Climbers: A Novel (33 page)
Authors: M. John Harrison
It was late evening when I climbed out, dark as I walked back up the path to the car-park.
The Polaroids I took the year Sankey died have developed with age. They tended to be over-exposed, but details previously awash in light can now be discerned quite clearly:
Bamburgh Castle has formed itself out of the morning haze and, seen in the distance behind the bonnet of Sankey’s Reliant, presents an exact if romantic outline of towers and stepped walls where originally it was hardly visible. The awning of the Hot Snax van in the lay-by at Kirkby Lonsdale on the A65 has begun at last to show mint-green stripes originally bleached by the six a.m. August sunshine into a white blur; a middle-aged woman in a print frock – caught in her moment of indecision, tea or coffee? – stands before it. As if pigments could learn about what they represent, events understand themselves more accurately towards the end than the beginning, the freshly quarried boulders photographed at Millstone Edge have confirmed their outlines and no longer resemble melted lumps of sugar.
This clarification has gone further in some shots than in others. In the blurred Polaroid I tried to show Sankey’s sister, for example, the climber could still be any of us, crabbing his way across the concrete of the Richard Dunn wall – which at that point is seamed with shallow, sharp-edged cracks, lipped enough for your fingers only where you don’t need it – just in advance of some small ongoing disaster, some failure of logic in the world itself. A snap even less communicative shows Mick from the pipeworks: unreconstructed and paranoid-looking – to the extent that you can see him at all – he stands on one of the Cromlech boulders, leering sideways at the camera through a grey leached-out air, his head tilted back as if to howl or crow. For some reason he is wearing his pullover as a pair of trousers.
Lovers, tribesmen and lunatics:
Gaz grins awkwardly up from a move on Wildcat Tor, his face gaining colour as it curdles year by year out of the glare of the built-in flash; the photographer’s foot can be seen in the left-hand bottom corner, and the ledge Gaz is making for is covered in fallen leaves. (In another picture, his wife has put her arms affectionately round his waist from behind and now rubs her face on his shoulder. At their feet the baby, in its red pants and grubby white T-shirt, sits on the hard-packed earth underneath Wall of Bubbles at Stoney, eating rock-boot laces to improve its technique.) Bob Almanac stares speculatively at the tangled mass of tapes, rope and wired runners he has just pulled out of his rucksack, like some shopper holding up a dead chicken by the neck. Normal, using my camera, has caught Sankey and me on a beach somewhere, washing an aluminium pan; the sun blazes off it into our eyes, making us seem puzzled and diffident. Here’s Mick again, fishing with a tin mug fifteen hundred feet up in the Langdales, reflected precisely in the water of Stickle Tarn. ‘I’ve got eight here!’ I remember him shouting to us. ‘Eight of the little fuckers!’ In the photo his mouth is a perfect O of delight.
I remember a blazing day we had in August or September on the Pembroke sea cliffs. As soon as you got down to the sea-level platform at Stennis Head, you were transfixed: the rock yawned up, acres of blinding white limestone in the sun, less like an amphitheatre than a vast parabolic mirror, with you at its exact centre of focus. At any moment, you felt, you might be ignited, fired up like a carbon arc: you might be converted into pure light. There’s a Polaroid of this too. I don’t know who took it, because all the climbers are in it, grinning, eyes screwed up against the sun: Gaz and Sankey, Bob and David, Mick and his girlfriend, Normal and me. The route we have just ticked, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, arches triumphally up behind us, the best climb any of us did all year. Our T-shirts are fastened on to our heads with bits of coloured nylon line, to fall back over our reddened shoulders like Arab headdresses. Mick’s girlfriend has crooked her arm to show her muscles.
The Committed Men
The Centauri Device
The Ice Monkey
Viriconium
Climbers
The Luck in the Head (with Ian Miller)
The Course of the Heart
Signs of Life
Travel Arrangements
Light
Nova Swing
Empty Space
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © M. John Harrison 1989
Introduction copyright © Robert Macfarlane 2012
All rights reserved
The right of M. John Harrison to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Robert Macfarlane to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 09218 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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