Читать книгу The Trickster - Muriel Gray, Muriel Gray - Страница 18

The blond boy stared up at the wolf with a mixture of awe and expectation. He jumped about three miles high when Katie spoke softly behind him.

‘It’s a female. She’s protecting her cubs. See? Behind her there.’

The boy breathed out hard, whirling round to look at Katie.

‘Did I give you a fright? I’m sorry. Guess I shouldn’t sneak around like that. Do you like the wolves?’

The boy’s heart rate had slowed enough to speak. ‘Sure. They’re neat.’

‘That’s the male over there. Do you notice he’s a bit bigger and a slightly different colour?’

She had an arm round the boy now as they both stood looking up at the stuffed animals whose dry, painted jaws gaped back at them in silent roars.

The boy’s mother appeared from behind a snarling grizzly bear to join them, her face registering curiosity when she saw Katie with her arm conspiratorially round her son’s shoulders.

‘Will the male wolf eat the cubs?’ The boy’s eyes were wide.

‘Well sometimes they can, but the mother wolf is a pretty strong force to be reckoned with. If I were him, I wouldn’t mess with Mom.’ Katie looked round to greet her young charge’s mother. ‘Hi. Hope you’re enjoying the museum. Can I tell you that we’ll be closing in about twenty minutes? Don’t rush on out or anything, but if there’s something else you need to see, now’s the time.’

The woman smiled gratefully and politely. ‘Sure. That’s fine. We’ve just about covered it all. It’s been very enjoyable, thanks. Hasn’t it, Randall?’

The boy was awestruck by the wolf again. ‘Sure. It’s neat,’ he said absently.

Katie smiled and left them to it. One quick circuit of the railroad display on the balcony to check everybody was out and she could cram in a coffee and a sit-down before locking-up time. The wooden stairs to the balcony creaked in protest as she mounted them, but offered her a view of the whole ground floor as she climbed.

The vantage point told her that the mother and son were the last ones in, and if the boy could tear himself away from the stuffed wolves she should have the place cleared in five minutes. Already she could hear the comforting sound of Margaret cashing up the till on the front desk, counting out the few dollars and cents that the handful of visitors to the Silver Heritage Museum had spent on postcards, pamphlets and bookmarks.

Katie cherished this time – the feeling of the museum having done its job, as though all the exhibits were silently shaking hands, or paws, congratulating themselves for another successful day intriguing, entertaining and educating the visitors. During the winter, this was where the vacationing wives and children who weren’t skiing came to look round, while Dad perfected his parallel turns on the slopes, or the stray family and seasonal worker who passed by and entered on impulse. All left delighted by the display of unpretentious, idiosyncratic mixture of local information that Katie had put together over the past five years. Stuffed animals raged beside solemn Indian artefacts. Posters trying to win the custom of potential Canadian Pacific Railway travellers in the 1900s were framed beside ancient and torturous-looking wooden skis. Fossils, millions of years old, sat happily in cases with blown bird eggs.

The Silver Heritage Museum wasn’t going to win any prizes for academic excellence, but for the entrance fee of a dollar it certainly gave its best shot at being value for money.

This year, Katie had managed to get a grant from the Alberta Tourist Board that would keep things ticking along financially for another two years, an achievement that had spawned a hilarious celebration party for the staff amongst the stuffed animals that made Katie smile every time she thought of it.

If the stern Alberta Tourist Board woman who’d written the letter to her congratulating them had seen her with a glass of cheap wine toasting the museum from the back of a mangy bull moose she might well have changed her mind. She didn’t. Things were doing just fine.

The balcony that ringed the main ground floor space of the museum was a mixture of displays that hadn’t quite been rationalized. Katie had acquired some Victorian glass cases from an auction in Edmonton and these were now filled with an assortment of items that couldn’t be crammed in downstairs. She had wanted the theme to be the building of the railroad in the late 1800s, and Silver’s important part in it. However, lack of space had made them include the history of the Kinchuinick Indians from the area; how they broke away in the eighteenth century from the larger Assiniboine and Stony tribes to live here in the mountains. And although the native Canadians had no part in the building of the railroad, Katie dug up a tenuous historical tie-in about how tribe members had apparently hindered the largely Scottish railroad work-gang during the final stages of building the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. The tunnel was the engineering feat of the century, that saw CPR blast that mad doubling-back tunnel two miles long right through the centre of Wolf Mountain.

