Above All Things (41 page)

He was supposed to turn George around and he hadn’t. And if George wasn’t back soon the dark would come. The temperature would plummet. He was already so cold.

He heard his brain cells dying from the lack of oxygen. From the cold. Each of them ended with an audible pop, his mind bubbling like champagne. His lungs filled with fluid.

“Darling?” Marjory was curled next to him, champagne flute in her long fingers. He wanted a drink, but she brought the glass to her lips and swallowed it down, smiling. There was sun streaming through white curtains. Everything was soft, white. She smelled clean, like snow. He didn’t want to talk. Wanted to lie there next to her. Sleep. “Darling, do you love me?”

Why was she asking that now?

“When you come back,” she purred, “what will happen? To us?”

Hadn’t they already had this conversation? What had he told her before? Something that made everything all right. But he couldn’t remember.

He didn’t love her.

Sandy jolted awake on the mountain.

“Then why, Sandy?” Dick stood in front of him, arms crossed. He was wet, must have just come in from the rain.

“You need a towel. You should dry off. You’ll catch your death.”

“I’d be more concerned about you.”

“I’ll be all right. I just have to wait,” he explained. “I have to wait for George to come back.”

Nodding, Dick sat next to him, the cold radiating from his wet clothes. He wanted to move away, but didn’t want to upset Dick, who stared straight ahead at the white cloud that enveloped them.

“You know, Sands, he’s not really your friend.” Dick jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing up, the way George had gone. “Not the way I am. He just left you here. He wanted the summit for himself, so he left you here. And you’re dying. Do you know that? You’re dying, Sands. That’s what he left you to.”

“No. He’s coming back. He had to leave me here. I’d never make it.”

“Was it worth it, then?” He tried to figure that out. Was it? Maybe. “If you don’t even love her?” Dick finished.

“I’ll put it right, Dick.”

“I don’t see how.”

“If you’d been here sooner,” he said, “you would have seen everything. From here the Earth curves away.” Sandy raised his arm, described the arc in the air. “Like that.”

God, it was so cold. He tried to draw breath, call for George, but choked on the dry air. His body convulsed, racked with coughing. He tried to peer through the cloud. What if George had fallen? What if he’d turned back and passed him in the gloom? He had to go down. If he went down, he could go home and he’d set everything right. Sandy struggled to his knees.

He looked down the ridge in the fading light. It wasn’t that late, was it? It was the clouds making the sky dark. The sharp edge of the ridgeline blurred into sky. He couldn’t make it down the Step on his own. He couldn’t do it.

He collapsed back to the rock and the anger ebbed out of him into the cold. Dropping his head to his chest, Sandy breathed into his scarf, tucked his hands between his legs. One of them was bare. Where was his glove? His hand was numb. Sandy prayed for it to end soon.

ALONE, GEORGE CLIMBED
above the cloud that stretched out around him in every direction. No peaks broke the banks of moisture, the dense softness of it. He reached for Odell’s camera. There was nothing here except Everest. The cloud was so thick he was sure it would hold him up if he stepped out into it. He could drift and float on the currents like tides.

He spread his arms for the drop and the camera tumbled from his hand, plummeting into the whiteness at his feet. Disappearing soundlessly. He watched after it.

It was gone. There’d be no record, then. No proof if he made it. Only his word. His and Sandy’s. He crumpled to the mountain and peered at the long snow slope.

What did it matter, then?

He turned his back to the summit, to the wind, slipped a piece of paper out of his pocket. Then, taking care to shelter it
with his body, his hands, he looked at the photograph of Ruth, his own face ripped away from it. The photograph was blurrier than he remembered. He couldn’t make out her features, the curl of hair at her temple where it had escaped the pins. He had removed the pins after, so it fell across the neckline of her dress, cut across her collarbone in an auburn frizz. He couldn’t make out any of that in the photograph now. He closed his eyes and tried to picture her, draw her from the white blankness of his mind. She refused to come. He could only conjure her in memory.

“I won’t go on like this, George.” Her face was blotchy, she’d been crying. How often had he made her cry? “I’ve waited and waited. I won’t wait for you anymore.”

He couldn’t feel the paper between his frozen fingers.

When he opened his eyes, the wind was fingering the corner of the photograph. He grasped at it, but the wind slipped the paper from his hands. It disappeared into the cloud.

He shifted his body slightly on the ground and stretched out his arm, palm up, reaching towards the peak. At this angle, he could hold the summit in his hand. So close. He could taste the wind that roared down from it, the jet stream that swept up from the Indian Ocean, carrying the scent of tropical rain, cleansing, warm. He could see the route drawn out in front of him. Just the long climb of the snow slope. There was nowhere to go but up or down. Maybe he didn’t have a choice anymore.

