Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  ‘You should have been there,’ he said. ‘All the lads were there. What a send-off! And after they’d gone we went over to Running Hill Pits in Sankey’s car and climbed a route. In our penguin suits!’

  He showed me a photograph he had taken of Sankey nearing the top of a climb called Plum Line, in a hired morning suit and polished black shoes. From what I could make out Sankey had tied on to the rope with a couple of turns round his waist. His face was a white smear. Runners hung out of his trouser pockets.

  ‘We were pissed out of our minds!’

  Normal shook his head reminiscently as I leafed through the rest of the prints. They were all blurred: Gaz, with an appalled grin like an expressionist self-portrait, standing as if he had one leg shorter than the other; Normal himself, holding up a glass of beer and a chalk bag; someone I didn’t recognise looking back over his shoulder as he came out of a door marked ‘Men’.

  ‘We shook chalk over them instead of rice. We were well pissed!’

  ‘You didn’t take any of his wife,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have seen her.’

  ‘She’s very nice,’ said Normal sentimentally. ‘Very nice. They went to the Isle of Man, she’ll enjoy that.’

  That night Sankey rang me up.

  ‘I wondered if you were going out with Normal in the week?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. ‘You know Normal.’

  ‘Only that I thought we could go to Millstone,’ he said cautiously, ‘and do Time for Tea. If you feel like it. If you’ve got nothing else on.’

  I lost touch with Gaz, although I had a postcard from him on his honeymoon at Douglas, and another one about six months later from the Verdon Gorge in Provence, which said in deeply indented block letters, WELL HERE WE ARE IN VERDON, WEATHER IS WICKED KEEPS SNOWING, HARRY & DAVE GOT BENIGHTED 300FT FROM THE TOP THEY HAD TO SLEEP IN A TREE THE FIRST DAY. THE ROCK IS INCREDIBLE POSTCARD DOESN’T DO IT JUSTICE. SEE YOU GAZ. (I didn’t know who Harry and Dave were but the Défile des Cavaliers, with its luxuriant vegetation and slightly pink limestone, looked nice: it might have been Symonds Yat, or Trow Gill in Yorkshire, but I suppose that was an effect of scale.)

  I met him again by accident in Lodge’s supermarket one Saturday morning about three years after the wedding. He didn’t seem to have changed. His wife was with him, a short girl in dungarees, with one breast noticeably larger than the other and long hair which she pushed back continually from her face. She put her arms round his waist from behind and rubbed her cheek against his back. They had a toddler which sat in its pushchair watching them silently.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Gaz said to me. ‘I’ll always remember you leading that – what was it! – Wall of Horrors. Wall of Horrors, what a name! Poiky stuff!’

  ‘That was Sankey,’ I reminded him. For some reason I felt flattered anyway. ‘Wall of Horrors is a big strong for me.’

  ‘You don’t want to do yourself down,’ Gaz told me. ‘You were always a good climber. You just needed that bit of steadiness.’

  After they had done their shopping, they said, why didn’t we go upstairs where you could have a cup of tea? That was what they usually did. Gaz paid, and his wife insisted we have cakes. They gave the little boy a drink of something bright red, but he couldn’t seem to manage the glass well, and he didn’t take much interest in it. He seemed bemused. The clatter, the steam, the Saturday-morning laughter made him blink. Gaz looked out of the window at the phone boxes in the square. ‘Same old place,’ he said with his typical grin. He still worked at the butcher’s: I wouldn’t have seen him there because he still worked in the back. He winked. ‘Still fetching the green tags out!’

  When I thanked him for his postcard he said, ‘Verdon! Oh it was fucking great. Thousands of feet of limestone, 5b and 5c pitches all the way. Ron Fawcett had just been there, freeing a bolt ladder seven hundred feet up: it went at 7b, so they all said. 7b! Can you believe that as a grade? I can’t. Dave was so freaked out he couldn’t even second some of the pitches. We had to pull him up on the rope like a sack: he didn’t know how to prusik!’ He laughed and pushed his cup away. ‘Six run-outs of 6a, and no dinner all day, then you have to lead at 7b! Fucking appalling!’

  A waitress came over and said to his wife, ‘I forgot to give you a spoon for your tart, love.’

