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  SNOW BLIND

  Richard Blanchard’s debut novel Snow Blind was completed in 2013. It draws on his life experiences: being an avid skier; becoming a father late in life and losing close friends too early in theirs. His previous short story work generated critical acclaim.

  Born in 1962, Richard Blanchard grew up in Liverpool. After graduating from the University of Westminster, he built a career as an executive in the retail industry. He still lives in Liverpool with his wife and two sons.

  Praise for Richard Blanchard

  “… a superb piece of prose, and really engrossing. His writing really has dynamism.”

  Chris Dukes (London School of Journalism)

  “In my opinion Richard Blanchard is a staggeringly good writer with his own unique original voice.”

  Mark Davies Markham (Playwright – This Life, Taboo – The Boy George musical).

  “With prose as taut as a guitar string, Richard Blanchard dissects the workings of the male mind.”

  Jan McVerry (TV writer – Clocking Off, Forsyte Saga, Coronation Street)

  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

  Edmund Burke

  Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 – 1797)

  SNOW

  BLIND

  RICHARD BLANCHARD

  Copyright © 2013 Richard Blanchard

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador®

  9 Priory Business Park

  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 9781783068456

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For John Young

  (1967-2005) RIP

  Peace, love, hugs ’n stuff.

  Author and John Young skiing the Valée Blanche

  Contents

  Prologue

  Wednesday 15th April 2009

  Chapter 1: Dan 13:13

  Chapter 2: Dan 13:23

  Chapter 3: Dan 13:47

  Chapter 4: Juliet 14.12

  Chapter 5: Dan 14:27

  Chapter 6: Dan 14:35

  Chapter 7: Dan 14:50

  Chapter 8: Dan 18:55

  Chapter 9: Dan 20.02

  Chapter 10: Dan 22.30

  Chapter 11: Juliet 22.30

  Thursday 16th April 2009

  Chapter 12: Dan 06.20

  Chapter 13: Dan 08.56

  Chapter 14: Dan 10.30

  Chapter 15: Dan 13.07

  Chapter 16: Dan 14.05

  Chapter 17: Dan 16.37

  Chapter 18: Dan 17.44

  Chapter 19: Dan 18.36

  Chapter 20: Juliet 22.01.

  Friday 17th April 2009

  Chapter 21: Dan 06.41

  Chapter 22: Dan 10.11

  Chapter 23: Dan 13.46

  Chapter 24: Juliet 15.05

  Chapter 25: Juliet 16.29

  Chapter 26: Juliet 16.44

  Chapter 27: Dan 16.56

  Chapter 28: Dan 18.05

  Chapter 29: Dan 18.30

  Saturday 18th April 2009

  Chapter 30: Juliet 00.22

  Chapter 31: Dan 01.30

  Chapter 32: Dan 02.10

  Chapter 33: Dan 02.53

  Chapter 34: Dan 09.45

  Chapter 35: Dan 11.20

  Chapter 36: Dan 13.01

  Chapter 37: Dan 14.40

  Chapter 38: Dan 15.06

  Chapter 39: Juliet 15.06.

  Chapter 40: Dan 16.04

  Chapter 41: Juliet 16.04

  Chapter 42: Dan 17.52

  Chapter 43: Juliet 17.52.

  Sunday 19th April 2009

  Chapter 44: Juliet 05.45.

  Chapter 45: Dan 06.58.

  Chapter 46: Juliet 07.52.

  Chapter 47: Juliet 09.49

  Chapter 48: Juliet. 15.40

  Chapter 49: Juliet 18.30

  Acknowledgements

  Dan’s Magnificent Seven The “Tracks of his Years”

  Prologue

  “Haaar…Oomph!” I am falling and laughing, ripped from a skiing heaven to an icy earth.

