Dougie Lewis

Was Dougie Lewis’s death an accident? I can never quite remember. If it wasn’t, he’s had his revenge.

Dougie didn’t look the kind of person you could hate that much. He looked like any other overgrown Australian youth doing Europe on a shoestring – except that, unusually, he did have money, enough to pay the rent I was asking for the spare bed in my flat, which in turn meant that I could afford a lift pass. It seemed like the ideal solution – at the time.

Sharing the flat was OK in itself, I suppose. At least, it was no worse than it usually is when two men live together in a cramped studio flat in a skiing resort. Even Dougie’s habit of sleeping with the window shut and giving the place an atmosphere could be dealt with by staying awake till I heard the first snore, and then opening the window very quietly. Besides, the morning always comes in the end, and with it sunshine, clean air, and freedom. But that was when the real problem began.

‘Just because I sleep with you tonight, it doesn’t mean I’ll ski with you in the morning.’ Either Dougie hadn’t read St Anton’s most popular T-shirt, or he didn’t think it applied to him. Perhaps things are different where he comes from, deep in the Outback. Perhaps men need to stick closer together in Miller’s Bottom or whatever he said it was called, with its scrub, its 20,000 sheep, and its two trains a week. Perhaps all the excitement of Thursday’s westbound departure can unhinge a man, so that he wanders off and loses himself until he’s in danger of missing the further thrill of Tuesday’s eastbound arrival – unless his mates stick close to him to keep him from harm. But St Anton isn’t Fleapit Hollow (or whatever). It has dozens of trains a day, and cable cars and chair-lifts. And I certainly didn’t need a keeper.

There was no way to tell Dougie this. I tried subtle hints. I tried unsubtle hints, but Dougie was impervious. He didn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed about following me around. He just came along.

I tried ignoring him, but he didn’t notice. I tried going down things that were too difficult for him – there were plenty of them – but he was too dim to know fear. He’d hesitate at the top and then overtake me half-way down. Sometimes he was with his skis, sometimes he wasn’t, but either way, when I got to the bottom there he’d be, standing there brushing the snow out of his hair, grinning crookedly and saying ‘rllykll.’ I’m not sure if that’s how they really say ‘really cool’ back in Ocker’s Arse, or if he got it off the television – do they have TV out there? Anyway that’s how he said it, ‘rllykll,’ as if he’d swallowed his tongue.

One afternoon I took him up onto the ridge west of Kapall – that is, I went up and of course Dougie came along. That was rllykll too. We did the ten-minute climb from the restaurant, and the hairy traverse that gives you time to get seriously scared, and then I pointed my skis straight down and did a whole series of sexy, sinuous curves down the virgin snow. No-one in St Anton can beat my technique, not even Sepp at the ski shop, and anyone who wanted could stand on far-off Galzig and look across at what I’d done, and despair. And then Dougie had joined me, in one piece and as happy as a spaniel. I was glad he’d survived. At least, I was glad then. When we got further away and I could see what he’d done to my mountain, I was a lot less glad. My wonderful waves were there – I’d never done them better. Next to them was a crude zigzag that looked as if someone had been laying a chain of matches. The short straight bits were when Dougie was descending out of control, and the big blobs at each corner were where he’d fallen over, to stop himself, and got up facing in the opposite direction.

My favourite fantasy about meeting the girl of my dreams is the one where she’s next to me in the cable-car and I touch her shoulder and point to my mountain and say ‘I did that’ and of course she sort of merges into my arms. Except that now she wouldn’t. Now she’d see my lovely lines and Dougie’s utter chaos and she’d ask, ‘Oh, which one is yours?’

Slowly, I began to hate Dougie Lewis.

I’m not a very efficient hater. I suppose I could have pushed him down a cliff or welded his bindings shut or something, but I didn’t even try taking him down somewhere he’d be sure to fall and break his neck. Knowing Dougie’s luck, he’d have ended up visiting me in hospital, and knowing the relaxed chumminess of the folks back in Dingo’s Dong, he’d have come to see me every day. Twice a day, even. So I skied cautiously, and I thought hard.

