Chapter Ten #2
‘About twenty thousand troops died in Dunkirk, J.’ She glanced at Nate, wondering if he was talking to Sasha. He was walking back and forth by their table, his left hand raking through his hair.
‘OK, bad example. Do you want me to call your parents or anything? Let them know you’re OK?’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ said Lucy, wondering if there was any way she could avoid it.
Would an avalanche in Switzerland make the news, if nobody had died?
She had no idea, but she’d definitely told her dad the name of the place she was travelling to, so they might get wind of something.
It felt wrong to add to their emotional burden, today of all days, but it also didn’t feel right to say nothing at all.
‘I’ll message you when I’m in Geneva,’ said Jonno. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’
‘Well, right now I’d like a helicopter and a hot bath,’ said Lucy.
‘I can provide neither of those things,’ said Jonno. ‘I am, as ever, totally useless.’
‘Mmm, but I love you anyway.’
‘Yeah, all right, bugger off,’ said Jonno. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
Lucy ended the call and took a deep breath, looking around at the eight other people in the room.
Gunther, Monica and Chantal were all deep in conversation behind the bar, no doubt playing Tetris with floor space and spare pillows.
The two band members were whispering quietly in their corner, and everyone else was on their phone, presumably sending messages like these might be their final words to their loved ones.
The weather outside suggested that was infinitely possible, so Lucy scrolled to her parents’ home number. Might as well get this over with.
‘Lucy, darling,’ said her mother’s voice after a few rings. ‘We wondered if you’d call today. I know you said you were going away, but I told your father you wouldn’t forget.’
‘Hi, Mum. I just wanted to—’
‘We thought of you earlier, when we were with Leo.’ Shirley and Richard Glover weren’t religious people, but any conversation about Leo brought out a kind of breathless piety, like they were whispering in church.
‘Have you spent time with him today?’ continued Shirley.
She meant spiritually, of course – Leo’s ashes were scattered amongst some rosebushes in Croydon cemetery.
Lucy had sat on the memorial bench nearby on many occasions, but she’d never felt as close to Leo there as she did in Bristol.
She’d moved to the city five months after he died, as soon as she’d finished her uni finals.
Even after all these years the city felt like it was full of him; the pubs he’d loved, the hills he’d climbed, the places he’d hung out.
For Lucy, Bristol preserved some of Leo’s spirit – creative, uncompromising, a little unpredictable and occasionally hectic.
A city that was sometimes charming, but still had sharp edges, just like her brother.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m actually calling because I’m stuck in Switzerland, Mum.
I’m in a bar in the mountains above Zermatt, and there’s been an avalanche.
’ She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, knowing that unless she was gasping her final breaths right now, any Lucy news would be taken as an unwelcome intrusion into a day that was all about Leo.
But her phone was running out of battery, so there was no time for platitudes.
‘You’re in a bar?’ said her mother, with the same aghast tone she might use for ‘You’ve run away to join the circus?
’ Lucy shook her head, kicking herself for not seeing that one coming.
She loved her parents, obviously, but they’d never made any real effort to hide that Leo had been their favourite child.
He was her father’s clever, creative son, and her mother’s emotionally fragile, precious boy.
His death had immortalised him as forever twenty-one – a little troubled and lost, but with so much potential – whereas the subsequent eleven years had rubbed away any residual shine from Lucy.
Single, childless, living far from home, a job that they didn’t understand and didn’t score them any points with the neighbours.
And most damning of all, the audacity to still be walking and breathing despite Leo being gone.
‘I came here for lunch with a work colleague, but that’s not the point. There’s been an avalanche.’
‘Goodness,’ said her mother, clearly still snippy about the bar thing. ‘Is anyone hurt? You sound fine.’
‘I AM fine. Everyone’s safe. But we’re stuck up a mountain, at least until tomorrow, and my phone is running out of battery. I didn’t want you to see it on the news and be worried.’
‘We don’t watch the news,’ said her mother.
‘You can’t trust the mainstream media. We stopped watching after those awful stories about your father’s work.
’ Richard Glover worked as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company who had been involved in some questionable opiate-pushing scandal in the US.
Richard led a team developing drugs to treat various forms of depression and anxiety, a decade’s work driven by the tragic and untimely death of his son.
So he’d never come close to the scandal, but Lucy’s mother had taken it personally anyway.
‘Jesus,’ muttered Lucy, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Fine, Facebook then. I just wanted to let you know I was safe.’
‘You should have been here,’ said her mother, the emphasis clearly on the final word. ‘With your father and me.’
‘I’ll come and see you when I get back, Mum.
I promise. I need to go, battery’s—’ She ended the call, relieved that it was done and she’d only been made to feel mildly like shit.
One of the reasons she’d never felt in any hurry to have children was because it would inevitably mean spending more time with her parents, although that definitely wasn’t the only reason.
As it was, she saw them three or four times a year at most, and only ever if she made the trip to their mock-Tudor detached house in Purley, south of Croydon.
They refused to come to Bristol, which considering the suspension bridge loomed large over the city, was probably fair enough.
How have I ended up here? thought Lucy, deciding that, all things considered, and even in the midst of an avalanche, it was still better than the alternative.