‘Bugger!’
Blood ran down his arm.
He laughed.
‘I’m stuck now,’ he said. ‘I can’t use that finger.’
First he decided to jump off. Then he decided to have another try at going up. Then he decided to jump off again.
‘It isn’t far,’ he said.
He was waiting for me to say something.
‘I’ve jumped that far before,’ he reminded me.
‘OK,’ I said, in as encouraging a tone as I could manage.
Nothing is worse than being stuck on a slab. You can stand there for a long, long time before you fall. You feel as if you’ve been abandoned, even if your friends are thirty feet away. Mick couldn’t go up: the holds were little more than patches of rock a different colour or texture to the rest, and blood had made his fingers too slippery to use them. If he didn’t jump, friction would hold him in place, but only until his ankles tired. Already, lateral torsion would be twisting his boots imperceptibly but steadily off the rock. Privately I had visions of his shin bone, popped out of the ankle joint and sticking through the side of his leg in the winter sunshine, as white as the mist that morning. I ran around underneath him, clearing the bigger stones from where he would land.
‘Whatever you think,’ I said.
But he had already delayed fatally. He couldn’t make himself do it.
‘Oh fuck. Fetch a rope, Mike.’
‘Will you be all right there while I get it?’
He stared miserably ahead.
‘Mike, just get a move on.’
I tied on to a nine-mil rope we had been using earlier in the day and went up the right-hand edge of the slab as fast as I dared. ‘Hang on,’ I called. ‘I’m on my way. Stay steady.’ It felt strange to have to say this to someone so much more experienced and skilful than me.
Mick laughed.
‘Don’t kill yourself rushing about like that,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll both look like tits.’
At the top of the slab I traversed left to get above him; but nerves made me belay too soon, and the rope spilled down ten feet out of his reach. ‘Hang on,’ I said. I thought I might be able to twitch it across to him. Nothing. I tried again. It was still three feet away. He stared at it out of the side of his eye: he didn’t dare grab at it, for fear of losing his balance. His ankles were buckling, and I could see him beginning to lose his nerve.
‘Be steady,’ I said calmly, trying to get off the belay. ‘You’re still OK.’
‘Christ, Mike, don’t be a pillock,’ he pleaded.
‘You’ll be OK,’ I said.
‘Mike! I can’t wait! Look, don’t bother with all that, I’m jumping off, I can’t wait—’
He looked down.
‘No I’m not,’ he said quickly.
He had to stand there in the middle of nowhere – marooned, pigeon-toed, and trying not to shiver – for another minute before I got my knots undone, moved into position above him, and dropped him the end of the rope.
Later he would laugh and claim: ‘The worst thing were the pain of those fucking boots!’ But on the ground under Great Slab, he was in a foul mood, with me and everything else. ‘You want to learn to tie knots a bit quicker, you do,’ he said. He threw his boots into his bag, and kicked out at it. I tried to put a piece of Elastoplast on his finger. It looked raw where the nail had peeled off, but it had already stopped bleeding and it wasn’t much of an injury unless you had been psyched-out by a 6a slab. ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘I really wanted that route. I wanted it that bad I could smell it.’ He got his flask out and unscrewed the top. His hands were shaking. ‘Now I’ve spilled that fucker,’ he said viciously. He looked over his shoulder at Great Slab. Suddenly he jumped to his feet.
‘Mick—’
‘Don’t say anything to me. Not a fucking thing,’ he warned.
He turned his back, and, hopping from foot to foot, dragged the magic boots on again. He was shaking so hard he could hardly tie their laces. Without a word, he levered himself on to The Snivelling and climbed neatly and carefully, without slowing down or stopping, to the top of it. There, he waved his arms disconnectedly in relief. He let out a shout of triumph which made his face seem distorted and animal-like: I understood that Mick went climbing only to release this expression from himself. What it represented I had no idea. For a moment though I was awed, and almost as excited as he was.
‘You bastard!’ I called up gleefully. ‘Mick, you bastard!’
