Just then, with a crashing of undergrowth, Patrick and Sarah ran towards him through the woodland. The man came first, with the rope coiled over his shoulder. Harry’s eyes flickered past him to the girl. She’d taken off her T-shirt and was carrying it in her hand. Her breasts shone whitely against the deeper tan of her arms and neck, rising and falling as she ran; there were smears of sweat on her stomach and the waistband of her slacks. She wore the spotted red neckerchief, knotted at her throat.
‘Harry!’ she called out. ‘I made it, Harry! I made it to the top!’
Before he could stand up, she launched herself at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her breasts lifted and tautened as she pressed herself to him. His hands flew to her waist and, for a second, he held her close. But she whirled away again, towards Patrick, her face as vivid as it had been when she’d found the natterjack toad in Harry’s garden.
‘Tell Harry how clever I am, Patrick!’ she cried. ‘Go on, tell him!’
The man looked up from his aluminium clips, and he smiled so that his eyes disappeared in deep, dark wrinkles.
‘You’re a very wonderful person, Sarah,’ he said drily. ‘You could be a good climber if you do everything I tell you to do. Good concentration, strong fingers, good ratio of strength to weight – what more can I say?’
‘My turn, is it?’ Harry interrupted. ‘Can I have a go?’
He was exhilarated by Sarah’s success, as thrilled as she was. When he stroked his face with his fingertips, he could smell her body. He could feel the weight of her breasts on him, and the slither of her arms on his neck. Charged with her energy, he stepped into the harness which Patrick had prepared and let the man arrange it round his thighs and groin. The rope slipped through a flimsy clip which would support him if he fell from the cliff-face.
‘It doesn’t look very strong, this thing!’ he said, with a grimacing smile in case Sarah was looking at him.
She wasn’t. Patrick explained in his nasal Black Country voice that the clip, called a karabiner, was plenty strong enough for Harry’s inconsiderable weight. Harry listened carefully, but he was watching the girl. She sat on a boulder, in the full beam of the sun. Shirtless, she leaned back and basked in the column of light. She glanced at Harry, smiling lazily, as though the heat made it too great an effort; then she closed her eyes and turned her face like a bloom towards the sun while her hands came up and untied the neckerchief. Her breasts tightened and lifted; at the same time, something tightened and lifted in the pit of Harry’s stomach. She held out the neckerchief, her eyes still closed, so that Harry could stretch across and take it from her fingers. He tied it around his own throat. Patrick finished fixing the harness and rope. He snorted when he looked up to see that Harry was wearing the neckerchief.
‘Let’s go then,’ he said. ‘But first, Harry Clewe, a few words of simple advice. You’ve got two hands and two feet, right? Well, try not to use any other parts of your body against the rock, not even your knees. You shouldn’t have to, with your reach. It’s a straightforward route, for your first climb. And very important: always maintain three points of contact with the rock. In other words, just move one hand or one foot at a time. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Harry said.
‘I’ll keep the rope nice and tight,’ Patrick went on. ‘Just relax. You never know, you might enjoy it.’
Once more, Patrick made the climb. He seemed almost to run up the cliff, bouncing from hold to hold until he was level with the branches where the long-tailed tits had been. Then he vanished. The rope trailed down to the clip on Harry’s belt; Harry had already forgotten what the clip was called. Sarah was silent, as still as a statue, as though she were petrified by the sunlight. Harry waited nervously. Stroking his mouth, again he caught the lingering scent of the girl’s body; but now that it was time for him to attempt the climb, he felt her energy draining from him. To try and rekindle it, he fingered the spotted red neckerchief she’d handed him. There was a cry and the rope tugged. Harry applied himself to the cliff.
