David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

HERE AN ALP, THERE AN ALP, everywhere an Alp-Alp. Torn, castellated, blue-white, lilac-white, white-white, scarred by rock faces, fuzzed by snowy woods … I’ve visited Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet often enough now to know the peaks’ names: the fanglike Grande Dent de Veisivi; across the valley, Sasseneire, La Pointe du Tsaté, and Pointe de Bricola; and behind me, Palanche de la Cretta, taking up most of the sky. I drink in two lungfuls of iced atmosphere and airbrush modernity from all I survey. That airplane in the evening sunlight: gone. The lights of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès, six hundred meters below: off. The chalets, bell tower, steep-roofed houses, not unlike a little wooden village I had as a kid: erased. The hulking Chemeville station — a seventies concrete turd — with its rip-off coffee shop and its discus-shaped platform where we four Humberites stand: demolished. The télécabines bringing up us skiers and the chair lifts going on up to the summit of Palanche de la Cretta: gone in a pfff ! The forty or fifty or sixty skiers skiing downhill on the meandering blue run or the far steeper black route: What skiers? I see no skiers . Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, Olly Quinn, and Dominic Fitzsimmons, nice knowing you. Up to a point. There. Now that’s what I call medieval. Did La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès exist back then? That skinny girl in the mint-green ski suit leaning on the railing, smoking like all French girls smoke — is it on the school curriculum? — let her stay. Every Adam needs an Eve.

• • •

“WHAT SAY WE add a dash of glory to this run?” Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt lifts his £180 Sno-Fox ski goggles. “The three losers can pick up the winner’s bar tab, from dawn till dusk. Takers?”

“Count me out,” says Olly Quinn. “I’m taking the blue run down. I don’t want to end my first day in the clinic.”

“Hardly a fair contest,” says Dominic Fitzsimmons. “You’ve skied here more often than you’ve siphoned your python.”

“Grannies Quinn and Fitz have made their excuses.” Chetwynd-Pitt turns to me. “What about the Lamb of Doom?”

Chetwynd-Pitt is a better skier than the rest of us, here or anywhere else, and at Sainte-Agnès nightlife prices the “dash of glory” will cost me dearly, but I mime spitting on my palms. “May the best man win, Rufus.” My logic is sound. If he wins the race, he’ll bet more rashly at pool later, but if he takes a tumble and loses, he’ll bet even more rashly later to restore his alpha-male credentials.

Chetwynd-Pitt grins and pulls down his Sno-Foxes. “Glad someone has his balls stitched on. Fitz, you’re our starter.” We go to the top of the run, where Chetwynd-Pitt draws a notional starting line in the dirty snow with his pole. “First to the giant fluffy snowman at the end of the black run is the winner. No griping, no ifs, a direct race to the bottom, as one Etonian said to the other. We’ll see you pair of delicate woollens”—he looks at Fitzsimmons and Quinn—“back at chez moi.”

“Under starter’s orders, then …” declares Fitzsimmons.

Me and Chetwynd-Pitt crouch like Winter Olympians.

“Ready, steady— bang !”

BY THE TIME I’ve settled into my crouch Chetwynd-Pitt is a snowball lob ahead. We barrel it down the first stretch, passing a wedge of Spanish kids who have chosen the middle of the run for a group photo. The run divides into two — blue to the right, black over a sharp lip to the left. Chetwynd-Pitt takes the latter and I follow, grunting at my poor landing a few meters later, but at least I stay upright. The old snow here is glassy but fast and my skis sound like knives being sharpened. I’m accelerating, but so is my opponent’s black-and-orange-Lycra-clad arse as it passes the télécabine pylon. The run curves into the upper wood and the gradient steepens. At thirty, thirty-five, forty klicks an hour, the air scours my cheeks. The four of us zigzagged down this section this morning, but now Chetwynd-Pitt’s taking it straight as a javelin — up to forty-five, fifty kph — as fast as I’ve ever gone on skis, my calves and thighs are aching, and the rushing air’s howling in my ear canals. An unseen but vicious bump launches me for three, five, eight meters … I nearly lose it on landing, but just maintain my balance. Fall at this speed and your only protection against multiple breakages is blind luck. Chetwynd-Pitt disappears around a deep bend up ahead, fifteen seconds before I hit it, misjudging its sharpness and whipping through the overhanging claws of fir trees before wrenching myself back onto the piste. Here come the slalomlike snake-curves: I watch Chetwynd-Pitt weaving in and out of eyeshot; try to follow his angles of incidence; duck on reflex as crows bowl up the tunnel of branches. Suddenly out of the woods, I shoot onto the slower strip between a sheer flank of rock and a neck-breaking drop. Yellow diamond signs with skulls and crossbones warn you away from the edge. My rival slows down a little and glances back … He’s stick-man-distant now, passing the Lonesome Pine on its finger of rock — the halfway point. Four or five minutes in now, surely. I straighten up to rest my stomach muscles and glimpse the town in its hollow below — see the Christmas-tree lights, in the plaza? My bastard goggles are starting to fog up, even though the salesgirl swore they wouldn’t. Chetwynd-Pitt is already entering the lower woods, so I thrust with my poles as far as the Lonesome Pine, then settle back into my racing crouch. Soon I’m up to forty-five, fifty kph again, and I should ease off but the wind in my ears will speak if I dare to go faster, and the lower woods smother me and the tunnel’s a blur and it’s fifty-five, sixty, and I’m flying over a ridge with a savage dip beyond, and the ground’s fallen away … And I soar like a stoner archangel … This freedom is eternal for as long as it lasts … Why are my feet level with my chin?

MY RIGHT FOOT hits the ground first, but my left one’s gone AWOL, and I’m cartwheeling, my body mapped by local explosions of pain — ankle, knee, elbow —shit , my left ski’s gone, whipped off, vamoosed — ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, a faceful of gravelly snow; dice in a tumbler; apples in a tumble dryer; a grunt, a groan, a plea, a shiiiiiiiiit … Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain—

OUCH. WRIST, SHIN, rib, butt, ankle, earlobe … Sore, walloped, sure … but unless I’m too doped on natural painkillers to notice, nothing’s broken. Flat on my back in a crash-mat of snow, pine needles, and mossy, stalky mulch. I sit up. My spine still works. That’s always useful. My watch is still working, and it’s 16:10, just as it should be. Tiny silver needles of birdsong. Can I stand? I have an ache instead of a right buttock; and my coccyx feels staved in by a geologist’s hammer … But, yes, I can stand, which makes this one of my luckiest escapes. I lift my goggles, brush the snow off my jacket, unclip the ski I still have and use it as a staff to hobble uphill, searching for its partner. One minute, two minutes, still no joy. Chetwynd-Pitt will be giving the fluffy snowman a victory punch down in the village just about now. I backtrack, searching through the undergrowth along the side of the piste. There’s no dishonor in taking a fall on a black run — it’s not as if I’m a professional or a ski instructor — but returning to chez Chetwynd-Pitt forty minutes after Fitzsimmons and Quinn with one ski missing would be, frankly, crap.

Here comes a whooshing sound — another skier — and I stand well back. It’s the French girl from the viewing platform — who else wears mint green this season? She takes the rise as gracefully as I was elephantine, lands like a pro, sees me, takes in what’s happened, straightens up, and stops a few meters away on the far side of the piste. She bends down to retrieve what turns out to be my ski and brings it over to me. I muster my mediocre French: “Merci … Je ne cherchais pas du bon côté.”