‘It’s death on a teacake, that route,’ he said. ‘Death on a teacake.’
Shortly afterwards it started to rain. We packed our gear and left. Mick pushed the black and yellow Suzuki up past Higgar Tor and then turned north-west on to the single-track road under Stanage Edge. There, with the rain flying into our faces and the wind snatching at the rucksack on my back, he first accelerated furiously, then slowed down to walking pace, gazing at the rocks and allowing the machine to yaw from side to side of the empty road. Eventually he stopped and switched the engine off. The rocks were melted and equivocal in the dull light. Filmy curtains of rain drifted across the shallow valley that slopes away in front of them towards Bamford Moor. I could smell sheep, dead ferns, tussock grass, water standing on peat. Mick took his helmet off.
‘I’ve had it with this lot,’ he said.
He was sick of the Peak District: he was sick of gritstone. It was always wet. ‘It looks like a sodden cardboard box when it’s wet,’ he said. It looked to him exactly like a cardboard box collapsing in the rain, and he was sick of it.
‘Just look. Just look.’
Because he found it so painful to admit this, and because I couldn’t think of any helpful response, I said:
‘It’s a bit brighter over towards Burbage.’
‘Oh fuck off, Mike.’
He started to put his helmet on again.
Then he said, ‘I’ve got a new job. It’s work away from home.’
He shrugged and looked up at Stanage, where low cloud was roiling over the Plantation, softening further the edges of the Wall End and Tower buttresses. ‘I’m not right keen on that,’ he admitted, ‘but what else can I do? There’s money in it, and I’m fed up here. And you can’t just hang around all your life, Mike. You can’t. What? Oh, two weeks’ time. I start down in Birmingham.’
I had to think for a moment.
‘It depends what you mean by hanging around,’ I said.
I was trying to make out the line of Archangel in the mist.
I still see Mick. He was promoted rapidly, and now runs his own team, mostly ex-climbers, mostly from the north. Their work takes them all over Britain. The concept ‘difficult-access civil engineering’ embraces everything from core-sampling the piers of a motorway bridge to cleaning the inside of some of the windows in the Barbican complex, which architecture has placed out of the reach of traditional methods. For a time Mick even operated offshore, abseiling down the vast steel legs of oil platforms in the North Sea – until one afternoon, working the ‘splash zone’ without a wet-suit, he found himself in the leading edge of hypothermia and forgot how to work the Jumars that would get him out again. But most of the work is done on behalf of the inner-city councils, who find increasingly that tower blocks put up by their predecessors during the Fifties and Sixties are falling apart; and so he is often in London.
‘They’re fucking appalling places to live,’ he often says of the blocks. ‘Especially Glasgow and Birmingham.’
Then he shrugs.
‘But what they ’ad before was no better.’
Food still obsesses him: he will still open a conversation as he used to out on the crag, by describing what he had to eat the night before.
‘Fucking hell, Mike, you should ’ave bin there. It were a place called the Green Frog. (Or was it just the Frog? I don’t rightly remember: anyway, summat in French.)’ Soon you discover that he ate steak in cracked pepper sauce at La Grenouille; with a starter of ham and cheese in choux pastry and a gooseberry sauce, and
followed by rum and Belgian chocolate mousse.
‘Thirty notes each for that, Mike. Not bad, eh? Thirty notes!’
He wears an Armani suit.
Mick’s stories about his job are mixed with sentimental memories of ‘the rescue’, preserved in – and intricated with – an even older level of material from his school days. He often seems to forget I wasn’t there when this childhood sediment was laid down. His tenses saw violently back and forth as he tries to unearth what he wants. It isn’t only that the various strata have contorted and compacted together during the upheavals of his life: in addition he sees us both as exiles, and he has elected me to the oral tradition not just of the climbers but of the valley as well. ‘The worst thing ever,’ he will say, ‘was when I were fast in that really small school blazer. No, wait, don’t laugh: I’m wedged so fast in it I ’ave to chop meself out wi’ an axe! You must remember!’ He scratches his head. ‘Were it at the jumble sale, that?’ A moment later he will be explaining again why he gave up the offshore work:
‘I sat there at the end of three hundred feet of static rope, soaked to the skin, wondering what these things in my ’ands were for. Meanwhile the spotter’s calling down to me, “Are you OK?” Dickhead.
