Climbers: A Novel (19 page)

He watched the food like a hawk. He watched you fetch the cardboard box out of the back of the car, he watched you open the tins. He watched the stuff cook, and he watched his own hands as they doled it out – they were like the hands of a priest. He would count the number of chocolate creams in a packet of Fox’s Mixed Biscuits. ‘Keep your eye on Mick,’ his friends warned, implying perhaps that he got more than his proper share. ‘You fucking gannets,’ he accused them. He watched food only because he loved it, and when he wasn’t climbing immediately began to put on weight.

Sometimes he would stare into space for a long time and then say confidentially, whether you had asked or not,

‘I were trying to remember what I’d ’ad last night.’

My knee ached if I walked more than a mile.

‘I must have pulled something,’ I told Sankey, ‘when we were at Whitestonecliffe.’

He looked at me vaguely. ‘Oh aye, kid?’ he said.

In the end I got an appointment with the doctor one Saturday morning.

The wind rolled an empty bottle across the sunny flagstones outside the surgery. Late blossom from a tree I didn’t recognise was falling like snow round the girls in their thin white dresses. I could feel Bob Almanac’s wife watching me from behind the cash register of the health food shop. She regarded the doctor as a professional equal, but one with only a partial grasp of the more important parts of the trade.

‘You’ll never learn, you people,’ I could imagine her saying to me later: ‘Still, why should I care?’

Inside, I leafed through a copy of
Woman’s Own
. While I was waiting for my turn an old man came in, sat down next to a woman further up the queue, and without any preamble said, ‘I’ve had this persistent diarrhoea.’ Perhaps they already knew one another. Perhaps he knew anyway that she would respond: he was one of those Yorkshiremen who have been taken care of for so long by women they still look like children when they are sixty – gazing round from the front seat on the top deck of the bus, bottom lip drooping with excitement, they make a great lip-smacking performance of sucking a cough sweet. They all have very blue eyes.

‘Be sensible about it,’ the doctor said, ‘and it will go back of its own accord.’ I had partly displaced the cartilage, he thought. ‘Only do what you normally would.’

I cleared my throat.

‘Right,’ I said.

Did he mean climbing? I wasn’t going to ask. I left the surgery with a prescription for ninety tablets of Brufen, one three times a day with or after food. They were pink, but in the bottle they looked orange, and very like Smarties. After I had filled the prescription I went up the steep zigzag streets behind the town and on to the edge of the moor. There were tortoiseshell butterflies opening and closing their wings, like mechanical flowers, on all the thistles in the grass verges.

Sankey had been planning to build an extension to his house.

When I called he was making a trench for the foundations. ‘It’s the right weather for digging,’ he said, indicating a wheelbarrow full of greyish crumbly soil. In one or two places he had got down to the rock the cottage was built on. After we had talked for a few minutes he said,

‘I usually have a brew about quarter past twelve.’

I took that to mean he would like to dig until then so I went and sat among the boulders above the house. The wind was cool, the sun warm: the boulders had a bare clean look, sharp-edged and distinct where in the winter they had bulged out softly like a thickening of the mist. To the south, sunshine flared off the windscreen of an infinitely distant car as it dropped through the bends of the A6204. Whatever the doctor had done to it made my knee ache and click. I put my magic boots on and tried a few moves. Sankey had the trench measured out methodically, and I suspected he had set himself goals. I went back a little after the time, to find him solemnly eating bread and cheese and drinking tea.

‘Milk, kid?’

When he saw me taking the Brufen he shook his head.

‘You want to look after your knees,’ he said. ‘I buggered mine ice-climbing.’ Ice-climbing, he said, was as bad for your knees as football. ‘You’re kicking the crampons in all the time you see, kid,’ he explained. ‘It’s just kick, kick, kick.’

He was thinking, he told me, of changing his car. There were piles of glossy brochures on the sideboard, full of French and Japanese hatchbacks. ‘I fancy one of these Sumbaroos,’ he said, showing me a Subaru with four-wheel drive, ‘except for the servicing.’ He said ‘epsept’. When he was in charge of the map or the guidebook, you never got a clear idea of where you were. Sankey, rendering Bilton as Blighton, would take you up cracks called Pzdn and Trigulph, walls named Quernx. As a boy in the 1950s, I guessed, he had learned from some Yorkshire schoolmistress the need to mumble defensively as he read, eliding the vowels into an approximate buzz.

