Climbers: A Novel (9 page)

I had been there once as a boy. I knew that, but you couldn’t say I remembered it.

The right bank of the cove is a clinted slab overgrown with whin, short turf and hawthorn bushes. From there the tourists can gaze out to sea or at the weed-covered rocks at the base of the cliff like green chenille cushions in the front room of a fussy old woman. They murmur and laugh, their children shout. When Gaz and I were there the hawthorn wasn’t yet in blossom. Sheep moved about on the turf.

‘You see those green tags in their ears?’ said Gaz. ‘I’ll be cutting them out on Monday morning. One quick slit of the knife and out they come!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Gaz.’

‘I could get you some eyes to put in people’s beer.’

They have given the climbs in this cosy place queer existentialist names, Victim of Life, Unreal City, Lemmingsville.

‘What’s
your
name, Louise?’ asked one little girl confidingly of another.

Gaz got out his cheap denim shorts and faded Union Jack T-shirt and undressed shyly. The women eyed him. They were out from Leeds and Bradford for Whit Week by the sea, with their bare red shoulders and untalkative husbands. Gaz’s arms and legs were peculiarly white, as if he spent all week in the cold store. He always looked underfed but full of uncontrollable energy.

‘Mummy, those men are in
our cave
!’

We traversed the whole cliff a few feet above the tideline, our shadows bobbing on the rock, dwarfing then stretching themselves, sending out an elongated arm or leg. All morning the water rose steadily, the colour of the water in the Manchester Ship Canal. ‘You wouldn’t like to fall in that,’ said Gaz. And then: ‘What are these fucking little shrimps doing up here?’ Laying away off a big white flake with his feet tucked negligently up and to one side so that he looked as intelligent as a gibbon, he probed about one-handed in a narrow crack full of things like lice with long springy tails. Suddenly he shrieked and threw himself backwards into the air, landing in the sea with a huge splash. When he came up blowing and laughing the children stared at him in exasperation. He said: ‘One of them jumped in me eye! Right in me eye!’ He rubbed his face vigorously.

Whenever anybody mentioned Jake Scout Cave after that he would wink at me laboriously and say, ‘Those fucking shrimps, eh?’

In the afternoon we lay on the clints in the sun. The tourists accepted us companionably. The tide was on its way out and a transistor radio somewhere down on the damp sand played ‘Green Tambourine’.

When you hear an old song again like that, one you have not thought about for years, there is a brief slippage of time, a shiver, as if something had cut down obliquely through your life and displaced each layer by its own depth along the fault line. Without warning I was able to recall being in Silverdale as a child. In the cafe hung a picture by a local water colourist, of two rowing boats apparently moored in a low-lying street: he wanted eleven pounds for it but it was worth more. I sat rigid with delight beneath it, a thick slab of steak and kidney pie cooling on an oval plate in front of me. ‘Eat your lunch, eat your lunch.’ Great channels of slowly moving water in the mud; strange flat peninsulas with the sheep chewing the tough grass; the empty thin hull of a crab in a pool shaped like a waving boy.

At about four o’clock Gaz sat up and clapped his hand to his face. ‘Fucking sunbathing!’ he said. ‘I’m going to regret this tomorrow.’ And he examined gloomily the reddening patches on his thighs. ‘Better get going I suppose.’ We drove to Junction 28 on the M6, where we squatted at the base of a wall in our patched baggy tracksuit trousers and headbands, like the remains of a punitive expedition gone native among the tribes in the killing humidity. ‘Junction 28,’ runs the advert, ‘the best place to eat, sleep and be merry.’ Everything was closed. Only the takeaway was open, and they had no Danish pastries.

‘That would be a “small” in America,’ Gaz told me with a kind of sneering nostalgia, remembering the Pepsi-Colas of Pasadena where he had been, it turned out, with the Venture Scouts. He put some chips in his mouth. ‘What you’ve got there would be a “small”.’ He brightened up. ‘You get to the bottom of it there and it’s
full of ice
.’

