Climbers: A Novel (27 page)

‘Keep your weight on your feet,’ Normal warned me.

‘Let’s abseil off!’

At the bottom again, we packed up the gear and poked round the edges of the pool, reluctant to go home, too wet to climb anything else. The usual rubbish was dumped there. Among it I came across a dead starling, its beak gaping and its neck extended in pain as if it were still rolling and flopping down all those broad slabs, faster and faster. The rain glossed its feathers, returning to it some of the oily iridescence of the live bird. Before we left I persuaded Normal to take some photographs of it. But when I went over to High Adventure a few days later to see them, they hadn’t come out.

‘Anyway,’ I ended my letter to Pauline, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch. It was all a bit short notice. I tried to phone you but no one answered.’

In the Manchester I remember from this time, partly-opened yellow crocus buds strain up into the weak sunshine outside the public buildings, like young birds clamouring to be fed. Every courtyard shrieks with their pitiless demand. Over and against this, in the bedsitter where I dreamed my nightly dreams of Nina (from which I composed my lies to her mother, and to which I returned in triumph from my first forays with Normal believing I would never have to tell lies again – already I believed I would never need anyone to tell them to), oblique light stretches the pattern of the lace curtain across the ceiling, the way dreams are cued in an old film. In the memories of Nina I can remember having then, she is sitting at the foot of some stairs counting her mother’s keys.

‘Now, Nina, will you have a hot potato for your lunch?’

These are not so much illusions – or even wish-fulfilments – as encounters in a fog. Pictures with sharp clean edges, they cut you and then dip away vertiginously as soon as you begin to feel the pain. Your breath was taken away once. Now memory takes it away again, like a seagull which banks against the dull sky, brilliantly, astonishingly white, then shoots away inland over the roofs of the seafront hotels and disappears, leaving you bereft –

But if I think of Pauline at all now, she is talking to someone I don’t even know.

‘I love the little spines of these fishes,’ she says to Chris or Anthony or Jonathan: ‘Don’t you?’

The lunch-time rush is over, the restaurant is quiet, the staff have suddenly cheered up and become human again. And there on her plate are the charred tails, pink flesh, filmy bones like the fossil imprint of a leaf.

‘The trouble with eating out is that just as you’re about to have your pudding you smell someone else’s starter. How sick that used to make me, as a child!’

She laughs and leans across the table.

‘Once I was in bed ill for a month. Everything but lying quite still made me dizzy. Reading was a torment, but it was all I had ever learned to do with myself. I was what, eight years old?’ She is forced to consider. ‘Nine? Anyway, I could never face Elizabeth Goudge again!’ She makes a face and exclaims wryly. ‘Oh,
The Dean’s Watch
!’ A waitress has just come up to the table. ‘Can we have the bill, do you think?’

I imagine her wandering rather vaguely home through the afternoon traffic. I imagine her staring – but only for a moment – into ‘the Pit’ before she closes the window with a sudden decisive movement. That evening she goes to bed early, the next morning she wakes up energetic and happy. She is still delighted by the flat with its odours of ground coffee and furniture polish, especially in the mornings when the cat Rutherford jumps on the table to have his milk, and his fur is filled immediately by a reflected, tranquil light from the street outside.

‘Rutherford! You’re so greedy!’

With the cat purring and rubbing its face against hers she settles down to read; and later begins a letter.

‘It seems such a long time since I’ve written to you.’

Without turning her head she can look down into the street. She can hear a vacuum cleaner in another flat. What can she say to someone she hasn’t seen for so long? ‘The weather is more like April than July.’ Or, ‘I went to Blackheath yesterday to see some books.’

A line or two more squeezed out, she picks up the cat – ‘Rutherford! Rutherford!’ – and sets him carefully on the carpet.

‘There was such a lovely watery light on the common that I stopped the car.’ This reminds her of another journey and enables her to write for some minutes without looking up. ‘A whole
mass
of chamomile and orange poppies in the grass at the side of the road. I felt like gathering an armful of the poppies, just sweeping them up as they were, soaking wet and hairy-stemmed and with their petals already falling.’ She thinks of flower petals floating on a dark green stream in some Pre-Raphaelite painting; shivers with pleasure. ‘It was somewhere along the A303.’

After this the letter casts about as if seeking a fresh centre, something fixed to pivot round: ‘The cats are well. I often wonder about renting a proper shop, although the books seem a lot of work lately.’ Failing to find it, and undecided how to end, she writes eventually, ‘I’m sure you’d like the new flat if you saw it.’ And then, at the very bottom of the page:

‘I’m sorry you couldn’t get down to London last month. We seem to be going in different directions now.’

This letter was the last I had from her. By then, though a few pieces of my stuff were left in the bedsit, and I collected my post from the landlady once or twice a week, I was over in Stalybridge every evening. I had a new flat of my own. I painted it, bought second-hand chairs for it, fetched my dinner back to it nightly from a chip shop on the Mottram Road.

Stalybridge itself is compromised, neither town nor country but a grim muddle of both. Chemical plants and stone cottages; the Moors Murders once a month in the local paper; open-coffin funerals in the huge bleak cemetery under the pylons at Copley.

I’ve already described my difficulties with the old man who lived downstairs. Yet at the time I expected so much from life – some kind of opening-up or flowering, a progression from one intensity to the next – that in a way I hardly noticed him. The smell of his cooking, for instance, was irritating only because it distracted me from the smell behind it: peat moor and gritstone, brown and dusty in the hot summer evenings like the smell of an animal in the sun. I found it hard to sleep. I woke early, already excited, because I could smell the same animal alert and waiting for me in some disused quarry not a mile down the road – there were no bars between us any more. The sound of the old man’s TV only annoyed me because climbing at Thornton-in-Craven had filled me with such excitement: all I wanted to be able to hear was Normal, repeating in the strange, crooning voice he used to calm other climbers down:

‘Stay steady, Mike. Steady now. You’re climbing well, you’re doing well.’