‘Mind you, I’ve driven the Reliant to the Alps and back.’

Unlike Mick, whose flamboyant pounces and sudden balletic shifts of weight sometimes made him look like three frames of a Marvel comic, or Normal, who dragged himself about by his hands, making progressively less and less use of his feet, Sankey climbed with the neat, professionalised moves of a survivor. We spent the afternoon on the boulders, where he set targets and worked as steadily towards them as he had done in his trench. To begin with he seemed old and stiff, groaning as he pulled himself over the top of each problem; later, as he warmed up and began climbing fluently, his youth returned to him, especially about the face and eyes.

After about fifteen minutes he took off his shirt and rolled his trousers up above his knees. The sun made him grin aimlessly. ‘Warm now,’ he said, not precisely to me; I felt he would have said it whether I was there or not. ‘Ha ha.’ Suddenly he shot backwards off an overhang and rolled over and over in the grass underneath it, propelled not by gravity but by the release of the mechanical energy which had held him in place.

‘Dog shit’s the worst thing here,’ he said, getting up.

He thought for a second.

‘It’s convenient for the house though.’

He trained up here in most weathers, he told me, except January and February.

‘I hate the first two months of the year,’ he added, a bit bleakly. ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

None of the problems were more than thirty feet high, most were between ten and twenty, but to do all of them took him three hours of fairly continuous effort, during which time he climbed perhaps fifteen hundred feet. He kept his eye on me and every so often, when he stopped for a breather, said, ‘You’d do better if you got your foot higher on that to start with, kid,’ or: ‘Most people do that one as a layback.’ (He referred to ‘most people’ as a way of gently asserting his experience.) I found that if I had the courage to follow it, his advice was good. But I soon stopped trying to keep up and, muscles already stiffening in the wind, took to wandering about after him watching him climb.

‘People bring their dogs all the way up here for a shit,’ he kept repeating. ‘That’s what I can’t see. I can’t quite see the logic of that.’ But he seemed happy enough.

I left him at five o’clock, making himself another brew. He offered me a biscuit before I went outside: he said, ‘I’ll put another hour or so in this evening.’

It was hard to guess what Sankey got up to on his own. Apart from climbing guidebooks and magazines stuffed haphazardly into the shelves either side of the fire, his only reading matter was
Samson
, by the Welsh climber Menlove Edwards; and
Treasure Island
, which he had in an illustrated children’s edition. ‘I love the pirates,’ he would say, ‘I love the way they talk,’ and quote: ‘ “We’re that near the gibbet that my neck’s stiff with thinking on it”,’ or, ‘ “If ever a seaman wanted drugs, it’s me”.’ Other than that he had his job; the television, which was hardly ever on; and the yearly visit to his sister, source of a constant if desultory speculation among the other climbers—

Normal would tell you with one breath that Sankey’s sister lived in Sheffield; and with the next that it was Derby or perhaps Birmingham, where she was married to a telephone engineer. ‘One thing’s certain,’ he would say significantly, ‘she’s a lot older than him.’ Bob Almanac, on the contrary, thought she was a fair bit younger, and that – though nobody had ever met the brother – she was actually Sankey’s sister-in-law; they lived locally but were ‘close’, that is, they kept themselves to themselves. These theories stood out among others as innocent and blurry as the world seen through a frosted glass back door – she was a southerner, she was his cousin, they weren’t related at all and she kept a wool-shop in Barnsley. When I thought about it I imagined Sankey’s Christmas visit to be much the same as the yearly do at Mick’s house, a tall back-to-back in Cooper Lane.

For that, Mick’s mother cooked all the previous day, quiches, sausage rolls, ham, potato salad with sweet corn; and in the evening the front room chairs were pushed back against the walls so that sixteen or seventeen people could shout and laugh across at one another. Candy, the fat labrador dog, distracted by the smell of food, was unable to sit down and rest but patrolled helplessly back and forth sighing and bumping into people’s legs until they shut her upstairs where she barked and yelped all night to be let out again. Whenever she fell silent Mick’s father looked round with a smile and said in his faint, worn-out voice,

‘Dog’s mithered itself to death, then.’

‘I could name a few the same,’ his wife said, giving him a straight look.

