the-range ski boots from the racks. They tried them on. The boots were beautiful. But they both found that their old boots were more comfortable, so they left the dazzling new boots in the store for another time when they might need them.
Then they went into the chic boutiques, helping each other choose complete new sets of clothes. Where before Jake would have stood aside with his arms folded, now he joined in with enthusiasm. Zoe laughed at the prices. Jake mocked the displays.
‘Where do we stand on fur now we’re dead?’ he wanted to know.
The boutiques carried every designer label. Zoe had no great interest in clothes but even she could name Prada, Gucci, Vuitton and Fendi, even if only to rail abuse at the fashion victims who made the names famous.
‘But look at some of this stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s couture.’
‘I ain’t heard o’ that one,’ Jake said.
‘It’s not a brand. It’s handmade stuff, even more expensive than those designer brands.’
‘Well. We’ll help ourselves to a brace of that, shall we?’
It was fun, for a few minutes, to pick out new trousers and handbags and scarves and shoes. Then Zoe tossed a coat on the floor. ‘You know what? I don’t want any of this shit.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Who would be impressed by it, anyway?’
‘Not me.’
‘And what’s the point of taking it back to the hotel? It’s here if we want it. Which I don’t.’
‘Right.’
‘Shit, Jake, there must be more to death than shopping.’
‘You know I’m on board with that. What else can we do?’
They considered the leisure opportunities, in addition to skiing, afforded by the village. There was of course no TV and no Internet; but they shed no tears for the absence of either. Jake said that watching TV had for the most part made him feel dead anyway, and that the Internet was a murky half-life of random surfing, needless messages, moronic football chat and porn.
‘You indulged in football chat?’
‘Once or twice,’ Jake admitted.
There were spa complexes in several of the hotels, offering saunas and steam rooms. There were sledges by the dozen and Skidoos, if you could get them unlocked, or you could swap your downhill skis for cross-country skis or snowboards. There was ice skating. There were polished granite stones and brooms for some incomprehensible winter sport called Curling. Beyond these opportunities, the entertainment prospects in the village were thin. There was no cinema, but they did find a bowling alley.
So they went bowling.
The machinery was working fine. They even honoured the request to wear proper bowling shoes though they had to discourage Sadie from chasing the bowling balls down the polished lanes. Since neither of them had ever been bowling before, neither knew how to score, so they simply bowled without scoring. It was encouraging to see and hear the balls returned by the operating mechanism with a pleasing click. And the pins made a delightful clatter as they went down. But the pleasure offered by the activity was somewhat limited.
‘I dunno,’ Jake said. ‘I just don’t see myself doing this for the rest of my death.’
‘I disagree,’ Zoe said, flinging a ball down the lane only to see it drop into the gutter. ‘I could see myself doing this for at least another ten minutes.’
Pretty soon they had their skis on again and were ascending the mountain by chairlift. Sadie sat between them, panting slightly, tongue hanging out. They planned to take her to La Chamade as a midpoint on the mountain where she could choose to stay indoors or be outside.
‘Same logs, still burning,’ Jake said after he’d been inside the mountain restaurant.
‘That’s crazy.’
‘It is. I thought I detected a slight shift in the position of the logs.’
‘A slight shift?’
Jake had left Sadie in the gabled porch of the restaurant. The dog had wagged her tail as he crunched through the snow back to his skis to rejoin Zoe. ‘I think one of the logs was at a different angle. Different from how we left it, I mean. It was leaning at maybe thirty-seven degrees against the other burning log, as opposed to forty- five degrees.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I think I am.’
Although she’d initially thought he was joking, she was serious just the same. They both read the details of the landscape avidly; they watched the weather, alert for signs; they studied the condition of the snow, to find meaning or portent; they hunted for cracks in ice and assessed the flow of streams; they scanned the surface of this world for the tiniest signals of change.
And they scanned each other’s faces for the same.
‘What’s up?’
‘That shopping this morning,’ said Zoe, ‘and that bowling. I’m sort of cross with myself.’
‘Time wasted?’
‘You know me so well. Now that we’re… well, I’ll say it, now that we’re dead, I’m thinking about my life all the time. What I did. And I’m not thinking about the good or bad things I did. I’m thinking of all the stupid time- wasting things. Shopping. Bowling. Not that I ever went bowling, but the equivalent. Pastimes. Pisstimes more like. And it’s making me think, is that what this is—all this hammering up and down the mountain slopes on sticks?’
‘No, this is different.’
‘Why is it?’
He didn’t even have to think about an answer. ‘Because it’s living on the gradient, where you have to stay focused, and you can’t switch off or go to sleep for a second; but at the same time as you are the sum of all those lumbering forces trying to stay in control, you are nothing on the enormous mountain, a fleck, a speck of dust, a melting flake.’
‘Stone me. You’re sounding religious.’
‘You don’t have to be on your knees to pray. This is me praying. This is me giving thanks, on the knee of the mountain. I’m a moving prayer. See the tracks behind me? Can you read what I wrote there?’
She looked back up the slope and wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s just tracks. I can’t read anything.’
‘Yes you can. That’s my writing. It’s a poem of praise.’
She blinked at him, impressed. He was smiling back at her, a thousand-watt smile. But she said, ‘You’re fucked up.’
‘Maybe. Are you coming skiing?’
He slipped away down the slope and she followed, trying to catch him. His words stayed with her. It was true: they were writing notes of praise on the page of the mountain, she told herself. That’s what they were doing.
They raced down the Black-graded slope, skis chattering where the trees had shaded the piste and ice had crusted on the surface of the snow; and the skis whispered and soothed where they emerged into the sunshine and the crust had melted or softened.
After several more runs they checked back at La Chamade for Sadie. She was still waiting in the outside porch. She stood up, tail thrashing as they approached, and followed them inside.
They peeled off their ski jackets and Jake fetched a bottle of wine from behind the bar. He pulled out the cork and was about to pour two glasses when Zoe said, ‘Do you hear that?’
He set the full bottle next to the empty glasses on the table and listened hard. There was a distant droning, like engines far-off; or like the movement of heavy, armoured trucks in the distance; or maybe one very large truck.
‘Is it a piste-basher?’
They listened again, and the drone became a rumble, sounding indeed like an approaching piste-grooming tractor, but without the beeping electronic alarm. The deep rumbling had an eerie low frequency, muffled and unsettling. It was as if someone had stuffed cotton wool in their ears.
