by Andrew Greig
Kathleen’s just wandered in. Her blue shawl points up the vivid colour of her eyes and her tanned face. She’s soggy with sweat, but quite radiant. I watch idly as she peels off her damp clothes. She catches my eye and winks. ‘I need a shower first,’ she says and goes into the bathroom.
Back to work. Or vocation, as Jon would have it.
Adrian Clifford – Doc or Aido as we already call him. He’s twenty-eight, got married just a few weeks back. Despite his natural Scottish accent, he’s picked up the ‘old boy’ stuff from the RAF with whom he was a doctor for some five years. He’s tall and lean, a naturally serious and conscientious person whose literal-mindedness is saved by his sudden schoolboy sense of humour. Very meticulous, likes everything just so, can get ratty if it isn’t.
Medicine is the first thing in his life, and he takes his role as expedition doctor with us very seriously. He checks out the kitchens wherever we go, takes our blood pressure, gives us our rabies shots, advises us on altitude medicine. I casually mention the painful twinges in my knee from running and he immediately bombards me with questions followed by a full examination. He seems the very picture of a sober, dedicated young doctor.
As indeed he is. Yet against that he confesses that normal life isn’t enough for him. That’s why he didn’t answer when his wife Sue asked him to give up climbing. He wants marriage, his work, financial security – he’s the only Brit with any money, drives a red Porsche – but needs the opposite as well. He needs risk and excitement. He’s very careful about his health, yet until recently was climbing, parachuting and driving a big motorbike. He doesn’t like or approve of risk, yet courts it.
‘I can relate to that, old boy,’ I said, parodying him. He burst out laughing, and we’ve got on easily since then. He’s done a solid amount of rock and ice climbing in Scotland and the Alps – he too met Mal on one of his Alpine guiding courses, and went with him on the Nuptse West Ridge trip. He doesn’t count himself as one of the lead climbers but is certainly no bumblie either. I get the impression he’ll fit halfway between the Four Aces and Burt and Donna.
Burt, Donna and Sybil … We were all intrigued to meet this strange ménage à trois. But if we were expecting three people who oozed libido and sexiness, we were quite wrong. Several people remarked on Burt’s resemblance to a pallid frog, and he looks distinctly overweight for the walk-in. His main asset is verbal energy – a constant stream of yarns and wisecracks and comic routines, invective and wild exaggeration. He’s the one who, along with Alex, entertains us when we’re too hot or bored to speak. It’s as if he thought the world would stop if his mouth did.
Talking and being plausible is his job as well as his nature. He was a professional hostage for a while, then became a minority rights job organizer, which means phoning people up and getting them to give work to Mexicans, Hispanics, blacks and so on. Trouble is he no longer seems to believe in it, and while some of his racist jokes are genuinely funny, he doesn’t know where to stop and becomes offensive. The same goes for much of his male-oriented humour. There’s bad taste that’s funny and liberating, and there’s simply bad taste. He doesn’t – to my sensibility at least – know the difference, and I can frequently feel Jon’s and Kathleen’s hackles rise as he holds forth. I keep waiting for Donna, who seems a perfectly strong-minded and self-possessed woman, to slap him across the face or tell him to can it, but she doesn’t. She just smiles.
As he says, ‘I give good phone.’ Kath heard that as ‘good foam’. Well, there’s possibly not that much difference, and certainly his foam down the phone has done wonders for the Expedition’s sponsorship. He’s drummed up veritable mountains of freeze-dried food and foil-pouched meals called retorts, Granola bars and Milk Duds, sun-block sticks that hang round your neck – a total success, these – decaffeinated coffee (groan!), tea, face wipes … An American candy maker asked him, ‘What do I get out of this?’
‘Only a picture of a box of your product on the roof of the world.’
‘You’ve sold me!’
