‘Where were you?’ I fume as I stop, deliberately spraying snow at the fucker. ‘I’ve lost the clients!’ A panicky feeling is rising inside me even though this is not my fault. It isn’t. The clients shouldn’t have lied to me. They shouldn’t have told me they were much better skiers than they actually are. What if I’d taken them down the kind of terrain they were actually asking for? What if we’d tried something steeper and more gnarly? Then where would we be?

‘I thought you had them,’ Andy says.

‘You should have been watching!’ I explode.

‘Bloody hell, calm down, Cameron! They’ll be fine. They must have gone ahead of us – you can’t see where anyone is when it’s like this.’

‘I would have seen them if they’d gone past me,’ I counter.

‘Yeah, right, whatever. Either way, standing here isn’t going to achieve anything. Best we can do is carry on down and see if we catch up with them. If we get down and we still haven’t seen then, then we’ll think about what to do next.’

Andy sets off down the slope without waiting for me to reply, almost instantly disappearing out of sight because the visibility is so bad. I race after, furiously. No one is beating me down the slope just to prove they’re the better skier! After a few seconds I whizz past the twat, down, down, down. I can barely see a thing but it doesn’t matter, I know this slope so well I could ski it with my eyes closed. Which I might as well be doing, given the conditions right now.

I’m so focused on beating Andy down that it’s only when I get to the bottom I remember the missing clients. Argh! Where are they?

I stare up at the slope, but there’s no one in sight. A few seconds later, Andy appears. ‘I thought we were meant to be looking for the clients? Why’d you race off like that?’

‘Seeing if I could catch them up if they were ahead,’ I lie. ‘Don’t want them deciding to fuck off home because we’ve left them standing in the cold too long.’ Where are they? ‘You didn’t see them?’ I ask Andy.

‘No.’ There’s a pause. ‘D’you think we should call someone? Let someone know they’ve gone AWOL?’

In spite of the freezing wind I feel a bead of sweat run down my back inside my jacket. ‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it? I bet they’re fine. Let’s head up on the lift and ski down again, properly slowly this time. We’ll probably pick them up second time around. You’ll give me a hand, won’t you?’ I ask, even though it almost kills me to say it.