Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  One Sunday we were sitting in a steep gully at Tissington Spires. It had been sunny all the way down in the car. Now if you looked into Dovedale you could see a feeble light bleaching out the moss and stones. The water was a gelid blue-grey colour in its deepest stretches; above it tumbled bleak slopes or rubble, destabilised by tree-felling and littered with huge raw logs; two or three anxious sheep stood between the river and the rock.

  Loose stones trickled down the gully. It was as cold as a bus shelter in the centre of Leeds on a Friday night, and as crowded, with climbers standing or sitting awkwardly wherever roots or dead branches crossed the steep dusty slope. Their quiet voices came back from the rock. When a few specks of rain blew through the ruined trees, a shaven-headed boy looked up and laughed; then down at the purple tape in his hand, his neck bent in the attitude of the inmate of a camp.

  There was a woman with one of the teams further down the gully, where a lot of dead wood had made it easier to find somewhere to sit. She had blonde hair cut in an exact fringe above her eyebrows. Gaz, waiting in the queue for his turn at Yew Tree Wall, stared at her idily, biting the hard skin round his fingernails. She was belaying a climber on the wall. She fed him some rope, took it back in, running it deftly through the Sticht plate. He swapped feet uneasily on a sloping hold and asked himself, ‘I wonder if I’m supposed to be able to reach that? Apparently not.’ He tried again, slithered back to his original position. ‘You bastard.’ The minute figures of tourists by the river, catching the clatter of his equipment, shaded their eyes helplessly and tried to see if anything had happened. The girl looked up at him and when he still didn’t make the move shivered with a mixture of boredom and cold.

  She tried to pull the sleeves of her long sweater down over her wrists; smiled quickly at nothing, as if she was practising the expression. The boy with the shaved head wanted to take a photograph of her but she wouldn’t co-operate. ‘Come on now. Big grin. Big cheesy grin.’ She reminded me of someone but I couldn’t remember who. When I told Gaz he nodded, still watching her.

  ‘I’ve seen her about,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen her a few times at the Bradford wall too, on a Tuesday night, climbing in pink tights.’ He chuckled. ‘Not bad! I wonder if she’s married? Eh?’ And he ducked his head in her direction with a significance I wasn’t sure I’d caught. I laughed.

  ‘Would it make any difference to you?’

  He looked away, so I left it.

  ‘It’s not a climber she reminds me of,’ I said.

  On the crux of Yew Tree Wall, a yawning lean to the right from the tips of two fingers hooked into a knife-edged pocket, Gaz lost his balance and had to grab an old aid sling threaded into the rock.

  ‘Well that’s fucked that then,’ he said viciously. ‘Back to stuffing mince into plastic bags tomorrow.’

  We abseiled off the tree at the top.

  ‘You drive fifty miles to do a route, wait two hours for a lot of pillocks to clear off it, then you pox it up by pulling on a piece of tat.’ All the way back along Dovedale to the car he was in a foul mood; in the pub at Wetton that night he looked round with hatred at the tourists.

  ‘All these dossers,’ he said loudly. ‘What are they ever going to do with their lives?’

  In country pubs like this there is always a plump boy with a brand-new French tracksuit top from the Grattan catalogue sitting opposite you with a packet of vinegar flavoured crisps. At the back of the room bikers plan their outrages: they will have a fire at the camp site, drink tinned beer, tease a dog. A middle-aged man walks stiffly past – under his tweed sports coat he has a striped shirt, a coloured scarf tied like a neck brace.

  ‘They come out here at the weekends . . . If they walk down Dovedale like the fucking Pickerton Ramblers they think they’ve had a big adventure. “Excews me,” ’ he mimicked. ‘ “Could a climber like that reelly fall off? I mean reelly hurt himself? ” ’

  ‘Yew Tree Wall won’t go away,’ I said. ‘You can come back to it any time. Next Saturday if you like.’

  ‘How do I know that? I might die. It might fall down. Anything might happen. I might drive me car into a wall and end up in a wheelchair.’ He drank his beer. ‘It ruins your whole weekend, something like that. All you’ve got to look forward to is another week of dirty water, your hands in fucking dirty water till they split. You want to try it, you do.’ He got up and went to the lavatory, his great height and lurching, hunch-shouldered walk making him look even more dejected.

