Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  ‘Bloody hell, Sankey, what a place!’

  He climbed in these Daliesque zones all morning, slowly adapting to them until he could pull fluidly from one ear to the next, trying out harder and harder moves. At noon when he stood on the slopes above the crag, a long ripple seemed to cross the valley, as if its image was wavering in the hot clear air. Long grasses streamed in the wind. The sheep cropped unconcernedly, then moved a few paces on.

  ‘What a place!’

  Earlier in the day, at Birch Services on the M62, he had bought a can of Coke. He was looking forward to a drink from it: but a couple of sips coated his mouth like raw syrup. Then, reaching for something else, he knocked the can over. He forgot it with a shrug; ate his sandwiches; and – to give his muscles something different to do before he started climbing again – wandered off up the valley with the guidebook. ‘There’s one or two other good spots around there, kid,’ Sankey had told him: ‘If you can just find them.’ All Bob found was a line of overgrown boulders. When, perhaps half an hour later, still thirsty, he returned to the Coke can to see if there was any left, a dozen half-dead wasps were crawling laboriously around inside it. Bob let out a shout of surprise. One of them had touched the inside of his bottom lip as he tilted his head back to drink.

  SEVENTEEN

  Death on a Teacake

  ‘I was nearly sick,’ he told us when he got home. ‘I looked in and there they were, flopping about in half an inch of the thing they most desired.’ He used this phrase repeatedly all evening – as though he had been considering it ever since:

  ‘The thing they most desired.’

  ‘So what did you do with them then?’ Mick asked interestedly. ‘Kill ’em, or what?’

  We were sitting with Bob and David the fireman in the lounge of the Farmer’s Arms. David was often there, with his best jacket on and his silver snooker-player’s hair combed back. he liked it because on a Sunday night there were always two girls serving at the bar. They wore dresses designed to slip down off the shoulder: one girl was tugging hers back into place every time she reached up for the spirit optics; before she could achieve the same effect, David observed, the other had covertly to pull hers off. A few local boys stood at the bar with bottles of foreign beer, staring emptily at this performance and talking about cars.

  Bob Almanac shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he admitted. He drank some of his Tetley’s.

  In the end, he said, he had tipped the wasps carefully on to a rock: there, they writhed helplessly over one another like newborn puppies or kittens. ‘At first they were stuck to one another. I couldn’t stop watching, I was so disgusted.’ Five minutes later they had pulled apart and a few of the stronger ones were flying away, yawing groggily off into the bracken: the others seemed less likely to survive. ‘I’ve never seen insects so pissed!’ Other wasps were soon arriving to drink from the spilled Coke. Such a mêlée developed that Bob found it hard to tell what was going on: but in the end only one of the original dozen was left, walking round and round in circles or grooming its antennae with its forelegs in an increasingly confused fashion.

  ‘What happened to that one?’ we wanted to know.

  ‘I’ve no idea. It didn’t look well. But half the Newcastle Mountaineering Club had suddenly decided to have their Saturday afternoon outing at that particular crag. As soon as I heard them coming through the woods I packed up and left. God knows why Sankey thought it was quiet. It’s a great place though, if you’re into ears!’

  ‘Ears!’ said David the fireman scornfully.

  Voices in a pub can recede so abruptly and become so meaningless that you think you are dreaming. People stare comfortably into their glasses. The pub cat goes to sleep on the bench close to you; looks up nervily when they drop something behind the bar; turns round twice and sleeps again.

  ‘That cat’s breathing far too fast,’ Mick said. ‘Pant, pant, pant, just look at it.’

  Behind him one woman was telling another, ‘I get quite passionate about being wrong – I mean really passionate: I hate it!’, firmly italicising ‘passionate’, ‘really’, ‘hate’.

  Mick grinned contemptuously.

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t drink in the Public,’ he announced to the room at large. Then he asked us: ‘What would you do if you had money?’ He looked round the table. ‘Eh? Just as a matter of interest.’

  ‘I wouldn’t piss it away every night the way you do,’ David told him.

  ‘Look who’s talking. Look who’s fucking talking!’

  Mick got up and put his Helly jacket on. ‘I’m fucking off home,’ he said.

  ‘Be like that then.’

