Climbers: A Novel (29 page)

‘It’s the winter,’ said Mick sepulchrally.

‘What?’

‘It’s the winter,’ Mick repeated. ‘Shutting the door on every fucking thing worthwhile.’

With his eyes closed and his head supported at an odd, broken-necked angle against the offside rear window, he looked dead. He swallowed as if trying to clear his mouth of something.

‘So face the fucking front, David, because that’s where the road is, and get us home in one fucking piece. Eh?’

The cartilage I had damaged the day Sankey fell off White Mare Crag didn’t seem to be any worse, but it didn’t seem to be any better either, and I was still taking Brufen, the anti-inflammatory the doctor had prescribed for it. I had a constant slight headache, a sense of pressure behind the temples which, until one day in November, I had tended to dismiss as the effect of the weather, or of inactivity.

November is one of the worst months, but even then you can get a day out, as long as you don’t mind a damp feel to the rock. About a week after the debacle at Ravens Tor, Mick decided he wanted to have a look at a route called The Snivelling on Millstone Edge. He took Wednesday off without informing his employers. ‘I’ll be round at ten or eleven,’ he had told me the night before. ‘Give the sun a chance to warm the crag up. No point in freezing us fingers off.’ In fact it was earlier than that when he arrived. I was standing at the back window watching the early mist retreat – thickening as it went – down the slopes of Austonley and Carr Green and into the valley bottom, where it boiled and shifted, startling white in the pale bright sunshine. It was more like a morning in late December, the air sharp and quiet so you could hear distant sounds very clearly. Children shouted in the valley. Traffic ground its way slowly up Holme Moss. All morning, a delivery van had been idling in the road outside my house.

‘That thing’s driving me mad,’ I told Mick. ‘Why don’t they switch the engine off? They can’t have been delivering all this time.’

Mick took off his crash helmet and unwound his scarf. Cold air had poured into the room with him.

‘I’ve come on the bike,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve got this stuff on. Hey, it’s a bit nippy out: but bright sun as soon as you gain some height!’ He sat down and scratched his head vigorously. ‘Can I use your phone? I’ve come early to get it over with.’

As he was searching his pockets for the piece of paper he had written the number on he added, ‘What van? There’s no van out there.’

I could hear it distinctly. I said:

‘You want your eyes testing, Mick.’

He gave me a weak grin. I could see him wondering how I was having him on. Then he shrugged, heaved himself out of the chair and with his motorcycle leathers creaking lugubriously went to the front door, which he flung open. ‘Come and have a look out here,’ he said patiently. ‘Come on, you daft fucker.’

The street was empty.

‘It’s you wants testing, not me,’ he said simply. ‘Sometimes I can’t mek you out.’

‘Why don’t we have a cup of tea before we go?’ I said.

I could still hear an engine ticking over. As soon as I was certain he wasn’t looking I went out into the garden and threw the Brufen bottle into the dustbin.

Mick was already on the phone when I got back with the tea.

‘She’s like two bricklayers welded together,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, not in her looks so much as in her attitudes.’ He listened for a moment – staring absently at me as if he could see through me to the person at the other end of the line – then started off on another tack. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I had a word with them the other night.’ He nodded and took the cup of tea. ‘Well they were being cagey, but as far as I can mek out it’s a new firm. They intend to specialise in what they call “high level and difficult access engineering”. Eh? Oh well, it’s like abseiling down council flats, things like that. Checking for structural damage. Aye. That sort of thing.’

There was another pause, quite long; then Mick said:

‘OK. OK. Well, let us know if you hear anything, and I’ll do the same.’

He seemed disappointed. He put the phone down and looked at his tea as though he wondered what it was doing in his hand. ‘Why are we hanging about here, then?’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go and climb some fucking routes.’

Millstone Edge: a cluster of arêtes like handfuls of flint knives against the sky, ten minutes’ drive from Sheffield.

As soon as the quarry was abandoned, thousands of dwarf birches colonised its levels and spoil heaps. From a distance they make a kind of pink-brown smoke in the pale light. Sandy paths wind up and down among them under the crag, maroon and orange, the colours of gritstone earth. Quarrying started here again briefly and illegally in 1983; then someone dumped a car in one of the bays near the Sheffield Road – burned out and upside down among the birches, it looks somehow as sad and vulnerable as a dead animal.

