December 29
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 c?té.”
“Rien de cassé?”
I think she’s asking if I’ve broken anything. “Non. à part ma fierté, mais bon, ?a ne se soigne pas.”
She hasn’t removed her goggles so, apart from a few loose strings of wavy black hair and an unsmiling mouth, my Good Samaritaness’s face stays unseen. “Tu en as eu, de la veine.”
I’m a jammy bugger? “Tu peux …” “Bloody well say that again,” I’d like to say. “C’est vrai.”
“?a ne rate jamais: chaque année, il y a toujours un couillon qu’on vient ramasser à la petite cuillère sur cette piste. Il restera toute sa vie en fauteuil roulant, tout ?a parce qu’il s’est pris pour un champion olympique. La prochaine fois, reste sur la piste bleu.”
Jesus, my French is rustier than I thought: “Every year someone breaks their spine and I ought to stick to the blue piste”? Something like that? Whatever it was, she launches herself without a goodbye and she’s gone, swooping through the curves.
BACK AT CHETWYND-PITT’S chalet, floating in the tub, Nirvana’s Nevermind thumping through the walls, I smoke a joint among the steam serpents and peruse the Case of the Body-Hopping Mind for the thousandth time. The facts are deceptively simple: Six nights ago, outside my parents’ home, I encountered one mind in possession of someone else’s body. Weird shit needs theories and I have three.
Theory 1: I hallucinated both the second coming of the Yeti and his secondary proofs, like his footprints and those statements that only Miss Constantin—or I—could have known about.
Theory 2: I am the victim of a stunningly complex hoax, involving Miss Constantin and an accomplice who poses as a homeless man.
Theory 3: Things are exactly as they appear to be, and “mind-walking”—what else to call it?—is a real phenomenon.
The Hallucination Theory: “I don’t feel insane” is a feeble retort, but I really don’t. If I was hallucinating a character so vividly, surely I’d be hallucinating other things too? Like hearing, I don’t know, Sting singing “An Englishman in New York” from inside lightbulbs.
The Complex Hoax Theory: “Why me?” Some people may hold a grudge against Marcus Anyder, if certain fictions were known. But why seek revenge via some wacky plot to loosen my grip on sanity? Why not just kick the living shit out of me?
The Mind-walking Theory: Plausible, if you live in a fantasy novel. Here, in the real world, souls stay inside the body. The paranormal is always, always a hoax.
Water drops go plink, plink, plink from the tap. My palms and fingers are pink and wrinkly. Someone’s thumping upstairs.
So what do I do about Immaculée Constantin, the Yeti, and the weird shit? The only possible answer is “Nothing, for now.” Perhaps I’ll be served another slice tonight, or perhaps it’s waiting for me back in London or Cambridge, or perhaps this will just be one of life’s dangly plot lines that one never revisits. “Hugo?” It’s Olly Quinn, bless him, knocking on the door. “You still alive in there?”
“Yes, the last time I checked,” I shout, over Kurt Cobain.
“Rufus says we should get going before Le Croc fills up.”
“You three go on ahead and get a table. I’ll be along soon.”
LE CROC—A.K.A. LE Croc of Shit to its regulars—is a badger’s set of a drinking hole down an alley off the three-sided plaza in Sainte-Agnès. Günter, the owner, gives me a mock salute and points to the Eagle’s Nest—a tiny mezzanine cubbyhole occupied by my three fellow Richmondians. It’s gone ten, the place is chocka, and Günter’s two saisonniers—one skinny girl in Hamlet black, the other plumper, frillier, and blonder—are busy with orders. Back in the 1970s Günter was ranked the 298th best tennis player in the world (for a week) and has a framed clipping to prove it. Now he supplies cocaine to wealthy Eurotrash, including Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’s eldest scion. His Andy Warhol flop of bleached hair is stylistic self-immolation, but a Swiss-German drug dealer in his fifties does not welcome fashion advice from an Englishman. I order a hot red wine and climb to the Nest, past a copse of seven-foot Dutchmen. Chetwynd-Pitt, Quinn, and Fitzsimmons have eaten—Günter’s daube, a beef stew, and a wedge of apple pie with cinnamon sauce—and have started on the cocktails which, thanks to my lost bet, I have the honor of buying for Chetwynd-Pitt. Olly Quinn’s tanked and glassy-eyed. “Can’t get my head round it,” he’s saying morosely. The boy’s a crap drunk.
“Can’t get your head round what?” I take off my scarf.
Fitzsimmons mouths, “Ness.”
