Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  When I said nothing, he rapped hard on the window so that the glass boomed and the three robins flew away.

  ‘Thick as two short planks,’ he said.

  How could I explain Sankey to him? I couldn’t explain him to myself.

  ‘I really only came to say goodbye,’ I said. ‘And thank you.’

  He looked at his watch. He sighed.

  ‘I’m expecting a mechanical digger. I thought I heard it a moment ago, but I can’t see anything.’ He arranged much of what he said around the hinge of that ‘but’. You saw it had been a hinge in his life – or if not exactly that, then an articulation of his way of understanding or ordering his life. ‘We’re having the drive dug up. It was the wrong day for it, I suppose. Anyway, he won’t come until tomorrow now.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  For some reason I was thinking of the New Year’s do at Mick’s house on Cooper Lane. Towards the end of the evening, they played a memory game, which a woman with very fat legs began by chanting the refrain, ‘I went to market and I bought a cow.’ Each player had to repeat correctly what the previous players had bought, and add something new to the list. It took a surprisingly long time to play. The women were better at it than the men: at midnight three of them were forced to call it a draw, and by then the list ran to forty-five items, including a pig, a sheep, a new TV, a notebook (‘memory book’), a videotape of the latest Dallas episode, and a cassowary. Accuracy was not enforced, except in order. Longer items were ruthlessly compacted or simplified. ‘Some scarlet beads’ rapidly became ‘beads’; other compressions were ‘Dallas tape’ and for ‘partridge in a pear tree’, ‘partridge’. ‘Cassowary’ suffered several modifications both accidental and deliberate, becoming ‘casserole’ and even ‘cashmere sweater’, to considerable laughter. Many of the purchases were hit upon only after thought, or a glance round the room; others were clearly designed to reveal the preoccupations of the player, as in ‘fitted kitchen’ or ‘a new climbing rope’.

  There was a lot of good-natured teasing of the men, who often couldn’t think of a word to add; and especially of Sankey, who seemed unable to remember the other words either. Once or twice before they allowed him to drop out of the game I saw his eyes go quite blank with anger as he looked at one or another of the older women. Later he explained, ‘I weren’t letting on, kid, but I felt right ill. Right bad.’ But to me he had looked like someone waking up suddenly and wondering how he came to be where he was.

  THIRTEEN

  Keeping Hold

  I kept a record, or at any rate a list, of the climbs I was doing, in an old-fashioned foolscap account book with black covers and a spine of discoloured red cloth. Its pages were yellow and grubby at the edges and I had mended it repeatedly with Sellotape which was itself now yellowed and cracked. Each climb was entered in red ink, with the date and a few coded details – a small black cross, for instance, meant that I had taken a fall while leading; an asterisk that I had been forced to climb back down the pitch for a rest before continuing; and so on. I would record only climbs I had never done before, and only those above a certain grade of difficulty, according to whether I was leading, seconding or soloing.

  A record of this type contains and scaffolds the whole climbing experience: most climbers keep one. They will add in details of the weather that day; who they were climbing with; and perhaps footage, so that they can tell you at the drop of a hat how far they climbed in a particular year or on a particular holiday. If they climb habitually at the harder – the Extreme – grades, they count ‘E points’ and total them up at the end of the season. Some write a proper journal. Normal’s was a box of colour transparencies. Mick stuck postcards in his, or drew a little cartoon figure of himself which looked a bit like a duck in friction boots. Out of its mouth would come a speech bubble saying, ‘Oh fuck, no holds!’ or, ‘A crock of shit in every pocket.’

  You come home with stiff hands on an evening in early autumn and, after you have made a cup of instant coffee, sit by the electric fire dividing pages into columns with a pencil and a ruler, looking up grades in guidebooks, translating from metres to feet. Experience is not quantifiable in these terms: that much is evident. Outside it has begun to rain or a frost is setting in, and all you have done by the time you put your pen down is add another inch or two to a list the only purpose of which is the satisfaction you feel in making it. Despite that, though, when you close your eyes you can still see one of those blackened, polyp-like gritstone flakes which sound so fragile and undependable when you tap them. You can feel your fingers curl round it, preparatory to committing your whole weight there.

