Chapter 32
CHRISTMAS EVE
Snow had fallen over the valley in stops and starts for days and the sun barely lifted over the horizon as the midwinter’s solstice, the shortest day of the year rolled by, bringing a dark time when there was next to no sunlight whatsoever to melt away the deep drifts on the mountainsides.
There’d been trucks summoned from the Scottish borders, arriving with hardwood planks and leaving loaded with Senga’s shortbread petticoat tails and chocolate rum balls and Christmas cakes for Eric’s workers’ families, all of them on special overtime rates because Eric had learned a very long time ago the importance of paying living wages.
When the trucks left, the lights stayed on at the repair shop around the clock, and the sounds of sawing and hammering sang out all the way along the riverside path, carried along over the frosty-white Nithy waters.
The high street was permanently lined with parked cars, and the pavements busy with folk coming to see the town’s traditional light displays as well as the exhibition up at the ski centre where there were modest queues of skiers waiting to drop down onto the long run where the honeycomb Dendix lay buried deep under the snow that was by now growing firm and compacted, and the Ptarmigan nightclub’s card machines kept beeping all night long as the DJ spun the decks for Christmas partygoers.
The updated website logged the launch day ticket sales, quickly selling out for days and then weeks afterwards.
This had astonished even Florrie, who had felt her hopes for the scheme rewarded tenfold by the growing interest across the region, helped of course by that reporter coming back and writing a very romantic update on the search for Eric Shaw.
The report of their reunion spread across the world, accompanied with a picture of Rhona and Eric holding on to one another and their antique, restored toboggan, outside the ski centre.
This time, though, Rhona consented to tell the story of her broken, and miraculously fixed, heart.
As the days of Advent had gone on, the repair shop regulars, aided by Eric, turned out more and more new toboggans, and mended the original ones, until a whole fleet was ready for launch. The opening day queue stretched all the way down through the ski centre complex and onto the high street.
Florrie, behind the concession bar, braced herself for what was to come.
‘Shall I lift the shutter?’ she asked Rhona.
Both resort workers were kitted out in exact replicas of the pink and purple vintage ski suit now on the mannequin in the exhibition space, complete with embroidered badge.
All Roz’s work. Hamish and Kenneth had the same matching ski suits too, now that Kenneth was trying out his new role as co-manager.
That had been something Florrie was quite insistent about in her report to Mr Banks.
Rhona checked her watch, and shouted through to Hamish and Kenneth in the exhibition and ticket office.
‘Are you ready?’
They both called back in the affirmative, and Hamish went to unlock the doors to let the waiting visitors in.
It had been Florrie’s idea to bring a little bit of the Ptarmigan bar down to the slope side where she would be serving up the alcohol-free eggnog, and some tremendously not alcohol-free Bombardino Scozzese, a Highland adaptation of her favourite Alpine après-ski cocktails, the recipe for which she’d had to ask her friends, the Sciò-Borromeos, about in a Zoom call last week, and they’d told her they were so happy she seemed to have found a place where she could really settle in.
Florrie had been taken aback that even her host family and former employers had recognised the ever so slightly lost, rootlessness of her life, something that even she hadn’t fully understood until she’d seen community in action the way it was in Cairn Dhu.
She’d done the right thing, fighting for the ski centre and for Hamish, even if it hadn’t gone down too well with her father, who she hadn’t heard from, apart from one line, after she copied him in to the email with her new report, which had gone directly to Mr Banks at the Regional Authority.
Her dad had replied, ‘What the hell are you up to?’ and then nothing.
Mr Banks hadn’t had a lot to say about it either, since his colleagues had been expecting a recommendation one way or another, and they had no reason to distrust the expertise of a representative of Norheim Ski Businesses Consultancy International.
They’d granted Hamish an extra year’s contract, on the proviso he did indeed return a net profit of at least fifteen thousand pounds, after payment of wages over the coming four quarters.
Without that, the centre would close next winter, but a stay of closure was better than nothing.
Rhona poured the heated Advocaat from the first of the big flasks into the glasses with the splash of whisky in the bottom, and Florrie stood ready with her big piping bag of whipped cream, her cinnamon sprinkles and glacé cherries as delightfully gaudy and festive garnishes.
She had her cash box and card reader on standby too, and of course the Slope Slushie machine was churning icily on the wall behind them, red and blue and ready for action.
‘Here they come,’ said Rhona, as the first of the visitors spilled into the slope side garden all dressed for the run, each one hauling a shiny red beautiful toboggan, and they stopped to read the drinks menu or to exclaim, ‘It’s her, the lady from the story.’
‘And we’ve hot stovies for when you need warming up,’ Rhona told the gathering families, indicating the big lidded pots behind them, and not at all minding the fact that she’d become briefly – what Florrie called – ‘internet famous’.
How could she mind when it had brought her man back to her? ‘It’s my very own recipe,’ she smiled.
Up on the slope, Morag Füssli, the plucky local news reporter who seemed to be deployed so often to Cairn Dhu to cover all of the town’s ups and downs, was listening to her cameraman’s countdown and breaking into her signature smile.
‘Two, one, action,’ he mouthed from behind the lens.
‘Thank you, and welcome to Cairn Dhu where, as you can see, the town has had record snowfall, the deepest recorded in five years. How long it will last, no one knows, but the locals are preparing to make the most of the flurries because today the Ski Centre is launching its new initiative, the Ullr Toboggan Run, named after the Norwegian god of snow, or so I’m told. ’
The shot pulled out to show Morag seated on the red toboggan.
‘I’m about to test it out with the help of these first lucky visitors. What are your names?’
‘I’m Ally McIntyre and this is Jamie Beaton,’ grinned the woman at the front of the sled to Morag’s right.
‘And you are?’ she turned to her left and held out her mic.
‘You ken who I am, I’m Finlay Morlich, the hill ranger?’ said Finlay, gripping the reins.
‘And I’m Murray McIntyre,’ shouted his boyfriend from where he clung on behind him, looking just as apprehensive about all this as it was possible to be.
‘And you?’ the camera pulled out even further to another couple seated on the furthest toboggan of the row.
‘Peaches and Euan,’ a smiling young woman yelled back, and the man behind her hugged her close, grinning happily. ‘We had to come home for a visit when we knew the centre was reopening.’
‘Right, well,’ said Morag, struggling to hold her mic and the reins as she pushed with her boots towards the very edge of the precipice.
‘We’d better go for it, I suppose. Remember, viewers at home, you can buy your tickets online for a ride on a Cairn Dhu flyer toboggan, just like this one.
’ She swallowed nervously but nothing had ever got in the way of her delivering the local news before and a fear of heights and sliding at speed (or the risk of crashing) weren’t going to stop her this time either.
‘This is me, Morag Füssli, wishing the whole of the Cairngorms a very merry Christmas. Back to you in the studio.’ And with a firm nod, she stowed her mic in her lap and pushed off over the edge.
The camera followed the seven thrill-seekers as they screamed and laughed their way down the long run until they were just splashes of colour spilling onto the matting at the bottom.
The report ended with a very tiny but triumphant two thumbs up from Füssli way down in the whiteout below.
It had been a long and busy launch day, and the very last of the booked-in visitors were tobogganing merrily down the slope by floodlight, their screeches of glee echoing off the mountain sides, when a very big black car pulled up at the slushy kerb.
The man rolled down his mirrored window and looked up at the slope, telling his driver to wait for him. He wouldn’t be long having a word with his daughter.