  It’s a juicy fall; the impact of which bellows half-used air from my lungs and sloshes the water content of my body around like a drunk’s glass. Maybe I wasn’t in skiing heaven though. I am falling head first into abundant off-piste snow, casting suffocating ice particles into my mouth, which I vainly try to spit out. My red carving skis are in the sky above me, chopping air like un-tethered helicopter blades. The perverse laughter is because my body is actually relieved to surrender to gravity after so much toil. I try to set a defiant smile into the gorgeous lateafternoon sun for the sake of both my ego and my friends, as I flash rapidly over their elongated Lowry-like shadows. Pompous parents sneer that pride comes before a fall, but I am not sure I have much.

  But you may ask myself, how did I get here? My fall may have started twenty yards back when I tipped off a narrow track, but its source was surely when my stags arranged for me to ski off-piste on Vallee Blanche under Mont Blanc. In hindsight this was unwise when I have so little experience; but I had made so much progress. Maybe the fall was inevitable when I let this stag group come together. My latest fall adds scorn to the disdain, embarrassment, hatred, panic and unerring inevitability that my stags are individually feeling. Perhaps I should blame it just on that bastard Robert, who hijacked the destination of this trip from Johnny, my best man. The worst fate I would have befallen there would have been vomiting the whisky produce of a Macallan distillery over trampled Highland heather. Perhaps setting foot on the plane last Wednesday was the real downfall. All of this is prefaced by the embarrassing moment I was told by Sophia’s dad that we were getting vii married on Saturday the 25th of April because he had secured a slot at his country club. I accepted this fate far too easily.

  My soul travels downhill uneasily; I am a pollutant, stripping away the high mountain snow, producing floodwater and misery in the valley below. I curl my neck upwards to try and pivot on my shoulders and pull my skis under me. An unseen hump does it for me, sending me airborne where I can manoeuvre my skis. I now slide faster from the combination of the flip and a more severe slope, but feel more control as I am almost in an upright sitting position. The view would be aweinspiring, mountain peaks jostling for supremacy, some cloaked in patchy snow, some nakedly showing their body of jagged rock. I read a sign way back at the top at the Aiguille Du Midi station that said the glacier below me is moving at a centimetre an hour. Apparently it takes ninety years or so to ride this natural escalator into Chamonix, as proven by the recently discovered skeleton of a climber. The heart of a crevasse defies all expectation; how can something so white be so vibrantly blue? You keep staring at it to build up your belief that you haven’t gone colour blind. This beauty is now a life-threatening beast. Blue lines drop away in every direction, encircling my journey. My flight instinct kicks in. Stop my fall. Alter my fate. I cycle my legs frantically, casting
off huge splashes of snow. I turn my torso to the hill; my ski gloves claw vainly uphill at nothing fixed. My last desperate acts are slowing me but not enough. I am sucked towards the cavernous crevasses and shattered seracs. Stalactites glisten and welcome me to their wintry desolation; they may soon present their sharpened edges to my supplicant body.

  Hell, I fell because of me. I surrendered to this downfall. Pompous parents sneer that pride comes before a fall, and so they should.

  I lift off and silence falls, no scraping and clawing just heavenly silence.

  WEDNESDAY 15TH APRIL 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  Dan 13:13

  “Oh, yeah!” Prince rips a vocal chord and cranks up his rubber-taut funk in my iPhone earphones. His lyric invokes the spread of AIDSinduced death and hysteria from France, the destination of my journey ahead.

  Sophia, my wife-to-be, drives me onward to Manchester airport; but I exist in Prince’s visceral music and a splendid isolation. She drives hunched forward, compensating for the ill-positioned steering wheel and seat. Glancing into the rear-view mirror she seeks the face of our son. Her straight, brown bobbed hair curves achingly down her cheek as she lifts her chin. Her lips wriggle, as she engages him in some reassuring babble. I often see this scene, but am often outside its intimacy with or without my musical exclusion. This beautiful device was released from its box yesterday; a pop of compressed Chinese factory air landed in my Chester office as the bottom of the Apple box hit my desk. This perk from work will undoubtedly result in more for me to do.

