‘I can’t hear you! Please! Je ne comprends pas!’
The voice barked an instruction or phrase at her.
‘Encore! Say again! Oh God! Please! Who are you?’
The voice spoke again. He seemed to say the words la zone, la zone. But the line crackled. It was impossible to know what he was saying. He might have been calling from the dark side of the moon.
The line went dead.
La zone. Or was it La Zoe? No, no. It was more like la zone. He might have been saying that. He might have. The zone. But what did that mean?
Zoe turned her skis to the fall-line and let them slice through the fluffy snow. She dropped a few hundred metres in seconds. Jake was waiting for her.
‘Skiing good,’ he said as she carved a turn to draw up beside him.
She looked at him. His huge sunglasses shielded his eyes, bouncing the sun’s glare back off the blue glass. She wondered how much to tell him.
‘You okay?’
‘The phone went again.’
‘What?’
‘Same voice. Same incoherent words.’
‘You’re not okay. You didn’t—’ ‘No, I didn’t imagine it. Why does it only ring when you’re not there? I’m going to give you my phone. You can handle it next time this happens.’
‘No, you keep it. I have my own.’
‘I thought he said la zone. The zone. But that might be wrong. I don’t know. It was so muffled and distant.’
‘The zone.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Come on. Enough. Let’s call it a day.’
They had no appetite for food that night. Jake re-inspected the vegetables and the meat on the slab in the kitchen and reported that they were finally going off. The celery sticks were browning. A grey patina was forming over the chopped potatoes. But it was all still happening very slowly.
They went out to a bar. They found a CD of songs by The Kinks and drank rich, dark, juicy Malbec; but they couldn’t be bothered to remember how it tasted or how to be drunk. The music they loved gave them little pleasure, as if that too had to be remembered. They ran out of conversation, so they went back to their room early and showered.
Zoe noticed Jake’s erection as he dried himself. She made some comment.
‘It’s odd. I’m hard all the time here.’
‘All the time?’
‘Yes. Well, it subsides for a little while after we’ve had sex but not for long.’
‘You should say.’
‘Sweetheart, I can’t be inside you all the time. You know you wouldn’t like it.’
She raised her eyebrows at him.
Their sexual activity had regulated a long while ago. She had never used it, like some women, as a means of getting her way on other matters. But she had never made herself open to him either. She had always controlled the flow. Sex was never rationed; but neither was it unrestricted. He liked to have her from behind; she didn’t. He liked to do it outside; she wasn’t much for that. He liked her to sit astride him; she preferred conventional positions. He occasionally suggested dressing up; she found the idea too bloody ridiculous for words.
‘I’ve been a disappointment to you in that department, haven’t I?’ she said.
‘No you haven’t,’ he countered.
‘I’ve been lazy.’
‘Not true.’
‘It doesn’t mean I loved you any less.’
‘I know that.’
‘Sex isn’t a measure of love. Sometimes it has nothing to do with love. Nothing whatsoever.’
He sat on the bed in his towel, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Why are you saying all these things?’
‘Because here it feels like I have to make everything I say count for something.’
‘Didn’t you before?’
‘No. Not always, anyway. I was careless with things I said. I was careless with my decisions. Careless.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t matter any more.’
‘Oh, it does matter. Everything matters. And in this place the rules are different.’
‘In this place we make up the rules, it seems to me.’
She sighed. She knew her words had depressed him a little. He’d simply come at her wanting a fuck and she’d disheartened him. But if there were to be no lovemaking that night it would represent the first pause since the day of the avalanche. Zoe didn’t want to allow that to happen. If a night went by, then the next day might, too; and then the next night. And what Zoe feared most was the wedge.
She couldn’t say exactly when she had started to feel the presence of the wedge. It might have begun in those very first days when they had argued about how to get out of this place. But she felt that some force, some power like magnetism or anti-magnetism was doing its best to quietly insinuate its way between them. Again it was like a law of physics, some current grounded in the place that behaved like another woman who wanted to split them up, through barely perceptible and insidiously manipulative means.
Her pregnancy was intimately connected with this feeling. She was still testing obsessively. And each time confirmation that the baby was swelling inside her was offered, then so did she become attuned to the possibility of a division between her and Jake. This was nothing to do with love or lack of it. Her love and affection for him, and their mutual dependence in this shadow world, had amplified massively. But there were forces of reversal at work here. If love was a force of gravity, this place had a centrifugal force, dragging at her psyche.
She wanted to arm herself against this centrifuge and sex was part of her armoury. She placed the flat of her hand on the rise of his belly and then leaned across him to lick a sensitive spot just above his pelvis, because it would always make him spasm. He kicked. She spat into her fingers and rubbed the saliva under the head of his cock and squeezed him. His cock grew harder in her hand.
She slipped his cock inside her mouth, sliding her tongue around the glans, and as his cock grew even harder and swelled in her mouth she felt his body give in to her and become limp by contrast. He lay back, surrendering to her, giving her all the power. She released his cock and sat upright, swinging her leg over him, to mount him. Outside the alpine light was a mysterious species of blue she associated with neon, almost ultraviolet. It illuminated his teeth and the whites of his bloodshot eyes and gave his limbs a tanned, healthy hue.
He had once said to her that she was such a sexual creature she could make a dead man come, and here she was, proving it. She levered herself onto him, impaling herself, gasping at the moment of yield when her vaginal muscles relaxed and let her slide down over him. She leaned forward, letting her long hair fall across his face, inhaling the smell of his hair and his sweat. The smell of fuck charged the room, circling above them like smoke, like a ghost. She pressed her fingertips against the white wall over the headboard above him to give herself leverage, raising and lowering herself onto him. She was fucking him hard and angrily and with a desperate air, as if this might be their very last time. The headboard was banging against the wall as she thrust with her pelvis, thudding against the wall, and she didn’t stop even when she felt him ejaculate and shiver as his orgasm eclipsed him entirely. She went on, driving herself, slamming the headboard against the wall until she started to feel the wall itself crumble under the touch of her fingertips, turn to powder, dissolve until it was no longer the powder of plaster but the powder of snow, freezing to the touch, and collapsing back into a swirling, gaping hole, from which a man’s arm reached through and took her by the neck, took her by the throat in an icy grip, closing off her breathing, pulling her, trying to drag her off Jake, choking her until she shrieked out loud, not in ecstasy but in terror.