Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  ‘I once knew two lads who called their rope Phillip.’

  I had worked in London for three years. On weekdays I ate in the restaurants near the university, queuing at cinemas in the evening to see the latest French and Russian films. At the weekend I would walk along the bank of the canal to King’s Cross to buy a paperback from the station bookstall; or, in the other direction, to Regent’s Park or the maze of streets behind Tesco where in a heat like a kind of jelly poured in between the buildings, Greek and Turkish Cypriot widows, the shortest women I had ever seen, toiled along with bulging patchwork shopping bags and huge, slow-moving buttocks, or sat by an open door stroking a black cat.

  There were cats everywhere, especially when it rained. They crouched under the shuttered railway arches among the sodden fish and chip papers off which they had already licked all the fat. They stood indecisively on the wet pavement outside the Plaza at night. They slept runny-eyed but patient in shop doorways and among the piles of plastic milk crates. Everyone in London had one, dancing embarrassedly on its hind legs in the front room to snatch at a bit of tuna fish; sitting on a television staring into space. One Saturday morning I saw half a dozen old people leaning over the railings of a basement area in Pratt Street, where a cat had somehow got itself shut in the coal cellar. They had heard it clearly, they explained, but none of them could see it or get down to it: there were no steps, and no one would let them into the house.

  ‘There it is. There it is again!’

  ‘Oh yes, there it is again, poor thing.’

  ‘ – the poor thing!’

  They tilted their heads, to encourage me to listen.

  ‘It might be hurt, you see, or anything.’

  ‘ – hurt or anything!’

  A diagonal shadow had been inching its way over the worn flagstones all morning and now divided the area in half. The cellar door, with its broken frosted-glass panels, was in the dark half.

  Once you got over the railings, I thought, the drop would be no more than ten feet: if you stepped over, bent down facing the street, and then lowered yourself to the full length of your arms, you would be all right. I touched the railings. They were warm and rusty. I could imagine myself swinging over them, and this made me feel vaguely excited, as if I had already done it.

  ‘I’ll just go down and see,’ I said.

  Down in the area it was cool. A mysterious vitality had caused its walls of greyish London brick to grow damp moss, and in one place small clumps of willow herb and bright yellow ragwort. If I looked back up I could see the agitated expectant heads of the old people, sweating gently in the Camden sun. I began to wonder what I would do with the cat if I caught it, and how I would get out of the area myself. Indistinct noises came from the cellar.

  ‘Come on then, puss!’ I called. ‘Puss?’

  All at once it shot out into the daylight blinking and hissing, and streaked up the wall sending down little fragments of rotten mortar.

  On the pavement among the feet of the old people, trapped again, it turned and turned on itself, making a sort of bubbling angry whine and rocking back and forth on its haunches, while they backed away from it with nervous skips and jumps.

  As soon as it saw a gap it ran off up Pratt Street and round a corner. It was tabby and white, quite large.

  ‘Oh well!’ I said. ‘Not much wrong with him!’

  This fetched a laugh.

  ‘Now,’ I said.

  Chipped or missing bricks encouraged me to scramble up a foot or two then hang from my left while I reached out with the other for the base of the railings. I couldn’t quite touch them, and I found that in this position I was pivoting away from the wall. A man kept sticking his arm through for me to catch.

  ‘Here! Here! Let me—’ he said.

  He took off his coat excitedly and knelt on the pavement.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I got down and started from the bottom again, extending my whole body this time instead of only my arm, so that I felt as if one long straight line could be drawn, up from the ball of my left foot to the fingertips of my right hand. I pushed down with my left hand and, as I began to swing away from the wall, got hold of the railings easily and tugged hard. ‘Here!’ shouted the man who had stuck his arm through. He fussed over me as I stepped back over on to the pavement, patting my sleeves and dusting my shoulders.

  ‘There you come!’ he said, looking around as if he’d pulled me up after all.

  I was wheeling a trolley round one of the supermarkets in Camden High Street when an old lady came up to me very determinedly and stood in my way. ‘I think it was a wonderful thing you did,’ she said. ‘And I hope they put you in the papers for it.’