  Gaz stared uncomprehendingly after her as she walked off. ‘Fucking bazzing!’ he said less certainly, as if he remembered his enthusiasm but had forgotten what he was talking about. He got up to fetch us all another cup of tea. Over the noise of the woman at the next table his wife said, ‘I always tell him I wish he’d go out climbing more. He does love it. But he likes to be with the kiddy at weekends. They do, don’t they?’

  The child was a sad little thing. Its hair stood on end, much like Gaz’s, and it was hard to tell whether it would smile at you or cry. When she saw me trying to attract its attention she said complacently, ‘Tired out, the poor little mite.’ She chuckled. ‘He gave me a fright this morning,’ she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice. ‘You’ll never believe what he did.’ She had got up, she told me, at five in the morning, to find that it had stuck Elastoplast dressings on the limbs of its soft toys and immured them in the nine-inch gap between the double glazing panes. ‘I don’t know what he thought he was doing, do you?’ She offered the child its drink, and it stared at her.

  ‘Mind you,’ she went on, ‘don’t you find you’re so pleased at what you’ve got that you don’t really care how they turn out? I mean, if he’s just average that’ll suit me. People tell me he should be taking a bit more notice now, but I say you’re only a kiddy once, aren’t you? Let him be a kiddy for a bit, eh?’

  Over her shoulder I could see the phone boxes in the square. Up on the steeply terraced streets above them a man had locked himself out of his house. He walked to and fro outside it for a minute or two, threw himself violently against the front door. Nothing. He knocked on a neighbouring door. Nothing there. He looked round warily then flung himself at his own front door again. He was so far away that everything he did had a kind of jerky, miniaturised savagery and motivelessness. Eventually he walked off rubbing his shoulder. A few spots of rain came down.

  ‘I haven’t got any of my own,’ I said.

  EIGHT

  Getting Out

  Before his marriage I often called for Gaz at the back door of the butcher’s, at quarter past twelve, dinner time. All I ever saw in there was a dozen large pork pies neatly stacked in wire delivery trays; someone’s racing bike propped up against a spotless wall. Gaz liked you to think his job was a bloodbath, but if you asked, ‘What do you actually do in there?’ he would only wink and – flicking a cube of raw meat, dark red and speckled with yellow sawdust, off his jeans – grumble, ‘Bugger all most days. Mind you, I bust one of the machines this morning.’

  I wanted to know what the hooks in the ceiling were for. They slid on rails and looked as if they would bear quite heavy loads. He scratched his head. ‘Oh, this and that. Generally we hang stuff from them.’

  Staring into the pet-shop window at a sort of expanding plastic maze he said, ‘Me sister’s got one of those. I never see what she keeps in it. It’s always asleep when I get home. I know she keeps something in it but I’ve never seen it.’ And then, looking slyly at me, ‘I wonder if you can eat it—?’ Whatever he did at the butcher’s was only tenable as a nightmare – sheep’s eyes in the beer, plastic tags slit from lambs’ ears, quartered hamsters. With an unguarded comment he might show it up, to himself as much as anybody, as boredom and drudgery. ‘I’ve gone right through these clogs. I’ll have to get new,’ he said as we sat on a bench in the sun. He unwrapped his sandwiches and opened one. ‘Fucking hell. Banana again.’

  Bob Almanac, oddly enough, was a teacher.

  He taught at a comprehensive in Lockwood and already had a smattering of Urdu. ‘I only went into it for the long holidays. In the Sixties everyone wanted you to have a career. That was the big thing then, a career.’ He enj
oyed reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids; one or two of them seemed interested. At college he had grown his hair down to his shoulders. It was hard for him to understand why they wanted theirs short, or why they fought with such insistent brutality among themselves. ‘Kids’ll always fight, I know that. But this seems so systematic.’ He said he sometimes found himself bellowing at children in the street, ‘I’ll sort you out if you keep on doing that!’ It was out of proportion.

  A climber called Mick had a job at the pipeworks, a sixty-acre desert over towards the M62, tunnel kilns buried in the hillside like air-raid shelters, chimneys against the sky, stack after stack of earthenware pipes in the rain. Bleak-looking houses had been built at the edge of it according to some patent system from the Fifties, not even of local stone. All day he smashed up faulty pipes with a spade, or swept the factory floors. When he got bored he tinkered with the sweeping machine until its performance grew erratic; he fell off it and broke his thumb. Sometimes when he had nothing to do at all he would fill a wheelbarrow with clay and pour water on it, then spend the afternoon throwing fragments of pipe into the mud, dreaming over a kind of miniature, internalised Passchendaele. When they gave him one of the bigger pipes to break up he kept it back until he thought of a new way of doing it; sometimes he saved it all day. He might, if no one was looking, run the sweeping machine into it, or trundle it into a pile of other pipes.’ ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I karate-kicked one of the cunts into six pieces.’ He nodded. ‘Six fucking pieces,’ he repeated, giving every word a heavy emphasis. ‘What do you think of that?’

