Good Thing Bad Thing by Nick Alexander

Author:Nick Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Part Three:

Good Thing Bad Thing

I watch Tom’s buttocks moving up and down beneath his beige cotton shorts as he weaves along the path before me. They are fleshier than before – with the weight he has put on – but they are actually more sensual, more inviting because of it.

He turns his head half towards me and says, “Where do you think this path actually goes? I mean, why would anyone go this way?”

I shrug and weave around a bush; it’s covered in tiny purple flowers. “Maybe just tourists,” I say. “Hill-walkers and the like.”

To our right the Alps begin in earnest, thrusting up from the flat of the land into jagged snow-capped points unworn by millions of years of weather. To the left the valley sweeps to the north, green and deep and lush with an almost unbelievably turquoise river along the middle.

Our own path weaves along from the tiny hamlet we’re staying in to an outcrop of grey, marble-like rock in the distance, weaving its way up and along the ridge of this, the largest of the foothills or the smallest of the southern Alps, I’m not sure which.

The air is cold, the sky a stunning deep blue; the sun, piercing through the thin air, pricks my arms as though they were covered with drying salt.

We have only walked ten minutes from the gite, but as far as the eye can see – and that’s a long, long way – there is no sign of life at all, no indicator of human society apart from this thin dusty path worn through the scrub by the constant flow of people wanting, for no apparent reason, to walk to the same point we are now approaching.

At the tip of the outcrop we see that the path actually continues, weaving down the side of the rock face and on up, way into the distant mountains.

“When you said the Alps,” Tom tells me, pausing and pulling a bottle of water from his backpack, “I thought you meant, like, hills… I didn’t realise there were proper mountains like this around here.”

He hands me the bottle of water and I take a mouthful before replying. “Nope, those are the real thing,” I say. “What now? Onward and downward?”

Tom looks to his left and nods towards a lone gnarled plane tree. “Shall we sit in the shade a bit first? I know we haven’t gone far, but…”

I shrug and head past him to the shade. “It’s not a race,” I say.

The leaves shift as the branches oscillate in the gentle breeze. We lie on our backs watching the light filtering through the almost fluorescent green of the leaves, at the turquoise sky peeping through the gaps.

“Have you noticed how good the air smells?” Tom asks.

I hadn’t, but I do now. I breathe in deeply and mull over the mixture – burnt earth, a cold, metallic mountain smell, floral hints from the wild lavender… “Yeah, it’s amazing,” I say. “And the noise of the insects. They sound like a squadron of B-52’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.