Cold Wars
Page 21
Then again, being smeared in someone else’s shit probably does warrant an overreaction.
Instead of shouting up, I sat silently waiting for a crumb of sleep, not wanting to wake him, or break the spell of any half-sleep he may be enjoying.
Dawn unlocked us, and stretching out my stiff legs, I climbed back up to the bivy. He apologised as we stood under our red canopy and melted some water.
‘Shit happens,’ I said.
He climbed back up to his highpoint and unlocked the hardest pitches of the route, an overhanging crack, followed by a steep corner, showing persistence and stamina. The rucksack was finally beginning to feel lighter as I jugged up behind him, glad I didn’t have to second, let alone lead, arriving at my pitches, then climbing them slowly and with much less style.
Night, as usual, came on quickly as we traversed across the face on insecure snow-covered ledges, the steepness nearly over, the summit close. I was unsure how to finish the route, as we’d simply followed our noses so far, but now I needed some better idea. I seemed to remember something about crossing the Dru Couloir and climbing up the steep rock on the other side, but simply finishing up the couloir would be faster, getting us to the top in no time, getting this torment over with. The problem was we only had a single ice screw, meaning only a single runner per pitch, ignoring the fact it may be required for belays as well, of which there tends to be two.
The second problem was the state of my axes and crampons, whose tips had been embarrassingly blunt before setting off, and were now almost non existent, the mono-points on my crampons looking more like nono-points after eight hundred metres of rock climbing.
Route finding could wait again, as we came to the end of our traverse at the edge of the Dru Couloir and set about digging yet another pair of bivy bucket seats.
My appetite had now returned with a vengeance, but searching through the food bag he found mainly empty packets and wrappers. Only a few scraps of food remained. We had banked on climbing the route in four days and this was our fifth night. We had to make do with some muesli bars and tea.
At least we had tea.
Tonight I was determined to get some comfort, and rigged up my rucksack so I could lean against it and sleep like a baby – although I’ve noticed babies can sleep anywhere. As I lay there, I thought about how the body adapts to such discomfort, how a sore arse and stiff limbs that scream to be stretched out become commonplace, along with the cold, the climbing and the drop. Up here, once adapted, life was really simple. Was it any wonder that people love it so much? True suffering was down there.
‘Got any brothers or sisters?’ I asked as he also shuffled around seeking comfort.
‘I had a twin brother,’ he said. ‘He died.’
I left it there, and thought instead of my own brother, wondering where in the world he was right now.
Grey dawn became blue morning. Abseiling from our bivy into the chasm of the Dru Couloir, I hung from a sling while he joined me. Today we would reach the top.
As I waited, the route above began to light up. My memories of easy-angled ice into which axe blade and crampon spikes stuck like glue faded. The reality was grey, impenetrable ice as old as the dinosaurs. He slid down beside me and looked up, still hanging from the ropes.
He didn’t say a thing.
It was my lead first.
The dull steel of my tools made little impression on the ice, and it took several blows to get a crampon point or pick to stick in by a few millimetres. I climbed slowly up, my arms growing weaker by the minute, my calves screaming, no doubt wondering what they had done to deserve such treatment, everything crying out for the screw to be placed. ‘Not yet,’ I told myself, inching up and up, until I couldn’t take it any longer. I felt I might come off at any moment.
Unclipping the screw, more careful than ever not to drop it, I tried forcing it into the hard ice. It was like driving a wood screw into dense timber, requiring every last bit of energy I had.
I clipped the rope into the screw and felt safe again. But the feeling was lost the minute my feet kicked past it.
I was sure I was going to fall off.
Long before I’d run out of rope, I stuffed a cam in a crack beside the ice, telling myself I couldn’t risk climbing higher.
He jumared up and took over, leading his pitches. He seemed to be just as insecure as me, feet wobbling, axes just in, yet he climbed with far more confidence, as if he didn’t realize how close to the edge we were. I couldn’t watch, but hung there anticipating the toboggan rush as he fell back down again.
The walls closed in on us, and the route seemed to stretch further than I remembered, or hoped.
Soon it was my turn again.
I looked at him, safe at the belay, and hesitated, signalling that I didn’t want to do it, that I wasn’t able.
He just sat waiting under a little overhang.
I wasn’t too proud to ask. ‘My axes are too blunt, I think you should keep leading,’ I said.
‘Take mine,’ he replied, unclipping them from his harness and passing them over.
I started traversing away from the belay, heading to where the ice zoomed up around a corner, pitiless and unrelenting. I flayed away, making movements like a man who was climbing, yet remaining rooted to the spot. I had to do it, it was my turn, my lead, this was how it was. We took turns at the sharp end. It was only fair.
But I just couldn’t.
I knew if I did I was going to fall.
‘I’m knackered,’ I said, stopping only a few feet away.
He said nothing.
I leaned in against the ice, rested my head against it and let out a long sigh.
I really wanted a drink.
He said nothing.
‘I can’t do it,’ I said, looking back at him. ‘I can’t do it. Please will you lead it?’
