by Helen Mort
‘Thanks,’ she said quietly, taking off her coat. ‘I can deal with this customer.’
The boy darted into the stockroom and Tom turned to face her, half-smiling. He was wearing a grey wool jacket, tight black jeans and a striped shirt, buttoned to the neck. She thought about making a joke – Has sir come straight from the mountain? – but his face was drawn and tired under its suit of stubble.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Missed you, too. Why aren’t you answering your phone?’
Leigh took him by the wrist and pulled him behind the counter. It felt more private back there, even though they were in full view of the door. It smelled of Pete’s dog. A dozen empty down jackets watched them. Above the jackets, a display of ice axes that Leigh had arranged last week, angled diagonally. She hadn’t realised how sinister it looked until now.
Tom tried to grab her by the hips and pull her closer to him.
‘I’ve been going mad without you. It’s been a shit week. Shit students, shit meetings. And there’s so much distance between me and Rach …’
She turned her back on him and started tidying the stock, rearranging the expensive cams and brightly-coloured nuts.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that was a crap thing to say. I’m not looking for sympathy.’
‘Good, you’re in the right place.’
‘Where have you been? I wanted to see you.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
Tom’s face tightened. She noticed the heavy bags under his eyes.
‘Busy with who?’
‘Keep it down. I’m late. I’m already in the shit if management catches me. And Pete’s off climbing.’
He leaned in close to her ear. His breath tickled her neck and she felt the hairs on her arms stir.
‘I am going to leave her, you know. One day. When things are simpler.’
Leigh turned to look at him. She didn’t say anything.
‘Leigh,’ he hissed. ‘I want to be with you.’
A customer was browsing the books at the far end of the shop, a fat bloke she recognised from the indoor walls in Sheffield. He had all the gear and none of the moves. She pushed Tom away, very gently, letting her hand linger on his chest.
‘Look, this is a bad time.’
The fat bloke had sidled over closer and was thumbing through guidebooks to places he’d never climb: Squamish, Mont Blanc. He kept moving closer to the counter, earwigging. Leigh wondered if she and Tom looked like a couple or not, if a stranger would put them together. Tom and his girlfriend definitely looked the part. She’d known that the first time she saw them through the window of his flat. Tall, poised. Her fur-trim coat and his black leather gloves. Their matching small noses and long fingers. She could imagine their future wedding photos. Leigh had never even been a bridesmaid. The one time she was meant to be, her cousin had called off the wedding a week before and Leigh decided she was a jinx. Her school friend didn’t want her to be her bridesmaid, because of her short hair and tattoos, the uncomfortable way she stood when she wore a dress, like a shop dummy.
Tom started buttoning his expensive coat. ‘Let me see you. I could come out with you sometime, out here. I could even hold your ropes if you want.’
She laughed, even though she didn’t feel like it.
‘Let me hold your ropes, Leigh.’
‘This isn’t about climbing.’
He stood up straight. ‘My mistake. I thought everything was with you.’
When Leigh used to go out with Tom in Sheffield and he saw someone he knew – one of his horn-rimmed PhD students with pointed shoes, or a colleague talking breezily into an iPhone, or the attractive receptionist from the faculty – they’d always nod to him, and she’d panic for a moment, expecting them to clock her and freeze her with a look, a full, suspicious, up-and-down stare. It was worse than that. They didn’t really notice her at all. And she’d give Tom a forced smile, mid-sentence, and remember that the things that make you shudder or thrill in your own life are invisible to other people.
