by Helen Mort
‘I keep thinking it’s one of his jokes. I keep thinking I’ll be out on Stanage tomorrow and he’ll stick his head out of Robin Hood’s Cave.’
‘Did the boy stay around?’
‘He went back to Kinlochleven. Leigh, do you believe in the afterlife?’
She thought about it. ‘I believe in being haunted. Don’t know if that’s quite the same.’
‘It’d be nice if the old bastard could come back and explain himself.’ He leaned back on Leigh’s rucksack and almost toppled into the empty fireplace. ‘You know, he got me through a difficult time in my life. We climbed together for ten years. And I knew fuck all about him. Just a few stories. Never even knew where he was from.’
Leigh drew her lips into a thin smile. Who did that remind her of?
The cat came in through the flap and announced itself with a thin, pathetic cry.
‘Pete, were you really in the police?’
He didn’t look at her.
‘You been talking to Dave? At the party?’
She nodded. ‘I never really had you down for that. Was it for long?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you leave?’
His harsh laugh turned into a cough. He took a long sip of whisky.
‘Hillsborough. One of my first jobs was Hillsborough. I was a lad, really. Naive.’
He looked as if he was about to go on, his mouth stayed open slightly, but he didn’t say anything more. She wondered how many times his silences were down to that. Times she thought he was thinking about his empty house, the daughter he mentioned, never saying her name, the one he didn’t speak to. Times she thought he was just lonely or hungover or contrary. Maybe he’d been thinking of Leppings Lane, whatever happened to him there. She couldn’t even picture it. Hillsborough to her was something from TV, from the newspapers; her parents putting down their cutlery at the dinner table when the news broke. The 96. Justice for the 96. She remembered the numbers. The measured voices on the radio and telly. She couldn’t think of Pete in the middle of it, Pete in a uniform, Pete not knowing where to turn.
Leigh could hear the woman next door vacuuming. It was a bit late for that. She was always cleaning, trying to put her house in order.
‘Are you cold, Pete?’ She was ashamed of asking him about the police now.
‘Save your heating bill,’ he said. ‘Have some Famous Wren or whatever the fuck it is.’
‘Sorry it’s so nippy. I’ve been away a bit.’
‘Where?’
‘Here and there.’
‘This, that and the other?’
‘Something like that. Good health.’
Their mugs collided. Pete leaned across the table. Whatever had gripped him seemed to have passed.
‘Did you hear about the accident?’
Leigh didn’t freeze, but she stalled slightly, mug just above the table.
‘Which one?’
‘Caron Rawlinson. The pretty lass that comes in the shop. Broke her pelvis in Ladybower Quarry.’ He crossed his legs as if in sympathy. ‘Why anyone would want to climb there is beyond me. They reckon she made a right mess of herself.’
‘I know.’ Leigh said, pouring more whisky into her glass. ‘I was there.’
‘What?’
‘I was holding her ropes when she fell.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Leigh.’ Pete buried his head in his hands.
Leigh nodded. She felt as if her eyes were very wide, but she couldn’t be sure.
‘She’s a fucking maniac.’ Pete was on his feet now.
‘I thought you said she was special, a great climber.’
‘She’s bad news.’
‘Stretcher was bad news.’
‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’ He slumped down on the sofa next to her. His eyes were slightly bloodshot and his forehead was crumpled, dented with anger. He’d never really raised his voice to her before, not in all the years they’d worked together. She’d never seen real passion in him, just disappointment or a flicker of fear as he climbed. For a moment, she imagined him with a baton in his hand, wrestling someone down, holding a man still, shouting his rights. Imagined him pushing his way through a crowd, fighting to survive.
They both stared at the broken fireplace.
At length, Pete spoke. ‘How did she fall?’
‘Loose rock. It just broke off in her hands.’
‘Ladybower’s notorious. What were you doing there anyway?’
