by M. T Hill
Freya snorts. ‘Says you.’
His brow and eyebrows soften. ‘It takes graft, obviously. Your muscles get strong fast, but it’s a while till the ligaments catch up.’ He rotates his wrist until it pops. ‘Hear that?’
Freya nods, horrified.
‘Knees are shot to shit as well. You have to learn how to climb back down, not jump. Even harder than going up. And stretch out when you can.’ He touches his shoulder. ‘Get too carried away and you’ll knacker a rotator cuff, or a hip.’
‘All a bit risky,’ Freya says.
The man looks up the wall. ‘That’s half the fun.’
‘So can I watch?’ she asks.
‘Watch what?’
‘Your next climb.’
‘Uh, if you want?’
Freya shrugs. ‘I learn better by watching.’
The man cocks his head.
‘If you don’t mind,’ she adds.
‘Might be more useful if I watch you.’
‘Nah,’ Freya says. ‘I don’t like being patronised.’
The man laughs. ‘Fair enough. But look.’ He wiggles his fingers. ‘We’ve both got four limbs.’
The man dips a hand into his chalk bag and sits down at the base of the wall, carefully rubbing his fingers. He extends his arms to full lock and expands his hands to grip two different holds, nails scraping the backboard as he adjusts for purchase. ‘And you kind of go with it,’ he says.
His movement from seated to climbing is explosive. His back bulges with the strain of it. He rocks up, down, then jumps – his toes seeming to stretch, angled into the wall, fingers splayed. From Freya’s perspective he hovers there briefly, before his feet dig into what looks like thin air above a pair of tiny sloping holds, and his fingertips secure him.
‘Crimps,’ he calls down to Freya, ‘are a bastard.’
‘Blimey,’ she says. ‘Now where?’ She can’t see his next move at all. There’s a feature with two holds a metre or so above him, but that’s it.
‘Dyno number two,’ he says, twisting a hip into the wall. From there, squatting almost, he uses the handholds to bounce over his knees, readying for another jump. Freya keeps one eye closed. Then the man is off and level with the feature. One hand landing, latched. The other flailing. He loses his grip, resigned to it. The rope screams through his gear as he falls back to the matting.
Freya squeals and hops back.
Flat on his back, the man splutters and starts to laugh.
‘And that’s… decking it.’
Freya stands over him. ‘Oh my God. Are you all right? Wasn’t your belay thing meant to stop that?’
He rolls to his belly and pushes himself up, dusting loose chalk from his chest. ‘I don’t… sorry, winded. I don’t use it. It’s only so they don’t kick me out…’ Now he’s holding out the rope for her. ‘Your turn,’ he says, coughing. ‘You can use my harness, if you want. You’d flash the green route.’
Freya shakes her head. ‘I was going to do some short routes over there.’
‘That’s not climbing,’ the man says.
‘Sorry?’
‘Bouldering. It’s not climbing.’
‘How come?’
‘Because.’
He smiles. She finds it inviting. ‘Mind another annoying question?’ she says.
‘No?’
‘Did you know Stephen?’
The man’s expression changes. ‘Come again?’
‘Stephen.’
‘Ste? Ste Parsons?’
Freya nods.
Now it’s harder to read him. One eye partially shut, like he wants to remember. In a suppressed voice, he adds, ‘You a journo, or something?’
Freya doesn’t reply.
The man sighs. ‘Seriously.’ He starts to pull the rope back through his belay device, but doesn’t tie it off. ‘You’ll not hear a bad word about him, if that’s it. He had this big cheeser on him, all the bloody time.’ Then a slight hesitation. ‘He didn’t deserve…’
‘No,’ Freya says. ‘That’s kind of why I’m looking into it.’
‘Into what?’
‘Whether he boozed a lot.’
The man holds up the autobelayer. His corrugated stomach is tensed. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Must have, given—’
‘Because I don’t think he did,’ Freya says. ‘Not normally.’
‘Oh,’ the man says again. ‘So you’re saying… what?’
‘Did you climb with him?’
