Chapter 25. The Old Things
Seonha, eyes closed, wore a warm smile. Tears flowed from her closed eyes. The sight shone so brightly that no one could open their mouth.
Sangjeong and Chunggi stared blankly at her, then turned their heads toward the one responsible for this situation. As expected, he was smiling brightly, but there was a slight shadow there.
“Jjo!”
“Yes!”
“Think you can do it?”
“Yes!”
Eunseo shouted back with a reply full of fighting spirit. The boys sitting in front of her nodded.
“Then you are doing it too!”
Ihan grinned widely and clapped his hands together with a smack.
“And…”
As the practice room door opened, a guy who looked somewhere between a young man and a boy walked in.
“Since Jiwon is going overseas, this hyung has agreed to take the bass,” Ihan introduced.
Fervent applause burst out. The former bassist of none other than “Park Jaegyeong Band,” Shin Gisu, lifted his chin in a cocky way and calmed them down.
“Well, since there is no YouTube shoot or anything, I shall personally look after you all.”
“Oh!”
“So cool!”
“Hyung! You giving up on the college entrance exam?”
The eyebrows of Shin Gisu, a third-year high school student, twitched.
“Junho, you go sulk over there.”
Under the members’ sharp gazes, Junho trudged off to the corner.
Shin Gisu looked at the cute juniors two years younger than him with satisfaction. Ah, the only girl, Eunseo, was four years younger. At that age, a two-year gap was quite big. There were kids who had just entered high school, and then there was an awkward “adult” who was almost grown. To the kids, Shin Gisu was that kind of existence.
Gisu looked over the lineup of the band he was going to lead.
First, starting with the members he already knew well from before:
Lead guitar and vocal, Ihan.
He had an attractive voice and good vocal ability. Above all, for his age his guitar skills were considerable. As a leader, his personality was decent, and his looks were more than good enough to be the “face” of the band.
On drums, Han Junho.
He was a guy who lacked a bit of social awareness and followed his own feelings more, but there were clear traces that he had worked hard. A quiet hard worker who did not show off. He fell short of pro level, but just looking at his build, he felt somehow reassuring.
On keyboard, Han Hyeonho.
He and Han Junho were fraternal twins. The two looked completely different. Junho was taller, and to be blunt, better looking. Because he had played piano for a long time, he sometimes interfered with the main melody, but that was something Gisu could fix himself. Of course, his skills were good.
And then, rhythm guitar, Jo Eunseo.
For a middle schooler, she was tall, and her fingers were long. He had heard her ability to understand songs was fairly good, and that she had an accurate grasp of her current level. She had not been playing guitar for very long yet, so she would probably grow quickly. She still showed clear signs of being nervous, but considering that she was a middle school student, he had heard her level was quite high.
He would have to check with his own ears, but having a middle schooler in the lineup might actually draw even more attention.
“Yujeong noona said she will upload a vlog of us practicing to her YouTube channel.”
“Oh!”
“Really?”
“Amazing!”
Gisu’s already lifted chin rose a little higher.
“At the very least, that will be enough to start off with some attention. Let us do well.”
When Gisu held out his hand, everyone piled their own hands on top of his. Even Junho, who had been in the corner, scampered over. Everyone’s eyes shone brightly.
It was an audition program for high school bands: “High School Band.” These were the members who had gathered to throw down the gauntlet for that competition.
The corners of Gisu’s mouth went up.
Because of the vocalist’s sudden declaration that he was going solo, the band he had staked his life on, even neglecting his studies, had scattered in all directions. When he had been sunk in dejection like that, his cousin noona had asked for his help and he had been running around busy.
He had barely pulled himself together, and then his noona had temporarily shut down her YouTube channel.
Once again, he suddenly had time, and while he was dazed in that feeling of being left alone…
“Kids! Fighting!”
““Let’s go! Let’s go! Fighting!””
…he had found something new to focus on.
Since he was doing it anyway, he would succeed enough to land a solid hit on that traitor Park Jaegyeong, who had abandoned the band they had gone through thick and thin with.
Gisu smiled with confidence.
“How was it?”
Seonha gave a faint smile at Jinhyeok’s eyes staring straight at her.
“It made me think of when I was carrying Seojun. All the hard things back then, the happy things, the guilt, all of that came rushing in… but at the end it felt like it was wrapping everything up and saying it was all right. I kept crying, but how should I put it, the meaning of the tears changed?”
With a somewhat sulky expression, Jinhyeok nodded.
“Why?”
“You did not sing along.”
“Huh?”
Jinhyeok furrowed his brow.
