Climbers: A Novel (5 page)

‘It sounds ideal,’ I said.

As he was looking into the crack to place his next jam, though, he saw something move. It was another hand, and it was reaching out for his own.

‘It wasn’t attached to anything. It crept out of some ferns growing in the back of the crack, where there was water sweating out of the rock. It got closer. I knew it lived in the crack: I knew everything about it.’

It was this ‘knowing everything about it’ which made him let go and fall, all the way down through the darkening air.

‘Pretty desperate, that dream!’ he said.

He thought for a minute.

‘I hate hand jamming anyway.’

Some climbers will tell you that, like hang-glider pilots and steeplejacks, climbers never have falling dreams; others that they always do. Every climber has a version of Normal’s dream. In some, that disembodied hand shakes yours, or grips your wrist and
pulls you in
; in others you are placing a key runner when the hand snatches it away into the depths of the rock so that you are left without protection on the hardest move of the route. The hand is cold and white, or warm and covered with hairs, and sometimes it is only the hand of a dead man seen inaccessible and rotting at the back of a crack on some eerie traverse of the Eiger, omen of a deteriorating situation – bad weather, doomed bivouacs, a glove lost, a dropped stove, a broken axe. In a pub near Oldham one night Bob Almanac told me a version in which there was no hand at all: but the crack itself closed on you and you hung there in the void unable to move up or down while the entire weight of your body slowly shifted itself on to your one trapped arm and you saw that worse than falling is not being allowed to fall. They tell it as a dream, a joke, an anecdote of the old Creagh Dhu Club, something once read. It is the expression of a deep-seated anxiety.

‘What do you think of
Take it to the Edge
?’ Normal asked me. ‘As a title?’

He stirred the sugar bowl and smiled over suddenly at the marmosets, one of whom had just said to the other, ‘I mean eggs.’

I dreamed about climbing the wall of a warehouse in Camden Town, high above an abandoned inlet on the Grand Union Canal. Below me, rotting wooden houseboats shifted on their dirty mooring ropes, and one or two brownish ducks huddled in the cold wind on the towpath, among the dock leaves and the hedge mustard stark as a tangle of barbed wire. At the base of the wall grew ivies with strange-shaped leaves. It was coming on to rain from the south, where I could see the white confectionery fretwork of the gasometer cradles, the spire of the St Pancras Hotel. An airliner slipped across the dusty sky. Over the inlet, on the bare packed earth of the scrapyards, they were breaking up a car.

All at once I clutched the empty metal frame of a window. My heart was in my mouth. I was aware that the life was leaking tragically out of all these things.

In the middle distance where the light made it hard to tell the water from the banks I saw a man walking under a bridge, harvesting a kind of rubbery weed. I would not go back down to look. Next he offered me a handful of pink shells. Eighty feet below me his face was an indistinct oval beneath the brim of his hat. He was determined I should go down. He held up his hands and they were full of flowers – orpine, ‘midsummer men’. A voice said, ‘Into the mirror to die, root and flower.’ Inside the empty shell of the building something tapped aimlessly and the draughts blew the dust along the floor. The window ledge creaked as I moved; it shifted a little.

I told Normal this dream, and he was silent for a minute or two. Then he nodded matter-of-factly, and with the air of someone opening up a new subject said,

‘I once knew two lads who called their rope Phillip.’

I had worked in London for three years. On weekdays I ate in the restaurants near the university, queuing at cinemas in the evening to see the latest French and Russian films. At the weekend I would walk along the bank of the canal to King’s Cross to buy a paperback from the station bookstall; or, in the other direction, to Regent’s Park or the maze of streets behind Tesco where in a heat like a kind of jelly poured in between the buildings, Greek and Turkish Cypriot widows, the shortest women I had ever seen, toiled along with bulging patchwork shopping bags and huge, slow-moving buttocks, or sat by an open door stroking a black cat.