In fact the centrepiece of the balcony display was a working model of the tunnel; a papier-mâché masterpiece they had commissioned from Calgary, where a tiny model train wound its way through the half cut-away mountain when you pressed a red button on the side of the case. The kids loved it. They would stand for an age pressing and re-pressing the button, making the train spiral its way round the tunnel until a bored parent dragged them downstairs to the bird display.

With the mountain cut in half you could see exactly where the line went, a luxury not available in real life. The papier-mâché world was much easier to understand.

Katie knew the whole floor should have been railroad history, but she had all these great Indian domestic tools, and artefacts to do with tribal worship and mythology to show and nowhere to show them. So she banged them in the cases and hoped for the best. Sam, of course, called the Indian stuff junk. She had watched his face as he walked round the display for the first time with her and the clouds of emotion that blackened his normally smooth brow were hard to fathom.

This contempt for his Indian past was something Katie had struggled to understand all their married life. Since it was virtually a taboo subject in the Hunt household she didn’t reckon she would ever be permitted to cross that bridge into the secret place that fed Sam with his self-loathing. Nevertheless, she grieved for him when she saw it manifest itself.

Often she would look at the two unmistakably Indian faces of her children Billy and Jess and mourn that they would never enjoy the rich part of their heritage provided by their father’s blood. But Sam could barely say Indian or Kinchuinick without spitting the words and she loved him too deeply to provoke the wrath he so readily turned on himself. If he thought the valuable Indian artefacts were junk, they would just have to agree to disagree. She made sure that all her Kinchuinick studies were done at the museum, keeping the facts to herself and her burning interest in the past of her husband’s race a jealously-guarded secret.

The beautiful carved bone amulet Sam wore round his neck, a very ancient Assiniboine charm, gave Katie her only tiny glimmer of hope that one day he would face up to his roots. She knew it had been his father’s, the male half of the dead parents Sam never spoke of, and the nature of her job told her it was valuable beyond its role of sentimental keepsake. But he offered her no explanation, no anecdotal family history, and he took it off only once, when he was forced to replace its leather thong after snapping it while swimming in the creek.

What kept her from prying too deeply were two things. First, she thought the ivory-coloured circle of bone hanging on the tight brown skin of his hairless chest was the sexiest thing she had ever seen; and secondly, she loved him so much that anything that made hurt flit across his broad innocent face made her die inside. So the history of Sam’s amulet was safe. Sam would never know she had located its origin in more than one book. She knew lots about that charm. One day she would talk to him about it, but not now.

Katie walked clockwise round the cases, completing her little ritual. She wandered past the display of beaded cradle-boards, noting that the model baby, strapped into the most ornate example was starting to go yellow on one side of its face. Dummies were a pain. They never looked real, and when they did there was something frightening about them. This mangled thing wasn’t going to fool anyone, but Katie had insisted on the baby, just to educate the public about the human side of her objects. It wasn’t enough to show visitors the old crumbling piece of wood and beading and make them admire the handiwork. You had to make them stop and think. Think about what life was like. Think about how their life was much the same as our life. Even make twentieth-century Mr and Mrs Leisure Suit consider that although things were harder for the average eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kinchuinick Indian, in some ways it was better then than now. She looked at the flaky yellowing face of the plaster baby. The real thing would have been strapped into one of these cradleboards from the moment it was born and taken out occasionally to stretch and kick and be cuddled, then strapped back in and attached to its mother. Secure. Loved. Cherished. Forest moss for a diaper, with the plant’s chemicals providing a natural barrier to diaper rash and a whole tribe providing love, attention and security. Pretty different from the Kinchuinick babies now. Nothing about their modern lives would sit happily in a mahogany case. The plaster baby looked back at her as if it mourned for them too. Needs a clean, she thought. Get rid of that yellowing with some turpentine. It went on her mental list.

Then on to the medicine bundles. Strange, small leather pouches full of herbs, used by shamans for good and bad medicine. All present and correct, except maybe one of the bad medicine bundles was responsible for a label peeling off at the back of the case. Bad medicine plays havoc with glue. Note two on the list. A stroll past the eagle feather wands and pipes completed her circuit, and ended, as always, with the model.

Just before closing, before she turned the model off at the wall switch, she always pressed the Corkscrew Tunnel’s red button and smiled as the tiny train started its last journey of the day through the mountain of paper: her own ritual.

