Rapids (12 page)

The church bell rang and rang. Four or five people had already abandoned their sleeping bags for the big kitchen tent. Phil claimed he would be rained out if it went on. Is it a warning or what? He would have to sleep here with

Amelia and Caroline. Then Michela appeared. Above long tanned legs, she wore a heavy mountain oilskin. She was smiling. Listen up, everybody. It’s just a habit here that they ring the bells when it rains really hard. She had come to reassure them. The noise of the bells is supposed to break up the clouds. Certainly breaks up any hope of sleep! Why would it do that? Vince asked. She smiled at him. She had a way, he understood, of seeming seraphic beyond her age. I’ve no idea, she said. It’s a faith they have here, a tradition.

Borrowing an umbrella, Vince made his usual trip to the loo. As always the urinals mysteriously began to flush as he approached. It should be reassuring, this sense of being integrated into the world’s sensible automatisms. Your arrival is foreseen, you are provided for. Faith in what? Louise demanded, when he crawled back between the fly—sheets. She had been reading a text message. The little screen glowed. The bell rang incessantly. The rain was trying the quality of Gloria’s old tent. Gloria loved camping. There were beads of water running along the seams. I know he acts a bit of a loser, but he’s sweet, Louise said of Mark. It’s his dad on at him all the time that makes him shy. Oh, it turns out they knew Mum quite well, by the way. She visited his mum who’s stuck in bed or something. His dad plays in the same tennis club. I know, Vince said. After a moment he asked, Who’s the message from? None of your business, Louise laughed.

They were lying on their beds while the rain drenched the fabric above them and the bell clanged on. Funny, Louise eventually said, her head on her hands, the impression Mum made on people. Mark says he liked her a lot. It was the first time in ten days together that she had spoken to him about her mother. I suppose we all make different impressions on people outside the family, Vince said cautiously. Suddenly, his daughter began to cry. She lay still, crying quietly. Vince leaned across and put his hand on her forehead, stroked her hair. To his surprise, she didn’t push the hand away. It was a pleasure to feel the soft hair under his fingers, the warm skin.

Later, after the rain eased off and the bell stopped, he lay awake, listening to distant voices, the clatter of drops blown off the trees, rustling fly—sheets, zips. He imagined the Italian girl unzipping her waterproof. Clive would be embracing her. Gloria, he whispered. He wasn’t jealous. Many evenings he went to sleep this way. The rehearsal of that final phone conversation, then the quiet mouthing of her name. Gloria. In Excelsis Deo, she liked to add primly. But he couldn’t hear his wife’s wry laugh in the dripping tent with his daughter gently snoring. There was no passion, he whispered. For a moment he imagined getting up again and going to the window of their chalet. You are sick, he thought, Vince Marshall. Sick.

M
ax had hung Wally from the brim of his straw hat. The talismanic bear swung from side to side at every bend. Mandy insisted that everyone buckle up their safety belts. No exceptions! The slalom course was almost thirty miles away. People had slept badly. Caroline had cried off altogether. Don’t you think ‘sort out the men from the boys’ is a pretty sexist expression, Brian was enquiring of Clive. I mean, women don’t even get a look—in. Anyway, the boys are usually better than the men, Phil boasted. It was the drooping eyebrows that gave him such a gormless look. Oh you think so too, do you, dearie, Max cried. The minibus pulled its trailer along the Bruneck—Brixen road. Amelia and Tom had their heads bowed over the BCU’s manual of correct recovery strokes. They seemed seriously absorbed. Vince felt his stomach tight. He had had to crap twice before departing. The course has sections that are grade four, Amal told him solemnly. That means there’s only one line to take through the rapid and you have to get it right. Or kaput! The Indian boy smiled. Why do I feel so determined, Vince wondered, to be on this suicide trip tomorrow? What do I have to prove?

About four hundred yards of river had been carefully reorganised to present more or less every troublesome whitewater feature: a stopper, a hole, a couple of daunting waves, rocks in the most trying places. Being dam—fed, the water levels were fairly constant. Criss—crossing over the river was a system of wires from which perhaps forty slalom gates were suspended so that their red— or green—and—white posts were just clear of the water. But this extra subtlety, the weaving back and forth in a set course among obstacles, was for the long, slim slalom boats, the experts. All you have to do, Clive explained earnestly— but he in particular had slept little and badly— at least for the first two runs, is to show me that you can break out of the current at every single eddy on the course, then break back in again without any trouble. Okay? We go down in groups of four. At the bottom you get out and carry your boats back to the beginning again. Keith will be stalking the bank taking notes and giving advice.

