href="#u1655a8a9-69d7-5c91-9de3-5e522d29f1a5">CHAPTER TWO
2nd January, Val d’Isère
‘You got room in your case for these?’
My oldest friend Gen throws a bulging Tesco bag at me and I miss the catch. It bounces off the bed of the room we’ve been sharing for the last week and falls to the floor. I bend down to get it and emit a groan of pain. Everything hurts, and my head feels as if someone has hit me with a snowboard. I shouldn’t have had that last cocktail last night. Or the one before. I stand up, holding the bag at arm’s length. It smells like something died in it.
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t ask.’ Gen shakes her head. She should be even more hungover than me, but she somehow manages to look glowing and healthy, her skin bronzed after a week on the slopes where mine is scarlet and wind-chapped. She’s tied her hair back with a band, but spirals of red curls have already escaped and are framing her face. She’s wearing an assortment of hideously clashing Nineties-style apres-ski clothes she found in a charity shop, and somehow it looks amazing on her.
I peer inside the bag and hold my nose. ‘Ugh, honking ski socks.’
‘If they ask if you packed your bag yourself, just say yes,’ Gen says.
‘And take responsibility for those?’ I shove them in a corner of my case. ‘They could probably walk home to London by themselves. Actually, I’m going to keep them,’ I say, teasing Gen. ‘When you’re a famous actress, someone will pay a fortune for them.’
‘Someone would pay a fortune for them now. There’s a whole market for smelly socks on eBay,’ says Sophie, who doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to money stuff.
‘That’s disgusting.’ I wrinkle my nose at the thought.
Being Soph, and therefore revoltingly efficient, she’s already got her bag packed, and is sitting cross-legged on her bed, back against the wall, scrolling through her phone. ‘Oh my God, Jess, that photo of us you’ve posted on Instagram is terrible. It looks like one of my legs is about to snap off.’
‘It’s not that easy to do a selfie on a ski lift,’ I say, peering at her screen to remind myself. ‘I was convinced I was going to drop the phone into a ravine.’
‘Then you could have got Fabien to zoom down off piste and rescue it,’ says Gen, making a dreamy face as she mentions our gorgeous ski instructor. ‘He definitely had the hots for you, Jess.’
‘Shut up,’ I groan. She’s been going on about it all week, and I still haven’t admitted to them that I’ve been daydreaming – and, if I’m honest, night-dreaming – about Alex, and accidental meetings in the kitchen where I’m dressed in a pair of cute PJ bottoms and a little vest top, my hair knotted up in a messy bun, just reaching into the fridge to get myself a glass of orange juice when his hands are on either side of my waist and he spins me round and looks at me with those incredible eyes and says …
‘Jess?’ Gen nudges me. ‘You’ve been on another bloody planet all week. Come on, spill.’
I shake my head and zip up my suitcase. ‘Just thinking, that’s all.’
My phone bleeps and I look down at it. Both Gen and Sophie pick up their phones at the same time.
‘Delay in coach pick-up,’ we read in unison. ‘You will now be collected from your hotel reception approximately two hours later than the scheduled time.’
‘Oh God,’ Soph groans. ‘We could have gone skiing this morning after all.’
‘Not without skis, we couldn’t,’ I point out, reasonably. ‘We handed them back, remember?’
‘Well, we can leave our bags here and go and have one last vin chaud at least.’
My stomach gives a warning lurch at the prospect. ‘D’you not think we had enough of those yesterday?’
‘And the day before, but one more won’t hurt,’ says Sophie, and we drag our cases down to reception and leave them behind the desk, collecting little tokens in exchange as they’re locked away.
Outside there’s no sign of the sun and the sky is thick with pale clouds, tinged with the faintest hint of violet. More snow on the way, it said on the forecast, after a week that had been absolutely gorgeous. The sun had shone so brightly that we’d sat at the piste café having lunch outside most days with our ski coats off, listening to the thudding bass of dance music, our skis standing upright in the snow. It feels sad to be leaving Val d’Isère, with its throng of holiday guests, swooshing past in their expensive-looking ski garb, heading up the chair lifts for another day of fun. We take a seat at the little wooden chairs outside the hotel and stretch our legs out in the sunshine. It’s strange to be back in normal clothes, after a week of clomping around in heavy ski boots.
Celebrating New Year – and New Year’s Day – in a ski resort has been amazing, but my liver feels like it needs to go on a rest cure. Not to mention my legs, which are aching so much I’m walking like a robot, and covered in bruises from a pretty spectacular fall when the aforementioned Handsome Fabien, the instructor we’d clubbed together to pay for, had tried to get us to go down a run that ended with ‘une petit noir’, except his idea of a little black run looked like a vertical drop. Sophie and Gen, who’d had more time on skis than me, managed to make it down in one piece. I’d landed at the bottom, on my bottom, followed unceremoniously by one ski clonking me on the head (thank goodness for helmets) while the other one sailed past, over the edge of the piste and into the trees.
The waiter brings our order – hot chocolate laced with cream and a dash of rum for me and Gen, vin chaud for Sophie.
‘It’s amazing that we’re all in the same place at the same time at the beginning of a year,’ I say.
‘Can’t remember the last time that happened.’ Sophie twirls a beer mat between her fingers, looking thoughtful. ‘Wonder what we’ll be doing this time next year?’
‘Maybe I’ll have had my big break,’ says Gen, who has been saying that since she started drama classes back when we were in primary school.
‘This is the year,’ Sophie says, sounding determined. ‘Rich and I are settling down. I’m going to be thirty. It’s time. And I’m knocking these on the head, too.’ She taps her glass with a neatly manicured finger.
‘You’re giving up drinking?’ I look at Gen, and Gen looks at me, and together we look at Sophie.
‘I don’t want to take any risks.’
‘You’re not even thirty. Nobody has children when they’re this age. You’re the only person I know who is like a proper grown-up, Soph,’ I say.
Gen nods. ‘They’ll make the house untidy and you’ll have loads of plastic crap everywhere and you’ll end up being one of those people who pisses everyone off in Pizza Express because you turn up with a baby that screams the place down when we’re all trying to have a nice hangover meal on Tesco points.’
‘Thanks,’ says Sophie, drily. ‘I can’t believe you spent so many years working as a mother’s help. You’re literally the most un-maternal person I’ve ever met.’
‘I am not,’ Gen protests, unconvincingly. ‘I just don’t understand why anyone would want to subject themselves to parenthood.’
‘That’s what she means,’ I say.
‘I am still here,’ Sophie points out. ‘As in sitting right here. Anyway, I won’t have the sort of baby that screams in restaurants. If it does, I’ll take it outside or something. But I’ve got it all planned out …’
There’s a split second where Gen and I look at each other