  ‘What’s this one like?’ someone calls softly from the ground.

  ‘All right, if you’re a contortionist.’

  ‘Is it any good, that flake?’

  You laugh.

  ‘It’s like a Jacob’s Cream Cracker up here. Best watch the rope.’

  In addition to keeping his log book, Bob Almanac saved the plastic tubs in which soft ice cream is sold. He would wash them carefully in warm water, then steam off the bright paper labels. Afterwards he used them as sandwich boxes. He kept his first aid kit in one. They were piled above the fridge in the kitchen of his house in Scholes, packed with muesli, wheat bran and decaffeinated coffee, which his wife bought in bulk. ‘It’s cheaper than Tupperware,’ he joked repeatedly. He also collected 35mm film containers, and the smaller tubs you buy vitamin pills in: these he used to store waterproof matches, a sewing kit, little tabs of Meta fuel for a stove he no longer took out with him. They were all labelled. It was convenient if you did a lot of camping.

  Mick, who teased Bob unmercifully about his habit, wouldn’t throw anything away. He kept all his worn-out climbing equipment in a big wooden tool-chest in his bedroom, squeezed between the wardrobe and the window, at the end of the divan bed with its home-made duvet cover. Some of the boots he had in there were so far out at the toes that not only had the rubber gone, but the suede too, so that they were down to the cardboard liner, which was a rancid tobacco colour. Others he had decorated. The rainbow patterns which had swirled so magically round the ankles and over the instep when he bought them (making his feet feel light and accurate, unable to make a bad choice) were by now ghostly, disjointed, unhelpful. They were tangled up with hanks of frayed and faded nylon tape, chains of corroded alloy snap-links with bent and broken gates, sheaves of outdated wire wedges worn into shapes like pebbles in a stream: so that if you pulled one item out everything else came with it, fatally intricated, and the room was full of a strong damp smell compounded of butyl rubber and chalk, dust and sweat. And Mick, smelling this, was thrown back by it like a shaman into some previous life, and boasted:

  ‘I’ve got stuff here going back to when I were seventeen. Pick anything, I’ll tell you a route I’ve done wi’ it. Go on.’

  He knew a lad called Malc, who was a climber but whose first love was motorcycling. Malc had spent two years rebuilding a Kawasaki 1000z; and during this period he had replaced every nut and bolt of the machine with its equivalent in stainless steel. ‘Corrosion,’ Malc would warn you. ‘That’s the problem with a bike, especially in winter. It’s the salt. The salt they put down.’ To counter this he had had the Kawa’s entire exhaust system copied and replaced, also in stainless steel, by a firm in Devon. ‘I like stainless steel. I like the look of it. But it makes engineering sense too,’ he would qualify the point; and, staring hard at you to emphasise this: ‘Because they make the troughs in piss-houses out of it, and it doesn’t corrode.’

  In the north, a route you haven’t done before is called a ‘tick’.

  ‘Right Unconquerable?’ you will hear young climbers say, with a mixture of affection and scorn. ‘I ticked that when I were still a nipper. Two year ago.’

  FOURTEEN

  Victims of Love

  Cut a nylon rope and fray it out. Often there is only a mass of white fibres like a partly opened head of thistledown. But sometimes it will be full of dar
k glorious reds and blues, as if you had cut into a sparrow only to find beneath its skin the colours of the macaw –

  A little girl from Meltham went to bring her pet goat in one evening and didn’t come back. Eight hours later, in total darkness, the team was working the deep black troughs that feed Muddy Brook, plodding conscientiously but without much hope into the grain of the moor, unaware that she had already been found, along with the goat, in a barn two fields away from her home. Communications were shot that night, they were forced to admit. At three a.m., unable to get instructions, an ATL called Daniels reorganised his line and began combing the slopes immediately above and below the big walls at Shooter’s Nab quarry. His lads were still searching at dawn; they couldn’t let it go. ‘Which was worse?’ he asked us afterwards: ‘If she’d walked off the top hours since, and we were somehow missing her; or if she were going to walk off in the next ten minutes and we were the only people who could stop her?’