Vince ran his fingers round the rim of the cockpit to check that the spraydeck was sealed. The tab was out, ready to pull. He was with Mandy, Amal and Phil. At once he sensed he would have felt safer in a group with one of the two instructors. The water rushed down, grey and gleaming, to where they sat ready on the low bank. But of course, not to be with an instructor was a compliment. The pour—overs were larger and fiercer than any they had run before. There were places where even a small mistake would lead to getting pinned against a rock. It’s years since I did something as tough as this, Mandy muttered. She was checking the strap on her helmet. Slalom courses are always a doddle, Phil said knowledgeably. They’ve taken out any sharp stuff you could hurt yourself on, haven’t they? Nobody ever gets killed. He seemed disappointed. You lead, Vince told Amal. The Indian boy launched himself from the bank.

Pointing upstream, Amal ferried from the bank to the first rock and signalled to Vince to follow. First his finger indicates the person who is the object of the message, then the place he has to arrive at. As Vince moved out, Amal was already leaving his small refuge to drop down behind the first spur. One by one the group followed. First in the eddy, then back into the flow and through a fierce stopper. Take it close to the left, Keith was shouting from the bank. He had his arm in a sling. Right against the rock! The rocks are your friends!

Vince raced down. The deceleration as you punched into the eddy, raising the bottom of the boat to the still water, was fearsome. At the third he misjudged and was pulled over by the inertia. He rolled up on the second attempt. It was freezing. The cold gripped his head. He was excited. He signalled to Mandy to follow and broke back into the current again. As the least likely to come to grief, Phil was at the back to pick up anyone who got into trouble.

Certainly beats banking, Vince told Mandy at the bottom when they’d completed the first run. Once again, the concentration required and the physical effort had cleared his mind of all pain. You looked good, Mandy said. She had taken a couple of photos from eddies. Pretty dull, Phil thought. He wanted to play in the big stopper. They heaved the boats onto their backs and trudged up to the top.

On the second run, Amal tried a ferry—glide just below the stopper. It has a hole as well! Keith warned them from the bank. It’s grabby. They are behind a spur of rock looking upstream into a fierce churn of white water beneath a drop of about three feet. A cold spume fills the air, causing small rainbows to form in the bright sunshine. The world has a glitter to it, a powerful presence. Everything is immediate. Just downstream of the white water, the surface is irregular and turbulent and there must be a point— you know this— where if you push too close to the froth, the backflow in the stopper will begin to pull you in. The boat will sink and spin in the soft, oxygenated water. But to make it over to the eddy that Amal has spotted way on the opposite bank, you can’t let yourself drift too far down. You must ride close to the stopper and its deep white hole. Amal steers his kayak out into the stream. His ability to set the angle and edge of the boat is uncanny. With no effort, he glides across.

Vince follows. He’s too vertical, pointing straight upstream. The hole begins to pull. He back—paddles, suddenly loses almost ten yards, but fights his way across with a huge expenditure of effort. Panting, relieved, he signals to Mandy to come across and join them. There’s room in the eddy for all four. They can regroup. As she looks across to him, Mandy’s face is grim and Vince guesses at once that she isn’t going to make it. The woman is hunched. Her posture betrays her nerves. She is here for the group, Vince is aware, for the companionship that expeditions like this can offer a single woman in middle age, for the photographs and fun.

Mandy’s first tentative stroke leaves the tail of the boat still anchored in the eddy. Before she’s halfway across, she’s lost at least twenty yards to the current. Barely breaking the surface, there’s a stone in the middle of the river here. She could rest the bow of her kayak behind it, take a break, decide what to do next. But she hasn’t seen. She isn’t thinking. She drifts against the stone sideways, paddling like mad. It surprises her. With the unexpected contact, the bow is shifted the other way, back to the left bank. She fights the shift, but half—heartedly. The river has got her now. Grey and bouncy, the current swirls towards a smooth black boulder by the bank where it piles up in a tense cushion before being forced back into the centre to plunge down the next drop. All this would be easy enough to negotiate if taken face on, but Mandy is pointing upstream. She is still trying to turn the boat back across the flow when the current pushes it sideways onto the boulder. Immediately she’s pinned, the underside of the kayak against the rock, the water crashing on the spray—deck.

Vince is watching all this from the safety of his eddy on the opposite bank, thirty yards upstream. He sees the woman try to brace her paddle against the oncoming water to keep her head up. He has a picture of the blue helmet, the orange paddle—blade. But it’s only a fraction of a second before she’s down. Now she will pull out and swim. She doesn’t. Arm in a sling, Keith is scrambling down the bank. But there are thick brambles between himself and the rock. He can’t get to it. Mandy is still under. Amal! Vince looks round. The boy is locked away from the stream by Vince’s boat. Vince looks for Phil. Incredibly, he is fooling around in the hole. He’s let his kayak be sucked in and is throwing the boat this way and that, tail up, tail down, in the spongy water. He hasn’t seen anything. He can hear no screams.

