Page 71 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘How long is too long?’

‘More than half an hour.’

‘Half an hour,’ she repeated, and took out her watch to set the bell.

The door clicked shut. He listened to the brown thumping as she went downstairs and wanted to go out after her, but standing up was too difficult. He waited at the window for a little while, leaning hard on the sill. Fukuoka was at the edge of the protest camp, and he bent down and made a fuss of her when she tumbled out, then picked her up to show her what was going on. Everyone had crowded together; they were burning a big, floppy doll made of white bedsheets and stuffed into a Western-style suit, complete with necktie and pocket watch. Fukuoka put Six on his shoulders.

Mori would have said that the worst really hadn’t come to the worst if people were still doing that sort of double-thinking. She was fine.

Owlbert surfaced and pecked the window latch. Thaniel let him out, and watched him swoop down to the protest camp to land on the crossbar of a half-constructed tent.

Thaniel crumpled onto the hearthrug and stayed sitting up for long enough to make a fire among the warm horseshoes in the grate, because it was so cold the lenses of his eyes felt like frost and he had a distinct feeling he would never wake up if he let the temperature drop any more. The second the little flame caught properly, he dropped down sideways. He lay with his cheek flat to the sheepskin rug, still too cold, breathing the smell of lanolin. He felt ill enough to spark a lick of panic. If he died and if Six came back in and assumed he was asleep, which she would, no one would find him until the steward came in mid-morning tomorrow.

After a heavy while, he forced himself half-upright and pulled the side table nearer. It was where the phonograph sat, well away from the fire to save the cylinders. He put it on loud, so that if it carried on late into the evening, someone would come in. Putting the needle onto the cylinder was as much as he could do. He snagged the blanket off the chair and fell back onto the rug. He felt victorious about the blanket. The fire roared through some pine needles.

He fell straight into nightmares about being lost on roads he didn’t know, with something following him. He kept waking up, but every time he went back to sleep, the thing was closer.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Abashiri, Hokkaido, 17th January 1889 (one month ago)

Takiko had gone to the edge of the forest early for firewood. They were running low at the prison; apparently it was one of those things the previous girl had done, but nobody had known. It was a novelty to collect wood for fires. She was used to coal, and as she picked up promising twigs and little branches from the dry powder snow, she quite looked forward to lighting them. Burning wood was a gorgeous thing, especially when it was minus fifteen in the sun.

There was a big snowdrift by one of the trees just a little way into the woods, suspiciously big. Hoping it was a stack of wood that the last girl had collected, she brushed some snow aside. She found the head of a horse underneath. She stood still for a while. The cold had desiccated the horse’s eye and turned it glaucous. She brushed off more snow. The rest of the horse was there, saddle and all. When she straightened up, she saw there were snow mounds right back into the woods. She chose one at random. Under it was a dead body in red. It was peculiarly less than upsetting. She’d never seen a dead person before, but, blanched in the cold, the body didn’t look like a person at all anymore, just a clumsy impression of one; as though something lonely had tried to make a man from frost and shards of birch bark.

When she hurried into the warden’s office, she recoiled at the heat inside. It wasn’t that hot, but after the gnawing cold outside, it was as bad as charging into a sauna in a fur coat. She had to catch the door frame, feeling sick.

‘Miss Tsuru,’ said the warden, surprised. ‘We’re in a meeting.’

He had called together all the remaining guards. Only eight. She explained what she’d found. Nobody looked surprised, only gloomy.

‘Yes, so,’ said the warden, ‘that’s two more guards gone. Consider the timetable changes permanent, gentlemen.’

‘Are we to expect any new staff from Tokyo, sir?’ Tanizaki asked, looking drab. He had his palsied hand strapped to his chest today, but it was still trembling despite the binding. She couldn’t see the timetable, but she could imagine it landed everyone with more night shifts for which the pay did not entirely compensate.

‘Not until March, I’m afraid. The sea’s impassable for now. On you go.’

It wasn’t until she had been going to the prison for a week or so that Takiko really noticed the big central tower. It didn’t have any windows. Its single feature was a lightning rod on the roof. She wondered if it was one of those odd government building projects that happened for no reason except to give restless people something to do. Whatever the reason for it, she had never been up there, though it must have sat right above the warden’s office. In fact the office, up its little stairway, must have been in the base of it. She frowned when she thought of that, because there was no stairway leading upward from the office. It could only be one tall, empty attic space. The electrograph had to be up there.

There had been a lull in the snow and the guards had taken advantage of it. The prison was almost empty, except for the high-security inmates. Everyone else was out in the forest, building the new road, the cell doors left open. She swept inside, took out blankets for laundry, and put new ones in. It didn’t feel like going into anyone’s private space. There was almost nothing else inside most of them. It wasn’t, Tanizaki pointed out, the kind of place where there was ever such a lot available on the outside to smuggle in. She stoked the braziers in the corridors and had to keep going back to them to warm up her hands. It had been cold before, but there was a miserable, permanent quality to it now.

The edges of her hands felt rough when she pressed her palm against her nose. The cracked skin was starting to look like burn scars. She sat looking at them, aware that the cold was coming up through the floor and seeping into her knees. Whenever she went to town to buy food, she saw fishwives her age who looked old. Even the Ainu women, who had been made for the cold, were grown up at fourteen and elderly by thirty. It wasn’t about quality of food or exercise, or any of it. It was just the weather. It was too cold to wash properly, too cold to sleep properly, too cold to eat anything fresh and not hot, too cold to ever get more sun than a ten-minute snatch on the way to somewhere else. For every day you were in this winter, you were three days older.

The warden had said the sea was too frozen to sail on now. Whatever happened, she was stuck until spring.

‘Tea time,’ Tanizaki called down to her.

‘Right, coming,’ she said.

When she came into the little office, the tremor in his hand was bad. He couldn’t pick up a cup and had to use his left. He was pinning his right down with his knee, but the next spasm was so strong that it knocked his leg upward into the underside of the table. The teapot juddered.

‘You need knee pads,’ she said.

‘I do. Like those things gaijin wear to play cricket. You couldn’t run down to the kitchen and fetch up some more water, could you? We’re running out and I think I’d … spill it,’ he said bleakly.

‘Should you be at work today?’

‘It never lasts long.’