The first thing was to get sane, and the only way to get sane was to get away from Dougie for a while. So I crippled my credit card and booked a day’s outing with a mountain guide. The night before, I went to bed early while Dougie went to a nightclub with some people he’d met. I lay there and relaxed and thought about Dougie. He was bound to come home very late and very drunk, but of course he wouldn’t let that stop him skiing hard tomorrow. Which in turn meant that in the afternoon he’d probably fall asleep. What made this such a desirable fantasy was that Dougie had recently taken to sunbathing on the railway line after skiing – cheapest sundeck in the resort, rllykll. He had a running battle with the police about it, and I’d warned him that the main Zurich-to-Vienna railway line was rather busier than the one at Gruesome Gulch, but he said not to worry, he knew the timetable. So tomorrow he’d be sunbathing on the tracks, and he’d fall asleep, and the train would come, and I wouldn’t have anything to worry about any more.

The crash woke me. Dougie had fallen over his bedside cupboard. It was 2 a.m.

But somehow, when Dougie’s alarm clock woke us at seven the next morning, I was the one with the hangover, and he bounced out of bed and into the shower before I could bring myself to move. Eventually I dragged myself to the ski school meeting-place and set off on my expedition. Dougie looked as if he was going to come along even though he wasn’t invited, but he realised just in time that it would cost him more money than he had. I was free.

The guide took me up to the top of the Valluga and we skied down the back. The landscape was unlike anything I’d come across before. There were huge powder bowls that you had to walk up out of at the end, and precipitous descents where falling was, as my guide carefully put it, ‘inadvisable.’ There was powder and windslab and crust and spring snow and finally a vast flat expanse of crème brûlée straight out of Scott of the Antarctic. Finally we found ourselves in Zürs, of all places, and squeezed into the bus back to St Anton.

I felt glad to be alive, which was something I hadn’t felt for a while, and I was even quite happy when I ran into Dougie at the pizzeria across the road. We played it by the rules. I told him all about my day, while he half listened, and then he told me all about his day, while I half listened. Fair’s fair. He didn’t seem to have minded being left on his own, but then Dougie never minded anything much. In any case, he must have found someone to ski with, because ‘we’ had spent all day going up the Schindler chairlift and down the red and black runs under it (I wondered what ‘we’ thought of Dougie’s head-first skiing methods) and ‘we’ had found all the remaining tiny patches of untracked snow and carved them to pieces. All but one, said Dougie. There was one untouched hump that was visible from the chairlift. It fascinated him.

‘It’d be really cool to ski that,’ he told me.

‘Well, if it’s been untouched for so long, it’s got to be totally inaccessible.’ I yawned. Dougie’s impractical enthusiasm was starting to irritate me again.

‘Couldn’t we climb up it?’

‘It’s too steep on one side, and there’s a sheer drop on the other.’ I couldn’t be sure; but then neither could he.

Dougie thought for a bit. ‘There’s always above,’ he said. I was busy eating, so he went on. ‘I heard about this place in Val d’Isère. There’s this chairlift that goes over a ridge from one bowl to the next, and on top of the ridge there’s a place you can see ski tracks, where people have jumped off in the middle. I’m sure you can do that here. It’s just no-one’s thought of it.’

I should have stopped him then. I should have told him not to be such a moron. I should have told him to stick to the nursery slopes, where he belonged – but I didn’t. I said nothing. Now, that could have been malice or it could have been simple tiredness. I can’t remember the truth of it any more. Perhaps I even spent the meal pleading with him not to take such a suicidal risk. Or I may have spent it watering the idea and making it grow. I just don’t know.

We were almost the first ones up the mountain. One good thing about Dougie, he did get up early. We took the first stage of the Valluga lift up to Galzig, great when there are no queues, and then some pretty flat runs with a T-bar in the middle took us over to Schindler. The sky was clear as usual, and the snow was all frozen porridge, with ruts – that’s the trouble with spring – but a thin veil of cloud on the horizon suggested that a major dump was on its way. Dougie picked up a lump of ice and took it up the chairlift with him. He counted the pylons aloud – one, two, three, four, five – and ahead of us, on the side of the ridge, I could see a small patch of untouched snow, just as Dougie had said. The chair swung down from the fifth pylon and he switched to counting seconds as the ground rushed up towards us – one, two, three, four, ... and on ‘eleven’ he let go of his lump of ice, and twisted round to see exactly where it would land, some twenty feet below us. ‘Bullseye,’ Dougie shouted. I gripped tightly onto the safety bar as we swung out over the next chasm.