Amal is trying to force a way round Vince to the stream, but now Vince breaks in himself. He will get to her first. In one stroke he’s in the quick of it. The power of the current tosses the boat round. It’s a matter of seconds. He is bearing straight down on Mandy’s boat, still pinned upside down against the rock. The bank is to the right, the next rapid to the left. I have no idea how to do this, Vince thinks.

Keith is shouting something, but Vince can’t hear, can’t listen. Instead of fighting the pull of the current onto the rock, Vince speeds towards it, as if to spear Mandy’s boat as he goes down. Lean into it! Keith is yelling. Vince pays no attention. Just before he hits the submerged boat, he lets go the paddle with his right hand and throws his body towards the rock to grab the bow—handle of the boat. His arm is wrenched violently, but the boat shifts. It’s free. Dragged over, Vince thrusts his hand down on the bow of Mandy’s boat to bounce up and prevent himself from capsizing. Now he’s spun backward and dropping into the rapid. He’s just got both hands back on his paddle when he hits a stopper sideways and goes down. This time he rolls up without thinking, as if rolling in white water were the easiest thing in the world. Mandy is swimming. Keith has already got a line to her. Amal is chasing the upturned boat down the river. Exhausted, mentally more than physically, Vince pulls over to the bank.

The deck just wouldn’t pop, Mandy is repeating. There’s a note of hysteria in her voice. She is stumbling up on the rocks. Her body is shaking. The water was so powerful, it wouldn’t pop. I couldn’t get out. I was drowning. Thought I might have to take a swim there, Keith laughs. Stitches or no stitches. Then the woman insists on embracing Vince. You saved my life. Nonsense! Later they worked out that the whole crisis had lasted no more than twenty seconds. Nursing the pain in his shoulder, Vince understood he had booked himself a place on tomorrow’s trip.

The chair—lift begins a mile or so above Sand in Taufers. It took them up in threesomes, their feet dangling a few yards above the tall pines either side, the cables humming and clicking above them, the air cooling around their faces, the valley falling away dramatically behind. The kids giggled and took photos of each other. Amelia was quiet beside Tom. Max dangled Wally below his seat on a string amid shrieks of fake horror. Somebody had begun to sing ‘Inky Pinky Parlez—Vous’.

At the top, a large timber—built hostelry, flying the vertical red and white banner of the Tyrol, sits in a wide meadow hemmed in on three sides by even steeper slopes leading up to a ridge at almost nine thousand feet. But the youngsters really don’t want to walk. The sun has a sharper, brighter quality here. They could buy Cokes at the hostel, fool around and sunbathe. Since Bri can only hobble, we’ve all decided to keep him company, Max laughed. Keith and Mandy had stayed behind, to explore Bruneck, they said. The woman had needed a rest. So for the walk up to the glacier there were just Vince, Amal, Adam, Clive and Michela. Adam tried to persuade his son to join them. Risking nothing, the boy had survived the slalom course well enough. He doesn’t want to, Vince said softly. It was clear there was something going on between him and Louise. Adam insisted. It would do everybody good to stretch their legs after being cramped in the boat. Mark didn’t even reply now. He turned and ran after the others.

Then no sooner had the walkers set off up a path that zigzagged steeply through walls of flint, than Clive suddenly stopped to apologise to Adam. Michela didn’t expect it. The party was brought to a halt on the narrow path. I shouldn’t have hit you. A clouded look came over his handsome face. Dead right, you shouldn’t, Adam agreed. Then the instructor said, Forget it, but grudgingly, Michela thought. They climbed in single file up the steep slope under bright afternoon sunshine, and as they walked and she watched Clive’s strong legs in short trousers and his powerful back bending to the slope, she began to feel angry. You shouldn’t be apologising, she began to speak to him in her mind. He isn’t worth it. And you shouldn’t be wasting time, doing stupid, touristy things, taking groups up mountainsides. The kayaking was a mistake, she told herself now. If we aren’t to be happy together, what point is there in arranging these trips? She was thinking in English. What point for a man like Clive? Suddenly she understood that he must do something
serious.
That’s why he has never married. He is preparing himself. Michela knew that Clive had lived with two or three other women before her. He couldn’t marry because he must do something important. It’s crazy for him to lead ungrateful people up a mountain, when they just want to hang around at the
rifugio
and flirt and sunbathe. He must do something that
changes the world. Yes.
Oh, but it made her so furious that he could break off their relationship, he could stop making love, just like that, before there was really any need, and that he could do it without missing her body at all, without any sense of loss. Why did I have to find a saint? she complained. I’m his last temptation. You’re a saint, Clive. The voice in her head was louder now. So what are you waiting for? she demanded of him. It sounded like a scream. Whatever it is you have to do, do it!