  ‘Been out doing some climbing then?’ the fat boy asked. He offered me a crisp and when I took one sat forward companionably. ‘Rather you than me,’ he said. ‘I bet you’ve seen some accidents at that game.’

  In country pubs like this women from the nearby towns dressed to the nines eat steak sandwiches from a paper napkin, holding their hands delicately in front of them like a praying mantis, gold bangles dangling from thin wrists. It’s their night out, and their feet must be killing them. Every so often they lean down and with a furtive but curiously graceful motion adjust a shoe which is nothing more than a few slim red leather straps. After you have been climbing all weekend this gives you a sharp sexual surprise. With their make-up and perfume, their white shoulders displayed suddenly as they turn to someone and laugh, they are like women from another planet. You watch covertly to see if they will betray themselves further; they never do.

  On the way home Gaz had the air of someone watching himself clinically to see how late he dared leave his braking. It was a kind of bitter investigation of his own technique. Once he swerved into the opposite carriageway of the A515 and drove along it waiting for me to say something. In the dark car I couldn’t make out his expression. He said,

  ‘Who did that girl at Tissington remind you of, if it wasn’t a climber?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  At that time of Gaz’s life driving and climbing were like two aspects or definitions of the same thing. Cars stood for the wish, climbing for the act.

  I think of him showing off on a Saturday morning in the scattered early traffic of the B6106, or flirting with the tight little corners of the Strines Road on the way from Huddersfield to the climbers’ cafes at Grindleford and Stoney Middleton:

  The brickworks lurch past on one side, on the other white faces peer at us momentarily through the streaming windscreen of a Land Rover. The roads are still plastered with last year’s orange leaves. Stone walls, sodden verges, sudden drops assemble themselves out of the mist only so Gaz can annihilate them; junctions and old gates yawn out at us and are snatched away. The Vauxhall rocks and dips as he forces it into bends fringed with dripping oaks and tilted white signposts. Everything is fog and wet, everything is at the wrong angle, after every narrow squeak he gives me a sidelong glance I pretend not to see. At Bole Edge, where the dark feathery conifers close in over the road, the mist thins without warning: An old man on a bicycle is silhouetted at the top of the hill, wobbling along against the bright morning sun!

  Something else danced one Saturday among the heat mirages in the middle of the road.

  ‘Did you see that? It was a hare! It was a bloody big hare!’

  ‘It was only a bit of newspaper.’

  Later the reflection of my watch flickered on the dashboard; the limestone factories swam like casinos and amusement palaces in a golden haze; trapped in the obsessional net of drystone wall on the long sweeping rises by the A623 east of Buxton, groups of beech trees caught fire suddenly in the sunshine. Gaz accelerated. It was like being in a video game.

  Though he made a considerable impression on me, I didn’t actually see a great deal of Gaz. I was out with Normal a lot of the time; Gaz climbed mostly with Sankey.

  Sankey was always so cautious and indirect, so ready to defer to your opinion. He wondered casually if you had a couple of days free that week: he knew full well you were on the dole. With him everything was open to negotiation. If, driving to a cliff he had known all his life, you asked, ‘Do we turn right here? ’, he would con
sider for a moment and then say, ‘Yes, yes, you can. Or of course you can go up round Ilkley if you want to. It’s sometimes quicker that way.’ And when you stared at him: ‘Well it probably is further to go. But now you can get on to the A650, some people do prefer that way—’

  By then you had missed your turning.

  This drove Gaz mad, and he wouldn’t have Sankey in the front seat of the Vauxhall with him. They got on all right in Sankey’s car, a three-wheeler van about which he was very defensive. To improve its fuel consumption even further he had taken the passenger seat out, so that you sat in the back in the dark with the ropes and piles of equipment. They took me to Almscliffe in it one day: it bumped and banged along the Yeadon by-pass, rocking from side to side. ‘I’m going to puke up!’ shouted Gaz. He gave me a wink. ‘I keep thinking, what if we get a puncture in the front wheel? I mean, you’ve only got the one, haven’t you?’