  The pipeworks had won some annual award to industry (‘The fuckers ’ave invented a straight pipe,’ Mick told us) and his supervisor said to him: ‘Give it a really good do, Mick, then vanish. You know. Go behind a machine. We want the visitors to think it’s always this clean.’

  ‘I knew it were that as soon as he opened his mouth,’ Mick claimed with deep satisfaction. ‘I knew it were going to be that the second he opened it. Good enough to sweep the cunting floors but not to meet the cunting Royals. What a crock of shit.’

  He was an assistant team-leader in the local mountain rescue.

  After school he had gone directly into an apprenticeship as a garage mechanic. Within seven months the garage had bankrupted itself and no one else would take an apprentice on. ‘They were all shit-scared of going bump themselves by then. Everyone were going down like ninepins.’ Whenever we went past the pipeworks in someone else’s car, Mick would scream and fart and make machine-gun noises, writhing about in the back seat to indicate hits. ‘My apprenticeship. What a fucking crock of shit that was.’

  Besides working on the railway and in High Adventure, Normal had been what he called a ‘silver service’ waiter. He hadn’t lasted long at it, he admitted; though when he wanted to he could take on an impressively servile tone.

  Climbing, Bob Almanac believed, had it in common with escapology that while its dangers were artificial they were perfectly real. The hinge between the game and its consequences was an act of choice. You were not compelled by the circumstances of an ordinary life to accept the straitjacket, the lengths of stainless steel chain or the padlocked sack: but once you had, and they had shut the coffin lid on you and dropped you in the River Thames, there was only your own technique and nerve between you and suffocation.

  ‘The river’s as real as you like,’ he would repeat with a shiver. ‘As real as you like. I admire those blokes. I do.’

  He didn’t think it had anything in common with Russian roulette.

  Saturday night above the Milnsbridge Liberal Club: a bar and disco in three rooms papered with neutral wood-chip. Though they had the windows wide, and fire-extinguishers propping the doors open, the air was still hot; it had a thick powdery taste of perfumes and deodorant. Some fat women were sitting in a line in the middle of the floor making boat-rowing motions and singing along with the disco, ‘hang on, hang on to what we’ve got,’ while their youngest – boys awkward in brand-new jeans, spoiled girls wearing orange lipstick and white dresses which made their skinny shoulders look for a moment mature and creamy in the dim light – watched in furious silence from tables pushed back to the walls.

  ‘It’s only a bit of a do,’ Mick from the pipeworks explained to me: a bit of fund-raising for the rescue team. ‘Most of them are here now, you can see them stood at the bar.’ They’d dance with their wives if the shop-talk faltered, otherwise it was Dark Mild and the Bell stretcher. ‘Oh, and it’s Paul’s twenty-first, too. His mum’s here. Nice trousers Paul. Nice shirt.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Paul’s mum helped us out with the caterer’s.’

  Paul was showing off to some of his cousins, who had come over from Barnsley in a Ford Escort. ‘It only makes sense to get your casualty down,’ he advised them in a loud voice. ‘OK, so he’s got a broken back. So what? You might make it worse. You might kill him. But how can anyone even put a bandage to him if he’s hanging off a rope?’

  He saw the rest of the team looking on ironically.

  ‘You wouldn’t bandage a broken back of course,’ he said.

  There was a silence, into which he laughed rather wildly.

  To help him out, Mick, very much the team-leader, said, ‘I can see the sense in that.’ Then he shrugged and gave a wide grin. ‘But look Paul, if you keep your mouth shut we shan’t have fuckers falling down it all the time, shall we?’ During the laughter at this – in which Paul joined – Mick went out to dance. The fat women wouldn’t have anything to do with him, so he capered about on his own for a bit, heaving and dragging himself across the floor like a sack of coal, eyes inturned, forehead dripping, feet thudding and banging arhythmically. When he came back he said, ‘This is why people generally get pissed at these affairs. Nowt else to do.’

