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.
‘Little bastard, you’ve got a lot of energy,’ Sixth Uncle wheezed as he caught up. ‘Your grandmother keeps telling me I need to lose weight, but thank God I’m a bit fat because it protects me from this damn cold.’
They found a restaurant, a dimly lit place hidden down a nondescript alley – a tip from a local acquaintance, Sixth Uncle said, guaranteed to be the best food in the area. Out of the cold, the warmth of the small room felt delicious, the air humid and wood-scented. They ordered too much food, as was the custom of their family, and Sixth Uncle had a bottle of sake that seemed too big for one person.
‘What a great holiday this is,’ Sixth Uncle said as he refilled the tiny cup; he misjudged the size of it, and the sake spilled onto the smooth lacquered surface of the table. ‘Thank goodness you’re around, though, otherwise it would just be your shit-boring parents.’
Justin smiled; Sixth Uncle was the only person he knew who spoke of his parents in this way – irreverently, whatever respect he had for Justin’s father well hidden under layers of coarse humour.
‘How on earth did such boring parents bring up a happy, strong boy like you? If you were just a couple of years older I’d let you drink some sake while no one’s looking. Hey – maybe I could slip it into your teacup? No, no, that would be too bad of me. Not even I would do that to my favourite nephew – though you’ve always been very grown-up for your age, so I wouldn’t give a shit about getting you drunk. Only thing I’d worry about is your dragon-tongued mother. Oh my God, speaking of getting drunk, I think I’m already pretty wasted.’
Justin toyed with a piece of lamb that was drying out on the helmet-shaped griddle in front of him, slowly sizzling to a crisp alongside a charred piece of corn. Sixth Uncle had told him that the dish was called ‘Genghis Khan’ because the grill was modelled on the exact form of an ancient Mongol armoured helmet, but Justin had not believed him – Sixth Uncle was full of amazing, unbelievable stories. Often Justin had thought that they were Sixth Uncle’s way of livening the heavy atmosphere at the dinner table, for he was the only one who would ever say anything amusing (and Justin would be the only one to laugh); but recently Justin had begun to realise that Sixth Uncle’s anecdotes were aimed at him. He had sensed a growing connivance, Sixth Uncle reaching out to him tentatively, for reasons he was not able to fathom. He was glad of the jovial company, but troubled by the lack of clarity; in spite of Sixth Uncle’s