But by the time they’d reached the foot of Division Street, she’d have convinced herself that she was the invisible one. Their glances passed straight through. While Tom picked up the overpriced coffees and she waited outside, she was back at school and it was Valentine’s Day in Year 11, and she was having a fag outside the back of the sports hall and trying not to look towards Jordan Richardson as he walked towards her, larger and larger in the corner of her eye. And her lanky, teenage self was ready to deny the card and the sparse poem. Ready to look him full in the face and turn at the last moment, turn back and smile, and they’d both know it was her, and he’d humour the pretence, but without saying anything he’d press against her and she’d feel the sheepskin collar on his denim jacket tickling at her neck, and his tongue slipping inside her mouth, and she’d drop her cigarette on the floor. Jordan Richardson, with his quiet kindness and solemn answers in English Literature and his worker’s hands and his permanent headphones. Then, he was right in front of her, sudden, his face all eyebrows. And she knew as soon as he took her by the arm and squeezed that it wasn’t going to play out that way.
‘I’m really glad Faye asked you to do it. You know what I’m on about, don’t you? I really appreciate you being cool about it. Discreet, I mean.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Sure.’
‘To be fair, I’ve fancied her since Year 9. I just never thought … I weren’t going to say anything. I knew right away it had to be from her. You’re a good mate.’
And she laughed when he walked away. She laughed silently until the laugh became an ache in her stomach and her ribs. And she texted Faye from the back seat of the bus to say Jordan really likes you, like the good go-between she was, like the messenger she always would be. In revision week, she saw Jordan and Faye in the library, hands entwined, Faye wearing his jumper, and he winked at her and she tried to hide whatever she was writing, but he came over the way he always did now, making an effort to speak to her, and asked her what it was and she lied and said a script. Great, he said, that’s great. You’d make a good scriptwriter.
People were always thinking Leigh was someone else. Or telling her she reminded them of someone. The people they named never had anything in common. Sinéad O’Connor. That girl from the news. They always grinned as if it was a compliment. A thin, sinewy woman with a perm stopped in front of the tills in the shop once and told Leigh she had a double, a woman who climbed at the bouldering wall on the south side of Sheffield. She’s the spit of you. Another time, a gang of teenage lads started hollering at her at the interchange, asking her if she had a sister. One of them thought they knew her so-called twin, that she worked in a hairdressing salon in Rotherham. Sometimes she could sense the words forming before they’d been spoken. You remind me of someone. You’re just like … It made her think of the man she slept with in a basement flat in Edinburgh who kept calling her Kirsty, who gripped her waist and pushed her face down into the pillow and shouted the wrong name, over and over, until she started to pretend she was Kirsty and she’d known him all her life and she was sick to death of him.
She and Tom only went away together once – a weekend in Whitby when he was meant to be at a symposium, and it rained for two days, the sea threatening the hillside – she’d woken up with him watching her, the hotel kettle steaming softly in the corner of the room. He’d been smoothing her hair while she slept and he smiled and asked her if she wanted to take the pirate boat trip out of the harbour for three quid, and she knew that he’d been thinking she reminded him of someone else with her eyes shut. Some ex he’d mentioned enough times for her to know it was more than a vague regret, the Romanticist who went to Iceland for a summer and only called him once, who cheated on him and made him feel that it was all his fault. And when he pulled her back under the duvet and licked a firm line from her navel to the base of her neck, she knew it was the idea of her that he wanted to fuck, the lovely, bittersweet notion of her, a woman who wasn’t afra
id to be alone, who kept something back, who didn’t care about the morning after. The idea of a rock climber, a risk-taker. His own past and his own impossible future. She was just passing through. She had a message to deliver and then she could go. Discreet. And when he told her he loved her, it meant he loved someone she might become, someone he hadn’t quite met yet. Someone she hadn’t met either. It was perfect. Somehow, it was just what she wanted. To be unknown, even when he was inside her. The rain battered the sash window and they decided not to get out of bed all day.