Although I could easily have got into Piccadilly every morning in time to open up for the day, I gave notice at the bookshop. The train fares, I told myself, would be too high for the wage I was getting. In reality, I wanted to celebrate. I was elated. I wanted change.

‘You mad bugger,’ said my boss cheerfully when I broke the news to him. ‘Wasn’t that where they chopped the kiddies up?’

He paid me, then gave me five pounds on top.

‘Come and say cheerio before you leave.’

A few days later I did. I found him bagging stock, deftly folding the plastic envelope over each copy of
Whitehouse
or
Count
(whose publishers regularly tried to drop the ‘o’ from the title by printing it almost the same colour as the background) then tacking it shut in the same movement with a short strip of Sellotape. It was a hot day, and as the work warmed him up he had taken off his fur coat, to display a chocolate brown shirt and matching V-neck pullover. ‘I don’t know why I bother with this job. They’ll have ’em open again in seconds.’ He kept a perfectly good heat-sealer in the stockroom, but hated the smell of melted polythene and pretended he didn’t know how to use it.

‘You may as well do a few now you’re here,’ he invited me, conscious perhaps of that extra five pounds. ‘You can sit at the till if you like.’

I took it that I was no longer an apprentice. We spent the afternoon bagging fun books and having a chat, as he said, about this and that. The distributors were on his back again, looking for quicker payment, fobbing him off with old stock, trying to get him to take stuff from New York and Amsterdam – ‘Too weak for them, too strong for us.’ He was thinking of changing the name of the shop, and rather fancied
FUNERAMA
, ‘though I don’t suppose the cops’d wear it. They’d be in here with the black dustbin bags twice a week instead of twice a month.’

We had had this discussion before.

‘It looks a bit like “funeral” from a distance,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyway, why antagonise them? You’ll only get closed down.’

‘Can you imagine it, though? A real neon sign?’

I could. I could see it, red and green, blinking
FUNERAMA FUNERAMA FUNERAMA
across the empty car-parks in the winter sleet at the end of the day, his new commercial instincts merging seamlessly with some dim old radical urge to confront.

‘Why antagonise them?’

He thought this over quietly for a bit. Inside the shop, confused blowflies patrolled the colourful racks of books; clustered, as if they could smell something sticky, in the doorway above the bin where we kept the second-hand magazines. Across the road in the dazzling sunshine, dense masses of purple buddleia hardly seemed contained by the broken walls and rusty chain-link fencing. Here all summer long the dossers would lounge amid rotting mattresses and shattered glass – blasted by the sun, light poulticing one side of their blackened faces. They would wade aimlessly through the waist-high growth of weeds like old Indians fishing in green river water; or set fires which they watched with tremendous muted satisfaction as the choking white smoke rolled away towards the women shoppers on Market Street.

‘I had those friends of yours in the other day,’ the proprietor said.

I couldn’t think who he meant.

‘You know,’ he prompted me. ‘What’s his name? Normal. Normal and his wife.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Looking for climbing books again.’

He shook his head and grinned mysteriously. He consulted his watch. ‘I suppose it’s too soon for a cup of tea?’

‘What did they want, then?’

‘Back copies of
Journal of Sex
,’ he said. ‘Half a dozen of them.’ He chuckled. ‘Do they know something I don’t?’

SIXTEEN

Bob Almanac decided to get away on his own for a weekend. At five o’clock one Saturday morning a week or two after Sankey’s funeral, he loaded up his blue 1978 Marina and drove off along the Huddersfield Road, leaving his wife lying at an angle under the duvet (which she called ‘the downie’) with one foot poking out. A thin stream of sunshine spilled into the room between the imitation velvet curtains. In a moment it would splash across his wife’s foot. He loved the feel of quiet early mornings; he loved to be alone in them with somewhere to go. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he whispered, but she was already asleep again.

A few miles away he drove into mist. Grey, sopping wet airs liquefied themselves on the Marina’s windscreen. A million drops of water stood on the withered dock plants and umbellifers at the side of the road. Stone barns and oak trees formed up suddenly out of the mist, while the light traffic ahead of him on the road was continually dissolving into it. For a time it was a whole world, with its own visual rules; by seven the sun had burned it all away.

Cruising between the coaches in the middle lane of the M62, he turned the radio on to get a weather report. Instead, music fell into the car like blocks of concrete: Queen, playing ‘I Want to Break Free’. Bob laughed and wound the window down. He was twenty-nine years old and he could go wherever he decided to.

‘I want to break free,’ he sang.

It was still quite early when he found the place he was looking for. Sankey had recommended it. Bob parked the Marina and went up steeply through boggy mixed woodland, falling over stumps and into narrow drains. The bracken was as tall as his shoulder: under it the hot dusty air had a smell of cinnamon or some other spice; there were small elegant beetles everywhere on the underside of the fronds, a breathtaking brown and cream colour. Tourists hope for a morning like this – breaking trail in the dreamy sunshine – coming unexpectedly on water, or a glade like a commercial for a chocolate bar where the willowherb down floats almost motionlessly in a shaft of light.

The crags hung over a warm narrow valley full of rowans bright with orange berries. They were sandstone, all ramps and overhangs: bulging with secrets newly forgotten.

Bob stood in the shade, panting.

Silence.

‘Not many people bother going there nowadays,’ Sankey had said. (He and Bob were sitting in the Farmer’s Arms one Friday night. No one else had turned up.) ‘You ought to have a look, some time when you want a quiet day.’