Yes, good phone, Burt. He’s done a tremendous amount of good work on the American side, and is now once again with Mal at Karakoram Tours and the Ministry of Tourism, patiently working through Pakistani bureaucracy. Which is agreed to be quite on the ball – what would take an afternoon in Britain, an hour in the States and a week in India takes about two days here. The officials are polite, patient and don’t expect to be bribed. It’s just that they have a habit of saying what they think you want to hear. Like ‘Yes’ and ‘No problem’. Trouble is, you come back the next day and they inform you, in the most roundabout and embarrassed way, that there is still this little problem, this unfortunate regulation. ‘So you have to jump on their heads a while.’
He’s irrepressible. He substitutes energy for dignity. Donna we all like; she’s warm, sensible and self-contained. While Burt never asks us about ourselves – he talks about himself and he talks about people, but seldom with them – she always seems genuinely interested in others. It’s hard to estimate their abilities as climbers – Burt talks a lot about ‘when I was in Peru’, ‘when we were in Nepal’, ‘when we were on McKinley’, ‘when we were in the Alps’. Most of his stories are very funny and told against himself, about how gripped he was, how he hates climbing, how he got lost here and gibbered there. ‘I don’t know the meaning of fear,’ he’d say in his nasal Chicago whine, ‘I go straight to abject terror.’
The others might say that sort of thing for effect; I feel he partly means it – as indeed do I.
So he and Donna have been around a bit and obviously have more experience than I. On the other hand, Mal points out they’ve always been guided, and much of that guiding has been real kid-glove handling. (He was horrified to discover that Rocky, after a few seasons of guided climbing, wasn’t sure how to put on his own harness and crampons.) It’s generally agreed that Donna is the stronger of the two, mentally and physically. Good phone … but what will happen when the phone lines stop and there’s no one left to persuade?
And then there’s Sybil, who seems to revolve around Burt and Donna like a secondary planet, abused by the former, sympathized with by the latter. Sybil with her ever hopeful, eager, tired, bony face. She’s put down and contradicted by Burt so often it embarrasses us, but she always comes back for more. Sybil who at breakfast today opined that President Reagan was the best thing that had happened to America and that Julio Iglesias was the finest singer in the world. Jon was left speechless, Kath raised her eyebrows in silent incredulity, I choked on my toast. We let it go. The night before an argument about politics had become heated and personal. For the sake of the trip, it had to become a nonsubject.
There’s a ghekko hiding in the top corner of the room like a lurking thought. Every afternoon round 5.00 it moves out of the shadows and goes hunting. I’ve some thoughts lurking in the back of my mind but I can’t bring them out and find the words. It’s probably the heat, over 100°C every day, and feeling unsure and insecure about my place in this group. I’m no climber at all, what am I doing here? Yet apart from climbing, I’ve practically nothing in common with the others. Only with Kath and Jon can I talk about the things that really interest me. Climbing talk, death talk, climbing talk – the prospect of another three months of it is wearisome. I’ve nothing to contribute.
There goes my ghekko, stalking across the wall like a Japanese wrestler. Must be tea time soon. What on earth is Kathleen doing in the shower? If she doesn’t come out soon, we won’t have time … Oh, he’s got his first fly of the evening. Perhaps everyone feels the way I do – a bit weary, restless, far away from home, unsure of where we stand. Certainly Mal and Adrian miss their wives, and even Sandy sometimes has that distant, abstracted expression. This vague sense of malaise warps these sketches of my companions. They’re probably wildly inaccurate, the kind of thing one looks back on and laughs.
We know we’ll know each other so much better in the next twelve weeks, but we don’t know how. We know a lot will hap
pen, but we don’t know what. The ghekko is becoming active as the day cools down, and my thoughts are starting to disclose themselves …
But Kathleen’s just stepped dripping into the room. She smiles and, wrapped demurely in a towel, sits on the side of the bed. ‘Are you finished?’ ‘Yes.’ My impressions of Alex will have to wait, here are matters more urgent.
Nothing became Rawalpindi more than the leaving of it.
