Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  ‘Piss off, Stox.’

  About sixty feet above the ground was a batten-stage, eight planks and a few bits of scaffolding fixed to the stack with cleats, through which it was easy enough to see the ground. It was bitterly cold up there. In winter, climbers try to pick a sheltered crag: here, with three hundred and sixty degrees of air around us, there was nothing between us and the wind. ‘I couldn’t work up here,’ I said, looking out over British Steel. The skin at the back of my neck crawled. ‘Not for money. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You can admire the view.’

  Parts of the works were being demolished prior to privatisation. For as far as I could see, cutting torches fizzed and flared and sent up showers of sparks from among the buckled girders. Heaps of waste smouldered in the mud between the huge corrugated sheds, giving off an acrid, low-lying smoke through which I could make out gantries crawling with oxygen pipes; muddy yards where the Mercedes, Volvo and Magirus Deutz trucks were parked in rows; the venous curves of a disused railway line – a bright, almost luminous green moss grew between its dull rails. As we walked past the shed now directly below us, I had seen what I thought were huge steel wheels piled on top of one another. They were already beginning to rust. This reminded me of how, at the turn of the eighteenth century, stone from France became cheaper than Hathersage grit. The grindstone industry collapsed, and work stopped in a day. Half-finished millstones are still scattered around at the base of the Peak District edges, for tourists to eat their lunch off.

  After a moment or two, a man strolled into view through the smoke, pushed his goggles up on to his forehead, and pissed against the side of a huge tank of brownish liquid.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Stox.

  He held the Sonartest against his ear and shook it.

  ‘This thing’s a bit Mickey Mouse today. You’re supposed to be able to calibrate it against the samples. Still, it’ll have to do.’

  There was about twenty feet of the stack left above us. Stox smeared some Vaseline over the Sonartest pick-up and set off from the batten-stage, ignoring the ladders in a display of pure technical cheek, climbing on bolt-heads, rivets, things I couldn’t see, moving up and down with an intent grace while he passed the pick-up over the surface like a doctor’s stethoscope and called down the thicknesses – ‘2.98 . . . 3.77 . . . There’s supposed to be four millimetres even, up here . . . 2.01! Site engineer’s not daft . . . 3.12 . . . 1.80! . . .’ The pick-up left little green patches of Vaseline wherever it went. Brittle flakes showered down on me as Stox scraped the rust away to get a better contact. ‘Wait a minute,’ he told himself, ‘if you—’ He swung out lazily and delicately in that characteristic posture of a climber assessing the next few feet, legs straight, heels down, head tilted up intelligently. ‘Got it. 2.88.’ By the time he’d finished we were both freezing.

  ‘Time for some nosh,’ said Stox.

  As I was about to leave the batten-stage he stood in my way and stared at me intently. ‘I land the soft jobs,’ he said, ‘the jobs like this, because I got a CSE. Do you see?’ His nose was running heavily, his hands and face had gone a pinkish-purple colour. Along with his cropped hair and the two short vertical lines of concentration between his eyebrows, this gave him a raw, hard look. ‘Most steeplejacks can’t find their arses in the morning.’ For a moment he seemed more disgusted with himself than with them. Then he grinned. ‘So it’s time for some nosh now,’ he said, letting me on to the ladder. ‘And that’s another hundred quid in the bank. Eh?’

  Rotherham might have been abandoned for all we could tell, like the steelworks. Housing estates of a kind of lugubrious maroon brick peered down through clouds of tarry orange smoke on to British Steel: acres of rubble, blowing waste paper, bulldozers. Dogs ran about on the bleak muddy expanses of grass in front of the houses. All the cafes were closed. In the end we went into a pub, where Stox bought a plate of pork pies, a whisky-and-Coke. ‘Look at that,’ he congratulated himself. He sat down and opened a recent issue of Stock Car Monthly.

  ‘The reason I like stockers so much,’ he said, ‘is the start. You’ve never seen anything like it for sheer violence. Really.’

  He leaned forward over the table.

  ‘Ever been? One minute nothing’s happening. They’re just cruising round the pace lap. The next it’s like Apocalypse Now in a cinema full of hot dog stands. You can’t see for cinders and all you can smell is fried onions. Fucking awesome! You get used to it after a lap though, so I just go for the starts. Did you see that film? Apocalypse Now? Brilliant!’

  He finished the pork pies. He wiped his mouth and said with a grin:

  ‘And what’s this I hear about you screwing Normal’s wife?’

  I only ever went over to Morecambe once. It was late in the day when we got there, but the sky was like brass. I remember the placid muddy water of the boating pool, beyond which rotting piles go out into some great slow tidal stream slipping past to join the Kent Channel; sleeping women on the sand, their dresses pulled up to expose their legs to the thick hot light; the giant cone above the ice cream stall. In a fish restaurant they advertised ‘best butter’ on the bread. A man finished his meal then stared ahead with his mouth open while two teenage couples took photographs of each other across the table with a cheap camera. Music hung in the air in the amusement park, with diesel smoke and the smell of fried fish: ‘Blue Moon, now I’m no longer alone.’ A dog trotted by. Nobody was playing at the Catch-a-Duck stall.