Leigh hesitated. She felt as if she owed Caron less and less. ‘She was in a bad mood. She wanted to climb Black Car Burning and it didn’t work out.’
‘Are you shitting me?’
‘She’ll do it, Pete. One day. She’s really strong.’
‘I didn’t think that were serious.’
‘I’ve never met anyone like her.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Pete got up and walked over to the window, away from her. Then he sat down heavily again. ‘Seems to me you keep meeting people like her all the time.’
‘You what?’
‘Unavailable. Not interested. Out of reach.’
Leigh shifted her body further into the sofa. The cat leapt up and mauled her leg for a while, then shuffled in between her and Pete and lifted its back leg up, started grooming its arse.
‘I thought he was all right, by the way. Your fella.’
‘Tom?’
‘Good looking. Good hair.’
‘He’s not my fella.’
‘He loves you, though.’
The thought struck her that the first time Tom ever came to her house she’d sat exactly where she was sitting now, and Tom had sat where Pete was and they’d talked awkwardly for hours, a bottle of whisky between them, better than the one that perched on the table now. It was the long night after a long evening in the pub. Leigh remembered her brief incredulity that he was here, in her cottage, this man she’d watched on stage only a few hours earlier, talking about what the Peak District used to be like, the things people used to die of, saying every place name with an alarming tenderness, so that she seemed to hear all these familiar words for the first time. She’d learned that the Goyt Valley coined the word goyter, from the large growths people used to sprout on their necks there from vitamin deficiency. She’d learned how many people died in Eyam during the Plague, and shivered despite herself at the tale of the woman who buried her whole family in one week. She’d stayed until the end, even though she was only there as a favour to a mate at the university, a skinny goth called Melissa who worked in admin and had organised the talks. She watched how the speaker kept his hands folded in front of him as he talked, as if he didn’t trust them. She noticed the slight judder in his left leg, even though his voice was level and warm. And afterwards she found herself next to him at the bar, asking a question about Bradwell she didn’t care about the answer to, then finding that she did care as he talked, her map of Derbyshire suddenly fraying at the edges.
When he sat on her sofa that first night, Tom looked like a captured, exotic bird. His blazer was too smart for the cat hair and charity shop furniture in Leigh’s living room. But he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and took his shoes off and leaned back into it as if he’d always sat there, and he topped up her whisky glass and asked her so many questions about climbing she started to remember why she loved it, why rocks were strange and fascinating. He was obsessed by the terminology she used. Fist jamming? Sounds filthy. Nobody had ever asked her why she climbed before. And she got self-conscious from talking and kept putting her hand to the back of her neck, until he put his hand over the top of hers and placed it in his lap and said You seem nervous and she nodded and he moved her hand higher and moaned softly and started loosening his belt. And it wasn’t that that made her breath quicken, but the moment when her hand slipped under his shirt and she could feel the heat of the blood under his skin, circling from his heart and it felt more private, more intimate than anything she’d done before.
Even in the morning, when he held her body
crooked into his and stroked her hair as if they’d been doing this for years and told her about his girlfriend, he had a way of speaking that made everything seem natural, inevitable. He said his partner’s name the way he said the names of all the places in Derbyshire, making it seem round and three-dimensional. He even said Leigh’s name like that, eventually. He was good with words. He never lied and said This won’t happen again. He kissed her on the forehead when he left. His blazer was still slung over the sofa. She tried it on and hugged it around her.
‘Leigh?’ said Pete. He was tapping on the side of her head with his fist. ‘Anyone home?’
‘Sorry.’
‘What do you say to it, then?’
‘To what?’
‘Brid. Tomorrow morning. Get away for a bit.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Change of scene. No rocks. Do us both good.’
‘Can’t hurt.’
She put her whisky mug down on the table. When she straightened up, Pete was pointing a camera in her face. She flinched, despite herself.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Photos. It’s my new thing. I should have started sooner. Do you know, I don’t have a single photo of Stretch. Not one.’
