Climbers: A Novel (22 page)

He winked at me over her head; took her arm solicitously.

‘Mind you don’t fall down this kerb here,’ he advised.

Most of Sankey’s relatives seemed to be women. They crowded into his sister’s house, where the reception was held, the old tottering about from cold buffet to sofa under great vigorous bouffants of bluish-white hair, the newly middle-aged rigid with self-control and homely as pudding. Young girls whose beautiful immobile faces looked like the cosmetics advertisements in
Honey
or
Elle
soon turned out to have been married a year or two before. ‘I throw a lot of frombies,’ I overheard one of them say. ‘At least that’s what my husband calls them. Frombies.’ The very meaninglessness of this released the grotesque in things, as if the damp air were a battery charged with it. I had no idea who they were, or in what relation they had stood to Sankey. I couldn’t imagine him here among them, with a plate of cake and a paper napkin. The youngest had sponged themselves as clean of life as the sides of a brand-new plastic bath. In contrast, the old women heaved with it, screaming with laughter to disguise a sudden deafness; fidgeting violently but quietly in a corner with their clothes; and always making odd excessive gestures in the region of their hair.

Bob Almanac eyed them slyly.

‘Look at this,’ he whispered. ‘Nightmare time in South London.’

‘Fuck off, Bob,’ I warned him. They were only women, drinking sherry and eating salmon sandwiches. I didn’t want to know what a ‘frombie’ was.

‘Oh,’ someone said loudly. ‘She supports
cats
, does she?’ And then: ‘It’s voluntary. Eight o’clock at the Lower Houses.’

Bob grinned triumphantly at me and went off to get something to eat. He seemed quite at home. The rest of the climbers, though, wandered about as if they couldn’t quite understand why we were there, looking along the shelves of books or out into the back garden with its well-groomed conifers and little stone path. They had tried the creamed avocado; brightened up a little at the cheese dip. ‘They’ve done us well here, you’ve got to give them that,’ Mick said to Normal. ‘They needn’t ’ave ’ad us at all, really.’ They were staring up at a print of Munch’s
Spring
, which shows a dying woman sitting near sunlit net curtains.

‘What do you make of this, then?’

Believing perhaps that people should be as responsible for what they witness as for what they do – determined anyway to take no comfort from the unhinged or the immature, Sankey’s co-conspirators in an inexplicable act – his sister was defiant and suspicious.

With me I had a Polaroid of Sankey (the only photograph any of us, even Normal, could find at short notice), taken that January on the indoor wall at the Richard Dunn Centre in Bradford. It was an eerie-looking shot, its colours skewed by the fluorescent lighting, in which the climber could be seen suspended, not very high up, in a kind of threatening luminous greyness. A whole section of the wall appeared to be falling outwards and downwards as he scuttled across it to the debatable security of blurred rectangular forms. His determination seemed like panic. White light from the Polaroid flash had done nothing to clarify matters, only spilled uselessly off the pillar which leaned slightly off the vertical in the left-hand edge of the frame. For this reason Sankey had always called it ‘the Dr Who picture’.

‘Who’s this?’ asked his sister when I showed it to her. ‘Is that water underneath him?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I explained. I explained again that it had been taken inside a sports hall. ‘I think it’s the floor. They polish it. I’m sorry it’s not much of a photo; but we thought you’d like to see something.’

‘Well it looks like water,’ she said. ‘I suppose you all encouraged him to do this?’

And she pushed the Polaroid roughly back into my hand, incapable of comprehending how or where it had been taken; or why. For a moment I couldn’t understand, either –

Some of the Lancashire quarries have no name, only a number. The local council uses them as waste tips. You struggle through the weeds with your green towelling headband, your rucksack and your rack of equipment, hoping for tall clean gritstone buttresses the colour of a sandy beach. Instead clouds of blackish flies swarm up to greet you from the heaps of domestic rubbish on the bare quarry floor. I remember Sankey turning away from the baking, unearthly walls of Wilton Two – where he would soon be confronting a fifty-foot fall on to his hands and knees – and murmuring, ‘Not much of a view, kid.’ It isn’t far from this kind of climbing – gymnastics in a rubbish dump – to the holds of an artificial wall in Leeds or North London, made polished and greasy by the passage of innumerable sweaty fingers, and without any virtue but the combinations they can be strung into. Out of some confused view of climbing, people always ask you what region of the Alps your snaps show; out of an idea of communication equally confused, you always try to explain why the Alps no longer necessarily play a part.

