The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

by Catrina Davies

  “It is a big world,” he said. “Bigger than wife.”

  All they cared about was getting back in time to party all night on New Year’s Eve. Which is exactly what I planned to do.

  There was an old bike in the apartment. I put some change in my pocket and cycled south along the Quai des Chartrons. It was bitterly cold, which only made everything seem even more beautiful. French Christmas decorations are more tasteful than English ones. All the trees were strung with tiny white fairy lights. Fairy lights picked out the archways of the old stone bridges across the Garonne. Fairy lights lit up the road signs as the Quai des Chartrons turned into the Quai Louis XVII, which turned into the Quai du Maréchal Lyautey and the Quai de la Douane.

  Finally I reached the phone box on the corner of the Quai de la Douane and the Quai Richelieu. I leaned the bike up against it and went inside. Ben answered.

  “Nice of you to let us know you’re alive.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Bordeaux.”

  “What happened to Nordkapp?”

  “I went there. It was amazing. I met a girl called Hanna.”

  I stopped. I wanted to tell him about Hanna and Unstad and Thierry and Georges and Oléron and everything, but I didn’t know where to start.

  “The van broke down. I had to come here to get it fixed.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Starter motor. Fixed now.”

  Ben was quiet.

  “How’s Broadsands?”

  “Crap. Just me and Jack rattling around like a gay married couple.”

  “What about …”

  The words got stuck in my throat.

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?” I gripped the receiver. “What happened?”

  “She was intensely annoying. Even Jack noticed in the end, once he got bored of the sex.”

  I swallowed. “So he’s still there?”

  I tried to sound casual.

  “Waste of space.” Ben’s broad Yorkshire vowels brought back so many memories. “On about going to Morocco or Portugal for the winter. Moaning because he hasn’t got any money. Refuses to work. I’ve told him I’m kicking him out of the shed when you get back.”

  I bit my lip really hard, to stop myself crying.

  “That’s if you’re not too busy lounging around in that yellow tin of yours with greasy Frenchmen.”

  I wanted to tell him I was coming home. That I really was this time. But my mouth wouldn’t work.

  “Fuck,” said Ben. “Got to go. Customers. Come back. I miss you. I fucking need you.”

  “Happy Christmas,” I said, and carefully replaced the receiver.

  There was no sweet, petite surfer anymore.

  I picked up the bike and cycled blindly toward the river and the Pont de Pierre, which was built by Napoleon and is the oldest of all the old stone bridges that cross the Garonne. The river is wide at that point and the bridge is a long one, with seventeen small arches, each one hung with yet more strings of fairy lights, which made the inky river look like one of those dot paintings by Monet or someone. I was all alone. Everyone else must have been huddled up at home with their families. I had a sudden vision of them all, squashed on a thousand sofas, watching a thousand televisions, a thousand death-grips hanging over their heads.

  Actually I wasn’t quite alone. I was vaguely aware of another cyclist coming toward me, his big frame huddled into what looked like an old fluorescent skiing jacket. Our paths met almost exactly halfway across. He veered wide to avoid me. I caught his eye. We both stopped at the same time a couple of seconds later. We both turned around. It couldn’t be. It was.

  “Børge!”

  28

  Børge lived in a tiny village called Les Torches, which perched above a larger and better-known village called Les Crevasses. Not that I had ever heard of it. I knew you took the road to Briançon from Grenoble and that both villages were in the Parc National des Écrins, right near the Italian border, nearly a thousand kilometers away.

  Thierry insisted on draining my radiator and replacing the water with liquide de refroidissement that could cope with temperatures of –25°C and below.

  “Faites attention, huh. C’est dangereux.”

  As if to hint at things to come it had already started snowing. Thierry, who had a permanent cigarette wedged in his mouth, sighed heavily.

  “Actually, I do not know why you go to the Alps in this camion.”

  “I’ll have somewhere to stay.”

