"Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don’t know any other stipend annexed to it."
Byron
December 12th 2:30 am
He’s just dragged her from the car park. Her skin’s luminous in the confines of the lift. Someone’s smashed the ceiling-panel off again, leaving the glare of three bare strip-lights to bounce off the snot smeared mirror and marker tagged metal walls.
There’s something a little like fear in her eyes. Blue eyes. Young eyes. But he can see the desire in them too. He can always tell when they want him.
His fingers find the top button on the control panel behind his back. Floor 6. Must be. He doesn’t want to stop looking at her. You don’t know what they’re going to do if you look away. Have to mesmerise them. Like a snake charmer. Like a snake.
"Please, no, I’ve got a boyfriend," she says, as he starts to kiss her neck.
Of course she has a boyfriend, she’s just arrived, they all have boyfriends.
When the lift stops at floor 6, he pulls out the roll of duct tape from his pocket, and tears off the first fastening of the season.
_____________________________________________
"Thou hast a voice, great mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe - not understood"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc, Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni (1816)
December 12th 11:00 am
It was thanks to Shelley that Itchy ended up in Chamonix. Shelley and Byron and Doctor Polidori. Poets with about as much relevance to the blood grudge struggle that marks life for most of humanity as the practice of sliding down snowy slopes on planks of wood.
The others have gone riding. Itchy’s alone in the apartment. Nineteen square metres to himself. The sink is full of plates, bowls, and the dumb, brown-glass beakers that all French flats have as standard, too small to quench your thirst without three refills. The floor, already covered in beer-stains and baguette-crumbs, is at least free from other people’s pants. They’re still in the early, tidy, phase.
He climbs out of bed, from under the comfort of the Union Jack duvet he brought with him, and looks out of the battered patio-doors over the balcony. He can’t see Mont Blanc for cloud. But he can picture its smooth saddle. He knows it’s there and that’s enough. When you can see it, the mountain doesn’t look so big from Chamonix, though the distance is further than from Everest base camp to summit. It’s from everywhere else that Mont Blanc looks big. From the Three Valleys, or the Southern Alps or Val d’Isere, hanging in the background, like Mount Fuji in a Samurai painting. You can love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore it; it’s there staring you in the face like an angry drunk. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough. So you do.
If you’re in advertising, sooner or later you will move to New York, to be the best you have to. Finance London. Fashion Paris. If you’re an actor you go to LA. Where at least, when you fail and flounder, you will have the sympathy of a city that knows how tough a business it is. You can swallow your pride and leave, or stay and throw your genes into the pool; add to an even more beautiful next-generation, just as doomed to prescription drugs and disappointment. If you like Winter - if you like Winter so much that you like even the word ’Winter’ - if you long for snow and are willing to work at whatever keeps you in it, then sooner or later you come to Cham. That’s just how it is.
The first time Itchy came here even the road up was like a call to arms. It’s raised on great soaring stone pillars, which look like they were looted from the temples of the Titans, but it feels as if it was made before even those pre-gods. As if it surged from the centre of the Earth with the same unfathomable energy that forced up the crag-ragged ridges on either side. It’s like a magic road, a way that leads you to Narnia or the Misty Mountains of Middle-Earth: suspended halfway up a valley; immersed in cloud and expectation; leading learned and unwary alike to pray at pitiless Mont Blanc. Chamonix is indeed a mythical place, a mystical place: where civilisation confronted the wilderness and for once they agreed to differ; undefeated; the undisputed free-ride capital; the death-sport centre of the world. All of the first mountains ever assailed were climbed from here. The history of Alpinism itself is a history of Cham. Chamonix is where it all began.
Even Itchy isn’t sure where it began for Itchy, why he leads this life he leads. Most of his mates work in London, earning a lot of money, or else not nearly enough. When he looked on the Friends Reunited website, to see what the lost majority from his year at school are doing now, he saw a lot of teachers, a lot of accountants, a lot of kids and cats. A lot of people planning to leave England ’soon’. No one was doing much spectacular with their lives. He’s not sure there’s much left to do for this generation.