  Sankey screwed himself round in the driver’s seat.

  ‘They’re very safe, these,’ he said. ‘Very safe cars.’

  Horns blared at him from the approaching traffic, into whose lane he had wobbled. For a moment all we could see of him was his elbows jerking about in silhouette as he sawed at the steering wheel. Gaz clutched himself among the rucksacks; it was an old joke, you could see, but a good one.

  At Almscliffe you can’t get out of the wind. It hisses in the greenish cracks and flutings. It blows from all directions at once even on a summer day. The dust gets into your eyes as you pick your way down the cold dark gullies that dissect the main mass of rock, while all around you Lower Wharfedale spreads its legs in the sunshine – farmland, spires, viaducts, hedges and trees. It might be a landscape much further south, much earlier in the year, great swags of blossom at the edge of every field. But up on the horizon the power-stations lie hull-down in ambush among the East Yorkshire coal pits.

  Gaz got straight into his harness and on to the rock.

  ‘I’m scared!’ he complained after he had hand-jammed about forty feet up into the wind. He was just passing a thing like a melted, dripping end of an old candle. The crack he was climbing arrowed above him into the blue sky. Soon he would get his foot stuck in it.

  Being there is like watching an old elephant, dying split-skinned in its own tremendous ammoniacal reek, gazing patiently back at you in a zoo. It hasn’t moved for a long time, you judge, but you can still detect the tremor of its breath – or is it your own? Meanwhile the children shout and try to wake it up with buns. At Almscliffe the visitors walk about bemusedly, shading their eyes, wondering perhaps why the zoo-keeper has let them in on such a tragic occasion. They are generally middle-class people, careful not to drop their sandwich papers from the top. The crag bears them up passively, while bits of route description, boasts and obscenities circle round them on the wind.

  ‘No you go left there and then swing round again.’

  ‘. . . Syrett . . . Pasquill . . .’

  ‘Go left from where you are!’

  ‘. . . Black Wall Eliminate in the rain, nowhere to rest, that fucking bog waiting for you underneath . . .’

  ‘Left! You go left you maniac. Oh fuck, look at that.’

  This has never been a quiet place. It was the first of the great outdoor climbing walls, the model of a local crag. Its enthusiasts – parochial, cliqueish, contemptuous of the performance of outsiders and resentful of their cheery unconcern for precedent – believe that the sport was invented here. Generations of them have brought the rock to a high polish, like the stuff that faces the Halifax Building Society. Every evening local men – Yorkshire men, who hardly ever speak – do the low-level traverses until they learn to allow for the shine of the footholds, the flare and brutality of the cracks. Their arms and shoulders grow strong. Their clothes fray. They develop a slow way of looking at you. Down Wharfedale they have wives and kiddies and bicycles just like anyone else, but all they think about is which one of them will solve the last Great Problem.

  It won’t be Gaz, anyway.

  In his orange-dyed karate trousers, with his runners jangling and clanging mournfully, he gingerly unlocked his foot. ‘What grade is this? Rubbish!’ Fucking and blinding he made his careful way up: pulled in a few feet of rope: vanished somewhere among the bottomless clefts and queer boulders of the summit, where picnickers looked at him like owls. After a moment his head popped back over the top. ‘Come on! Never mind sitting on your arses down there, get some climbing done!’

  As he brought me up he dangled his legs over the top like Pinocchio and stared out over the plain towards York, where the tourists would be making their way from shop to shop in a muzzy, good-tempered dream. He was in one himself. ‘You want to jam that crack, mate,’ I heard him advise someone on another climb, ‘not layback it.’ After a moment he kicked his legs disconnectedly and sang in a maudlin voice, ‘I don’t know what to do when you disappear from view . . .’ Soon a great loop of rope hung down in front of me.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Gaz, pay attention. Take in. Take in! If I fucking fall off—’

  ‘You’re not going to. Stay steady. Steady. You’re all right. Can you get your hands in the break? Just stay steady and you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It’s easy.’ He took the rope in tight anyway. ‘Look,’ he said, leaning out at an odd angle against his belays so that he could see down the climb; it made him look as if he had been photographed in the act of throwing himself off. ‘See there? Just above that bit of a rib there? . . . No there, above you, you wollock! . . . That’s it, just there. Can you see a tiny little layoff?’