The rock was very cold. That was the first, disconcerting impression. But the climbing seemed easy enough. After a series of scrambles he found himself on top of a big boulder, about fifteen feet above the ground . . . no, it was more than that. When he glanced down at Sarah’s upturned face, he was surprised and somewhat alarmed at the height he’d achieved so quickly. She was a long way down. But the rope was comfortably taut, running from his belt and humming in front of his face. He climbed for another minute and stopped to rest with his toes on a ledge about an inch wide, with his hands around a bulging outcrop. A quick look over his shoulder brought the unnerving realisation that he was level with the treetops, exposed on a slab of featureless rock. He could see the road and Patrick’s horrid van. Hands on hips, pointing, a number of people were staring up at the cliffs. There was a flashing of teeth in their anonymous faces, followed a second later by a chorus of ragged laughter. Were they laughing at him? Why? He glanced down at his feet in their flimsy, inappropriate shoes, and between them into the swaying branches of the trees. Christ! He forced himself to stare at the stone in front of him. His eyes followed the rope upwards until it disappeared over the protruding crag. Was Patrick up there? Or had he tied the rope to a boulder and abandoned him? The bastard was probably down in the woodland with Sarah, squeezing her nipples with his rock-horny fingers . . .
The rope twitched. Patrick’s voice came pealing to him. ‘You all right, Harry? Keep going! You’re doing fine!’
Harry took a deep breath and started to move again. When he groped for the next handhold, he felt nothing but smooth, cold stone.
‘That’s it, Harry! That’s the next hold!’ Apparently, the invisible Patrick could see the climber from his vantage point at the top of the cliff. ‘Pull yourself up with that hold!’ he was shouting.
Realising that Patrick must be referring to a hairline crack hardly big enough for his fingernails to fit into, Harry heaved himself higher and dug the toes of his left foot into a tiny vertical crevice. There was nothing to hold on to. The rock face was completely bald. He embraced it with his whole body, his chest and thighs and knees, and sucked himself to the cliff.
‘Try not to use your knees!’ Patrick’s singsong Black Country accent rang in the cool, still air. ‘Just your fingers and toes, please, Harry!’
At this, a runnel of sweat broke from Harry’s forehead and trickled across his glasses. He couldn’t move at all. His left foot was taking all his weight, wedged into a crack, while his right foot scrabbled vainly for somewhere to go. Both hands, about level with his face, were stretched out to their respective scratches in the rock. Then his left leg started to quiver, imperceptibly at first, then more and more, until his knee was jumping up and down and knocking itself against the stone. This spurred him into making another move, anything to relieve the pressure on his toes before they leaped from the crevice.
The rope tightened suddenly and lugged him upwards. There was a sensation of delicious relief in his left leg and his fingers found a good hold; but he realised, through the sweat-smeared lenses of his glasses, that he wasn’t really climbing; he’d been lifted bodily over the last six feet. When he glanced down again, the view made his head swim. Another hoot of laughter came to him from the antlike figures on the grey strip of road. The rope went completely slack, dangling in front of his face. He gripped the rock and wedged his right knee into an adjacent slit. And there he remained, his left leg hanging uselessly like a puppet’s, with all his weight bearing on the bruises of the kneecap he’d banged on the bathroom washbasin. The sweat dripped down his chin.
‘No knees, please!’ The voice came calmly from above.
‘Oh, bugger off!’ Harry yelped.
He heard Patrick laughing. Straining every muscle, he tried to raise himself on his fingertips, just enough to dislodge his knee from the excruciating pressure. Both his hands slipped from the rock.
He fell backwards. A space yawned between him and the cli
ff. With a hoarse cry, he jabbed his fingers forward, failing to touch anything but the empty air. His knee slipped out of the rock. He lost all contact with solid matter.
Nothing to hold . . . Nothing to touch . . .
He fell and fell, spinning through the emptiness towards the trees and the boulders below. The cliff was a blur of greys and browns. Then his knees struck hard. The side of his face banged an outcropping fist of stone. His glasses were smashed off. There was an impact like a punch in the solar plexus, rattling him to the very base of his spine, and the rope went tight.
And there he was, suspended in midair, helpless and disoriented, knocking and knocking on the cliff wall. Still much higher than the top of the tallest trees, he clutched uselessly at the space around him until the knocking slowly stopped and he scratched for a grip on the rock. His feet found a ledge, big enough for both of them, and at least he could lean a little and try to recover some shred of his wits. He was trembling uncontrollably, with his eyes squeezed shut. The blood pounded in his head, and his chest heaved. Voices came to him from above and below, Patrick’s and Sarah’s and laughter from the people on the road who’d seen him fall from the cliff. He ignored them all. Let them all piss off, he thought. Just let me grip and grip this rock and never let go. No one, not even Sarah – whom he wanted with every bruised and traumatised nerve in his being and whom he’d wanted from the moment she’d jumped into his car – could persuade him ever to risk a movement from the safety he’d achieved. He put his lips to the stone and planted a long, long, trembling kiss. ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me,’ he whispered. ‘Just let me hold you like this and kiss you, please, oh please, oh . . .’
