by M. T Hill
‘And when did it bite you?’
Shep moves the van abruptly to the inside lane and slows off. ‘My first go?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s colour.’
Shep rolls his head sideways as if to say fair enough. ‘Colour.’ He nods slowly. ‘Well… obviously we did pylons as kids. A fair few building sites in Ashop. But the first proper one was with a mate called Mo. Off his head, Mo was. Couple of years older than me. Climbed together all the time before he did his hip. One day we’re at Big Walls and Mo goes, “Do you want to go see that big radio telescope at Jodrell Bank?” Simple as that. “And I mean see.” I wasn’t listening and agreed. Next thing we’re blatting straight over there in our gear. The West Coast Mainline runs past Jodrell, so we leave the car in a workers’ lay-by to sneak in through a trackside fence. And we’re kneeling, there, right, snipping mesh with his dad’s tools, and whooomph. A train goes past full pelt. And bear in mind I’m already jumpy, so now I’ve got my head right down on the verge. My hair’s soaking and full of grass cuttings, and Mo’s pissing himself laughing. “Mecca in’t that way, chum,” he said.’
‘Did you get caught?’
‘Did we bollocks. Legged it over the field and shinned straight up the Lovell from the back.’
‘And…’
‘And what? It’s a beautiful thing. The trelliswork. But in the dark, big open face like that, it’s a monster. It groans in the wind. The steel was soaking wet. It burned your hands.’
Freya can picture the scene. School trips with neat packed lunches.
‘So, me and Mo are going up the nearest leg, and bear in mind Mo’s a sprinter build, so he’s well ahead of me. Well over two hundred feet of climbing, and halfway up we realise the control room is facing us with a couple of security bods in there. Fluky bastards, we are – how they didn’t see us, I’ll never know. Can’t tell you what that feels like, either. Next news there’s an almighty croak, and the whole thing starts to judder, and then we’re moving.’
‘Oh shit,’ Freya says.
‘What can you do? We’re bricking it. Stuck on this beast while it wakes up. Proper bad disco-leg, sweats, all the symptoms. Forearms pumpy as anything. And don’t forget this is before I was jacking, so I’m not in competition shape. When it stops, we hop off the leg and onto the dish support, and it’s still shuddering a bit, but the view makes it all worth it… It filled you with this weirdness, I dunno, like you were just meant to be there, under the dish like that. Mo must’ve felt it, too – he said if we whispered into the dish loud enough, the whole galaxy was tuned in to hear. Soppy crap like that. Two paper cups and some cosmic string. And Mo’s like a statue the whole time. Hard to imagine a lad so big with tears in his eyes. Anyway, I’m telling you all this… that’s not even the punchline. We’re standing there, gormless, and there’s this ungodly screeching sound, this mad flapping, so loud the guards come to their window to check it out. “Now bloody what?” Mo goes. And I look round slowly, expecting God-knows-what, and what is there but a massive peregrine falcon staring at us from its nest in the telescope leg. Staring us out. And I swear – I can still see that big bastard now – I’ve never laughed so much or got down anything so fast in my life. By the time the guards cottoned on, we were already on the ground, running like billy-o towards our hole in the fence. It was – I dunno. It’s the freest I’ve ever felt. And when we got back in Mo’s car, I knew. I knew.’ Shep taps his chest. ‘I’d mainlined it right into here.’
Freya rubs her face. She can’t help grinning. Shep’s come alive beside her, and his excitement is infectious. It hasn’t just reassured her – it’s reaffirmed that this is the right thing to do.
‘I thought about taking you there,’ Shep says. ‘It was Jodrell, or this abandoned sewage works I know. Get you wading a manky watercourse – see what you make of that. Or if we had time to go further, the Angel of the North. But that was shit to climb – too many laybacks, rockovers – even for me. Then I remembered a better one to start you with.’
‘In Chorley?’ Freya asks.
Shep nods. ‘In Chorley.’
‘Right,’ Freya says. ‘Well, you asked if I like surprises. I don’t.’
‘What do you like?’
‘Spoilers.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Come on.’
‘Can’t you just wait?’
