Papa Georgio

by Annie Murray

  ANNIE MURRAY

  PAPA GEORGIO

  A story for the 9’s to the 90’s

  Published by Annie Murray 2012

  Copyright © Annie Murray 2012

  Annie Murray has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior written consent.

  This electronic book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This electronic book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Annie Murray and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  Contents

  Preface

  The Mountain God

  Fizz and the Ship of Dreams

  Dear Charlotte…

  Bella Italia

  Fizz Again

  Salamander

  Alberto

  Purple Mountain

  Everybody

  Treasure House in the Snow

  The Times, Tuesday May 9th, 1972.

  Avalanche claims British Climbers

  Hopes that the two mountaineers missing in the Himalayas will be found alive are now receding. The two were swept away in their tent by an avalanche at first light on Sunday. There has been no sighting of them since.

  Peter Armitage, 35, the expedition leader, and Steve Langley, 29, disappeared while climbing the slopes of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, on the borders of Nepal and Sikkim. The three remaining members of the ill-fated expedition have now returned to Base Camp, but conditions on the mountain are treacherous and it seems increasingly unlikely that the two missing men could have survived.

  The Mountain God

  I.

  ‘Miss! Look what Janey’s doing!’

  I don’t know why I did it.

  One minute Miss Marshall was telling us about Hannibal and his elephants crossing the Alps in the snow and I had long, thick plaits. The next, the scissors were in my hand and I was chomping them through my hair, right up by my ear. They were lousy scissors but once you’ve started something like that, you can’t exactly stop. You just have to keep going.

  I’d cut through to the last strands of the second plait by the time Katy Harris piped up in her know-it-all voice and Miss Marshall came charging down between the desks like a deranged heifer.

  So there I was, a hunk of my mucky-blonde plait in my hand like some sort of hairy snake, my head gone all light suddenly and everyone staring at me as if I’d grown three heads. My best friend Charlotte’s mouth was open like a goldfish and even her freckles had gone pale.

  ‘Oh my…!’ she began, but Miss Marshall drowned her out ….

  ‘Jane Armitage, what on earth d’you think you’re doing?’

  I used to draw pictures of Miss Marshall sometimes with a red, triangular face topped by her frizz of ginger curls. I’d pencil in her eyebrows as two thick lines coming together furiously in the middle like a black bird flying across her face, which is just how she looked now, looming over my desk.

  ‘What on earth possessed you girl?’

  I don’t know. I stared down at my desk. Someone had carved ANDREW on it in swirly letters and inked them in. I didn’t cry: it wasn’t as if I could feel anything, not then. Something terrible had to happen, that’s all I knew, because something terrible had already happened.

  When I looked up, Miss Marshall’s face had changed. It was still a red triangle but the bird had flown away. She wasn’t frowning any more, just looking worried.

  ‘Janey, dear,’ she said in an unusual soft way. ‘Put the scissors down. I think we’d better go and see Miss Lawrence, don’t you?’

  I didn’t care much what we did and I obviously didn’t have a choice, so I traipsed along behind her to the head teacher’s office.

  My hair was all chopped clumps round my ears. I didn’t dare touch it to feel exactly what I’d done. Sitting in Miss Lawrence’s office which smelt of wood polish, I stared down at my grey uniform skirt for what seemed ages. Then Mum arrived. She took one look at me and crumpled. Tears started pouring from her eyes.

  ‘Oh Janey sweetheart, what have you done?’

  She put her arms round me and I felt sick hearing her crying again. I knew they didn’t want me to cry: teachers and mothers never do. And anyway, I knew it’d be all right in the end. Dad was still out there somewhere, battling through the snow to reach us.

  Missing. That’s all they’d said that first day.

  The telephone rang early in the morning and I heard Mum answer it in the hall. A moment later she moaned as if she had hurt herself very badly. Her voice gushed out, high like a whistling kettle, ‘I knew it… I knew this would happen!’

  I ran downstairs. Mum was in her white dressing gown, next to the table with the notepad and leaking biros, leaning over as if she’d been punched. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, her feet bare. There was pearly pink nail varnish on her toenails.

  ‘Daddy’s been caught in an avalanche. They don’t know where he is...’ She couldn’t seem to breathe properly and her eyes were stretched wide. I couldn’t take in what she was saying, but I was scared because she looked like a little girl who didn’t know what to do. At last she held out her arms. ‘Come here Janey love...’

  I loved being hugged by Mum. She was sturdy and strong, like a little pony. She’d climbed mountains too, but not really big ones like Dad. She smelt of soap, and her dressing gown was soft and fluffy, but this time I could feel her shaking.

  ‘They’ll find him,’ I kept telling her as we cuddled. ‘He’ll be all right. He knows how to deal with that old mountain.’

  Mum had a solemn talk with Miss Lawrence. I sat noticing the shape of a tortoise in the grain of the wooden floor.

  ‘I thought it might be best for her to be at school – keep to her routine,’ she wept. She liked things to be normal. I was never one of those climbers’ kids who put down ‘Everest Base Camp’ as their address. ‘But maybe I got it all wrong…’

  ‘I’m sure you’re doing everything you can for the best. This is a dreadful time…’ Miss Lawrence was patting her on the shoulder and looking watery–eyed herself which was the weirdest thing of all - these teachers being soft and emotional.