I felt shame saying those words but they came easily enough. I’d have given everything I had not to lead that pitch.
He nodded.
I climbed back to him.
We swapped axes.
He led for the rest of the day and nothing was said about it.
The notch between the summits of the Grand and Petit Dru, where the couloir terminated, came into view just before the sun set, him boldly leading up, now the master. Out of the gathering gloom the rescue helicopter appeared again, hovering towards us, slipping sideways, the crew looking out at us once again.
The smell of aviation fuel filled the air, as well as the wump-wump-wump of the rotors, the noise echoing back and forth across the walls so that it overlapped. I felt its warmth, knew that someone cared, that someone was worried about us. We were overdue. We waved, one hand up in the air to signal ‘N’. We were okay. With that they turned once more, reassured, and swept away, dropping back to the valley, the flashing tail light fading into the night.
We scrambled up towards the summit, speeding over broken rocks, until not far below it we found what we’d been dreaming of for so long: a slab of rock the size of a table, somewhere flat we could at last lay down and sleep. We pulled the fly over us for a final time and rested, our bellies empty, but our bones grateful to be laid out like the dead.
‘Well done,’ I said in the dark, the wind whipping up.
‘Thanks Andy,’ he said.
The descent the following day was hell. We got off route on unfamiliar abseils, and the easy way down took all of the day, and much of the night. All the way down I was gripped about not making a mistake, that we had to get down safely, and it was only when we couldn’t find any anchors that we realised we’d missed the traverse half way down the South face, and instead had to press on to the terrifyingly jumbled Couvercle glacier below.
We made a long, free-hanging abseil onto the ice at midnight, passing two fixed and frozen ropes no doubt left by someone else who’d made the same mistake, to discover we were in a labyrinth of tottering seracs and a maze of giant bottomless trenches waiting to swallow us, all of which we had to cross.
‘Let’s have a brew,’ I said as I pulled down the ropes. ‘Then we’ll go across.’
All I could do was let go of my fear and do my best, and cross the glacier to the other side. Or not.
Our tea over, we started. I led us through a surreal landscape, jumbled and out of kilter, sometimes under wilting seracs the size of houses, sometimes jumping from one to another, from roof to roof.
It was exhilarating.
And we made it, but even then it wasn’t over, our way down blocked by a big rock wall, the glacier sitting in a wide canyon.
Now I felt anger.
‘I’ve climbed A5,’ I shouted, raging at the mountain’s unrelenting stubbornness and unwillingness to let us go. ‘I’ll get up this fucker.’
Then in that instant the night took pity and a ray of moonlight shone from the cliff face, and following it, we found a tunnel, jammed with chockstones, that led us up to the hut.
The last few yards were through deep snow, but by now struggle was as unnoticed as breathing. We finally reached the wooden hut and fell through its door.
A bird had somehow got in and the interior was full of its feathers.
We stood like Arctic explorers having found their way back to civilization, blinking at the end, eyes only held open by the fizz of adrenaline.
The following morning we woke when we woke, no alarms for us now. Wrapped in thick woollen blankets, I watched the sun streaming in through cracked windows, feeling that familiar mountain hangover.
It felt strange to walk around without boots or crampons on, no harness or ropes tying us to the Dru. Without the bulk of mountain beneath me, I felt suddenly adrift.
We sat at the wooden table, like normal people, with grubby knives and forks drinking tea and eating leftovers scavenged from the shelves of the hut. We hardly spoke. Not like enemies, but like friends. This was the beginning for him. For me it felt like the end, but then it always did.
We walked down through the high alpine meadows, soon to be buried in winter snow metres deep, but so colourful now after the greyness of the Dru. I’d only been here in the winter, and had no idea it was so beautiful.
No idea.
I wondered why it had taken me so long to notice.
We stopped for a moment, because we could.
‘I wonder what my brother’s up to?’ I said out loud, hoping that he too was heading away from danger.
He remained silent.
‘How did your brother die?’ I asked, without thinking.
‘He died climbing.’ he said. ‘He died climbing with me.’
He stood up and set off down.
I began to cry.
FOURTEEN
Sheep
I searched through my computer for the number, knowing it must be there somewhere. Not being one I rang very often, it was missing from my phone, but after a long hunt I eventually found it at the end of an email.
‘Hi Dad. It’s Andy.’
‘Hello,’ he said. It sounded as though he was outside, the wind blowing against his phone. He was either up a mountain, or on a golf course. I preferred to imagine it was a mountain, slightly ashamed at the idea of a golfing dad.
‘I’m doing a talk in your neck of the woods next week, can I stay at your house? You can come if you want?’
It was rare for me to visit my dad, or even call. Our paths only ever crossed through chance or work. It wasn’t that we didn’t get on, or avoided each other. It was simply the way we were, the way all Kirkpatricks were, the way most families are these days. Nuclear. In meltdown.
I’d been booked to do a talk in the Welsh village of Llanrwst for the Ministry of Defence, talking to the Joint Service Mountain Training Centre. Dad had worked there while he was in the RAF and had settled in the same village, meaning I could see him and get a bed for the night.