She had encouraged him to wear for the occasion a pair of well-pressed but voluminous trousers which made his upper half look fragile and ill. He was sixty-odd. He had been at the pipeworks since he was a boy.

‘Oh aye?’ he said.

‘You cheeky monkey.’

Mick’s older brother, a fireman, had set light to his own garage with a propane torch earlier in the year. ‘They’ll give me some stick about that,’ he promised me cheerfully. ‘Oh yes, I’ll tek some ’ammer over that tonight.’ He seemed to be looking forward to it. The wives, who wore long waistcoats they had crocheted themselves from a pattern one of them had found, exchanged photographs of last year’s party, when they had had ‘pass the parcel’ and Mick had won a huge pair of plastic ears.

‘You’re a bit quiet this year,’ they teased him, and then explained, ‘He’s usually the worst of the lot. You can see him, look how he’s wearing those ears—!’

Mick sat on the floor by the gas fire and gave, when he could be bothered, as good as he got. He had bought himself two litres of Marks and Spencer’s Lambrusco, and was soon drunk. I heard him ask someone loudly, ‘How would you kill yourself if you got stuck, caving?’ and answer himself: ‘Bite your tongue off and swallow it.’ Cries of disgust greeted this. ‘I were trapped in a settee once,’ he boasted. His girlfriend of the time was a teacher. She leaned back against his chest, eyes narrowed, shy or perhaps bored, smoking a cigarette. She wore a pink plastic bangle and a cluster of thin silver bracelets. Though her hands were small they obviously belonged to a climber: when she reached over to accept a glass from someone her sleeve rode up momentarily and I saw the long hard muscles of the forearm beneath the skin.

‘One year we ’ad forfeits,’ Mick told her. ‘I was supposed to eat a daffodil but they let me off it.’

‘Someone ought to see about that dog.’

The moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.

By September the reservoirs were at their lowest, revealing strange fossil beaches, submerged cliffs and channels, a monolithic architecture of tunnels and ramps. ‘Water rationing may soon be on its way,’ claimed the valley papers. Up at Sankey’s end, a hot tarry haze hung over everything. Constant shifts of humidity and pressure threatened not so much rain or an electrical storm as some property of the atmosphere it had never demonstrated before. In weather like that you never quite sleep. Long dreams merge seamlessly with the long days, leaving you entranced and stuporous but somehow restless; hypnotised yet full of ambitions you cannot dissipate –

‘We’re getting the weather now.’

Sankey let go of the wheel to rub his hands together. The M6 had made him thoughtful for a time, and I was glad to see him cheer up. He laughed out loud at the sun and the wind as we rocked and groaned up the A686, dog-legging past the microwave station and out – suddenly, like stepping on to a diving board – on to Hartside Heights, where tourists sit in their cars in the car-park and stare across at the indistinct hills of the Lake District; and in the Hartside Cafe, where your tea comes in a Pyrex cup without a saucer, plump creamy girls with tomato-red nails bent over the old-fashioned space-invader machines, out of which came the cheerful tune,

‘Poop: poop: poop,’ then on a much higher note: ‘Peeeep!’

‘Bloody hell, kid. This is more like it.’

The signs were good. On the way to Cornwall one Saturday in Bob Almanac’s car, Mick saw two white doves on a motorway banking; and shortly after that, he claimed, a girl undressing on her own in the back of a moving caravan. She was quite tall, he thought, eighteen or nineteen, white and surprising against the tan fittings, as unconcerned and tranquil as if she had been undressing in her bedroom at home except that she swayed a little with the movement of the vehicle. ‘Look! Look! No
there
, are yer blind?’ None of the rest of us saw her, but we turned the music up anyway on the strength of it and went flying down to St Ives in a welter of rock and roll, running headlong into the immense potential of the day, while the verges streamed past full of glorious poppies bright red and yellow in the browning grass. The car was full of new rope. We had got it cheap. Between us, Mick calculated, we had twenty-three pairs of boots. Most of them were his.

It was Mick, too, who found in a cafe in Penzance a notice which read: W
E
S
ERVE
R
AY
W
ING
.

‘Who’s he?’ he asked the waitress.

‘Pardon?’

‘I mean, what’s Ray Wing when it’s at home?’

She thought for a moment.