Climbers: A Novel (17 page)

In winter, the death toll is savage. Those that survive learn to cope with the continual wind and rain, the bitter nights and damp blowing snow of the watershed, by forming loose unhierarchical groups. They know the insulating power of dead bracken. When there are no more ramblers, the girls might run down a sheep: three or four flicks of naked white speed against the rain and the endless black peat rollers: a fire in the night. A girl on her own will not light a fire, but get into the warm carcass and curl up instead, to conserve heat.

Air Force Cadets, Boy Scouts and teenage charity walkers, lost on the long hikes which would have initiated them as useful members of society at large, are adopted eventually by this regime of wild children. Who hasn’t caught a glimpse of them at one time or another on the moor, pale and naked, running with that supernaturally confident gait between the tracts of bog cotton?

Living along the gritstone edges, and soon forgetting any other existence, they become like lemurs, like ghosts. In some way the rocks and the climbs come to belong to them. They allow us to see only dream rocks, dream climbs. This is what Sheffield climbers believe. Silent Spring, The Knock, Above & Beyond the Kinaesthetic Barrier with its eerie tangle of 6b moves: all only shadows. To have had first ascents at all, they must already have been climbed by the escaped girls. In this way, it is maintained in Sheffield, areas of rock hitherto unclimbable are ‘released’ to the hardest and most visionary technicians, who, to encourage the children, leave them gifts of food, cigarettes and equipment.

When Bob Almanac told me about the Variety Club children, I felt a sudden unbearable compassion for their adolescence as it passed: the mornings by the pool, the light blonde down on the arms, the eyes narrowing bemusedly in the bright sunlight, the dumb awareness of the sexual organs. I asked him: ‘What happens when they grow up?’

‘They become people like you and me,’ said Bob. ‘They reinstate themselves slowly into human affairs.’ He winked. ‘After a few years no one knows.’

ELEVEN

There are climbs whose secret is a succession of moves – like the enchained steps of a ballet – sometimes so intricate that the likelihood of your working it out by trial and error is directly dependent on the number of falls you are prepared to take from it. Yorkshire climbers often call this sequence ‘the numbers’. Tourists watch them in the evening at the bottom of the great central wall of Malham Cove, pivoting suddenly away from the little holds as if they have grown shy, one arm thrown backwards, an expression halfway between surprise and excitement on their faces. They seem to hang there forever in the soft warm quiet air, like photographs of themselves, before they begin to fall. Learning the numbers: to what end, perhaps, they are less and less sure.

TWELVE

‘What are you doing with all that money you’re making, Sankey?’

For a moment Sankey, leaning forward over the pub table, had a look on his face as delicate as a girl’s. Then he said,

‘Buggered if I know, lad. Tax man gets most of it I suppose.’

No one expected more. Some kind of evasion, a covering of his tracks, had always been normal to him. He had once told me, for instance, that his teeth were false. ‘They’re more trouble than they’re worth, kid, your own teeth,’ he said. One night after a dream in which he was looking down a deep stinking hole, he’d woken up to find an awful smell in his cottage. ‘I thought, “That’ll be why I had the dream, then.” I got up and looked round for a bit, but I couldn’t find anything. I even went downstairs and had a look in the sink. Then I realised it was my own mouth. Nearly puked. Went and had them out the next day.’

But later when I referred to this story he insisted,

‘I don’t know where you got that idea from, kid. I’ve always taken good care of my teeth.’ He seemed huffy.

How much of himself did he conceal behind manoeuvres like this? I don’t remember wondering. It was a long time before I learned what he did for a living. Bob Almanac told you one thing, Normal another, and soon I saw that neither of them actually knew. Some climbers thought he was in computing, others that he worked for a firm of electrical engineers on Chapel Hill in Huddersfield. From the hints he dropped it could have been either. Whatever it was, he was notoriously mean with what he earned at it.

Every Christmas Day he went to a sister of his. She gave him a woollen hat to climb in. What he gave her in return I can’t imagine. When I knew him, he was still wearing the first one she had ever given him. The rest were in a drawer, perhaps a dozen woollen bobble hats, a bit stretchy on the head, in white and one other colour: hats going back for years, enough hats for the rest of his life.

‘They’re good hats these, kid,’ he would say. ‘Really last well.’

There was a kind of self-expatriation in the way he lived by himself in the cottage under the edge of the moor. It had concentrated his forces so that he hadn’t much need for anyone. In the end, though, this tended to alienate the other climbers. You saw he was interested in them only because their share of the petrol money would lower the cost of a day out in a car whose fuel economy was already a legend. His evasiveness galled people; his self-sufficiency was revealed as a statement of policy rather than a way of life. I remember him sitting on a bench outside the cafe at Stoney Middleton because he felt sick. That was before I climbed regularly with him. It was a freezing cold day in April and he thought he had some virus that was going round at work. ‘I can’t seem to get warm somehow,’ he complained. He had been complaining all morning. I made him have a cup of tea and in the end persuaded him to come inside and drink it. Out of the window we could see snow falling through the sunlight.

‘It’ll be like this for a month now,’ Sankey told me. ‘The weather.’ I asked him if he’d like to give up for the day and go home and he said, ‘You might as well feel ill out here, kid, as at home on your own.’ When I repeated this to Bob Almanac later he laughed and suggested,

‘Ask yourself who paid for the tea.’