There were cats everywhere, especially when it rained. They crouched under the shuttered railway arches among the sodden fish and chip papers off which they had already licked all the fat. They stood indecisively on the wet pavement outside the Plaza at night. They slept runny-eyed but patient in shop doorways and among the piles of plastic milk crates. Everyone in London had one, dancing embarrassedly on its hind legs in the front room to snatch at a bit of tuna fish; sitting on a television staring into space. One Saturday morning I saw half a dozen old people leaning over the railings of a basement area in Pratt Street, where a cat had somehow got itself shut in the coal cellar. They had heard it clearly, they explained, but none of them could see it or get down to it: there were no steps, and no one would let them into the house.

‘There it is. There it is again!’

‘Oh yes, there it is again, poor thing.’

‘ – the poor thing!’

They tilted their heads, to encourage me to listen.

‘It might be hurt, you see, or anything.’

‘ – hurt or anything!’

A diagonal shadow had been inching its way over the worn flagstones all morning and now divided the area in half. The cellar door, with its broken frosted-glass panels, was in the dark half.

Once you got over the railings, I thought, the drop would be no more than ten feet: if you stepped over, bent down facing the street, and then lowered yourself to the full length of your arms, you would be all right. I touched the railings. They were warm and rusty. I could imagine myself swinging over them, and this made me feel vaguely excited, as if I had already done it.

‘I’ll just go down and see,’ I said.

Down in the area it was cool. A mysterious vitality had caused its walls of greyish London brick to grow damp moss, and in one place small clumps of willow herb and bright yellow ragwort. If I looked back up I could see the agitated expectant heads of the old people, sweating gently in the Camden sun. I began to wonder what I would do with the cat if I caught it, and how I would get out of the area myself. Indistinct noises came from the cellar.

‘Come on then, puss!’ I called. ‘Puss?’

All at once it shot out into the daylight blinking and hissing, and streaked up the wall sending down little fragments of rotten mortar.

On the pavement among the feet of the old people, trapped again, it turned and turned on itself, making a sort of bubbling angry whine and rocking back and forth on its haunches, while they backed away from it with nervous skips and jumps.

As soon as it saw a gap it ran off up Pratt Street and round a corner. It was tabby and white, quite large.

‘Oh well!’ I said. ‘Not much wrong with him!’

This fetched a laugh.

‘Now,’ I said.

Chipped or missing bricks encouraged me to scramble up a foot or two then hang from my left while I reached out with the other for the base of the railings. I couldn’t quite touch them, and I found that in this position I was pivoting away from the wall. A man kept sticking his arm through for me to catch.

‘Here! Here! Let me—’ he said.

He took off his coat excitedly and knelt on the pavement.

‘No,’ I said.

I got down and started from the bottom again, extending my whole body this time instead of only my arm, so that I felt as if one long straight line could be drawn, up from the ball of my left foot to the fingertips of my right hand. I pushed down with my left hand and, as I began to swing away from the wall, got hold of the railings easily and tugged hard. ‘Here!’ shouted the man who had stuck his arm through. He fussed over me as I stepped back over on to the pavement, patting my sleeves and dusting my shoulders.

‘
There
you come!’ he said, looking around as if he’d pulled me up after all.

I was wheeling a trolley round one of the supermarkets in Camden High Street when an old lady came up to me very determinedly and stood in my way. ‘I think it was a wonderful thing you did,’ she said. ‘And I hope they put you in the papers for it.’

She rubbed her eyes.

Two or three weeks later someone I knew rang me up and asked me if I would like to go and learn rock-climbing in the sports centre at Holloway. Remembering how easy and pleasant it had been to reach up, lock off my arm, then pull hard at the base of the railings so that I was suddenly lifted almost without effort back into the street, I said yes. I was about thirty years old.

At Hoghton Quarry the rhododendron flowers are a strange transparent lilac colour. They drift down past you as you climb, like confetti at the marriage of air and rock, while below you the tall straight trees filter out the light from the boggy aisle in front of the cliff. There are rhododendron bushes on every ledge, and when you are trying to get off the top you have to make your way down through a plantation of them, slithering helplessly about with the steep friable brown soil caking your feet and your nose full of their oppressive dusty smell, you clutch at the tangled stems with mounting hysteria.

‘Those,’ said Normal when I mentioned them, ‘are the rhododendrons of an Earl. They are an
Earl’s
rhododendrons, and those are his trees.’

