The Silent Land

6

The snow stopped. The swollen grey clouds drifted on and the sun appeared in the ice-blue sky. The sun lanced off the snow and they had to wear sunglasses all the time. Good sunglasses, expensive ones, and all they had to do was walk into a store and pick out the very best designer pairs available.

Of course Zoe did not immediately accept that they had died in the avalanche. Swallowing that was more than a little difficult.

For who could acknowledge such a thing? But it was as if once Jake had enunciated the fact, and had himself accepted the logic of the situation and openly proclaimed it, then the weather had changed accordingly. There was no longer any need—it seemed—for the world to be wrapped in a spectral mist of snow, and the best of all possible worlds could be on display.

Naturally Zoe blanked the idea. She insisted they walk out of the village all over again, this time on the clear roads. Jake offered no resistance, beyond commenting that it would make no difference. He was right: even on a clear day, with no confusion over the direction in which they walked, the roads unaccountably delivered them back to Saint-Bernard-en-Haut all over again. They commandeered the police car again and successfully started it up; but whichever route they drove it was as if a giant, gentle hand curved the road and steered them back to their starting point.

‘How can this be?’ she had railed. ‘How can this be happening?’

Jake had merely blinked his eggshell-blue eyes. ‘I’ve explained it to you. There’s no more to be said.’

Four days of this. It was impossible; it couldn’t be happening; it made no sense; it defied natural law. But there it was. And in that time lighted candles did not burn down, meat and vegetables on the slab showed no sign of decay or wilt, and blood did not flow.

While her brain resisted and reasoned, fought and tested the uncanny and undeniable logic, her heart never 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: All I know is that there is sun and sky and snow and me and you, that’s all I know. And she would rage against him, until he felt obliged to try to answer the questions for her, even though he admitted now that he’d spent all of his life pretending to know the unknowable, pretending to be able to outstare the man in the hood.

‘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.

I’m not going to say anything, she thought. If he wants to play games…

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 her feelings started to change. The thing was, she wanted Jake’s feelings to change along with hers, to mesh, to cog; and she suspected that was going to be unlikely. They had discussed it once or twice, and the question had evaporated. There wasn’t a no. But there wasn’t a yes in the air, either.

They had watched with rotating envy, suspicion and horror as friends of theirs became parents. They had seen lives changed, both for better and for worse. In some cases the advent of parenthood had been a thrilling and giddy elevation of life into the upper air; in others it had been a chaotic nosedive into disaster and divorce. For some, becoming a mother or a father channelled a blissed-out source of energy and joy; others were exhausted drones, depressed and zoned out by the experience. There seemed to be no rules for how the thing played itself out in people’s lives.

But when she had fallen pregnant just before their skiing holiday, Zoe knew she wanted it. She was just not the sort of woman to drag a man kicking and screaming into fatherhood. Her plan had been to await the magical moment, perhaps at the top of a mountain or during a walk through the perfect snow of early evening, and with dusk settling to sound him out; and if the auguries were positive, she would reveal her sensational news.

But then the avalanche.

And now, although every sinew and nerve inside her resisted the premise, she was dead.

Pregnant and dead.

The new question of course concerned the nature of her pregnancy. Was it the kind of pregnancy that gestated and changed with the passing of the sun across the sky; or one that remained in a state of stasis, a frozen embryo suspended inside her, like the candle flame that never progressed down the wax? If it were the former would she tell Jake? And would she if it were the latter? Perhaps if they were trapped here for eternity, she would be eternally pregnant, without ever arriving at full term.

She heard the outer door open and close as Jake came back into the room. She hoiked up her trousers, flushed the toilet and carefully hid the tester stick at the bottom of the bathroom bin. When she emerged Jake was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, looking at her strangely.

‘When did you last have a dump?’

‘What?’

‘When? Because I didn’t have a dump since the avalanche until just now. And the urge only came on me when you mentioned being hungry. I thought about that and felt hungry. That made me remember that I hadn’t had a dump. And remembering not having a dump before made me suddenly have to go for a dump.’

‘Jake, do you think we’re trapped here? Or have we been released here?’

‘You think about it hard enough and you’ll want a dump too.’

‘Can you shut up about dumping?’

‘Just sayin’, okay?’