A miracle happened. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He raised his forehead from the grey wall and opened his eyes. It was Patrick.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ the man said. ‘Calm down. We’ll get you down in a minute.’
Even without his glasses, Harry could see that Patrick was grinning. The man went on, apparently standing quite comfortably on another ledge, ‘You fell a few feet, that’s all. Banged your face, by the look of things. Bleeding a bit, just a graze. Don’t worry,’ he said, still with his hand on Harry’s shoulder. ‘No one feels good about falling, even a short distance. I’ve done it myself, so I know it’s not nice. You got a bit gripped, that’s all.’
Harry remained still, unable to move at all. Staring owlishly at Patrick, he felt himself forming a spastic smile. It hurt his face. He was glad his glasses had gone; content with his scrutiny of the rock in front of him, he didn’t want to look at Patrick or anyone else. Meanwhile, Patrick had started shouting to someone on the top of the cliff.
‘There’s a mate of mine up there,’ he explained to Harry. ‘Another instructor. He’s going to ease you down on the rope while I climb down with you. Right? The only thing, my friend Harry, is that you’ll have to let go a little bit or you won’t be able to move at all, will you?’ Then there was a sharper edge on his voice. His accent was suddenly stronger. ‘End of sympathy now, Harry, or we’ll be here all bloody day. Come on, we’re climbing down.’
He took Harry off the rock. Another minute’s gentle persuasion, and then he lost patience. Ignoring the whimpers and pleas, Patrick prised Harry’s hands from the rock and kicked hard with his own bare, calloused feet so that Harry was knocked clear of the cliff. Harry squealed, dangling in midair again. He flailed his arms, scraping his fingers on the rock for any microscopic crack that might secure him again; but Patrick kept barging him off with the flat of his hand and shoving him into empty space. For Harry, it was a nightmare of pain and sweat and cold, grey stone. He was suspended in the sunlight like a heifer in an abattoir. His knees and elbows cracked on protruding rock. Gradually, he began to relax a little as he realised the rope was safe and was lowering him into the shade of the woodland. The descent continued, and Harry even attempted a few moves to help. But Patrick’s patience was gone. He tugged and cuffed at Harry to maintain their momentum, until they fell together into the sun-sweet glade from where the climb had begun.
Sarah hadn’t moved at all from her basking boulder. She was a golden blur, as still as the lizard. Harry dropped into a bed of long grass and started to wipe the sweat from his face, using the piece of shirt he tugged out of the waistband of his trousers. There was blood as well. His cheek was raw and puffy from its impact with the cliff. He leaned back and closed his eyes, opening and shutting his mouth like a goldfish to ease the pain in his jaw. With a skid and a rattle, the rope and its assorted clips dropped into the woodland, landing in nearby nettles. Patrick retrieved it and neatly coiled it, checking every inch for any damage that might have been caused by Harry’s fall. Nobody spoke.
The heaving in Harry’s chest calmed down, and so did the banging of blood at the base of his neck. The overwhelming relief he’d experienced to find himself on the ground again and relatively unharmed now gave way to a wave of shame at his failure – and the way he’d failed. Sarah had succeeded, slowly and deliberately, in her ascent of the rock. Harry had been terrified: gripped, to use Patrick’s word. He’d panicked. No wonder the shouts of laughter had reached him from the roadside; no wonder they were pointing at him. And Patrick had manhandled him from the ledge, after the bone-wrenching, bowel-churning shock of the fall. Harry kept his eyes shut. He felt safer, less exposed, in the thudding gloom of his own head.
‘Your glasses,’ Sarah said.
He blinked at her. For a sickening moment, he saw sparks in the top right-hand corner of his vision.
‘Here they are,’ she said, holding his glasses towards him. ‘When they fell off, I saw them come down and land in the nettles. One of the lenses is broken.’
