Climbers: A Novel (18 page)

‘Fucking hell,’ Sankey repeated. ‘Eh?’

Bunches of leaves were still drifting down out of the tree.

‘Only one of these ropes is holding you,’ I said. ‘And I’ve burned myself.’

Before the belay plate locked, several feet of rope had whipped through my left hand. It hurt, but when I made myself unclench it all I could find was a stiff, melted-looking patch in the middle of the palm, one or two small blisters on the top and second joints of each finger.

‘It’s not as bad as I thought,’ I admitted.

Something sly and amused flickered for a moment in the corner of Sankey’s eye.

‘It never is,’ he said, ‘is it? Never as bad as you think.’

He turned himself upright on the rope with a quick wriggling motion and swung back on to the route. ‘I’ll get going then,’ he said. ‘If you’re OK.’ Immediately he began to climb again as if nothing had happened.

‘Christ, Sankey!’

I had no option but to follow. I saw that I would have to move quickly through a region of creaking flakes – they had been pasted on with the cheapest cement – where the climb overhung gently but persistently so that your weight was always on your arms. Holds fell off as soon as I touched them. Every time the rope moved I expected it to fetch more loose stuff out on my head: and I felt dazed, awkward, reluctant to climb, as if this had already happened. ‘Take in, Sankey. Fucking hell, take in!’ A cluster of aid moves turned up at about sixty feet. Just out of reach above a bulge studded with bent, rusty pegs, was a bleached wooden wedge, hammered into a crack some time in the early Sixties. Nobody had done this sort of climbing seriously since then. I got some slings off my harness – they fluttered round me uncontrollably for a moment, blue and fluorescent green, in the hot wind – stood in them and made a wild lunge for the wedge. One of the old pegs broke and I found myself hanging in a tangle of 3000kg tape, with my left hand trapped behind a snaplink by my own bodyweight and nothing but clear air beneath me all the way down to Gormire Lake, which I could see very small and sharp-cut in the sun like a view in a colour slide. Sand smoked away from the underside of the bulge; bits of rubble fell out of it and went spinning down.

‘You bastard,’ I said.

I fastened everything into the highest peg, jerked into a standing position in the slings, and snatched for the wedge. Once: twice: again. Again. Even when I reached it I found I couldn’t release my trapped hand. The whole system had locked into place: it was impossible to lift myself off it, and the strength was going out of my arm. I began to understand the cynicism of Sankey’s ‘You’re not the sort to go grabbing stuff and swinging about on it.’ The climb couldn’t be done in any other way. That was its paradox. That was where its value lay.

‘Oh
fuck
!’ I shouted up at him. ‘I hate this!’

During the struggle my blisters had burst and some thick dark red blood oozed out of them. It was the only blood we saw in the whole incident, though Sankey had fallen twenty feet or more before the Sticht plate engaged. All his runners had been nuts placed in poor rock, or
in situ
channel pegs rusted to a gesture. He couldn’t remember how many of them had failed before something held him. He had a reputation for being cautious but during the time I was with him he repeatedly climbed himself into similar situations. His only fear was that he would take a long fall on the old waistbelt. ‘I don’t know which would be worst, if it broke or if it didn’t!’

On the way home from Whitestonecliffe it was hard to talk fast enough. I can’t now remember what we said. Our sense of relief ran on into such an incoherent jumble we hardly knew which of us was speaking anyway. ‘You should have seen your face!’ (‘I thought I were dead.’) ‘Fucking great branch ripping right off! Five inches thick!’ ‘The runners just popped.’ (‘I thought I’d had it then!’) ‘I knew what you thought, fucking hell I thought you were dead then!’ ‘Fucking hell.’ And so on until we were laughing and shouting at the tops of our voices at one another while the yellow Reliant wobbled down the A170 at fifty miles an hour. Every so often, as if to emphasise how pleased and excited he was, not just by the narrowness of his escape but by its circumstances too, Sankey gripped the steering wheel harder and, like a racing driver he must have seen in some old film when he was a boy, made a great play of pumping his elbows, rolling his shoulders and squirming about in his seat. He urged the three-wheeler on with his buttocks, and it rocked from one carriageway to the other.

‘Fancy an ice cream, kid?’

‘Do I!’

