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Authors: M. John Harrison

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BOOK: Climbers: A Novel
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Taking a film out of his OM–
I
at mid-day in August, he would be ambushed by memories of the Atacama he had never seen.

Punta Arenas lay in wait for him at the end of Morecambe pier.

Always just out of sight, the sixty-metre ice cliffs of the San Rafael Glacier glittered in the sun, calving into a green and milky sea. Slowly he realised it was not the real South America he loved but some continent of his own invention.

After Normal left High Adventure and moved to Huddersfield, where his wife had the offer of a local authority job that would support them both, there was nothing to keep me in Stalybridge. The work I was doing meant nothing to me. Normal got a house on an estate. Since he was the only person in the north I knew well, I thought I might as well go and rent a cheap cottage in one of the valleys that run down from the moors south and west of the town. I didn’t want to live on a housing estate.

By that time my cat had died, though not from eating the old man’s fishbones. It ran in from the street one morning with the left side of its lower jaw broken, and lay sprawled and panting on the mat. The eye on that side had been pushed in, causing it to turn and lift its head irritably every so often, as if it could see something through it that wasn’t there. A car had run it over I suppose. Sick cats often hide in the garden or crouch all day just out of reach under a cupboard: but they always know when a human being is their only chance. I kept it alive for two or three days, even though the vet recommended putting it down. In the end I had to give up. While I was trying to get it to drink something it looked up at me, with the broken jaw making a kind of fragile snarl, and purred. I didn’t know whether this was from pain – out of some desperate failure of vocabulary – or affection. Either way I remembered it butting its forehead against mine after it had eaten its dinner, and I couldn’t bear that.

When I left Stalybridge the old man was still going strong. Oddly enough he never seemed to understand that the cat was dead. For a long time afterwards I would hear him on the stairs in the evenings, calling ‘Puss! Puss!’, or in the mornings find a saucer of thin grey milk outside his door.

 

 

 

 

FOUR

 

Sankey’s View

 

 

 

 

After each thaw the view from the upstairs window became much bleaker. The snow retreated to the edge of the fields and lay there piled up against the low stone walls. Everything had a curiously unfinished look. Sheep picked their way over the steep fields in single file, unnerved by the re-emergence of this forgotten landscape. The old poached places reappeared at gates, black against the bruised grass. Nothing could yet be said to be green. It was less quiet. Starlings sat up in the house gutters and on the telephone wires to do poor, cracked imitations of other birds; after each effort, sneers, whistles and a kind of rhythmical creaking or scraping noise broke out. Later every afternoon as the days grew longer, the sodium lights came on on the other side of the valley, grouped in twos and threes near farms, following the line of a road. In the fading light the wooded cloughs struck diagonally across the hillside, very black and immobile. The next time he looked up it had all gone quite black, and only the orange lights were left.

 

 

 

 

FIVE

 

March, in the End

 

 

 

 

In the end March was useless.

We weren’t getting the weather, Bob Almanac said. Without that the year was in abeyance, its whole business untransactable. We raced into the dazzling sun of the cold mornings, looking for signs that the door was swinging open for us. But a grey light lay on the beech trees, and the walls and farmhouses had the bleached look sunlight gives them deep in the winter. One day I saw a warm tobacco-brown haze on the moors to the south of Buxton.

‘It looks nice.’

‘Wait till you get out of the car. It’ll freeze your bollocks off. What’s the capital of Louisiana?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I thought you were educated.’

The sun had always gone in by the time we got where we were going. The rock was bitter. Down in Staffordshire knuckles of it break out of the tops of the ridges in the mist, like the rocks in a Hammer film. The wind sweeps up from the Potteries over isolated farms where they are committing incest or parricide or staring into an empty cup listening to the abandoned machinery and banging gates outside.

‘What’s it like up there?’

‘Piss wet through.’

‘I mean, what’s the climbing like?’

‘All right if you’re a duck.’

Bits of hail bounced along the slanting ledges like bone dice. After half an hour it settled in. It melted on the holds and from each one a little dribble of cold water started down the dry lichenous rock like a tear. Another Saturday fucked.