Ritual was important to Katie Hunt. Perhaps not quite as important as it had been to Katie Crosby, but it was still up there along with breathing and eating. But if that love of ritual had endured the years, lots of things had disappeared forever; and they started to disappear when the twenty-three-year-old Katie Jane Crosby had first gazed into the delicious, mischievous black eyes of Sam Hunting Wolf. Mostly bad things. Things she was glad to have shaken off like dandruff. Things like Tom.

That had been close. Whenever Katie thought back about how close, she shuddered.

Was it really her who thought a Friday night barbecue at Tom’s sailing club was the height of sophistication? Yes it was. And it was Katie Crosby who used to practise signing Mrs Tom Clark on the telephone pad when she was doodling during a long call. A real close thing. She recalled her parents’ faces that night. Expressions of almost catatonic shock, the night she let them all down. But also the night she set herself free.

It was her own fault. She should never have let Tom own her the way he did. But the things you know as a woman are different from the things you believe as a girl. He bullied her. She knew that now. Then, of course, she thought he loved her, was telling her things for her own good. Christ, she’d lied to herself all those years. Lied when she saw a line for a blockbuster movie she ached to see, when she and Tom were heading for the art-house theatre to sit through a long dark European film with subtitles. Lied to herself when Tom told her that her college friends were young and silly and he couldn’t tolerate them, that his boat-owning friends were more interesting. Lied about liking to push weights, ride expensive mountain bikes and go roller-blading with the big muscle-bound dumb geeks Tom admired. She ate low cholesterol food to please him, and agreed with Tom that bed by ten-thirty was a good thing to help with a personal training programme.

A whole series of lies and self-deceit. It had left her awash and confused, wondering who the hell Katie Crosby was. Did she like Sylvester Stallone or Ingmar Bergman? Would she rather go to the private view of an exhibition of Corbusier drawings, or go and fly a power kite in a storm? Why did she long to skip ‘training’, sit up until 4 a.m. drinking beer and arguing with friends whether Kojak would look like Barbra Streisand if he grew hair? Her confusion had made her pretend she was full of certainty, boasting to her friends that she was settled and sure of life, that she had the answers. She was grown now and the answer was, she could like anything she wanted. No reasons necessary. But then, the answer had to be Tom’s way. It wasn’t his fault. It had been hers. She didn’t think she was at all pretty, and no one changed her mind. In fact everyone remarked on how handsome Tom Clark was. She was ‘lucky’ to have snagged him. He said he loved her because she was funny and bright and full of life, but in private moments, in subtle ways, he made it clear that one of them could have anyone they wanted, and the other one should be damned grateful.

He treated her degree in archaeology and anthropology as a curious and charming little hobby. It was his yacht chandlery yard that would keep them solvent, and she needn’t worry about a thing.

But she had loved him. Slim, tall, handsome Tom. Tom who bought endless magazines about boats, who wanted to be thought an expert on books, architecture, design and civilized living, but really only knew about his resting pulse rate. Tom who was like a child, as a direct result of trying so hard to be a man. And she very nearly married him. Warning bells had been sounding long before she met Sam, but she hadn’t listened to them. Sex with Tom had started to be so infrequent and awkward she dreaded him even trying. His clumsiness made him treat it like a chore, and every bungled attempt left them beached further apart on some strange shore. It was, after all, her fault. He told her so, often.

‘You never initiate making love.’

She hated that term, ‘making love’. Sounded like a school’s sex education lecture. It took the lust, the dirt, the fun out of it.

‘That’s the problem,’ he would say. ‘You have to start it sometimes.’

But for some reason she didn’t want to start it. She wanted him to want her more, to grab her like a plumber in a dirty movie and make her ache for him. But that was never going to happen. Remember, Tom could have anyone he wanted. She was ‘lucky’.

And all the time her parents welcomed him like he was the son they never had, never once noticing their happy-go-lucky only child growing increasingly more insecure, miserable and bitter.

Then there was Sam. The first time Sam had really made her laugh, she thought a flood-gate had opened somewhere inside her. A joy so profound and delicious burst from her that she felt intoxicated. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how to laugh like that. Crying with mirth, sides aching from elation. With the laughter, always a stirring of sexual passion that made her lightheaded.

