At dawn, as the first light was moving over the garden, when the house had been silent for hours, I reached the open window. I was so numb with cold that it had taken hours to crawl back. Every inch was a fight with the seductive lethargy of cold, but at last I was here. I peered out cautiously, my heart thudding dully, sure that the Nurse would come charging down on me from some hidden lair. But the garden was silent, an eerie, crystalline world, as still and quiet as a ship marooned in ice. Everything was covered in little diamonds of frozen drops, surreal against the snow like necklaces strewn among the trees.
Climbing out of the window exhausted me. I dropped into the snow and, for a long time, I was too numb to do anything except sit where I’d landed, slumped drunkenly against the branch with the carrier-bag at my feet, and stare distantly at this silent winter world.
What had happened here? What had happened? Every one of the windows in the gallery had been smashed, the branches on the trees had been snapped, a shutter hung on its hinges, squeaking occasionally.
The drops in the branches are so beautiful… In the dawn light my mind moved slowly. So beautiful. I looked at the trees round the stone lantern, at the area of the garden that had so fascinated Shi Chongming. A slow bud of recognition was opening dreamily inside me. Frozen drops of blood and tissue were sprayed in the branches, as if something had exploded there. Draped across the stone lantern, like a faded paper chain, was… A hazy memory of a newspaper photograph – a nameless Japanese victim, his viscera spooling below the car.
Jason…
I stared at what was left of him for what seemed like hours, astonished by the patterns – the braids and furbelows, the little scrolls like Christmas decorations. How could it look so beautiful? A wind came, buffeting and pirouetting the snowflakes, springing the blood from the branches. The wind rattled through the broken panes in the gallery and whirled along the corridor. I imagined myself from above, I imagined looking down at the garden, at all the vermiform paths and the thickets, I imagined the way the blood would look, a halo round the stone lantern, and then as I drew further away I saw the roof of the house, its red tiles all gleaming in the melting snow, I saw the little alleyway with a solitary old woman clipping down it in clogs, I saw the poster of Mickey Rourke, then the whole of Takadanobaba, the ‘high horse field’, and Tokyo glittering and glinting next to the bay, Japan like a dragonfly clinging to the flank of China. Great China. On I went, on and on, until I was dizzy and the clouds came over and I closed my eyes and let the sky or the wind or the moon pick me up and drift me away.