Further in, morning light strikes obliquely across the very tops of the vertical walls. From the ground this makes them seem like pages turned down in some huge book: but as soon as you get up there, a hundred feet of rope trailing sadly out behind you in the cold wind, you find only dust, great meaningless holes, layers of rotting stone constructed like a cheap chest of drawers –

‘If you don’t like it you can always pull it out and throw it away,’ Mick advised me, as I struggled with the last few feet of a climb called Lotto.

‘Very funny, Mick. Mick, I can’t do this.’

‘Yes you can, you wimp. That’s not the ’ard part. You’ve done the ’ard part.’

I hauled myself over the top. My legs were shaking.

‘Well I’m never doing it again!’

Mick followed absent mindedly, singing to himself. ‘You’re getting a bit better,’ he admitted at one point. ‘Not much, but a bit.’

By mid-day the quarry had warmed up, so he went over to the bottom of the Greta Slab and put his magic boots on. Overnight, he had drawn a Union Jack on one of them with red and blue felt-tip pens. He looked at it critically. ‘I wish I ’adn’t done that now. I were bored.’

The slab was out of the sun; a bit greasy; polished, even along the less popular lines. After fifty or sixty feet it reared up into a dark steep headwall. Mick looked at it doubtfully and shivered. The Snivelling – originally named The Snivelling Shits, after a Punk band of its day – streamed out above him, a series of minute scratches on the rock. He would have to solo it: good protection turns up on that route, but only after the difficulties are over, when you don’t need it. ‘They always look steeper than they are,’ he said: ‘Slabs.’ After a moment, he chalked his hands, tightened his boots; he chalked his hands again. Then he lurched up over the short lip and on to the slab. ‘Me feet hurt already!’ he complained. But he made steady progress – mainly by high, balancey steps and fingertip stretches – until he was about twenty-five or thirty feet up. There, an iron rugosity like a razor blade tore the side off his left index fingernail.

‘Bugger!’

Blood ran down his arm.

He laughed.

‘I’m stuck now,’ he said. ‘I can’t use that finger.’

First he decided to jump off. Then he decided to have another try at going up. Then he decided to jump off again.

‘It isn’t far,’ he said.

He was waiting for me to say something.

‘I’ve jumped that far before,’ he reminded me.

‘OK,’ I said, in as encouraging a tone as I could manage.

Nothing is worse than being stuck on a slab. You can stand there for a long, long time before you fall. You feel as if you’ve been abandoned, even if your friends are thirty feet away. Mick couldn’t go up: the holds were little more than patches of rock a different colour or texture to the rest, and blood had made his fingers too slippery to use them. If he didn’t jump, friction would hold him in place, but only until his ankles tired. Already, lateral torsion would be twisting his boots imperceptibly but steadily off the rock. Privately I had visions of his shin bone, popped out of the ankle joint and sticking through the side of his leg in the winter sunshine, as white as the mist that morning. I ran around underneath him, clearing the bigger stones from where he would land.

‘Whatever you think,’ I said.

But he had already delayed fatally. He couldn’t make himself do it.

‘Oh fuck. Fetch a rope, Mike.’

‘Will you be all right there while I get it?’

He stared miserably ahead.

‘Mike, just get a move on.’

I tied on to a nine-mil rope we had been using earlier in the day and went up the right-hand edge of the slab as fast as I dared. ‘Hang on,’ I called. ‘I’m on my way. Stay steady.’ It felt strange to have to say this to someone so much more experienced and skilful than me.

Mick laughed.

‘Don’t kill yourself rushing about like that,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll both look like tits.’

At the top of the slab I traversed left to get above him; but nerves made me belay too soon, and the rope spilled down ten feet out of his reach. ‘Hang on,’ I said. I thought I might be able to twitch it across to him. Nothing. I tried again. It was still three feet away. He stared at it out of the side of his eye: he didn’t dare grab at it, for fear of losing his balance. His ankles were buckling, and I could see him beginning to lose his nerve.

‘Be steady,’ I said calmly, trying to get off the belay. ‘You’re still OK.’

‘Christ, Mike, don’t be a pillock,’ he pleaded.

‘You’ll be OK,’ I said.

‘Mike! I can’t wait! Look, don’t bother with all that, I’m jumping off, I can’t wait—’

He looked down.