  She rubbed her eyes.

  Two or three weeks later someone I knew rang me up and asked me if I would like to go and learn rock-climbing in the sports centre at Holloway. Remembering how easy and pleasant it had been to reach up, lock off my arm, then pull hard at the base of the railings so that I was suddenly lifted almost without effort back into the street, I said yes. I was about thirty years old.

  At Hoghton Quarry the rhododendron flowers are a strange transparent lilac colour. They drift down past you as you climb, like confetti at the marriage of air and rock, while below you the tall straight trees filter out the light from the boggy aisle in front of the cliff. There are rhododendron bushes on every ledge, and when you are trying to get off the top you have to make your way down through a plantation of them, slithering helplessly about with the steep friable brown soil caking your feet and your nose full of their oppressive dusty smell, you clutch at the tangled stems with mounting hysteria.

  ‘Those,’ said Normal when I mentioned them, ‘are the rhododendrons of an Earl. They are an Earl’s rhododendrons, and those are his trees.’

  Normal had taken two or three of us up there in his car to try and free the remaining aid moves on a climb called Boadicea. We were trespassing. Hoghton is a secluded, impressive place whose pale sandy walls stretch above you, some as concave as the bow of a battleship, others raddled with enormous silent overhangs. Birds give piping calls in the green twilight. Between the fallen quarry buildings and overgrown hummocks the ground is spongy with sphagnum. There is a fur of lichen on everything; it gives an air of intimacy, but you don’t welcome intimacy on such a scale. You eye the huge corroded bolts sticking out of the rock: your gaze is drawn up further than it wants to go. Every silent figure you see among the trees might be the Earl, breathing heavily but quietly – watching. We had no luck with Boadicea, and towards evening rain began to rustle down between the leaves and drip into our little colourful heaps of equipment.

  To get to the quarry you go over a railway line, then walk up a marshy slot. On the way back through the wet fields, Normal pointed gravely at everything as he named it: grass, fences, walls, all belonged to the Earl of Hoghton. A grey mist came up out of the distant woods. When we got to the place where you cross the railway he made us stop while he studied the signals intently, then he flopped down and put his ear to one of the rails.

  ‘Nothing coming,’ he said.

  In the village where we had parked the car he told us, ‘This is the village of an Earl. How do you like it? These are an Earl’s flowers, this is his chapel – Wesleyan – and this is the telephone box of an Earl.’ He spread his arms wide. Rain drummed on the roof of the car. We were soaked. ‘Above is the fucking leaky sky of an Earl!’

  On the way home he pointed out barns and hedgerows that he said belonged to the Earl.

  ‘Are those the cows of the Earl?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But that’s his chemical factory?’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  There was scaffolding under all the motorway bridges in the north that year. The signs were being changed. That night, lost among the contraflow systems around Bolton, we watched the heavy vehicles nose past with water smoking away from under their mudguards and their loads wrapped in blue and orange tarpaulin.


  ‘Is this the A666?’

  ‘It says “Back Lorne Street”.’

  Finally, as we went through Salford, Normal swerved the car in towards the pavement and pointed his finger at a dark furry mess in the gutter.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘was the cat of an Earl.’

  This was the year after I had left London, and I had a cat of my own.

  I had just met Normal, who was still working at High Adventure, in Manchester, lounging yellow in the face with boredom every day behind a glass counter, while the rain blowing down Deansgate made white streaks on the windows and his customers argued desultorily over the merits of a hank of fluorescent rope from Italy, or leafed through the autobiography of a famous mountaineer they thought they had once seen. ‘Adventure,’ promised the neon sign above the main window, ‘High Adventure’.

  By then I lived in one of the solid red ironmaster houses that are set foursquare behind laurel hedges all along the main roads into Stalybridge and Ashton. The earth in the back garden was stamped bare and strewn with charred mattresses, but had once a huge tree which drooped over my balcony. At night I would go out there with the cat. A smell of laburnum came remote and tranquil from some other garden. The balcony was full of dry stalks and leaves flaking down to powder. The cat sprang and pounced among them, or sat still suddenly and purred. There was a shout from the main road, then a note or two of music. I would stroke the cat absentmindedly.

