Soloing a route like The Sea of Dreams was bad enough, but being alone on a big wall with a chopped off finger must have been serious, not to mention painful.
I suddenly wondered what I was getting myself into.
Robert described how the finger was dangling from some tendon, and how he’d nevertheless managed to abseil down and make it to the road. Holding up his bloody hand he’d stopped a car, which took him to the small local hospital.
‘An amputated finger can be sewn back as long as it’s within four hours of the accident,’ said Robert, looking down at his hand like a bride admiring her ring. ‘The problem for me was I had to be flown to a bigger hospital and they wouldn’t do that without a credit card. I had left mine on the wall.’
Finally a friend vouched for Robert and the chopper whisked him to Merced, only to find the surgeon was off for lunch.
‘My finger was sewn back on, and I was told not to take the bandage off for two weeks, but after a week there was a stink. My finger was dead, and so it was cut off,’ Robert explained. ‘It is bad to lose your finger,’ he laughed, ‘but worse when you owe nineteen thousand dollars for a late helicopter and a bad operation.’
The train arrived and we headed down to the glacier. I put on my snowshoes and Robert his skis, and then we began shuffling towards the Leschaux hut, the same hut I’d visited so many times but never successfully.
Maybe this was the trip where I would break with tradition?
Leaving the Mer de Glace, we trudged slowly up the Leschaux Glacier, the mighty Jorasses filling our view, until we reached the ladders that led up to the hut. I felt intimidated climbing with such a legend so went first up a short section where the ladder had torn away, hoping to show I could climb, only to have my crampon pop off.
Dumping our gear inside, we sat on the balcony and looked up at the face, tracing the lines.
‘Once I stood here and saw stones falling down the couloir of the Colton-MacIntyre,’ said Robert. ‘They were tumbling from top to bottom.’ I looked at him, wondering what the significance of the story was. Perhaps it was a warning, since the Japanese route ran next to the Colton-Macintyre. ‘Then I realised they were people,’ he continued. ‘Three Spanish climbers, falling all the way to the bottom.’
‘Want a cup of tea?’ I asked.
It was getting chilly.
I busied around the hut, melting water and chatting while Robert lay in the bunk bed that ran the length of the room, the same bed I’d shared with Paul Ramsden, Ian Parnell, and many others.
‘I don’t feel well, Andy,’ said Robert, sitting up. ‘I think I have caught this virus.’
The next day we slogged back to the valley, me walking, Robert skiing, but visibly ill, stopping and starting, his head bowed, his weight resting on his ski poles.
At Montenvers, I said the usual stuff, the stuff you say to partners who have let you down. ‘Not to worry, we can try it another time.’ Inside I was seething at my continuing bad luck.
‘You must be careful with a virus not to push yourself,’ said Robert, as the train slowly descended to Chamonix. ‘It can damage your heart. It is not worth it.’
I told him about my heart palpitations on Les Droites, laughing them off, but Robert looked concerned.
He was right too. For two years I had chest pains when I exercised.
Back at the car we sorted out our gear and shook hands once more, still only strangers who climbed.
‘I can come back in a week perhaps,’ he said. ‘We must climb something Andy,’ said Robert.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
And he was gone.
I got the train back to Servoz and walked back to the house, knocking on the glass of the door, seeing the kids inside watching television, sat on the settee under a blanket, messily eating a baguette.
‘Daddy!’ they both shouted, leaping off the settee in a shower of crumbs, unlocking the door and both hugging my legs.
‘Oh Dad, we’ve missed you so much,’ said Ewen.
‘What happened?’ asked Mandy looking irritated that I’d not climbed anything. The sale of our house was not going smoothly, and I felt some pressure to make this trip worth all the expense and hassle. At the time, I resented her question, that now she wanted me to perform. The reality was that as usual she had found the strength to see me go, and hold it together, knowing I might not come back. She wanted me to go and climb and feel normal, that one hard route would be enough. Coming home like this solved nothing. She knew I’d have to leave again.
The following day we went skiing, Mandy going off for some one-to-one instruction while I skied with the kids, Ella snow-ploughing, while I skied with Ewen between my legs again, the technique advancing in leaps and falls.
The day started badly. Ella had built up a phobia about the button lifts, scared she couldn’t get off at the end, that although she could grab the seat and stick it between her legs before being yanked forward, she wouldn’t be able to reverse the process at the end.
To get round this, I took Ewen on the lift, then once we jumped off, plonked him down to wait for Ella and help her.
On the first trip of the day I arrived at the top, parked Ewen, then turned to grab Ella. But when I turned around, Ewen was not where I’d left him.
Instead, to my horror, I saw him in his red ski-suit sliding down the piste at high speed.
Mustering everything I knew about skiing, which wasn’t much, I suddenly developed enough skill to hurtle after him like an Olympic champion.
In my head I had visions of him hitting the trees, or being wiped out by another skier, each scene playing out in my head as I raced after him.
Ewen hit a flat spot and slowly came to a halt just before another drop off.
When I reached him, he was standing dead still and crying.
Ella swooped in behind, laughing so hard she could hardly stand.