I mime hanging myself with my scarf, but Quinn doesn’t notice: “We’d planned it. I’d drive her to Greenwich, she’d introduce me to Mater and Pater. I’d see her over Christmas, we’d go to Harrods for the sales, skate on the rink at Hyde Park Corner … It was all planned. Then that Saturday, after I took Cheeseman to hospital for his stitches, she calls me up and it’s ‘We’ve come to the end of the road, Olly.’ ” Quinn swallows. “I’m like … huh? She was all, ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s mine.’ She said she’s feeling conflicted, tied-down, and—”
“I know a Portuguese tart who enjoys that tying-down stuff, if that oils your rooster,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.
“Misogynist and unfunny,” says Fitzsimmons, inhaling vapors from his vin chaud. “Splitting up’s an utter bitch.”
Chetwynd-Pitt sucks a cherry. “Specially if you buy an opal necklace Christmas prezzie and get dumped before you can turn the gift into sex. Was it from Ratners Jewellers, Olly? They issue gift tokens for returned items, but not cash. Our groundsman had a wedding called off, that’s how I know.”
“No, it wasn’t from bloody Ratners,” growls Quinn.
Chetwynd-Pitt lets the cherry stone drop into the ashtray. “Oh cheer up, for shitsake. Sainte-Agnès plus New Year equals more Euro* than the Schleswig-Holstein Feline Rescue Society would know what to do with. And I’ll bet you a thousand quid that the feeling-conflicted line means she’s got another boyfriend.”
“Not Ness, no way,” I reassure poor Quinn. “She respects you—and herself—way too much. Trust me. And when Lou dumped you,” this is for Chetwynd-Pitt, “you were a train wreck for months.”
“Lou and I were serious. Olly ’n’ Ness lasted what, all of five weeks? And Lou didn’t dump me. It was mutual.”
“Six weeks, four days.” Quinn looks tortured. “But it’s not time that matters. It felt … like a secret place just us two knew about.” He drinks his obscure Maltese beer. “She fitted me. I don’t know what love is, whether it’s mystical or chemical or what. But when you have it, and it goes, it’s like a … it’s like … it’s …”
“Cold turkey,” says Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. “Roxy Music were right about love being the drug, and when your supply’s used up, no dealer on earth can help you. Well: There is one—the girl. But she’s gone and won’t see you. See? I do know what poor Olly’s suffering. What I’d prescribe is”—he waggles his empty cocktail glass—“an Angel’s Tit. Crème de cacao,” he tells me, “and maraschino. Pile au bon moment, Monique, tu as des pouvoirs télépathiques.” The plumper waitress arrives with my hot wine, and Chetwynd-Pitt deploys his smart-arse French: “Je prendrai une Alien Urine, et ce sera mon ami ici présent”—he nods at me—“qui réglera l’ardoise.”
“Bien,” says Monique, acting bubbly. “J’aimerais bien moi aussi avoir des amis comme lui. Et pour ces messieurs? Ils m’ont l’air d’avoir encore soif.” Fitzsimmons orders a cassis, and Olly says, “Just another beer.” Monique gathers the used dishes and glasses and off she’s gone.
“Well, I’d fire my unsawn-off shotgun up that,” says Chetwynd-Pitt. “A cuddly six and a half. Yummier than that Wednesday Adams lookalike Günter’s also taken on. Frightmare or what?” I follow his gaze down to the skinnier bargirl. She’s filling a schooner of cognac. I ask if she’s French, but Chetwynd-Pitt’s asking Fitzsimmons, “You’re the answer man tonight, Fitz. What’s this love malarkey all about?”
Fitzsimmons lights a cigarette and passes us the box. “Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”
I’ve heard that line elsewhere. Chetwynd-Pitt flicks ash into the tray. “Can you do better than that, Lamb?”
I’m watching the skinny barmaid making what must be Chetwynd-Pitt’s Alien Urine. “Don’t ask me. I’ve never been in love.”
“Oh, listen to the poor lamb,” mocks Chetwynd-Pitt.
“That’s crap,” says Quinn. “You’ve had lots of girls.”
Memory hands me a photo of Fitzsimmons’s yummy mummy. “Anatomically, I have some knowledge, sure—but emotionally they’re the Bermuda Triangle. Love, that drug Rufus referred to, that state of grace Olly pines for, that great theme … I’m immune to it. I have not once felt love for any girl. Or boy, for that matter.”
“That’s a pile of steaming bollocks,” says Chetwynd-Pitt.
“It’s the truth. I’ve never been in love. And that’s okay. The colorblind get by just fine not knowing blue from purple.”
“You can’t have met the right girl,” decides Quinn the idiot.
“Or met too many right girls,” suggests Fitzsimmons.
