I sat up and listened, but it seemed as if the house had turned over and gone back to sleep. A memory drifted by, of my primary school teacher Mr Peterson, a man who had looked grey – grey hair, grey cords, grey cardigan – but with a face that had looked out at the sun and the stars for many years, telling the class about fighting the Japanese in some jungle far from our Hull classroom. They would know when the Japanese were close because the jungle would become, like now, in the house, deathly quiet. Why had I thought of that? The memory had lain hidden for decades without ever being referenced before? Why now? Something was wrong.
Tip-toeing upstairs I entered Ewen’s room, opening the door quietly, expecting to turn immediately away when I saw him safe and sound, but happy that I’d checked, feeling that thrill of jumping back into bed – or at least, the settee – knowing everything was as it should be.
Deep down all parents fear that their kids won’t wake, which is strange because when they’re babies all you want them to do is fall asleep and stay asleep for as long as possible through the night, a desire that always seems, quite literally, beyond your wildest dreams. Until that morning comes, you wake and find that you have been dreaming, and that the baby has slept all night. Instead of relief all you feel is panic, sending you running to their room to check they’re still alive.
A child’s breathing is so quiet, their sleep so deep and peaceful, that they can easily trick you into believing that they aren’t breathing at all as you creep in to check on them. It’s only by holding your fingers close to their nostrils, feeling the hairs on the back of your finger moved by their soft breath, that you know how stupid you were for thinking the worst.
I knew I was just being paranoid, as I pushed open the door, but instead of a peaceful, silent child, I found Ewen laid on his back, his breathing laboured. Something was wrong. I stood over him for a minute, feeling my body cooling, waiting for the sound to die, for life to return to how it was so I could rush back to bed. Instead it continued, a rhythmic heavy sound, like an old man labouring for his last breaths.
I lifted him up out of his bed and held him in my arms, trying to wake him up, calling his name. Instead of waking, he seemed oddly dozy. ‘Stay calm,’ I thought, knowing I had to do something.
‘Mandy, wake up!’ I called up into the loft. ‘Don’t panic but I think there’s something wrong with Ewen.’
In less than a minute the house went from tranquility to subdued panic, Mandy running down the stairs in her dressing gown and taking him from my arms, visibly worried, stroking his hair and looking at his face.
‘Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s okay,’ I said, having no basis to make such a diagnosis, but trying to be positive. I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning.
We went downstairs and sat on the settee and looked at him in the light, giving him some water. Now his breathing seemed worse than before. He’d gone to bed perfectly healthy but now he looked as if he could slip away in front of our eyes.
‘What should we do?’ said Mandy, looking really worried, saying his name to see what his response was.
I thought about ringing the doctor, but knew it was urgent and didn’t want to be fobbed off. So my usual urge not to bother anyone was superseded by the need for decisive action. For the first time in my life I dialled 999.
‘Emergency services, what service do you require?’ said the male voice that answered in a stern, authoritative voice.
‘Hello, my son, who’s three, has woken up with laboured breathing and we’re not sure what to do.’
‘What’s your address?’ said the man, his strong and positive tone making me feel better straightaway. I gave him our house and street number. ‘Okay, we’ll send an ambulance straightaway.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling relieved.
‘They’re sending an ambulance,’ I said, putting down the phone, Mandy now rubbing her hands up and down Ewen’s back.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘For being so calm.’
‘Don’t worry, Mandy,’ I said. ‘Kirkpatricks are never ill.’ And I went to put the kettle on, not because I wanted a cup of tea, but because that was what people usually did in such situations, like boiling water and getting towels when a baby is due.
I came back in and saw Mandy was deeply upset, so I sat next to her and stroked her back to comfort her, while she did the same to Ewen, and both of us sat and wished for the best while considering the worst.
‘You’d better get some clothes on in case you have to go to hospital,’ I said, and I took Ewen from her as she ran upstairs to change.
He seemed more alert now, but his breathing still didn’t sound good. I put on a DVD of Barney the annoying American dinosaur, with his annoying American kids, all ham and cheese and teeth with braces. The DVD drove me round the bend. Years later I heard it had been used to break down prisoners in Iraqi jails, played at full volume twenty-four hours a day. But on that night it seemed to tilt the balance back towards normality, and for the first and only time I was glad to hear him sing.
I stood and walked round the living room, Ewen in my arms, his head on my shoulder, feeling the warmth and weight of his body, his chest against mine, his soft breath brushing my neck. We stood just as we had the day after he’d been born, as I watched the twin towers falling, fearful for his future.
A light flashed by outside and I walked to the window as a taxi passed, no doubt taking some clubber home, slumped in the back, a pizza on their knees. I thought about how we move through the world, our own world, unaware of all the miracles and tragedies around us. Untouched. We all have our own stuff to deal with, things we need to get done. That’s how I seemed to live my life, avoiding anything that involved me emotionally with other people’s lives, complications that may impede me in my own desires. I was married but I could easily not be, both of us having insulated ourselves – with the depth of time we’d been together – from the fact that we were broken. The only strong emotional connection, the thing that was inescapable, was Ella and Ewen.