  Then Mum took me home in our bouncy, red and white old ‘Two C V.’ Mum says that the French farmers wanted a car which could carry eggs across bumpy fields without them breaking and this was the rather peculiar result.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said, as we sat in it (but without eggs). She’d stopped crying and was trying to be brave and cheery. ‘Your hair’ll look nice short love. I’ll tidy it up for you.’

  At home she wrapped a towel round my shoulders and did her best with the kitchen scissors. As she moved round my head she kept sniffing. When she’d finished she put her arms round me for a moment and kissed the top of my head. Then she gave a gigantic sigh.

  ‘Oh – all this waiting’s a killer…’ I thought she was going to cry again but she said,‘Come on, let’s try and eat something. Peggy came round earlier and left us a cake. And Lorna’ll be round later.’ Everyone was doing they’re best to help.

  We made some lovely buttery toast and snuggled up on the sofa once the kids’ programmes came on and watched Scooby-Doo and Blue Peter. We were both waiting, each minute too long and tense. My ears ached with expecting the phone to ring. And it did ring, often, and Mum leapt up to answer it, her face
stretched with hope. But it was never what we needed to hear, that they’d found Dad and that he was OK, was coming home.

  Granny rang from Yorkshire - Dad’s Mum. His father’s been dead a long time. Mum tried to calm her: no, there was no news, and no she shouldn’t come down to us, she wasn’t well and there was nothing any of us could do…. Afterwards Mum put the phone down and closed her eyes for a moment. Then her own dad, Grandpa George, phoned from down south. She told him the same.

  In the middle of Scooby-Doo it rang again.

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice went high and breathless. All of me clenched up, then unclenched when her voice went flat again.

  ‘Oh hi, Lorna.’ Her best friend. Lorna kept coming round all the time, sitting with us, cooking casseroles and egg and chips that we could hardly eat . ‘No – no news yet. I can’t stand it, this waiting. They sent Janey home – she’s cut her hair off …’ And she started crying again.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the telly as the theme tune played, ‘Scooby-Dooby Doo….’

  At night, I dreamt of snow. On my bedside table was propped my favourite picture of Dad, standing on a rocky slope, a coil of orange rope in one hand. There was snow tucked between the rocks and he was wearing his enormous climbing boots and blue trousers which brought out his bright blue eyes. His beard was bushier than ever, his face tanned and there was a smear of white cream across the bridge of his nose. He was smiling straight at me.

  I always kissed the picture before I went to sleep.

  ‘Night night, Dad. Come home soon. Safe journey, and I hope your feet aren’t too sore.’

  The night after Miss Marshall took me to Miss Lawrence’s office and she was gentle and told me to be brave, I dreamt that Dad had to dig and dig to get out from under the pile of ice and snow so he could walk all the way home. Nepal was a long way away, of course, but my father was strong. Of course he was: he was a mountaineer.

  I said I’d carry on going to school. It was better than the waiting and waiting at home. But two days later, something happened that made Mum was more furious than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘For goodness sake – why didn’t she take you out of the room while she told them?’ she ranted. ‘I mean I know you already know, love, I‘ve told you, but what a way to go on.’

  Had she told me? I hadn’t heard a word of it.

  Miss Marshall had stood in front of our class, her eyebrows like two high railway arches this time.

  ‘I have something very important to say to you.’ The way she was talking made everyone go quiet. She looked at me and my tummy did a nasty somersault. Was this about me?

  ‘Now children, you must be very kind to Janey Armitage. She has had some very sad news. Her father, as some of you know, was in the Himalayas. He has been killed in a climbing accident.’

  I sat, in a fog. The words ‘has been killed’ bounced off the walls.

  Who’s been killed? My head was in a muddle. Not Dad, who was somewhere in the mountains, amid the blue ice and spindrift, the powdery, flying snow. The mountain goddess would breathe on the snow and let him out.

  Everyone tried to be nice. They came up at break and stood round me. Someone squeezed my arm.

  ‘D’you want to come and play “it?”’

  ‘D’you want a strawberry lace? (That was Charlotte – strawberry laces were her favourite.)

  ‘Here – have my crisps.’

  But after that they didn’t know what to say and I didn’t feel like crisps or strawberry laces, or like playing, even with Charlotte.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t like me to be quiet and what with my crazy choppy hair on top of this extreme news, they didn’t know what to say. Their fathers worked in banks and offices. Charlotte stroked the end of her long ponytail as if she was glad she still had hair and looked hurt. Then she went off with Katy Harris and I sat on the steps of the boiler house, by the climbing frame, staring at my shoes.

  They didn’t understand that I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the snow, that nothing would ever feel right until I heard them.

  II.

  The mountain was a mystery and a joke.

  ‘We’re going to India,’ Dad told me, sitting on my bed one night last winter. There was an icing sugar dusting of snow on the peaks outside the window. We lived in Derbyshire where there are lots of hills to climb.