And to think she nearly didn’t join her parents in Silver that year. Tom had asked her to forgo the yearly family vacation in Alberta and stay in Vancouver as his partner at some charity ball, and she had nearly said yes. Her parents didn’t expect her to come with them any more. She was a grown woman after all. The ball was tempting. Tom’s friends and business acquaintances were rich. There would be a marquee, and she could wear a taffeta ball gown and long silk evening gloves with a bracelet over the wrist. She would drink sparkling white wine and maybe break away from his iron-pumping idiot pals for a moment to find someone who would talk about something more than their own flesh and how they were keeping it healthy. But somehow Katie wanted to be a little girl again for a few weeks. She longed to wear an old sweater and stack her Dad’s woodpile neatly for him, the sensual touch and smell of the rough pine delighting her. Her routine. A routine that had survived for two decades. And she wanted to sit with her Mom as Mrs Crosby in her silly cotton hat made another futile attempt to capture Wolf Mountain in watercolour from the porch. She wanted all that warmth and security that Tom seemed to provide but really didn’t. So she went to Silver with her delighted, but surprised parents. And she met Sam Hunt.

He drove a bus. That’s what Sam was doing when she first saw him. Katie remembered everything about that day. It was hot as Hell, and she was wearing khaki shorts, a plain white T-shirt, a tiny tartan rucksack on her back, making her way to Lazy Hot Springs for a hike. And she was waiting to board Sam’s bus in the depot.

A big sign on a stand read Passengers wait here until driver checks your ticket, and so she waited by it. Funny thing was, everybody else just walked by her, out through the glass swing doors to the sidewalk and got on the bus. It sure was filling up. There were lots of Japanese, a few hiking couples and some elderly tourists. But they were all getting on the bus before her. She saw the seat she fancied was already gone, the front one opposite the driver where you can look out front from the big windshield, and she started to get annoyed. Where was the driver? Why didn’t someone in charge come and tell all these people to wait in line like the sign said?

Then a young man appeared in the blue company overalls, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. A young, impossibly handsome man. Sam was twenty-five, six feet tall, his black shiny hair swept back from a noble forehead. His blue tunic top was open by three buttons, revealing a T-shirt beneath and the suggestion of tight brown pectorals. He was obviously Indian and to Katie’s surprise, he was also undeniably gorgeous.

This driver from the planet sex stopped and looked at Katie, and then at the nearly full bus through the glass doors. Walking over to her he handed her the coffee. ‘Can you hold this, miss? I’ll be right back.’

She took the cup, astonished.

He boarded his busy vehicle and she could see through the doors people standing and milling about on board. In seconds the passengers were pouring off the bus, back through the doors into the depot concourse.

Sam was at their back, waving his hands and shouting, ‘Come on, that’s it … hurry along … quick as you can …’

The passengers milled around grouchily, complaining under their breath, in front of Katie. She was going to be last again.

Sam pushed his way through to where Katie stood, took her by the hand not occupied holding his coffee, and led her to the front of the line.

He cleared his throat, and clapped his hands together twice. ‘Could I have your attention please, ladies and gentlemen?’

They grew silent, some fishing around in bags for the tickets they were now going to have to present.

‘I’d like to introduce you all to a very special person.’

Katie looked at him, horrified. What was this? The crowd started to look curious.

‘This young lady is unique in Canada and it’s a great honour to have her with us today. We, at Fox Line Travel, always knew that one day she would grace us with her presence, but now it’s happened, and all I can say is that I’m humbled to find that I’m one of the people to witness it.’

The crowd started to buzz with low conversation, heads bobbing up to get a look at the woman this bus driver held by the hand.

Katie was blushing to her feet. What on earth was this man doing? Who did he think she was?

Sam held up a finger. ‘Now I know there’s not much time for speeches or nothing, what with the bus already a few minutes behind schedule, but let me, on behalf of the bus line, just say this.’ The crowd were expectant. Sam turned to Katie, smiling, and under his breath said, ‘What’s your name?’

Stunned by the warmth of his smile, she replied. ‘Katie Crosby.’

Sam looked to his audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Katie Crosby, the only, and I mean only, woman in Canada …’ he paused. ‘Who can FUCKING READ!’

There was a stunned and shocked silence and then Katie burst out laughing. The crowd exploded into an irritated hubbub of noise, peppered with well really and cheeky son of a bitch.

Sam smiled and stood defiantly by the sign, tapping it with a finger. He let go of Katie’s hand and waved her through. ‘Keep the coffee. It’s milk, no sugar.’

