The Josephs and Other Stories. Polly Tuckett

       The Terrible Mountains

      You had to trust that your survival instinct would kick in, trust the will to control the body and determine a positive outcome. How could she know that whether on purpose or due to inexperience she wouldn’t veer off to the left into that stand of fir trees?

      The white expanse was like death itself. Her weakness was a drug coursing through her body, taking hold. Her legs were trembling and her feet inside the unyielding boots felt as though they were swimming in blood. The only way was down, although she could take sidewise penguin steps up the mountain to the ski lift. But no, she couldn’t – look at those empty chairs sailing free on their way back. Paolo was dead. And she had to get down the mountain; she, an alien, placing her faith in the manmade prosthetics jutting from her feet. Sick of the drama, the tumultuous poeticisms and pseudo-philosophical pronouncements clamouring in her mind, she could not, though, distance herself from them.

      The skis were pointed downwards, ready for the plunge. All around her people seemed glibly cheerful – determined, achieving, capable – people who knew not to question the sense of all things. A three year-old whooshed past, slaloming stylishly down the slope. The lift was passing overhead, the people sitting on the stupid little chairs seemingly unconcerned, legs dangling high above the abyss. And the sky so relentlessly blue. A set of feelings gripped her, nameless, overwhelming, and ice in her stomach.

      Earlier that day she’d been taught snow plough on the nursery slopes, but now her knees wouldn’t bend right and the valley was rushing up towards her. She leaned back, lost a stick and swerved to avoid someone. Her skis crossed and ejected her. The jolt to her tailbone as she hit the ground brought tears to her eyes and once she started crying she couldn’t stop. Something more than physical incapacity, a deep humiliation in relying on the body to do what it should and finding that it would not. She couldn’t cry about Paolo, even though she spent her whole time thinking about him, yet here she was blubbing like a baby because she’d hurt herself.

      There had been warning signs right from the start. But weren’t there always? He told her about a story he was writing in which a woman asked her lover to murder her. When they started sleeping together he put his hands around her throat and started choking her, reminding her of a group exercise in a Theatre Studies class where you had to fall backwards, trusting you’d be caught. She told him she wasn’t into it and he never did it again.

      She spat out snow and brushed it off her face and the plastic bib of her neon salopettes, sitting up. A woman with white lipstick and reflective goggles swished to a neat stop beside her and asked in German if she was OK.

      ‘Yes,’ she answered in English.

      ‘Is this your stick?’

      ‘Yes, thanks.’

      The woman helped her to her feet.

      ‘Will you be all right?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said. The woman skied off. Edith picked up her skis and trudged down the mountain to the next station. When she got there her mum, dad and brothers were waiting for her.

      ‘Have you been crying?’

      ‘No,’ she said.

      After a while her dad and brothers took off and Edith sat with her mum on the veranda drinking Schnapps. She felt heat flood to her face. The snow was dazzling and the people were insects crawling about on it. Exposed rock on the mountains opposite appeared harsh, like wounds.

      ‘This is too much for you, isn’t it? We don’t have to do any more skiing if you don’t want to. You can get the lift down from here.’

      The next day they went skating because she hated skiing so much. The lake was covered with a fine mantle of snow and scarred with the tracks of ice skates and paw prints. Shelf ice massed at the edges and the long spikes of candle ice pitted the surface nearer the middle, which was bluish white from impurities in the water. The ice was at least a foot thick but it creaked and groaned alarmingly as it split into rifts, great jagged continents forming beneath Edith’s feet.

      A young girl whirled past, twizzling and flinging her arms about like a ballerina. The bloom on her cheeks and the soft hat, pinks and whites, her dewy youth and delicate eyelashes, the simple joy – Edith felt a stab of envy, wishing she could exchange her life. Her mum held her hand tightly as they skated tentatively out towards the far end of the lake. There was no need for words. Everything was dwarfed by the terrible mountains.

      One night, unable sleep, she grabbed her diary. I would rather, she wrote, that he died than that he left me. When he’d been gone without news for so long, already dead, she had dreamed up fantasies of deception, him with another woman, laughing at her, or worse, oblivious to her. And then she found out that the night she wrote her diary was the night he died. Did this make her a witch?

      The holiday was a mad idea and she’d been shoehorned into it. They were there with her brothers’ public school and she found the noise and the exaggerated Englishness of the party unbearable. So the ice skating was an escape. Her mum was wearing the black velvet coat with the real fur collar she’d had since the 70s. In the bright light its worn patches took on a gunmetal sheen. They lurched and stumbled as they went round the lake, keeping each other up.

      Was she unlovable? Her mum loved her – well, she had to. He had claimed to love her too but it was a fad,