Normal had taken two or three of us up there in his car to try and free the remaining aid moves on a climb called Boadicea. We were trespassing. Hoghton is a secluded, impressive place whose pale sandy walls stretch above you, some as concave as the bow of a battleship, others raddled with enormous silent overhangs. Birds give piping calls in the green twilight. Between the fallen quarry buildings and overgrown hummocks the ground is spongy with sphagnum. There is a fur of lichen on everything; it gives an air of intimacy, but you don’t welcome intimacy on such a scale. You eye the huge corroded bolts sticking out of the rock: your gaze is drawn up further than it wants to go. Every silent figure you see among the trees might be the Earl, breathing heavily but quietly – watching. We had no luck with Boadicea, and towards evening rain began to rustle down between the leaves and drip into our little colourful heaps of equipment.

To get to the quarry you go over a railway line, then walk up a marshy slot. On the way back through the wet fields, Normal pointed gravely at everything as he named it: grass, fences, walls, all belonged to the Earl of Hoghton. A grey mist came up out of the distant woods. When we got to the place where you cross the railway he made us stop while he studied the signals intently, then he flopped down and put his ear to one of the rails.

‘Nothing coming,’ he said.

In the village where we had parked the car he told us, ‘This is the
village
of an Earl. How do you like it? These are an Earl’s flowers, this is his chapel – Wesleyan – and this is the
telephone box of an Earl
.’ He spread his arms wide. Rain drummed on the roof of the car. We were soaked. ‘Above is the fucking leaky sky of an Earl!’

On the way home he pointed out barns and hedgerows that he said belonged to the Earl.

‘Are those the cows of the Earl?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘But that’s his chemical factory?’

‘No it isn’t.’

There was scaffolding under all the motorway bridges in the north that year. The signs were being changed. That night, lost among the contraflow systems around Bolton, we watched the heavy vehicles nose past with water smoking away from under their mudguards and their loads wrapped in blue and orange tarpaulin.

‘Is this the A666?’

‘It says “Back Lorne Street”.’

Finally, as we went through Salford, Normal swerved the car in towards the pavement and pointed his finger at a dark furry mess in the gutter.

‘
That
,’ he said, ‘was the cat of an Earl.’

This was the year after I had left London, and I had a cat of my own.

I had just met Normal, who was still working at High Adventure, in Manchester, lounging yellow in the face with boredom every day behind a glass counter, while the rain blowing down Deansgate made white streaks on the windows and his customers argued desultorily over the merits of a hank of fluorescent rope from Italy, or leafed through the autobiography of a famous mountaineer they thought they had once seen. ‘Adventure,’ promised the neon sign above the main window, ‘High Adventure’.

By then I lived in one of the solid red ironmaster houses that are set foursquare behind laurel hedges all along the main roads into Stalybridge and Ashton. The earth in the back garden was stamped bare and strewn with charred mattresses, but had once a huge tree which drooped over my balcony. At night I would go out there with the cat. A smell of laburnum came remote and tranquil from some other garden. The balcony was full of dry stalks and leaves flaking down to powder. The cat sprang and pounced among them, or sat still suddenly and purred. There was a shout from the main road, then a note or two of music. I would stroke the cat absentmindedly.

The old man in the flat downstairs from me kept his door open so that the sharp smell of cooked vegetables soaked into the warm air of his landing. The bathroom, which was shared, was on his floor, and as soon as you got into the bath he was knocking to say that he had to use the lavatory. He waited on the stairs if he heard your door open or close, and let milk boil over late at night. The first day I was there he came up and told me he was on his own, his daughter had gone out without leaving him anything to eat.

‘She usually leaves me something,’ he said. ‘A bit of ham or something. Are you having some tea?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I could make you a cup of coffee,’ and he stood in my kitchen looking at the orange plastic breadbin I had bought that day, while I boiled the kettle and got two cups out. ‘It’ll only be instant,’ I said.

Did he take sugar? He liked a bit of sugar. Milk? Not too much. He had a kind of weak pliability but once he began to stare at something he seemed to go into a dream.