Teenagers, out for an afternoon in the car in their tight clean jeans and striped cotton tops, eyed his burnt arms nervously. Old people walked past, pretending to ignore us but carefully avoiding our feet. ‘Closed,’ they murmured, staring numbly straight ahead. ‘Closed.’ The caravans rolled south along the motorway, full of children and dogs. Little Asian girls with great laughing eyes and white teeth caught sight of our bruised and chalky hands and immediately became thoughtful: the women, in paper-thin lamé trousers, hurried them past.

‘Another hole in me shirt,’ said Gaz. ‘What a fucking sight I look.’

We ate our chips and even threw a few of them at one another in a sort of desultory slow motion, while the teenagers looked on, prim, embarrassed.

Gaz walked off to the car.

‘I’m sick of being stared at now,’ he said.

So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’ already a nostalgia number. How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton.

Gaz never simply threw a rope down a crag; he ‘cobbed it off the top’. He didn’t fall: he ‘boned off’. If the moves on a climb demanded as well as strength or delicacy that kind of concentration which leaves you brutalised and debilitated when you have done the moves, he called them ‘poiky’. ‘That was a bit bleeding poiky,’ he’d say, hauling himself desperately over the top and trying to control the tremor in his left leg. ‘Fuck me.’ He soon recovered though. ‘A bazzer that. A bloody
bazzing
route!’ He had made up some of these words himself. Others, like ‘rumpelstiltskin’, which he used to mean anyone eccentric or incompetent, he had modified to his own use.

I saw a picture of him when he was a baby.

His parents kept it on the sideboard at home by the clock with the brass pendulum and the long chains. It was in a wine-coloured cardboard frame with gold edging and in it he looked older than his own father.

One Sunday we were sitting in a steep gully at Tissington Spires. It had been sunny all the way down in the car. Now if you looked into Dovedale you could see a feeble light bleaching out the moss and stones. The water was a gelid blue-grey colour in its deepest stretches; above it tumbled bleak slopes or rubble, destabilised by tree-felling and littered with huge raw logs; two or three anxious sheep stood between the river and the rock.

Loose stones trickled down the gully. It was as cold as a bus shelter in the centre of Leeds on a Friday night, and as crowded, with climbers standing or sitting awkwardly wherever roots or dead branches crossed the steep dusty slope. Their quiet voices came back from the rock. When a few specks of rain blew through the ruined trees, a shaven-headed boy looked up and laughed; then down at the purple tape in his hand, his neck bent in the attitude of the inmate of a camp.

There was a woman with one of the teams further down the gully, where a lot of dead wood had made it easier to find somewhere to sit. She had blonde hair cut in an exact fringe above her eyebrows. Gaz, waiting in the queue for his turn at Yew Tree Wall, stared at her idily, biting the hard skin round his fingernails. She was belaying a climber on the wall. She fed him some rope, took it back in, running it deftly through the Sticht plate. He swapped feet uneasily on a sloping hold and asked himself, ‘I wonder if I’m supposed to be able to reach that? Apparently not.’ He tried again, slithered back to his original position. ‘You bastard.’ The minute figures of tourists by the river, catching the clatter of his equipment, shaded their eyes helplessly and tried to see if anything had happened. The girl looked up at him and when he still didn’t make the move shivered with a mixture of boredom and cold.

She tried to pull the sleeves of her long sweater down over her wrists; smiled quickly at nothing, as if she was practising the expression. The boy with the shaved head wanted to take a photograph of her but she wouldn’t co-operate. ‘Come on now. Big grin. Big cheesy grin.’ She reminded me of someone but I couldn’t remember who. When I told Gaz he nodded, still watching her.

‘I’ve seen her about,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen her a few times at the Bradford wall too, on a Tuesday night, climbing in pink tights.’ He chuckled. ‘Not bad! I wonder if she’s married? Eh?’ And he ducked his head in her direction with a significance I wasn’t sure I’d caught. I laughed.

‘Would it make any difference to you?’

He looked away, so I left it.

‘It’s not a climber she reminds me of,’ I said.

On the crux of Yew Tree Wall, a yawning lean to the right from the tips of two fingers hooked into a knife-edged pocket, Gaz lost his balance and had to grab an old aid sling threaded into the rock.

‘Well that’s fucked that then,’ he said viciously. ‘Back to stuffing mince into plastic bags tomorrow.’

We abseiled off the tree at the top.