“Human beings,” I inhale my wine’s nutmeggy steam, “are walking bundles of cravings. Cravings for food, water, shelter, warmth; sex and companionship; status, a tribe to belong to; kicks, control, purpose; and so on, all the way down to chocolate-brown bathroom suites. Love is one way to satisfy some of these cravings. But love’s not just the drug; it’s also the dealer. Love wants love in return, am I right, Olly? Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in—jealousy, the rages, grief, I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind. I—”
“I spy an Alien Urine.” Chetwynd-Pitt smirks at the skinny barmaid and the tall glass of melon-green gloop on her tray. “J’espère que ce sera aussi bon que vos Angel’s Tits.”
“Les boissons de ces messieurs.” Lips thin and unlipsticked, with a “messieurs” that came sheathed in irony. She’s gone already.
Chetwynd-Pitt sniffs. “There goes Miss Charisma 1991.”
The others clink their glasses while I hide one of my gloves behind a pot-plant. “Maybe she just doesn’t think you’re as witty as you think you are,” I tell Chetwynd-Pitt. “How does your Alien Urine taste?”
He sips the pale green gloop. “Exactly like its name.”
THE TOURIST SHOPS in Sainte-Agnès’s town square—ski gear, art galleries, jewelers, chocolatiers—are still open at eleven, the giant Christmas tree’s still bright, and a crêpier, dressed as a gorilla, is doing a brisk trade. Despite the bag of coke Chetwynd-Pitt just scored off Günter, we decide to put off Club Walpurgis until tomorrow night. It’s beginning to snow. “Damn,” I say, turning back. “I left a glove at Le Croc. You guys get Quinn home, I’ll catch you up …”
I hurry back down the alley and get to the bar as a large party of He-Norses and She-Norses leaves. Le Croc has a round window; through it I can see the skinny barmaid preparing a jug of Sangria without being seen. She’s very watchable, like the motionless bass player in a hyperactive rock band. She combines a fuck-you punkishness with a precision about even her smallest actions. Her will would be absolutely unswayable, I sense. As Günter takes the jug away into Le Croc’s interior she turns to look at me so I enter the smoky clamor and make my way between clusters of drinkers to the bar. After she’s wiped the frothy head off a glass of beer with the flat of a knife and handed it to a customer, I’m there with my forgotten glove gambit. “Désolé de vous embêter, mais j’étais installé là-haut”—I point to the Eagle’s Nest, but she doesn’t yet give away whether or not she remembers me—“il y a dix minutes et j’ai oublié mon gant. Est-ce que vous l’auriez trouvé?”
Cool as Ivan Lendl slotting in a lob above an irate hobbit, she reaches down and produces it. “Bizarre, cette manie que les gens comme vous ont d’oublier leurs gants dans les bars.”
Fine, so she’s seen through me. “C’est surtout ce gant; ?a lui arrive souvent.” I hold up my glove like a naughty puppet and ask it scoldingly, “Qu’est-ce qu’on dit à la dame?” Her stare kills my joke. “En tout cas, merci. Je m’appelle Hugo. Hugo Lamb. Et si pour vous, ?a fait”—shit, what’s “posh” in French?—“chic, eh bien le type qui ne prend que des cocktails s’appelle Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt. Je ne plaisante pas.” Nope, not a flicker. Günter reappears with a tray of empty glasses. “Why do you speak French with Holly, Hugo?”
I look puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“He seemed keen to practice his French,” says the girl, in London English. “And the customer is always right, Günter.”
“Hey, Günter!” An Australian calls over from the bar football. “This bastard machine’s playing funny buggers! I fed it my francs but it’s not giving me the goods.” Günter heads over, Holly loads up the dishwasher, and I work out what’s happened. When she returned my ski on the black run earlier, she used French, but she said nothing when my accent gave me away because if you’re female and working in a ski resort you must get hit on five times a day, and speaking French with Anglophones strengthens the force field. “I just wanted to say thanks for returning my ski earlier.”
“You already did.” Working-class background; unintimidated by rich kids; very good French.
“This is true, but I’d be dying of hypothermia in a lonely Swiss forest if you hadn’t rescued me. Could I buy you dinner?”
“I’m working in a bar while tourists are eating their dinner.”
“Then could I buy you breakfast?”
“By the time you’re having breakfast, I’ll have been mucking out this place for two hours, with two more hours to go.” Holly slams shut the glass-washer. “Then I go skiing. Every minute spoken for. Sorry.”
Patience is the hunter’s ally. “Understood. Anyway, I wouldn’t want your boyfriend to misinterpret my motives.”
She pretends to fiddle with something under the counter. “Won’t your friends be waiting for you?”
Odds of four to one there’s no boyfriend. “I’ll be in town for ten days or so. See you around. Good night, Holly.”
“G’night,” and piss off, add her spooky blue eyes.