by M. T Hill
Shep edges out from the platform until only his toes are left. He opens the biter’s mouth and takes up his starting position. He swallows and leans back, legs like a bipod, lines good and taut. Kapper feeds out rope until Shep stands fully horizontal off the platform lip. The sun on his bare arms is close to unbearable.
‘Holding,’ Shep says. ‘Guy cable’s two metres down.’ And he commits one sole to the beams that support the platform, heart raging. Past his excess rope and dangling gear, the tower’s first hundred metres taper gracefully into the base pad. The merging blue-gold horizon out to sea. Eyes up, and he almost can’t stand the beauty of it: a shimmering curve rolling up, up, up for another nine hundred metres into the heavens, his angle giving it the appearance of a solid blade. The rush is acute.
He thinks of altitude sickness. He thinks of slipping, falling. He thinks of jumping deliberately, like on the motorway when you realise how easy it would be to gently rotate the wheel towards the central barrier to meet the oncoming traffic. Seventy miles an hour to zero – just like that. He could shrug off his lines and go for it, right then and there. What does falling that far feel like? If you jumped from the scaffold’s very top, it’d take about fifteen seconds to hit the base pad, or the ocean, or the island’s sheer edges. The effect would be much the same. Those unlucky enough to be in earshot would talk about the sound you make breaking for years to come. But after the sudden lurch, the strange heaviness in your lungs, wouldn’t it be blissful?
‘Are you on, or what?’ Kapper says.
Shep nods to himself. ‘Solid.’ With his legs wrapped around a beam at the knees, Shep arches back and applies the biter’s mouth to the guy-line. The biter chews through the protective grease and into the metal. He asks Kapper to check the jaw pressure.
‘All gravy,’ Kapper shouts. ‘Oh – what weight are you again? Haven’t factored.’
To emphasise the point, Kapper gives both fall arrests a playful tug. Shep’s guts drop. He can hear Kapper laughing on the platform.
‘Twat,’ Shep whispers. He takes a breath and shuts his eyes and starts to shimmy down the first metre of cable. It’s a complex slippery braid about as thick as his leg, and he relies on the biter to chew and release as he goes. He has three beacons to space at five metres apart, out to fifteen metres. He thinks of Gunny as he slots in his first beacon at the five-metre mark, wincing as the connection is made, grateful for the cable’s rigidity. The ten-metre install is harder – not least because Kapper has a better view of what might kill him, and the wind is gusting. As he edges down to the fifteen-metre mark, the sweat is relentless, and the cable’s slickness makes his hands ache from gripping. What he’d do for some chalk. For a cold rain to break overhead as it always seems to when you’re out on gritstone.
‘Keep shifting,’ Kapper shouts from the platform. This far away from the beta, Shep can see his partner. Kapper’s stare is laser-precise, a disdainful look of concentration. He’s hardly holding the belay, but his stance gives Shep confidence.
Shep secures the last beacon. Taps it triumphantly.
‘Done?’ Kapper shouts.
‘Yeah,’ Shep shouts back. ‘We’re hanging tough.’
Kapper nods, seemingly satisfied. ‘Nice one,’ he says, like he means it.
Shep starts back up the cable towards the platform. Metre by metre, bite by bite, more cautious now the task is done and the adrenaline has waned. At around twelve metres out he pauses to wipe his brow on his sleeve. A smear of sunblock, cable grease and sweat.
‘All right?’ Kapper asks.
‘Yeah?’
‘Billy?’
Shep’s face tightens. He’s hot and his ears are ringing again. Forearms cramping slightly. He takes a sip from his hydration tube, then starts the routine again.
‘Billy,’ Kapper says. A distance between them now. Shep notices Kapper has taken one or two steps forward, and that the anchor lines securing Kapper to the platform are straining. Kapper’s face is also different. His lips are moving but Shep can’t tell what’s coming out.
‘Can’t hear you,’ Shep says. And his own voice is muffled, too. Like being underwater. He tries to swallow, but his throat has closed.
Ten metres out. Kapper is past confused – he looks frightened. Shep edges up the wire towards him, unclasping and clasping the biter. His lips are burning. The metal too hot in the sun. He notices the way Kapper’s boots are protruding from the platform edge. How, for some reason, Kapper is leaning back towards the access shaft like he’s being pulled over and trying to stop himself.