His knee hurt as he stood up from the grass. Indeed, his whole body was bruised from its repeated impact against the cliff. With blood on his face and shirt, with sweat in his hair, with the expression in his eyes somehow altered by the absence of his glasses, he limped towards her. She didn’t move to meet him. She simply held out the glasses at the end of her slim, brown, naked arm.
‘Thank you, Sarah,’ he said. The right lens had a starburst crack in its top right-hand corner, like a tiny bullet hole. Unable to resist it, even in his demoralised condition, he put the glasses on and attempted a joke. ‘Making a spectacle of myself!’
‘Yes,’ she said, without a flicker of a smile.
‘Let’s go, Sarah,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ve got all the gear sorted out.’
She got up and wriggled into her T-shirt, turning to follow Patrick through the woodland. Harry picked his way behind her, finding it hard to make out the path through the crazed lens. A cluster of sparks was dancing in front of him. Stumbling, he fell heavily and sat down, too weary and dispirited to get up again. Sarah had heard him fall. She stepped towards him, as though to help, but Patrick said sharply, ‘Come on, Sarah, leave him!’ so she turned from Harry and followed the man out of the trees to the gravel of the roadside.
In no time, they were in the van again. Patrick had stopped to talk to someone while Sarah unlocked the doors. There was a volley of laughter from the people Patrick was talking to. Harry offered to take the rope from his shoulder, to put it in the van, but Patrick waved him away with the same lazy gesture he’d made with the marmalade-smeared knife. Harry climbed into the back, arranging his awkward, angular limbs on the rumpled bedding.
Sarah got into the passenger seat. She quickly spun round and asked in a clipped, matter-of-fact voice which he hadn’t heard before, ‘Are you all right, Harry Clewe?’ Then she turned away before he could answer, because Patrick was getting into the van. So Harry said nothing.
Patrick drove slowly to Beddgelert. Through his spangled glasses, through the shimmering sparks, Harry saw a flock of lapwings tumbling in the sky, a blurring of black and white wings like a conjuror’s card trick. He heard the lunatic cackle of a woodpecker. He hugged his knees, ducked his head and squeezed his eyes shut again.
The Mercedes-Benz was parked nearby, w
here Patrick stopped the van. The car looked ridiculous. Harry had thought it was grand: fine, big and powerful . . . worth having. It wasn’t. It was a heap of clapped-out swank. Now, in front of Patrick and Sarah, after his humiliation on the cliff, he felt foolish as he sat at the wheel and turned the ignition key. The engine churned and churned and wouldn’t fire. Patrick crowed with laughter. Sarah grimaced with the embarrassment she felt for Harry Clewe. Harry tried again and again, until, with a loud bang and a snort of filthy black smoke, the car started. Grinning, shaking his head, Patrick turned away and disappeared into the back of the van.
‘Will I see you again?’ Harry asked the girl.
He had to ask her, although he ground his teeth with shame. He had to. He couldn’t not have asked her, although it exposed him to the worst and biggest humiliation of the afternoon. Like the hound, Gelert, in the picture the girl had painted, he offered himself up and waited for the killing thrust.
‘Will I, Sarah?’ he repeated, over the snort and splutter of the car’s engine. ‘Will I see you at all?’
She wouldn’t look at him. She picked at a blister on her little brown paw. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sorry. You’re a nice man, Harry. I like you. But I’ll be with Patrick when I’m not working in the restaurant. Then back to London. I’m going back to university quite soon.’
Picking her blisters, she climbed into the van with Patrick and the doors slammed shut. Harry drove out of the village.
In the cottage, he threw off all his clothes, tossed down the broken glasses and walked naked into the bathroom. His face in the mirror was a mess; the skin had been burned from his left cheek, and there was dried blood and dirt in the raked-over flesh. He studied his reflection through an arc of sparks which would soon eclipse his vision. He knew exactly what the immediate future held. The angel had come for him. Soon, the pounding, poleaxing headache would begin. Then he would retch until his chest felt as though it had been torn inside out. At last he would sleep, completely drained, his head aching as though he’d been slugged with something very hard and very heavy. Resigned to all of this, dreading the pain he knew was coming, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
The Blood of Angels Page 5
