on the ground by the car, his eyes red, his voice solid. ‘I’ll buy a new guitar. Please. Help me take those things back inside. Please, Dorothy. Help me.’
On the other side of the road a neighbour emerged from her front door, pulling her dressing gown tight around her, a telephone receiver in her hand. She walked a step towards them, as far as the cord would allow. Dorothy got out of the car and waved to the woman and called that she was Frank and Lee’s daughter, the Forrests’ daughter, everything was all right.
5. Out There
There was no queue yet for the second chairlift, and Evelyn had the bench seat to herself; it rocked under her shifting weight when she yanked the gloves and hat on and rubbed her ears through the wool. The ski-hut roof was icing white and smooth with snow. Up in the mountains, crumbs of rock faced outwards through the snowfall, dark and bumpy. The last of the pine trees passed beneath her feet. The boots hung heavy with the skis. Behind the sunglasses, her eyes stung and watered.
The chair reached the top and she lifted the bar and skied away before it arced the half-circle for its slow return journey. She kept climbing the slope, cutting the skis horizontally into the gradient, heading for a ridge that snaked upwards to a peak. At the ridge she faced up-mountain and was able to walk directly forwards. Her arms and legs worked hard; inside the ski suit was effort and heat. Her vision filled with the whiteness of snow. She panted heavily, thirstily, and lactic acid seared her muscles, and the slim Vs of her steps in the skis inched closer together until she was shuffling. She pushed on with the poles.
At the top of the ridge, where the ground fell away into a valley that led to another hill, Evelyn rotated the skis like irregular hands of a clock, the ticking spread and smashed in the snow in a five-point manoeuvre until she was positioned to head downhill. She took off the hat and listened to the whistling. Her hot head quickly cooled, the air like fingers through her hair. Velvety blue shadows ran down the side of the ridge’s spine. There were the dotted pines below, gathering further down into a white and black forest. And the car park, and the roads out, and very far away the muzzy village, some farmland, a greenness that was probably trees, and a shining fingernail of silver that might have been the edge of a lake, or a stretch of highway hit by the sun, or the tubing of an industrial greenhouse. Above, nothing but the pressure of the sky. For a moment it thudded closely onto her head, onto the speck that she was. She whooped – a ringing shout bounced back off the slopes – pulled the beanie back on, took a breath and launched forwards.
In the late afternoon, Daniel and the boy from the new family stood on the elevated deck of the hut. Daniel’s wrists hung over the railing and he held a cigarette between his fingers, the acrid smell drifting on a channel of air, and he and the boy looked out across the snowfields towards the pines. The boy was talking; Daniel smoked and listened, and at something the boy said he barked a short laugh. Evelyn waved up and pushed at her ski buckle with the pole to unclick it. A blast of wind scoured her face. As she entered the hut, Daniel and the boy retreated from the deck. In the shade of the cork-floored entranceway, the drying room and the utility room to either side, their overhead footsteps echoed. A cosy smell of wet wool rose as soon as she levered off the snow boots. The outer socks were thick and tongue-shaped, with a tweed-like pattern, dark around the edges with dissolved snow.
Evelyn stepped around the crusts of ice left by her boot prints on her way into the drying room, where she unzipped the ski jacket and emerged from the waterproof overalls and hung them up next to Daniel’s giant orange ski suit, a discarded lobster shell. She ran a hand down the leg of his overalls, the polyurethane coating slightly stiff. Her fingers found something hard halfway down the leg and she slid her hand into the slit of the trouser pocket. She felt a leathery flatness and drew out the small, dried body of Daniel’s