by Helen Mort
‘Have you ever thought of going for it?’
Leigh smiled at her.
‘I’m not that kind of climber,’ she said.
‘Don’t listen to her,’ said Pete. ‘She could do anything if she put her mind to it.’ He hitched the rope further over his shoulder. ‘Besides, she’s full of shit.’
Leigh watched them walk down along the path together, the path that was really an outline, someone’s idea of a path, leaning into each other’s sentences and laughing and passing a water bottle between them. Alexa’s hair matched the light. She’d untied it and it ran down her back, moving when she moved. Leigh felt something she couldn’t place as she watched them get further away from her, something like the feeling on a crux, the second just before you make the move. An elevated kind of feeling. She wiped the sweat from her face with her T-shirt. It was early. There was so much daylight left.
A wide black shadow passed over her. It was as if the lights had gone out on the whole afternoon. Then it shifted and the sun came back again. She looked up and saw two paragliders arcing over Stanage. They were more like bats than birds. But they were giants. Their span was huge and sturdy. Now she was under the shadow of the second one. They moved in perfect silence through the air, describing something beyond words. Safi scampered underneath and barked and barked at them, confused by their size and slowness. Leigh squinted as their darkness left her. They were entirely quiet, utterly contained. She had never thought about flight before. Pete always called them mad bastards. Them and the cavers, seeking out the coolness underground; hidden, tight places that gave Leigh the creeps. But now, watching them planing over the rocks, nothing seemed more logical, more necessary, than the way they moved, not rising but gliding, looking across the whole valley, changing it with their passing.
Somewhere far away to her left, she heard Pete shout ‘Climbing!’
One day she would do it. One day she would stand somewhere higher than this. She would walk to the edge and trust that all she had could hold her. She would step out into the air.
Hillsborough Inquest, 2016
When the courtroom erupts it’s like the roar at a football match. People fling their arms around each other. Some of them have wet cheeks and red eyes. I’m there on shoes and skin, on sweat and held breath. I’m a trace on the clothes of everyone who ever set foot in me, ever touched me, ever said my name aloud. I’m a film on every tongue, the saliva on the roofs of their mouths. For months I’ve stared out from the faces of the families in ordered rows, the muttering police and their barristers, the photos of the 96. I’ve settled on their smiles, their flat cheeks, the sheen of their reproduced, familiar images, those faces that hardly seem like people at all any more. I seeped into the clock and looked down on the heads of the nine jurors, the six women and the three men, noticed which were nervous, which were bold. I have heard everything. I have heard the words gross negligence and cover up, the words drunk and disorderly, over and over again. I know each spoken name by heart now, the way I know my own street names and shops, even as they change, even as the signs get painted over and graffitied. And then, this morning, the great pause and the clenched knees.
Unlawful killing. A 7–2 majority vote.
Pete is near the back of the courtroom, alone, his left leg twitching like he’s operating a sewing machine. He stands, unsteadily. I get inside his jacket, then. I cling to him. I’ve known him so long. He walks out on to the courtroom steps. It’s a beautiful spring day. He takes his jacket off and he slings it over his shoulder. The shadow of a bicycle overtakes him as he walks. He checks the timetable for trains to Liverpool. Pete stops at the florist to buy a bunch of flowers – extravagant pink lilies and broad carnations. He goes to Bank Quay and he loses himself in the crowd.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Parisa Ebrahimi, Charlotte Humphery and Clara Farmer at Chatto and to my agent Peter Straus. Thanks also to Alan Buckley, Claire Carter, Ian Cartland, Hannah Copley, Heather Dawe, Jess Edwards, Niall Fink, Andy and Janet Mort, Miranda Pearson, Ben Wilkinson and Jonathan Winter and everyone in the Derbyshire Irregulars Climbing Society. I owe a debt of gratitude to Douglas Caster and the University of Leeds for a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellowship from 2014 to 16. Thanks also to Laynes Espresso, Leeds, and Cafe#9, Sheffield, where much of this novel was finished. Thank you to the production team behind the BBC2 documentary Police Under Pressure for making the footage available to me after broadcast.
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Copyright © Helen Mort 2019
Jacket design by Stephen Parker. Author photograph © Jan Bella
Helen Mort has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2019
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473548817
Extract from ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ © Julian Cope. Reproduced by kind permission of Julian Cope
Extracts taken from: Bridges LJ in Hicks v. Wright [1991] UKHL 9 (5 March 1992); Griffiths LJ in White and Others (Respondents) v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire and Others (Appellants) [1993] 3 WLR 1509 House of Lords; The Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, September 2012.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