  A plane hangs low in the sky alongside our rear view mirror, a monumental cacophony of beaten metal. Banking south over polluted devalued properties; I speculate its destination to be the wonderful freespirited San Francisco, the plane crammed with pioneers going west, exhausting both spent fuel and Virgin’s Cool Britannia brand presence. The fumes trouble me personally; the brand hurts me professionally. As a copywriter working for the mosquito-sized budget airline ByeFly, I wince at the challenge of feebly attacking them. Working on their account would be a dream. I squirm anxiously in my seat and imagine pitching my latest campaign idea to Richard Branson; a poster campaign to attract new customers for them. I press the projector remote to reveal a photograph of a naked couple reclining discreetly in a business-class seat: the lady astride him with her right arm covering her breasts. The strap line underneath would boast: “Lose your virginity in style”. I also imagine the sneers the plane is now attracting from the irate ruddy-faced Cheshire set nearby.

  Sophia had picked me up on time outside my flat in Chester. I had waited on the street, sat on the guitar case I am interestingly using as a suitcase this weekend. It was very chilly down low so I had pulled my purple velvet lapels across my nose. The early commuters must have thought I was a sulking under-confident busker awaiting a sufficient audience before he would perform. I counted the nights I will spend under my flat’s roof till I move in to Sophia’s parents’ house in Wilmslow south of Manchester; ten more nights minus the four I am about to spend in France. Must make the most of the days before life changes. Her mum and dad are good strong people but I fear I will be overwhelmed in a household with their grandchild in it.

  Prince is still unhappy in my head; now bemoaning man’s sheep-like behaviour in pursuing life threatening thrills like going to space on a rocket. If he was to sing for another forty verses he might produce an attack on the environmental impact of skiing, the reason for my travel. More specifically to an event that at forty years old I never thought I would live to see, my own stag weekend. When did the stag night, essentially a huge piss-up ending in a mixture of pain and embarrassment, stretch to become a weekend? When did a weekend become five days? This extension adds the inconvenience of having to carry on drinking for days on end and living with pissed people, most of whom you only want to converse with once a year. I have meekly succumbed to this generational change.

  I turn again and Sophia is talking directly at me. Her mouth is speeding now, showing strained dimples around her chin. The sweetness of her face isn’t lost, but there is exasperation there. Her head flicks between looking at the road and trying to get my attention. My last moment of contemplation is lost. I pull out my embedded earphones too sharply and my right ear stings.

  “Where in hell are we going Dan?” asks my tetchy wife-to-be.

  Answering Manchester airport would not help, she must mean which terminal. The weak spring sun flashes across the papers on my lap and I flush knowing she needs a decision fast.

  “Probably Terminal 3.”

  “I am in completely the wrong lane. Are you sure?”

  She scowls and lurches her Daddy’s obscene green luxury car into the right-hand lane with a skid. The leather seats squeak with our body weight, emitting an opulent odour of brushed clean death.

  “Err!” The number three appears to me belatedly from the e-ticket and I let her drive on without interruption.

  “How come I get a Hen night in Manchester and you get a five-day skiing holiday in France?” Sophia protests with childish petulance; she doesn’t think I have earned enough credit to take this liberty.

  “It wasn’t my idea. You know it was Robert who sorted it all babe.” I try to carry the conversation beyond argument by blaming someone else. I know what really irks her is how come Juliet my ex-girlfriend is going on my Stag weekend.

  My son Giuseppe, or Bepe for short, fires orange polystyrene pellets from a Scooby Doo pistol. He hits the front windscreen twice.

  “And how did he get that?” Sophia frowns at me as we negotiate a series of roundabouts. I had succumbed to his whining to liberate the gun from the front of his latest magazine.

  “Good shot baby,” I humour him in an overload voice.

  Juliet scowls and I think she says, “Who is the child around here?”