  I felt relaxed and elated, both at once. The music, the signs on the sea front, the thick horizontal evening light which seemed to slip over us like warm water, might all have been one thing, one stimulus or substance appealing to a single simple sensory organ we all used to have but now forget we possess.

  Later, at the hotel, Normal’s wife knelt on the edge of the bed, leaning forward supported by her elbows. She had pulled her pleated Marks & Spencers skirt up around her waist. Her elevated thighs were bare; between them, the white gusset of her knickers contained her sex, shaping it into a clean plump cotton purse. Suddenly she moved her knees apart so that I could see her round shiny face upside down between her legs. Complexion reddening, body swaying just slightly with the effort, she looked like a big child with a new enthusiasm; or a Polaroid from Fiesta’s ‘Readers’ Wives’ in 1979, in which the very ungainliness and naivety of the exhibitionism caught at your throat with a mixture of compassion and greed.

  ‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ she said.

  ‘In a minute, Margaret.’

  For two hours a thunderstorm had been moving furtively along the horizon. I couldn’t tell whether it was inland, fumbling its way over the quarries east and south of Preston, separating them briefly with its fingers of rain and darkness, looking in, pushing them away; or somewhere out to sea like a great wheel of light.

  Margaret allowed herself to fall sideways on to the bed.

  ‘Did you see those women on the beach? Honestly!’

  She rearranged her skirt.

  ‘When I was eight,’ she said, ‘I ran into a disused electrical socket in the lounge.’

  As a result of this three stitches had to be put in her forehead: ‘He was such a sweet old doctor. “Now I’m going to do this without an anaesthetic,” he told my father, “but you mustn’t think it’s because I’m being cruel. It’s in case there are problems later.” Daddy didn’t know what he meant.’

  She gave me a wide smile and pulled back her hair. ‘But he was quite right. Look! No scar!’

  Perhaps a month had passed since I first spoke to her for any length of time, in the yeasty heat of Normal’s front room, then in his rock garden. I order my memories of that afternoon in time to the breathing sound of a saw. Off at the edge of the estate, dogs barked, children called to one another. Wasps buzzed past us in long determined arcs, attracted by the mess Normal had made in the kitchen. She had come down the garden, you remember, to find me. ‘I see you’re admiring the quarry. I call it his quarry.’ She had wa
shed her face carefully. The black velvet pansy was pinned to her blouse. About to speak, she turned her head – in the next house they had switched a radio on, then after some argument off again.

  ‘Your hair’s very nice today,’ she said eventually. ‘Have you just had it cut?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Normal can’t help the way he is.’

  Which of us said that? What mattered at the time, I suppose, was that neither of us believed it; or cared. Somehow, in trying to say something about the black pansy, or touch it, I touched Margaret instead, and was shocked by the suddenness and certainty of her response. ‘Let’s go inside! Let’s go inside!’ We lay on the front room carpet in a bar of sunlight, looking at one another, smiling and shivering with nerves. I kicked my rucksack out of the way. The flowers on their glass shelves had a scent now. We had known this – whatever it was – about one another since I walked into the house. ‘Here!’ ‘I love you.’ The warmth when I entered her was such a shock I thought I had come; it was like a ripple going across a familiar landscape – everything is what it was before, everything is different, everything is what it was before – a heat-shimmer on a summer day.

  ‘There! There! You see?’

  ‘Oh.’

  In the hotel room at Morecambe, perhaps, these certainties had already begun to seem less clear. Sankey was dead and buried. A fly looped repetitively across the blank television screen in the corner, its shadow preceding it. ‘I adore hotel rooms,’ said Margaret. She pushed the window up, leaned far out, and looked across the town towards the funfair, the distant sea. I remembered Normal telling me about Ed, who had earned his living here as a photographer, and I wondered if through her own Morecambe she could see any of Ed’s: and then, transposed very faintly upon that, any of his South America of the mind.

  ‘It’s best to get sex over with as quickly as possible in weather like this,’ she said. ‘Not that you don’t enjoy it. But if you aren’t quick, you can get sticky.’

  ‘It didn’t last long,’ I told Stox. ‘Normal doesn’t know.’

  Stox grinned.

  ‘I never said he did.’

  He emptied his glass.

  ‘That’s whisky-and-Coke,’ he prompted me, pushing it over the table. ‘You tight bastard.’

  TWENTY

  Rock Gardens

  This summer I photographed two cormorants standing on the edge of Porthmoina Island, Bosigran, West Penwith. Just after I pressed the shutter, they dived suddenly into the water.