Freya turns to him. ‘Tell me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because!’
Shep chuckles. ‘Okay, okay… It’s a theme park. Closed down donkey’s years ago. They’re still waiting to redevelop the land.’
‘Not that place, what was it… Camelot?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Jesus. Camelot. You’ve been before?’
‘Course. Piece of piss to get in. Too easy, actually, so the taggers’ve been at it. But it’s ace. Get up the coaster rails if you want. It’s overgrown, like one of those apocalypse films.’
‘Does it excite you?’
Shep sniggers. ‘Not massively. Dibble gave up on watching it, so it’s only edgy if you bump into other groups there. Never know who’s camping out in a place like that…’
‘If it doesn’t excite you,’ Freya says, ‘I’m not bothered. You must know somewhere better.’
‘Blackpool Tower? Suction cups for the glass? I’ve seen that done.’
‘That’s not exciting. That’s mental.’
Shep laughs, but it’s hollow. A sudden nervous edge.
‘If Jodrell was freeing,’ Freya says, ‘where else is freeing?’
Shep sniffs. His demeanour changes again. ‘You interviewing me? How’s about you talk about what you do, and let me plan our date?’
‘Date. It’s not a date. Just tell me why it’s freeing.’
‘Because you don’t think of anything else,’ Shep says. ‘Everything vanishes. All the shit in your life.’
Freya looks out the window and squeezes the chair. Falling in, losing control. And loving it.
‘Do you still get scared?’
‘Course,’ Shep says. ‘That’s what I love about it. You have to use it.’
‘Then that’s what I want. To be scared. All of it. Even if that sounds weird. All of it.’
‘That’s not weird.’
‘I don’t want it sanitised. I don’t want beginner’s stuff. I want to know what Ste—’
‘Freya—’
‘I want to be scared.’
Shep steers the van back into the middle lane and puts his foot down. He glances across at her. There’s an unsettling, intense look in his eyes, and she can’t read it – or him – at all.
As if to offset himself, Shep clears his throat. ‘That’s your first test passed, anyway,’ he says.
Freya’s stomach twinges. ‘Test?’
‘I was blagging about Chorley,’ he says. ‘It’s novice shite. I can’t tell you where we’re actually going.’
‘What?’
‘It’s too good. It’s… I want your opinion on it. Like a mini-investigation.’
And there: another twinge, lower down. A tiny electric spike. The delicate queasiness that comes when things are heightened.
She watches Shep check himself, as if he felt the same. His face in profile. His jaw muscles contracting.
Is he grinding his teeth?
‘Have I got the right gear with me?’ Freya asks, trying to diffuse it now, trying to cling on. Her throat squawks when she swallows. ‘Will I be warm enough?’
‘You’ll be right,’ he tells her.
Is this excitement? Pride? Shep’s gawkiness has evaporated. The purpose is back, and she finds him more persuasive. No, she finds him more attractive.
‘Has to go dark before we can get in there,’ Shep says. ‘You telling your editor you’re going off-piste?’
‘No,’ Freya says, tight-lipped.
‘It’s still a good while from here, is the only thing.’
Freya grips her seat
belt. Hot and uncomfortable. It’s weird to accept it, but she does anyway: the arousing unknowable. She reviews Shep in this new light – his shoulders pulled back, firm posture, slender waist – and visualises a gentle crease in the skin of his stomach. She wonders if there’d be a faint red line if she pulled up his top.
‘Let’s go there, then,’ she says.
A single bead of sweat slides from Shep’s temple. He opens his window and puts his hand in the airstream. ‘Know Scafell Pike?’ he asks. The heavy buffeting makes his voice distant. The land is beginning to ripple around them. The Lakes.
Freya tells him she doesn’t.
‘I have to start training for a big contract next week,’ he says. ‘Going away for a while – overseas project we’ve got on. And I thought, well, I wouldn’t mind seeing that big lovely bastard again before I go.’
‘The Lakes,’ Freya says. ‘Not very urban.’
‘The Lakes,’ Shep says. There’s no denial.
The Steeplejack
Shep comes off the B-road and holds the van on the mossed slopes of a wide fell. Below lies a tarn that tapers away into austere land, starkly brown. The peaks above the water are rendered flat and featureless against the burning dusk. He pictures the range under snow, pale and somehow larger, and places Vaughan’s orbital tower on the closest summit. A great lace frame, rising into the night to come.
‘We go from here?’ Freya asks him.
‘No,’ Shep says. ‘I just need a slash. Thought you’d like the view.’
‘It is pretty,’ Freya says. ‘The colours.’
It’s closer to average, compared to other views Shep knows up here, but he isn’t about to spoil it for her. It’s enough to have her with him. Enough that she’s engrossed, and to know he succeeded. To know he’s this close to returning.
‘It’s better later at night,’ he adds, ‘when the water looks like fresh tar. Or first thing in the morning, with the light coming down a certain way. Mist on the water. Sometimes the peaks look like they’ve been cut away from the earth. Like they’re hovering.’
‘You always do this stuff in unsociable hours?’
Shep shrugs. ‘You wanted a scare,’ he says. ‘There’s a public hiking trail. It’d be too busy in the day.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
Shep smiles uncertainly. ‘If you don’t mind your step.’
Freya undoes her seat belt and struggles out of her jacket. ‘I want to get cold,’ she says, ‘so it feels cosier in here.’ She gets out of the van and goes to the bonnet. She stretches, hands raised against the sunset almost piously. Shep’s stomach spasms, and he turns off the engine.
Freya sits on the bonnet as he applies the handbrake and climbs out. The fells on the other side of the lake shifting to a richer purple before the half-lost sun. She smiles pointedly at him. What changed?
‘Only be a minute,’ he says, and relieves himself behind a bush. When he comes back, Freya is lying flat out on the bonnet, swinging her legs off the side.
‘Washed your hands?’
Shep doesn’t reply.
‘I’ll pretend you did.’ She pats the bonnet. ‘Space for two.’
Shep sits down next to her, feels the thin metal give, the van sag on its suspension. ‘Do you usually stalk strangers online?’ he asks.
Freya snorts and props herself up with her elbows. ‘I’m not the one who waited outside the library like that.’
‘Nah. But you came to Big Walls in the first place.’
‘It was different.’
Shep pulls a long blade of wild grass from the ground. ‘How?’
‘You followed me in your spare time.’
‘It’s Saturday, today.’
‘It’s overtime.’
Shep chuckles. ‘You like your job, then.’
‘I enjoy the writing. I like having templates, making things fit. Sometimes it’s a puzzle.’
‘And you don’t mind leaving your morals at the door.’
Shep hopes she’ll laugh again, but she glances away.
‘No one pretends it’s noble,’ she says.
‘Not even when you cover war crimes? Corruption? Kiddy-fiddlers? Exposing that shit is noble.’
‘I’m not really qualified.’
‘So you’re happier turning over dead people’s lives? Taking a stick and poking what you find underneath?’
Freya flinches this time, as if to physically dodge the question.
‘Slippery, aren’t you?’
‘I’m paid to be slippery,’ she snaps. ‘And no, I’m not proud of everything. But that’s work. Is anybody? You have to… disengage.’
He nods. ‘So you’re only a minor scumbag.’
She tuts. ‘You don’t know much about me, remember.’
‘Why Stephen, then? What’s the deal?’
Freya pulls away from the view and rubs her hands on her thighs. ‘It wasn’t even a thing at first. Not straight away. I—’
‘Fancy him?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The guy dies, you go digging, you get a crush on him. You find me. Us lot – climbers. Because what else drew you in, if it wasn’t that bugger’s dreamy smile?’
‘The climbing interests me,’ Freya says. ‘But there was something else going on with Stephen. Weird stuff, I mean. It’s a hunch.’
‘Urbex?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Must be part of it. Since you must’ve pulled my reports as well. Were you comparing us? Was that why you came to Big Walls?’
Freya looks shocked. ‘No,’ she says, emphatic. ‘I lucked out. Talking to you was opportunistic. You were alone. You looked like you knew what you were doing.’
‘I do.’