What he had focused on while making this piece was an overwhelming feeling where, as long as you had experienced being pregnant, just listening would make you hum along. Just now, Seonha had been so focused that she cried, but she had not sung along.
“Hey! Is that not already amazing?”
“Yeah, noona cried, you know?”
Jinhyeok shook his head.
“No. It is lacking.”
What was it lacking?
He raised his hand to cover his friends’ mouths as they tried to say more and thought hard about the reason.
Certainly, he had expressed that feeling well, and he had captured the voices of the pregnant women filled with sincerity.
Staring at the synthesizer screen, Jinhyeok slowly nodded.
“Live.”
“Huh?”
“Now I know the conditions.”
“This guy really has no ability to make others understand him.”
“Right. He is great at music but falls short in language.”
“Agreed.”
At the combined volley of jabs from the couple and his friend, one of Jinhyeok’s eyebrows twitched and he shook his head.
“My ‘miracle’ only comes out live.”
To pull out true emotion, it was difficult with an audio track that had been converted to digital. He had to follow along with emotions that changed from moment to moment.
The two performances he had done for the pregnant women—because he had faced them directly, he had been able to follow their hearts and gently soothe them.
Emotion flattened into a single line by an audio track could not touch each individual heart. Of course, even as a recording, the track could stir up feelings, but it was not enough to be called a “miracle.”
“We should hurry up and practice.”
The two friends nodded. Those were the words they had been waiting for. All of them were already fired up.
Just then, Chunggi quietly raised his hand.
“Um… do you remember that place where we used to practice?”
“Yeah. The building at the intersection?”
“The basement there… it is still around, they said.”
At Chunggi’s words, the corners of Jinhyeok’s mouth lifted. He remembered the long-haired ajusshi who used to argue passionately with him about the history of rock and himself.
“Shall we look into it?”
Smiling brightly, Jinhyeok nodded.
“So… under the city-maintenance plan, our neighborhood will also…”
“Shut it, you punk!”
A rough voice rang out among the residents gathered in the community center auditorium.
“Sir, this is all government business. All the approvals have already gone through…”
“Gone through, what has gone through? I have checked everything myself! Is this not just a show to get us to sign consent forms?”
When the head of the neighborhood office standing on the platform frowned slightly and jerked his chin, the men standing at the entrance walked over to the old man who was shouting.
“Just try laying a hand on me. I will slam your head into a chair for real.”
At the old man’s threat, the men looked awkwardly up at the platform. The neighborhood chief on the platform shook his head and could not give any particular instructions.
No wonder: the old man who had just started to crank up this ruckus was a famous stubborn mule in this neighborhood. If he were just stubborn, they could have ignored him to some extent, but he owned five buildings in this area alone. He also owned a fair amount of land. On top of that, he was the old man whose word carried the most weight with the local old-timers.
He had decent connections with civic groups, and it seemed the lawyers for those groups had given him a heads-up.
The neighborhood chief had planned to brush it off as “state business” and go on with the explanation, but today’s residents’ briefing looked like a bust. Flinching under the fierce glare of the huffing old man, the neighborhood chief quietly lowered his eyes.
“So you are saying it is not refurbishing, it is redevelopment?”
“That is right! I was so furious!”
“Heh heh. I knew it. No wonder the explanation sounded like it was skipping steps.”
“Still, it is a relief we found out in advance thanks to our Seongdol brother.”
One grandmother kneaded Grandpa Juseongdol’s shoulder. He stuck out his chin and looked over the people gathered in front of him.
“First off, these bastards are going to come jab at you with compensation money soon. No matter how much your kids try to sway you, you must not give in. Got it?”
The faces of the old folks nodding darkened a little.
Every one of the old people gathered here had lived in this neighborhood for over sixty years. The area around the stream had been rice paddies and fields. When they were young, roads had been laid and modern houses built.
They remembered persuading their parents, who had worried as the paddies and fields disappeared.
“Now this place is developing too. We have to accept new things. How long are you going to farm?”
They, too, had covered over their parents’ land and piled their own years on top. Now the time had come when they were being told to scrape up those accumulated years again.
Each of them knew that perhaps it was a bit of a stretch. Old things are bound to have to hand their place over to new ones. Even if they held out, they would only be pointed at as “outdated.”
Grandpa Juseongdol lifted his head and looked up. He looked at the branches of the ash tree that their parents had defended to the end back then, a tree older than they were.
In the brisker air, its branches were gradually growing more bare, and somehow that made it feel like it resembled him.
When he was a child, there had been nothing higher than that tree on the hill, but between its branches now he could see tall apartment buildings blocking the sky.
