Downhill

You’re a chameleon, Victoria told me last night at dinner. It’s the sort of thing she says. Put you next to someone, she said, and you take on their colour in no time. You just become like whoever you’re with.

That could have been an epigram, or a criticism. Being Victoria, probably a bit of both. Like when she told me that my girlfriend liked being taken out to Japanese restaurants only because they were very expensive and gave you nothing to eat. It was too good not to repeat, but it was toxic if you did. I found that out to my cost.

The thing about Victoria is that she views every relationship as a continuation of war by other means. Sex and power are the same thing, for her. When we were at university together I discovered this just in time – only just, in fact. Going to bed with Victoria is just like going to bed with a man, they used to say. And that’s an epigram too.

Being on a skiing holiday with my two best friends is a pretty good test of Victoria’s chameleon theory. Can I be a calculating over-educated intellectual like Victoria and simultaneously an impulsive carefree meathead like Charlie? Actually, I think I can. Put a chameleon on a tartan rug and it’ll have a nervous breakdown, but I rather enjoy the experience. It’s good to be stretched.

Today was definitely a tartan sort of day, in chameleon terms. It started Charlie-coloured, because we went to the ski shop together to see about hiring some snowboards for tomorrow. Try everything once, that’s Charlie and me. Now the man at the ski shop was from New Zealand, and when someone from Nizullund talks about sex, he calls it ‘six.’ The guy in the shop didn’t talk about sex at all, but it being snowboards, he had to talk about decks rather a lot. Charlie was enchanted, and if he was, I was.

To add to Victoria’s irritation, our deck-sounds-like-dick jokes don’t all come out at once (so to speak). We got size and stiffness out of the way very quickly, and even colour and shape only lasted us till half-way up the first lift. We honestly did mean to be grown up and serious after that, but a couple of runs later we saw a group of snowboarders and realised, quite independently, in a grown-up and serious way, that some of liked to rard their dicks one way round and some the other. It was hard luck on Victoria that she was sitting between us on the chairlift at the time. ‘Can I ride yours if I let you have a go on mine?’ And so on.

Victoria never counter-attacks frontally, because that would be no fun. On the cable car up to lunch she merely started thinking aloud about the Roman legions and how far they had got into the Tyrol. I’m sure she gets these things from reading the back covers of serious paperbacks, but that doesn’t stop them being interesting. By the time she’d mixed in Hannibal (but everyone knows he crossed the Alps over the St Bernard, not here) it was too fascinating for me not to join in. I knew nothing about the subject, but then talking about things you already know about it is just dull.

The only minor drawback from Victoria’s point of view was that Charlie didn’t mind us talking over his head at all. Charlie never minds – that’s Charlie. At lunch, sitting on benches at the long table, beer-hall style, he embedded himself happily in soup and chips while Victoria and I carried on into the Roman provinces of Dacia, Moesia, Upper and Lower Pannonia, and other places I’ve forgotten. I have no idea where they all are. That’s what makes it such fun.

Long scrubbed tables mean neighbours, and long wooden benches mean that you notice them when they try to get in or out. Sort of breaking the ice by breaking the shins. I said that, not Victoria. I can do epigrams too.

Our new neighbour apologized. ‘Next time I’ll try jumping in with both feet at once.’

‘You’ll slide all the way in.’

‘No, my chin will stop me,’ he said. He punched his jaw shut with his fist, to demonstrate. ‘Sorry again.’

His name was Nicholas and he was from Holland.

It was Victoria who made the first move.

‘The Flying Dutchman,’ she said. Subtle, as ever. Then she had to add: ‘No, Charlie, not a train, the Flying Scotsman is a train, the Flying Dutchman is an opera.’ Opera is something Victoria knows about, because opera is something powerful people go to.

‘The legend is older than the opera,’ said Nicholas, not overawed in the least. ‘Besides, you can never trust Wagner.’

‘Why not?’ Victoria sounded disapproving and condescending at the same time. Wagner is opera, and opera is something that powerful people…

‘Well, look at it. Cursed and condemned to sail the seven seas forever, it could happen to anyone, I guess. Allowed on shore once a year – or is it seven years? – to look for love, I’ll allow that, you need the girl or you haven’t got your story. But all this business of dying for love? Come on! It’s like Tristan and Isolde. You know, when they meet and fall in love? Remember? “Isolde, I love you.” – “Tristan, I love you” – “Oh goody, let’s drink poison together.”’ Nicholas raised his glass to emphasize the point. ‘And anyway we’re not on the ocean.’

‘But snow is frozen water,’ said Victoria.

‘And in the summer I do sail,’ Nicholas added, sabotaging his own argument with a grin.