Turning Stone Edge
I’m made-up with graffiti. Pink and bright green, smiley faces, giant cocks, signatures daubed by local kids. It’s drizzling, the air’s muzzy with damp and when the short girl settles down to belay, my new colours bleed into her clothes. I look best in bad weather, though – a dark thought, kept out of mind behind the agricultural fields and faint softness of Ashover, behind the beech copse and stone wall. I’ve never been popular. All day, nobody’s held me or said my name but these two women who call to each other back and forth through the grey air. Sometimes they climb separately, traversing near the ground on juggy handholds and small ledges. But mostly, they’re roped together. One tall and slim with cropped, dark hair, the other stronger, smaller, piercings glinting on her face. Between them, the yellow rope judders with movement, pulling taut and then slackening again. The tall one never takes her eyes off the other. She moves her feet up, and the things she carries on her harness chime and click together. I love their strange music. Take in. Safe. I love that one best of all. Safe. A word that locks itself shut. I like the way the shorter woman murmurs it first, as if she’s talking to herself, then shouts it down to her partner. How Safe makes the rope go loose, the air soften, the day uncoil. Sometimes, she says it when she isn’t quite safe yet – she’s still near the edge, not yet anchored. From the ground, the other woman can’t possibly know the difference.
Him
He couldn’t stop looking at that poster of Jimi Hendrix. Legs apart, strangling the neck of the guitar. It had taken him a moment to place Jimi, like he was someone he caught the bus with every day and had just seen out of context, clutching a coffee in the Peace Gardens. He stared at him and Jimi looked out somewhere over his shoulder, at the bruise-coloured sofa with its out-of-date hippy throws and furry cushions, at the peace lily on the windowsill and the joint on the lip of the ashtray. Or perhaps Jimi was looking through the floorboards, down into the bar and the knot of regulars round the jukebox. Jimi could see through walls and walk through them. How else could he have got here, straight from heaven, leaving his small cloud to pose in a pub landlord’s flat? Perhaps it was hell and there was a shortcut. I want to go to hell, where the soundtrack’s better. Who said that?
Sandra the pub landlady was framed in the kitchenette doorway, holding two mugs of tea. It was sometime after two in the morning. She set one down in front of him, on the antique chest that doubled as a table, and sat down, holding the other. Her blonde hair was bigger than her. A mane. Watching her in the pub from his corner table, he’d always thought she looked like Stevie Nicks in the right light.
‘You all right now, love?’ Her hand on his knee. Jimi watching.
‘You ever wish you could go back in time and see him?’
‘Who?’ She picked up the joint from the ashtray and took a drag. ‘Hendrix?’
‘Yeah.’
Passing the joint to him, she exhaled. ‘Nope.’
The flat smelled stale and sickly. He wondered how his house must smell to someone who came back for the first time. There was a chest of drawers in the spare room and even now he thought he could smell Angela in it. He used to go in and open them, one by one, then sit on the edge of the single bed and breathe.
‘I played guitar once,’ he said, taking a drag. ‘In a covers band.’
She snorted. ‘You? Were it The Everly Pregnant Brothers? Something like that?’
He laughed and sang a line from ‘No Oven No Pie’. Out of tune. The smoke filled his lungs. He could feel its tendrils in the quiet places of his body. Curling round the inside of his ribs. He took another drag and he could feel it behind his eyes. Before he could exhale, she was pulling his face towards her, coaxing his lips near, wanting him to breathe into her mouth. He got so close, the room went dark. There was a brief warmth and then she was pulling away from him. Then she was leaning in again.
‘Sandra …’
He was trying to remember if they’d done this before. The way she gripped his thigh seemed familiar. He had no memory of the room. There were nights in The Byron that he hardly knew at all the next morning. Times when someone helped him leave and he went back to his house and listened to old Bowie CDs and new, nameless things he’d picked up from Fopp in a fit of optimism and sang himself senseless, or walked along Brincliffe Edge until dawn, never cold, alive and restless and almost happy. He was never afraid when he woke up and couldn’t recall anything. He never reached for the phone or cowered under the duvet, trying to put the pieces together. Why should it be frightening to forget? There were days and months he’d give anything to get rid of.
She was kind. He was fairly certain of that. She let him be the last to leave when that was what he wanted. Other nights, she wouldn’t serve him when the mood was on him and he kept asking for whisky. It was comforting to touch someone after all these years. That was enough.
