Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [115]
‘No, you come here – they’re switching on the fountains.’
Natalie rushed to the window, and they watched the lake in front of the hotel erupt into life. The water seemed to shoot above the hotel. ‘This happens every fifteen minutes, practically all day and night,’ she reported. ‘For no apparent reason.’
She looked like a kid, wide-eyed and excited, Tom thought. ‘You’re going to like this, aren’t you?’
‘I’m going to love it.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Thank you for bringing me here, Tom.’
Was there a moment? In the hug that followed?
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this!’ Natalie held Tom’s hand tightly; with the other she gripped the headrest of the seat in front. The helicopter banked sharply and completed a second arc above the Hoover Dam.
‘You okay?’ Tom mouthed.
‘Think so,’ she mouthed back. She had no idea how they had got to the dam – she’d had her eyes screwed shut since the helicopter had started its lurching hover above the tarmac of the airport. She had grabbed Tom’s thigh in panic. Forty minutes, they’d said this was going to take. She wasn’t sure she could do it.
But, wow, that dam really was amazing. After a minute or so of staring at it, marvelling at how they had built it, Natalie discovered she wasn’t quite so petrified. She released Tom’s hand. His fingers were white where she had gripped them. Liberated, he rubbed the blood back into them, then offered it again, but Natalie – who had retained her grasp on the headrest – waved him off. Actually, this was okay. They probably weren’t going to die after all.
For the next ten minutes, they were both absorbed in the rugged terrain that the helicopter was flying over. Then the world literally fell away under them, and the helicopter was in the canyon. They followed the path of a river, flying lower and lower into this huge hole in the world, and finally landing in a clearing, with a crude wooden shelter. Natalie crouched low to exit, and Tom laughed. ‘Don’t laugh at me!’
‘Can’t I laugh with you?’
She giggled – relief at having survived mingling with the realisation of how silly she must look crawling out of a stationary helicopter. ‘You can’t be too careful!’ she remonstrated with him.
‘Oh, I think you can!’
A ‘champagne picnic’ was included: they were each presented with a small wicker basket containing a plastic glass, a packet of Doritos, and a dubious ham and lettuce roll. Natalie decided eating might not be the greatest idea, since the exit route from the canyon was to be the same as the entry one, but she drank the champagne quickly, facing away from everybody else.
‘The pilot says that cliff there,’ Tom pointed in front of them, ‘is four thousand feet high. And that’s just the start of it. Four thousand feet! You can’t imagine it, can you? Just think, we abseiled a hundred feet, so that is… what? Forty times as high. Bet you’d like to go off there, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yep. That’s really me!’ Natalie shielded her eyes and gazed up – the top seemed impossibly high. A for Abseiling. They’d come a long way since then, hadn’t they? Twenty-something letters. Nearly six months. She’d almost forgotten about the alphabet game. The other passengers had gone walkabout and the pilot was busily collecting up the plastic champagne glasses. Tom and Natalie wandered to the edge of the picnic site.
‘Most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?’
‘Definitely.’
‘We’re meaningless, aren’t we? Inconsequential. Infinitely small. We’re nothing.’
She punched his arm gently. ‘Speak for yourself.’
‘You know what I mean. All the stuff we run around worrying about and sweating over, it’s bollocks, isn’t it?’
‘Not to us. You can’t say that.’
‘No, of course not to us. But I reckon if you flew everyone over here and dropped them at the bottom like this they’d come to see that it didn’t matter all that much. They’d go back and live differently, I bet you.’ He was thinking about Patrick and Lucy.
Natalie