It rather looked as if he was going to be skiing with us today. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. Skiing with Victoria is nothing like skiing with a man. Take yesterday, for instance, behind the Dachstein glacier, ‘a perfectly ravishing run’ the guidebook says (I love those translations). Victoria fell early on, and so of course she got all shook up and so of course both of us had to stay with her. Because if one of us went off to ski the ravishing run leaving the other to stand guard, that would be admitting that looking after her was a duty instead of being the sole aim and fulfilment of our lives. So we both stayed with her until she got herself together, and then we escorted her down. We did our duty as gentlemen, but we were both savage as hell by the time we got home.

Having Nicholas with us could solve everything, really. We’d be three men, so one could squire and two could ravish – especially if Nicholas was happy to do the squiring. I got out the piste map and started talking in a general way about our plans for the afternoon.

‘Where do you want to go?’ Nicholas asked.

I pointed out a few possible routes that we’d thought of, and explained the problem about varying degrees of compet… er, confidence. Tact, you see. That’s me.

‘I know a route,’ said Nicholas. ‘It can be as long and hard as you like,’ he said to Charlie, who luckily forgot to think of a deck joke in time. To me he said, ‘There’s always a gentler way round. We can do those parts separately and meet up again afterwards,’ as if it was me he was being kind to. He gave a shy almost-smile to Victoria.

It sounded great. Nicholas and Victoria doing the cruising, Charlie and me on the chewy bits. So we went for it.

Getting up from the table, Charlie tipped his bench over. It had to happen to someone. It made a lovely crash.

Nicholas took us to a part of the mountain I didn’t know; and I thought I knew them all. The paths through the trees split, and crossed, and merged, so you really needed to be sure where you were going. Perhaps that was why there was no-one on it now. If I’d been in charge then I’d have been worrying already, perhaps there’s just one lift out of there, at the bottom, perhaps the lift man only works half-days: but Nicholas was pistemaster now and I just lay back and enjoyed being a passenger.

We were following a broad clearing straight down the hill. As it started to get narrower and a little steeper, Nicholas pointed out a horizontal-looking path off to the left. He said it was a road the foresters use in the summer. ‘The next part is rather technical,’ he said. ‘We’ll go round by the path and meet you at the bottom.’ He went off with Victoria, leaving Charlie and me to do the interesting stuff.

‘Technical’ was right. The gap between the trees narrowed down until we found ourselves in a steep gully with knee-high bumps. You need skill for those. The key is not to go over the top of them, but almost. Then your skis have only one point of contact and it’s easy to pivot them and sideslip down the far side. Technical, as Nicholas said; and beautiful too, if it’s done properly, the way I do.

After I’d crossed the slope a couple of times I glanced back up to see how Charlie was doing: if he was about to come flying into me, I wanted notice of the fact. I needn’t have worried. He was flowing across the snow with the ease of a natural dancer on his fourth day on skis, who has no idea yet what’s meant to be difficult and what isn’t. Ignorance protects you from fear.

My skis noticed me looking up, and being good skis, they obeyed. Before I could tell them they were wrong, I found myself down in the furrow between the bottoms of the moguls, locked into a nutter’s groove that pointed downhill along a steep, straight diagonal. It’s like when you’re riding your bike on your friend’s lawn and someone’s left the hose out. Once your front wheel hits it, it holds on to the hose and it can’t let go. It follows it wherever it’s going – usually into the pond.

This groove was seriously nuts. It slashed across the slope straight towards a pine tree that stuck out from the others, perfectly placed for an instant gender change.

I’m not a fan of changing genders and I detest being stuck in a groove, nutter’s or not, but my opinion didn’t count for much just then. My skis were on opposite sides of the furrow, so they responded to opposite sets of bumps. First one knee tried to knock my teeth out and then the other one did – a crash course in spinal flexibility. Finally, at the very last bump, both my feet got thrown into the air at the same time, and me with them, and I twisted round somehow and scraped down the back of the icy mogul like a cat sliding down a corrugated iron roof. Then I was shooting back across the smooth snow at the bottom at a speed considerably exceeding vmax, until a friendly snowdrift stopped my skis dead.

I slid backwards out of the snowdrift and tried to look as if I’d planned the whole thing. I looked up to see how Charlie was getting on.

Charlie was gazing down at me and laughing loud enough to set off avalanches in neighbouring valleys. It was roll-around-on-the-floor laughing, but he was doing it on skis.

Roll-down-the-piste laughing, in fact.

It was epic to watch. If only I’d had a camera, I could have set it to music and got a million hits on YouTube. First Charlie bounced a few times, then he settled down to a nice steady freefall dive. Head first, skis last, because your skis are the biggest bit of you and they pick up the most drag from the snow. I did say that Charlie likes to throw himself into things head first. Well, he really does.

One other thing about Charlie: apart from hair gel and goggles, the only thing he wears when skiing is a ski suit open to the waist. He says he’d get too hot if he wore anything under it. That lacks class; but when you’re in freefall down the mountain, an open ski suit makes a very good extra parachute. It slows you down by scooping up snow.

