Climbers: A Novel (20 page)

‘I don’t know, but you get a lot.’

‘I’ll ’ave it.’

Leaning against the contraceptive machine in the gents opposite the Naughty But Nice ice cream kiosk, he stared sentimentally at the urinals.

‘She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘What, the waitress?’

‘The girl in the sodding
caravan
.’

A few dandelion seeds blew in through a ray of sun, followed by a blowfly which blundered round and round until it found its way out again by a broken window. Above the cistern, which cheeped and whistled like a cage full of birds, someone had signed himself ‘Psycho’ and drawn to go with it a cap-and-bells; or perhaps it was a crown –

All summer I slept in a Goretex bivouac bag Normal had sold me just before he left High Adventure. ‘It’s your money,’ he warned me. Bags like these had appeared on the market in numbers just after the Falklands crisis. They were lighter than a tent, if a bit cramped, and they were supposed to be completely waterproof. No one thought much of them. Often I would wake up in the morning with a ring of climbers staring curiously down at me. Eventually one of them would smile and say as if I wasn’t there,

‘Is he mad or what?’

One night Sankey and I had to camp in a scenic car-park a little way off the A591 near Castle Crag of Triermain. It was new and raw-looking. A line of thin saplings bisected the symmetrical grass and gravel picnic space. To one side, up against the edge of the conifer plantation, were two or three Portaloos, and next to them a small unfinished building of breeze blocks, with stacks of planks and scaffolding outside its door. We had our dinner there. Blue flames hissed in the quiet. A bird pinked occasionally from the conifers.

As it grew darker inside and the air cooled down, the smell of new wood stole out of the rafters and window frames, to mingle with the smells of tinned pie-filling, carrots and Cadbury’s Smash. On and off this was replaced by the stink of disinfectant from the Portaloos. Sankey’s stove, fuelled on a ‘high altitude’ mix of propane and butane, glowed cherry red, then for no reason shot out a long yellow torch of flame.

‘Christ, Sankey!’

‘Sorry kid. Was it your foot?’

‘It was my bloody hand.’

The floor was littered with discarded zinc nails. Sankey went carefully through them in the gathering gloom. ‘Some of these aren’t even bent,’ he said. ‘Look at that. I can’t make out why they would have thrown that away, can you?’ He looked outside briefly. ‘It’ll rain tonight. I’ll kip in the van.’

‘Come on Sankey,’ I protested, looking at the clear sky. But he was right.

A few spots were falling as I unrolled the Goretex bivvy in the middle of the picnic area. I woke up at two o’clock in the morning with the fabric plastered cold and damp against my face, and the rain making a noise like deep fat frying on the outside of the bag. Water had already got in through the zips and seams. I lay there dazed for a bit, hoping it would ease off; then, when my things began to get wet, leapt out and ran zigzagging stark naked between the saplings towards the half-finished shed, dragging the bivvy behind me. Within thirty seconds I was soaked. Mud squelched up between my toes. Still half asleep, I had a clear hallucinogenic glimpse of myself running headlong into one of the trees and being found the next day naked, concussed and suffering from hypothermia – still clutching a zipped-up Goretex bivvy bag full of warm clothes.

‘What could have happened,’ they would ask each other, ‘to panic him like that? What did he see?’

For once I was up before Sankey. After breakfast we drove round the Langdales for a while but it was too wet to do anything. The slumped outline of a boy hitch-hiking came up from nowhere at the side of the road, an apple tree hanging over the hedge behind him. The storm had washed down drifts of leaves which looked sodden in the bright thin sunshine. Stickle Ghyll writhed and plaited in its bed: even from the road you could see the spray flying up into the air.

‘I didn’t like that car-park, kid,’ Sankey admitted suddenly. ‘I was sure I heard something moving about there last night’–

Mick’s mum persuaded him to take a job in the Peak District National Park.

Officially, he said, he was a ‘warden’: but the job actually consisted of going round the picnic sites every morning with a black dustbin bag, picking up the used contraceptives, Kleenex and torn pages of
Rustler
thrown out of the car windows the night before. It took him about twenty minutes to valet each one. ‘When the tourists roll up later in the morning, they ’ave somewhere clean and decent to drop their fish and chip papers.’ By mid-day it looked like Leeds city centre again, except that there was more dog shit.

‘Why aren’t there any litter bins?’ I asked.