  ‘It was only a joke, Mick,’ Bob explained.

  ‘It’s half past ten,’ said Mick. ‘I’ve to mek a phone call anyway.’

  He was always on the phone, people began to complain. Whenever you needed him he was in the middle of some tale, talking to someone you didn’t know about someone else you didn’t know:

  ‘They’d bin to the Bradford Wall, see. They always go for a curry afterwards apparently, I don’t know where, in some cellar next door to Bradford City mortuary if you hear them tell it. Oh aye, it’s a good spot, or so they say: only one pound fifty for spinach and dal and three chapatis.’

  A momentary expression of greed would cross his features.

  ‘But listen, listen! They wanted something to drink, you see, so they asked what there was. “Special tea,” the bloke says. “What’s that?” they ask. “Tea wi’ milk,” he says. It sounded all right, so they thought they’d ’ave that. But listen – no, listen – when it came it were a cup each of sterilised milk, lukewarm, wi’ a teabag in it—!’

  You’d hear some tinny laughter at the other end of the phone, and then Mick would say:

  ‘Oh aye, they’re all going to work for him. Denny Morgan and all that lot from up at Pigshit Quarry, the whole Halifax team. I ’ad it from that bloke who says “heavy duty” all the time. I forget his name. What? You know who I mean. “Heavy duty, heavy duty,” he says it all the time. Aye, well: I’ll keep you posted. Right. Cheerio.’

  One morning I heard his mum shout from the kitchen, ‘When are you ever going to think about my telephone bill?’

  Mick put the handset down and went over to the stereo. ‘Watch this,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll get a bollocking for this now, just wait.’ He found a tape of Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and put it on so loud that the little red and blue lights on the graphic equaliser jammed solid. His mum came in and roared:

  ‘And you can turn that off too!

  ‘Whatever am I going to do with him?’ she appealed to me. ‘He always used to hate the telephone.’

  His temper was patchy.

  Someone at a rescue-committee meeting had convinced him that you could drop a cat seventy feet on to a concrete floor before it was certain to be killed. As he understood it, this was to do with body weight, air resistance, and the relative strength of bony structures.

  ‘After that height, you see,’ he explained, ‘so many of its bones and organs would be damaged it couldn’t go on. Seventy feet. That’s the splat-height for a cat.’

  He rummaged about in his sandwich box. ‘Hey, look! Ginger cake!’ Chewing steadily, he stared out across the valley through the teeming rain. It was Saturday afternoon. A month or so after Sankey’s death the weather had closed down on us, gales from the south-west wiping out most of October. ‘A doctor told me that,’ Mick said with satisfaction. ‘About the cat. Of course, that doesn’t rule out killing the bugger first time you drop it. It’s just that it isn’t bound to die until that height.’

  It seemed a cruel and unnecessary example to me, and a pointless thing to know.

  ‘What’s the height for a dog?’ I asked.

  ‘He never said.’

  I looked in my own sandwich box, but I had eaten everything.

  ‘He was having you on,’ I said.

  ‘Seventy feet,’ he said, ‘on to a
concrete floor. If it didn’t break its neck straight out. That’s what he told me. They’re tough little sods.’

  We were sitting under the prow of Ravens Tor in Millers Dale. Mick would go anywhere on a wet day rather than face the indoor wall at Odsal Top. He had temporary work on one of the ‘community projects’ that were springing up all over the North. ‘I see enough fucking bricks during the week.’ Water dripped off the huge leaning shield of rock above us, the overhang causing it to fall twenty or thirty feet out. When we arrived we had found the low, shallow cave under the crag full of little piles of half-dried shit and pink tissue paper. No one thought of Ravens Tor as a free-climbing venue in those days. It was nothing like the outdoor gymnasium it has become since. Hikers and tourists used it as a lavatory and the only reason climbers went there was to do an easy aid route called Mecca, the first pitch of which forced its way round the roof of the cave. The second pitch could be done free, but most people aided that as well. Bob Almanac and David were still on it. For some reason they had been there since three o’clock, and now it was gone five. A dull light still fluoresced in the rock where it faced west, but the stars were coming out.