And then you stand up.

I didn’t laugh. I thought it would twist the knife better if I didn’t. I didn’t even watch Charlie living through the severest case of snow balls I’ve seen. I looked away. A lens had come out of his goggles, so I went and picked it up and gave it back to him.

Just then, Nicholas and Victoria appeared, so Charlie put the goggles and the lens in his pocket for mending at the next lift. Victoria was crushingly sympathetic to poor Charlie. Once my loyal friend had told her all the earlier events that she’d missed seeing, she was equally gracious to me. We both felt honoured.

The next time we did that gully, we took extra care to do it perfectly. The key is to have two brains. One deals with the turn you’re doing now, while the other looks ahead and plans where and when to do the next one. Some video games are like that – you launch your fingers and they get on with it while your brain plans the next action. Drinks parties are like that too, if you’re Victoria, having one conversation while planning who to have the next one with.

The key is to have only two brains, not a third one that says ‘Hold on, what if you fall?’ Just go for it. So that’s what I did. All the way down I was making short tight turns, so that my speed would never build up too much, and it worked. At the bottom, I was euphoric. I looked at my watch and counted my pulse: 137 beats per minute. Sixty seconds later it was already down to 104: that’s what comes of being fit.

Nicholas and Victoria were being slower this time; or perhaps we’d been unusually fast. Charlie and I sat on the ground and shared an orange while we waited for them. Charlie lives on oranges. He buries the peel in the snow – says it’s biodegradable. I disapprove of that, but not too loudly. I don’t want sticky pockets any more than he does.

Charlie’s goggles were still broken. I asked had he forgotten to mend them when we were going up the lift, and Charlie said there hadn’t been a lift yet. I said yes there had, and I described it to him in exact detail. Yes, he said, but that was this morning, before lunch, didn’t I remember? I didn’t, as it happened, but neither lifts nor goggles seemed worth having an argument about.

Nicholas and Victoria came into view in the distance. She was sailing down, looking more relaxed than usual. Not dynamic, of course, but not creased up in her usual panic either. Stately, you could say. Nicholas was a little behind her, but not too far away to keep an eye on where she was going. Definitely she was skiing better. He didn’t look bored. It looked as if he was going to carry on looking after her. This was turning into rather a nice afternoon. I felt I could ski like this for ever.

Now that Charlie and I had showed what we could do if we liked, we stayed together with the others. It was nice, broad, flattering skiing. Nicholas skied next to Victoria while Charlie and I played around them. At some point I thought the burden should be shared and I asked Nicholas whether he wasn’t bored with this simple stuff, but he just said, ‘In my flat country, winter sports mean sleighs drawn by bicycles. After that, anything is steep.’ It was so elegantly put, I didn’t care whether it was true. I left them to it. Victoria was forgetting to talk about ancient Roman tribes, or even about the important people she knew. She sounded like an ordinary person, really. She could apply to re-join the human race, if only we could find the forms.

I held back for a bit to let the others get ahead, so I could pick up speed and get a proper gallop. There’s something about going that fast when you’re that close to the ground. It doubles the speed somehow. The tiniest bump becomes a major landmark. Things happen before you have time to think. You have to be 100% alert the whole time – it’s a different kind of living. As I passed the others, I bled off a little speed by using my edges. It sounded like the thrusters on a spaceship making a mid-course correction. I did the same thing again a couple of times, then I started to slow down seriously, switching from edge to edge and throwing up great plumes of snow on either side. Finally, near the junction with another clearing, I put on the brakes and skidded sideways to a halt.

I looked down at where I’d kicked the snow away. Something lay there, something that someone had hidden under the snow earlier on.

Orange peel.

I looked up at the clearing that was coming down to join our path. I remembered it well. It was our gully. I remembered looking up there before, waiting for Charlie to come down.

This time I was certain. I’d been watching out for lifts, and there hadn’t been one since the last time we’d been here. I was sure. We’d come here without a single lift, downhill all the way.

I stood in the hazy sunshine. The weather had been like this all afternoon. It should have given me sunburn by now. It hadn’t. How long had we been out? I pushed back my cuff and looked at my watch. It said 3.15. That seemed reasonable, except that last time I’d looked at it, when I’d been measuring my pulse, it had also said 3.15. I looked at the second hand. It was still going round. The watch hadn’t stopped.

I pressed down on the snow and it yielded just a tiny bit. It was still perfect. It should have been getting softer with time, but it hadn’t.

Nicholas and Victoria came into view in the distance, just as they had before. Charlie was with them.

I ignored Charlie. I could see he was on one of his endorphin highs. You could tell him the world was ending, if you wanted, and he’d just say ‘Hey, cool, let’s go for it.’ I caught Nicholas’s eye. He looked guilty and vulnerable, all at once. That made sense. He was the one who had brought us here. This was his place. It had to be him.