‘It’s an important question—if we’re trapped, or if we’ve been freed to be here. It will change the way we are when we’re here, won’t it?’

‘We’re at cross-purposes, aren’t we? Talking on different levels.’

‘You could say that.’

‘Dumping is a very important question.’

‘Hell! I suppose I haven’t since the avalanche. It’s probably the trauma. You know? A reaction. Now I’ve started thinking about, I have to go.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ he said.

She turned and went back into the bathroom, shutting the door on him.

‘It’s always good,’ Jake shouted through the closed door, ‘to take a happy dump.’

‘Shut up!’

Jake moved away from the door. ‘Always good to take a happy dump,’ he said quietly.

In the night she was awoken by a bright white disc hovering in the air close to her face. A voice clearly whispered her name:

‘Zoe! Zoe! Approach the light! Come into the light.’

Zoe sat up in bed, squinting between her splayed fingers at the source of the light. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Even as a dead person you can be such an arsehole.’

Jake switched off the lamp he was holding a few centimetres away from Zoe’s face and put it back on the bedside table. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I keep thinking about our situation.’

A crack of light leaked through the curtains. Zoe got up and drew back the curtains and the room was washed by thrilling moonlight. Outside it reflected brilliantly on the snow. It was enough to see by. ‘Pour us both a cognac. Let’s talk.’

Jake splashed the amber liquid into a pair of tumblers, handing one of them to Zoe. He took a drink and sniffed.

‘I want to ask you something,’ she said. ‘It was something I asked you yesterday, but I want you to think hard about it before answering.’

‘Fire away.’ He took another sip. ‘You know what? This cognac doesn’t taste of cognac.’

‘I asked you if you thought we’re trapped here, or if we’ve been freed here.’

‘Depends which way you choose to see it.’

‘Exactly. There isn’t a right answer, is there? It depends on how we choose to see it. If we choose to see it as if we’re trapped here, then our situation is tragic. If we choose to see that we’ve been liberated here, then it’s the opposite.’

‘Comic?’

‘Comic isn’t the opposite of tragic.’

‘No.’

‘I mean to say, if we choose to see it the right way, we could have the most magical time here. You and me. Together and alone. We have warmth, shelter, food, the best wine, skiing on wonderful slopes together. It’s paradise: if we choose to accept it. If we choose to call it that.’

‘I guess.’

‘You guess?’

‘Well, yes. You could be right.’

She heard the shadow on his words. ‘But. There’s a but, isn’t there? There’s always a but.’

‘No, you’re right. We can be free, together, staying here, playing in the snow like children, with all our needs taken care of.’

‘But. Tell me your but.’

‘Okay. It’s like this. Even though there is no decay here, even though meat stays fresh and candles don’t burn down, there is still another level in which time is passing. The sun goes down and comes up. We sleep, we pee, we dump. There is energy, keeping the lights on, driving the chairlifts. And energy burning is an event. And the event must pass.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

‘Been thinking about it. In all our folklore about death, someone comes to collect us. You know, Uncle Derek in a surgical gown telling you to go into the light. The Devil shovelling you into his furnace. Charon to row you across the River Styx. I can’t help feeling someone or something… is coming.’

‘Coming?’

‘Yes… coming. To collect us.’

Zoe shivered. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

He went over to the window and looked out across the lustrous moonlit snow. ‘Me too. I also wish I hadn’t said it. But . . . that’s my but about all this. I feel it. I feel something coming.’

‘You don’t believe in any of that! Charon, the Devil, Uncle Derek! Maybe this is an atheist’s afterlife. You’re an atheist to the bone, like I am.’

‘I am. And I’m not backing away from that. I just feel that someone or something is making its way here.’ He drained his glass. ‘What does this cognac taste like to you?’

They went out to ski. Zoe said that she’d come to this place to ski and that she wanted to ski, so out they went. She asked if they might try the same route by which they’d tried to leave the village after the avalanche. Jake knew that she was going to want to cut through the trees all over again, to find a way out, but he said nothing. He seemed resigned to letting her try, as if he knew what was going to happen. It made no difference if they tried or if they didn’t.