We met Mandy for a hot chocolate at the top, the kids sworn to secrecy about Ewen’s near-miss. Mandy was thrilled by skiing and loved the mountains, all of which was a surprise. For all our lives together, the mountains had come between us, a place she didn’t understand that she was forced to share me with. I wondered if it all made sense to her. ‘Why don’t you ski down the mountain instead of getting the cable car down’ she said. ‘We’ll meet you at the bottom.’
The way down was a long blue run, and without a child between my legs I found the going much easier, sweeping down in long turns, exhilarated. It suddenly made sense why people like skiing. It was fun. It wasn’t like climbing, with all its doubt and fear and death. It was simply fun – intoxicating, lighthearted fun.
I thought back over the last few years, trying to recall moments that stood out like this one did: sliding down from the Dru sat on a haul-bag, standing in a frozen river in Norway, and all my time with Ella and Ewen.
Halfway down I came to a big drop-off marked as a black run, the blue zigzagging down in another direction. I came to a halt and looked at its steep angle, feeling like James Bond. It looked terrifying and dangerous. One slip and you’d go for miles. I’d only been skiing for a few days but assumed I was now good enough to do a black run.
‘I’ll learn on the way down,’ I thought, and just dropped in.
The slope was icy and the edges of my skis barely gripped as I tried to make a turn and slow down. Skittering across the ice, my focus was intense as I drew on everything I knew, while filling in the gaps. There really were only gaps.
I must not hesitate.
I must be bold.
I must imagine I am a great skier.
I made the turn and swept on down again.
Two more turns and I was down.
I turned around on shaky legs and looked up at the stupid thing I’d just done.
Mandy and the kids were waiting as I whooshed towards them, feeling like a pro now.
‘Wow you look like a proper skier,’ she said, as I clipped off my skis.
Sat in the car on the way back to the flat
she turned to me and said how at home I was such a fuckwit, forgetting everything, unreliable, distant, not there, while here I was in my element, capable, dependable – ‘a real man.’ Maybe that’s why I liked it – because I was good at it.
Feeling better, Robert returned a week later with another strong German climber named Martin, an engineer who worked for BMW with whom Robert had climbed a hard route on the Eiger.
They only had the weekend, so we planned another route on the North Face of Les Droites, the Maria Callas Memorial Route, aiming to climb it on Saturday and Sunday. It would be a tight schedule.
The forecast was fine apart from the temperature dipping down into the low minus twenties. There was also a lot of snow in the mountains, so Martin had brought a pair of mountaineering skis for me to use and so speed our approach.
We fiddled with gear in the morning outside the flat, the kids looking on, fascinated by Robert’s missing finger.
‘What happened to your finger,’ asked Ella shyly.
‘A shark bit it off,’ came the reply, and forever after Robert was the man whose finger was eaten by a shark.
I tried to get the skis to fit onto my soft mountaineering boots, then Robert had a go, but to no avail.
‘Here let me try,’ said Martin ‘I’m an engineer.’ Within a minute he’d broken the binding in half.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t be able to ski in my boots anyway. I’ll just shuffle down, it’ll be fine even if its broken.’
Saying goodbye to the family was even harder than the last time. There had to be some separation between one life and the other. It was like gearing up for war with your wife and kids looking on.
‘Be careful, Dad’ said Ella – again.
‘I will.’
The journey up the Grands Montets was so familiar now, the smell of the cable car, the smell of the people, the view, the sun dazzling through scratched windows. I looked around and saw the faces of all those climbers I’d shared this little box with, the living and the dead.
Clumping down the metal stairs to the snow, the vast slope leading down to the Argentière Glacier looked easy enough to ski in rigid boots, but not soft ones. No doubt born on skis, Robert and Martin clipped their skis on and within a minute were several hundred metres away, skinning up the glacier.
‘I’ll catch you up,’ I shouted after them.
I soon found that a heavy rucksack, compounded by having the wrong boots, meant going in a straight line proved impossible. Any acceleration caused me to fall over backwards.
Each time I hit the snow, which felt quite hard by the twentieth repetition, I’d take off my heavy rucksack, get up, put it on again, then zoom off uncontrollably again, desperate to keep the skis on because if the broken one popped I’d struggle to get it back on. I was quickly exhausted.
Having almost reached the bottom of the slope, I took a hard fall and lost the broken ski. Without the usual brake, or a strap to attach it to my ankle, my ski quickly picked up speed.
Resigned, I watched it slide away without me, powering down the slope, over a small ice cliff, and out onto the glacier, where it stopped like an obedient dog that’s roamed too far.
Now I was really in trouble, as the snow was too deep to walk in, and skiing on a single board was beyond me.
I took off my remaining ski and sat on it bum-shuffling down the slope, knowing full well that there had never been a more pathetic sight in the history of ski mountaineering. To make matters worse, a French guide swooshed down to me, looking like skiing’s answer to Mikhail Baryshnikov, asking if I was alright.
‘I’m British,’ I said looking at the floor, trying hard not to burst into tears.
‘I understand,’ he said, no doubt embarrassed for me, and then skied off.
I made it to the glacier an hour after setting off and picked up my missing ski, only to lose more time as my skins fell off with the cold, almost as soon as I put them back on.