We let the others carry on down the path. We looked at each other.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nicholas said eventually. ‘If you’ve got only one day to find happiness, you can’t help wanting to make the day longer.’

He waited for me to answer. I said nothing. It was more than I could digest all at once. He turned and skied down to join the others. I followed, at a distance.

They certainly made a nice couple, Nicholas and Victoria. The fact she wasn’t trying to manipulate him was unique in history. You could see from their skiing how comfortable they felt together. They looked as if they’d known each other in another life.

At a bend in the path everyone paused to let me catch up.

Victoria looked at me and smiled. It was a happy, human smile. Nicholas had uncovered a Victoria I hadn’t known existed. It happens sometimes – once you see something in a girl, everyone else starts to see it too. It’s the mirror image of beginning to see some good in Japanese restaurants.

Or perhaps it was more than that, and he’d actually brought her to life just by being with her for a few hours.

It seemed a bit unfair but it didn’t matter, really, because I still had one advantage over Nicholas. I know what the real Victoria is like. I’ve known her a long time and I know what makes her tick.

‘Victoria,’ I said, ‘the committee meeting, isn’t it today?’

It’s all about power, you see. It’s all about power.

Or perhaps it was more than that, and he’d actually brought her into being. Watering a flower that everyone else had thought was dry and dead? It didn’t really matter, because I still had one advantage over him. I knew something that Nicholas didn’t. I knew the real Victoria. I’d known her a long time.

‘Victoria,’ I said, ‘isn’t it today, the committee meeting?’

It’s all about power, you see.

Somewhere in the infinitely tedious corporate politics of where Victoria works, there’s a committee she isn’t a member of. She has allies on it, and spies, but she isn’t a member. It was due to meet today. Its decisions could affect the status of a project, one person’s future, another person’s standing… as I said, it’s tedious. Since meeting her in the departure lounge at the airport, I’d heard the whole story from her three times, and listened to it once.

‘The committee meeting,’ I said, and sat back and waited for it to take effect. I knew it would work. It did. I saw it working. Nicholas saw it too.

‘Darling,’ Victoria said – to him, not to me, ‘darling, I need to keep my finger on what’s going on. I need to be available. Could we – ? Could I – ?’ Un-Victoria-like hesitation. ‘Can we see each other tomorrow?’

When you’re on the top of the mountain and the guide says don’t shout, and you do shout, and nothing happens, not to you – but you look down and you watch the white mountainside slip down and cover all the houses – that’s what it felt like, what I’d just done.

Nicholas couldn’t say that Victoria would be able to ski for hours yet and still not be late, without revealing his whole plan. Would that break the magic? Maybe it was just against the rules. Besides, whatever he said, Victoria wouldn’t listen to him now. Her eyes weren’t soft and blurry any more. I could see the cogs inside her head begin to revolve.

Nicholas looked down on her. He shook his head gently and said a word that, if it had come out without choking, would have been ‘No.’ Victoria looked up – not at Nicholas, her friend and on the way to being something more than a friend, but at an inconvenient datum, a minor obstacle to the grand strategy.

There was nothing more to be said. We skied on. At a given point Nicholas stopped, and so did we. ‘The lift is over there to the right,’ he said. ‘I go this way.’ He said goodbye to each of us in turn. He held Victoria’s hands for a long time. She let him, politely. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, so we hugged each other with averted eyes. Nicholas waved to Charlie and Charlie waved back. He wasn’t eating an orange, so something of what had just happened must have got through even to him.

Just before the next bend in the path, Nicholas turned to wave to us. He wobbled, recovered, and then he was gone. We stood there for a bit. After a while, somewhere off to the right, we slowly began to hear the sound of the lift.

Back in the chalet, we’re at the dinner table and we’ve just finished the main course. I stopped off at the jewellers on the way in, looking for expensive gifts for an expensive woman, but I couldn’t see anything I could be sure of. It’ll have to be an Hermès scarf at the airport again, a cliché but safe. Charlie is in the kitchen, helping the chalet girl be very late with the pudding. Charlie does throw himself into things rather. I don’t know if going to bed with Charlie is just like going to bed with a man, but I expect it will be. I hope they’ll be happy.

Victoria is impressing herself and irritating our fellow-guests by sending and receiving emails at the table. She’s completely back to normal now. That has to be good. I suppose it must be. Normal, the way she’s always been.

I wish I could undo what I did.

‘In the summer, I sail,’ he told us when we first met him.

This summer, we’re going sailing. The sea is huge; but I don’t care.

We’re going to sail.

This story is taken from "The Snow Cow: Ghost Stories for Skiers" by Martin Kochanski, published by Universalis. ISBN 978-0-956319-0-6.

Copyright 2009 by Martin Kochanski. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Downhill