Zoe opened the mahogany TV cabinet doors and switched on the set. She flashed through the channels but all she could get was an electrical snowstorm of a picture and the sound of static interference. Jake got up and grabbed the remote control from her, as if his pressing the buttons might produce better results. It didn’t. The TV was also programmed for radio reception, but nothing was coming through on any of the channels. Just static. White noise.
‘Look,’ Zoe said, ‘I’m not thinking straight. We’re here for the night. We need to eat something.’
‘We’ll have to cook it ourselves.’
‘No hardship. Let’s see what they’ve got in the kitchen.’
They went down to the restaurant and slipped through to the kitchens, where they’d been earlier. Everything was still the way they’d found it on their first visit. Lean cuts of red meat lay on the work counter, ready for cooking, as did a neat array of chopped vegetables. They decided to leave the stuff that had been out all day. In the chiller cabinet they found fresh fillet steaks.
Zoe poured olive oil into a huge pan while Jake popped the gas burners. He found a pristine white chef’s toque and put it on. He was living it large. ‘Everything’s runnin’. Gas. Light. Me. We may be about to die under an avalanche but I’m in the kitchen and we’re sizzling a steak.’
He served it medium rare with onions and mushrooms. Zoe meanwhile dished up green beans and butter. She had also raided the wine store and popped open a bottle of red.
‘What’s this, you cheapskate? Get back and fetch us a bottle of real wine, will ya?’
Zoe shook her head. ‘Take that hat off. You look like a twat. We’ll get billed for all this, you know.
‘I don’t care. If this is my last bottle of wine I want something good.’
He got up. When he came back she’d lit a candle at the table. He was still wearing his toque, and was carrying a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. She wanted to look at the wine list to see what his choice might have cost them, but he grabbed it off her and skimmed it across the empty restaurant, telling her to just pour it. She in turn snatched the toque from his head and tossed it the way of the wine list.
‘We’ll get thrown out of here,’ he said, clinking glasses.
‘Survivors,’ she said.
‘Survivors.’
‘This is surreal.’
‘But it’s not a dream.’
‘When I think of all the places we’ve had dinner together. Meals at home. Dinners out. Fancy restaurants. Cheap cafes. Picnics. This is the one I’ll remember above any of them. It’s like we’re the last people in the world.’
‘And the snow outside is still falling. If you were with the right person you might even find this romantic.’
The candlelight wavered slightly, and she saw the catch-light flicker in his bloodshot eyes, and she remembered that they had come on this holiday with a job to do. There was something they had to sort out. Something they were meant to discuss. But she knew that right now was the wrong moment. She let it go.
‘How’s your steak?’
‘Perfect. You know,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve always been secretly afraid of the avalanche. This is what, almost my twentieth skiing break? And right from when I was a beginner I’ve always known it was there. Like something in your dreams, crouched, waiting behind you, waiting to snatch it all away from you.’
‘Are you still afraid of it? After what happened today?’
‘Put it like this. I think we should move into one of the rooms across the hall. I really don’t think the snow is going to crash down on us. But if it did, we’d be safer on that side.’
‘Right. That’s a very nice wine.’
‘Really? Doesn’t taste of much to me.’
‘Nonsense. Let’s go two bottles.’
‘You sure? I don’t want you drunk.’
‘Yes you do. You want me drunk.’
They commandeered a new room, where they lay on the bed with the curtains open, should there be any movement or activity or patrols in the night. Zoe was anxious at every creak of the hotel, in case it heralded the big slide of snow. Jake was oddly resigned. He didn’t think it was going to happen: he didn’t know why he thought that, he just felt that despite the evacuation, it wasn’t a threat.
Two bottles of red wine were enough to sedate them, though sleep didn’t come easily. They lay kissing for hours. Just kissing, not wanting to speak, not wanting to take their mouths away from each other’s lips, which was of course a way of speaking. Then Jake did something he’d never done before, which was to lift her and carry her from the bed so that they fucked against the wall, standing up, with Zoe balanced on her toes.
Then they fell back into bed, and finally fell asleep.
‘Wake up!’
Jake blinked at her. It was morning. Zoe pulled off her wool hat and opened her ski jacket. She’d been outside, to a pharmacy, to get some drops for their bloodshot eyes.
‘You been out?’
‘I got you this. Put your head back and open your eyes. Man, that looks sore. Your eyes are like piss-holes in the snow.’ She let three drops fall into each of his eyes, then screwed the dropper back into the bottle.
‘Anyone out there?’
‘Nope.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Not late.’
Jake tossed back the covers. ‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep.’
‘I thought you needed it. I think you’re still traumatised.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I think you are. You’re behaving differently.’
‘Like how?’
Zoe raised an eyebrow.
He dressed hurriedly. ‘We need to get that car back on the road and get going.’
‘Okay. I brought you some breakfast from the kitchen.’
There was a tray on the table: coffee, juice and scrambled eggs on toast under a silver dome. ‘You know what? You could almost get to like it here. If you didn’t have to scarper.’
He ate breakfast quickly, pulled on his thermal under wear, his salopettes and ski jacket and together they went out to take a look at the car. It was still snowing but only very lightly now. Tiny flakes billowed in the air, barely contributing to the thick, feathery deposit that layered the road and the pavement. There were plenty of patches of blue in the sky between the low-lying grey clouds. They stuck to the middle of the road, trudging through the thick snow.
After twenty minutes they came upon the police car and Zoe gasped as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
‘Holy heaven!’
Jake just blinked.
The wheel of the police car on the driver’s side dangled in space above a clean drop of fifteen metres down a smooth face of granite. Had it continued over, the car would have hit more granite rocks at the bottom, and from there it would have plunged down a steep tree-lined slope. Maybe it would have hit a tree trunk head on; maybe not. A rounded tooth of amber-stained limestone poking out of the snow in front of the passenger-side wheel had stopped any further onward motion of the car. The rock blocking the wheel looked like a carved tombstone, but their names weren’t chiselled there because it had been their salvation.
Zoe kneeled on the snow and covered her ears with her hands. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘You’d better.’
‘We must have an angel watching over us. I swear.’
‘Well, I don’t believe in angels. But you’re right.’
Zoe scrambled to her feet again and grabbed Jake’s arm. They stared down at the car, and the drop beneath