‘I were as good as dead that day,’ he will say. ‘It’s fucking cold is the North Sea.’
There’s a pause, in which he allows you to contemplate this. Then he adds:
‘Still, it’s not the risk that gets you down.’
Neither is it the brutality of the work, which is at least similar to that of hard climbing. For Mick it is simply that he has to live from week to week in boarding houses, make up his own sandwiches in the morning, drive five hundred miles overnight to get to the next job; that he sees, for the most part, only the centres of cities, the windy spaces of air where dirty bits of paper blow between the tower blocks; that he gets home to the valley once a month if he’s lucky, and then because he is self-employed must spend all his free time arguing with the National Insurance people at Crown House in Huddersfield.
The last time we met it was to go for something to eat. He wanted me to try a restaurant in Chinatown. He’d been there before, he said, and it was good.
‘You know, they mek you use chopsticks, and the waitresses smash the bean curd and shrimps down in front of you so hard it goes all over your shirt.’
We laughed.
‘ “Can we ’ave some Dim Sum?” ’ he mimicked himself. And then the waitress:
‘ “No.” ’
When I met him at the restaurant, though, he seemed less amused. ‘I’m not sure this is the one after all,’ he said. The staff made us wait for twenty minutes in a draughty lime-washed passage until a table became vacant. ‘They’re all called Fuck Something,’ Mick said, staring at the dirt growing like fur round the passage doorway: ‘These places.’ When we were finally allowed in he begged me, ‘Just don’t order anything looking like a garden pond that’s bin left too long.’ A family of London Chinese were taking photographs of one another at a table nearby; every time a flash unit went off, Mick winced. ‘Not while that kiddie’s screaming like that, anyway,’ he said. ‘I ’ad the odd drink this afternoon.’
He stared round the walls.
‘I can’t stand these pictures in boxes, can you? Everything’s so little in them.’
He ordered a lot of food but hardly touched most of it. ‘ ’Ave some of this sea-bass,’ he kept urging me. ‘Try these prawns.’ He would watch me carefully as I ate the first few mouthfuls, to make sure I was enjoying it; say, ‘It’s good that, isn’t it?’; then lean back in his chair and peer out of the window. The glass had a dense pattern of roses on it: this had the effect of smearing and spreading the neon signs outside. Mick seemed to be trying to identify the vague figures coming and going in the street.
‘I always think I’m going to see someone I know.’
He drank some more Tiger beer and studied the label of the bottle.
‘Sometimes I even miss Normal,’ he said.
He laughed.
EIGHTEEN
December
Chalk up.
Pause for a moment. Your desire for excitement itself makes you excited.
Intention tremors tighten your calf muscles.
The psychological window is closing. If you go too soon your determination will eat itself. If you go too late you will feel it all run out of you like water.
Suddenly, you clamp your fingers down very hard on the holds and fling yourself at the sequence. You believe, as you make the first move, that you have already accepted the potential fall.
Pull up, lock off, bring the toe of your left boot up into a pocket. Reach very high with the left hand so that your fingers, stiff and trembling with effort, slot behind the upside-down lip of a flake. Pulling outwards on that while you let your weight swing right, bend the left arm until you can begin to raise your body, get the other hand in the same place, and finally run both feet up the wall until your knees are tucked up near your waist. Almost at the limit of tolerance now, straighten the legs explosively and jump for the top.
At this point, fear and excitement are indistinguishable from one another: together, they are indistinguishable from joy.
I couldn’t settle.