I took it as good manners that neither Robert nor Martin asked where the hell I’d been.
We sat in the dark hut sorting out gear again before getting to bed. Due to our tight schedule we had to get up at one. It hardly seemed worth going to bed at all.
I lay in the same bunk I’d slept in many times before and wondered what our chances were. I was nearly out of time on my dream holiday, and it was turning out to be far from what I’d imagined. Maybe there was something to be said for having your dream in installments.
The alarm went off. We packed and walked over the glacier to the start of the face. Spindrift poured down making it seem a lost cause, but Robert tried anyway while Martin and I stamped our feet at the bottom.
It was too cold.
It was too dark.
It was too grim.
‘This is no good,’ shouted Robert, his way blocked by a never-emptying bucket of powder, and with that another climb came to naught.
Down he climbed, jumping back over the bergschrund.
‘Maybe we can wait till it gets light,’ I suggested, happy to fail, but wanting to know we were failing because we couldn’t climb, not because we didn’t want to.
We pulled out a bivy bag and sat side-by-side, shivering, frost covering the fabric. Our breath fought and died against the cold. No one spoke. I felt the cold creep into my soul, the cold that had been eating into me for so long, its nails buried deep and never letting go. The feeling of freezing to death was a familiar call to arms. But as I sat there, I felt all my fight had gone.
‘Once,’ said Robert, bent over and hugging his legs ‘I climbed the Messner route on Les Droites with a friend. Halfway we found a small cave filled with tools and chemicals left behind by the crystal hunters and the crystals they had been searching for, all lying there, waiting to be fetched once their chemicals had done their work.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘We filled up our rucksacks and took all we could carry,’ he replied. ‘We were very poor, and knew the money from these stones could pay for many more holidays.’
‘How heavy were they?’ I asked, knowing that on such a route every gram mattered at the best of times.
‘This was our mistake’ said Robert, his face still bent towards his boots, as he hugged his legs, fighting to keep the cold from entering his chest. ‘The higher we climbed the more crystals we had to throw away, until we reached the top and found we only had one small stone each.’
‘Why didn’t you just abseil down?’ I asked, knowing this way they could have kept the lot.
‘We are climbers. The route meant more.’
We were silent again, and I recalled the span of time between that moment and the Lafaille route, the routes and the people between. Someone once told me that you never know when you’re standing on your greatest summit until you look back many years later, that although you believe that there will be better and harder climbs to come, in reality you are simply climbing slowly down. You will never hold those heights again.
The thought that this was true was almost too much to bear. All those years, I’d been struggling to return to those same heights.
Where had it gone wrong?
When had I begun this descent?
I knew the answers. We’d not gone to the summit from the top of the Lafaille. I’d retreated from the Devil’s Dihedral on Fitz Roy. I’d backed off from the Troll Wall. A hundred moments when I was too weak to push, too scared of death to risk it all.
It was all over.
…
I wanted to go skiing.
‘It is nearly light, maybe we can climb a little way up then come down,’ said Robert, pulling up the corner of the shelter.
Martin and I were quiet.
‘Let’s just go home,’ I said finally. ‘There’s is nothing left to discover here.’
This time Mandy was pleased to see us back safe, and I knew she knew we would be back empty-handed. Maybe she saw what I had become, that even superheroes couldn’t keep their masks on forever.
The
kids hung around Robert as we sorted out the gear, their eyes fixed on his missing digit right up to the last moment he waved us goodbye.
‘Are you going climbing again, Dad?’ asked Ella, holding my hand as we walked back to the house.
‘No,’ I said.
We sat down in front of the television and I flicked through the channels, looking for something kid-friendly, catching for just an instant a banner headline scrolling under a BBC newsreader.
‘Breaking news: RAF Hercules shot down in Iraq. Ten crew believed killed.’
I sat there, stunned.
No one had my number in the Alps.
What if it was Robin’s aircraft? He flew to Iraq almost every week.
I found a cartoon for the kids and went to the bedroom to call the Ministry of Defence helpline.
‘If you are the next of kin you will be informed shortly,’ said a woman’s voice.
I rang my brother’s number.
There was no reply.
I dialled my mum’s number.
‘Hello,’ she said in her normal cheery voice.
‘Hi Mum, are you okay?’ I said, my voice close to trembling, my mind racing out of control, my brother’s life flashing before me.
‘I’m fine, are you enjoying your holidays?’ she said. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if Robin’s wife had been told but Mum hadn’t heard yet, unsure of how these things worked.
‘Just checking you’re okay,’ I said.
I put down the phone and rang Robin’s number again.
It was a UK dial tone, meaning at least his phone was at home.
I imagined it sat in his locker, left behind, ringing.
The whole room would be filled with phones ringing.
Images of him as a kid raced through my mind, all the good times and bad, how I had hardly seen him for the last ten years. I thought about his kids, the same ages as Ella and Ewen.
The phone rang.
I thought of him as a child, as my child.
‘Hello,’ said the voice of my imagined dead brother.
‘Robin,’ I said, lost for all words but his name.
‘I’m okay,’ he said.
Cold Wars Page 30