  ‘It were a full panel do, too,’ Mick added. ‘Teams from as far north as Ambleside. Must ’ave bin near two hundred of us stumbling about out there. Only real danger to anyone was the fucking goat.’

  Two weeks later they were on the other side of the A653, looking for a fifty-year-old Hyde man who had abandoned his Cavalier in the lay-by where the Pennine Way crosses the road. By the time the police had got them started, rain had been sweeping horizontally across the moor for hours. Luck or common sense led them to the little triangle of oakwood north of Reap Hill Clough. Rain, night, steep wet wooded ground: atrocious conditions for a close-country search. Soaked to the skin under neoprene waterproofs like portable steam baths, they called it off in the small hours, then went back at eight. It was still raining. Mick’s line, end-stopped against a narrow stream to limit the search area, pushed through the wet mist and found him curled up like a baby in some undergrowth. He had wormed his way back into it as far as possible. He had hypothermia, but they got him into a fibre-pile casualty-bag and began turning him round with a combination of body heat and warm air from ‘the Dragon’. The valley papers ran it under the headline LOCAL RESCUE UNIT IN ‘LIFE OR DEATH’ SEARCH.

  Mick could only laugh.

  ‘It were more death than life, that one,’ he said. ‘Poor sod wasn’t best pleased wi’ us when he woke up in hospital. He’d been trying to kill ’is self since March.’

  September is the month for suicides to make their shy, determined way on to the moor. Many of them come from the big industrial towns up there, and – unable to face another winter of domestic squabbling, or pain, or unemployment, or making do – define by their deaths and disappearances two corridors, one each side of the Pennines, from North Staffs all the way up to the Trough of Bowland. Clutching their bottles of prescribed Mogadon they look for high car-parks, unfrequented paths, the shores of lonely reservoirs. Near Embsay a woman hanged herself with her own tights; she had walked out of an £80,000 house in Skipton after a row with her married daughter. Bob Almanac found her. Later in the month, called to woodland above Hebden for the second time that year to look for the same missing primary school teacher from Halifax, he caught himself crawling on all fours through dense undergrowth, knowing that if he came upon the six-month-old corpse it would be face to face.

  ‘I didn’t fancy that,’ said Bob, ‘but as it turned out the bloke wasn’t there anyway. He’s probably been living it up in Oldham since he vanished.’

  ‘Oldham?’

  ‘You know. Home of the tubular bandage.’

  ‘Who the fuck would want to live in Oldham?’

  By September, summer is all doomed awareness of itself. Petty whin flares on the West Penwith headlands like a signal out to sea; scarlet pimpernel hides in the neat turf of the Pembroke coastal ranges (where at night artillery fire sounds across St Govan’s Head like doors banging in some row between educated but childish married people). Flowers are everywhere: but there is a perceptible drop in temperature too, a sudden sharpness and clarity of the air, especially in the morning. The climbers feel this and drive south. They stop climbing suddenly and stare out to sea until their eyes water with the glare: there! A seal, staring back! But a mist comes in after an hour or two and for the rest of the weekend the crags are clagged-in and eerie, and every clink of equipment against the rock seems amplified and meaningful.

  Sunshine, adrenalin, butyl rubber: magic fuels and magic boots.

  It slips away at this end of the year, and you lurch after it, route by route, the summer’s sense of endless flight.

  In Trowbarrow Quarry a boy from Lancaster panicked above the crux of quite an easy route called Touch of Class and fell with a groan of fear backwards on to zinc grey boulders the size of a commercial refrigerator. By the time Mick and his girlfriend had got down off their climb and over to the boulders to help him, he was sprawled out staring vaguely at the clouds. CSF was coming down his nose, and Mick easily found the open wound above and behind his left ear. He smiled at Mick. ‘Have I done the route?’ he asked. He seemed to collect himself for a second, then he was off somewhere staring at the sky again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I know I’m not making sense.’ Mick ran off to phone for an ambulance. While he was gone, the injured boy laughed and talked to Mick’s girlfriend, who was thirty years old and kept looking away from him and crying as silently as she could. Earlier that summer she had come off some stupid friable traverse in Anglezarke Quarry not far from Trowbarrow down the M6, the runners popping one by one as she hit them, so that she fell fifty feet in quick ten-foot increments, the tiniest jerky little pause between each one, until she was hanging head-down perhaps seven inches off the ground.

