Legs like the proverbial jelly, heart racing and hands shaking, I stood a mere ten metres away from safety. Breath held, head pounding, sense telling me this is madness.......I can't do this! Then from somewhere, nowhere, there was movement, downhill movement, and gravity and I were one, as we swooshed together across the whiteness to the foot of my own personal 'red' run where Matt waited with a high five and an awkward hug, exhaling in relief.
It had been just over three years since I had been on skis in our favourite Alpine resort, trying to ignore Christmas and avoid the brutal truth that Mark was dead. Heather, Mark's beautiful and amazingly brave girlfriend, was with us and we were, to all intents and purposes, still a family of four trying to act normally in a time and place that was anything but. We cried as we arrived in the picturesque resort, we cried on the chair lifts, we cried as we opened presents on Christmas Day and again, as we wrote his name in the snow whenever we could. We glided down blue, green and the occasional red run-usually by mistake!- and half expected to see a flash of brilliant blue streak past, cut us up and disappear round the next hair pin bend to reappear, casually smoking a cigarette and smiling smugly.
That first Christmas without him, we were like birds with broken wings, clinging to each other trying to breathe with hearts battered and bruised, in the crisp mountain air, holding each other up, as the landscape of normality slipped away from us. But we were together that first awful Christmas and that's all that seemed to matter, as we threw ourselves downhill, not really caring if we made it to the bottom or not.
I started skiing when I was a young teacher and was invited on the school skiing trip to Scotland with a group of mouthy teenagers. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss and Paul, my then fiance, came too. Now skiing in Scotland is a totally different game to the Alps. Can't think why!....... We were ill equipped in borrowed gear and on Bambi legs we snow-ploughed, slipped, collapsed and giggled, our way through lessons in the blinding blizzards that swept the Cairngorms daily.
But we were bitten by the bug. Mark began skiing at eleven; he too learning up in Scotland and Matt when he was just six, a tiny dot shivering with fear at the top of the dry ski slope in Swadlincote. During his time at uni, Mark worked several nights a week at the ski centre in Sheffield, earning beer money when his grant didn't stretch to such luxuries. But it was only in fairly recent times that we all went away together.
Skiing holidays, when Mark came with us. were never quite how I envisaged them when buying new thermals or booking ski hire. Never quite the bonding experience I imagined, We usually arrived fraught and exhausted after a ten hour drive, fuming in stop- start traffic around Chambery, losing the battle with the snow chains at the foot of a 14km almost verticle climb, and struggling with the language in the ski hire shop. ( how do I know how many kilos I am and what size poles I need?) For the first few days we would travel the gondolas and ski lifts, happily planning our routes around the pistes, waiting for each other in the queues, laughing over a mug of gluwein or chocolat chaud; Mark animated, showing off, daring us to follow him, sharing long standing family jokes, which made us giggle all over again. Mark pushing Matt to go further and faster; laughing himself silly when there was a fall, a mistake, a crash or wrong turn. Evenings were spent eating huge plates of pasta, creamy cheese, fresh French bread and drinking beer to re fuel for more of the same the following day.
Things would change subtely on about day four when, slight irritations would creep in. Patience wore thinner, as we had to stop to reposition David after he had planted himself into a snow bank, skis crossed and poles lost, for the fourth time in an hour, or a chair lift stopped numerous times, leaving us dangling in mid air, icy winds freezing icicle tears to our faces. Tempers flared over the most trivial of stuff and our skiing became more aggressive and careless; risk taking ignited our fears and adrenalin and, inevitably, a full scale argument would start over an innocent remark during the evening meal. A stand off, a barrage of insults, more tears, polite requests to calm down, shouting and a walk out until, finally, silence, subdued apologies and 'do you still love me?' hugs before retiring, weary and worn out, to bed around the first misty light of dawn. The last day was always fun, with relieved togetherness and a renewed sense of 'we', 'us' and 'family'. We would giggle at nothing, celebrate my attempts to finally conquer an elusive slope, whoop, whoop our way down our favourite runs and return our skis to the hire shop with many 'merci s' and lots of 'l'annee prochaine, mais oui....' and regret that it was all over far too soon and we must endure the endless journey home........until next year, when we would do it all again, except, now, we don't get to do it again with Mark, do we?
But Matt and I ski on, for us, for Mark, for the past, the memories and the times ahead. Which is how I found myself at the Snowdome shaking, petrified and questioning my sanity. I'm old; I'm not exactly in the peak of fitness; I could do with losing a stone or two, but my sallopettes still fit, and miraculously my kness instinctively remembered how to 'push down' and I was off hurtling towards my destiny. Matt was patience personified, urging, encouraging, cajoling and praising all my efforts. Mark would just have laughed, left me stranded on two uncontrollable planks of wood and then been waiting at the bottom, with a, 'What took you so long?' Secretly, incredibly proud of his dare devil mum. An hour later I was skiing from the top at phenomenal speeds, (OK, maybe not quite that fast) carving up boarders, (sorry!) who seemed to spend more time sitting on the snow than upright, and sliding to a dignified (not quite a hockey). stop at the bottom. Go me! Go Matt! Go us!
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