The Silent Land

The shadows too were gone. There was nothing there, and nothing indeed that could form a shadow. Seconds earlier there had been people—or things—behind her. She had felt their breathing. She had heard their low murmuring voices. Now, nothing. Only the horn of the mountain nodded back at her, unconcerned.

She waited in a kind of shock. The idea that she had somehow hallucinated the presence of other people— other beings—was untenable. Their moving shadows had been cut clear into the white snow. Their voices had been made buoyant by the chill air. Their breathing had almost tickled the nape of her neck.

Now their absence was almost as terrible as their presence. For the first time she wondered if this place might be inhabited not by other people, not by other ghosts, but by something she might call demons. She needed to catch up with Jake. She flexed her grip on her poles and turned her skis in the snow.

Then her phone rang again.

The sound plucked her out of her terror and triggered her back into another. The playful signature call was coming from the inner pocket of her ski jacket. Her gauntleted hand flew to her jacket and she fumbled with the zip, but the padded fingers of the gauntlet were too thick to pull the zip open. She was afraid she wouldn’t get to the phone before the caller hung up.

She dropped her ski pole and tore the gauntlet off her right hand as the signature tune played louder inside her jacket. Her fingers fumbled at the zip and clawed inside her pocket, at last folding around the cold metal curve of the ringing phone. She flipped open the cover and pressed the phone to her ear.

‘Hello? Hello? Who is it?’

It was the same voice on the line again. A gruff male voice, speaking in a language or accent she couldn’t understand. The line wasn’t clear. It was muffled and distant and the man seemed to be repeating the same phrases over and over.

‘I can’t hear you! Please! Je ne comprends pas!’

The voice barked an instruction or phrase at her.

‘Encore! Say again! Oh God! Please! Who are you?’

The voice spoke again. He seemed to say the words la zone, la zone. But the line crackled. It was impossible to know what he was saying. He might have been calling from the dark side of the moon.

The line went dead.

La zone. Or was it La Zoe? No, no. It was more like la zone. He might have been saying that. He might have. The zone. But what did that mean?

Zoe turned her skis to the fall-line and let them slice through the fluffy snow. She dropped a few hundred metres in seconds. Jake was waiting for her.

‘Skiing good,’ he said as she carved a turn to draw up beside him.

She looked at him. His huge sunglasses shielded his eyes, bouncing the sun’s glare back off the blue glass. She wondered how much to tell him.

‘You okay?’

‘The phone went again.’

‘What?’

‘Same voice. Same incoherent words.’

‘You’re not okay. You didn’t—’ ‘No, I didn’t imagine it. Why does it only ring when you’re not there? I’m going to give you my phone. You can handle it next time this happens.’

‘No, you keep it. I have my own.’

‘I thought he said la zone. The zone. But that might be wrong. I don’t know. It was so muffled and distant.’

‘The zone.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Come on. Enough. Let’s call it a day.’

They had no appetite for food that night. Jake re-inspected the vegetables and the meat on the slab in the kitchen and reported that they were finally going off. The celery sticks were browning. A grey patina was forming over the chopped potatoes. But it was all still happening very slowly.

They went out to a bar. They found a CD of songs by The Kinks and drank rich, dark, juicy Malbec; but they couldn’t be bothered to remember how it tasted or how to be drunk. The music they loved gave them little pleasure, as if that too had to be remembered. They ran out of conversation, so they went back to their room early and showered.

Zoe noticed Jake’s erection as he dried himself. She made some comment.

‘It’s odd. I’m hard all the time here.’

‘All the time?’

‘Yes. Well, it subsides for a little while after we’ve had sex but not for long.’

‘You should say.’

‘Sweetheart, I can’t be inside you all the time. You know you wouldn’t like it.’

She raised her eyebrows at him.

Their sexual activity had regulated a long while ago. She had never used it, like some women, as a means of getting her way on other matters. But she had never made herself open to him either. She had always controlled the flow. Sex was never rationed; but neither was it unrestricted. He liked to have her from behind; she didn’t. He liked to do it outside; she wasn’t much for that. He liked her to sit astride him; she preferred conventional positions. He occasionally suggested dressing up; she found the idea too bloody ridiculous for words.

‘I’ve been a disappointment to you in that department, haven’t I?’ she said.

‘No you haven’t,’ he countered.

‘I’ve been lazy.’

‘Not true.’

‘It doesn’t mean I loved you any less.’

‘I know that.’

‘Sex isn’t a measure of love. Sometimes it has nothing to do with love. Nothing whatsoever.’

He sat on the bed in his towel, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Why are you saying all these things?’

‘Because here it feels like I have to make everything I say count for something.’

‘Didn’t you before?’

‘No. Not always, anyway. I was careless with things I said. I was careless with my decisions. Careless.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t matter any more.’

‘Oh, it does matter. Everything matters. And in this place the rules are different.’

‘In this place we make up the rules, it seems to me.’

She sighed. She knew her words had depressed him a little. He’d simply come at her wanting a fuck and she’d disheartened him. But if there were to be no lovemaking that night it would represent the first pause since the day of the avalanche. Zoe didn’t want to allow that to happen. If a night went by, then the next day might, too; and then the next night. And what Zoe feared most was the wedge.

She couldn’t say exactly when she had started to feel the presence of the wedge. It might have begun in those very first days when they had argued about how to get out of this place. But she felt that some force, some power like magnetism or anti-magnetism was doing its best to quietly insinuate its way between them. Again it was like a law of physics, some current grounded in the place that behaved like another woman who wanted to split them up, through barely perceptible and insidiously manipulative means.

Her pregnancy was intimately connected with this feeling. She was still testing obsessively. And each time confirmation that the baby was swelling inside her was offered, then so did she become attuned to the possibility of a division between her and Jake. This was nothing to do with love or lack of it. Her love and affection for him, and their mutual dependence in this shadow world, had amplified massively. But there were forces of reversal at work here. If love was a force of gravity, this place had a centrifugal force, dragging at her psyche.

She wanted to arm herself against this centrifuge and sex was part of her armoury. She placed the flat of her hand on the rise of his belly and then leaned across him to lick a sensitive spot just above his pelvis, because it