The chairlift running up the south side of the valley was still in motion, exactly as they had left it. The engine emitted a low hum and machinery rattled as empty chairs were whisked around at the bottom of the lift and sent back up in pointless ascent; on the other side the chairs returned in regular order, somehow looking as if they’d been through fire; or through a war; or had survived some bitter experience that, regardless, had left them stoic and unmoved. Though they were just empty chairs, there was a horrible futility in the repetition of their tracked existence along the cable lines. As if they’d had the chance to learn something, but failed.

They dropped into a chair together. Jake put his arm around Zoe. She let herself snuggle into him as they were whisked above the trees. She saw him scanning the white wilderness below.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.

‘Tracks.’

‘Tracks of what?’

‘Anything alive. Fox. Hare. Chamois. Pine martens. Anything. Bird tracks even.’ He leaned across the chair, scanning the pristine snow between the trees. ‘I haven’t seen a living thing since the day of the avalanche.’

‘I have.’

‘Really.’

‘There were two crows.’

‘Really?’

‘I haven’t seen them since.’ She fell silent, thinking about the crows. There was only the hum of the cable,and a chatter as the chair rode over a pylon, followed by a regular flapping of the cable like large leathery wings. Then there was quiet again, with only the sob of the wind in the taut wires.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘The crows.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know that it means anything. It was just two crows. Does everything have to mean something?’

There was no answer to this, other than the chatter of the chair. At the top of the lift they easily glided off. Jake re-fixed his hat and threaded his pole straps over his wrists.

‘It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. Jake, Can we—’ ‘Yes.’

‘Yes to what? You don’t know what I’m going to ask.’

‘Halfway down. Can we turn off into the woods. Try again. Yes.’

‘I made such a bad job of skiing it the other day. I only want to see if I can do it better.’

He smiled. ‘That’s a good reason.’

‘We can be a little more relaxed this time.’

‘Sure. We’ll stop at the same place.’

Jake pushed off, letting the skis glide. The quality of the snow had changed. It was still deep and unblemished, unpisted by machines, but the sun had softened it and the skis ran fractionally slower, and with more of a hiss.

Zoe came behind him. The sky was an astonishing blue and the larch and pine mingled with spruce wove a thrilling flank of green velvet either side of the waxen white slope. Zoe knew that just to let the skis run was the nearest she could ever come to flying.

I am falling through the rings of heaven.

The virgin snow parted for the floating tips of her skis. Way, way down the slope she looked back to see Jake, in his black ski suit, swooping down the run like a beautiful crow, offering barely a turn, wheeling only when he approached Zoe so that he could draw up beside her.

‘I didn’t know I’d passed you,’ she said.

‘You were in your own world.’

‘I was. Just for a minute I was a bird. So were you.’

‘Through the trees now?’

‘Through the trees.’

They managed it more effectively this time, and where they didn’t, they laughed, and their shared laughter cut through the silent trees. It was a little like laughing in church: whether it was approved of or frowned upon depended on the aspect of your God. They sprang across icy streams, and stepped around outcrops of stone that resembled the half-buried fists or knuckled fingers of giants. They slipped between the shadowy spruce and pine, triggering flurries and falls of powder behind them.

It was difficult going, but they got through it without taking a fall this time before hitting the same snow-covered logging road. They knew it would carry them back into Saint-Bernard, so without a word, they plunged further down through the trees, only to find another loop of the road beneath them, and a steep edge they couldn’t cross. Surrendering again to the inevitable, they let the skis ride the logging road back into the village.

There were no signs of the ski tracks they had made on their first attempt to abandon the village. All had been covered over. Jake stopped twice on the way down, turning to look back. He said he thought there might be someone or something behind him, following them. Or maybe he just wanted there to be something behind him.

They saw nothing. A kind of acceptance came over them.

They set chairlifts and drag lifts running all over the village, opening up a network of runs. The snow conditions were perfect. The sky was the blue of a prayer and the sun made it possible for them to leave off their coats.

‘I’m skiing better than I’ve ever done,’ Zoe said.

‘Me too. You want to stop for lunch?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Me neither, but I want to stop at one of these mountain restaurants, build a fire and relax in front of it.’

‘Are you cold?’

‘Not at all. But it’s what I want to do. We eat when we’re not hungry; drink when we’re not thirsty; and I want to relax when I’m not tired.’

‘Okay. I’ll race you to La Chamade.’ She was already sweeping down the fall-line.