  The airport rises in front of us, screaming nonsense from illconceived signs at my word-alert sensibility.

  “For Terminal 3 follow T3” the sign suggests coyly; I never would have guessed. Terminal is such a bad name to be associated with such a risky way to travel. It threatens a trip with no return, a destination with no way out. Partnered with cancer is its most succinct and compelling usage, but is that just the wordsmith in me?

  “Manchester – Gateway to the World.” For some maybe, it must be the prison of the North for others. Is our passage helped or hindered by this boastful nonsense?

  Relieved to see the “Short Stay and Rental Vehicles” sign we enter the gloomy car park, accepting their extortionate fee unchallenged as the barrier lifts.

  I stop Prince in time to hear the engine turn off.

  “You got me here in great time babe.” I thank Sophia. I think she was motivated to be here early to see the group assemble, but most definitely to check out the surprise stag Juliet.

  I get out of the car to seek a trolley but the signs fail me and I am lost scouring acres of this desperate space. The low phosphorescent light brings to mind oozy images of stolen affairs between illegitimate lovers with collapsed home lives. Eventually the bashed metallic crate I need appears, abandoned in haste across two spaces but hidden from plain view. I feel proud to have rescued some unsuspecting traveller from denting their bodywork and losing their no-claims bonus, but my chivalry is at a personal cost. The plastic panel screwed onto the hand luggage basket advertises my own crafted words let loose in the real world.

  WAVE GOODBYE TO BRITAIN; WAVE GOODBYE TO OTHER

  AIRLINES; FOR FLYING SATISFACTION

  GO GO BYEFLY.CO.UK

  My heart sinks with the over-promise. I squirm at the sure knowledge that they offer nothing but flying squalor on their planes. I wince knowing how I avoided mentioning price in the vain hope we happen to mug enough travellers who can’t work out the implications of our small-print baggage and plane tax clauses. I gag at the client’s twee obsession with using a Waving Goodbye theme. What is it doing here anyway; surely spending money advertising somewhere else to someone about to buy a flig
ht ticket would be better than someone just about to get on one. I am disconcerted.

  Bepe strains prematurely to get out of his car seat; compressing the flesh at the top of his plump arms. His buckle snags my fingers.

  “Daddy is getting on a plane now Bepe,” I lift him out with his two-year-old hands grasping a toy plane and the already spent plastic pistol.

  “Let’s leave them in the car for later,” I take his toys from him.

  “No Diddy.” His face instantly frowns, threatening to reap tears. The physicality of his protest surprises me, and I accede to the Scooby Doo gun. I sense Sophia’s disapproval; I have just given her the moral high ground should this be lost or cause more tears.

  I place Bepe on his feet while I unload the car.

  “Don’t let him down in here, you know he will just run away.” Sophia reminds me of Bepe’s recent behaviour. I sit him on the hand baggage shelf at the back of the trolley. I put my inappropriate guitar case onto the trolley. My packing logic went haywire, lost trying to recall what is needed to go skiing and coping with the extremes of blinding heat and bone-quaking cold that accompany a trip in April. I also packed for the inevitabilities of a man in my position, such as being dumped outside in the middle of the night by my stags (a vest and long johns), being regularly doused in water or urine for a laugh (every Tshirt I own) or suffering theft from my wardrobe (spare ski pants and fleece).

  “Come on guys, time to scoot,” I warble to my family, revealing my nervous state.

  “Scoot! Where did that come from?” Sophia barely tolerates my search for offbeat ways to communicate.

  We head out of the gloom, crossing two parallel lanes. Cars line their kerbs spitting bags and passengers towards the terminal building.

  “Listen, you are going for the purple paisley waistcoat aren’t you? My dad needs to go and get one today if possible. He says your wedding shoes are finished, he will get someone from the factory to deliver them to your flat when you are back.” The urgency of all this is clear with our marriage ten days away, but I do not feel it.