‘Obviously.’ Freya rolls her eyes. ‘But I had no idea you were into urbex as well. I didn’t realise so many climbers were.’
‘They aren’t.’
‘Doubly lucky then, aren’t I?’
‘Pretty much,’ he says. ‘So, hang about: you didn’t find my reports?’
‘Get over yourself,’ Freya says.
‘Seriously?’
She sniggers. ‘No, Shep. This is pure fate.’
‘I don’t believe in that shite.’
‘No?’
Shep holds up his good hand. Flexes his fingers. ‘I cock it up, that’s on me.’
Freya seems to think about that. The slick road going bronze, loose stones like scattered gems. She gets off the bonnet. ‘I’m cold enough now,’ she says. ‘Can we go?’
The van heater kicks out hot dust. Shep continues to drive the van in manual. Drives it eagerly, too fast into the corners. While Freya says nothing more, he notices her holding her chin high, eyes level, as if she’s fighting to avoid travel sickness. For the first time, he thinks he can scent her nervousness.
‘There it is,’ Shep says.
‘There what is?’ Freya replies.
Shep stops the van abruptly and reverses back up the road. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’ll do it. Hold tight a sec.’
Before Freya can respond, Shep has them fording a stream and buries the van in a thicket of brambles. He notices her gripping the fabric of her seat as the van squeals deeper, cabin dark under knotted branches. When he’s satisfied, Shep applies the handbrake and removes his belt.
Freya’s speechless. A visible sheen on her face.
‘What?’ Shep says. ‘Gotta do it properly. Bit of a walk from here.’
‘Isn’t this your company van?’
He shrugs. ‘Few scratches never hurt. Can you manage?’
‘With this?’ She forces the door against the bulk outside. Three good shoves until there’s a wide enough gap for her. ‘Yeah,’ she says.
‘Chuck my rucksack, will you? And mind yourself down the side.’
‘I’m fine,’ she tells him, a little snippy. She hauls his bag onto his lap and slips out. He watches as she squashes herself up against the panelling, a hand protecting her face, her eyes tightly shut. She grows smaller in the mirror.
/>
Shep does the same on his side. At the rear doors, he picks a thorn out of his cheek and spits in the mud. Freya stands away from him, swaying gently. ‘That jacket’s too bright,’ Shep tells her. ‘I’ve got a bin bag you can wear.’
She breaks away from the view. The purpling silhouettes. ‘Seriously?’
‘’Fraid so. You’re a vision. See it as insulation.’
Shep opens the van and fishes out the roll of bin bags. He can’t be sure Freya isn’t studying him as he moves old rope and scrambler parts, his sleeping bag and camping stove. It gives him a twinge of self-consciousness, or self-reproach. Like he’s reacting to an extrasensory signal. He looks back at her. She’s biting her nails, staring blankly. She really has no idea what she’s in for. But Shep isn’t scared of that. He’s just ready.
Freya takes the bin bag and tears holes for her arms. She flashes him an expectant look.
‘Now what?’ Freya says.
‘Lots more sweating,’ Shep says. He takes out his camera, secures it around his neck, and throws the rucksack back into the van. ‘And rustling.’
‘You know, I think I’ve got some high heels in my bag as well,’ Freya says.
He ignores her and passes her a dust mask. ‘For your lady lungs.’
Freya shoves him. Their first physical contact. ‘Dickhead,’ she says. ‘Do I really need this on right now?’
Shep shakes his head. ‘Soon though.’
‘Soon,’ Freya repeats.
‘Off we trot then,’ he says. And he locks the van doors and pulls a veil of brambles across them.
For a time, they trudge single-file along a winding ridge, him concentrating, her determined. The sun is all but down, the fells in rich shadow, the clouds joining up and conspiring. ‘Scafell Pike’s somewhere over there,’ Shep points out. Bats slice past their ears, and creatures whine and yammer in the middle distance. Shep remembers his first approach to the bunker, compares it to now, his timing and all the rest of it. The beetle on the access road. The thought makes him cringe.’You see owls out here,’ he says, and takes from her expression that it reminds of her something. ‘Poke me if you clock one.’