Smashed black blocks of rock balanced on one another like the remains of some civilisation whose observances grew so monolithic that in the end there was nothing to do but fall back into error, decline, barbarism. Easy enough to say what sends you away from here feeling so defeated. The weather, the moor, the greenish lichen on everything. Everything turns to paste when you touch it, says Bob Almanac, disgustedly scratching his head. Even the bones are green here, dead sheep scattered empty-socketed at the bottom of a stony gully. The climbs seem wilful. You ebb away into the valley.

‘Clocks change soon then.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean: why? You great wazzock, the
clocks
change soon. It’ll be British Summer Time in a week!’

‘Oh. I thought you said, “Pog’s changed his tune.” ’

‘Who’s Pog?’

I ran over Black Hill every morning to keep fit. For three days the valleys were full of freezing fog. From above you could see it lying pure white and motionless in the sun. Going down into it you found it grey, without comfort. A tree stood on the interface, bare and thorny. Inside, frost covered everything: before you had run a mile it had formed in your hair and beard, on the fibres of your clothes. Distances were shortened, sounds muffled. You went on in silence and the sheep lifted their heads to stare.

I was still at the indoor wall once or twice a week. I always went on Tuesday or Wednesday, in the afternoon when I would be unlikely to find other climbers there. The problems seemed as hard as they had done in January, but I thought I was getting stronger. I wasn’t panicking so much, either, when things went wrong. After half an hour or so I would sit on the floor flexing my fingers and listening to the weightlifters who worked in an area near the wall. (Climbers had been forbidden this area because they had sneaked into it so often without paying.) They groaned like invalids. They addressed their apparatus, with all its springs and counterweights, like lovers. They moved off deeper into it, browsing placidly, so that you saw them like elephants or oxen through a screen of trees.

Sometimes they smiled at me patiently, wondering perhaps why anybody so thin would come here at all.

Waiting for some signal I sat tiredly on the gymnasium floor, watching the traffic through the long windows, the light on the polished but dusty floor. I waited for the bus back to Huddersfield. A few crushed-looking Pakistanis got off it and went away into the cold. From the top deck of the bus I could look down at the monumental stone houses set slightly back off the road, with their flat bare lawns and neat tarmac paths like those in the grounds of a mental home or a crematorium. Factories, cottages, terraces, then a vista of fields opening out to a viaduct; a sudden smell of acetone on the bus.

That Saturday I said, ‘I think it’s Memphis.’

‘What?’

‘The capital of Louisiana.’

We were racing the weather down to Miller’s Dale. March is the hinge. There is always the sense that the year might as easily slam shut on it as open.

 

 

 

 

PART TWO

 

SPRING

 

 

 

 

SIX

 

Masters of the Modern Dance

 

 

 

 

In April I fell off a route at Stanage Edge.

A new kind of rock boot had come on to the market. Manufactured from the rubber compound used in Formula One tyres, the soles of these boots were supposed to give considerably improved friction on slabs and in all the situations where footwork was important. Their disadvantage was that they were hard to come by; and they were so badly designed they were painful to wear. Some climbers were sceptical about the claims made for them; others believed, it was not clear why, that they should be reserved for experts, ordinary boots being good enough for anyone else. I had some and I wanted to try them out. The suede uppers were a beautiful shade of bluish grey, the laces wine red. I had had a pair of size seven shoe trees in them for a week to stretch them.

Normal went first.

The route began with some painful finger-jamming round an undercut, then he had to turn a series of big featureless overhangs which forced him diagonally to the right across the front of the buttress. It was very strenuous. He got some protection in a horizontal break, hissing and puffing with nerves as he hung from his right hand and sorted with his left through the wires and tapes clipped to his harness until he found something that would fit. After that his strength began to fade and his progress was fragmentary, full of stoppages and wrong decisions. ‘You’re on your arms all the time!’ he complained, tucking his feet up under him and scraping at the rock with first one and then the other to try and spread his weight. By the time he had wrestled his way back left and worked out how to use the short finishing crack, his forearms were pumped up like Popeye the Sailor’s, and I had to lower him off on the rope.

He stood at the bottom, panting and looking up.

‘You’re on your arms all the time,’ he repeated.

He shook his head.

BOOK: Climbers: A Novel
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