In a little shop near York, Sankey put the back of his hand against the caked ice inside the refrigerator then touched it to his face. ‘And a bag of Alien Spacers, please.’ Two women in white summer dresses came in and, eyeing his torn vest, pushed past him to the counter. I saw their perfume envelop him. The next morning my fingers were perfectly all right; but my left knee was stiff all day. I couldn’t remember banging my knee, but then you never do. When I looked at it there was no bruise.

If you mentioned some incident like that to Sankey a week or two later he would look at you vaguely for a moment – as if he couldn’t quite place it but felt that would be too abrupt an admission to make – then say, ‘Oh aye, kid, that were a right gripper.’

He gave his shy smile, his eyes sliding away from you so that he seemed to be looking at you from the whites.

‘It were a gripper right enough.’

In fact his memory was good. He had an almost supernatural fund of experience. But climbs and techniques, falls and difficulties, overlapped for him like a pile of colour transparencies, each one lighted so that only a detail stood out, a line of holds leading up to a crack, three fingers locked sideways into a limestone pocket and then shifted suddenly so that he could pull upwards on them, a new way of tying an old knot. A gritstone corner in Yorkshire would suddenly have superimposed on it some of the dynamics of a boulder problem he had done in Joshua Tree in 1972.

‘Half the time he doesn’t know where he is any more,’ Normal would complain.

But Sankey knew exactly that: the climb, the moves necessary to complete it or survive it, existed for him solely as an excuse, as a phantom of his own sense of absolute personal orientation. The times I climbed with him his only piece of advice was this:

‘You never get away with a fall, kid. It always has some effect on you.’

Mick from the pipeworks shrugged this off.

‘He’d have more chance if he didn’t wear that fucking old waistbelt,’ was all Mick would say. And when I told him, ‘Sankey didn’t seem to be all that certain which route we were on at Whitestonecliffe,’ he answered, ‘Oh he knew where he was all right. Only a lunatic would have gone there with him in the first place.’

He looked at me in disgust.

‘He’s trying to strip the last few aid-points off that fucker before the Cleveland lads get it. He wants his name in the magazines.’

‘You never know what to make of Sankey,’ I said, ‘do you?’

‘Speak for yourself.’

Mick and I didn’t have much in common (although once, when he saw me writing in my notebook, he said almost sympathetically, as if he knew and understood the pressures of obsession, ‘Do you have to put down everywhere you’ve bin, then?’), but he had given up his sweeping job in disgust at last, so I could sometimes go climbing with him during the week when Sankey was at work. He did his best with me, but lost his temper easily. We often ended up at Stoney Middleton, where the walls and white ruined-looking pinnacles of the cliff went up ivy-covered over some cottage gardens and an empty garage forecourt.

‘It’s a great spot,’ Normal once told me, with uncharacteristic irony.

Limestone dust from the big quarry workings on the other side of the A623 sifted down invisibly all day to be sublimated as a whitish filth on the rose trellises and parked cars. It choked the stream. Further up Middleton Dale, near the Eyam turn, a virus disease had attacked the leaves of the younger trees and turned them black. In late summer the fireweed silk looked like fibreglass waste. Winter revealed poached, aimless-looking tracks beneath the crag, fringed with withered nettles. It was already a popular venue for the Sheffield climbers eager to practise techniques learned in Europe, though they hadn’t yet taken to wearing Lycra tights and surfing T-shirts. To make them feel at home, heavy vehicles rumbled past twenty yards away, and in the packed black soil you could find broken glass, charred tin cans and hundreds of fragments of pottery.

The first time we went Mick had been laid off with a popped tendon. Because of this he didn’t want to do anything hard, he said, so we started at Carl’s Wark, two walls varying in height from forty to eighty feet, hinged at a vertical corner and divided up by cracks and bedding planes like the handful of lines on a Constructivist canvas. There is a hole in the ground beneath one of them, out of which a cold wind will issue suddenly on the hottest day. Conversely, in the winter warm air comes out of these cave systems and melts the snow. Groups of local cavers with ten pounds of gelignite in the back of a Bedford van scour the dale for new entrances, prepared to bomb their way in. They are short, with thick beards, and in the Rose and Crown, Eyam, keep themselves to themselves, poring all evening over the crossword puzzle in the
Yorkshire Post
.