She smiled and got on the empty bus, into her favourite seat. Opposite the driver.

Through the window she could see Sam smiling at his frowning passengers, and lip-read him saying tickets please as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

That was a great journey. They talked, of course. All the way to Lazy Hot Springs, until Katie had to get off. She’d gone off the idea of a hike by then. All she wanted to do was stay on that bus and talk more to the handsome funny guy at the wheel. But she got up and made to leave and when he asked her for her phone number she told him. He smiled, opened the hydraulic doors and said, ‘Fox Line wishes you a nice day. Driver Sam wishes you a shitty one for not taking him with you.’

She laughed and waved goodbye, still waving as the bus pulled away, with windows full of glowering people staring at her like she was the Anti-Christ.

All she thought about on the hike was Sam. Her head was spinning and she walked further than she intended, striding out in a trance. Why would she give a bus driver her number in Silver when she practically lived with Tom? But she didn’t regret it, and when the bus back that evening was driven by a middle-aged pot-bellied man with a moustache, she was crestfallen.

The phone call came the next day, her father getting there first. He asked who was speaking in a very careful and deliberate way and then called Katie to the phone in the parlour. He held the receiver out to her as if showing a child something it had damaged and waiting for an apology.

‘A Sam Hunt. For you.’

Katie’s heart had started pounding. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old on her first date and her father could see it through her mask of indifference.

She took the receiver without putting it to her ear and said thank you. Frank Crosby understood the gesture and left the room.

With that first Hello? she knew it was over with Tom. She and Sam met that afternoon in town and walked up through the trail in the forest to the old fire lookout hut. And they had sex that nearly made Katie die with ecstasy. She’d known Sam for less than twenty-four hours but her appetite for him was insatiable and she thought as she lay in his powerful dark brown arms between all that rapture, that she would never be able to live without him again. With Sam it was fucking, not making love, although each act contained more love than Tom had given her in her whole life. And they talked. They talked so much Katie felt she’d known Sam since she was born.

She didn’t tell her parents a thing. Her father never asked about the phone call, and neither seemed to show any signs of suspecting that each time she went out she was meeting an Indian bus driver who would alternately make her laugh until she cried, and then cry out again in pleasure when he peeled off her clothes, high above town in the pines, or in the tiny wooden bed in the staff accommodation hut behind the depot.

She knew the ugly name for it of course. Indian-struck. That was what white people said when any white girl fell for a Native Canadian man. But Katie wasn’t Indian-struck at all. She was in love with Sam: the man, not the Indian, and she wanted to make sure he knew it.

The night before the Crosbys were due to leave she met him at the fire hut. She held his hands and looked into his black eyes very earnestly indeed.

She was going back to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.

Katie braced herself for Sam to be sceptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, ‘I know you will.’

They did what their bodies told them they had to do about four or five times, and then, exhausted, crawled back down the trail to town. Sam said goodbye at the end of her street, and walked away as if there was absolutely no doubt they would see each other again. Katie knew that was the truth.

She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.

She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort. She would tell him the moment they got back.

He called twenty minutes after they returned and said he’d made a dinner reservation in Denton’s. Where better to tell him, she thought, than in the best restaurant in town? Her parents seemed excited, asking her ridiculous questions, like, what time Tom was picking her up and what was she going to wear? Perhaps if Katie’s mind hadn’t been on Sam Hunt’s brown body and warm lips, she might have detected something was up in the Crosby household, but she slung on her green dress and grabbed a jacket when the door chimes announced Tom was there.

Tom held her and kissed her on the lips the moment she answered the door, as her eyes screwed in a grimace that he couldn’t see.

‘God, I missed you, you hick.’

She gave him a weak smile.

‘Let’s eat.’

He was looking unusually smart. He wore a grey Italian suit and a silk tie that she hadn’t seen before, and as he opened the passenger door of his Volvo for Katie she saw him raise his head and wink up at her father waving from the bedroom window.

They went to a wine bar first and Katie let him talk for three-quarters of an hour. He talked about the ball and how everyone had missed her. He told her about the trouble he’d had with his new PA and how James had a new car. He told her that she should enrol in this new health club on the coast that everyone was joining. It would do her good. Get her in shape. She watched his mouth move but struggled to concentrate on what the words meant. Katie was back in Silver, smelling the pines, hearing the woodpeckers knocking out a rhythm in the distance, feeling the rough dry earth beneath her back and buttocks as Sam blocked out the sun above her with his body. But here she was. Sitting in a bar full of vacant young men in crumpled designer suits and women pretending to be young and cool until they could revert to their true suburban colours the moment they hit thirty.