November moved into December. The view was good until you came close to it: every stone wall, every tree in the valley was covered with thick green lichen, cold, streaming wet. Mick left for his new job, and shortly afterwards we had the first snow up on the moor, a short damp fall that lasted a day. Two weeks of clear sky followed; morning frosts which guaranteed a little warm, wan sunshine for two hours in the middle of the day. There were distinct shadows on the road by the church, lines of washing at the backs of the houses, threads of chimney smoke in the illuminated air. ‘I haven’t seen the buses so crowded!’ people said to one another in surprise. Ordinary life had become graceful and festive to them. ‘In nice weather like this everyone goes out to buy something.’ On their way back from town they laughed at the young turkeys growing up in wire cages behind the farms in Oldfield – white now, much bigger, standing proudly among heaps of moulted juvenile feathers.
My knee had begun to hurt again, and it felt stiff when I got out of bed; but effort seemed to ease it, so I took increasingly to the rocks behind Sankey’s house. There, a cheerful lad called ‘Red Haired Neil’ to distinguish him from some other Neil who no longer lived locally, showed me how to solo with a Sony Walkman.
‘Go on. Try it. Here.’
It was like discovering electricity.
‘The big hazard at this crag is still falling in the dog shit,’ said Neil; but as long as I had the Walkman on I was invulnerable. I could thrive on risk. I played Bryan Adams, ‘Straight From the Heart’: my intuition astonished me. I played Bruce Springsteen, ‘Ramrod’: problems succumbed so easily I was filled with energy. I played ZZ Top, ‘Deguello’: my aggression seemed endless. The music fell obliquely across the rock, illuminating it like a new wavelength of light to reveal brand-new ways of climbing. It was still possible to be outfaced: but, burning magic fuels, I would know the end of the day had come only when my fingers let go of their own accord: I would look up suddenly, dazed with fatigue, adrenalin and rock-and-roll, to see headlights sweeping down Holme Moss and into the valley. My arms were grey with cold, the elbow joints painful from repeated pulling up, the fingertips sore and caked with chalk. Only then would I change back into my Nike shoes, turn the music up louder to combat a sudden sense of depression, and, shivering, walk down past Sankey’s cottage where the FOR SALE board had been up for a month.
I never saw anyone viewing it.
The front room curtains were down and all his furniture had gone: but you could see scattered across the bare floor the Subaru catalogues he had been poring over the month he died.
Towards the end of that fortnight the weather became strange and undependable. Above the Holme Moss transmitter you could see alternating bands of weak sunshine and low thick cloud;
shifts of pressure pumped them down from the plateau one after the other to give first a cold wind then a blue sky that seemed warmer than it was. Resting for a moment at the top of some problem, I would watch the late sun burning the bare trees and mill chimneys, igniting the windows of the double-glazed barn conversions all the way to Greenfield. One minute things swam in light; the next they were flat and wintered, ordinary.
‘It cuts like a knife,’ whispered the Walkman: ‘But it feels so right.’
By now my leg ached all the time. At about two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon – in one of those lenses of warmth and sunshine, with the Walkman turned up full so that energy and excitement flooded up inside me from moment to moment – I made a high step on a problem I had done a dozen times before. Something seemed to lurch inside my knee, like a small animal trying to escape. I was twenty-five feet off the ground. A bit desperately, I threw my weight on to that leg and tried to stand up. Nothing happened, except that the headset of the Walkman came off and dangled on its wire in front of me, so that I stepped on it. The knee wouldn’t straighten. I tried to reverse the move, but I was already falling. Each time I hit something on the way down I thought, ‘That’s my shoulder, but it’s OK’ or ‘That’s my foot, but it’s OK.’ I could hear myself saying, ‘Christ! Christ!’ I finished up in the heather under the climb, where the ground sloped away suddenly enough to absorb most of my momentum, with a sprained ankle and a few bruises. The sun had gone in. I was shaking. I could hear the motor of the Sony turning over creakily: and Mick’s clear voice in my head advising me,
Climbers: A Novel Page 22