Mick had no sooner started up a climb called Carl’s Wark Crack when two figures dressed in muddy wet-suits wriggled up into the light from this hole, blinking. It seemed to take them a long time. Black and cumbersome, striped at each seam with bright yellow tape, they looked as juicy as caterpillars. ‘Then Alex dropped the ammunition box,’ we heard one of them say as they forced themselves out. ‘Ah ha ha ha.’ He didn’t sound local. When he raised his arms his rubber elbow patches flapped untidily.

‘The stupid divot,’ his friend said.

‘Ah ha ha.’

Weaving a little as if dazed they pushed their way through the scaly undergrowth towards the road.

‘They must be mad,’ said Mick with a shiver. He hated to be shut in. ‘It’s dark, it’s freezing down there, and it fucking stinks.’

He glanced down into the hole, which was directly beneath him, then quickly away.

‘They ought to have more sense,’ he said.

He wasn’t doing well. Popular limestone routes take a tremendous polish simply from being touched, like the stones of some shrine. The rock of even a newish climb looks like sweat-stained marble, blackened at crucial points with friction rubber, caked with chalk. Where it would accept them, Mick had worked his slippery hands into the crack. To keep them there he had to change feet constantly, twisting his body one way or the other as balance demanded, gaining an inch or two at a time. This didn’t suit his normal style of climbing, in which every move was informed by a barely suppressed fury – a kind of pouncing across the rock from hold to hold.

‘Oh fuck I can’t remember how to do this,’ he said.

Every time he had to use his damaged finger he said quietly, ‘Cunt. You cunt.’

Eventually he discovered a shallow pocket for his hands, and by working the toes of his boots into the crack managed to distribute his weight more or less comfortably. This enabled him to admit he couldn’t get any further.

‘I’m coming down.’

As he said this the cavers were making their way back awkwardly through the trees, suits shiny with water. Had they been to wash themselves in the stream? Or simply taken a wrong turning somewhere – one they would never have taken down there in the dark – and fallen in? They stared up at Mick as if they didn’t remember him writhing and cursing above them when they emerged from the system, then they began to climb a bit of faded, muddy rope which someone seemed to have dangled for them like an old sash cord down the corner. Their tapes and harnesses were greyish and undependable-looking; they ascended tiredly, with a clanking sound. Their great brown industrial boots scrabbled for a second on the glassy lip of Carl’s Wark, then vanished. They pulled the rope up after them.

Mick watched them until they were out of sight. Then he said, ‘I can’t be bothered downclimbing this. Watch the rope,’ and jumped off.

He was about five feet above his only runner. The impact as he hit it dragged me towards the hole and then over it, so that I had a brief glimpse of narrow contorted slimy walls as polished as the ones above, then hauled me up into the air. On his way down, Mick got my head rammed between his legs. ‘Christ,’ he whispered. For a long moment we dangled there, one on each end of the rope, staring into one another’s faces, three or four feet above the hole, out of which came a chilly, foul-smelling draught – ‘As if the whole world had farted,’ Mick explained to someone later. I looked up at the runner, wondering how long it would hold us. Mick shook his head slowly, a curious expression of bleakness and disbelief on his face.

‘You incompetent fucker,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Let’s go and have a snack.’

Food obsessed him. As soon as he had finished climbing all he wanted to do was eat; when he wasn’t eating it was all he ever talked about. He would describe to us meals he had eaten in canteens, meals he had seen through cafe windows in Leeds in the rain; meals he had always imagined having.

‘Fucking hell,’ he would exclaim suddenly into a silence as Gaz bounced the Vauxhall round the moorland bends of the B6054 (spinning one strand of that tranced, instinctual web we threw over the Peak District in July and August). ‘Fucking hell! Fish in a teacake, wi’ salad cream and tomato sauce – grill some fucking Dairylea cheese on it. Fish in a teacake!’ This was not so much a recipe as a celebration, and reminded him immediately of something else. ‘Hey! ’Ave you ’ad that stuff you squeeze like toothpaste?’ He had eaten a whole tube once, shrimp flavour, in Cornwall after seven pints of Flowers at the Gurnard’s Head. ‘Spewed up all the next day.’

Out camping he ate stew and rice pudding from the same plate, and always kept his pans filthy. Every time he got an upset stomach he complained, ‘I can’t understand it, I’ve never ’ad trouble like this before, I’ve always et out of dirty pans. That rain must ’ave washed summat down the stream—’