As she gathered the courage to say what she had to say, he motioned to the barman for the check and told her it was time to go. It could wait, she thought. She would tell him at dinner. Give him time to take it in.

They drove to the restaurant in near-silence, Katie staring ahead, Tom smiling and humming. She’d been to Denton’s only once but the head waiter greeted them as if they were long-lost friends. Tom took Katie’s arm and halted her in the marble-floored, plant-filled lobby.

‘You go in, darling. I’ll be there in a minute. I love you.’

He held her face and kissed her deeply. She was stunned. Weird behaviour, but the head waiter was already guiding her through the lobby into the restaurant before she had time to ask Tom what the hell he was playing at. Big shock. Her parents and Tom’s widowed mother were sitting at a big round table for six. They stood up and greeted her. Katie was completely and utterly lost. The restaurant was full, faces looking at her as she sat down heavily on the blue velvet seat pushed into the back of her knees by the waiter.

She looked open-mouthed and helpless at her mother for an explanation, but Mrs Crosby put a finger to her lips and smiled at something behind Katie’s shoulder.

The lights in the restaurant were dimmed, and behind her she heard Tom’s voice. My God, he was talking to the whole restaurant. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone very special here tonight.’

She was going mad. What was happening? Her mind tossed in a frenzy to make sense of it. Had Tom somehow read her thoughts? Was this mockery of her first meeting with Sam to punish her, to make her pay for her betrayal? How did he know? How could anyone know her secret?

She spun round. He was standing with a guitar in his hand, his best friend James at Tom’s side holding a lit candelabra.

Tom continued while Katie looked on with the expression of a witness at a road accident.

‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me for interrupting your meals, but I’m hoping that this special person here, Miss Katie Crosby, is going to say yes to what I’m going to ask her in a moment.’

There were noises of people going aw, and ah, and before Katie could move or shout no, her horror was completed as Tom started to play the guitar. It was a clumsy attempt at Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live if Living is Without You’. She only barely recognized it. Katie’s easy-listening habit stretched way back and Tom naturally scorned her for it, but occasionally relented and bought her albums she liked, always among albums he thought she should listen to. She didn’t, however, like Nilsson. If Tom was being generous, he was misdirecting his energy. He started to sing, becoming embarrassingly and comically way off his limited vocal range when he came to the chorus.

Katie had descended into Hell. The nightmare of a song went on for about ten years, and then it stopped. There was a burst of applause from the diners, and Tom dropped onto one knee while James grabbed the guitar. He took Katie’s limp hand in his and said it.

‘Katie. Will you marry me?’

There was a cheer from some of the more inebriated diners who were clearly enjoying this spectacle.

Katie’s parents beamed and Tom’s mother dabbed at an eye with her napkin.

She thought then that she would like to die. Time stood still for Katie Crosby at that moment. It seemed that all the faces staring at her had frozen in the middle of some action, like an edition of the Twilight Zone. Surely Rod Serling would walk in any moment with a cigarette, and introduce the first story?

She saw through the dimmed light a fat man in the corner with a fork raised half-way to his mouth. There was a woman leaning her head on an elegant hand by the window, grinning with the slit of a red-painted mouth. A couple who were holding hands at the next table smiled at her as though she were their daughter graduating from high school. But she could hear nothing except the beating of her heart and the buzzing of her own blood in her ears, and there was Tom’s face, still gazing up at hers in theatrical expectation.

Katie stood up. Her mother made a happy O shape with her mouth over at Tom’s mother.

She spoke quietly, but nobody in the restaurant missed a word. ‘No. I won’t marry you, Tom. I love someone else and I’m going back to Silver tomorrow to ask him to marry me.’

There was a tiny scuffling noise from the table, but mostly silence.

‘I’m sorry. I really am.’

She pushed back the chair and walked calmly from the room. She walked more quickly through the lobby and by the time she got to the street she was running as hard as she could in her high green silk shoes. She ran gasping down the sidewalk, tears of humiliation and horror streaming down her face and she didn’t stop until she got the ocean in sight.