I thought this revealed more about him than it did about Sankey.

‘Come on, Bob,’ I said. ‘Be fair.’

Sankey decided he wanted to get out to a place called Whitestonecliffe, or White Mare Crag, near Sutton Bank in the Hambledon Hills, one of several shaky teeth in that gum where it curves east above the Yorkshire Plain.

It was a hot day. We were in running shorts, with Sankey’s dusty old ropes draped round our necks; I had bought us a lot of soft drinks. ‘Water’s cheaper,’ Sankey advised me. (He kept his in a dented aluminium bottle which he had used in the Alps to carry cooking fuel and which nobody else would drink out of.)

‘I haven’t been here for a year or two.’

From the scenic car-park, with its waste bins full of wine bottles and Peau Douce disposable nappies, he found a sunny little path through some woods, narrowed by colonies of dog rose and bramble, filled with the dozy hum of insects so that it seemed like the path that runs along the bottom of some secluded, overgrown town back garden, then suddenly opening right up on the edge of the escarpment so that you felt as if you were flying. One step sideways and you could have drifted out over Gormire Lake, a Victorian brooch oval and dark in the drenching sunshine, while below you the A170 stretched just like a bored cat before flinging itself up the huge earthwork of the Clevelands.

‘They found a woman’s body here,’ Sankey told me seriously. ‘It were in a dry-cleaning bag.’ He considered this. ‘Aye, a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag, that were it. She were in her thirties, so they said. Just behind the car-park as was.’

The cliff is quite a tall one. Steep soil-creep terraces overgrown with willow-herb lead down to its base, where sections have fallen away over the years to produce its substantial roofs and overhangs like a motorway flyover among rumours of corrupt contracting – poor materials, backhanders, bankruptcy. The rock is a kind of crumbling yellow cement stuffed with pebbles, adulterated with sand, propped up here and there by paving slabs of harder stuff bedded so that you can slot them in and out. In some places it has a spurious warm honey colour in the sun; elsewhere it looks like the cheese it is.

‘You’re usually all right,’ said Sankey, ‘if you keep to the cracks. The rock round them seems a bit more reliable.’

He claimed he had been on it regularly with two or three Yorkshire teams while it was still an aid-climbing venue, adding quickly that to climb there was more of a Cleveland tradition: ‘It were lads from Cleveland did most on it. Some of them were free-climbing here even in the Sixties.’ While I sat there reluctantly uncoiling the rope he pointed out a system of cracks which slipped between the biggest overhangs. ‘I remember it as quite easy, this one. Technically, I mean. What makes it interesting is it’s just that bit loose.’

‘Wonderful,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ll have no trouble. You’re not the sort to go grabbing stuff and swinging about on it. Thing is, it’s technically easy but just slightly loose you see, so you’ve to treat it with a bit of respect.’ He looked up hopefully. ‘I’m almost certain it followed these cracks. There might be an aid move or two left on it.’

I watched him through the overhangs and out of sight. After that there was only the movement of the rope, the steady patter of small stones and sand like rain on dry leaves in a summer shower. Heat blew back off the rock. Harvest machinery clacked and groaned in the distance; closer to, insects were buzzing and blundering about among the boulders. ‘How does it look?’ I shouted to Sankey. No answer. I could hear his breath going in and out like coal being shovelled; he sounded a long way up. If I sat back and strained my neck I could just see him: the angle of the rock was such that he disappeared again almost immediately. I felt thirsty but I couldn’t get the Tizer open without letting go of the rope. In the end I wiped the cold tin over my cheeks and neck instead, and this made me think suddenly of a post office in some village somewhere – Ingleton or Trewellard or Porthmadoc – where in a corner of the small refrigerator among the ice creams there are always a few packs of Birds Eye beefburgers frozen into a lump with a sundae in a plastic tub shaped like a goblet. The colours of the sundae have dulled with frost, and it is hard to eat; they separate the beefburgers for you with a bread knife. ‘Watch the rope,’ said Sankey irritably.

The block he was pulling on had begun to tilt. Before he could get his weight off it, it came out. He floated into view fifty or sixty feet above, his runners ripping one by one as his weight came on them – you could see the puffs of dust like little explosions as they smashed the crack apart.

At first his back was towards me, and he was clutching the block: it was squarish, about twenty inches on a side, and he had his arms wrapped tightly round it as if it contained a portable television he had just bought. But then it seemed to detach itself from him, very slowly; while just as slowly he turned over, spreading his arms like a swimmer under water, until I could see the expression on his face. It was neither panicky nor blank, but some indecipherable, almost comical combination of both. Quite suddenly the block accelerated back to the speed of ordinary events, tore through a tree five or ten feet from where I was standing, and was catapulted outwards tumbling over and over through the air.

Surprised by the violence of this I fell down. At the same time the rope ran out through the Sticht plate as if I had caught some enormous fish, and there was Sankey dangling upside down not very far from my head, gaping like a failed Peter Pan, with that passive unreadable expression fading from his eyes.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘Ha ha.’

The block went on bouncing down the slopes below Whitestonecliffe. We listened to it for a long time the way people must listen in the aftermath of an explosion, as it rolled and thumped about among the trees, bursting through cool tunnels of foliage and setting up slides of smaller stones, leaving a trail of scarred hawthorn branches and ploughed-up dirt. Eventually it stopped.