  The old man in the flat downstairs from me kept his door open so that the sharp smell of cooked vegetables soaked into the warm air of his landing. The bathroom, which was shared, was on his floor, and as soon as you got into the bath he was knocking to say that he had to use the lavatory. He waited on the stairs if he heard your door open or close, and let milk boil over late at night. The first day I was there he came up and told me he was on his own, his daughter had gone out without leaving him anything to eat.

  ‘She usually leaves me something,’ he said. ‘A bit of ham or something. Are you having some tea?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I could make you a cup of coffee,’ and he stood in my kitchen looking at the orange plastic breadbin I had bought that day, while I boiled the kettle and got two cups out. ‘It’ll only be instant,’ I said.

  Did he take sugar? He liked a bit of sugar. Milk? Not too much. He had a kind of weak pliability but once he began to stare at something he seemed to go into a dream.

  ‘I don’t want to intrude,’ he said.

  ‘I’m always busy in the evenings,’ I said. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘If you haven’t got any tea,’ he said.

  He forced his eyes away from the breadbin.

  ‘I can’t have coffee. We never have coffee.’

  I said that I had some Chinese tea somewhere, but he wouldn’t have that either. After a minute or two standing there he left the room slowly. I poured the Nescafé down the sink and swilled the cup out, feeling angry but relieved. Then I heard him coming back again.

  ‘I’ll have to wait for my daughter then. She went without me seeing. Could you give me a slice of bread to be going on with?’

  I banged the breadbin open, cut him two slices of bread and put butter on them. Without looking at him I said, ‘They’re wholemeal. You probably prefer white. Oh, and you’ll want a plate.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘They’re thicker than I like.’

  I heard him talking to himself as he went down. After that I kept my door locked even when I was in, and if I heard him on the stairs stopped whatever I was doing until he’d gone. He never knocked, but he would sometimes shuffle round for hours on the landing outside, pretending to sweep the lino.

  If I had milk delivered, he took it. When I went to get it back I saw that the furniture in his rooms, inert great armchairs and sideboards with cracked and lifting veneers, was hidden under a drift of letters he had also stolen over the years – circulars, bills, cards, small parcels, anything that had come through the door for a tenant who had died or moved away. He gave pride of place to some postcards addressed to him from Australia, and this was how I discovered that his daughter had married and emigrated there sixteen years ago. ‘She was ungrateful,’ he said. ‘She was an ungrateful girl.’ He avoided my eyes and stared at the television, an old black and white set with a screen like a fishbowl. He kept it on all day: and in the summer when he couldn’t sleep the sirens of phantasmal foreign police cars hee-hawed through the night until I banged and banged on his door.

  He hated the cat.

  ‘Bloody filthy dirty thing,’ he said. ‘I was trying to get rid of it before you came.’

  I caught him making feeble pushing motions at it on the stairs.

  It was a dirty cat. It never seemed to lose its dense, oily kitten fur, which soon became spiky and matted. It was smallish, very black, and it pulled its food about all over the kitchen floor, running up suddenly to snatch a piece out of the saucer, coughing and snorting loudly as it ate. When it had finished it would come and sit on the arm of the chair and butt its forehead into yours, purring and breathing the smell of fish and liver into your face. I watched it trying to catch flies in the dim washy light after a thunderstorm. One of them escaped it and walked about in repetitive loops on the wall, its shadow preceding it. The cat clicked and mewed with rage.

  ‘You leave it alone,’ I warned the old man. ‘And don’t take milk that isn’t yours.’