She cried like a child for at least five hours, walking the streets until she could have dropped, before she dared hail a cab and go home. By the time she crawled out of the cab and stumbled up the front porch steps she looked like a hooker on a busy night: her jacket mangled and creased from being clutched to her chest and her face streaked with make-up that had dissolved hours ago in salty tears.

There were no recriminations from her parents – she loved them for that – they were just glad she was safe. But there was talking to be done as her father put it, and never mind them, he thought Tom deserved an explanation.

So she wrote it all down in a letter and posted it to him. Nothing about Sam, just about her and Tom and why it could never work, then packed a bag and made a rail reservation. She didn’t tell her parents who she’d fallen for. She wanted to see if it was enough for them that she needed to be free, that she yearned for something else other than a middle-class life in a Vancouver suburb. And it seemed to be. They asked no questions. They gave her the keys to the house in Silver and kissed her goodbye. When Katie Crosby stepped on that eastbound Via Rail train she had never felt so free in her life.

The miracle was there. Sam was at the station.

Katie saw him from the window before the train stopped, a tall, solitary figure leaning against a wooden parcel trolley. She was completely unable to decipher the emotion that the sight of that patient, hopeful man standing alone on a train platform stirred in her. It was more than love and gratitude. It was more than the very real need to weep. It seemed as though he had always been there, waiting for her to realize who she was and come and find him. But even that could not fully explain the complexity of her passion.

She stepped down from the carriage and waited motionless for him to see her, her bags at her feet.

Katie watched as Sam scanned the crowd of passengers weaving their way from the train to the street. He saw her. The invisible beam of light between them set fire to his face, but he walked rather than ran to her. They said nothing for nearly a full minute as he held her, then he held her face in his hands. ‘I thought I’d check the trains every day for a month.’

That was his explanation. Simple.

‘And then what? What about the fifth week?’

He looked down into her eyes, milky blue jewels, swimming with tears. ‘And then I’d check them for another month.’

They married nine days later, and Mr and Mrs Hunt started married life in the tiny staff accommodation room that Sam rented from the bus company. He wouldn’t use the Crosbys’ house and Katie respected his wishes. It wasn’t hard for Katie to get a job in Silver. Everyone knew Frank and June Crosby’s girl, and within a month of having run out on Tom, Katie was a happily married woman, selling fossils and loose gemstones to Japanese tourists in a lobby arcade shop in The Rocky Mountain Chateau, the massive Canadian Pacific hotel on the edge of town.

Of course there was tension on the day they picked Frank and June up from Calgary Airport, but it was a lot for the Crosbys to take in at once. She forgave them, like she hoped they would forgive her.

And two beautiful grandchildren had subsequently softened everything. Now, her parents liked to think of themselves as shining white liberals, proud their daughter had rejected the shiny prize of North American conspicuous consumption for love.

Oh it was love all right. A deep, enduring, growing and generous love. He had never once let her down in any aspect of their life, and she hoped he could say the same of her. She loved Sam and her children more than anything in the world, and the snarling female wolf downstairs would have tough competition from Katie when it came to who was more terrifying in defending their family.

Which was why her antennae were twitching now. Sam wasn’t himself. It wasn’t just the blackouts, it was as though he was fighting some secret battle.

Katie ran a hand over the top of the model mountain’s glass case and then walked to the wall to unplug the cable.

The snow was piling up outside and she looked forward to kicking her way home through it, letting the big flakes settle on her hair and the cold making her cheeks blush with cold. Katie Hunt loved the snow. But Katie Hunt did not love secrets, which was why she was going to keep a watchful eye on her family. The stuffed wolf continued to bare its teeth silently downstairs, in a lifeless tableau of female solidarity.

Eric Sindon’s formidable rota hadn’t taken Sam’s involuntary stop-over at Stoke into account. There were no points for getting stranded in the snow, and certainly no favours for manual groomers, a species regarded by Silver Ski Company as only slightly further up the food chain than lichen.

Sam found his welcome back to a full day at the depot consisted of being assigned to the bottom station of the Beaver chairlift, on the day of the fun-run. The Beaver run, an easy green trail, was in shade all morning until the sun crept up and hit it around two-thirty. The geeks in fancy dress would come down then, racing for some dumb prize, dressed like morons. Another idea of Pasqual Weaver’s. But that wouldn’t happen until the sun came round. That meant Sam had to freeze his balls off in the shadow of the mountain for six hours while he loaded untidy, grouchy herds of beginners onto the creaky old chairlift. Meanwhile, the lucky guys who drew a longer straw with Sindon basked in the sun on the south-facing slopes, saluting happy passengers on the high-speed quads, and topping up their tans.