Dougie’s excitement took him down the run past the Ulmerhütte with un-Dougie-like competence, and we got to the bottom of the chairlift in one piece despite the icy conditions. I’d like to remember that I begged him not to do it, but I can’t. I must have, though. I must have offered him distractions and alternatives – the back side of the Kandahar, dodging in and out of the trees – off-piste Osthang with its electricity pylons and its waist-high moguls. Surely I did? I’ll never know, now; but if I did, it didn’t work. We went up anyway.

One pylon, two, three, four – I opened the safety bar for him – five. One second, two seconds, ... eight seconds, nine, ten, eleven. Dougie slid out. The chair lurched and I held on tight to stop myself falling out, and I listened for the sound of his landing.

A wet, crunchy, cracking sound. You know, when you’re pulling a chicken to pieces and a bone comes out of its socket? The same sound exactly. The landing site was hidden behind the ridge but there wouldn’t have been any point in looking anyway, not after that.

Any noise out of him, and I could have believed he was still alive, but there was nothing. When a scream did come, it was too high-pitched to be Dougie, and too close as well. It went on and on. Someone on the chair behind must have seen what had happened. I could see it too. A brightly coloured mass in an impossible position, and blood seeping into the white snow. It was too far away and behind a ridge, but every time I shut my eyes, it was there. It still is.

I heard afterwards that his ski had broken and slashed open an artery.

The clatter of the next pylon drowned the screaming. The lift took five minutes to get me to the top, five minutes for Dougie Lewis to lie bleeding to death in a snowdrift. Not that he needed that long. All the way up, I held on to the safety bar and kept my eyes shut, watching Dougie’s blood. I was still holding on when the chair got to the top. I was still holding on when it swung round its pillar on the start of its journey down, so the automatic brake tripped and the lift stopped and they wound it back a bit and I staggered off and slumped in an out-of-the-way corner while the radios shouted and the lift re-started. The next people to arrive were the ones who’d actually seen it happen. They were a bit better than me, because they got off the lift all right, but they didn’t manage to do much else, they just skied helplessly into the nearest bit of safety net. It’s nice to know those nets work. At last someone calmer arrived, and what he said made them stop the lift at once. Long radio conversations. The lift started again and ran until everyone who had been on it was safely off. It stopped. More radio. It started again, slowly. The rescuers, someone said.

But I knew there was nothing to rescue.

Much later, they got me onto the chair with someone responsible next to me. He closed the safety bar and held it closed. He didn’t need to. The lift started, going backwards this time. I tried to enjoy the novel experience of going down a chairlift.

I counted five pylons and then realised it didn’t help, I had no idea how many pylons you had to count if you were going down. So I stopped, and shut my eyes, and watched Dougie bleed again.

At the bottom of the chair there was a piste-basher, and they put me on it and drove me in style all the way down the Steissbachtal and into St Anton. How Dougie would have loved it all, riding home in triumph. I wondered if they’d taken him down the same way.

I expected the police would be asking me what had happened, and I tried to work out what to say. But the police weren’t much interested. They’d never liked Dougie much. Once they’d established that he’d jumped and not fallen, and that there was no danger of claims for compensation, they didn’t care about anything else. They sent someone back to the flat to get Dougie’s passport and look for anything that had his home address on it, and that was that. They left me alone.

All the next day, I stayed indoors. The promised front had arrived and it was chucking it down. The town was silent except for the muffled thumps of distant artillery trying to set off avalanches. Some time during the day they came and packed up all of Dougie’s things. I went out drinking that evening but I came home early. Going out isn’t the same when you have no-one to avoid.

I opened the window wide before going to bed, because I had no-one to stop me. All night I was too cold to sleep but too sleepy to shut the window. When I did doze off, I was back on the chairlift again.

Dougie’s alarm woke me up at seven the next morning. They must have forgotten to take it. I lay there and counted thirty of its thirty-two beeps, aiming to leap out of bed at the last possible moment and make it to the bathroom before Dougie did. I won, of course. I always would win, now.

The cold front had passed. The sky was a rich blue, and the tops of the mountains shone white in the sunlight. Even the village streets were covered in snow. It was the kind of day that skiers dream of. It was my duty to make something of it.