Zoe stood at the entrance to the mountain restaurant, skis off, holding them upright, waiting. ‘Slacker.’

‘I don’t know how you do it.’

There were a couple of abandoned ski sets, ice-packed and snow-covered, resting against the rack outside the log-built restaurant. They set their skis upright on the rack next to them and went inside. The lights were on in the kitchen but not the dining room. La Chamade had a large open stone hearth, with a ready basket of logs. Jake went into the back to find kindling and matches, then quickly made up the fire. The pine logs spat as they caught.

He sniffed at the smoke. ‘Can you smell the pine logs?’

‘Yes. Or maybe I can now you’ve said it.’

‘Can you remember that feeling, of coming in from the cold snow, maybe when your fingers and your toes are aching from the chill of it, and you sit near a fire and your cheeks start to flame, and the pleasure of thawing out, and what it does to your blood?’

She shuffled over to him and leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘I can remember. I’m feeling it now.’

‘That’s just it, isn’t it? We remember it, and then we feel it. You describe the sensation to me and then I feel it. But not before the fact. Not before.’

Zoe started to cry. ‘Where are we? What’s happening?’

‘Come here. Don’t cry now. I don’t know the answer. I only know one thing: to be here alone, to be experiencing this on my own, that would be hell. With you here, I can do it.’

She hugged him and looked at him. ‘I’m not unhappy. I’m bewildered, and more than a bit scared.’

‘But do you understand, Zoe? We have to remember things for each other. This life, whatever it is, we re-make for each other.’

‘I think I understand.’

He went to the bar, found a bottle of red wine and removed the cork. He brought the bottle and two glasses, filling one for each of them. ‘Taste it.’ He read the label. ‘It’s an Albert Bichot Gevrey-Chambertin les Corvées 2004 Burgundy, which means bugger-all to me, so I don’t know if it’s good or bad, if it costs an arm and a leg or if it’s a cheap one. You’re on your own. Tell me what you think.’

She stuck her nose in the glass first, like a connoisseur. Then she tasted, holding the wine on her tongue for a moment before letting it wash around her mouth. She thought about sugar and acidity and tannin, then about fruit and spice and earthiness. Then she swallowed it, thinking about whether she truly wanted another sip, or not.

He looked at her expectantly with his still-bloodshot eyes.

‘You want me to be honest? It doesn’t taste of anything. Neutral.’

‘Exactly. Like everything around here. But what if I remember for you how good red wine tastes. That it has the savour of, maybe, cherries, but a bit spicy. That it’s a bit woody, like oak, and that there are all kinds of savoury tensions on your tongue, sweet and acid, dry and fluid. And that the taste persists, light, but a pleasant aftertaste.’

‘I can taste all that now!’

‘And doesn’t it evoke the cardinal’s red robe and the Devil’s furnace?’

‘Now you’re talking bollocks. Although, now you come to mention it…’

‘Sin and redemption?’

‘Honey and fire?’

‘You’re going to have to pour me another glass. Does it still taste of nothing to you?’

‘No—it tastes of all the things you say, it really does. It really, really does. Don’t you think that’s odd?

‘Everything is odd here.’

‘No, I mean the way it only tastes of something after we’ve talked about it. And I had no idea you knew so much about wine.’

‘I don’t. I was making it up. At least I think I was. The point is that here, we can tell our own story. The story of what happens. We don’t have to let other people tell us the story and— Did you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’

Jake was on his feet and striding across to the window. ‘I swear I heard a dog bark.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yes, a dog. I heard it bark. Really clear, with an echo across the snow.’

She joined him at the window. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘I wasn’t imagining it.’

‘I’m not saying you did.’

‘I know you’re not saying I did. When I say I’m not imagining things, I’m talking to myself.’

‘I can’t see anything out there.’

‘There was a dog. Or at least there was a bark. I’m going out to look.’

She shrugged and let him go and she sat by the fire and waited. She took another sip of the cardinal’s red robe. The fire burned in the hearth without a crackle: clean, orange flames, like fingers reaching from under the curve of the log, cradling it, almost lovingly, as it burned. She turned from the fire, looked out, and saw Jake trudging through the snow.

After a while he came back. ‘Nothing,’ he said in a depressed voice.

‘Well.’

‘I could have sworn.’

‘Drink some more wine.’