Itchy’s Grandad won the war. No doubt others helped, but it was mostly him. He hardly talks about it, but was in one of the finger-countable 7th Armoured Division tank crews that survived all of the campaigns that roll of the tongue: Siege of Tobruk; El Alamein; the invasion of Italy; D-Day. He returned with no job and few prospects, to a wife and soon a baby son. He walked out of a prefab every morning for months on end to look for work, walked till his demob shoes were walked right through. He built from the nothingness he was given a stable home. One day bought his own home.
Itchy’s dad, that man’s son, the only one, that baby, got school scholarships, became head boy, went to University, a family first and got a first. Worked for a blue chip company and then started his own company. Turned the stable home he had been brought up in, into a wealth his own father could hardly comprehend, an ease of living and a spending power completely alien. He is highly intelligent and took some gambles, but mostly he grafted. For years, maybe since his first day at a school he hadn’t the social prerogative to attend, he worked harder than any one else around him.
And Itchy? What meaning did they leave him? Where was there left to go? To turn a comfortable life into an even more comfortable one? To come from an affluent background and make himself even wealthier. To out-do his father, to become ludicrously, obscenely rich. To throw parties with ice sculptures costing thousands of pounds which will drip into nothing by morning. To have a car so fast there is no where left to drive it. To find a trophy wife so beautiful it hurts just to look at her. When you come from what is perfect where are you supposed to journey to? All Itchy can see to do is to try out a different life, that they weren’t able to. And sometimes he thinks his dad understands this.
He necks a stubby from the sallow, food-stained fridge to kill his hangover. Ignoring the nagging worry that this willingness to drink from the start of the day is the first slip towards alcoholism. Booze lurks at the periphery of everything he does, but he doesn’t see it as controlling. He blasts through it like the snow, he chooses the direction, he stops when he wants. Anyway, Itchy isn’t the sort of person who gets addicted to things. He doesn’t have those genes.
Not that he’s some kind of a predestination freak, quite the opposite - but when he’s gone to one of the discount supermarkets in Moutiers, Cluses or Bourg, or any of the dark, deep valley, dirty industrial towns out in the Alps, he’s seen people who clearly never stood a chance. Thin-necked, chinless spindles, whose family trees can only have survived at all through charity, and the cripple’s exemption from military service.
The Derapage has been in Jean-Paul’s family for generations and it looks like it has remained unchanged for most of that time, though apparently it started out as a butcher’s shop. It’s a cellar bar now, down stone steps; it’s small, but long on wood panels. It could be used as a film set for war-time France - if you knocked one of the walls out, otherwise there’s not enough room for cameras.
Jean-Paul’s a short man, lean and haggard in a way that suggests a slow taxidermy from filterless fags. If he was English you’d suggest he see a doctor, but there’s nothing strange about looking like that in Cham - the mountain sun corrugates in age the same skin that it kissed in youth.
The first time he met him, Itchy thought Jean-Paul was himself a Doctor, most of the Brits call him Doc. It’s a joke though: JP, his nickname with the French, is pronounced G.P. to English ears.
It’s only Itchy’s fifth night at the Derapage now, and it’s slow. Working in a bar is painful when it’s as quiet as this. He polishes the pumps, though it seems unlikely that he and the solitary half-pint nurser in the corner can have produced much by way of dust since the last time he did it. A couple of shots of Fernet Branca’s goodness make him feel a little wholer. Fernet is a liquor like the cigarette-tar that causes a cough and the syrup that cures it, distilled into one.
It’s getting near closing down time when they come in: gendarmes, out of uniform, drunk. He recognises them from when he worked at Wild Wallabies, coming in to catch staff not on the books. They never did. Which is not to say that there weren’t any. They come to the bar to order, unusual for French, most expect you to wait on them. Which is fair enough, it’s their country.
They spot he’s English, even through the haze of their session and in a frog bar.
"Two aleves of beeer, please siir," one says, in an accent which could be a clowning exaggeration, or simply slurring, but which makes them laugh.
They both have the large moustaches favoured by gendarmes and comic-book Gauls and one has a booze-pocked nose, bubbling like the head of the beer Itchy pulls him. They switch straight back to French, and a previous conversation, as they prop up the bar - presuming Itchy can’t understand, or not caring.
"So you think we’re going to catch him, this rapist?"
The word ’rapist’ draws Itchy’s ears, it’s violeur in French, sounds like a musician or his instrument.
"We will eventually, these guys, they always get caught eventually. But usually just from luck. Someone passing by, something they drop. We can’t keep the whole carpark under watch and he knows it."
"Probably a foreigner, English," pock-nose nods his head towards Itchy slightly with this; who feels a scald of shame, moves further away to re-stack unused glasses.
Sean, one of his flat mates, sends a text message just as Itchy’s locking up.
ichie, in Dicks.
So r nu Ski
Planet nannys…
Ugly but gr8ful. C u
here l8er. ];-)>
Sean has a scar he tells girls he got in a knife fight in Mexico. They must have stabbed him right in the appendix if so. He likes to make curry so hot that his eyeballs sweat.
His offer is not overwhelmingly tempting bird-wise, but then Itchy does fancy another beer. Itchy generally fancies another beer, even if the prices in Dick’s Tea Bar are predatory.
The streets are quiet in a way that only normally busy streets can be. He sees corners he’s never really noticed before. Snow is falling but not settling or coming hard enough to promise a powder day. It just leaves the cobbles wet, and a white dusting on the hair of the few people he passes. In the mirror of a blackened window Itchy catches a glimpse of what he might look like as an old man. A silver crowned wiser him, grown out of the sins of youth. But that seems unlikely. Sometimes even living to be old seems unlikely. And he’d probably be bald like his dad.
Sean’s got black slicked-back hair, like a prohibition gangster. And he looks a bit like one: lolling at the bar in Dick’s; arms around a couple of molls. But Sean’s a holiday rep, he deals in cheese instead of bootleg-liquor, and these girls are slappers not flappers.
The one Sean tries to palm off on Itchy has big cheap-gold earrings, which swing gently - chavertising - she’s called Bryony.
"But my friends call me Britney," she says, "cos of these." She squeezes her arms together to exaggerate her prominent but unremarkable cleavage.
Itchy agrees that she does appear to have exactly the same number of breasts as Miss Spears, the sarcasm missed by a mind well washed with Bacardi Breezer.
Truth is, he’s never really seen the attraction of overly large breasts. Ok, they look good in tight tops, jutting out, supported by more wires and straps than a flying Peter Pan at the Christmas-panto. But unlike Peter, they are exceptionally susceptible to age and gravity, they should come with a best before date tattooed on an underside. Even when they’re young, it’s hard to get them in exactly the right place: pendulous in doggy; slumped in missionary. Sure, they’re fun, but no more so than a small pair; and you always feel like you should be doing more with big tits, when there isn’t really anything else to do.
He can’t decide whether shagging Bryony is going to be worth listening to any more of her drivel, but when she says she’s off to Meribel for the winter tomorrow, that they were just in Cham for training, he decides it probably is. At least he’ll never have to see her again. Besides, it’s always safer to do things; things Itchy didn’t do are infinitely more regrettable to him - except for that one thing. The ghosts of all the girls he never fucked haunt Itchy - the nearly’s and the maybe’s, the wastage - because one day, he knows, he will lie on his death bed and wish he’d had more sex.
He unlocks the Derapage and fucks her on a table. He has no idea where Sean went with the other one. The table has a funny wobble, he should stick some folded paper under one leg to make it level - like they used to for exams his first year of Uni. Itchy dropped out after that first year. He focuses on the wobble to avoid coming too soon, not because he much cares about Bryony’s pleasure, and she’s not going to talk to anyone he knows, just because he’s enjoying himself.
Bryony can’t remember where she’s staying, so he ditches her in the middle of town. That’s the best thing about shagging the homeless - you can drop them off anywhere. She’s shameless drunk, knickers in her pocket, screaming at him across the square that he’s a bastard. As if he doesn’t know. But it’s snowing hard now, coming down in great globs like the money shot from a porno, and he can’t stay out too late, because it’s looking like a powder day tomorrow.
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