Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
his skis sliced over it. He had become a machine, as he always did when he skied at his best. His blood froze and his body fused to the skis.
Down. The wind and the snow plumes and the sweet slicing turns.
On down. Like flying, but rawer. Like diving, but faster and fiercer. Like sex. Like death itself.
Almost the bottom of the Happy Valley. A right-hand turn and ahead a flat traverse, then a rise to the Mürren ski hut, and the control point.
Josh’s head jerked up.
He heard the roll of thunder before he saw anything. But he knew that it wasn’t thunder. It was a crack and a spreading roar that came from the Schwarzgrat, high overhead. The noise rose up to choke him, indistinguishable from his own fear. Then he saw the snow falling off the cliffs. Only it wasn’t snow any more. It was vast white monuments that dropped and sent up billowing clouds and brought rocks and trees and churning debris racing towards him.
Josh turned with such violence that spraying snow lashed his face. He shot away at an angle with the avalanche clawing at him like a nightmare. And out of the corner of his eye, in one split second, Josh saw Alex Mackintosh. The ragged white wall swept him up and threw him over and over like a twig, and then he was gone.
The leading edge of the avalanche caught Josh at the same instant. It smashed him down and punched the breath out of his body. He folded his arms helplessly around his head as the snow gagged him, blinded him and sucked him down. His skis were torn off and he was pitched into blackness, uselessly clawing and fighting against its brutal strength.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity of suffocating terror, it was suddenly quiet. Josh opened his eyes, very slowly, as if his eyelids were weighted. There was blue sky above him.
He was gasping for breath and whimpering like an animal, but even as he lay there he knew that he had never seen anything so beautiful as that pure, ice-blue sky.
He stared at it, fighting for his breath, with the euphoric realisation Pm not buried singing in his head. For a long moment he couldn’t move, and he looked up into the wonderful space above him as content as a baby. And then he remembered Mackintosh. He sucked more air into his burning lungs and tried to struggle on to all fours. Pain throbbed down his left side and Josh swung his head from side to side, trying to clear the mist of it. He saw then that the snow had engulfed him up to his thighs. He kicked and writhed, hauling at the debris with his hands to pull himself free. At last he lurched to his feet and saw his skis sticking out of the snow behind him. Josh lunged towards them, one hand pressed to his side, jerking like a clumsy marionette over the snow blocks.
It seemed to take hours.
With each step Josh was trying to work out where in the hideously changed landscape he had last seen Mackintosh.
At last the skis were within his grasp. He wrenched them out of the snow and jammed his boots into the bindings. The way ahead looked almost impassable but he pushed forward, staring into the hollows for any sign of the other skier.
He fell and fell again as he plunged down the slope, and then as he scrambled up again he saw the aluminium basket of a Tonkin pole identical to his own sticking up out of the tumbled mass. Josh hurled himself down next to it, kicking off his skis. He scrabbled at the snow, cursing his hands that seemed so ineffectual against the avalanche debris. He began to gasp with the effort as he worked and sweat ran down behind his goggles, almost blinding him. He glanced up once in desperation and saw black figures bouncing and sprawling over the snow. Help was on the way from the control point at the Mürren hut. He bent down again, working faster, and the ice tore through his knitted gloves.
Then, suddenly, his hand broke through into space. His bare, frozen fingers felt the smooth canvas of a ski-jacket. Josh hauled at the snow, dragging it in chunks away from the man’s body. He was shouting, without knowing what he said, ‘It’s all right. You’re clear. You’re okay.’
And then, like’ a miracle, the body was moving too. It shuddered convulsively and one shoulder appeared. Mackintosh was lying curled on his side, his arms raised in front of his face to make an air pocket, and his Tonkin pole thrust vertically over him.
Josh stuck his hands under the man’s armpits and hauled at him. The Scotsman’s head broke out of the snow and ice as the first of the rescuers reached them. His face was grey and ridges of snow and ice clung to his hair and eyebrows. His blue lips hung open, and he was breathing.
‘He’s alive,’ Josh yelled. His shout rolled over their heads, echoing briefly and then swallowed up by the heights. The rescuers flung themselves forward. There were shovels and ropes now, in place of Josh’s hands. He stood back, shivering a little, looking at Mackintosh’s face.
One of the Swiss officials was shouting something at Josh. He waved, and pointed on down the slope. Josh gaped at him, understanding at last that the man was telling him to go on. He had forgotten all about the Inferno. He shook his head impatiently. Mackintosh was all but free now. They were reaching gently, to lift him on to a canvas stretcher. Somehow, on their backs or on a sledge, they would carry him up to the hut. They had done it often enough before.
‘He is gut,’ one of the officials said. Josh lifted his head then. Racing away, out of his control, his imagination swept to the route down, beyond the avalanche. Mackintosh’s face had been hidden by the backs of the rescuers, but as they moved him Josh saw it again. His eyes were open, incongruously as blue as the sky. He was looking at Josh, and his lips moved.
Go on.
‘Ja, ja.’ They were shouting and pointing again. They were telling Josh that he was to climb back up and walk along the flat to the control point, in order to restart his race from there.
Suddenly, Josh was moving. He snatched up his poles and hoisted his skis over his shoulder. He glanced at Mackintosh for the last time, and saw the flicker of a painful smile.
‘I’ll have to finish for us both, Alex,’ he shouted. ‘You do the same for me some other time.’
He was already on his way when one of the rescuers grabbed his arm. He was holding out his own gloves. Josh tore off his ruined pair and waved the good ones in a salute. Then he was off, up over the debris, his legs pumping like pistons.
At the control hut a DHO regular, Tuffy Brockway, had materialised. He clapped Josh on the back and Josh staggered.
‘They’ll credit you with the time you’ve lost,’ Tuffy roared. ‘It’s happened before. Esme Mackinnon stopped down at Grütsch to let a funeral go by. Took off his cap and stood to attention, of course. They gave him the time back.’
Josh barely heard him. He leaned on his poles for a second, gulping air and trying to steady his shaking legs. He looked down and was amazed to see other skiers skirting the worst of the avalanche. They were sliding and falling, but the race was still in progress.
A stopwatch clicked decisively beside him. Josh’s grip tightened on his poles and he flashed away. Ahead lay a steep drop, a rise up to Castle ridge, and then the hideous Inferno slope itself. Josh tried to shut off the pain that wrenched at his side, the memory of the thundering snow and Mackintosh’s deathly grey face. Alex was alive, and he wanted to stay alive himself. That was all there was room to know now. He was skiing again. A second later there was nothing in Josh’s mind but the way down, unfurling like a treacherous ribbon ahead of him.
At the Allmendhubel, Sophia looked at her wristwatch again. She was frowning. ‘He should have come through by now. And the man before him. If he’s going to stand any chance, he should be here by now.’
They stared up at the route until their eyes stung, searching for another of the black specks that would fly down to them and grow, faster and closer, until it became a man who swooped past them in a glittering plume of speed and ice.
The mountain was empty.
They stood in a huddle, not speaking. Julia’s hands and feet were numb, but she was watching too intently to stamp and clap to try to warm them.
Another minute