Climbers: A Novel (8 page)

‘All the time. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for that.’

He tried twice more but couldn’t do it and came down each time massaging his hands, depressed at the waste of all this energy.

‘I’ll get the runners out later,’ he said. ‘I’ll abseil down for them after I’ve had a rest.’

I was lighter than Normal. I thought I could accept the logic of the rightward movement round the overhangs and not fight against it.

‘Leave them in,’ I said. ‘I want to try.’

He stared at me surprisedly. Then he laughed.

‘You and those bloody boots!’

I shrugged.

He knew I had never led anything so hard before, and he seemed to be discussing it with himself. ‘I suppose it can’t hurt,’ he said, then: ‘All right, why not? Give it a go.’ He undid from the rope – we were using a doubled nine millimetre – and handed me the end. ‘Get tied on to that before I change my mind.’ He rummaged through his sack until he found the Thermos flask. He always had his tea without milk. ‘You’ll be quite good if you can do anything with the crack,’ he promised me, gazing out over the valley.

I went round picking up my bits and pieces; I hung them on my harness.

‘You won’t need those,’ Normal said. ‘The gear’s good. You could drop a Ford Fiesta on that top runner. You could drop an elephant on it.’

After all, I thought: I’ve got the boots.

By then I was planning one or two moves, a show of courage, a graceful retreat. But the undercut gave way as soon as I pulled up and I was so surprised I began to scuttle right as quickly as I could, after the deteriorating handholds. Suddenly it was no effort. I could smell the damp bracken; and the curious spicy odour of the gritstone in front of my face. I could feel the new boots, edging on a tiny quartz pebble, clinging magisterially to nothing; and my hands as they selected and rejected a finger-pocket, a little rib, a large rounded hole like a bucket which worked in the wrong direction to be any use. It was exhilarating. I was the idea or intuition that sat cleverly at the centre of all this, directing it.

I remembered clearly being in the swimming baths as a boy. The tiled edge was slimy, the steps steep, the water glutinous and lifeless about me. Everyone else could swim. I was cold. I patrolled slowly from one side of the shallow end to the other. I made swimming motions, but only to feel the water slapping under my chin. I was half-hearted, I expected nothing. But then intention and action became somehow confused and I was shooting forward over the surface in a way I did not understand. It was some time before I related this sensation to the idea of swimming; after that I never felt it with quite the same purity and sharpness . . .

At the base of the finishing crack, dependent on an astonishingly painful hand-jam while I fought to get one foot on a sloping ledge somewhere at the level of my chest, I heard Normal shout,

‘Don’t give up! It’s yours now! It’s yours!’

He was delighted. When I looked down I could see his face, gleaming and mad. He groaned. He called, ‘Go on, go on! I’ve never seen you climb like this!’

The last runner he had put in was four feet below me. The same distance above me was the top, a few clumps of grass and bilberry hanging over a dusty, rounded edge. ‘Go on then,’ shouted Normal, ‘just reach through. Just reach through!’ The hand-jam plopped out without any warning, and then I was dangling a bit dazed on the end of the rope, blood coming out of my nose where I had banged it on the rock. My hand looked as if it had been through a food processor.

‘Bastard!’ said Normal. He had hit his head on the undercut when the impact of the fall jerked him off his feet. ‘Why did you do that? It was yours!’

I still felt elated.

‘I nearly had it,’ I said. ‘I nearly had it!’

As I hung there gently turning from side to side I could see right along the edge in both directions. It was about half past eleven on a Saturday morning. Great strings of ramblers were already trailing up and down the worn stones of the Roman path, coloured like the paper tails of kites. ‘Cut that noise down,’ the school parties had been warned as they left the minibus, ‘and remember you’re out for a day in the country.’ The new boots had begun to pinch my toes.

‘Are these things supposed to wear a hole in your foot?’ I called down to Normal.

He climbed it in the end.

He solved the crux by attacking the overhangs direct, in a sustained savage burst of effort which eliminated most of the protection. In that form it was beyond anything I could do.

‘It’s a trip, that,’ was his judgement.

His hands trembled with adrenalin-shock: he studied them puzzledly. Under the impression it hadn’t been climbed before, I wanted him to name it The Magic Boots; Normal, though, favoured Peanut Power. We soon learned that a team from Sheffield had snapped it up at the end of the previous November.

‘What did they call it?’

‘Masters of the Modern Dance. The fucking wimps.’

The local climbers describe any fall that ends on the ground as ‘decking it’. Elsewhere a fall like that might be known as a ‘crater’; it depends where you are.

Normal boasted about his own falls, particularly the one he took from the railway train, which put him in plaster for a whole summer: but he had a prim attitude to other people’s.

One day near the end of April Sankey, who used to tie on to the end of the rope with a peculiar home-made waistbelt which transferred the shock load of the fall directly on to his kidneys and diaphragm, misjudged a move high up over the pool at Lawrencefield Quarry. Fifteen feet above and to the side of his runner, he swung across the wall like the pendulum of a clock and with a mournful clatter of equipment and an explosion of chalk smashed into a shoulder of rock at right angles to it.

After a short silence he said, ‘Let me down quick.’

Normal laughed grimly when he heard about this.

‘Sankey’s losing his touch,’ he said. ‘What route was it?’ I told him and he said:

‘Two years ago he’d have pissed up that. Pissed up it.’

Not long after I got the magic boots we were back to Stanage. A climber from Rotherham was stretchered off before we had been there half an hour.

