The illegal business relationship between Songrim and Taegang. Songrim’s victory verdicts that brought chaos to the labor market by siding with large corporations. Korea’s top law firm representing the interests of the powerful. Law above the law, Songrim.
Besides this, there were many anecdotes about the birth and development of Songrim. Jung Hyun-wook’s maternal grandfather, who had been a first-generation labor and human rights lawyer, was highly respected. The messy rumors about the engagement of a prestigious family had quite a large impact. At that time, a woman with a fiancé having an affair and getting pregnant seemed to be considered a major scandal.
Coincidentally, the year after Attorney Jung Kyeong-hwan and Jung Hyun-wook’s mother married, his maternal grandfather, Attorney Song Gang-seok, suddenly passed away from a heart attack. At that time, Songrim, which had been the prototype of a progressive joint law firm, naturally came to be led by Attorney Jung Kyeong-hwan.
In the end, as Sung Woo-jae said, making the name ironic, Songrim continued from Representative Attorney Jung Kyeong-hwan to his successor Jung Hyun-wook, and jokes circulated that they should change the name to Jungrim.
My lips were completely parched. My hand automatically reached toward the table. When the transparent water glass touched my lips, Sung Woo-jae smiled with an indecipherable meaning. My thirst became worse and I gulped down the water in one go.
“Urk!”
My esophagus was hot as if burning. The smell of alcohol rushed up. The glass I dropped from my hand spun around on the table. Nausea rose up in an instant and I lowered my head.
“Are you okay?”
Jung Hyun-wook’s hand grazing the nape of my neck was ice cold. No, maybe my neck was on fire.
“What’s wrong?”
“Well… he drank water and suddenly.”
As Sung Woo-jae trailed off, Jung Hyun-wook immediately picked up the fallen glass on the table and put his nose to it. There must have been a terrible alcohol smell.
“It’s soju.”
That was my last memory. Beyond my fading consciousness, I could hear Jung Hyun-wook getting angry. My body felt like it was floating, then was placed on a hard stone.
When I opened my eyes, I was on Jung Hyun-wook’s back. I dangled my legs and let out laughter that kept leaking out. As my tongue became dull, words flowed out like sticky liquid.
“It was definitely waterrr…”
“Ha…!”
Jung Hyun-wook sighed as if finding it more and more absurd the more he thought about it. I burrowed into Jung Hyun-wook’s back. I felt warm heat.
“Stay still. You’re going to fall.”
Jung Hyun-wook said deliberately sternly.
“I’m not movinggg. I’m staying stilll…”
“You absolutely can’t drink alcohol from now on.”
“I won’t drinkk. I’ll never drink alcoholll…”
When he chuckled, the hard, warm stone shook. Is this what a stone bed feels like?…
“Jung Hyun-wook… What did you talk about with Jong-hwa yesterday?”
“Just. He asked me to take care of you for a few days.”
A few days? Not just yesterday?
“Why. Are you worried?”
I couldn’t answer. I was weak to ominous signs. Having been exposed to violence and an indifferent home environment since childhood, I often reacted sensitively even to a single small footstep sound. The high-pitched sounds of men and women entangled were once the source of my nightmares.
Anxiety always existed beneath my feet. It was impossible to run away from it.
But somehow, hanging loosely on Jung Hyun-wook’s back like this, my senses felt blurred. It was good. Being able to freely distance myself from things I wanted to avoid gave me the illusion that I was properly controlling myself.
Is this why people drink?
“A long time ago. When I was little, when my father would get drunk every day and collapse in front of the house, Jun-seok’s grandmother from the house across the street always said something. She’d click her tongue saying, ‘A child resembles their father, tsk tsk.’ I hated those words terribly. I was scared that it might really come true.”
So I always tried to live differently. That was my entire childhood.
“Jung Hyun-wook. Why did you enter law school?”
What made Jung Hyun-wook live? What made him endure?