‘No I’m not,’ he said quickly.

He had to stand there in the middle of nowhere – marooned, pigeon-toed, and trying not to shiver – for another minute before I got my knots undone, moved into position above him, and dropped him the end of the rope.

Later he would laugh and claim: ‘The worst thing were the pain of those fucking boots!’ But on the ground under Great Slab, he was in a foul mood, with me and everything else. ‘You want to learn to tie knots a bit quicker, you do,’ he said. He threw his boots into his bag, and kicked out at it. I tried to put a piece of Elastoplast on his finger. It looked raw where the nail had peeled off, but it had already stopped bleeding and it wasn’t much of an injury unless you had been psyched-out by a 6a slab. ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘I really wanted that route. I wanted it that bad I could smell it.’ He got his flask out and unscrewed the top. His hands were shaking. ‘Now I’ve spilled that fucker,’ he said viciously. He looked over his shoulder at Great Slab. Suddenly he jumped to his feet.

‘Mick—’

‘Don’t say anything to me. Not a fucking thing,’ he warned.

He turned his back, and, hopping from foot to foot, dragged the magic boots on again. He was shaking so hard he could hardly tie their laces. Without a word, he levered himself on to The Snivelling and climbed neatly and carefully, without slowing down or stopping, to the top of it. There, he waved his arms disconnectedly in relief. He let out a shout of triumph which made his face seem distorted and animal-like: I understood that Mick went climbing only to release this expression from himself. What it represented I had no idea. For a moment though I was awed, and almost as excited as he was.

‘You bastard!’ I called up gleefully. ‘Mick, you bastard!’

‘It’s death on a teacake, that route,’ he said. ‘Death on a teacake.’

Shortly afterwards it started to rain. We packed our gear and left. Mick pushed the black and yellow Suzuki up past Higgar Tor and then turned north-west on to the single-track road under Stanage Edge. There, with the rain flying into our faces and the wind snatching at the rucksack on my back, he first accelerated furiously, then slowed down to walking pace, gazing at the rocks and allowing the machine to yaw from side to side of the empty road. Eventually he stopped and switched the engine off. The rocks were melted and equivocal in the dull light. Filmy curtains of rain drifted across the shallow valley that slopes away in front of them towards Bamford Moor. I could smell sheep, dead ferns, tussock grass, water standing on peat. Mick took his helmet off.

‘I’ve had it with this lot,’ he said.

He was sick of the Peak District: he was sick of gritstone. It was always wet. ‘It looks like a sodden cardboard box when it’s wet,’ he said. It looked to him exactly like a cardboard box collapsing in the rain, and he was sick of it.

‘Just look. Just look.’

Because he found it so painful to admit this, and because I couldn’t think of any helpful response, I said:

‘It’s a bit brighter over towards Burbage.’

‘Oh fuck off, Mike.’

He started to put his helmet on again.

Then he said, ‘I’ve got a new job. It’s work away from home.’

He shrugged and looked up at Stanage, where low cloud was roiling over the Plantation, softening further the edges of the Wall End and Tower buttresses. ‘I’m not right keen on that,’ he admitted, ‘but what else can I do? There’s money in it, and I’m fed up here. And you can’t just hang around all your life, Mike. You can’t. What? Oh, two weeks’ time. I start down in Birmingham.’

I had to think for a moment.

‘It depends what you mean by hanging around,’ I said.

I was trying to make out the line of Archangel in the mist.

I still see Mick. He was promoted rapidly, and now runs his own team, mostly ex-climbers, mostly from the north. Their work takes them all over Britain. The concept ‘difficult-access civil engineering’ embraces everything from core-sampling the piers of a motorway bridge to cleaning the inside of some of the windows in the Barbican complex, which architecture has placed out of the reach of traditional methods. For a time Mick even operated offshore, abseiling down the vast steel legs of oil platforms in the North Sea – until one afternoon, working the ‘splash zone’ without a wet-suit, he found himself in the leading edge of hypothermia and forgot how to work the Jumars that would get him out again. But most of the work is done on behalf of the inner-city councils, who find increasingly that tower blocks put up by their predecessors during the Fifties and Sixties are falling apart; and so he is often in London.

‘They’re fucking appalling places to live,’ he often says of the blocks. ‘Especially Glasgow and Birmingham.’