‘That would be great. I’ll look forward to it,’ he said.
As a kid, whenever the topic came up of how bad the family was at keeping in touch, Grandma Kirkpatrick would always say, ‘We’ve got our own lives to live.’ This seemed to be born out, since decades could pass between visits by cousins and uncles. I’d neglected my mum, and my sister and brother too. Wrapped up in my own life, I reckoned they could wait, that relationships were a given – that they would always be there.
I’d once sat with Uncle Eddie at a wedding, a rare chance to meet cousins who had gone from children to adulthood unseen, even though they lived only a mile from my house in Sheffield. It was the sort of occasion when, at the end, half drunk, the dance floor emptying, you say, ‘Why haven’t we stayed in touch?’ Suddenly, you feel that little hint of genetic magic meeting others who share your DNA. ‘We must stay in touch.’
Of course you don’t.
You wake up the next day and carry on as before.
My uncle Eddie was a great bloke, even if he looked like a roughish pirate, a long scar splitting his face. He’d made his fortune diving for salvage, as dangerous a job as climbing any mountain. He’d lost mates and had some very close calls, starting out illegally diving alone on crumbling World War Two U-boats using Army Surplus diving gear, until he was arrested. The authorities let him off as long as he worked for the Admiralty.
Eddie had an endless supply of true Kirkpatrick tales of over-optimism and resulting near-disasters. Like the time he bought his first secondhand salvage boat. Sailing it from Scotland to Hull in a Force Eleven storm, the boat was hit beam on by a huge wave that almost tipped her over.
Like most Kirkpatricks, Eddie attracted disaster and crazy stories, but always somehow won through. He got into scrapes not only with the dangers of the deep, like getting snagged inside a U-boat on the bottom of the ocean and watching his oxygen run out as he fought to escape, but also encounters involving London gangsters, the IR A and anti-terror police.
‘We’re self contained Andy,’ he told me. ‘We can be dead social, with loads of mates, but we don’t need it. That’s just the way we are. Maybe it’s why we do daft stuff. I’m like that, your dad’s like that, you’re probably like that.’
‘I wonder if we know how to love, to love other people, love ourselves even?’ I said, my mind seeing things afresh, listening to Eddie speak about things I thought only I felt. ‘If we did we’d take more care.’
‘If you don’t feel a strong bond with other people then it’s easy to not be there, do you know what I mean? You just don’t think they’ll miss you.’
‘Do you think that’s why it was easy for my dad not to see us much when we were kids, that he didn’t know how much we loved him?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You’re better asking him maybe?’
I drove over to Wales early in the morning, arriving to find him eating curry for breakfast, having just returned from working for a month with a charity that helped street children in India. He was supposed to be retired, but had just as much energy as ever. In India he’d been setting up an outdoor centre that would be used to fund work with street children, a model based on Brathay Hall in the Lake District, using corporate cash to solve social problems.
The whole thing seemed quite random as Dad told me what he’d been doing there. Only one of the eight Indian kayak instructors was able to swim, the climbing wall sat beneath a Buddhist shrine, its statues used as belay points, until the locals got pissed off and dumped a dead cow at the bottom of the wall.
I imagined my dad thriving on the chaos of it all, and assumed going to India was part of his ongoing thirty-year midlife crisis, the trip sounding like a good remedy, leaving him obviously thankful for what he had and reflective about his life.
‘I’m giving up golf,’ he told me as we drank tea in the kitchen. This was a surprise, even though golf had been out of character for a Kirkpatrick.
‘Why are you giving it up?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been playing for twent
y years and I’m still crap. It’s time to move on.’
That night we walked down to town for the talk, which was for a bunch of physical training instructors, whose job was to beast Army, RAF and Royal Navy personnel in the Welsh hills. I had been told to do something motivational, and had been racking my brains about how to do a classic corporate talk, all that leadership, team building and goal-oriented rubbish climbers make up after the fact, when in reality it’s all about glorious greed, ambition, selfishness and getting one up on your mates. So I decided to tell a few stories and let them reach their own conclusions.
The organiser, who I assumed must be an officer, met us at the local British Legion where I was due to talk, the room looking perfect for bingo, discos and family weddings, the bar full of the usual types you find in such places: toothless, smoking and in a contented stasis of drunkenness. He was dressed in smart chinos, a nicely ironed shirt, polished shoes, looked very fit and offered a knuckle-cracking handshake.
We talked over the evening, how it was a chance for people to let their hair down – not that they’d have any.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said in his clipped accent, ‘but there will also be some people from Hereford coming tonight.’
I guessed he meant the Special Air Service, since they were based in Hereford, but chose to act ignorant. ‘What, like some farmers?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean people from – the regiment.’
‘I thought you were all in regiments?’ I said, continuing to play dumb, looking baffled, turning to my dad for some clarity, instead seeing only a smirk.
‘I mean,’ said the officer, leaning forward to whisper even though the room was empty apart from us, ‘the SAS.’