  ‘I can’t mek head or tail of it,’ Mick kept saying irritably. ‘ ’Ave they got summat stuck, or what? It’s only a hundred and thirty feet, that route.’ Every so often he shouted up to them to get a move on; but since he wouldn’t go out into the rain, the whole dull lump of rock absorbed his voice, and they never heard.

  ‘I can’t seem to mek meself understood,’ he would repeat. ‘I can’t seem to mek meself understood at all. Is that Orion up there? No, there, you dozy pillock.’

  He sat back comfortably against his rucksack and sighed. The stink of the River Wye, terminally polluted all the way from Buxton, wafted gently up to us.

  ‘Get a move on up there, you fucking pair of cripples! Any coffee left in your flask, Mike?’

  Bob and David were soaked to the skin. On the way home their clothes filled the car with steam, but Mick complained he was cold, and refused to have the windows open to clear it. Instead he rolled his pullover up for a pillow and fell asleep in the back, as he often did – only to sit up suddenly as the car lurched round some slippery dog-leg on the Strines Road, stare without hope out of the misted-up windscreen at the sodden, leafless trees reeling past in the dark, and say in the voice of someone who has woken up in hell: ‘It’s only forty feet for a human being. You only ’ave to fall forty feet to be sure of major damage.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ argued Bob Almanac. ‘Use your common sense. You’ve seen people walk away from worse.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ said Mick. ‘No I haven’t.’

  He shivered, and seemed to nod off again, with his mouth open.

  David, who was driving, turned round and asked me, ‘I wonder what that noise was?’

  All afternoon at Ravens Tor we had been hearing a deep thud, like an immense door swinging to in the distance, which seemed to resonate through the limestone itself at four- or five-minute intervals. At first we had assumed it was the sound of quarry operations at Stoney Middleton or King Sterndale. ‘Be your age,’ Mick had suggested: ‘Who’s going to be blasting every two and a half minutes?’ Whatever it was, it left a faint impression of itself, a fossil in the rock, the sound of thunder quite a long way away on a July day. Sometimes it seemed to come from up the valley, towards the Angler’s Rest and the B6509, sometimes from Lytton Mill in the other direction. But you never heard it when you were listening for it. Your analysis was always behind the event.

  ‘It’s the winter,’ said Mick sepulchrally.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the winter,’ Mick repeated. ‘Shutting the door on every fucking thing worthwhile.’

  With his eyes closed and his head supported at an odd, broken-necked angle against the offside rear window, he looked dead. He swallowed as if trying to clear his mouth of something.

  ‘So face the fucking front, David, because that’s where the road is, and get us home in one fucking piece. Eh?’

  The cartilage I had damaged the day Sankey fell off White Mare Crag didn’t seem to be any worse, but it didn’t seem to be any better either, and I was still taking Brufen, the anti-inflammatory the doctor had prescribed for it. I had a constant slight headache, a sense of pressure behind the temples which, until one day in November, I had tended to dismiss as the effect of the weather, or of inactivity.

  November is one of the worst months, but even then you can get a day out, as long as you don’t mind a damp feel to the rock. About a week after the debacle at Ravens Tor, Mick decided he wanted to have a look at a route called The Snivelling on Millstone Edge. He took Wednesday off without informing his employers. ‘I’ll be round at ten or eleven,’ he had told me the night before. ‘Give the sun a chance to warm the crag up. No point in freezing us fingers off.’ In fact it was earlier than that when he arrived. I was standing at the back window watching the early mist retreat – thickening as it went – down the slopes of Austonley and Carr Green and into the valley bottom, where it boiled and shifted, startling white in the pale bright sunshine. It was more like a morning in late December, the air sharp and quiet so you could hear distant sounds very clearly. Children shouted in the valley. Traffic ground its way slowly up Holme Moss. All morning, a delivery van had been idling in the road outside my house.

  ‘That thing’s driving me mad,’ I told Mick. ‘Why don’t they switch the engine off? They can’t have been delivering all this time.’

  Mick took off his crash helmet and unwound his scarf. Cold air had poured into the room with him.

  ‘I’ve come on the bike,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve got this stuff on. Hey, it’s a bit nippy out: but bright sun as soon as you gain some height!’ He sat down and scratched his head vigorously. ‘Can I use your phone? I’ve come early to get it over with.’