‘What are you doing?’ Shep calls.
Kapper continues to ruminate. Opening and closing his mouth, eyes blank and wide. For a moment, Shep swears he sees a hornet flit across the platform and coil a figure of eight between Kapper’s legs.
‘Whatever you’re doing, you need to fucking stop,’ Shep tells Kapper. ‘You need to pack it in.’
But Kapper’s boots are casting longer shadows off the platform and down the supports, and he’s unspooling the main protection to give Shep more slack.
Shep stops again. Arms weak. Nausea and petrol. The beta scaffold glowing again. He has the biter’s mouth up by his face, but doesn’t remember taking it off the cable. The sky is so blue. The hornet reappears by Shep’s face. He swats at it, and then he weighs nothing. He cries out. The guy-line is suddenly a long way above him.
* * *
The fall ends before he knows it’s started. Shockload, violent and disorientating. A shattering crack as the main safety line runs to full extension, where at its limit Shep pitches right over, sky-then-ocean, whiplash-quick, and hears the rope snap back on itself, a second crack deep inside his head. He spots a tool – that’s my Stillson! – pinwheeling away from his belt, flashing silver before it’s impossible to tell it apart from the dazzling ocean surface. There’s a groan, either Velcro tearing or his throat, and all the alarms are going off on his harness. In that bonded bubble of time, Shep notices the sleeves of his overalls have ridden up. He looks at his wrists and thinks there’s more blood in them than there ought to be, that his veins are much darker than they ought to be, and he vaguely understands that he’s dangling off the scaffold with his ear yanked right into his shoulder, clamped against it.
The answer comes from without:
– the safety line’s round your neck –
Next thing, the arrest line tightens. He’s rising, vision clotted purple, a sweet smell and a taste he knows. A muffled voice: ‘Billy! Billy! Shep, you fucking cabbage! Look at me!’
‘It’s all right,’ Shep says drowsily.
Someone grips his leg. An arm there, knotty with muscle, veins like shoelaces. At the end of that arm is a shoulder half-out of its socket, a straining neck and frothing mouth.
Why’s Kapper out on the guy-line?
But he is. Kapper is flat along the wire, feet down past Shep’s head. His anchor lines are all stretching the wrong way, and his fancy belay device is smouldering at his waist.
‘Brake on,’ Kapper tells him, nodding urgently at the biter. ‘Brake on, son. Use the biter. Now.’
Shep reaches up with the biter, mercifully still attached to his wrist. He depresses the trigger, watches the teeth chew in.
Kapper’s voice is clear at last. ‘You’re okay,’ he’s saying. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ The jack has a hand jammed between Shep’s throat and the rope, while Shep is suspended in thin air, the friction wet and stinging, and it’s such a long way to fall. ‘Can you move your head?’ Kapper asks. Shep can, and he does, and the rope drops away and his head lolls back. Complex pain explodes in his neck.
‘When I say,’ Kapper says, ‘you grip my harness and brake off. Your protection’s shagged but you’re quickdrawed on to me – look.’
Shep spots the linked carabiner, umbilical. He still doesn’t understand it entirely – this says Shep’s main safety line is no longer running through his partner’s belay device. That only the biter is protecting him from t
he drop.
‘Go,’ Kapper says.
Shep releases the biter and grips Kapper’s harness at the shoulder. Kapper slips an inch, another inch, then holds fast, and there’s a gruesome whine as Kapper presses the switch to retract the platform’s anchor lines. After a clunk, a juddering hesitation, both men accelerate up towards the platform. They’re smashed against the edge and dragged across the floor to the access hatch. There they roll apart and lie coughing and moaning.
Kapper starts laughing first.
‘Fuck me. You trying to die on me?’
‘There was a hornet,’ Shep says, gasping.
Kapper slumps against the railings and clips on with the last of his energy. Extending his legs in front so his toecaps touch and he’s half-sitting like some petulant child. ‘You were tugging the main line,’ Kapper tells Shep, ‘like you wanted to come back faster – it was pulling me off the platform. There aren’t any frigging hornets up here.’