  ‘This must be boring for you,’ the boy said.

  He knew something was wrong with him. Fluid was coming out of his ears as well as his nose, and he had both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He would talk happily for a few minutes about his home or his job. (He was a technician at Windscale reprocessing plant. ‘It’s as clean as a whistle in there,’ he kept promising Mick’s girlfriend. ‘I know you won’t believe me but we keep it as clean as a whistle.’) Then he would look over at the main wall, where Jean Jeanie and Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide run aimlessly up like cracks in the side of a house, and say suddenly, ‘What am I doing here?’ A weak laugh. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to tell me again: have I done the route already, or what? I’m not quite clear about that still.’

  ‘ ’Is brains might as well ’ave been in a bag,’ Mick told me a few afternoons later. We were sitting in the front room at Cooper Lane, watching TV with the sound turned down. From the set I could hear faint, tinny Australian voices; outside, someone was washing a car. Mick’s mum had gone out: to demonstrate his independence Mick had made us some instant coffee. ‘Thing is, he’d bin on that route before, and failed on it.’ Psyched-out but determined, the boy had returned with equipment bought especially to protect him through the difficulties; but had failed to place it. ‘To my mind,’ Mick explained, ‘he never really expected to get that far. He knew the route were too ’ard for him. So he didn’t know how to go on. It always shakes you when that ’appens: you start seeing difficulties where there aren’t any.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, that’s the only way I can think he’d fall after the crux.’

  ‘Where was his second all this time?’

  ‘God knows. Went off for an ambulance before we got there, couldn’t find a phone.’ He thought. ‘It were never really on,’ he decided. ‘He were a thin lad, the one as fell, middling tall, wi’ blond hair. Not very good. You’ll ’ave seen him about.’

  I asked Mick how his girlfriend had coped.

  ‘She did well,’ he admitted. ‘We went out for a pizza afterwards.’ He winked at me. ‘Wi’out anchovies.’

  Islands of consciousness, victims of love. In September and early October you have the illusion that the year has become confused. For a while, at least, it will slip past itself in two opposite streams. On the clifftops above Mowing Word or the Great Zawn, the tourists are zipping up
their coats and going home early, and every low, tangled thicket of hawthorn is covered with bright red berries. But down on the wave-washed platforms below you can still be stunned into immobility by the summer sun. Because of this, your dreams persist.

  ‘He’d been wearing a helmet all morning, but it made his head itch so he took it off. It’s a fucking war out there this year.’

  After a pause Mick changed the subject.

  ‘Normal still not speaking to me then?’ he said.

  ‘You might well ask, Mick.’

  After Sankey’s funeral most of the climbers had caught the six o’clock train home. They would be expected to work the next morning. But Normal – still on the dole – and Mick, who claimed he just didn’t care, had decided to go out for a meal instead. ‘You’re only in London once, after all,’ was Mick’s conclusion. Both of them had been drinking steadily since we left Sankey’s sister’s house. ‘They won’t do much wi’out me anyway. It’s me as holds keys to Land Rover.’ When we came out of the Pizza Hut on Oxford Street there was an hour to wait for the next train. Pricing video recorders along the Tottenham Court Road, we drifted into King’s Cross where it leans up against Camden at the bottom of St Pancras Way; and then into Camden proper. There, the walls were black with rain, and after a squabble I couldn’t quite understand, Mick pushed Normal down a basement area.

  ‘He’s been asking for it,’ Mick told me.

  He hung over the railings and shouted at Normal, ‘I don’t give a fuck about any of that. Sankey were a good bloke.’

  Normal, on his hands and knees among the area rubbish, looked round and groaned helplessly.

  ‘He’ll spew up now,’ Mick announced in disgust. ‘I bet he spews up.’ He laughed. ‘Go on, you fucker, spew your heart up!’