  As he was searching his pockets for the piece of paper he had written the number on he added, ‘What van? There’s no van out there.’

  I could hear it distinctly. I said:

  ‘You want your eyes testing, Mick.’

  He gave me a weak grin. I could see him wondering how I was having him on. Then he shrugged, heaved himself out of the chair and with his motorcycle leathers creaking lugubriously went to the front door, which he flung open. ‘Come and have a look out here,’ he said patiently. ‘Come on, you daft fucker.’

  The street was empty.

  ‘It’s you wants testing, not me,’ he said simply. ‘Sometimes I can’t mek you out.’

  ‘Why don’t we have a cup of tea before we go?’ I said.

  I could still hear an engine ticking over. As soon as I was certain he wasn’t looking I went out into the garden and threw the Brufen bottle into the dustbin.

  Mick was already on the phone when I got back with the tea.

  ‘She’s like two bricklayers welded together,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, not in her looks so much as in her attitudes.’ He listened for a moment – staring absently at me as if he could see through me to the person at the other end of the line – then started off on another tack. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I had a word with them the other night.’ He nodded and took the cup of tea. ‘Well they were being cagey, but as far as I can mek out it’s a new firm. They intend to specialise in what they call “high level and difficult access engineering”. Eh? Oh well, it’s like abseiling down council flats, things like that. Checking for structural damage. Aye. That sort of thing.’

  There was another pause, quite long; then Mick said:

  ‘OK. OK. Well, let us know if you hear anything, and I’ll do the same.’

  He seemed disappointed. He put the phone down and looked at his tea as though he wondered what it was doing in his hand. ‘Why are we hanging about here, then?’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go and climb some fucking routes.’

  Millstone Edge: a cluster of arêtes like handfuls of flint knives against the sky, ten minutes’ drive from Sheffield.

  As soon
as the quarry was abandoned, thousands of dwarf birches colonised its levels and spoil heaps. From a distance they make a kind of pink-brown smoke in the pale light. Sandy paths wind up and down among them under the crag, maroon and orange, the colours of gritstone earth. Quarrying started here again briefly and illegally in 1983; then someone dumped a car in one of the bays near the Sheffield Road – burned out and upside down among the birches, it looks somehow as sad and vulnerable as a dead animal.

  Further in, morning light strikes obliquely across the very tops of the vertical walls. From the ground this makes them seem like pages turned down in some huge book: but as soon as you get up there, a hundred feet of rope trailing sadly out behind you in the cold wind, you find only dust, great meaningless holes, layers of rotting stone constructed like a cheap chest of drawers –

  ‘If you don’t like it you can always pull it out and throw it away,’ Mick advised me, as I struggled with the last few feet of a climb called Lotto.

  ‘Very funny, Mick. Mick, I can’t do this.’

  ‘Yes you can, you wimp. That’s not the ’ard part. You’ve done the ’ard part.’

  I hauled myself over the top. My legs were shaking.

  ‘Well I’m never doing it again!’

  Mick followed absent mindedly, singing to himself. ‘You’re getting a bit better,’ he admitted at one point. ‘Not much, but a bit.’

  By mid-day the quarry had warmed up, so he went over to the bottom of the Greta Slab and put his magic boots on. Overnight, he had drawn a Union Jack on one of them with red and blue felt-tip pens. He looked at it critically. ‘I wish I ’adn’t done that now. I were bored.’

  The slab was out of the sun; a bit greasy; polished, even along the less popular lines. After fifty or sixty feet it reared up into a dark steep headwall. Mick looked at it doubtfully and shivered. The Snivelling – originally named The Snivelling Shits, after a Punk band of its day – streamed out above him, a series of minute scratches on the rock. He would have to solo it: good protection turns up on that route, but only after the difficulties are over, when you don’t need it. ‘They always look steeper than they are,’ he said: ‘Slabs.’ After a moment, he chalked his hands, tightened his boots; he chalked his hands again. Then he lurched up over the short lip and on to the slab. ‘Me feet hurt already!’ he complained. But he made steady progress – mainly by high, balancey steps and fingertip stretches – until he was about twenty-five or thirty feet up. There, an iron rugosity like a razor blade tore the side off his left index fingernail.