  I said I could.

  ‘Well don’t use that, it’s no good.’

  The sun came down and scraped into the irregular corners like Gaz’s mother scraping an oven. He moved his shoulders uneasily and exchanged his pullover for a T-shirt with a design advertising a northern equipment firm: ‘Troll Gets You High’.

  We had something to eat. Then, forced into inhuman, expressionistic postures by its grim logic, Sankey strained and contorted up Wall of Horrors, until his impetus ran out just under the crux. He stretched up: nothing. He tried facing left, then right, grinding his cheek into the gritstone. His legs began to tremble. All the lines on the rock moved towards him, in a fixed vortex. When he lurched suddenly on his footholds everyone looked up: he was only sorting through the stuff on his rack for something to protect his next two moves. If he took too long to find and place it he would come off anyway. His last runner was lodged in a crack like a section through a fall pipe, fifteen or twenty feet below him.

  ‘Can you get something there?’

  ‘Can you get anything in higher up?’

  He didn’t hear us.

  He was fiddling about in a rounded break, his eyes inturned and panicky, his head and upper body squashed up as if he was demonstrating the limits of some box invisible to anyone else. Under the impact of fear, concentration, physical effort, his face went lax and shocked, his age began to show. By 1970 he had climbed all over the world; he had done every major route in Britain; the ‘new’ climbs were his only hope – violent, kinaesthetic, stripped of all aid. ‘Wall of Horrors!’ he would say. ‘John Hart talked me up that, move by move, first time I led it. Years ago. It overfaced people then. Ha ha.’ He was forty, perhaps forty-five. As I watched him I wondered what he was doing it to himself for.

  All the time Gaz was watching him too.

  He had to predict when Sankey would go. He had to mother him. The runner in the fall pipe was too close to the ground to be much good: if Sankey boned off, could Gaz run back far enough quick enough to shorten the rope? I didn’t think he could. He fidgeted it backwards and forwards through the Sticht plate, which clicked and rattled nervously.

  Up in his invisible box Sankey twisted one arm behind his back to get his hand into his chalk bag. His shadow moved uneasily on the buttress over to his left, the shadow of the rope blowing out behind it. Chalk smoked off into the turbulence as he shifted his feet.

  The sun went in.
<
br />   ‘OK, kid,’ he said. ‘Watch the rope.’

  Suddenly we saw that he was calm and thoughtful again. He stood up straight and went quickly to the top, reaching, rocking elegantly to one side, stepping up.

  Things have moved on now, of course, but Wall of Horrors was still a test-piece then. When he came down several people were waiting to congratulate him. Most of them were boys of fourteen or fifteen who would one day solo it; against that time they were willing to give him uncontrolled admiration. They were dressed in white canvas trousers, sweatshirts and pullovers with broad stripes, in imitation of the American and Australian climbers whose pictures they saw in the magazines; in two or three years they would be wearing silkskin dance tights, courting anorexia in search of a high power-weight ratio, exchanging the magic words of European-style climbing: ‘screamer’, ‘redpoint’, ‘Martin Atkinson’.

  One of them said, ‘Are you Stevie Smith? I’ve seen you climb before, haven’t I?’

  Sankey gave his nervous laugh.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  He sat down tiredly among some boulders and began sorting through his equipment, strewing orange tape slings about in the dust as if looking for something that had let him down. Then he just sat, absentmindedly clicking the gate of a snaplink until Gaz brought him some coffee from a flask. As we walked away from the cliff the backs of my hands smarted in the wind. I saw the shadow of a dove flicker over the rock in the warm slanting light. These birds live in the high breaks and caves. They ruffle their feathers uncertainly, hunch up, explode without warning over your head; they come back in the evening. Sankey’s eyes were losing the empty, exhausted look that had entered them on the wall.

  On the way home Gaz said, ‘I wouldn’t mind being an owl in my next life.’ Then he said, ‘I’m getting married next month.’ He had to shout to make himself heard over the engine of the three-wheeler.

  I didn’t go to the wedding – something intervened – but I needn’t have worried, because Normal told me about it later.