  He hit himself on the forehead.

  ‘Oh fuck, I’ve got me MRC Syllabus coming up tomorrow. Why didn’t anyone remind me? Ask me summat, for Christ’s sake! No wait, I know. Paradoxical respiration! Only occurs from a flail segment of rib. You can’t – no don’t tell me, you dozy crock of shit! – you can’t stop it going in, so stop it going out. OK? Right. Now, in classic pneumothorax . . . no, tension pneumothorax . . .’

  He shook his head impatiently.

  ‘I’ve forgotten that fucker’s name,’ he admitted. ‘Anyway, your heart and everything get pushed into your other lung . . . Treatment: avoid morphine and bang a wide-bore hypodermic needle straight into the pumped-up lung: you can control the air-flow with the end of your finger.’

  ‘What about mediastinal flap?’ someone suggested to him.

  He was puzzled for a minute. ‘Now that’s nearly the same,’ he said. He thought. ‘But you’ll get that with penetrating wounds,’ he remembered triumphantly. ‘An ice axe or summat. That’s the example they always give. Some incompetent fucker falls on his ice axe, you see, at the top of Market Street . . . Where’s the bog here?’

  He wandered off to find it.

  Sankey, who had once been on the team himself, laughed. ‘He’ll drink fourteen pints of beer now and wonder why he can’t remember anything in the morning. He was an idiot even before they got him in the pipeworks.’

  ‘Will he pass the exam?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh aye, kid. He’ll pass it.’

  ‘Bowel sounds’ll be the same whether it’s spleen or liver,’ I heard someone point out. ‘They both give diminished or absent bowel sounds.’

  Sankey told me about a friend of his who had had a steel plate put in his leg as a result of a skiing accident. When he fell off a climb a year or two after the operation he smashed his ankle to a pulp.

  ‘The plate’s rigid, you see,’ Sankey explained, ‘so your leg has to give somewhere else. He packed it in after that.’ He was silent for a moment, then he added:

  ‘He can still walk a bit.’

  Later on, to get away from the disco, Sankey, Mick and I went next door, where the caterers had the food spread out on folding tables. Th
ere wasn’t much left now, and they were beginning to pack it up, but among the bits of pinkish ham and half-empty trifle cases, Mick found some little cakes iced in pastel colours – violet, yellow, a strange luminous green – and decorated with bits of crystallised peel. While we were eating them Paul’s mother, who was about fifty, walked in tiredly, sighed, and sat down to look at the cars parked solid along the street. ‘There’s no air in here,’ she said, as if she was talking to an empty room. After a minute or two she blew her nose, patted her hair. ‘I can see you two gannets are enjoying yourselves in the usual way,’ she said to Mick and Sankey. Mick went over to her.

  ‘Are yer all right?’

  ‘Aye, I am, but I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised.’

  ‘I’m phoning them up in the morning. I just haven’t been satisfied.’

  She went out and came back again with a florist’s bouquet wrapped in cellophane. It looked like one of the cakes.

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  Sankey wanted to know if I was getting out much with Normal. Because – giving me an oblique look – if I wasn’t he could easily start picking me up at weekends. There was plenty of room in the back of the van. ‘If you weren’t getting out, kid, only if you weren’t getting out.’ It would split the cost of the petrol, too.

  ‘I can see the sense of that.’

  NINE

  Wives

  In fact, I wasn’t getting out much with Normal.

  During May and June the weather had improved steadily. Along the edges of the gritstone moor, clematis grew on every cottage, insects hummed in the laburnum. As soon as the flowering cherry was finished, ornamental broom and rowan began pouring across the lawns a scent sometimes so strong and confectionery it overpowered itself, like jasmine in a closed room. You knew you could smell something but not what it was. At six in the morning the villages were already lapped in hot brilliant air. By afternoon the limestone crags further south burned above their steep little valleys with the luminosity of exposed bone. Beneath them masses of hawthorn blossom were piled up like exotic buttercream, from which streamed downwind vanilla and corruption intertwined; and on the gently curving slopes above, a bewildering variety of flowers none of us could name. In the evenings the rock seemed to sweat from inside. As it grew dark the lupins in front of Sankey’s house gave off like tall translucent candles a perfume so delicate it might have been mistaken for a faint white light.