Only that isn’t Shep’s version of it at all. There was a hornet, a taste, and he was gone. ‘I thought it was you,’ Shep says. He sleeves away the sweat. ‘You were slacking out—’
‘Yeah, you prick,’ Kapper says, ‘if I didn’t, you’d have taken us both down.’
Shep nods. ‘Sorry, man.’
Kapper shakes his head. ‘Don’t apologise. Save it for the paperwork. But that weird shit you were babbling out there, you need to keep that to yourself.’
Shep can’t reply. What did he say? His head is full. He can’t bear the absent spaces. The idea of a lapse.
Kapper starts repacking his gear, shaking his head, as though a minute ago they weren’t staring down a long drop. ‘At least you went pretty fast with the beacons,’ Kapper adds. ‘I dunno. Maybe it was just a bad rush. Helmet too tight. I’ll need a new belay before the next batch, so you might as well get your head checked. Of all the things… Christ almighty. That was a fucking shit-show.’
Shep doesn’t know what else to say. He inspects his mechanical biter, the fibres snagged in its teeth. An image of Gunny’s burst hand on Clemens.
He catches Kapper’s eye.
‘What?’ the jack asks. ‘You’ve not popped another fucking boner, have you?’
The Journalist
A cold bedroom and a scratchy blanket. Then a smell of the sea and, fainter, condom latex. To Freya’s right is a bright square of a window, morning light warm on her arm. She rolls to one side. The man is snoring softly, chin angled away from her. A funny whorl of stubble at the hinge of his jaw.
Freya is a little hung over, and the man will be too. Perhaps he doesn’t snore when he goes to bed sober, or alone. She picks the sleep from her eyes and watches the bedroom clock roll on.
Reykjavik has surprised Freya. The city is flatter than she expected, yet even under grey skies it avoids drabness through playful colour – building roofs and iron sidings are brightly painted, garlanded with scrappy bunting. It’s also small, very walkable, and sedate. Even with days being so short at this time of year, the locals don’t rush at all. It’d rained non-stop the evening before. It was so heavy at times that the man she met fell about laughing as she struggled to keep her hair from curling.
‘I wanted to see the Northern Lights,’ she’d said.
‘Too wide,’ he’d replied, meaning the cloud. ‘And it’s not cold enough, even if we go somewhere empty.’
It was chilly enough, though. November in the north of England wasn’t a bad analogue for Iceland in autumn, which made Freya think of her parents’ bungalow and the colour it turned on a wet morning, and knew she’d packed the right clothes. Her mother’s old ski jacket kept out the wind and the damp. Her brogues kept her toes dry.
‘Take me to see some music,’ she’d slurred to the man after the third or fourth drink. He was probably ten years older. She’d nodded too enthusiastically when he said he patrolled the coast for illegal trawlers. His eyes were sharp, and his lips were slightly chapped, which seemed enough to prove it. When he first went to kiss her, he licked them first.
‘The smell is like bad eggs,’ he’d said over Freya’s shoulder in the late afternoon. That had been his first line to Freya, who was sitting in a tiny cafe browsing for things to do locally – thermal spas, city tours, ice bars, interesting food. Anything to distract herself from what she planned to do the next morning.
‘The spas smell of egg,’ he explained.
‘Really?’ she’d said back, playing ignorant.
‘You are a Londoner, are you?’ The man leaned on her chair in a way that would’ve annoyed her if he wasn’t grinning. She’d immediately liked the scruffiness of his hair: a same-length fuzz that might have grown out from a number one all over.
She shook her head.
‘Then where?’ he’d said. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Near Sheffield and Manchester.’
The man had shrugged. ‘I think they have nice mountains near Sheffield and Manchester.’
‘Hills. They’re just hills.’
‘You will have to explain.’
A seeking half-smile. ‘Okay,’ she’d said. ‘But it’ll cost you a beer.’
‘Of course.’ And he’d half-winked in kind.
Their sex had been slightly disconnected, more of a secondary act to the way they kissed. Salted caramel, indefinable heat, wine.
* * *
After breakfast with the man, polite and nonchalant, as if they hadn’t met by chance and allowed their lives to helix briefly, Freya says goodbye to him with a peck on the cheek. She sees herself out of his flat, wondering if being here was made all the more inevitable by the mystique of a new city, a new face. But last night wasn’t only about distraction – it was procrastination. And now, this morning, the task is at hand.
It’s drizzly outside, the clouds a heavy alloy. Freya diverts herself past the Hallgrímskirkja, a Lego rocket ship of a building tipped with a dainty crucifix. She stands in the rain and takes some pictures and posts the best to her stream. Proof this trip has really happened.
After that, she goes in search of food and a toilet. A little shelter. She finds a homely cafe not far from the Hallgrímskirkja and eats a pastry in a window seat.
Hi, I’m Freya. I knew Stephen. Could we chat?
She doesn’t even know if Alba will be in. What if she’s at work? What if she’s already left the address Stephen’s father gave her?
Gulls are calling. Freya puts down the pastry. She can’t swallow her mouthful.
* * *
Alba’s apartment occupies a nondescript block around six storeys tall. The building’s modular fascia is coming away from its battens, and underneath, in the shadows, Freya makes out the old walls, stained and furry where moss grows in the mortar.
In the building’s foyer – there’s no lock on the front door – Freya loiters until a resident collecting his post goes outside. She checks the communal post boxes. The labels are filled with handwritten characters and names. Alba’s sits in the fourth row: A y O.
Freya takes the lift to the fourth floor and walks into a windowless corridor that smells of wet mud. She stops outside what must be Alba’s apartment, straightens her jacket, clears her throat, and forces a yawn to prepare her mouth. Then, shoulders back, she knocks.
Alba opens the door looking taller and narrower than Freya anticipated. The space between the two women shifts like a weather front. Alba’s expression is impassive, her hair gathered into a half-hearted topknot. Dark eyes, naked lashes. Wisps of fly-away hair. She’s wearing an oversized woolly jumper and clasps her baby to a wet towel on her left shoulder. The baby is naked and making little snuffling noises. Beyond Alba is a messy room strewn with small clothes and blankets. A sleep monitor hisses gently.
Directly facing the door is a framed picture of Stephen.
‘Hi,’ Alba says.
‘Hello,’ Freya replies, surprised to notice her breath condensing on the second syllable. ‘Alba?’
Alba considers Freya’s clothes and nods. �
��From the police?’
‘No,’ Freya says. ‘Not with the police. Is now a good time?’
‘He has fed. If you don’t mind, I must wind him…’
‘Of course.’ Freya waves her on. ‘And then do you think we could chat? I’m okay to wait out here while you sort him.’
‘Chat?’ Alba says. She pats and rubs her baby’s back. After a few seconds he burps wetly, and Alba strokes his cheek as if to congratulate him. ‘About what?’
‘England.’
Alba glances behind her. Back to Freya. She bobs gently. ‘England.’
‘About… yeah.’
‘What about it?’
‘Stephen,’ Freya says.
If Alba reacts, she hides it well.
‘Who?’
Now Freya weighs the situation. ‘Stephen Parsons,’ she says. And her next words come even more slowly. ‘Your partner.’
Alba pulls her son into her chest and holds him there beneath the towel. The baby relaxes. Alba draws a long breath. ‘Okay.’
Freya crosses into Alba’s apartment, careful not to tread on the blankets and muslin squares strewn across the carpet. It’s desperately cold.
‘Please take a seat,’ Alba says.
Freya swallows her guilt and sits down in the stream of an air-conditioner. ‘Thank you,’ she says, hugging herself.
Alba settles on the couch opposite, still unperturbed. She holds her son against her belly. ‘How did you find us?’
‘Stephen’s father,’ Freya says quickly.
Alba gives a little backwards nod. ‘And you are Freya. You searched for me online.’
Freya doesn’t break eye contact. ‘Yes.’
Alba looks at the baby, unbothered by the chill, and says, ‘Do you hear that, little man?’ She swaps him to her right shoulder, allowing Freya to catch his face in profile, milk-drunk and half-asleep. In person it’s hard to say who Oriol better resembles – one of those babies who takes features from both parents, and looks different in every picture.
