the bucket at the window where we washed the pots, I thought I heard something like a vague growl in the distance, and my eyes searched past the grime on the glass and away across the countryside and hills surrounding us. I turned my head to Grandfather and caught him staring at his wife, my grandmother. I looked to Mother and Father, neither moving, just listening. The sound grew louder.
I leant closer to the window pane. “No,” I whispered, shaking my head, my skin prickling, my chest tightening and my head spinning. “There’s a car coming,” I muttered.
“Not here?” Mother whispered.
I turned to Father, his eyes filling with disappointment as he looked at me, his head shaking.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed to him, but he wasn’t looking at me any more, and he wasn’t listening.
He was on his feet with Mother and my grandparents, staring through the window to the car that had now turned towards the village, clouds of exhaust fumes belching out behind it.
“It can’t be coming here,” Mother whispered.
I opened my mouth to speak, to explain what I had said to Sook, about my dream of the city with the lights and the food and the music, Father saying he would take me there, his plan to live there. But I clung still to the belief that Sook wouldn’t have done that, wouldn’t have betrayed me like that, and I didn’t dare say the words that proved how much I’d let my family down.
So I stood. Just stood. Watching the car. Knowing it was heading to us.
“Get rid of everything quickly,” I heard my grandmother say. And I turned round, wondering what she could be talking about, catching a look between the adults and realising I was missing something, that some secret was being kept from me.
“Father,” I whispered, “I need to tell you something.”
“Not now,” he replied and the worry in his voice made me gasp, and I watched dumbstruck as he knelt at a cupboard, pulled a drawer out at his feet and stretched an arm into the space it had left. With my mouth open, I watched him draw out handful after handful of papers, and saw my grandparents grab them from him, toss them on to the fire and poke them into the flames as they shot looks back and forth to Mother at the window, then to the door and then back to the jumble of things spread out across the floor.
“But—”
“I said not now, child!” Father shouted.
I moved around them all, trying to make sense of what they were doing, staring at the papers: handwritten letters, photographs, some black and white, some colour, magazines, postcards, newspapers. I stared without understanding at the flames licking round the faces smiling out at me, devouring the words before I could even try to read them.
“Not that one… please… not that one… let me keep that,” my mother begged, grabbing an envelope from the floor, a flash of colour peeking out, sheets of paper covered in scrawled handwriting. I watched her gulping back tears as she stuffed the envelope inside her top.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “What is all this stuff?” I bent down, picking up a postcard of a city at night-time, the sky a beautiful deep, velvet blue, the streets alive with colour, buildings stretching up into darkness, the windows lit different colours, shop signs flashing neon symbols.
My stomach turned. “This… this is the city I dreamt about.” I felt breathless and dizzy, staring at the neon signs on the card in my hand that I didn’t understand and couldn’t read. “This isn’t North Korea,” I said. “It’s not Pyongyang. Sook was right.”
Everything stopped. They stared at me.
“I didn’t… I didn’t…” But I couldn’t lie. Father knew, of course he did; he knew the second he heard the engine and saw my face. I had betrayed him. I dropped my eyes away from them, the pain of the guilt too much to bear, and I stared at the floor scattered with the secrets they had kept hidden from me for so many years, secrets I had ruined without a thought.
I saw my grandmother’s feet stride towards me and I looked up. Her face wore an anger that was indescribable, venom I thought no one could ever feel for me. I didn’t see her lift her hand, but I felt it across the side of my face, and I felt the floor as I landed in a heap.
I stayed there. My face stinging, the car engine louder, the shuffling of paper around me, the crackle of the fire as it destroyed their memories. My mother’s sobs.
What had I done?
I could smell the car’s exhaust.
I felt my grandfather’s hand on my shoulder, a gentle squeeze, and I was so very scared. And I realised how stupid I’d been. How thoughtless and selfish and naive. Of course I couldn’t trust Sook. Of course he would tell his mother.