He had lost his momentum thirty feet up a blunt fin of rock when he found himself bridged out between the arête and a smallish foothold on the face. The effort of sustaining the bridge made his legs shake. He called something down to his second and shifted his feet as far as his situation would allow. This eased the strain on his thigh muscles and gave him enough confidence to pat, pat, pat with his free hand, looking for any tiny hold which might lever him out of the bridge and help him shift his weight on to the face. Soon his legs started to shake again. He looked down desperately as if to impress on himself the distance to the ground and called to his friend, ‘I’ll have to put my feet back, it’s no good, they were better where they were—’ By the time we noticed him it was clear he had been through this cycle three or four times. He had tried and failed to place a runner. He was beginning to tire. He would not find the hold he wanted. To Normal he was just a figure in faded red tracksuit trousers, a T-shirt bearing the legend Pacific Ironworks: near enough to see but too far off for sympathy.

‘It looks quite hard,’ I said.

‘He won’t do it now,’ Normal predicted. ‘He’s already blown it. You don’t bridge that, you just step across.’ He got into his harness, inspected the buckle disgustedly. ‘I’m chucking this away when I get home,’ he promised. ‘It’s been buggered for a year.’

‘I don’t think I can work this out,’ said the boy from Rotherham.

By now everyone but Normal was staring up and giving conflicting advice. If one said, ‘Sort that runner out and get a move on!’ there was another to tell him to forget it. ‘If you go back to the arête you can have a rest.’ Aware that his private misery had become public, and tiring as much as anything else of the social and intellectual pressure to find a solution, he gave up and tried to take all his weight on his right hand. We watched him swing gently outwards, like a door opening, and slip off. He fell among the boulders with what in other circumstances might have been a sigh of relief. Afterwards, strapped to the Thomas stretcher, he reminded me of a chrysalis, primed and pupating.

His friend went bounding down the hill in front of him carrying both their rucksacks, full of that queer nervous energy which often embarrasses you in those situations, quartering the slopes like a spaniel in the winter bracken, looking back over his shoulder at the stretcher bearers as if for encouragement; while a small ambulance drove up and down the road below, sometimes flashing its blue light at the moorland sheep. He was a tall, fair boy, about eighteen years old, who looked as if he had the makings of a good athlete.

Later the foil blanket which had covered the casualty caught the light as someone folded it up. By that time the ambulance was going back to Sheffield, not at a great rate, and we had started climbing again.

‘I didn’t see blood,’ I said. ‘Do you think it was bad?’

‘Keep your eye on the rope,’ Normal recommended quietly. ‘I’m on the hard bit.’

He was a long way above me but the wet air gave his voice close, conversational qualities. He stood up delicately on one toe and with his back curved in a strange, graceful S-shape reached for the rounded holds at the top. ‘They’re here,’ he explained. ‘But they’re awkward to use.’ When it was my turn the rock looked very black.

We climbed all day. Rags of mist came up through the plantation, where a kind of humid softness or distinctness of the air made the trees seem as if they were hiding something, and the rock never really dried out; but though it threatened to rain it never did. All day long the cement factory above Hope pumped heavy moist smoke straight up into the cloudbase, then at nightfall it vanished without warning, to be replaced on the obscure hillside by a constellation of orange lamps which suggested the shape of an ocean liner.

‘Never mind that,’ said Normal. ‘Let’s get to the pub.’

Though it looks remote, and in some lights romantic, Stanage is only two miles from the suburbs of Sheffield. When the wind is right you can smell dinners cooking in the Kelvin Flats.

SEVEN

An awkward grinning lad called Gaz worked at the butcher’s in the town. You often saw him at dinner time, a head taller than anyone else in the street, clumping over the zebra crossing by the health food shop in the steel-rimmed work clogs favoured by generations of local slaughtermen, his red hair cut in a kind of savage brush. He was eighteen or twenty. He had transport, a fawn Vauxhall which he sometimes drove like a maniac. When he spoke he made aggressive bobbing movements of his head and shoulders; this was out of shyness. He was always impatient to get to the crag, and he came out with one or another of us whenever he could take a day off.

At the beginning of May he and I went to Trowbarrow Quarry in Lancashire, where I wanted to try a route called The Coral Sea. Coral Sea is fun not because it is hard but because it’s a steep slab covered with tiny delicate fossil imprints, so that you are climbing even more than usual on a kind of frozen time. We found that ICI had closed it and put up trespass warnings. We wandered about anyway to emphasise what we thought of as our clear right to be there, scuffing the wood sorrel and craning our necks in astonishment at the evil zinc-grey face of the old workings. ‘It’s meant to be limestone, but it never looks like it to me,’ said Gaz. ‘All the books say it is but it never looks like it to me.’ Trowbarrow Main Wall, a hundred feet high, totters on one pediment of rock: as it slips inevitably away to the right, Jean Jeanie, Cracked Actor, Warspite Direct, all the cracklines are widening stealthily . . .

‘You just can’t settle down in a place when it’s banned,’ he complained.

He went twenty feet up the oppressive Red Wall in his torn and dusty running shoes; warned himself, ‘Oops! Don’t look down!’; jumped off with a thud and stared sulkily across at the abandoned explosives store with its fringe of rank weeds.

‘Looks like bloody
Dr Who
.’

Earth, 1997: everyone lives under the ground and wears identical clothes. Something appalling has been done to their sexuality and they walk round staring directly ahead of themselves. ‘Not much different to now.’ Every fifteen minutes a voice like the station announcer at Preston says something nobody can understand and they all walk off down a different corridor. Can the Doctor help them?

‘For fuck’s sake shut up,’ said Gaz, ‘and let’s go somewhere we can
climb
.’

Though the climbs were easier we had a much better time at Jack Scout Cove, a narrow defile at the end of a caravan site which opens out on the sudden shocking spaces of Morecambe Bay near Silverdale. As you face the sea the cliff goes up on your left, whitish, dusted with the same lichen you can see on any other limestone crag, say at Giggleswick or Malham: custard yellow, dry and crusty. You get to the top among the yew trees bent and shaved by the sea wind.