Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
I think. If Ron doesn’t want a repeat of lunch I’ll do a treat for him, too, maybe a creamy gratin dauphinoise, one of his favorites that now has to be rationed to keep his cholesterol down. It always seems to me a luxury rather than a burden to be the cook of the household, choosing what I want for each meal with the added pleasure of being able to gift what I cook. The rich trivia of domesticity, a sustaining thing, I think, as I crush the peppercorns in the heavy ceramic bowl, surprised afresh by the mouthwatering spicy scent from such a dull kitchen staple.
We prepare for lunch in a companionable duo. Ron has laid the table and is now sorting out the drinks. I found an interesting-looking bottle of whisky while I was down in the cellar, he says, one I haven’t tried yet. The boys and I can have fun tonight seeing what we make of it. I think now about Miles’s frank acknowledgment of the adjustment he had to make when Ron came into our lives. In the turmoil of my collapsing marriage with his father he had stepped right into the breach as the oldest child and provided, aged only twenty-one, a solid wall of support for me and his three younger siblings. It wasn’t easy for me when you first met Ron, he told me when we talked about it some time later, I had to make an adjustment, my role in the family changed. But he’s a top guy, Mum, the best thing that could have happened.
The main course is coming to an end, the ice cream and caramelized oranges are ready and waiting and there is nothing left to do now except enjoy myself. When the phone rings I answer it in the kitchen and the background noise of people and laughter makes it difficult to hear the young man asking me if I am Miles’s mother. Yes, I reply, why, what’s happened? I know already, I know from the tone of the man’s voice even before I hear that Miles is gravely injured; later he will tell me the most harrowing moment of his life so far was being with Miles on the mountain slope as his body convulsed away from him into unconsciousness. I’m Ben, a friend of Miles’s, he says. He has had a serious accident on his snowboard. What injury? I ask, but again somehow I know. A head injury. He’s in an air ambulance now, on his way to Innsbruck University Hospital. Another friend and I are taking the train to Innsbruck to be there with him. I’m sorry, I have to go now, but I will call you again as soon as I get there.
The line clicks dead. I remain standing, frozen, still holding the phone to my ear, not daring to sever the thread that connects me across sea and forests and mountains to Miles, to the person who was with him at that fateful moment when I was not. From one instant to another the world has changed. We are no longer safe; with frightening clarity I see each one of the people I love as though standing on the edge of a precipice, isolated, friable, their outlines sharply etched above the abyss that now threatens us all. With what complacency have I existed before this moment.
My mind seems to have cut loose in a peculiar floating calm while my body absorbs the shock in a visceral plunge of nausea. Upstairs in the bathroom I study my reflection in the mirror with detached interest, as though peering through the window of a stranger’s house and seeing someone who looks faintly but interestingly familiar. Going back into the kitchen I’m still floating as in a dream, an out-of-body experience, watching myself as I put my hand up to stop the lunch party conversation. I’m so sorry, you’ll have to leave. Miles has had an accident snowboarding. A head injury. I can hear my voice, flat, expressionless, see Ron’s face as he stands up, the confusion and shock, and register the intake of breath as Jennifer, a psychiatrist, reveals something else in her expression of horror, a doctor’s knowledge.
Ron sees our guests out while in a distant land Ben and Charlie are traveling over the mountains to Miles. Above them a rescue helicopter (red, I imagined, but now I’ve seen the photograph I know it was white) is taking Miles low over the same mountains towards the waiting surgeons. In the helicopter the sound of Miles breathing on the portable respirator as his brain is silently bleeding and swelling, the noise of the blades chopping the air outside, the Austrian paramedics talking in low tones (or shouting above the noise?) working to keep him alive while below them the snow-covered Alps gleam in the late afternoon sunshine. Too terrible to think of myself vainly crushing peppercorns at the moment that he stood, thrilling with adrenaline, on the top of that ski slope, unaware he was poised on the threshold of consciousness. He fell to earth and only his brain was hurt; from such a height and at such a speed that it shattered in the crash helmet like an egg in an empty biscuit tin, shearing the axons and damaging all those fragile, magnificent neurons. And not a bruise on the rest of his body—how can one make sense of that?
Late that Sunday night we too fly over the mountains, endur-
ing the banter of the easyJet air hostess and the jovial passengers setting off on carefree holidays. The children’s father, David, has joined us, and landing at midnight, blank with exhaustion, we hire a car and drive through the bleak streets beyond the airport to the first hotel we come across. It looks brutal, an unloved concrete façade punctuated by straight lines of barred identical windows. The foyer is too hot and the man behind the reception desk ominously relaxed, as if he has been expecting us to arrive here in this place at this time. He leads us to our rooms through stifling circular corridors, the air as stale as a tomb.
The Austrian surgeon we telephoned from London before we left had advised us to stop on our journey overnight. Get some rest before you arrive, he said, it would be better for you to come feeling fresh in the morning. We will take care of him. He sounded concerned and kindly and we had not questioned his advice, but now I wish we had. Rest is irrelevant and anyway impossible; the only imperative is to reach Miles. Lying on my back on the hotel bed in Munich, the day’s events sift down slowly in my mind like the last silent ashes falling after an eruption. Everything lies colorless, shapeless, now coated in a thick layer of dread. Through the window above my bed a pale sliver of moon gleams coldly; it will be shining down on Miles, too, I think, and I sense the first tremor of a strange new anger. I’ve known that moon since early childhood, growing up on a farm in Africa hundreds of miles from any city; most nights were as black as pitch, but when the moon was up it shone with a fierce beauty that dazzled the African darkness. Later, when we moved to live by the Indian Ocean, it gilded and soothed the waves with its ethereal light. I felt protected by this moon of mine, felt a private oneness with its ancient, soundless presence that continued into adulthood. It is my childish secret, so that even living in London, on the rare nights it breaks through the cloud, I get out of bed and go to a window to let it drench me in its light. But now I find I can no longer look at it, cannot stand to look at it. Fuck the moon, I think, fuck the fucking moon; and feel betrayed.
After a fitful sleep I wake before dawn. In the gray half-light the plainly furnished room with its barred window could be a prison cell, and with sudden, cold precision I know that my life before this morning is no longer accessible. A barrier has come down in the night; I have been shut off from the world as it was and which now appears so far removed, a distant, light-filled place of ease and foolish innocence. Across the room Claudia and Marina are still asleep in the narrow double bed. I don’t know what our future holds, but I can’t suppress a deep sense of dread that threatens to extinguish the hope I so desperately want to maintain.
An early breakfast in the empty hotel dining room and we set off in the car, soon leaving Munich behind us. We could be aliens in a spaceship, so unrecognizable does the world look as we speed through it, so safe, tranquil, ordinary, as though nothing has happened. I’m surprised people are not staring and pointing at us as we go by, strange creatures from another planet gazing out on their ordered world of fields and forests and sturdy Bavarian farmhouses with smoke curling from warm kitchens into the pale morning air. When the mountains rise into view their menace seems equally unreal; they are where this thing happened to Miles and I marvel at their indifference, the carefree destruction at their heart as they tower so calmly over us. When finally Innsbruck appears spread out in the valley below us it could be a surreal postcard. Picturesque Tyrolean rooftops and glinting church domes just catching the light as the sun rises over the encircling snow-covered peaks, a macabre fairy-tale scene in the midst of which Miles lies, injured and alone. Silence in the car as we descend into the town, each one of us tense, braced for landing. We have no idea, we have absolutely no way of even beginning to know, what we are about to face; the future is a void.
I
We have arrived too late. Everything has happened; we are simply witnesses to the aftershock. Charlie