The camera clicked. Leigh shivered, involuntarily.
‘I hope you’re not anticipating my death.’
Bamford Edge
The best part of my face is the short shape of Wrinkled Wall, a perpetual frown. Elephant skin, shallow grooves and indents, ruched and pleated, the weather folded in. In places, the gritstone is spotted, starred with old blood. Rock that has lived, beyond imagination. I’m a maze of levels, high and low spots. On the slant of Bamford Rib a young woman has frozen under the final moves; her friend is throwing a loop of rope down to her. She swears and sweats. There’s a place where the edge juts out towards Ladybower; walkers reach the end and stand there, looking out, poised, as if they’re walking the plank, ready to topple down into Derbyshire. Today, there’s a man with his dog, the animal running too close to the edge, then veering back, careering into his legs, her mouth open, panting, but the man hardly noticing her. Below where he stands there are routes named by men like him, named for wives and girlfriends, softness in the syllables. Angela’s Ashes. Lovely June. A fistful of heather moving in the wind.
Pete
The first time it happened, Pete was on Wrinkled Wall at Bamford, traversing left across the creased rock. He was about to place a small cam. He looked behind him and realised his leg was shaking uncontrollably. Not just a slight tremor, the kind of judder that could have you off in a moment if you didn’t get it under control. He glanced down. Stretcher was holding the rope and, as usual, had his eyes fixed somewhere across the Hope Valley.
It was his breathing that went next. He felt as if his lungs were filling up with something solid, something hard. It crept up his chest and then started to line his throat. He felt like a jug, a jug held under a tap with the water rising to the brim.
It seemed to go on forever. But he didn’t fall. He didn’t move from his stance at all, even though his body was quivering. He was there for so long without letting go that he started to wonder if he was part of the rock itself. A stone giant. When he finally moved, he wasn’t aware of it. It was as if he was in one place for a year, and then it took him a second to get to the top. Stretcher didn’t notice a thing.
The doctor asked him if he was sleeping OK. She offered him anti-depressants, another course of bereavement counselling. It was only a year since Angela had died, after all. And not much longer since the day of the match, the aftermath, his resignation. Even when you think you’re over the worst, the doctor said, these things can creep up on you. It was natural, she said, that he would get these feelings. Every time he climbed, his body was imagining his wife’s accident. Imagining the stadium at Leppings Lane, too. The stands. She recommended some time away from the crag. She asked him if he had any hobbies. Asked if he’d thought about meditation.
‘That’s my hobby,’ he said. ‘Rocks.’
The doctor looked down at her file.
Pete refused the drugs, packed the nipper off to stay with his sister for the summer holidays and went to Greece with Stretch. They climbed from dawn until the midday sun melted them. Long routes. Multi-pitch routes. Scratchy rock that tore the skin off your knees and made your hands red and made you sweat. Big, jagged holds called chickenheads and long, slender tufas. And every day Pete got the same feeling, halfway off the ground. Frozen solid. No way up or down.
If Stretch noticed, he was too polite or too afraid to say anything. They finished every night drinking grappa and brandy in a bar on the main drag, flanked by huge palm trees. Stretch thought the barmaid had the hots for him, he kept asking her questions she didn’t understand. One night he got her to reel off the name of every drink they sold behind the bar, just to keep her standing by their table in her tight white blouse and pencil skirt. The night before they were due to fly back, they stayed out until 5 a.m. They’d been necking red wine, because Pete thought Greek wine didn’t give you hangovers – something about the tannins – and Stretch went to put his glass down and missed the edge of the table and it shattered to pieces on the floor. They got kicked out after that and walked the wrong way down the beach for ages, trying to get back to their grubby apartment, the slim moon winking at them overhead.