“Is this it, George?” his father asked, towering over him. “Is this what it was all for? All the sacrifice?” The cold had moved past temperature to pain. George rocked against it as it crept into his veins, his heart. It curled and snaked the length of his spine. “Not that you ever made any sacrifices yourself.” His father turned to glare down the ridge, his black coat stark against the cloud cover. He followed his father’s stare. Sandy was down there somewhere, waiting for him.

“They all paid the price for you,” his father continued. “Trafford. Ruth. Your children. That boy down there. He will wait for you. He won’t leave you behind as you have him. He’ll follow orders – just like the rest of them – and he will die. For this, for you. If he isn’t already dead.” There was a long pause. “And for what? What was it all for again?”

There was the bright explosion of a flashbulb. “Because it’s there.”

“Right. Because it’s there. You’ve always been focused on what’s out there, George. It’s high time you focused on what’s here.”

“That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard,” Stella sighed into his ear. Her hands were in his hair, long nails scratching at him, under his fur helmet. She leaned in to kiss him. George turned away from her and pressed his hands to his face, squeezed his eyes closed.

“What will they do?” Sandy whispered to him. “What will they do if we don’t come back?”

He tried to imagine it. Ruth in black. His children. He pictured the candle Sandy’s mother had set in her window. The flame flickered.

He couldn’t just sit here. If he sat here much longer he would die. He had to make a decision, but there was no easy choice. No good ending.

Through the cloud below him he couldn’t see Sandy anymore. Sandy was still alive. He had to be. The summit above the cloud was a perfect snow cone. A small, white pyramid. Clean, untouched.

It was so close.

THE SUN HAD
not quite set, but it would soon, behind the banks of clouds that smudged the edges of everything. They
shouldn’t be up here. They should be back in their tent, with tea, the chocolate he’d kept in his pack for when they returned. When Sandy took off his goggles, the wind stung his eyes, scraped across them. He squinted. There was a shape on the ridge. Beside him. Someone next to him. George. He’d come back. But he was just sitting there. In a stupor, eyes open, staring out over the clouds. Sandy shook him then struggled to his feet, hauled George up with him. The clouds were now rising up around them, brighter than the darkening sky, as though they trapped the light. He was drowning in them.

As Sandy watched, George wavered on his feet and seemed to double before his eyes – two of him standing there. Sandy tried to focus; he had to know what happened. “Did you make it? You did, didn’t you?” He nodded at George, his head pounding with the effort. Sandy closed his eyes against the doubled vision. When he opened them again, George stood in front of him, raising his head to meet Sandy’s gaze. Had he nodded? He must have.

Sandy tried to smile. His swollen lips cracked.

“We have to go,” George said at last.

Sandy tried to imagine the view from the summit. What would it have felt like? He tried to remember his proudest moment, but couldn’t. Maybe this was it. He wished he’d been there, seen what George had seen. Everything was going to be all right. They’d done it.

George shook him roughly. “We have to go.”

The world swayed. He was on a boat, waves chopping beneath him, around him. No. On the mountain. George was tying the rope around his own waist again. They were face to face on the mountain, the rope between them. George turned him, let the tension play out on the rope. He felt it go taut at his back. It held him up. He began to stumble down the ridge.

It didn’t matter. George had done it. They would go down and everything would be different. Everything would be fine.

GEORGE WAS WADING
into the dim light reflecting around him, flattening everything to two dimensions. He was leading now, Sandy close behind, the rope short between them. He didn’t want to lose Sandy in the gloom. Didn’t want to leave him alone again on the mountain.

Feeling for his footing, he stepped, shifted his weight forward. The scree slipped out from under his boot and rattled down the mountain. He settled his foot again and moved forward. They’d been climbing from dawn to dusk but he didn’t remember the climb up. Nothing seemed familiar. There was, he remembered, a mushroom-shaped rock. He had to find that rock again. He was parched. Hungry. Nauseous. They had been climbing for more than fifteen hours. They had to be nearing the crack into the Yellow Band. Must be. He strained for the rock, the small gully they’d followed up. If he missed it in the dark …

“Where’s the torch?” Geoffrey asked him.

“Must have left it in the tent. Shouldn’t have needed it.”

“Bloody stupid, George.”

Yes. Bloody stupid. There was nothing for it but to keep moving. The only choice now. If he stopped he’d never get up again. He shuffled his foot blindly forward, sucked the thin air into his lungs.

The cold radiated up through the hobnails in his boots and burned into him in freezing points. His hand was stiff around his ice axe, weak. Humiliating – how weak he was. What must Sandy think of him?

He squinted against the blackness, against the snow that was beginning to kick up. Thick flakes of it, like moths against a window.

He could hear his breath in his lungs. Cells were bursting,
like tiny fireworks in his brain. He could see them, feel them, small explosions coursing through his body.

The cold and wind washed over him like water. He could feel it everywhere. Against his skin, against his legs where they pushed through the thin air, at the seams of his clothes. The cold clawed its way in. His body shivered, contracted. Tightened around him.