  I loved it when Dad came and talked to me in my room. Sometimes he’d sit and rub my feet between his big warm hands. When I was little he read adventure stories to me: Treasure Island and a book about Sir Edmund Hillary and his Tibetan friend Sherpa Tenzing climbing Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

  I snuggled down under my quilt. No one else at school had a continental quilt then, it wasn’t the fashion. Most people still slept under sheets and blankets and eiderdowns, but Dad bought it for me when he was climbing in Austria. Its cover was pale pink and dotted with alpine flowers and it was thick and snuggley for the winter. I always felt proud showing it to friends, especially Charlotte because she seemed to have everything, but she hadn’t got a quilt like mine, nor a cuckoo clock like the one he brought back from Switzerland. But all his climbs in the Alps were just one step towards the Himalayas.

  ‘There’ll be six of us,’ Dad said. ‘Steve and me and the team. We’re going to climb a very big mountain called Kanchenjunga.’

  ‘Kan-chen-junga…?’ There was a thick vein of ice in the name, as well as something harsh and stinging. It was a karate chop of a word.

  Dad laughed and his eyes held the blue light of glaciers.

  ‘Kan Chen Junga?’ he asked. ‘Can she? Can Janey Junga too?’

  He tickled me to make me laugh. I hated it when he went away.

  ‘Cuddle?’ He wheedled.

  ‘All right.’

  In his arms I could smell the thick wool of his blue jumper and feel his beard prickling against the side of my head.

  ‘Is Chen the name of the God?’

  Dad always said that there’s a God in every mountain.

  ‘Maybe it is – although most people call her ‘Kanche.’

  ‘So she’s a lady god?’

  My cheek was against Dad’s chest and when he spoke, I felt his Yorkshire flavoured words rumble up as if they were coming out of a cave.

  ‘I think she must be. Kanchenjunga means “five treasure houses in the snow.” There are five peaks and the Tibetans tell stories about them, as five store houses for the goddess’s treasures. One peak glows in’t morning sun and they say that’s the one that stores the gold. Another casts deep grey shadows: that one stores the silver. And the other three hold copper, and corn and sacred books. So yes, a mountain goddess.’ He looked down at me. ‘Lovely in’t it?’

  I nodded. But it wasn’t always lovely. I heard those times when Mum cried and got angry with him, and it was always about a climb.

  ‘One day you’ll go off and you won’t come back…. Don’t you realize how selfish it is?… You shouldn’t be going off on big expeditions like this now you’ve got a family…’

  People died in the mountains. Dad’s friend Mick died in the Alps, at Chamonix.

  When they had argued, his voice would go quiet and he’d say, ‘I have to do it, Liz. You know that. It makes me who I am.’

  I looked into his eyes, not laughing now and my voice went squeaky.

  ‘You will come back, won’t you Dad?’

  He gave a sad, twisty smile and hugged me tight.

  ‘Course I’m coming back Janey-kins. I always want to come home to you.’

  They set off in April and we went to the railway station to say goodbye. We’d said proper goodbyes at home and there was a crowd at Belper station. There were a lot of climbers living near us. They scrambled all over the hills then sat in a café called the Lovers Leap in a fug of steaming rain gear, drinking gallons of tea while they told each other all the amazing, brave things they’ve done. Believe me, it was dull. But they did buy me cakes, and there was especially nice chocolate shortbread. Then D
ad bought me my own boots and started taking me rock scrambling sometimes at weekends. I learned to dare a little bit, and I liked the café more after that. And the Lover’s Leap crowd were all agog about a big Himalayan expedition.

  Mum was wearing her bright blue anorak, her hair tucked in at the back and it made her look young. People sometimes said we looked like sisters from behind, with our long fair hair. Dad kissed her again and she looked up at him, loving and worried and sort of angry all at the same time and I didn’t hear what they said. There was a lump in my throat as if I’d got a gigantic rubber stuck down there so I was staring at my feet and trying to swallow.

  Dad suddenly reached down and swung me up by the waist. He hadn’t done that for years.

  ‘Hey there, little lady!’

  I wrapped my legs round him and giggled. ‘I thought I was too big for this!’

  ‘Well, this is a special occasion.’

  He was all excited, alive, the way only climbing seemed to make him feel. And he was so big, like a mountain himself. He hugged me tight.

  ‘Take care of your mother. I love you, lass.’

  ‘Climb well,’ I said, which felt really lame but I could hardly speak and I didn’t want to start blubbing in front of Dad’s beardy climber friends who all thought doing really dangerous stuff was normal.

  They all cheered as the train left. Mum held my hand and squeezed it as we waved Dad past and they disappeared towards Derby.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said, staring after them. ‘It feels so ordinary – just getting on a train when you’re going to the very top of the world…’

  She sounded small and lost.

  III.

  ‘You can’t go without me! Where am I going to go?’

  I was beside myself. I‘d just got home from school where we had a vicious Maths test, then needlework – another word for hell - and it was mince for dinner which is the worst food in the world. And Charlotte was hardly speaking to me because she didn’t know what to say. Dad had been missing for two weeks (because as far as I was concerned he was missing.) And now this.