As Sam shovelled more snow onto the chair run-up platform, Eric Sindon’s rota of injustice was far from his mind.

Dreams were one thing. Blackouts that left you unable to account for your actions were another. Sam had wrestled with his damaged memory since waking at Stoke, trying in vain to recall how he came to be in the truck. The part of it all that stung him hard was the blood. There was no escape from the fact. His face, his chin to be exact, had been covered in thick, dried, blackened blood. Sam had woken in the warm truck to find himself half-way up the pass from Stoke, on the edge of the highway with the engine running. He had sat in the cab for at least five minutes trying to figure out what the hell had gotten him there, until a glance in the rear-view mirror let him catch sight of his face. Everything below his nose was black with it. It caked his face like a kid’s first chocolate brownie at a party.

His first thought was that he was dying. The panic that rose in his breast sent images of Katie and the kids whirling in front of his eyes, and although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had croaked Katie’s name as his hands flew to his face.

But the blood was old, and Sam was not wounded. Half-falling from the cab into the road, he scrubbed at his face with handfuls of snow until the blood, and what felt like most of his head, had finally disappeared.

Now, faced with the grinding normality of the first of the morning’s skiers clattering onto the chair, the incident felt like a distant and vile nightmare. Except that Sam knew it had been real.

The cold was real, too. And the conditions were hellish. All this snow might be good for business, but only if it would damn well stop. It was clear right now, but the blizzards had been rolling in and out of Silver like they’d been ordered. Huge dumps aren’t much use if the pass keeps closing. This morning, it was minus twenty at the lodge and Sam shovelled like a fevered gold prospector to keep his circulation going.

The Beaver took three-at-a-time on a chair that should have been junked ten years ago. Skiers were arriving at his hut in ones and twos, warming up with the first run of the day down what the instructors called a pussy run. This was where Sam was supposed to say have a nice day and enjoy your run as he steadied the chair for them and swept the snow off the seat with a broom. Today, it was unlikely Sam would win bonus money for being employee of the month. In fact, the skiers would be lucky if he looked at them. Sam Hunt was in a very far-away place.

Two early morning ski patrollers, Baz and Grant, who’d been laying the slalom poles for the fun-run, skidded up to the chair, coming to a halt with whoops in a high spray of snow directly and deliberately aimed at Sam, with the misguided intention of making him laugh. Mistake.

‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Sam barked at them from beneath his new mantle of snow, like a snowman possessed by a demon.

‘Hey. So the customer relations course went well then, Sam, huh?’ Baz laughed with an abandon that came with the knowledge he’d soon be skiing in the sun with girls looking at his butt.

‘Sure. Soon as I see any customers I’ll give ’em a hug and ask them back home for dinner. Meanwhile all I see are assholes with backpacks.’

Grant smiled. ‘Whoooeee, Baz! Let’s hope Mr Hunt don’t break a leg when we’re on duty. So long, Sam. Keep smiling, you hear?’

They slipped forward onto a chair that Sam kicked as it moved off, leaving the boys rocking their way up the hill, their laughter dying in the deeper shadow of the pines.

Sam ran a hand over his face in exasperation. No point taking it out on his buddies. He already regretted the exchange, but it was too late to do anything about it now, short of growing wings and flying after Baz to apologize. What would he say anyway? Sorry guys. On edge today. You see I’ve been blacking out lately, and yesterday I may have just gotten into the habit of packing away a live coyote for a snack while I’m out cold.

He leaned on his shovel and looked out towards the mountains of the back bowl. The peaks of the Rockies looked back at him with a beautiful indifference. Sam turned the key in that little space at the back of his mind for a moment, allowing himself to wonder what his ancestors dreamed, planned and worried over as they moved about these peaks and valleys.

He knew what his immediate ancestors thought about. A bottle of fortified wine in a brown bag. But the ancient ones, the ones who told stories round fires instead of shuffling out of their prefabs to play bingo for liquor money, did they ever guess that life would be so different, so impossible, for the grandchildren of their grandchildren?

As if in answer, a chill wind with a cargo of drifting snowflakes eddied round the hut and tugged at Sam’s jacket. He resumed his shovelling without looking up to greet the couple of skiers who climbed onto the Beaver in a miserable silence that echoed his own.