I was just pulling on my ski boots when I heard the voices. Some guys with snowboards were passing by on their way to the lift, and they stopped for a moment outside my window. There was a gap in the conversation and I heard someone say ‘really cool.’ It was nothing like the way Dougie used to say it, but it was enough. I gave up the effort. I took off the boot, and put on my trainers. I wasn’t ready, yet, to face a world full of Dougie’s accent, Dougie’s catchphrases, anoraks like Dougie’s, and the colour red against the white snow. Even being dead didn’t seem to stop him following me around. I needed to escape.

I went to the station and waited for the next train to Innsbruck. It was hot in the sun, but there were no sunbathers on the tracks, and on the platform there were just two old women in furs, and a large crate.

The train to Zurich airport came first, and the crate was lifted aboard. I read the label. ‘LEWIS,’ it said, ‘Miller’s Hollow, WA, Australia. ZRH–BKK–PER.’ He had followed me here as well.

The Innsbruck train came next, and I got on it. I counted the pylons as they went past. Then I counted the thumps that the wheels made on the track: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten – but when ‘eleven’ came it was always in Dougie’s voice. So I stopped myself counting and looked at the piles of limestone ballast by the side of the track. Back home in Australia they probably use sand instead of limestone. That made me think of the sand they sprinkle on the pavements in cities when somebody’s jumped out of a window and they’ve finished tidying up the mess. I wondered what they’d used on Dougie’s red-and-white snow.

Innsbruck is an odd sort of a place. It’s a mile up in the air but it looks like any ordinary provincial town. It gets very hot indeed, even in March. The park had tropical-looking flowers, and little flocks of green parakeets were flying from tree to tree, which looked surreal against the background of white mountain peaks. I did the sights in an hour and a half – town hall, Golden House, and all – and then I wandered through grey, dusty streets until I ended up in a café by the main road, where two or three dumpling-faced Austrians were playing video games. In the end I couldn’t stand it any more and I went back to the station. The bookstall was selling the same blockbuster spy book that Dougie had been reading, three pages a night, the one I’d nearly finished when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t buy it. I just took the train home.

I sat in one corner of the compartment, by the window. It was the only seat that didn’t face a photograph of snowy mountains. Just before the train left, a small dark-haired girl came in and took the seat furthest from me, by the door. The train started moving, and as I tried not to count pylons again, the door slid open and a party of Americans looked in, large Americans in thick sweaters. Four of them came in and sat down, filling the compartment: the rest went further down the train somewhere. I buried myself behind an Austrian Railways brochure and tried to look European and unapproachable. To my amusement, the girl did the same.

The Americans threw their bags on the rack, took out their chewing-gum, and settled down to a detailed discussion of the game of ice-hockey they’d just won. They also took off their shoes. Eventually they settled down to sleep. But their socks didn’t. I calculated how far we had to go before St Anton. It was impractical to try to hold my breath till then.

For a few minutes, all was silence. Then I saw the girl in the corner put down her brochure and lie down on the floor. She stretched her arm out towards me. I was puzzled to know how to respond, but then she reached out and took the discarded left shoe of the American opposite me and stealthily drew it towards herself. She did the same with his neighbour’s left shoe; then she stood up, bent down, and picked up the left shoes of the two sleepers nearest her. She slid the door open slowly, so that there wouldn’t be a sudden change in the noise to disturb them, and disappeared, carrying the shoes. A little later, she reappeared, without the shoes. She slowly slid the door shut again, and sank back into reading about the corporate history of the Austrian railway system. She didn’t look at me.

When the train stopped at St Anton, the hockey players barely stirred. I stepped carefully over their legs and got out. They didn’t move. The girl was there on the platform. I waited till the train was moving away before I spoke.

‘Where did you put them?’ I asked.

‘Out of the window.’

‘Why just the left shoes?’

‘Less to carry. And you can’t make a pair out of two right ones. The SAS did it during the war. Not trainers, but aircraft wings. It saved explosives.’

I was enchanted by her knowledge of military history and its applications. ‘So how did you know they were going further than us?’

‘Oh, I didn’t,’ she said lightly. ‘Coffee?’

Why not, I thought. It’s not as if I’ve got anything to go home to. We settled down in the station buffet, and I studied her upturned nose.

‘What did you think I was doing?’ she asked.

‘I honestly had no idea. I knew you weren’t doing it because you liked shoes.’

‘Why?’