‘Sometimes. I prefer it alone. Not really wired for spotting people.’ He holds up his splinted finger. ‘Don’t really trust myself. But we weren’t that close, me and Ste. Might’ve gone out as a group now and then… He’d always let on, ask me how it was going, whatever. If we were bouldering near each other…’
‘I thought bouldering wasn’t real climbing.’
‘It’s not. It’s conditioning.’
‘Okay. Were you at the funeral?’
‘I was away with work. Were you?’
This wrong-foots Freya, and she doesn’t deflect it well.
‘Not many of us here made it,’ the man continues. ‘Not even his missus, from what I heard. Only his closest mates.’
Freya nods, making a mental note. ‘And there’s a memorial day being planned for here.’
The man frowns. ‘How do—’
‘You know any of his good friends?’
He shakes his head. ‘They’re on the Sheffield side.’
‘Then what about his girlfriend? I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.’
‘Not much of a hack, are you?’
‘I’m curious.’
‘Professionally curious?’
‘No, I meant why wasn’t she there—’
‘I don’t know. She used to climb here. Stopped coming a while back.’
Freya clears her throat, trying to stay casual. ‘She must be in ribbons.’
The man shrugs. ‘I guess.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ha, that’s shameless. Can I get on?’
Freya wavers, then lets it slide. A different tack: ‘You know Ste did urbex?’
The man drops the autobelayer. ‘What?’
But Freya can tell he knows. ‘Never mind,’ she says.
Does he look relieved, now? ‘All right,’ he says, motioning to the wall. ‘I’ve got this 7B to boss. Just be careful who else you chat to in here, yeah? It can be a closed shop. Loads of rawness around Ste. I don’t mind much, but it won’t go down well, you sniffing about. We all join up somewhere.’
Freya gets that. And even if his assumption annoys her – she has some discretion – she smiles gratefully. ‘Some other Saturday?’
‘Maybe,’ he says, and pulls an awkward smile. ‘What’s your name? So I know where to kick off when you start posting your fake news.’
‘Freya,’ she says.
‘Freya what?’
‘Medlock.’
‘All right, Freya Medlock,’ the man says, sitting down to face the wall. He looks at her over the bulb of his shoulder. ‘I’m Shep. See you around.’
The Steeplejack
Shep’s too weary to notice his colleagues staring across the car park when he arrives at headquarters. It’s harder to miss the shape of Mallory Junior leaning against the yard’s chicken-wire fence. As Shep approaches, head low, the boss clears his throat, but he doesn’t greet him. Much less mentions the swelling and caked blood on Shep’s face.
‘Happy Sunday, arsehole,’ Mallory Junior says, holding the yard gate open for Shep before locking him in. ‘Crack on,’ he says. ‘We’ll chat later.’
Left there alone, Shep paces. When the yard isn’t a cell for misbehaving greens, it goes unused: a museum for the firm’s antiquated safety gear, a catalogue of the random stuff a jacking firm accretes as it updates its training regimes. One of these retired artefacts is a grubby first-aid dummy that lives on, limbless, in the bucket of a dead cherry-picker. Everyone calls it Harold, and there’s a rumour IT have installed a c
amera in Harold’s mouth.
Out of custom, Shep flicks Harold the Vs. The dummy gawps back, thin-lipped and bovine. Shep feels a flicker of rain on his scalp. This isn’t the first time they’ve met.
Before he gives in to labouring, Shep sits on a pallet out of Harold’s sight and stretches out. The tiredness is catching up, and little wonder: a clock on the wall reads 6.30 a.m., which makes it twenty-five hours awake. Shep yawns in kind and tries to ignore the slop bucket in the corner. He staggers around unsurely for a while, retrieving a bag of toothbrushes from the shed, some wire wool and rags, foam chunks for knee padding. Under Harold’s catatonic gaze, wincing every so often at his taped finger, his sore face, Shep starts scrubbing rust from a box of fall arrest gear.
Come ten o’clock, the back door lock jangles. Mallory Junior opens it a crack.
‘Boss?’
‘Get a hot drink,’ Mallory Junior says. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes.’
Except Shep doesn’t go to the canteen. Lightheaded and hollow, he slinks to the server room, where the IT manager has his feet up and is sucking on a bulky e-cigarette.
‘Oh,’ the IT manager says, swivelling idly in his chair. He glances back to his laptop. ‘Heard you’d been a naughty boy. Who lamped you?’
‘No one,’ Shep tells him.
‘Right. So what, then?’
The room smells of peaches. A hazy pall hugs the ceiling tiles.
‘You still a first-aider?’ Shep asks.
‘Yeah, why?’
Shep dangles his injured finger over the IT manager’s shoulder. ‘I need some first aid.’
The IT manager sighs and draws on his e-cig. It crackles warmly. Another big cloud of vapour. ‘How’d you manage that?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember.’
‘No.’
The IT manager stands up. ‘Let me check what I’ve got.’
‘Cheers,’ Shep says. ‘And I wondered if I could have a blast on your laptop.’
The IT manager looks at him.
‘Your other laptop.’
‘No chance,’ the IT manager says, pulling a green box from a shelf. ‘Whatever you did last time borked the whole rig.’
Shep shakes his head. ‘You still owe me for that VR set I scored for you.’
The IT manager tuts. Pulls out a bandage roll and points to the server stack. ‘Five minutes. Or a splint. Choose one.’
Shep snatches the bandage roll and squeezes past the server cabinets. It’s hot and loud behind them. Stacked on the floor is an array of Chinese crypto-miners running at full tilt, a heavy-looking laptop as the controller.
‘Aren’t you better off doing this at home?’ Shep shouts over the racket. ‘Stay cosy through winter with this lot.’
The IT manager’s face appears in the gap between two of the cabinets. ‘Four minutes,’ he says. ‘Gobshite.’
Shep opens the laptop, unsmiling, and pulls up an encrypted search program. He navigates to a webapp that aggregates reports from every major urbex board. When it loads, the search terms tumble out.
Bunker, Whitehaven, Lake District.
Lakes, dead bird, petrol.
He scans and scans. No sign of his bunker, nor any recent visits or reports with hits in the right context. A few results mentioning waterworks and unfinished developments near Whitehaven, but not the same place. Not his place. He refines and tinkers and continues until there’s a kind of relief pushing behind his stinging eyes.
No posts match your search.
Shep closes the app and comes back round the stack, wiping the sweat from his face. The Whitehaven clerk must’ve had it wrong. The lifting of that burden is perfect.
‘Ta for that,’ Shep says. The IT manager grunts, and Shep heads back to the yard. There, kneeling on the foam, he peels the climbing tape from his finger and bandages it properly. His next job is to run the frays off a crateload of training ropes.
* * *
Mallory Junior fetches Shep at one-thirty in the afternoon. The boss seems preoccupied, and they walk in lockstep towards the canteen.
‘Tasty shiner you’ve got there,’ Mallory Junior comments. ‘Or two, let’s be honest. Who weighed you in?’
‘No one,’ Shep tells him.
‘I do know why you do it,’ Mallory Junior says.
‘Do what?’
‘Don’t play the smart-arse.’
Shep stares dead ahead.
‘My old man hired kids like you for good reason,’ Mallory Junior says. ‘So I’m asking, on a level, that you don’t pull this again. Wife’s going to kill me later for the time that woman in Whitehaven called. On top of that, you’re meant to be in Redcar this week, and now I’ve had to pull another green out of Fawley.’
Shep rubs his neck. ‘That green’ll thank me for it. And Redcar’s fine. Sea views.’
‘I’m not asking for more opinions, Billy.’
‘Then I’m sorry about your wife.’
‘I bet. And doing a runner from Clemens was worth it?’
‘The yard time? Or these shiners?’
‘The lack of bloody sleep.’
Shep shrugs.
‘It’s not a game, this. Get some grub in you now and see me after. We need to talk about what happened up that stack.’
Shep stops walking. ‘Is he going to be okay?’
‘Gunny?’
Shep looks away as he nods.
‘They saved his hand, if that’s what you mean. He’s off sick with full pay for a few months. Isn’t far off retirement anyway.’
‘It was an accident,’ Shep tells him.
Mallory Junior says nothing.
‘I feel shite about it,’ Shep adds.
‘If it’s anything,’ Mallory Junior says, ‘he thinks you’re all right. Doesn’t want to press charges. He said you were getting shit off the other lads, might’ve been distracted. I’d say you’re forgiven.’
‘That makes me feel guiltier.’
Mallory Junior snorts.
‘If you’re sacking me, I can go now.’
Mallory Junior keeps his head very still. ‘Come to my office after your scran. Like I told you. We’ve got stuff to talk about.’
And Shep watches him go. A heavy, heavy feeling.
* * *
In the canteen. Shep says hi to the chef, but the chef ignores him. A plate of chips, a slice of bread, half a round of quiche. When he’s done, he wipes the plate clean with the bread and rifles his pockets for a pen and paper. Then he starts writing, bad finger burning.
Abandoned military, Lake District, unnamed bunker e/of Whitehaven.
Burrowed a nice one this Sunday gone. Night mission so I took the scrammy for the country leg. Aim to go that way while there’s still light and take a big lens for the views. Route is national limit so a good clip into blind corners. Ditched van on the coast and biked rest. Standard tyres do the job but you’d manage with an MBT. Facility security is standard: HW and spiker. Wore thermals, torch and darts. Hopped HW nice and easy but the spiker line was nasty.
On site there’s debris all over, ruins, weeds, nothing you haven’t seen in the wild before. No burns or tags. I bagged a few parts. Here’s the main site scene [picture here?]. The parts looked like alloy, burnt. Bunker is old school, maybe Cold War, in good nick. Guessing at gardening/tool storage. Main room could hold a lot of people. Field hospital or fallout shelter? Last section I found was a corridor with mouldy boxes on the shelves. I got rumbled when—
Shep stops writing and absently sucks the salt off his fingers. It’s uncomfortable to leave out what he thinks really happened. And there’s a bigger issue: does he really want someone else to be intrigued, head up there? He scrubs the line and continues:
I poked about but there was nothing much. Wasn’t a wasted trip because I got a buzz, but I can’t recommend it.
Shep rocks back and reads his draft from the top. Not bad, but at the same time all wrong, dishonest. No point lying to himself: he doesn’t
want to expose the bunker to the wider community. And even if this instinct isn’t in the spirit of exploring, isn’t the sport of it, he knows if he isn’t careful there’ll be nothing left there to pick at. That’s a certainty – he’s seen it happen time and time again. He stands up. His breaths have shortened. Maybe that’s what the couple did, too. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t find their report. He screws up the paper and heads back to the yard with it stuffed in his pocket, digs a lighter from the stash and puts the flame to the paper, a finger to his lips. He whispers to Harold, ‘This one’s between us.’
Viewed sidelong, it’s possible to believe the dummy’s expression has changed, its lipless mouth set into a smile. When Shep looks back to the burning paper, the flames working towards his thumb, he frowns. Something new and unexpected. Beneath the final sentence – I can’t recommend it – another line has been scrawled on, as though he wrote it with his other hand. The flame draws close to his skin, and he drops what’s left. Flame becomes ash, and the ash disperses. Shep kneels and bites a thin strip of skin away from his thumb. He can’t be sure – no, he doesn’t want to be sure. Because he thinks the extra line said: our blood ladder. And he doesn’t remember writing that at all.
The Journalist
On Sunday morning Freya agrees to accompany her father to the splicers’ market at the garden centre a few villages along. Conversation in the car doesn’t move beyond clipped small talk, and while Freya smiles in all the right places, nods along, she isn’t fully there. Her back and shoulders ache from her session at Big Walls, and her stomach is unsettled. Regret she missed her chance to ask the climber – Shep – more, if she were to guess. At the very least she should’ve taken his number.
‘It’s a life, this,’ her father says. ‘Best decision we ever made moving out here, I’m telling you. Then you turned up, with all your little ways…’
Looking out on these higgledy-piggledy houses, their wonky slate roofs, to Wracklow moor looming above, slopes of heather burnt into black patchwork, Freya couldn’t disagree more. To become her parents would be to fade away.
Suddenly the dread is overwhelming. She needs a break, to get out of there.