  That wasn’t strictly true. Børge had simply repeated what he had said at Unstad, that if I found myself in the Alps I could park outside his house and run a heater to my van, and if he got a good picture of me wearing the Patagonia coat in the snow whilst playing my cello, then I could keep it. The coat was the reason I was going. At least, that’s what I told myself. Thierry shook his head and put out his cigarette on my engine before closing the bonnet and turning the key in the ignition. The van gave a comforting roar. I climbed into the driver’s seat. It had been a long time.

  “She will be okay now. But if you have problems you can come back,” said Thierry.

  “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  He leaned in to hug me. For a moment I buried my face in his big old overcoat. I closed my eyes and breathed in the comforting smell of oil and grease. Then he let go and I was on my own again.

  It had been such a strange coincidence. Børge had left Bordeaux that same night. There had been no time to meet up. No time for anything. I had cycled back to the Quai des Chartrons and sat on the floor by the petrol heater. The last thing I wanted to do was go to the bloody Alps. I studied the map in Europe on a Shoestring. The shed was mine again. Jack was there. There was no sweet, petite surfer. I counted my piles of money. After I had paid Thierry I would have just under five hundred euros. Enough to get to Roscoff and get a ferry from there to Plymouth. Enough to drive the hundred miles from Plymouth to Broadsands. I crossed the room and stood staring out of the window at the street below. It was Christmas Eve.

  A whole week had passed before I finally gave up trying to talk myself out of it. When I said good-bye to Thierry it was late afternoon on the second to last day of the year. I decided to go across the Auvergne, so as to avoid tolls, and because it sounded romantic. It probably would have been romantic, too, in summer, when there wasn’t black ice all over the road and the heater in the van hadn’t decided to stop working. I had to pull over and make a hot-water bottle, wrap it in a blanket, and put it on my lap, just so my hands wouldn’t freeze. The only light in the old stone villages came through the cracks at the edges of thick wooden shutters. It was far too cold to even think about sleeping. I stopped in Clermont-Ferrand to fill up with expensive diesel for sub-zero temperatures. I made a fresh hot-water bottle and spent a long time driving in circles around the industrial suburbs of Lyon. Eventually I made it to Grenoble and from there I somehow got myself on to the road to Briançon, which is when the fun really started.

  The road to Briançon follows a narrow V-shaped valley, the steep sides formed out of mountains so tall and strange and uncompromising they filled me with dread. While the mountains in Scandinavia are old and worn and soft, the Alps are young, and they seemed to have all the cocky arrogance of youth. They towered over the narrow valley, folding me into their black shadows, while the snow made small mountains of the trees and spilled onto the edges of the road until I was reduced to driving in the middle of it, on the narrow strip that was scraped by huge orange snowplows that traveled up and down like beetles, lights flashing, stopping, turning, scraping again, because no matter how fast they scraped they were no match for snow like that. It fell in thick sheets, in clouds, in flakes as big as my hand, silently, eerily, relentlessly, burying everything alive. Apart from the snowplows there was no other traffic, just big flashing signs, warning of the need for snow chains, and another sign, later on, that said the Col du Galibier was fermé. I had never seen snow li
ke that, let alone driven in it.

  It was early morning by the time I finally reached Les Crevasses, a one-street village at the bottom of a mountain called La Mas. There were a couple of shops, a couple of cafés, a bar aptly named L’Arctique, and a ski lift. Small groups of people in brightly-colored salopettes were emerging from the cafés and heading for the lift. Next to it was a car park. I could have turned into the car park, but the cars there had been buried alive like the trees and I was terrified of getting stuck. I had to keep going until I found Børge’s house. At least it wasn’t actually snowing anymore. I crawled through the village, out the other side, and through a tunnel before I finally saw a sign for Les Torches. My heart sank. Les Torches appeared to be halfway up the side of the valley, at the end of a steep, single-track road with hairpin bends that had clearly not seen the benefit of a snowplow.

  I paused, hovering at the junction. If I could have turned around I would have got the hell out of that valley right there and then. But the road was narrow, I was already sliding all over it, and trying to execute a thirty-six-point turn with my back wheels pointing off the edge of a precipice did not seem like such a good idea. Neither did attempting to negotiate those terrifying hairpin bends. I could see Les Torches. Being higher than Les Crevasses, further up the mountain, it was bathed in sunshine.

  I wished with all my heart that I’d never met Børge. I hated him and I hated snow and I hated that stupid Patagonia coat. I cursed whatever stupid impulse had made me come to this stupid place. This death valley of orange snowplows and petrifying roads, sides so steep you couldn’t see the end of them and the skeletons of trees, smothered by the relentless, suffocating snow. And now there was a car coming. I could hear it making its way toward me, then it came to the junction and sat, waiting for me to turn. So I turned. Because I had to. I turned and started inching my way up the steep road toward Les Torches, my heart bashing around in my chest like it was going to fall right out of my mouth.

  My van was as wide as the road, which meant that every hairpin bend brought me inches from the edge. There were no barriers, just an increasingly sheer drop into the pit of the valley below. It was trumping everything. I was more scared than I had been getting on the ferry in Newcastle, more scared than I had been setting up outside the Nationaltheatret in Oslo, more scared than I had been in front of all those stags in the Ølhallen in Tromsø, more scared than I had been at Unstad when that huge wave had picked me up like a piece of driftwood and nailed me to the sand. One false move and I’d be dead. And it was all happening so slowly. I managed to get around the first three bends, but on the fourth I skidded. Somehow, I don’t know how, I avoided sliding off the road and bouncing down the mountain to wind up in a mangled heap of twisted metal at the bottom of the valley. But the slide had caused the back wheels to come off the tracks made by other cars and dig themselves into thick snow. They spun hopelessly, and the more they spun the worse it all got. I was halfway up the steepest mountain I had ever seen, in a 3.5-ton truck, jackknifed across the road, my wheels hanging off a precipice, having not slept for twenty-four hours. And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the car I had just about managed to pass earlier came back up.

  29

  The car stopped. It didn’t have much choice. There was a knock on my window. I lifted my forehead from where it was resting on the steering wheel and found myself looking at a man with a furrowed brow, elderly glasses, and a thick wool sweater.

  “It’s okay. I’m a doctor,” said the man.

  “I’m not hurt,” I said. “Just stuck.”

  I climbed out of the van, trying not to look over the edge, or at how close my wheels were to it. The snow came right over the top of my boots, falling inside them and making my socks wet. The doctor had a shovel in the back of his car. He dug the snow away from the tires until the van could be straightened up and reunited with the road. He did this part, too. Then he offered to drive the van the rest of the way. I could drive his car. Which had chains.

  The doctor, who was called Pierre, parked my van in a small lay-by, reversing it so the front was facing the road and the back was facing La Mas. I could see the people in brightly-colored ski pants zipping up and down it like butterflies. There was another van already in the lay-by. At least I think that’s what it was. You couldn’t actually see it because it was buried under so much snow. I tried not to wonder how on earth I was ever going to get down again.

  “Merci beaucoup,” I said, like a twelve-year-old.

  “De rien.”

  We both stood awkwardly in the snow.

  “I am staying over there.”

  Pierre pointed to a small stone cottage with green shutters. It was one of many similar-looking cottages. In fact, the village was made up entirely of small stone cottages with green or brown shutters, a stone farm with some stone barns and a tiny stone church with a big stone cross next to it. In another set of circumstances I would have thought it very picturesque. The only building that wasn’t made of stone was a big wooden house like the ones you see in photographs advertising expensive skiing holidays. It stood a little bit apart from the others. Pierre didn’t seem to know what to do.

  “You can come if you need something.”

  “Thank you.” I wanted to grab hold of him and not let go. I also wanted to cry. Instead I said, “Do you know someone called Børge?”

  “Børge?”

  I reverted to English, which Pierre spoke very well. “Yes. He said he’d be able to lend me a heater.”

  Pierre said nothing for at least a minute. Then he said, “You haven’t got a heater?”

  I shook my head. It was only just starting to dawn on me, what I had done.

  “Børge?” he said a second time. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Børge lives with Rémy.” He pointed to the big chalet-type house. “But I do not think he is at home. I think he is in the mountains.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll just wait for him. He’ll have to come back when it gets dark, right?”

  Pierre didn’t reply.

  I walked up to the house anyway. It was even bigger than it looked, with a long wooden veranda wrapping all the way around, a swing chair covered in snow, and a pile of snowboards that looked like they’d been there a while, just like the pile of surfboards at Unstad. I peered through a glass door at a huge fireplace and a sink full of dirty dishes. I knocked. Pierre was right. There was nobody in. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to drive anymore, and I knew where he lived. Not that I could see how I could possibly park close enough to borrow a heater. But surely even Børge wouldn’t let me freeze to death. I yawned. I might as well sleep while I waited.

  I walked back to the van. I was too hungry to fall asleep, so I tried to make some porridge, but the milk carton was frozen solid like a brick, and you could knock yourself out with the bananas. The water in the jerry can was also frozen solid, so I filled the kettle with snow, feeling very intrepid. I tried to light the stove. Nothing happened. I shook the gas bottle. There was plenty of gas. I could hear it sloshing around. I tried again. Nothing.

  I put on all my clothes and got into bed. I stared at the ceiling, which was no longer black with mold. There was something wrong with it, though. I sat up and touched it. I lit a candle and peered at it in horror. The whole of the inside of the van, which normally had a layer of condensation, now had a layer of ice. In all the corners there were tiny icicles. I lay down again, but it was like trying to fall asleep in a chest freezer. After ten minutes I was so cold I started to worry about frostbite. I sat up. I lit the rest of the box of candles and tried to warm my hands over them as if they were a fire. Outside it was snowing again, only now the flakes were like a swarm of locusts, a thick cloud of snow so dense you couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t see Pierre’s cottage anymore, or La Mas on the other side of the valley, or Børge’s house.

  Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t suddenly remembered my cello.

  My cello, which ha
d essentially been stuffed in this massive chest freezer all night, without the benefit of a hot-water bottle. You didn’t do that to musical instruments. You just didn’t. Let alone ones that doubled up as your best friend. Ones you were depending on for your survival.

  The snow was so thick I fell over three times. Twice my cello landed on top of me. Once I landed on top of my cello, falling sideways off some invisible steps. I swore that if by some miracle we both survived I would save and save for a smart new case, and I would be a normal person, and not spend my days and nights plowing through snowdrifts in a van with no heater just so I could see a man who had always made it pretty clear he didn’t like me very much.

  Pierre opened the door without his glasses on and wearing a clean white shirt, which made him look about twenty years younger and completely different. It was only after he pulled me inside, sat me down in a big armchair by a roaring fire and handed me a huge glass of cognac that I remembered it was New Year’s Eve.

  At home, the whole village went to Broadsands on New Year’s Eve. Ben would move his decks into the bar. Andrew would make a vicious punch. Jack’s climbing buddies would drive down from Scotland and the party would go on all night. In Les Crevasses the whole village went to Børge’s. Not because of Børge, Pierre explained on the way up, but because of Rémy, his housemate, a champion snowboarder who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and dishing out mojitos from a great silver cup that he was telling everyone he won in some competition in Canada. I was wearing one of Pierre’s white shirts over the same jeans I’d been wearing all night and all day. My only pair, since I cut up my torn and faded ones in Oléron, thinking I was going home. At least I’d had a bath. My first bath in six months. I wished I hadn’t washed my hair though. It stuck out like a huge afro with weird missing bits where I’d had to cut the dreadlocks out. A flock of skinny girls with fake winter tans and tiny pink dresses were hanging around Rémy. They didn’t look exactly friendly. There was still no sign of Børge. I was growing more and more nervous of seeing him. He’d never have thought I’d actually come.