They finished off the bottle of red wine. Now it tasted of many wonderful things.

‘It would be good,’ he said.

‘What would?’

‘If there was a dog.’

She held his hand in hers. ‘Do you think we’ll ever get over that? The sadness? The regret?’

He drained his glass and placed it on the table. ‘Let’s go and have some fun.’

They went up the drag lift onto a long easy run and skied down backwards together all the way. They took a steep red run and came down carving precision turns, she trying to keep in his tracks exactly, and then reversing the order. They found their way into the snowboarding park and rode a few jumps. Their skiing seemed to have improved disproportionately to the time they had spent on the skis. Zoe said skiers always remember themselves as performing better than they had in reality; Jake agreed but said he could never remember being this good. The skiing was by no means effortless, but their technical proficiency was a surprise to both of them.

The snowboard park had a control station with a sound system for broadcasting through speakers wired across the slopes. Jake found a Jimi Hendrix CD, cranked up the volume and they spent the rest of the afternoon tearing around the snowboard park, running the half-pipes and quarter-pipes, leaping the spines and tabletops. They’d both started out as snowboarders but had moved over to skis in favour of speed.

After a couple of hours the light started to fade. Jake wanted to leave the music running, but Zoe made him turn it off. She said she liked to hear the sound of the moon and the stars over the snow and it seemed so right at the time that he didn’t question it. They let their skis glide them back to their hotel.

As they arrived at the bottom of the slope, a dog barked, clearly in the cold. The bark seemed to hang in the icy air.

‘I heard it that time, Jake!’

‘Over there. Near the trees.’

‘There it is!’

At the foot of the ski slope was a thin clump of trees dividing two nursery runs. A medium-sized black dog sat back on its haunches, muzzle pointing up, its front paws between its hind legs. It barked again; and the bark ricocheted to them through the cold dusk air. The dog licked its lips and its red tongue flashed in the chiaroscuro of the declining light.

Jake whistled to the dog. ‘C’m here, c’m here.’

The dog rose, its tail wagging; though it seemed reluctant to approach. Jake pushed on his skis and glided nearer to the dog, whistling, calling it. The dog barked again.

Jake stopped and stepped out of his bindings. He took two steps towards the dog and then he stopped dead. ‘Oh my God,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ Zoe came up behind him. The dog was still wagging its tail, looking happy. ‘Come on, boy,’ Zoe called.

‘It isn’t a boy,’ he said. ‘It’s a bitch. It’s my dog. It’s Sadie.’

Sadie was the dog that Jake had grown up with. He’d had her from a pup and she had died when he was eighteen, some years before he’d met Zoe.

The dog, as if triggered by the name, flung herself across at Jake, yelping and wagging her tail. Almost delirious in her happiness at finding Jake, as she jumped up at him she left yellow spots of piss in the snow. Jake fell to his knees hugging the dog, letting her lick his face.

‘What’s going on?’ Zoe asked.

‘It’s my dog it’s my dog it’s my dog!’ Jake was laughing and crying simultaneously. ‘I haven’t seen her in years and years, and I missed her, and she’s back.’ With his knees deep in the snow and the dog licking the tears from his face, he looked up at Zoe, smiling. ‘She’s back.’

Zoe squatted down by the dog and her husband. ‘Jake… are you sure it’s your dog?’

‘Sadie, meet Zoe. Zoe, meet Sadie. I can’t believe this day! I can’t!’

The dog licked Zoe’s face, and then went back to Jake. Zoe wanted to share in the happiness, but she didn’t believe it. Though she was thrilled to see this new sign of life, she was not a dog lover and had no experience of canines.

‘Jake, how can you be certain it’s your dog?’

Jake laughed. ‘Can you hear that, Sadie? Can you hear that? Darling, if you have a dog, you know it when you see it again. You know it.’

‘Okay. It just… looks like a lot of dogs to me.’

‘Listen to her, Sadie! She says you look like any ol’ dog! Sweetheart, if I didn’t see you in years and years I’d still know you. It’s the same thing.’

‘Okay. I just… you’re not fooling yourself because you want her to be Sadie, right?’