‘You drive fifty miles to do a route, wait two hours for a lot of pillocks to clear off it, then you pox it up by pulling on a piece of tat.’ All the way back along Dovedale to the car he was in a foul mood; in the pub at Wetton that night he looked round with hatred at the tourists.

‘All these dossers,’ he said loudly. ‘What are they ever going to do with their lives?’

In country pubs like this there is always a plump boy with a brand-new French tracksuit top from the Grattan catalogue sitting opposite you with a packet of vinegar flavoured crisps. At the back of the room bikers plan their outrages: they will have a fire at the camp site, drink tinned beer, tease a dog. A middle-aged man walks stiffly past – under his tweed sports coat he has a striped shirt, a coloured scarf tied like a neck brace.

‘They come out here at the weekends . . . If they walk down Dovedale like the fucking Pickerton Ramblers they think they’ve had a big adventure. “Ex
cews
me,” ’ he mimicked. ‘ “Could a climber like that
reelly
fall off? I mean reelly
hurt
himself? ” ’

‘Yew Tree Wall won’t go away,’ I said. ‘You can come back to it any time. Next Saturday if you like.’

‘How do I know that? I might die. It might fall down. Anything might happen. I might drive me car into a wall and end up in a wheelchair.’ He drank his beer. ‘It ruins your whole weekend, something like that. All you’ve got to look forward to is another week of dirty water, your hands in fucking dirty water till they split. You want to try it, you do.’ He got up and went to the lavatory, his great height and lurching, hunch-shouldered walk making him look even more dejected.

‘Been out doing some climbing then?’ the fat boy asked. He offered me a crisp and when I took one sat forward companionably. ‘Rather you than me,’ he said. ‘I bet you’ve seen some accidents at that game.’

In country pubs like this women from the nearby towns dressed to the nines eat steak sandwiches from a paper napkin, holding their hands delicately in front of them like a praying mantis, gold bangles dangling from thin wrists. It’s their night out, and their feet must be killing them. Every so often they lean down and with a furtive but curiously graceful motion adjust a shoe which is nothing more than a few slim red leather straps. After you have been climbing all weekend this gives you a sharp sexual surprise. With their make-up and perfume, their white shoulders displayed suddenly as they turn to someone and laugh, they are like women from another planet. You watch covertly to see if they will betray themselves further; they never do.

On the way home Gaz had the air of someone watching himself clinically to see how late he dared leave his braking. It was a kind of bitter investigation of his own technique. Once he swerved into the opposite carriageway of the A515 and drove along it waiting for me to say something. In the dark car I couldn’t make out his expression. He said,

‘Who did that girl at Tissington remind you of, if it wasn’t a climber?’

‘I can’t remember.’

At that time of Gaz’s life driving and climbing were like two aspects or definitions of the same thing. Cars stood for the wish, climbing for the act.

I think of him showing off on a Saturday morning in the scattered early traffic of the B6106, or flirting with the tight little corners of the Strines Road on the way from Huddersfield to the climbers’ cafes at Grindleford and Stoney Middleton:

The brickworks lurch past on one side, on the other white faces peer at us momentarily through the streaming windscreen of a Land Rover. The roads are still plastered with last year’s orange leaves. Stone walls, sodden verges, sudden drops assemble themselves out of the mist only so Gaz can annihilate them; junctions and old gates yawn out at us and are snatched away. The Vauxhall rocks and dips as he forces it into bends fringed with dripping oaks and tilted white signposts. Everything is fog and wet, everything is at the wrong angle, after every narrow squeak he gives me a sidelong glance I pretend not to see. At Bole Edge, where the dark feathery conifers close in over the road, the mist thins without warning:
An old man on a bicycle
is silhouetted at the top of the hill, wobbling along against the bright morning sun!

Something else danced one Saturday among the heat mirages in the middle of the road.

‘Did you see that? It was a hare! It was a bloody big hare!’

‘It was only a bit of newspaper.’

Later the reflection of my watch flickered on the dashboard; the limestone factories swam like casinos and amusement palaces in a golden haze; trapped in the obsessional net of drystone wall on the long sweeping rises by the A623 east of Buxton, groups of beech trees caught fire suddenly in the sunshine. Gaz accelerated. It was like being in a video game.