‘Got a shirt you could lend me, Doggo?’
’Try this one.’ He passes me a white shirt, only lightly creased—astonishing given that it’s spent four days in the sports hold-all he has for luggage (you can tell his family doesn’t travel much).
’Thanks! Don’t suppose you’ve got any trousers, have you?’
‘Didn’t you pack anything?’
I thought that Mum and I had been thorough in our preparations for this skiing trip. In one of her periodic fits of extravagance she bought every one of the items on the duplicated sheets handed out by the school, including thermal undershirts, long johns, two pairs of ski-pants, a weather-proof anorak and some snow boots I knew I would never use because they looked like something a 90 year-old woman from Lapland might wear. Meanwhile I worked my way through the exercises diagrammed on the sheets, desperately trying to get my ectomorphic frame—winnowed out by childhood TB and too many nights under the covers reading books by torchlight—into some sort of shape for the slopes.
Somehow it hasn’t occurred to either my mother or me that at some point the skiing must stop and there will be evenings. And socialising. But no-one in our immediate family has every been on a ski trip before. There is also no way it could have been predicted, I suppose, that the hotel would throw an actual party for us towards the end of the holiday—a party with actual girls moreover, from a school in Scotland; and in particular a blue-eyed, brown-haired pharmacist’s daughter who has seriously got amongst me since the moment our eyes locked over a table-football machine in the bar two nights ago.
Returning to my room with the borrowed shirt and trousers I dress a tad more carefully than usual. I’ve never previously given much thought to fashion beyond a concern to avoid the sort of errors that cause trouble at school—such as turning up for a geography field trip where you are allowed to wear your own clothes in a pair of Levis you have ill-advisedly allowed your mother to buy without supervision, and which your classmates immediately recognise as bearing the wrong coloured back-pocket tag—prompting the taunt: ‘Helmer’s wearing Junior Levis’; and placing a stain on my record that will take years to erase.
But now I do give a thought to clothes, since Fiona (that’s the pharmacist’s daughter) will be at the party. And to hair. Appearance suddenly seems really important. I feel an unaccustomed urge to in some small way approximate the suavity of childhood role models such as Adam Adamant, James Bond and Napoleon Solo. Though the sight that stares back at me from the mirror—sticky-out ears, shock of disobedient blonde hair, nose burned to a violent red—looks anything but suave.
Having made the best of a bad job I join the throng going down to dinner, through corridors with their wintergreen smell that are flooded in daytime with Alpine light of an austere brilliance. Descending to the ground-floor we find glasses of some sparkling white wine set out on the tables, and unaccountably, they’re for us. This is the French part of Switzerland, which also means that the food is good, if unfamiliar.
After dinner we make for the hotel bar where I quickly find Fiona and we lock eyes again and then, for the first time, hands. We’ve spent a couple of evenings in this bar together since that game of table football; drinking cokes, putting coins in the jukebox and generally getting to know one another. But tonight is special. It’s the last we’ll have together before we both go home. After an hour or two of enraptured chatting Doggo, who is also paired off, with another girl from Fiona’s school, suggests a walk.
We follow the road out of Champéry for a bit, the four of us, and after a while I take Fiona’s hand. It feels awkward at first because we can’t get in step: I haven’t yet learned the trick of adjusting my pace to that of someone who is shorter than me and who walks less quickly. So I put my arm around her shoulder instead and this seems to work. She leans into me. Stars blaze ferociously in the clear air, while the moon picks out snow-covered roofs in the valley below, and colours purple outcrops of rock in the alp that looms above our heads. After a while the other couple fall behind, and soon we notice they’ve come to a stop. Fiona and I look at each other, giggle, and walk on, pressing closer. When we are around the next bend it is our turn to move against the mountain, synchronising perfectly at last.
Snow is falling. Chill air prickles the skin of our faces, making the warmth of her mouth all the more startling as it meets mine. An unexpected voltage runs through me, reminiscent of a time on the top bunk in the room I share with my brother at home when, out of a mixture of curiosity and boredom, I stuck my thumb in the bulbless light socket overhead.
How long does it last, our huddle against the alp? Time not measurable by clocks, atoms or stars. It’s time out of time. And who decides when it should end? Probably the sensible pharmacist’s daughter, whose favourite record is Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bouncy Bad Moon Rising, where mine is the slushy Something from The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Both of these records are on the hotel jukebox in the bar, and as we head back there I am amazed at how smoothly and easily this has all gone; the cheesy pickup lines and tricks of coercion passed around at school proving to be completely unnecessary. It’s so simple, I think to myself; you talk to each other about your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams for the future, you look into each other’s eyes a couple of times and then without thought or calculation come together. (Come Together, flipside of Something, is also on heavy rotation back at the bar, popular for the innuendo in its title and reference to ejaculation in the line, ‘he shoots Coca-Cola’).
I feel as if Fiona and I have been moved on a mountain ski-lift to a new stratum of air, where we can pause and look up towards the exosphere of adulthood, which doesn’t seem so bad from this vantage. Parents and siblings aren’t the only bodies in the universe that have a gravitational pull on our affections now. Far beyond the orbit of family and home, life seems suddenly full of new, stellar possibilities.
Back at the bar we sit and hold hands covertly in the fold of a banquette, listening to the jukebox. It’s songs have grown extra meaning. ‘I’m leaving on a jet plane,’ sing Peter, Paul and Mary. ‘I don’t want to leave her now,’ coos George Harrison. The reality of our situation begins to dawn.
We swap addresses. Back home we write a couple of letters each, letters full of longing and sadness, then stop. The practical difficulties of continuing a relationship when we live at opposite ends of the British Isles are too starkly clear to ignore. Gravity reasserts itself.
I spend most of that Christmas maundering around listening to Abbey Road and annoying my family with my listless sighing at mealtimes. Come New Year we have a family party and, feeling almost a grown-up, now that I have loved and lost, drink alcohol as if I were a grown-up. Next morning reveals a puddle of puke on the carpet next to my bed, and a sadness unlike anything I have known before. Limping to the window, I look out at the sky. It is leaden and dull. I feel an anxious sense of something big and horrible on its way.
Meanwhile, Mum works grimly at the carpet behind me, applying some noxious-smelling cleaning product that will bleach the puke stain into permanence and taint the air of the room for months to come.
‘Welcome to 1970,’ she says bitterly.