‘Here! Without looking, I know she has a scar in the inside fold of her left ear. She got a nasty cut from some barbed wire one time. Come over here.’ He held the dog still and pulled back her ear. Zoe peered hard at the pink fleshy exposed part of the inside of the ear. It was true there was a little scar there. Or perhaps it was a shadow. Maybe it was a scar, she thought.

‘Phew!’

‘This is so wonderful,’ Jake said. He got up out of the snow and hugged his wife. ‘Come on, let’s take her back to the hotel.’

With the dog trotting happily at Jake’s heels, they all made their way back to the hotel.

‘Do you think the management allow dogs?’ Zoe said.

Now they didn’t even bother leaving their equipment in the ski lockers; they just left everything in the carpeted lobby, along with their skis boots, gauntlets and coats. Jake went through to the kitchen to find something for the dog. He glanced at the steak still gleaming fresh on the block with the chopped vegetables; then he decided against.

‘No old steak for you, Sadie!’

Instead he walked into the freezer and took a steak from the rack. He defrosted it in the microwave and fried it in a skillet. He let it cool before putting it on a plate and offering it to the dog. Sadie wagged her tail and licked her lips, but she turned her nose up at the steak.

‘No good, girl? What they been feeding you on here?’ He wondered why Sadie wasn’t eating. Any dog would devour a piece of steak regardless of its state of hunger. Jake hunkered down and grabbed Sadie’s head just behind each flappy pouch of an ear. He wanted to smell her breath to see what she’d been eating. Thinking he was playing, Sadie licked him. He got a blast of her breath but it smelled of nothing. He tried to remember the smell of a dog’s breath.

Fishy, he thought, even when she hadn’t been eating fish; and mealy, like biscuit; and earthy like the soil after rain; and like yellow meadow grass; and pond-water; and… stop. He told himself to stop. He told himself to stop because this process of remembering made him bring to mind all the things he would never scent or savour ever again in his life other than in memory; and even though memory could restore them momentarily, that thought was bitter-sweet.

He grabbed the dog again, and she licked him, and this time he scented on her warm breath all the things he had just remembered. He walked out of the kitchen and the dog followed him.

He found Zoe in their hotel room.

‘Can we have Sadie in the room with us?’

‘I’d welcome Sadie’s fleas if she had some right now. It’s just great to see another living thing.’

‘Well, I guess she’s another dead thing, actually. I mean, I buried her, in the back garden, years ago. Buried her under a plum tree that had never fruited. Next season and ever after there was tons of fruit on that tree.’

‘Nutrients.’

‘Or a way of coming back to say hello? Shall I tell you something? I didn’t cry when my dad died, but I blubbed like a baby when I buried Sadie. Does that make me a bad person?’

‘A bad person?’

‘I felt more for my dog. Some people would say there’s something wrong there.’

‘You didn’t care much for what “some people” said when you were alive. Why would you now you’re dead? Heck, it doesn’t feel right saying that, but you know what I mean. Your father never showed affection. That’s what you told me.’

He went to the window and looked out at the darkness creeping over the unimpeachable white that lay on the ground like marzipan on a wedding cake. ‘Cold as the snow. Food on the table, clothes on your back, a serviceable education and never a hug. Never once.’

‘A different generation, Jake.’ ‘Well, they got that wrong. If I had a kid I’d—’

‘You’d what?’

He turned back to the dog. ‘Come here, girl!’

Zoe almost framed a word. But couldn’t.

That evening, before preparing for bed, Jake set a blanket down for Sadie so that she could make her den against the wall. Sadie threw herself on the blanket as if she’d always slept there. She lay with her head between her front paws, looking up at them with button eyes. Jake went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. As Zoe pulled back the duvet cover, something happened.

The lights dimmed for a moment, flickered and went out. After a couple of seconds of darkness, they blinked back on again.

Jake came out of the bathroom, holding his toothbrush. ‘What was that?’

‘The lights went out.’

‘I know that. What I mean is why?’

Zoe just stared at him.

‘Did they go out all over the resort?’

‘No idea.’

‘Do you think it was just our room? Or just our hotel?’

She shook her head.

‘I wonder what it means,’ he said.

Sadie was up on all fours, gazing at him. She barked, once.

‘Does it have to mean anything?’ Zoe asked.

Jake went to the window. ‘The lights are still on out there.’

‘Come to bed.’

‘I wonder what happened.’

‘Come to bed.’