accepted any of it.
‘I can’t be dead. I can feel pain. I can feel pleasure.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘I know I love you. That can’t be death, can it?’
‘I’m not saying I understand it.’
‘It’s not hell to be here. It’s not heaven either, because I keep thinking the avalanche is going to come down over us.’
‘The avalanche already came down, my darling. That’s what you won’t accept. We died in the avalanche.’
‘No, I mean the bigger one. There’s a big avalanche up there, waiting. I can feel it. I can feel the tension in the air. Maybe this sunshine is going to melt the snow and bring it crashing down. Do you think it’s like this for everyone?’
They sat on the snow-carpeted steps of the village church, stunned, exhausted and bewildered by the compact nature of their new existence.
Jake took off his sunglasses and thumbed his still-bloodshot eyes. Zoe kept asking him questions, as if he knew, as if he had the faintest idea of the answers. If this were an afterlife, would it last for ever? Did it fade? Would other people come into it? Could they die inside this death? Why was time there measured by the movement of the sun and the moon but not by the burning of a candle? She had a hundred such questions, and Jake would say:
‘What man in the hood?’
‘The one who watches us all.’
‘You mean Death? Is that what you mean?’
If Jake was right, Zoe thought, and they had died in the avalanche then all the great religions of the world were wrong, that much was clear. The sacred building right behind them was a cold shell, populated by flickering points of hope, and no more than that. Only one question remained: what were they to do? What to do?
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you actually felt cold? Since it happened, I mean. Since the day of the avalanche?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Believe it or not, it was only three days ago, no… four days.’
‘Was it? It feels like… much longer. Much longer.’ ‘Weeks, yes. But it isn’t. And my point is, have you actually felt cold? You see, we’ve been sitting here an hour. And I don’t feel cold at all.’
‘Take your clothes off,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel cold pretty quick.’
So he did. He shrugged his ski jacket off, and his pullover. Then he took off his boots and his salopettes, and then he stripped off his thermal underwear and his thick socks. Naked, he lowered his bare bottom onto the snowy step.
She watched his eyes, waiting. He held her gaze.
But several minutes went by. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen. No, maybe two minutes.
‘Admit it,’ she said at last. ‘You’re fucking freezing.’
He shook his head, no.
Zoe stood up, pulled off her jacket and unbuckled her trouser belt. She undressed completely and sat beside him, her bare bottom on the icy snow. She linked her arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘You know what? Even if we don’t need clothes I’m not going around naked.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Maybe I would if this were a tropical island.’
‘But it’s not.’
‘Do you think that the place where everyone dies is where they get to be afterwards? I mean, if you’d died in the trenches of the First World War, are you stuck there for eternity?’
‘Who says we’re here for eternity?’ he said. ‘My arse should be blue. I can’t feel the cold at all. Can you remember what it was like?’
Zoe thought hard. ‘Remember it for me.’
Jake said, ‘It was like catching a finger under a hammer. It was like a burn. It was like a mouth, sucking at you, stinging as it sucked. It was like a knife sharpening itself on you, whetting itself so it could cut you.’
She winced. ‘My God, I am fucking freezing! Look—I’m shivering!’ She jumped up and started pulling her clothes back on. Her teeth chattered. ‘I don’t know if I just remembered it or if I felt it, but I’m going to put my clothes back on. Aren’t you cold?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll get dressed. Shall we go back to the hotel?’
Zoe was now perishing as she waited for Jake to put his clothes back on. With the winter sunlight dipping over the mountain, and with their shadows flung before them across the white snow, they walked back together. As they passed some shops, Zoe peeled away from him. ‘I’ll catch up. I want to pick up some things.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘It’s okay. I’ll catch up.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Jake, are you afraid we’ll lose each other? I just want to pick up some things.’
‘What things?’
‘Some more eye-drop from the pharmacy, stuff like that. I’ll be two minutes!’
He shook his head and walked on.
Zoe pushed open the door to the pharmacy. The lights were on, as they always had been. She knew where to go to get the eye-drops because she’d picked them up on that first day. But that wasn’t what she’d come for. There was something else.
‘I’m not dead,’ she said, as she moved between the aisles of the pharmacy. ‘I’m not dead.’
‘What do you want to eat tonight?’ Jake said when she came into the hotel room. ‘What do dead people eat?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Well, we have to eat something.’
‘Do we? Do you actually feel hungry? Have you actually felt hunger these last few days? Or are we just eating because it’s what we do?’
Jake opened his mouth to speak but then closed it. He had to think about it. She pushed past him to get into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
She opened the small carton and unwrapped the plastic stick from its foil packet. She dropped her trousers and pants, holding the stick under her as she tried to piss on the half-centimetre by three-centimetre absorbent stick without pissing on her hand. At first she couldn’t seem to pee at all. It was as if she’d forgotten how. Then she didn’t seem to want to stop. In any event, she’d covered the stick for more than the required five seconds. She replaced the cap on the stick, sat on the toilet and waited.
After about a minute Jake thumped on the door.
‘Can’t I use the toilet in peace, Jake!’
She heard some muttering
‘For God’s sake, there’s a corridor full of rooms, each with its own toilet. Go and find your own.’
She heard more muttering, and the outer door opened and closed.
When she examined the stick, there were two clear blue lines. There was no question that she was still pregnant.
Jake knew nothing of this. It was the sixty-four-million-dollar question she’d been waiting to ask him and she’d been looking for a suitable moment. The moment when the stars aligned.
For all of the time they had been together neither of them had been much interested in having children. Then