She had an old record player on the sideboard, the kind that hadn’t been used in too long, not one of the new ones everyone was going mad for these days, and she got up and took an LP from the box, took the record from the sleeve and placed it under the needle. She had a neat way of doing things. Capable. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ filled the room. She sat down next to him and smiled, and he stretched as if he was yawning, then settled an arm around her shoulders, like a kid in the cinema.
‘My ex-hubby hated this version,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He always thought the Dylan one was better. I don’t reckon much to him, not really.’ She had a smoker’s laugh. ‘Dylan, I mean. Not my ex.’
The joint was going out and she re-lit it.
‘I remember him trying to get Glastonbury tickets, years ago. He wouldn’t leave the flat until it was done. He was just sitting there in that armchair, kind of rocking backwards and forwards with the phone under his chin. I was trying to make a sandwich or something and the sound of the knife on the chopping board was doing his head in. I was slicing a cucumber. He kept saying to me Do you have to be that loud, Sand? and I just laughed. And I must have kept on or something, because the next thing I know he’s pinned me against the oven and he’s got the knife up close against my cheek and he’s holding the back of my head, winding my hair with his hands, and I remember I could see the blade of the knife was orange at the end, glistening, because I’d just started cutting one of those peppers. The yellowy ones, you know?’ She lifted the joint. ‘Have you got kids?’
‘One.’
She nodded, holding the smoke in her mouth for a moment and letting it go.
‘I like that about a person. You know, like my ex. You can live with them for twenty years and you know what they like doing, know what they sound like in the house and what they think about things. But there’s always summat, isn’t there?’
She passed the joint to him again and he stared at her like a complete stranger. But it wasn’t her he was looking at. It was his own face in the glass of the cheap door, the one that looked as if it had been kicked in and replaced.
When he saw footage of Hillsborough in the newspapers, he stared at it as if it was the first time he’d ever seen the place in his life.
‘You can never be sure of a man, that’s what I think. Like them lot downstairs,’ she nudged the floor with the black heel of her boot, ‘when they’re tanked up … Paul glassed one of the lads from the bakery last week.’
He smoked greedily, letting his chest expand as far as it would go. She was talking about the bouncers and why most of them were teeto
tal, how some of them arrived and worked for a while and left, and you never knew what went off. A doorman from Hungary who never told her his name, a rectangular man with shoulders like bollards who she once watched in the car park, kissing another man, one of the regulars. She talked and he stared past her at the threadbare armchair, where he could see her ex-husband, holding the phone between both his hands, legs apart, swaying slowly, staring at the carpet, the anger boiling inside him. And he took his arm from around her shoulders and folded it across himself instead.
He must have fallen asleep like that, because when he woke up he was on the boxy sofa with a blanket tucked up under his chin and another mug of tea in front of him on the antique chest. He took a sip. It was cold. He could hear Sandra breathing somewhere in the next room. Her boots stood empty by the doorway. He had hoped this would be comforting, sleeping in the same house as someone again, but it was not.
* * *
He passed weeks without noticing where the days started and ended. He went to work, driving across the moors too fast, but taking the bends easily. He’d pull up in the car park without remembering how he’d got there. He had no recollection of traffic lights or junctions and wondered if he’d stopped for them at all. At work he spoke to people, or said nothing unless he was asked. On his days off, or when he finished early, he sat cramped in his corner of the library, reading until the place behind his eyes ached.
Sometimes he looked up and the huge municipal clock was showing a significant time. As if he knew when to pause. It was often 3.15 when he raised his head from the screen. 3.15. To some people, it meant the end of school or the mid-afternoon tea break, or the time when traffic started to clog the bottom of Ecclesall Road, down past the Botanical Gardens. To others, it would always be cut-off time. The end. The point after which no evidence would be considered. The second hand seemed to hover over the hour forever, and he wondered if it was a trick, or if the clock was stuck, if it was going backwards.