‘You’d have taken both. And it wasn’t me you were after. I mean, women lying on the floor with their arms outstretched, all right, I’m used to that, but in public…’

She had grey eyes. They were perfectly inexpressive. She could see right through me but I still couldn’t see an inch into her. She might as well have been wearing mirrored sunglasses.

‘What do you like having for breakfast?’ she asked.

There is an age at which boys think this is a sophisticated and subtle chat-up line. I’d long since grown out of it (Dougie hadn’t, quite), but in any case I’d never heard a woman use it.

The grey eyes were looking at my right ear now, or even just past it. ‘Waffles,’ she said. ‘Waffles and baked beans. Waffles and eggs. Waffles and eggs and beans. Waffles and maple syrup. Canadian bacon and maple syrup.’

I looked behind me. There was a menu painted up on the wall, white letters on a black board. High-calorie food for skiers. Everything short of deep-fried Mars bars.

I turned back to her and said, ‘Stir-fried waffles in black bean sauce,’ and there was amusement in the corners of those eyes, I was sure of it.

‘7.15,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘7.30.’ I had to assert myself somehow. I felt entirely out of my depth. Actually, that wasn’t a bad feeling at all.

Thanks to Dougie’s alarm clock I was there at 7.25. She wasn’t there. I had no idea how much of a joke yesterday had been, or if it had been only yesterday’s joke and not today’s. Still, I could cover my uncertainty easily enough. They did breakfasts, so I ordered breakfast. Not waffles, though.

She came in while I was in the middle of a loud bit of toast. She was wearing her ski boots, which made me glad I’d come in mine. There was no discussion but it was obvious we were going to ski together. There was something in her eyes again, and again I didn’t know what.

I let her choose where we went. My excuse to myself was that I didn’t want to embarrass her by asking her how well she could ski. We went up Galzig, and down, and up the long chairlift. I looked across at the mountainscape to our right, and saw with relief that the snow had obliterated the tracks that Dougie and I had made a few days before. Now I’d have an opportunity to make uncontaminated ones.

Coming off the chairlift, we turned right and then left, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe, because that was the way across to the Schindler lift. I tried to catch her up and tell her to stop, but she was faster than me. What could I have said, anyway? I couldn’t have explained.

We slid straight onto the first chair (it was too early for queues) and I was whisked into the air on my appointment with Fate.

I turned my head away so that she couldn’t see that my eyes were shut, and I counted the pylons by their sound. One, two, three, four... when we got to six I’d be safe. ‘Look,’ she said excitedly, ‘look there!’ and she grabbed my arm and pulled me round so that I could see what she’d seen. I couldn’t help myself. I looked down at the site of the disaster.

It had been a good dump. A thick, even, untouched blanket of white covered everything, stones, boulders, everything. I couldn’t even see any ski tracks, just the rhythmic swell of the landscape. It was blank, blank, blank.

Except that passing directly below us, coming down from the ridge that Dougie had wanted to ski from, was a single track. It was rather a messy track. A crude zigzag of short straight lines connecting big irregular blobs. It started nowhere in particular and it didn’t really go anywhere. In a couple of seconds the ridge blocked the track from our sight, but I recognised the style. It was unique, and its author was at that moment lying in a box at Bangkok airport, waiting for his flight to Perth.

‘Just because I ski with you today, it doesn’t mean I’ll sleep with you in the night.’ Well, perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. I don’t mind. She has a sense of humour, that’s good, and if she’s laughing at me – well, that’s better than pity. And I know already what she likes for breakfast.

It’s nice to have someone to ski with. I hope I’m not following her when I shouldn’t, like Dougie.

Wherever we go, I see more of those zigzag tracks. They’re always on blank inaccessible patches of snow, and they’re always connected by these big shapeless blobs.

OK, Dougie, I’ll let you go now. I’ll rent the space to someone else and he’ll snore in bed and he’ll fart and argue about the window and do all the things you did and it won’t be the same, it won’t be the same and I’ll still miss you, Dougie. I’ll miss you always. But when I get up early on a sunny morning after snow and I look at the impossible places that no-one can get to, I’ll see your mark. Line, blob, line. Line, shapeless blob, line.

Never stop, Dougie Lewis. Don’t ever stop.

This story is taken from "The Snow Cow: Ghost Stories for Skiers" by Martin Kochanski, published by Universalis. ISBN 978-0-956319-0-6.

Copyright 2009 by Martin Kochanski. All rights reserved.

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Dougie Lewis