The lights of the cab disappeared leaving the street still and empty.
A fox padded over the road and disappeared into a garden.
Being up so early reminded me of waking up too soon on Christmas Day, and being told to get back to bed, only this time we were waiting for an ambulance and its gifts, not Father Christmas. How many times had I still been awake at two in the morning on a climb, battling on, searching for a place to sleep, or even waking up and setting off, trying to hold all the cards daylight would offer. Climbing seemed far away right then, utterly irrelevant.
A blue flash flashed around the walls of the houses at the end of the street and then the ambulance appeared, pulling up in the middle of the road outside the front of our house.
‘Okay love,’ said the paramedic, dressed in a shade of green no doubt designed to calm, looking like a retrained ex-steelworker, his big hands on Ewen’s chest: ‘I think we’ll give him some oxygen in the ambulance and take him to hospital.’
Mandy looked both relieved that we’d done something and Ewen would be as safe as he could be, but disappointed that we hadn’t been told off for wasting their time and being fussy parents.
‘You go, I’ll stay here and look after Ella,’ I said, and wrapping Ewen in a blanket she was led to the ambulance by the paramedic and I watched as the doors were shut and they drove away into the night. I walked back up stairs and went into Ella’s room, and sat at the end of her bed, as she lay oblivious to what was going on.
For me the night always brought fear and clarity about my life, and waking in the dark I would lie there dwelling on my future plans and see them as being dangerous and foolhardy, that I was playing an endgame, and that on waking I should remember how I felt and pack it in. But come morning things always seemed bright.
Tonight I considered the lives of my children, not mine, and how it would feel to lose a child. How would you ever get over it? Someone had tol
d me about interviewing the mother of Alex MacIntyre, one of the greats of Himalayan alpine-style climbing, who had been killed by a single falling stone on the South Face of Annapurna in 1982. Even though to climbers his life and death were in the distant past, his loss was still raw for her, a wound that would never heal, her living room full of his pictures. How would my mother and father feel? My brother and sister? It’s easy to make excuses for a climbing death, make fancy eulogies, talk about freedom and choice and a life lived to the full. But what about those who are left behind, their lives hollowed out forever?
The phone rang.
‘Hi, he’s okay,’ Mandy said, laughing with relief. ‘The doctor saw him straightaway and he said he’s just got croup. Sometimes it can just come on in the night, but he said he’ll be fine.’
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah, I’m fine. I think he enjoyed going in an ambulance. The ambulance man was really nice. Anyway I’ll get a taxi back, I won’t be long.’
‘Okay, see you soon, and well done,’ I said and listened as the line went dead.
I walked back to the settee and slumped down into its soft cushions feeling relieved – life restored, no change – and watched Barney sing as I waited for Mandy and Ewen to come home.
THIRTEEN
Lesueur
December 2003
I sit on a rock and cry my eyes out. I bury my face in my knees, feeling the dirty fabric against my wet face, still gritty with rock dust and musty with days of ice melting in and drying out, the smell of a week on the wall.
I try not to cry, try to focus on the smell of the fabric, its components, part me and part mountain. It smells of action and adventure, of being alive.
It reminds me of my dad, of him teaching me to climb.
The tears come again.
The Dru stands above me.
Again.
Climbed for the third time. It feels like the last.
On its dark side for too long now, I sit in the sun, in an alpine garden of fine grass, delicate moss and lichen and tiny flowers, the peaks and glaciers set out before me – a perfect place to be. And yet I sit here crying, not quite sure why.
I rub my eyes, and try to hold it together, watching as he slowly walks away.
His pack looked ridiculously heavy as we dropped down from the Montenvers railway, zigzagging down to the steel ladders that led onto the glacier, the Dru standing watch over us all the while, grey in the December light.
The night before we’d argued over how much food to take, me pushing for less, while he pushed for more. I’d told him Andy Parkin’s line about food: ‘Why take any, you’ll only run out.’ But he remained unconvinced with my lightweight philosophy.
I wanted a packet of noodles a day, some tea bags and muesli bars for breakfast. He wanted an alpine banquet: cake, croissant, sausage and a whole array of foodstuffs that I thought more appropriate for a hamper than a rucksack.
The reality was I didn’t feel strong enough to climb with such a big load. I was overweight and unfit, gambling on being able to climb hard by the fact that’s what I always do.
We worked out a compromise, that we would take all the food, but he would have to carry it to the route. The plan ignored the fact the load would still have to be shared on the climb, the leader climbing with a light sack, the second toiling behind with this hamper on his back.
I’d never climbed with him before, but he had come recommended through a friend of a friend. I was told he was a guide, was ‘up for climbing’ and lived near Chamonix. With no one else to climb with, I dropped him an email, wondering if, during the autumn, he fancied trying the Guides’ Route on the Dru, one of the North Face’s hardest routes with only a handful of previous ascents. The autumn is a strange time to climb in the Alps, being neither winter nor summer, but with no one around – either climbing or skiing – it offers remoteness to any climb. He seemed keen, and offered to pick me up at the airport, which was a good start.