‘Did
you
encourage him?’ Sankey’s sister asked me directly.

Suddenly she shouted, ‘I hate water!’

‘Try not to think about it,’ her husband recommended. ‘It’s just the polished floor.’

He put his arm across her shoulders, but this gesture only made it seem as if she were supporting him, and the weight of it depressed her further. I was surprised not so much by their large house as their age. They were ten or fifteen years older than Sankey and comfortably settled in East Dulwich, so that it was like talking to someone’s retired parents. She had been a teacher; he still worked for the Polytechnic of Central London. The snap-framed Expressionist prints on the walls were hers. (‘Her idea of art,’ he told me later with a short laugh.) Neither of them had a trace of a northern accent left, which also surprised me.

‘People do what they do,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘It’s their own choice.’

‘Oh yes,’ she agreed bitterly. ‘I heard all about that from him. Every Christmas.’

I could see her and Sankey as children, laughing out of the same bone structure, the same mouth of large but even teeth, the same black and white Kodak print with the sea at Morecambe or Blackpool a thin horizontal line in the background. ‘I know how we can get an ice cream, kid,’ I could hear him say conspiratorially (or so I thought). The same eyes which had made him look shy and retarded at one moment, sly and childlike the next, lent her an intelligent, impatient, disbelieving look, as if she had had enough of children and childhood for good. The jaw which had made him resemble in his late twenties and early thirties the young John Harlin now gave her a bony, mannish appearance.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to me. ‘I think someone’s disarranged my flowers.’

She walked away abruptly, looking straight ahead. At the other end of the room a vase of asters was going off like a firework in the dim mid-afternoon air, yellow and white stars and silent crackles of light. She stopped by them for a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen. The guests stared after her; at me; at the other climbers. Though I tried to talk to her again, she avoided me.

Later, washed up somehow in the empty breakfast room with Sankey’s brother-in-law, I showed him the Polaroid. He barely glanced at it before passing it back.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

Trying to think of something else to say to one another about it – or anything else – we stood by the bay window and watched the rain beading his neat lawn. It was raining that Wednesday in a long diagonal band across the south-east and much of the Midlands. By the weekend it would have spread to the north. The hot spell was over. This side, the garden was large, with steps down to the lawn, some holly trees and shrubbery at the end away from the house, and a short drive which led to the old-fashioned wooden garage. Three robins were hopping about on different parts of the lawn in the rain, ignoring one another.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen three together in a garden all at once like that,’ I said.

‘We had eight here last winter.’ He looked at me as if he thought I might not believe him, then went on, ‘But they fought until there was only one left. Mid-air fights, feathers floating down, the lot, until there was only the cock-robin left.’

This was produced with such relish and premeditation I couldn’t think of a reply to it. In the end, just for something to say, I asked him,

‘Do you miss the north at all?’

‘I’ve never been there myself,’ he said dryly, ‘but I’ve heard a lot about it.’

‘What part of Yorkshire was your wife born in?’

‘Kent,’ he said. ‘The Kent part. Didn’t you know?’ He stared at me and then began to laugh. ‘They were both born in Kent,’ he said. ‘He went to grammar school in Tunbridge Wells until he was eighteen, and then got a degree in electronics at Cambridge. It’s one of the things that makes her so bitter. It’s not just the waste of a good career. It’s that he never saw Yorkshire until he was nineteen, on some university coach trip.’ He laughed again. ‘Can you tell me why someone with a good Cambridge degree buries himself away up there and pretends to be as thick as two planks?’

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

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.’