Byron started it. The original rockstar. It was thanks to Byron that Itchy wound up living in Chamonix Mont Blanc, the death-sport capital of the world, among the high mountains and low morals. For the last few years he tried to numb the pain of his past with alcohol and adrenaline, but now a serial rapist is stalking Cham's tourist-thronged streets, haunting the same shadows as Itchy and triggering an obsession which will lead him far from Europe's peaks, to the depths of the valley and himself. The promise of Jonathan Trigell's first novel, Boy A, is confirmed in this depiction of the world of extreme sports and adrenaline junkies, where all the violent mistakes of a man's life come back to haunt him.
Release date:
December 1, 2011
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages:
160
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Mont Blanc, Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni (1816)
December 12th, 11 a.m.
It was thanks to Shelley that Itchy ended up in Chamonix. Shelley and Byron and Dr 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 farther 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’Isère, 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 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 him, 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 he was in one of the finger-countable 7th Armoured Division tank crews that
survived all the campaigns that roll off the tongue: the 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 anyone
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 outdo 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 nowhere 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, which 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 wartime 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 GP 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 the 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 that 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 slightly towards Itchy with this; who feels a scald of shame, moves farther away to restack unused glasses.
Sean, one of his flatmates, 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 nearlys and the maybes, the wastage – because one day, he knows, he
will lie on his deathbed 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.
Dangers which sport upon the brink of precipices have been my playmate; I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.
Shelley
December 13th, 8.32 a.m.
The best bit about sex is the static just before the first kiss. Anticipation. Likewise Itchy loves preparations for powder: strapping on his knee brace, testament to a
ligament-shredding fall four seasons back; wrapping the corset-belt of his armadillo spine-protector; buckling into place his avalanche transceiver, the click and half-twist of the fasten, the
light that flashes against slick blue moulded lines – the James Bondness of it; filling his camelback with tap water, fresh as Evian; checking that his collapsible shovel and probe are in
place in his pack; and throwing in three Mars Bars, because there is no time to eat on a powder day.
Powder is what it’s all about. More than birds. More than booze. More even than mountains. Because powder is the medium the mountain uses to play with you. And it comes so infrequently,
lasts unsullied by sun, unblasted by wind, untracked by people for such a brief instant, that it is purity and transience and pleasure distilled.
Aussie Mark, the other flatmate, has a car. It’s a short-wheelbase Landy that looks as though it probably did service driving various charities, mercenaries and militias
around African starvation spots, before retiring to the Alps. It’s got a rack, bolted and rusted on to the spare wheel on the back, and Itchy and Sean shove their skis in. Aussie Mark’s
a boarder and a bum, he’s a diamond driller – whatever the fuck that is – Itchy knows it’s to do with construction and not jewellery; he makes a bundle in London in the
summers anyway.
Aussie Mark has a scar above his right eye from a punch he took defending a stranger and he likes the way his climbing harness squeezes in his trousers, making his packet look really big.
The Landy guffs out of inertia, and Aussie Mark executes a perfect seven-point turn, pulling out of the cramped underground parking space, around the scabby Renault van that has all but blocked
him in and a Guy Fawkes pile of broken wood and cardboard boxes.
The carpark is massive, runs under the whole of Chamonix Sud – the ghetto. It is a warren, though that sounds too pleasant, of interlinked tunnels and small isolated bays, all covered in
crude graffiti, oil, ancient urine and squares of smashed-in windscreen glass. It is home to rubbish bins and rats, and now it would seem something worse.
Sean is building a spliff as they drive along the postcard road up to Argentière. He does it the French way: crumbling herb into his cupped hand and using this as a
mixing bowl to meld it with tobacco from a Camel Light. Aussie Mark taps on the steering wheel, even though there is no music playing; he’s always tapping or fidgeting, too much energy. Itchy
watches the trees out of the window. They are bowing to the car, bent under weighty ermine robes from the first big valley floor dump. It’s hard not to feel like a hero today, hard not to
imagine you are a gladiator, helmed and armed, about to do battle for nothing but glory and love of the fight.
Sean’s mobile rings, with two tinny lines from an old Sade track – ‘Smooth Operator’ – and breaks Itchy’s shallow abstraction.
‘Snow Spirit Holidays, Sean speaking, how can I help?’ he says, though he has just checked out the caller ID so knows who has rung. ‘Oh, hi, boss. Yes, going round doing my
health and safety checks. Yeah, it does look great up there, doesn’t it? How could you think that? I know how important it is to get everything sorted now. Yeah, I don’t mind –
there will be plenty more powder days.’
Sean lies with a glibness and fluency that Itchy had never before encountered. He seems proud of it, lies unnecessarily and extravagantly. Lying is of course in a rep’s remit, but you
can’t help admiring someone who takes so much pleasure in their work.
There’s a queue for the lift up at the Grands Montets. They haven’t opened the cable car yet, waiting for the pisteurs to finish detonating avalanches. Occasionally
a volley, as if from a lone Luftwaffe bomber, reverberates around the valley. On big blasts the vibrations judder up into the legs of the crowd stood waiting. There are no punters in the queue; all
season workers, or bums, or locals. Pupils glossy with expectation. There is tangible camaraderie, smiles, stranger chat. This is what it was like in the Blitz, when that spirit of the Londoners
was everywhere and the good old Queen Mum could look the East End in the eye – though no doubt they were expected to stoop to the ground, to make this easier from within an armoured
Bentley.
Itchy’s muscles ache with readiness, but his hangover lungs retch on the thin cold air and his gut churns with every early morning movement. His skis feel heavy in his hand. He has one of
his Mars Bars while he’s waiting. What he could really do with is a beer.
There is a cheer when the cable car engine churns into life, in its one gear. The lifty might be bunking off school to stand at the turnstile letting people through, he looks about fifteen.
He’s got sparse and soft blond bum-fluff, and a grin like he wouldn’t want to be riding the hill because looking at lift passes is so much more fun.
The guys get in the third cabin to go up, which is not bad for when they arrived. It’ll be different when the season really kicks off in a week or so’s time.
The doors are closed and cranked in place with a metal bar, like the French Foreign Legion use to hold the fort gates when the Arabs charge. The lift system in Chamonix is antiquated and
unapologetic. They never spend money on it. Why bother? The town’s always full anyway. They don’t care about investment, or competitiveness, nor about advertising, nor customer service.
Even by French standards, they don’t care about customer service. The problem with Chamonix is that it knows it’s Chamonix.
Itchy is by the cabin front window, separated from the other two by a throng of Scandies, all wearing helmets and earnest expressions. One of them is about eleven feet tall.
Itchy looks at the cable from which the ’bin hangs, twisted like a liquorice stick, barely the girth of your arm, but spiralling off unsupported up the mountain.
A friend who had never skied came out to see him at the end of last season, and Itchy was amazed by his reaction to these lifts. You could sense his adrenalin, the urge to jump – if only
to end the spin-giddy fear of looking down. Humans very quickly become complacent about such things, though. Have to keep upping the dose of danger to get high. To Itchy, the view is pretty but the
cable car not in the least bit exciting – except for what is promised at the end of it.
The riding is out of this world. They do two laps of the Lavancher bowl, barely stopping, in deep untracked powder. Relishing the sprays of snow hitting their faces as they
turn. Dancing in the order they descend. Shouting and laughing like kids. Serious as saints.
For Itchy, deep powder is a near-religious experience. It is absolute freedom, because you can ski where you want: rocks are blanketed; tree stumps blister-packed; pitfalls filled. And it is
merciful, the snow allows you mistakes and welcomes them, envelops them in its love. It liberates, lightens the load, lifts even the everyday burden of your own weight. It lets you fly with an
abandon that you couldn’t hope to get away with on normal snow. It is forgiving and allows him to feel forgiven. Drops that would jar his spine, or smash his knees into his chin, instead
catch him and cradle him. And everything is as white as the light that Itchy may one day walk towards in that final drop, where he would not hope to be forgiven as fully.
‘Spot on,’ Aussie Mark says, just the three of them in one of the Bochard bubbles, ‘today is totally spot on.’
He wipes off the snow stuck to the top sheet of his board with his big, gloved hand and watches it drop to the rubber-matted floor. Then looks up with a smile that splits his Labrador’s
face into toothy mayhem.
He’s a funny-looking sprout, Aussie Mark, there’s no doubt about it. Has a curly ponytail, like some eighties wide boy, and wears his jeans drainpipe tight when almost everyone else
in Cham still buys them about five sizes too big. Not that he’s wearing them now, of course. Only Parisians and teenagers wear jeans for skiing. It’s not a good look. And you’re
not paying respect to the mountain if you aren’t wearing waterproof and properly insulated gear. You have to remember, the mountain can crush you at any moment. It’s not exactly
hankering to, it doesn’t even notice you’re there. To a mountain that has existed since the continents formed, a human being is not even as significant as a micro-organism is to a sperm
whale. But Itchy is in no doubt that when it’s going about its business – of eating giant squid and being enormous – a sperm whale regularly destroys whole congregations of
micro-organisms. And it is certain that the ill-prepared, badly dressed ones die first.
Sean wears this bright yellow jacket, which is top of the range, double duck down, but still makes him look like a motorway maintenance worker. Aussie Mark wears a mishmash of makes, but all
black; his board’s black too, with a naked lady and dragons on it. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