It had begun to look as if we’d never get away. At the last minute we’d been assigned a new Liaison Officer. Fine. So all the gear we’ve bought for him is for a man four sizes bigger, but that’s not our fault. Problem is, this new LO doesn’t show up. And the country’s having a three-day holiday, the Ministry of Tourism is closed, and no one knows where our LO is. The Ministry had been informed about it, not their problem, they’re not part of the army … He’ll turn up soon, inshallah … How often we were to hear that inshallah – ‘God willing’ or simply ‘maybe’. But they were insistent on one thing: we could not leave ’Pindi without a Liaison Officer.
We pointed out that it wasn’t our fault that he wasn’t there; they smiled and agreed, agreed it was unfortunate, but these are the regulations. At this point we were all packed and ready to go. The nine blue barrels, more than forty cardboard packing cases, each meticulously weighed in at 55 pounds, and our rucksacks were all stacked in Room 45. We had been here seven days and we were desperate to leave. If we didn’t get away that day, we couldn’t go for another five days, because the road between ’Pindi and Skardu would be closed for repairs. We couldn’t wait another five days, firstly because the Expedition simply could not afford it, and secondly because we knew inside ourselves that any longer here and we’d disintegrate. The Man-from-Lahore incident showed we were getting seriously out of hand.
Miracles. Our LO shows up, Captain Shokat Ali Bhatti. Let’s go, for God’s sake. But the Ministry gently inform us he has to be briefed. Okay, so let’s have the briefing this afternoon. Ah, Sahib Greenspan, regrettably this is public holiday and briefing is not possible. Two days, inshallah …
At this point a silent scream rises in the throat and Burt feels like banging his or someone else’s head against the wall – except that’s exactly what he’s been doing for seven days now. Sitting helplessly in the lobby of Flashman’s, we’re tense, silent, defeated.
The ever resourceful Mal and Burt try one more Third World body-swerve: Mal as Leader will stay behind with the LO for the briefing while the rest of us set off for Skardu by bus; they’ll catch us up by plane.
They buy it.
For Christ’s sake let’s go before they change their minds.
We left in the charged twilight of a gathering thunderstorm. The sky was orange and greeny-grey, the clouds looked bruised. The banana trees hung like loose fists motionless against the swimming pool as we loaded the bus in the quivering humidity. Our bus! A travelling altar, a monument to the magpie instinct, a glitter grotto studded with tin, hung with charms and trinkets and glass and mirrors, decorated with coloured glass, paint, plastic, wood, raffia, it sat in front of the hotel as absurd and magnificent as a sultan’s ceremonial elephant. But would it take the twenty-six hours’ continual driving over 400 miles of some of the roughest road in the world?
Another last-minute crisis blows up as the sky grows dark. We’ve loaded the bus with our small mountain of gear, then our own packs, and found there’s room left only for a small hard single seat each. Burt starts waving his arms around, his eyes swivelling, his legs quivering with rage, voice whining like a buzz saw – he’s furious because this is not the size of bus he’d ordered and paid for. He for one is certainly not going to sit cramped shoulder to shoulder for twenty-six hours in that heap of shit!
Nazir, the helpful boss of Karakoram Tours who did much of our advance organization in Pakistan, is offended and embarrassed. He insists this is the size of bus ordered and, besides, a bigger one cannot be found at short notice. ‘Forget it, Burt, it’s no problem. We’ll just go in this,’ Mal says. Burt points out forcefully that Mal isn’t going to travel in it, and no way is Burt going to be ripped off by these chiselling – !
‘It just shows the difference between climbers and trekkers,’ one of the Aces murmurs. ‘Burt demands comfort and we’re thankful not to have to walk it.’ I immediately resolve not to whinge. A certain amount of suffering in life seems natural and inevitable to a Scot. Burt always hopes to get round discomfort with money, technology, training and pills. It can’t be done.
Eventually, as always, a solution is found. We repack, stack the roof rack till it’s practically as high as the bus, and create some twenty empty seats for the ten of us. And as we finally roll away from Flashman’s, all our anxiety and tension are released in a soaring arrow of euphoric excitement. On the road again. ‘In a bin-man stylee!’ Jon exults.