‘They’d ’ave to pay someone to empty them,’ he explained. ‘You find some funny stuff,’ he added darkly. He had a Land Rover with National Park signs.

One morning he was still in the old quarry above Digley reservoir when the first tourists began to arrive. A little boy got out of one of the cars and, while his parents were fussing about – slamming the doors, looking in the boot for something they had left in Surrey – tottered uncertainly about scuffing the gravel, picking up bits of sodden tissue and dropping them again. Becoming aware of the brown rock walls leaning above him, he walked towards them: changed his mind: stood, rocking slightly with his bare fat little legs bent at the knee, staring up into an enormous shadowy corner, full of huge poised blocks and tufts of dead grass. Suddenly he began to scream and cry.

‘No reason for it,’ said Mick. ‘Poor little bugger. He were about three year old. Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ll probably see you Monday after tea.’ They wouldn’t let him use the Land Rover after work, so he had ridden round to see me on his Suzuki. When he got outside he discovered it had a flat tyre –

Hadrian’s Wall, dreaming in the wind and sunshine, suffers lovers and scaffolding with equal patience. Families from the dying industrial estates of the North East come here, drawn by God knows what racial memory to stare out towards Black Knowe and the Kielder Forest as if they were at a real frontier. Conservation teams tip rubble down the gullies. The footpath beneath the ancient masonry is a slot twelve inches deep. Four swans float almost motionless on the shallow pool below Crag Lough.

Coming over the top – it had been a disappointing climb – to search fruitlessly among boulders like melted sugar lumps for something to tie the rope on to, Sankey surprised a couple from Tynemouth. Or did they surprise him?

‘Ooh,’ said the girl, getting quickly to her feet, ‘he’s not climbed all the way up this cliff, has he?’

The boy pulled her down again. He allowed her white skirt to billow up in the wind, looking along her legs then grinning thoughtfully at Sankey, showing her off.

‘Don’t be daft, of course he hasn’t,’ he said.

She shivered and was still.

‘Because I could never do that,’ she said.

Later, in the Crown and Thistle on the B6342, that endless road to Alnwick, Sankey asked me my opinion. ‘I couldn’t work it out at first, kid,’ he said wonderingly. He stared into his pint of heavy. ‘Her dress was undone right down the front.’ He added after a moment, ‘I could see everything she had.’ As he spoke I was watching a little girl, three or four years old, walk uncertainly at first but with growing confidence along the low wall of the pub garden. A car rushed past her on the road outside; she rocked delightedly in its slipstream. Reaching the end of the wall, she lifted her dress to show very white knickers and laugh.

Watching this performance indulgently, the locals nursed their bottles of European beer, talking in quiet broad voices about Stevie Cram. ‘Why man,’ someone said. ‘That’s just where you get the true sense of his speed.’

Sankey shook his head. He couldn’t work it out, or so he said –

The lights of the Bamburgh golf club winked through a fringe of grass and thistles silhouetted against the afterglow like an advert for wallpaper. The sea went grey, the islands black: from its square white tower at the top of the bay the light began its sweep. Another light answered it promptly from the south. Every time I drifted off to sleep Sankey groaned and shifted restlessly, rocking the van on its suspension and waking me up again. We had the doors open a crack. This admitted a chilly air, and the sound of the stones grinding together in the tide. Cars lit up the interior with their headlights; the lighthouse sent in its beams.

In between sleep and waking I dreamed road numbers, M62, M6, A65 and signs:
WELCOME TO OLDHAM
,
HOME OF THE TUBULAR BANDAGE
. I was seventeen before I jumped in the sea for the first time. I had that peculiar ugly surprise you get when the experience fails to fit your expectations. My arms and legs were all over the place. I was upside down. I would be battered, smoothed off into the limbless potato shape of a thalidomide baby. I dreamed of that: then, just as the sea turned me over and spat me out half frozen and half drowned, up came the numbers again to comfort me: A591 B5343
PIRAMID SNAX
A6024 B6105 A6
CLOSED CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
A53 A6024 A628
NO BRAINS RULE
A560 M56 A494. I dreamed suddenly of London, and Pauline saying, ‘Liverpool Street was bitterly cold – but such an appetising smell of onions!’ A5 A4086
GET IN LANE GET LANE
M62 M6
THE ULTIMATE BAIT
–
LIVE SAND EEL
! Light slanting through the trees in stripes; lorries like coloured boxes at the top of a hill; crows, with a black muscular stride, driving their beaks into the earth or planing on the wind, wings warped and tip-curved elegantly: I dreamed without warning and completely the gentle rise and fall, the sudden sunny dips and lifts, the white bridges and broad embankments of the roads of summer –

DANGER
,
OIL ON BEACH
.