Ten years, the time it takes for rivers and mountains to change. He had endured through that period, and by the time he had kept holding out and holding out, this precious neighborhood had, before he knew it, become isolated like an island.
Had his father felt like this too?
“All right. They say if modern buildings come in, they will also put in roads…”
A memory suddenly came back to him with piercing clarity. As his father had looked at the paddies and fields that had been torn up for his whole life, a lonely glimmer of water had shone in his wrinkled eyes.
Without realizing it, a low sigh slipped from his own chest.
“The bidding date for Eungsudong has been set.”
Chairman Kim Chungseok of Changcheon Group, who had been looking out the window, turned his body.
“Approval has not even been granted yet.”
“It has been decided that the center and the surrounding area will be approved separately.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Once excavators start digging right next to them, would their hearts not start to waver?”
On the narrow, narrow land of Seoul, far too many people had gathered. The only countermeasure was that, for the same amount of land, you tore down the low buildings and put up higher ones.
In this way, it had become one of the cities with the largest number of apartment buildings in the world. Population density, third highest in the world. That was Seoul’s current state.
And so, old things were being replaced with new.
Eungsudong, which had just been mentioned, had hosted a major global event in the early 2000s, and subway Line 6 had opened. A neighborhood that had been little more than the outskirts of Seoul had suddenly changed.
Even before it was developed, it had been a kind of undervalued zone, and every company had been drooling over it.
However, because the resistance from the residents had been so fierce, its priority for redevelopment had been pushed back, and only after a long time were they finally able to sink shovels into it.
In this redevelopment, Changcheon Construction, a subsidiary of Changcheon, held a firm grip on the initiative.
When other construction companies had swarmed the surrounding areas to secure the central zone, Changcheon had stepped back.
At present, the only construction company with remaining allocated shares in this zone was Changcheon.
They had waited ten years.
At last, the National Assembly had given them the pretext of “urban maintenance measures.”
In other redevelopment zones, they had always been pushed aside by other construction companies and had only been able to raise “Blue sky” in a few scattered spots. But this time, they planned to raise Changcheon’s kingdom in the exact center. The tallest of all.
As he imagined that sight, Chairman Kim Chungseok beamed.
A real estate agent’s day is truly grueling.
From the outside, people often looked at how they just “introduced” properties and made quite a bit of money, and cast bad looks at them.
Despite those looks, everyone and their mother had jumped into real estate, and now the market was saturated. It was common for multiple agencies to compete over the same listing, and disputes broke out here and there. As a result, the business had become one where only the ones with guts and grind survived.
If you only behaved honestly, it was hard to survive among them. And so, the way people looked at them could only grow worse.
“Hey now. A young woman should not be staring straight at me like that…”
“Sir. How can you steal away someone who just stamped their seal on a contract?”
“They have not even put down the deposit yet, what contract is there to talk about?”
“No, still…”
“You see? This is not the kind of business where a young woman can earn trust by being all vague and gentle. Not this line of work. You are still so young, why suffer here?”
Jin Miyeon glared at Choi Gwangyeop, the head of “Changjo Real Estate,” who had just broken a massive rule and was slithering out of it with a smirk.
Her insides were burning, but talking more would only burn them further, that much was obvious.
Any second now, he would start letting comments slip that skirted the line of sexual harassment, so she clenched her teeth and turned away.
She had started this job because she could read buildings fairly well and found dealing with people fun, but this was an industry where nonsense ran rampant everywhere.
Not long ago, in the bidding for a mixed-use commercial complex, they had even mobilized gangsters. Her heart, which had been so shocked back then, was still pounding.
It had been the first jeonse lease contract she had come across in a long time…
Without realizing it, tears welled up.
“Ugh. Maybe I should just go have a soju.”
She rummaged in her bag for her phone, and right then, it buzzed.
“Yes, this is Jin Miyeon from Happy Real Estate.”
Her insides were hurt, but she was quite proud of herself for still managing a bright voice for customers.
“Ah… the basement of that building? That is…”
It was a famous building even Miyeon knew. Wasn’t her absolute favorite band, Nabi Valley, also from the basement practice room of that building?
It was notoriously hard to get in, but the building’s owner was fair in his own way.
Once, when she had contracted a commercial space there, another agent had tried to snatch the client at the last minute, and the building owner had splashed water on the guy and chased him out.
“This punk. Cheating like that, damn. I will kill you.”
When she remembered that grandfather’s face, a smile spread across her own without her realizing it.
“To move into that practice room, there are a few conditions…”
Her explanation began about the “holy ground” of musicians, a property with more unusual conditions than any other in the world.
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