  At Bosigran the cliff goes up blinding white in the sun. From a distance, the glossy ivy on the boulders underneath gives it the air of a wall round a prosperous Penwith garden. After I had photographed the cormorants I put my magic boots on and climbed up the first two pitches of a route called Doorpost. This brought me out on to comfortable ledges in a sunny niche a hundred and fifty feet up, from which I could look out over Porthmoina cove at the sea boiling round the wet black aprons of granite at the base of Commando Ridge. From that height, the sea has a surface resembling intensely rippled glass. It takes faith to penetrate the world the way a cormorant must. If I were one I would have to promise myself every day, ‘The water looks impervious: but at the right moment it will give.’ I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn’t know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.

  It was late evening when I climbed out, dark as I walked back up the path to the car-park.

  The Polaroids I took the year Sankey died have developed with age. They tended to be over-exposed, but details previously awash in light can now be discerned quite clearly:

  Bamburgh Castle has formed itself out of the morning haze and, seen in the distance behind the bonnet of Sankey’s Reliant, presents an exact if romantic outline of towers and stepped walls where originally it was hardly visible. The awning of the Hot Snax van in the lay-by at Kirkby Lonsdale on the A65 has begun at last to show mint-green stripes originally bleached by the six a.m. August sunshine into a white blur; a middle-aged woman in a print frock – caught in her moment of indecision, tea or coffee? – stands before it. As if pigments could learn about what they represent, events understand themselves more accurately towards the end than the beginning, the freshly quarried boulders photographed at Millstone Edge have confirmed their outlines and no longer resemble melted lumps of sugar.

  This clarification has gone further in some shots than in others. In the blurred Polaroid I tried to show Sankey’s sister, for example, the climber could still be any of us, crabbing his way across the concrete of the Richard Dunn wall – which at that point is seamed with shallow, sharp-edged cracks, lipped enough for your fingers only where you don’t need it – just in advance of some small ongoing disaster, some failure of logic in the world itself. A snap even less communicative shows Mick from the pipeworks: unreconstructed and paranoid-looking – to the extent that you can see him at all – he stands on one of the Cromlech boulders, leering sideways at the camera through a grey leached-out air, his head tilted back as if to howl or crow. For some reason he is wearing his pullover as a pair of trousers.

  Lovers, tribesmen and lunatics:

  Gaz grins awkwardly up from a move on Wildcat Tor, his face gaining colour as it curdles year by year out of the glare of the built-in flash; the photographer’s foot can be seen in the left-hand bottom corner, and the ledge Gaz is making for is covered in fallen leaves. (In another picture, his wife has put her arms affectionately round his waist from behind and now rubs her face on his shoulder. At their feet the baby, in its red pants and grubby white T-shirt, sits on the hard-packed earth underneath Wall of Bubbles at Stoney, eating rock-boot laces to improve its technique.) Bob Almanac stares speculatively at the tangled mass of tapes, rope and wired runners he has just pulled out of his rucksack, like some shopper holding up a dead chicken by the neck. Normal, using my camera, has caught Sankey and me on a beach somewhere, washing an aluminium pan; the sun blazes off it into our eyes, making us seem puzzled and diffident. Here’s Mick again, fishing with a tin mug fifteen hundred feet up in the Langdales, reflected precisely in the water of Stickle Tarn. ‘I’ve got eight here!’ I remember him shouting to us. ‘Eight of the little fuckers!’ In the photo his mouth is a perfect O of delight.

  I remember a blazing day we had in August or September on the Pembroke sea cliffs. As soon as you got down to the sea-level platform at Stennis Head, you were transfixed: the rock yawned up, acres of blinding white limestone in the sun, less like an amphitheatre than a vast parabolic mirror, with you at its exact centre of focus. At any moment, you felt, you might be ignited, fired up like a carbon arc: you might be converted into pure light. There’s a Polaroid of this too. I don’t know who took it, because all the climbers are in it, grinning, eyes screwed up against the sun: Gaz and Sankey, Bob and David, Mick and his girlfriend, Normal and me. The route we have just ticked, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, arches triumphally up behind us, the best climb any of us did all year. Our T-shirts are fastened on to our heads with bits of coloured nylon line, to fall back over our reddened shoulders like Arab headdresses. Mick’s girlfriend has crooked her arm to show her muscles.

  Also by M. John Harrison:

  The Committed Men

  The Centauri Device

  The Ice Monkey

  Viriconium

  Climbers

  The Luck in the Head (with Ian Miller)

  The Course of the Heart

  Signs of Life

  Travel Arrangements

  Light

  Nova Swing

  Empty Space

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © M. John Harrison 1989

  Introduction copyright © Robert Macfarlane 2012

  All rights reserved

  The right of M. John Harrison to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Robert Macfarlane to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 09218 1

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.ambientehotel.wordpress.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk