The Christmas Lights

by Karen Swan

  Anna, though, seemed unperturbed. She certainly wasn’t watching him longingly or overtly trying to catch his eye; well, not unless the mascara and lip gloss were for his benefit.

  Bo looked down into her coffee, realizing she didn’t care either way about the team’s love lives; she didn’t feel up to ‘work’ today – photographing waterfalls was not high on her list of priorities right now. She wanted to hide away, for it to be just her and Zac for once, the way it used to be – not the illusion of it with a small entourage in tow and a vapour trail of nine million ghosts, Him watching her from behind a screen.

  Standing beside her, Lenny reached across the table to pour himself the last of the coffee and a whiff of stale BO wafted over her like a nuclear cloud. Instinctively she turned away. It was his turn to get the bath tonight and frankly it couldn’t come soon enough.

  ‘So, we all set?’ Lenny asked, noticing her flinch and a scowl settling over him.

  ‘As soon as— Oh good, here he comes now,’ Zac said, watching as Anders suddenly appeared on the plateau, arms swinging, head down as he walked at speed up the grass, as though unaware he had just hiked a near-vertical path. He was wearing his orange waterproof gear again, a large backpack strapped to his back, flashes of his scruffy blonde hair escaping from the hood like fur trim.

  A minute later there was a brisk knock and he was standing in front of them all, expectantly. ‘You are ready?’ he asked, his eyes scanning the motley group and lingering particularly on Anna, looking so bright and perky in her beautifully coordinated outfit.

  ‘Sure,’ Bo sighed, draining the coffee and scraping her chair back. She supposed the sooner they went, the sooner it would be done. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Anna’s expression wavered as she took in Bo’s muted outfit. ‘Uh, Bo – are you going to change?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Bo looked down at herself dispassionately.

  ‘Well, I was just thinking – if we’re going to a waterfall, this would be the perfect time to wear the matching waterproof trousers with the jacket, wouldn’t it? I mean, not that I’m trying to tell you how to dress,’ she smiled. ‘But it does seem like a perfect opportunity, doesn’t it?’ She bit her lip anxiously, waiting for Bo to respond.

  ‘That’s not a problem, is it, Bo?’ Zac said, answering for her as he pushed his chair back too and stretched. ‘I’m already in mine.’ Bo noticed for the first time he was wearing the branded trousers in black, with a matching long-sleeved charcoal thermal top.

  ‘Two hundred thou,’ Lenny whispered under his breath as he passed by with his breakfast can of Coke, clearly trying to incentivize her.

  ‘Bo?’ Zac pressed with an impatient tone, seeing how she didn’t react. ‘We’re good to go when you are.’

  ‘Uh, yes, of course,’ she mumbled, bringing herself back into the moment. ‘God, yes, of course, what was I thinking?’ She slapped her hand on her forehead as though she was a dunce. ‘I’ll go and change.’ She walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her, feeling an overwhelming urge to cry, but she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and took a few deep breaths instead, trying to calm herself down – all she had to do was wear a pair of trousers; it was hardly unreasonable.

  She knew she had to get it together. She was overreacting, still spooked by last night’s email, but he wasn’t real. He was just a faceless coward behind a screen, probably on the other side of the world; the threat was implied, not real. She would never meet him. He would never get near her. Not again . . .

  The collection of Ridge Rider outfits were draped over the wooden spindle chair in a rainbow medley, the tags still on and with the slightly chemical odour of factory-fresh clothes. She stepped into the yellow waterproof trousers – no cool black or grey for her; they fitted well but as she looked down at herself, she thought that with the jacket on too she looked like a Teletubby.

  Still, everyone was waiting.

  ‘Okay, great!’ Zac said as she came out of the room again, eyes down. ‘See? That wasn’t so hard, was it, babe?’ he asked, small barbs still prickling his words.

  ‘Oh, you look so cute! How do you pull that off?’ Anna exclaimed, clasping her hands together happily.

  ‘It’s okay then?’ Bo asked doubtfully, looking down at herself.

  ‘Just wait till Head Office gets a sight of you.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ Anders said briskly, not passing comment as he turned and led them all out of the cabin, Zac on his heels like an over-eager student.

  ‘Yay! Let’s do this,’ Anna said, doing a little air-punch behind him, using her and Zac’s catchphrase.

  Bo followed her with a sigh as she zipped up her coat and pulled up the hood, all sound instantly becoming muffled, like voices below a duvet. Lenny brought up the rear as he shrugged on his jacket and locked up behind them. Bo glanced in the windows of the other cabin as they passed – was Signy up from bed yet? Sitting at her rocking chair by the window? – but at this time of day, the glass only reflected her own yellow-bundled image back to her.

  Anders set a brisk pace. He was taking them to the Suitor waterfall, a four-hour round trip by foot from here, which, with the limited daylight, was going to be tight if they wanted rest-stops and time to take footage too. The waterfall was close to the farm as the crow flew, but with no designated path for much of the hike and having to go up first before they could get down, he had warned them the going would be slow and potentially treacherous in places, for although the early snow had largely thawed, some ice patches remained.

  Bo wasn’t sure they had the weather for it today, as they marched in file like soldiers on a training exercise. Just as Signy had predicted, she could feel snow in the air; the sky had clouded up overnight – robbing Lenny of yet another Aurora – and was now as woolly as a bobble hat but nowhere near as warm. Not that that mattered – she was panting and pink-cheeked within minutes as they went straight into a steep hike.

  The Suitor was one of the most famous sites in the area and sat directly opposite the Seven Sisters fall, which she had gazed upon in an almost constant meditation on the opposite side of the fjord since arriving at the farm. Anders had explained that if they wanted dramatic shots, there was another waterfall, Storseterfossen, just behind Gerainger itself, which had a sherpa path running directly behind the water; but when Zac had looked it up on TripAdvisor, it had come up as the fourth most popular activity in the region – far too mainstream for their tastes (or their followers’). They had to do it ‘authentically’, Zac had insisted, which translated as ‘doing it the hard way’: finding a waterfall without a path to, from or behind it, and taking their pictures there. ‘The journey’s the destination, man,’ Zac had shrugged, when Anders had looked at him like he was mad.

  Turning their backs on the fjord, they followed a steep path tracking up and away from the farm, heading into the trees again; for the first fifteen minutes, Anna kept up a stream of hearty, excitable chatter but as the gradient refused to give and the trees kept on coming, acres of forest still above them, she lapsed into the breathless quiet of the rest of them. This was the reality behind the filtered images – hard slog.

  Behind her, Bo could just detect Lenny snapping away intermittently – even with her hood up, her ear was acutely attuned to those distinctive clicks – but apart from that and the snapping of twigs beneath their boots, the silence rolled like a storm cloud, sometimes gathering up birdsong within its embrace, but more often feeding on itself and becoming louder, stronger, bigger.

  Fifty minutes in, without a break or even a slowing down, they were at 1,800 metres above sea level, lingering patches of snow freckling the grass at these higher altitudes, the air as clear and pure as diamond chippings.

  ‘We’ll take a short rest here; there’s no more path beyond this point,’ Anders said, walking over to a boulder and sitting on it with the same casual action of a commuter taking his seat on the train and beginning to read the paper.

  Lenny groaned. ‘I hope that’s not
his way of saying we’ve just done the easy bit,’ he muttered, immediately sinking into a cross-legged position on the grass as Anna dramatically sprawled spreadeagled like a shipwreck survivor beside him.

  ‘I think I’m dying,’ she groaned. ‘You guys are all so fit. I’ve got to get to the gym.’

  ‘Nah. You look in excellent shape to me,’ Lenny replied, giving her an obvious visual sweep. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Ooh.’

  Bo watched on from beneath lowered lashes, feeling like she was watching them from behind a wall of glass. It distantly occurred to her that if they were still flirting then perhaps that meant they hadn’t got it on yet? And if that was so, then she could still get to Lenny first and warn him off – the last thing they all needed was an ugly split and an atmosphere for the next two weeks. But not yet. Not now. She looked away, losing interest in them. He was filling up her head and she could concentrate on little else.

  The ground had plateaued here at the top of the mountain, the sheer cliffs rolling up to a sudden but gentle stop. It wasn’t a view that could be ignored and as she stared out, letting the view wash over, her eyes began to focus and notice details as her gaze followed the terrain rolling away into the distance: snow-speckled, forest-furred mountains becoming grey bumps, becoming just a haze as the mountaintops rippled out towards the Norwegian Sea on the horizon.

  At the sight of it, she felt her spirits began to rise like a spring sap. The big view made her feel small, and that made her feel better. Her own troubles, such as they were, seemed so inconsequential when she stood on a mountaintop and saw the world at her feet. It was a curious mix of euphoria and invincibility, coupled with a feeling of being utterly insignificant. And it was this feeling that was the reason she did this. It was the high that kept her going.

  Bo looked across at Zac. He was standing off to the side, looking into the distance like Columbus searching for America, but she could tell from the set of his jaw that he was still hurt. Wounded. She had practically leapt from his touch last night, his enquiring hand reaching over in the same moment she had seen the message, and it had been a sucker-punch to his ego.

  Glancing over at the others – Anders was poring over a map, Anna and Lenny each rolling a cigarette – she walked over to him and slipped her hand in his, glancing up at him anxiously as he stared ahead. ‘Hey.’ She squeezed his hand, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘Still love me?’

  It was a moment before he squeezed back. ‘Just about,’ he said in a low voice.

  She felt her heart ache as she watched him; he was such a boy in so many ways. ‘I’m really sorry about last night. I was just . . .’ What did she say? She had never told him about the troll, not really, not all of it. With followings the size of theirs, it was statistically impossible to please everyone or have everyone like them. They were both resigned to – if not fully inured to – the jealous, mean-spirited and sometimes outright cruel remarks and jibes some strangers felt entitled to make. And this guy had always been clever – nothing was ever too explicit, there were no outright threats, he was savvy enough to make sure he didn’t do anything that would give either Instagram or the police something to work with; but an undercurrent of menace still dripped from every word. He might have talked about wanting to humiliate her, punish her, degrade her – but he always signed off with smiley face emojis. He had only harassed her for a few months but during that time, he had posted a comment every single time she put up a new image; and although she received comments in the thousands, she always found herself scrolling through to find his; it could take hours, it had become a compulsion but she had needed to know if he was still out there.

  And he had been, as constant as a shadow, until one day, quite suddenly, it had all stopped. She remembered it well – the shocking vacuum. It was the first time she had shared a photo of herself with Zac, a month or so after they’d got together, when she’d felt sufficiently reassured they had some kind of future together. She had never shared anything of her private life before that night, she had scrolled for almost two hours through the comments trying to find his response but there had been nothing, nor the next day or the day after that. Zac’s presence had scared him off. Coward that he inevitably was, he had seen that she wasn’t alone any more, that she was less vulnerable. But even though he had been silenced, still the question had always niggled in the back of her mind – was he still there, watching her through a screen? Or had something happened to remove her from his life – maybe he’d been in prison? Or his own life had improved, he’d got married himself? Or perhaps he’d been doing this to other women like her and simply shifted his attention? Worse, he’d begun harassing real women in his actual life? Or perhaps he was dead – hit by a bus. Cancer. Karma . . .

  The questions had lingered, even though for three and a half years there had been nothing; and slowly, slowly, she had allowed herself to relax, to believe she was free again. So why now? Why had he come back? What had she done to tempt him from his hibernation? She was clearly still with Zac. Why couldn’t he just leave her alone?

  ‘Hormonal?’

  It was a moment before she clicked back into the present again. ‘. . . Yeah . . . right. That.’ It was as good an excuse as any. She could hardly explain it all now, out here, anyway.

  He glanced down at her and caught sight of her expression. ‘Hey, it’s okay,’ he whispered, turning to look at her fully and clasping her face in his hands. ‘Of course I still love you. I’m nuts about you. I just hate it when we fight.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I love you so much, baby,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know. And I love you too.’ She blinked up at him, waiting to be forgiven, waiting to move on. She closed her eyes as he kissed her but in the background she heard the click-click-click of Lenny’s camera and an ‘Awww’ from Anna.

  ‘God, they really are so cute,’ Anna stage-whispered to him. ‘We used to wonder, sometimes, if maybe it was just a publicity thing.’

  ‘Nope. Suck-face the entire time,’ Lenny drawled in a bored voice.

  Bo pulled away; she wanted to grab the camera from Lenny and stamp on it, tell him to keep his cynical opinions to himself, but she didn’t stir. Zac had asked her only last night to try harder with him and she would. She would even let it go about the bath picture. This time.

  Anders, having folded away the map again, was sitting on the rock, his elbows splayed on his knees, watching them all impassively. He seemed to feel no inclination to become their friend, or become a closer part of the group: there was no chitchat or small talk or joke-telling or anecdote-swapping. It was as though he had told himself he was their guide, pure and simple, and that any contact beyond getting from A to B and back to A again was outside his job description. Which was odd, because he had been such easy company the day before when she had sat with him in his grandmother’s cabin. Although he never said or did more than was absolutely required to make his point – no arm waving or hyperbole – there had been animation within his stillness. No fuss hadn’t meant no fun.

  Anna and Lenny dragged their last draws on the cigarettes and stamped them out on the ground, a small puckered circle of raspberry gloss around the neck of Anna’s. A cold gust ran at them all and Bo shivered again – though she was warm from the hike, the wind chill was inescapable and she pulled up her hood again. Snow was definitely coming.

  ‘Given that there’s no more up to climb, please tell me we’re going down?’ Anna smiled as she walked over to Anders. She had a slight grass stain on her white jeans and mud had spattered up her calves but she still looked like a model on a campaign shoot.

  ‘Yes, but this is where the hard work begins.’

  ‘What?’ Anna half wailed, half laughed, turning back to Lenny as she pulled a series of funny faces.

  ‘Oh man, didn’t I just know he was gonna say that!’ Lenny groaned.

  ‘We need to be careful across this stretch.’ Anders stood up and was addressing them all. ‘The land here is steep
and the grass may be slippery as we go down. Walk in a single line behind me and keep your eyes on the ground. If you slip or trip here, you won’t stop till you hit water.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Lenny quipped, hoisting the camera strap over his opposite shoulder and stretching out his neck.

  ‘You will hear the waterfall before you see it but do not stop to take photographs until I have found somewhere safe for us all to stand, okay?’ He looked at them all in equal turn. ‘No picture is worth dying for.’ And when there was a silence, he added with a frown: ‘I hope we are all agreed on that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Bo murmured, but Zac and Lenny were a full beat behind her. Many times Zac had risked his life getting the ultimate selfie shot – one time in Yosemite, he had pulled a line between Higher Cathedral Spire and the nearby cliff face and halfway across the tight-rope, dangled upside down by just the karabiner at his waist. The resulting image was one of his most notorious – his hair falling vertically downwards, the whites of his eyes dominating as the sky switched places with the very, very far-away ground – and Bo still didn’t like looking at it. She suspected he didn’t like being read the health and safety act by Anders either but he had little choice: the balance of power was with their guide right now; he was the only one who could get them where they wanted to go so they had to play by his rules.

  They followed him down the face of the cliff, the grass brushing their left shoulders. It was precipitously steep and they all fell into a solemn silence of concentration that was only punctuated every so often by Anna giving tiny squeals or gasps, before a breathy laugh escaped her, along with a nervous but still jaunty ‘sorry!’ So much for being seen but not heard, Bo thought, her nerves beginning to fray as she picked her way down the trail carefully. It had begun to sleet, making the grass wet and even more treacherous.

  The climb down was hard going on their thigh muscles and made all the worse for the slow control the descent required. But sure enough, as Anders had predicted, they grew aware of a growing roar like distant planes as they steadily dropped height, traversing across the mountain. Occasionally, Bo couldn’t resist snatching a look up as it grew to a deafening din, but there was nothing to see – not until they suddenly stepped out from the trees and walked into a mist as thick as soup.