Emails tell you little about a partner, and the man who met me at Arrivals was a quiet Scotsman with sandy hair. He had a gentleness about him, and a melancholy, but he looked strong, with a rugby player’s physique, a man you would struggle to provoke, but who’d beat you to a pulp if you did. I’m generally a bad judge of character, no doubt due to always being overly optimistic about most things, but I felt at once he would be a good climbing partner. He had an easy manner, and promised to be good company on some gnarly epic.
The truth was I didn’t care who or what he was as long as we got up a route.
Driving back to Chamonix I did most of the talking. He seemed reticent about his experience, which I put down to being Scottish. The only worrying comment was that he’d only ever bivied once on a route, which I took to mean he was very fast.
The sky was grey as we descended to the glacier, and no doubt the staff in the train station thought us foolish to be setting out on such a day, but then perhaps after a season or two you cease to care when you work in such places, and anyone who leaves the sanctuary of the gift shop or cafe is a fool. I joked to him that by setting out in bad weather we could guarantee good weather would arrive, rather than the reverse.
The route we hoped to climb worked its way up the North Face of the Dru, a cold hole that had a mysterious air, without the razzmatazz of the West face, and known for being very steep and loose, with a preponderance of wide cracks, which at this time of year would be full of ice. There would be no big wall climbing like on the Lafaille, this would be down and dirty mixed climbing and alpine jiggery pokery.
The glacier was devoid of snow, leaving only a muscled ice rink, something I’d never seen before, having only crossed it in winter. No longer buried under snow, you could see its surface embedded with a sharpness of stones, pieces of old rope and shards of rusted metal, giving the impression we were crossing a disused factory floor.
Careful not to trip on the detritus, man and mountain-made, we crept across.
The winter snow could only be a week or so away, and I hoped it would hold off until we got down again. The summer had been one of the hottest on record and the glacier showed signs of major change. Universities had opened up new departments in glacial archaeology as ice melted away to reveal what the mountains had once swallowed. Planes had been found, some almost intact but lost for decades, as well as soldiers from World War Two, gunned down by bullets, avalanches and rock fall.
The hard work began as we climbed off the glacier, up a hazardous mess of mud, rubble and fridge-sized blocks, blocks that had once been part of the Dru. He pointed out a spot where a young girl had been crushed, and all the while you felt as if you were in acute danger, the ground always moving, shifting and uncertain, scraped by the remorseless and lugubrious glacier.
Speed was crucial, but unacclimatised – and unfit – I found my legs and lungs unable to keep up with his and he powered on, finding the way, his big rucksack obviously proving no impediment. Even at the back his occasional halting was welcome.
I was glad I’d found such an able partner.
Higher up, the glacier offered easier-angled progress, but was also buried in snow, so again I was grateful as he ploughed on in front. The sky grew dark, night coming early. Short days would mean a lot of climbing in the dark, or if that wasn’t possible, long bivys. Without a portaledge I had already braced myself for some bum-numbing nights sat out on the wall.
We stopped at the boulders where Ian and I had camped before climbing the Lafaille. I looked for the cave we’d spent a few days in, but found instead it had been filled with rubble and boulders, a sign of the continuing disintegration of the wall above. Looking in, and thinking of us lying there, mates and climbing partners, I felt a sudden and surprising sense of loss, and rejection. Why wasn’t I here with him, instead of this stranger?
With nowhere else to sleep we trampled down the snow in the lee of an overhanging boulder. I pulled out my down sleeping bag and mat and got into bed before growing too cold, taking of
f my inner boots and using them as a pillow, making sure everything was at hand. Winter was still a calendar month away, but although the snow had yet to arrive, the cold had, and the short days only added to the sharpness.
He fiddled around, taking a long time to empty out all the food from his sack, piling it up neatly beside him. I watched from the comfort of my sleeping bag, wondering when his sleeping bag might appear, or if he’d simply forgotten it, as the rucksack grew emptier and emptier. I’d seen he had a huge green down sleeping bag on his bed, but couldn’t fathom how he’d managed to fit this in the space he had left once he’d emptied out a shopping trolley’s worth of fodder.
The answer was he hadn’t.
Instead of his big winter bag, out came a small grey tatty stuff sack from which he pulled out the kind of sleeping bag a boy scout might use for a summer camp, its faded fabric and slim synthetic lining ironed flat by years of use. ‘Bloody hell, you’re going to freeze in that,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Why didn’t you bring your big down bag?’
‘It was too heavy,’ he replied, looking as though he’d suddenly become aware of an earlier overconfidence in how warm it would be up here. I thought back to Mermoz, and my own frigid night-time agonies and shivered on his behalf.
‘If you need a big thick sleeping bag in your house, didn’t you think you’d need a big thick sleeping bag up here?’ I asked. ‘Also, where’s your sleeping mat?’ I added, looking round.
‘I’m just going to use this one that’s folded into the back of the rucksack,’ he said, pulling out a slim concertinaed flap of closed cell foam, something that was little more than a nod in the direction of usefulness.
Cold Wars Page 19