“I wanted to show my father. I wanted to let him know that there are things in this world that don’t go his way. I wanted to go to the law school he so desperately wanted and ruin everything. You have to destroy the desired picture right before completion for it to be more dramatic.”
It was a really nasty answer. I couldn’t believe such twisted emotions existed inside Jung Hyun-wook. This time Jung Hyun-wook asked,
“What about you?”
I told him the answer prepared like the conclusion of all this.
“I’m the son of a murderer. And I’m also the son of a victim.”
Smart Jung Hyun-wook understood this contradictory statement at once.
Jung Hyun-wook readjusted me as I was slipping. I held his neck tighter and buried my cheek in his broad back.
The orange streetlight stretched long, and the evening breeze pleasantly tickled my face. Every time I breathed, the strong smell of alcohol rose from my mouth.
“Ah… the smell of alcohol.”
At my words, Jung Hyun-wook made a determined vow.
“I will definitely find the bastard who poured soju into the water glass.”
4.
There was a nightmare I often had in childhood. I’d come home from school to find my father, who had turned the house upside down, sleeping on the wooden floor snoring. The terrible smell of soju vibrated throughout the house. Then I’d quietly come in, put down my bag, and leave. Then I’d trip over an aluminum basin rolling around near the faucet. When the cheap basin rolled noisily across the cement floor, I’d lock eyes with my father who had woken up.
It had been almost 5 years. Since I had that nightmare again.
My eyes snapped open. Jung Hyun-wook’s rooftop room, which I had become quite familiar with, came into my still-dark vision. After blinking several times, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and captured the interior clearly.
The back that had been hard last night was soft. A thick blanket was laid on the floor, and the rest of the blanket was covering up to my chest.
Jung Hyun-wook was sleeping in that corner covered with a padding jacket instead of a blanket. Why was he sleeping there in front of the door where cold wind came in?
The time was 4 AM. It was soon time for the first train. I quietly went to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. There was a new toothbrush next to Jung Hyun-wook’s, only in a different color. Today too, he had gone grocery shopping and even prepared a new toothbrush with the plan to bring me to this rooftop room.
I brushed my teeth with the new toothbrush Jung Hyun-wook had bought. I erased the awful smell of alcohol from my mouth. Unbearable shame rose up. The nightmare I had after 5 years wasn’t a dream. The terrible smell of alcohol from those days wafted from my body.
I wanted to quietly leave this place before Jung Hyun-wook woke up. I didn’t know what had happened while I was escaping with alcohol. Yesterday I didn’t have a convenience store part-time job. I should have gone to find Jong-hwa immediately.
When I opened the bathroom door and came out, Jung Hyun-wook was already standing in front of the door. His eyes were bloodshot as if he hadn’t slept well.
“Where are you going?”
I looked for my coat while avoiding his eyes.
“Home.”
He sighed softly. He roughly rubbed his spiky hair sticking up in the back, then pressed on a cap and picked up the padding he’d been sleeping under to put on. Then he said bluntly,
“I’ll take you.”
The blue light of dawn seeped through the window cracks. The brighter it got, the more embarrassed I was to face him.
“I can go alone. It’s time for the first train now…”
“Are you that worried about him? Enough to rush out so frantically as soon as you wake up at this dawn?”
He roughly swept his face.
“Let’s go.”
Jung Hyun-wook, who spoke so coldly that I couldn’t add anything, led the way. He didn’t say a single word all the way until we arrived in front of the semi-basement room. The semi-basement room window, which had always been firmly closed, was half open.
Looking back, that day was the beginning of everything. The place where passersby spat, threw cigarette butts, and we couldn’t sleep peacefully for even a moment due to the commotion of drunkards at dawn. But it was our first truly complete space, the day that semi-basement room was ruined by muddy footprints.
The few household items we had were smashed. Among the household goods scattered in a mess, only my textbooks were neatly placed in one corner.
Jong-hwa was leaning against the wall, chain-smoking. He gave us a brief glance as we entered the house and said nothing. He also seemed to have just come back from work, dressed in his going-out clothes.
“What is all this?”