By eight o’clock the next morning the sun was already quite strong, baking alike the eastern walls of Bamburgh Castle and the roofs of the peeling beach huts below the coast road. I walked down to the sea through yarrow-like white cloisonné brooches scattered in the grass. There I found Sankey squatting moodily by a tidal pool. ‘Saving energy, kid,’ he said. He was washing his lock-knife and frying pan. The blade of the knife flashed under the cloudy water like a fish. Later, when I remembered that summer, it was always through glimpses like this, as a kind of sleepless daze presided over by the smell of waves or flowers, fried food or perfume. I was embalmed in it like a photo in clear plastic, along with Sankey. I wish I had gone out with him more often. But he was killed bouldering on the rocks behind his cottage two or three weeks after we came back from Northumberland.

A climber called Andy Earnshaw, who knew him quite well, found him at the bottom of a 5b problem about halfway along the little edge where it reaches its maximum height. Apparently he had come off near the top and fallen thirty feet on to his back. There were no signs that he had moved about after the fall; though subsidiary injuries suggested that momentum had rolled him, flailing his arms, down a short slope before he came to rest.

Everyone agreed how unlucky he had been.

‘It was a broken ankle fall, that,’ Bob Almanac claimed. ‘A broken ankle fall.’ He repeated this several times, then added: ‘I’ve seen people fall thirty feet and bounce.’

He and Mick had been on the team that brought Sankey’s body down, at two in the afternoon on a hot Wednesday. ‘It was a spot pick-up, that’s all we knew. Someone had phoned in. Police never told us it was Andy, or that Andy knew who the casualty was.’

At first they had been unable to make themselves understand that the body was Sankey’s. Neither of them could imagine him falling off a problem so simple. ‘It were an easy way down for him, that route,’ Mick said. ‘He’d reversed it a thousand times.’ The two of them had climbed up and down it in their work shoes to look for a patch of raw new rock where a handhold had flaked off. They were so sure they would find it. ‘It ’ad to be a loose hold,’ Mick kept arguing reasonably, as if he’d just that minute thought of it again, ‘because Sankey wouldn’t just fall off summat that easy.’ But in the end they found nothing. The rock was sound; sound as a bell.

‘What could have happened, then?’ I asked.

We were in Mick’s front room in Cooper Lane, five or six of us, drinking tins of Newcastle Brown. People had been dropping in all afternoon to find out what was going on. You would hear the back door open on to the ginnel – with its oblique line of sunshine falling on to flower pots, dusty newspapers and a brand-new aluminium ladder – then Mick’s mum saying, ‘You’ll have to wait outside a moment, she can be a bit queer with strangers,’ while the labrador dog barked and choked and flopped heavily on the floor by the cooker. After that she would usher in whoever it was, look at us all, and say: ‘Well, it won’t get better for staring at the wall, will it?’

‘Might he have walked off the top wi’out looking?’ someone suggested; and Mick was forced to admit:

‘It’s as likely as anything else.’

It wasn’t even clear how Sankey had died. Percussion of the lower back had given the dull sound which suggested a solid mass – blood – where nothing should be. To Mick this meant only one thing: haematoma from paraspinal injury. But other obvious injuries, notably some broken ribs on the left side, had made Bob Almanac think immediately of a ruptured spleen. The police doctor, when he arrived, had told them nothing. ‘In the end,’ Mick complained, ‘he could of died of anything.’ When I asked him what the doctor had actually said, he shrugged bitterly.

‘He said there was no fucking foul play. He asked us to stretcher the fucker off.’ He laughed. ‘Up in the Lakes and Scotland, the teams ’ave their own doctors. Us, we’re just fucking barrer boys. I’m fucking giving it up. I am.’

And he stared into the corner of the room, frustrated and resentful. To distract him, Bob began to explain to me, ‘You’re always hard put to tell whether you’ve got a paraspinal or, for instance, a ruptured spleen. There’s rigidity in the abdomen: is that from retroperitoneal bleeding, or is there an actual closed abdominal injury? You can’t even be sure which side the muscles are guarding. It might as easily be a kidney as the spleen.’