All around him he could hear the sounds of families preparing for Spring Festival – children’s footsteps upstairs, the occasional burst of excited chatter, the rumble of wheeled bags heavy with treats being dragged along the corridor. He heard people singing along to their karaoke machines, sometimes a family singalong with croaky old voices mingling with cartoon-happy children’s voices, other times a lone female voice, surprisingly pure and sad, falling flat from time to time. He hated this voice; it wriggled into his head and cut into his innards, forcing its way into his space as if it wanted to be close to him. It was not like the other noises, which were impersonal and distant; this voice was intimate, intrusive, and he was thankful that it never lasted very long. He did not know where any of these noises came from, for they echoed strangely, rebounding in the walls and pipes.
He thought about what his own family would be doing at that precise moment – their New Year celebrations were a well-rehearsed ritual, comforting in their predictability. In the family mansion they would be taking delivery of inhuman quantities of food, and the caterers would be setting up for the open-house party that would take place over the first few days of the festival following the family dinner on New Year’s Eve. His mother would play at being stressed by the pressure of organising affairs, even though her distaste for physical work meant that she rarely performed any function more strenuous than making phone calls to the florist or the confectioners, leaving the servants to deal with the deliveries and the setting up of tables and chairs. In recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year’s Eve dinner in a hotel – the servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn’t trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she’d heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to Manila, people being killed in their own homes). So they would book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, twelve of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. ‘How lucky we are to have a family like this,’ his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. He’d said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird’s-nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn’t even recognised – perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming uncle – for the loss of their fortune, for the loss of their eldest son.
But he was deluding himself. They would not be blaming each other for their misfortune; they would be blaming him. He had disappeared, he had let them down, he would not answer their calls for help, he was selfish – that was why they were in this mess now. It was a line of reasoning he had heard many times before, so often that sometimes he too believed it. It was all his fault.
As he stood at the window and looked out at the strange frozen shapes of the city – the glass-ice trees, the streets scarred by snaking tracks of snow – he thought of the family holiday he had once had in Sapporo, when he was about thirteen, old enough to understand that the vacation was happening under a cloud of discontent; that it was not a holiday but an escape of sorts. It had taken place over the New Year period, the decision to leave for Japan made late in the day, when preparations for the usual celebrations were already well advanced. There had been no explanation for this hasty change in plan, which triggered a frantic search for the children’s woollen jumpers and down jackets in the store room, and the attendant anxiety as to whether or not they had outgrown them since their trip to Canada the previous year. His mother simply said, ‘I’ve always wanted to spend New Year’s in a snowy place.’ In the coded language of their family, full of unaired grievances, her firm statement of intent spoke loud and clear to Justin. Something was not right, and this something was compelling enough for them to leave home over the holiday.
The snow that blanketed Sapporo felt permanent, comfortably settled on the long straight avenues and the mountainous landscape around it. The freezing air raked the lining of his nostrils, burning its way down his throat and into his lungs; his lips and fingertips became sore and chapped, and his thin tropical blood felt powerless against the cold. And yet he was not unhappy; the omnipresent snow had a way of silencing the unspoken troubles that had arisen in his family, dampening them, making everyone calm. His younger brother did not take so well to the cold: he whimpered softly and became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to venture out of the hotel room. Justin observed the way his mother and father avoided each other – she lavishing extra attention on the younger of her two sons while her husband worked on his papers even at breakfast, concentrating on indecipherable sets of accounts as he ate his rice porridge, rarely looking up at the rest of the family.
‘I’m going to take Mother out to dinner tonight,’ his father said one morning, without looking up from his paperwork, and Justin recognised this statement to be a sort of apology, or at least as much of an apology as his father was capable of offering. There was a cry from his brother, aged six – the start of a tantrum over being forced to finish his eggs; then he began to scrape a piece of burnt toast noisily, the black powder scattering on the cream-coloured tablecloth. No, his mother replied, that would be too much hassle – the young one needed looking after. Justin listened for signs of regret or gratitude in her voice, but could discern nothing other than the turbulent silence that descended on his family in times of anger and dispute. Outside the sky was clear, the winter light glassy, pale. He thought how fortunate he was to be in a foreign place, for somehow the problems of his family seemed easier to bear when they were far from home, in an unfamiliar land shrouded in snow.
With his mother clinging more and more to her younger son and his father disappearing to work for long stretches, Justin was left to discover the wonders of Sapporo with Sixth Uncle, who had come on holiday with them as he often did, partly to help with the children but mainly to organise the logistics of travelling in a foreign country – booking tickets, sorting out the best rooms in hotels, moving the family swiftly through airports, finding good restaurants. He always seemed to know people everywhere they went – contacts he’d met through business, or friends of friends of friends who were willing to help show them round or lend a car and a driver. He was ‘good with people’ – affable, insistent, often daring in his humour, occasionally foul-mouthed but always unthreatening in his chubbiness. He would flirt with hotel receptionists and sweet-talk directors of airline companies; he always got what he wanted. The youngest of the uncles, he was only twelve years older than Justin – barely in his mid-twenties at the time, though already very much a man, someone Justin recognised as inhabiting his father’s world, not his, in spite of the childish banter that passed between him and Sixth Uncle.
They visited the Snow Festival, just the two of them. It felt like an adventure, striding forth into the bitter cold, walking through the snow and feeling it seep through their boots, leaving behind the younger brother, who was too small and weak, and his parents, who were too old and slow. ‘I’m going to have my ass kicked for leading you astray,’ Sixth Uncle said, and laughed as they walked around the fantastic ice sculptures. ‘Your mother is going to bite my head off when she sees her dear little son frozen to the bone. Hey, look at that – remember that?’
It was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which they had seen during a previous holiday, but made entirely of snow. Elsewhere there was a life-size Pyramid and a faithful reproduction of the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; there were fearsome ogres and cuddly polar bears and a herd of long-necked dinosaurs; Mount Rushmore with different, unrecognisable heads; Eskimos and penguins; a tropical landscape of palm trees and a beach with sun loungers – all glowing with the pale white-blue of snow and ice. They threw snowballs at each other, as people who are not used to snow always do, and if they tripped and fell they just lay on the snow, feeling its strange powdery-crusty texture beneath them. Justin no longer noticed the cold; his fingers felt swollen and numb but impervious to the biting frost, and he felt a growing strength in his legs as he ran along the edge of a perfectly flat snow-canal that led to a Dutch windmill.