Out of the blue, Stretch had turned to him and said Do you ever think about it, mate? And he said What?, even though he knew full well what Stretch was on about, and Stretch spelled it out for him. And he said Yes. And he remembered, there on the beach, he remembered when he’d had that frozen solid feeling before. He was at Gate C, the turnstiles, by the Leppings Lane terrace and everyone was jostling around him. And they’d just been given the order to open the gates, but he didn’t want to move; he just wanted to stand there as if he was a rock in a river and let everyone go around him, go around and past him and keep going as if there was somewhere they could go. Ten to one in the afternoon. He’d looked at his watch. And then there were more and more fans from every direction. And there was nowhere that any of them could go. As he remembered it, there on the beach, he had this feeling that him and Stretch were standing in the water, up to their knees, even though the tide was metres away. And he let himself go forwards, into the sea, and found himself crouched down on the shingle with wet sand in his hands and tears wetting his face.
Pete told Leigh this as they stood on the front at Bridlington, not looking at each other, the wind carrying his words away from her. Safi was tear-arsing it up and down the beach, trying to herd the small waves. Her tongue lolled from the side of her mouth, astonishingly pink.
‘I love Brid,’ he said. ‘Came here on honeymoon.’
Leigh was remembering how much she hated the seaside. The sound of the gulls that seemed to tear straight through her. The long afternoons. The smell of vinegar. The kids letting go of balloons and crying for dropped ice creams. When she was a kid, before her parents split up, her mum used to take her to Skeggy, while her dad was in Scotland, walking. She would cry the day before he left and try to hide herself in his rucksack. Skeggy was all disappointing helter-skelters and candyfloss her mum wouldn’t let her eat.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Pete. ‘I’m sorry for telling you all that.’
Leigh put her arm round his shoulder and didn’t say anything. She gave him a squeeze. Then she felt embarrassed and let her arm fall limp to her side.
‘Was your wife a climber, then?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Outdoor instructor. Before it was trendy. She knew Stanage like the back of her hand.’
‘How did she die?’ The bluntness of her own question surprised her.
‘Avalanche. Same as Stretch.’
Leigh’s throat was parched. A seagull screeched low over their heads and she ducked instinctively, expecting it to shit on them.
‘Angela was from Liverpool,’ he said. ‘It used to make me so fucking angry, all that shit in
the press. I was glad … I was glad she wasn’t there to see the way it carried on, all those years. What they said about the fans. It was disgusting.’
The gull settled on the railing behind them. It was unnaturally large. Close up, its beak and eye looked prehistoric.
Pete’s voice was hard. ‘You know he never apologised, don’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Duckenfield.’
Safi was racing back along the sand towards them now, her ears alert, kicking up plumes with her back legs. When she got close to them, she swerved off course. A tiny girl with blonde pigtails was building a huge sandcastle with her dad. She had a red plastic spade and a yellow bucket. Safi slowed, trotted over to them and ceremoniously pissed on the sandcastle, trampling it down. The child crumpled into tears.
‘That’s filled the moat,’ said Pete.
Safi came back eventually and flopped at her master’s feet. The three of them were statues. Leigh wondered if the sea could reach them if they stood there long enough.
One summer in Sheffield, someone had stolen a blue sign that said TO THE BEACH and planted it in the underpass, near Bramall Lane. In the weeks that followed, people brought things to leave by the sign – a bottle of suncream, a half-deflated beach ball. It was there for a month and then it was all gone. Sheffield-on-Sea.
‘Do you like water?’ she said to Pete, realising how stupid she sounded.
He paused. ‘Take it or leave it.’ Then, he added, ‘I can’t swim.’
‘Really?’
‘Can’t type, either. Not properly. There’s a lot of things I can’t do.’
‘You can climb.’
‘That’s what it’ll say on my gravestone: HE COULD CLIMB.’
They walked back to the high street, past the karaoke bar with its 2-4-1 Jägerbombs and pink lighting, and bought a bag of steaming chips from The Top Plaice and ate them on a wooden bench.
Before they left, Pete took a photo of Leigh with the beach and the sea stretching away from her, like a long road.