We drove out of the city through the thunderous dark. Now the night had come, the day’s fast that applies through the month of Ramadan had ended and all the pavement stalls and cafés were crowded with men. Round faces, angular faces, hands and eyes caught for a moment in the light of kerosene lamps as we ricocheted by. ‘Forward going,’ murmured Mohammed Ali, our Karakoram Tours guide, ‘I am happy now.’ He settled himself beside the driver and smiled into the night. Forward going …
We’ve been on the road six hours now. Our headlights flare through a night as dark and complete as our ignorance of what’s up ahead. Certain members of our party have been indulging in illegal substances and the air in the bus is extremely potent. Perhaps that’s why the music in my headphones is so intense and penetrating. Phrases I may or may not have heard aright tumble round my mind. I feel buoyant with amnesia, riddled as the times, going forward letting the past unwind behind.
Everyone is silent now, asleep or in reflective trance. I look round us all, one by one. Alex is sitting up front beside the driver, erect and motionless. He stares straight ahead, his bony face pale green and calm in the dashboard light. For all his bizarre humour and extrovert behaviour, it’s hard to say what goes on in there. Raised in the Caribbean, he’s by nature and instinct a Californian, i.e. laid back to the point of being horizontal. He’s been a sculptor’s model, sculpts and paints himself, is seriously involved in photography, has played in a rock band, and spent the last year climbing and guiding in the Cascades and Yosemite. For the last six months he’s made a living humping other people’s loads around between 10,000 and 14,000 feet, so for all his skeletal build he must be super-fit. ‘Our dark horse,’ Sandy commented. ‘We expected a Base Camp Manager and we got an extra climber. That could make all the difference.’
Beside him, swaying easily as the bus jolts, is another unexpected plus. Mohammed Ali Changezi. Because Kathleen and Sybil were down on a list as trekkers, not climbers, regulations insist that they have a guide for going up the Baltoro Glacier to Base Camp. It’s a restricted zone, not surprisingly with China just a few miles away. His services are costing us a lot of extra money, but he’s been an instant success. One of the most likable men you could meet, adept at all forms of bargaining and body-swerving, he’s saved us a lot of money and hassle already. He’s very good-looking and knows it, with big observant brown eyes and black hair always immaculately brushed back.
Adrian sits in front of me, staring determinedly forward as he fights with motion sickness. Thinking of Sue and running over yet again in his mind the contents of the medicine chest and the possible side effects of drugs. He’d watched over everything we ate and drank in ’Pindi, given us our rabies shots, passed out the malaria tablets, sleeping pills and sun cream. Out of medical curiosity, he decided to take our pulse rates and blood pressure. Jon vehemently refused. Doctors or writers, he doesn’t like anyone monitoring him. Aido can quickly become irate at anything sloppy or casual, and so is probably the least sympathetic of the Brits towards the Third World, but his meticulousness got us all through a week in ’Pindi without any sickness, a minor miracle. Getting to Base Camp acclimatized a
nd in good shape is half the battle.
Kath is sleeping on the seats behind me. Her face is relaxed and soft. She looks very young. Behind her Jon is stretched out in the nest he’s made and clung to. He’s got the best place on the bus and simply doesn’t hear suggestions that he might share it around. A sharp operator. Donna and Sybil are asleep, propped against each other like book ends.
Burt shifts and grunts in his sleep, still planning and hassling even in his dreams. Looking back, I catch Sandy’s eye. He’s surrounded by rucksacks, smoking quietly – something he only does on expeditions, believing as does Mal that it helps acclimatization. His head bobs to the unheard music of his Walkman. His thoughts are not here but in Chamonix, thinking of a golden earring and a sun-browned neck and the long black hair of his girlfriend Dominique. He gives me a thumbs up, grins lazily, perfectly poised and content.
My own ghostly reflection in the window looks suitably mysterious and unfathomable. I can’t see into myself at all. I scarcely know why I’m here, but it feels right. There’s nowhere I’d rather be.
Precious human cargo in the grotto bus, cargo of hopes and fears, thoughts of home and girlfriends, of mountains and beer, insecurities and pride – I feel a warm swell of affection and tenderness towards us all as we bounce on through the night, our headlights skewing down the road ahead.