  I still loved for their own sake the look and feel of the things you use for climbing: the clear, sharp-edged, almost fluorescent colour of a length of brand-new nylon tape as Normal pulled it off the reel at four o’clock on a dark winter afternoon, the bitter smell it made when he burned the end to seal it, the thick complex knot you had to tie in it to employ it as a sling. I loved the weight and polish of a figure-of-eight descender when you picked it up in the shop, a great mass of forged aluminium alloy designed to channel the heat away from the rope as you shot down it a hundred feet clear like a spider on the end of its string; or, whooping and shouting, pushed yourself out from the cliff in gigantic leaps and bounds as you dropped. I loved the light they seemed to generate, orange, blue, neapolitan lime, a glitter like chrome; and the memory they brought back, like a physical event, of the climbs I had done a week or a month before.

  I went to High Adventure whenever I could. I tried on and bought this harness or that pair of boots. Normal watched with a kind of amused benevolence from behind the counter. I encouraged him to talk. Often he would turn up where I lived on a Friday night to lend me a book or show me a photograph of a new climb. One night he told me about a climber he knew called Ed, who had made a reputation in the Lake District while he earned his living as a beach photographer at Morecambe.

  Ed had found it a good business, Normal said. All you needed for it was a reasonable camera and a monkey: there was a small grey type with clean fur that would sit fairly quietly on your shoulder even in a crowd, and in general the beach photographers used that. The idea was to get among the people on the sea front so that the women and children spotted the monkey. As soon as one of them picked it up or made a fuss of it – snap!

  ‘ “Like the photo, madam? ” ’ Normal mimicked. ‘ “I’ll post it on. One of the kiddy? Ten quid to you!” ’

  ‘Ten pounds?’ I said. I didn’t know how much of this was Normal’s fantasy. ‘How did he get away with it?’

  Normal looked into his coffee.

  ‘Oh you rarely got one that wouldn’t pay,’ he said vaguely but with a suggestion of menace. Then something made him laugh. ‘People like a monkey until they find out about its habits.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Ed was at Morecambe for two or three seasons running. He found that he could make enough in a day to live, and enough in two or three to live well. When he was out on the front he wore to attract attention to himself a velvet coat a nice colour of maroon, cut very long and flared, and a green neckscarf. He had his Olympus OM–I round his neck and the monkey, attached to a length of shiny chain,
on his shoulder. The monkey, Normal said, had a strange smell when you got close to it, strong but not unpleasant, and its fur had in some lights a real green tinge. Ed looked very smart, on the whole; very smart indeed. The older women loved him.

  ‘But guess what he had on his feet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Rock boots,’ said Normal. ‘He had his rock boots on! Because when he’d made his money for the day, he’d go down on to the sand and do slab problems on the sea wall!’ He chuckled reminiscently. ‘Have you seen the size of that sea wall? He was a mad bugger, Ed.’

  Everyone Normal knew was mad. It was a diploma he awarded without reserve. When I met Ed later I found that he was a fattish powerful man, rather quiet and withdrawn, who still climbed very well indeed though he was less interested in it than he had been. Every time I saw him in the Peak District, picking his way up Artless or Downhill Racer or one of the other unprotected gritstone climbs there, I thought of the little grey complaisant monkey, and the children on Morecambe pier watching mystifiedly as Ed worked out careful balancey moves five feet up on the flaking concrete of the steep but minute sea wall: shifting his weight slowly, slowly, then scuttling crabwise up to grasp the thick polished railings at the top and heave himself over with a satisfied grin. ‘Like the photo, madam?’

  ‘Does he still do it?’ I asked Normal.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What happened to the monkey?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it hung itself in its chain one day.’ And he got up to rinse his cup out in the sink. When he had finished he said, ‘How’s the cat?’

  I couldn’t tell. It was ill. It was eating as greedily as ever then vomiting the food up in fits which frightened and disgusted me. It crouched on the living room floor, coughing out fur balls and swallowing them again in great bronchitic heaves, staring warily at me in case I put it outside the door. During the close, thundery afternoons it sidled about under the furniture and was sick by the bookshelves. I was always too late: a rhythmic gulping sound, a croak, a grey puddle spreading on the carpet. Between these fits it purred and watched the flies, much as it had always done. I discovered that the old man had begun to feed it fishbones from the side of his plate.