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blue to black, and half an hour later it starts to snow. It snows so heavily that seven adults and twelve or thirteen kids get snowed into a space under a crag on Ben Wyvis. It’s before the days of mobile phones. There’s no way of letting anyone know where we are. It’s freezing. We huddle together, then the adults huddle the kids inside a circle of their bodies. It’s afternoon. It gets dark. It doesn’t stop snowing. All there is is snow in the dark, and more snow, and dark at the back of it, snow for miles of empty sky, and a lot of swearing from my father, he’s dead now, and the man from across the road, he’s dead now too, I think, threatening to murder Mr Fenimore, and my mother who’d worn shoes with heels on to go up a mountain in, my mother, she’d never even been on a hike before never mind anywhere near a mountain, cursing herself, and a bit of arguing about who should go for help, and Mrs Fenimore crying, and Mr Fenimore counting heads everyfive minutes, before he sets off into the white dark to bring help back.
    Oh god, Tom says. Does he die?
    It ends happily, Paula says. Doesn’t it?
    Mr Fenimore is lost on the hill till the next day, when the rescue services pick him up, I say. He’s in hospital for a week. We’re all already home by then. We all get picked up about an hour later by three men in a helicopter. The father of a girl called Jenny McKenzie, in the year above me at school, has picked up the bad forecast on the radio and phoned the rescue services and told them where we went. They keep four of us in hospital overnight, including me. It’s a laugh. We’re all fine. But the thing is, we get back to town, back home, and – there’s no snow anywhere. None. It’s all just like normal, grey pavements and tarmac and roofs, like none of it happened.
    Then what? Tom says.
    What happened about the Fenimores? Paula says.
    How was that a happy Christmas? Tom says.
    I had no idea what happened to the Fenimores, I realized, sitting there by myself in the warmed-up seat in my car in a near-empty car park miles from home. I could remember her sad face. I could remember his open, naïve brow, his forward slant when he walked down the school corridor orup the makings of a path at the foot of the ben. They were only there for that year, maybe. They moved away. The judo club stopped. A home economics teacher took over the cookery club. People stopped talking about them like they were the local joke pretty soon. Where were those people, the hopeful man and his sad helpful love; where were the Fenimores tonight, nearly thirty years later? Were they warm in a house, well into their middle-age? Were they still the Fenimores?
    From here in my car I could see the frosty roofs on the village terrace below, down at the bottom of the slope. I looked the other way and saw, through the side window of the pub, the man and the barmaid.
    The man had his back to the bar. He was holding a near-empty glass, staring ahead into space. The barmaid was leaning on her elbow. She was staring in the opposite direction. They stayed like that, unmoving, like figures in a painting, the whole time I watched.
    The barmaid was called Paula. I had no idea what the man’s name was. Good, because I didn’t want to know. I was just a stranger who ordered supper and didn’t eat it. I was long gone, as far as they knew, on the road out of here in the dark.
    I put my hand on the ignition key, whisky or no whisky.
    But if I went back inside, I could eat. And if I went back inside, if I was simply there, those two people would speak to each other again, they’d be able to, even if I was just sitting reading my paper or eating my supper ignoring them.
    I looked down at the roofs of the houses sheened with the fierce frost, like a row of faraway houses in the kind of story we tell ourselves about winter and its chancy gifts.
    I opened the car door and got out. I locked it, though I probably didn’t need to, and I went back into the