Climbers: A Novel (6 page)

‘I don’t want to intrude,’ he said.

‘I’m always busy in the evenings,’ I said. ‘Here you are.’

‘If you haven’t got any tea,’ he said.

He forced his eyes away from the breadbin.

‘I can’t have coffee. We never have coffee.’

I said that I had some Chinese tea somewhere, but he wouldn’t have that either. After a minute or two standing there he left the room slowly. I poured the Nescafé down the sink and swilled the cup out, feeling angry but relieved. Then I heard him coming back again.

‘I’ll have to wait for my daughter then. She went without me seeing. Could you give me a slice of bread to be going on with?’

I banged the breadbin open, cut him two slices of bread and put butter on them. Without looking at him I said, ‘They’re wholemeal. You probably prefer white. Oh, and you’ll want a plate.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘They’re thicker than I like.’

I heard him talking to himself as he went down. After that I kept my door locked even when I was in, and if I heard him on the stairs stopped whatever I was doing until he’d gone. He never knocked, but he would sometimes shuffle round for hours on the landing outside, pretending to sweep the lino.

If I had milk delivered, he took it. When I went to get it back I saw that the furniture in his rooms, inert great armchairs and sideboards with cracked and lifting veneers, was hidden under a drift of letters he had also stolen over the years – circulars, bills, cards, small parcels, anything that had come through the door for a tenant who had died or moved away. He gave pride of place to some postcards addressed to him from Australia, and this was how I discovered that his daughter had married and emigrated there sixteen years ago. ‘She was ungrateful,’ he said. ‘She was an ungrateful girl.’ He avoided my eyes and stared at the television, an old black and white set with a screen like a fishbowl. He kept it on all day: and in the summer when he couldn’t sleep the sirens of phantasmal foreign police cars hee-hawed through the night until I banged and banged on his door.

He hated the cat.

‘Bloody filthy dirty thing,’ he said. ‘I was trying to get rid of it before you came.’

I caught him making feeble pushing motions at it on the stairs.

It
was
a dirty cat. It never seemed to lose its dense, oily kitten fur, which soon became spiky and matted. It was smallish, very black, and it pulled its food about all over the kitchen floor, running up suddenly to snatch a piece out of the saucer, coughing and snorting loudly as it ate. When it had finished it would come and sit on the arm of the chair and butt its forehead into yours, purring and breathing the smell of fish and liver into your face. I watched it trying to catch flies in the dim washy light after a thunderstorm. One of them escaped it and walked about in repetitive loops on the wall, its shadow preceding it. The cat clicked and mewed with rage.

‘You leave it alone,’ I warned the old man. ‘And don’t take milk that isn’t yours.’

I still loved for their own sake the look and feel of the things you use for climbing: the clear, sharp-edged, almost fluorescent colour of a length of brand-new nylon tape as Normal pulled it off the reel at four o’clock on a dark winter afternoon, the bitter smell it made when he burned the end to seal it, the thick complex knot you had to tie in it to employ it as a sling. I loved the weight and polish of a figure-of-eight descender when you picked it up in the shop, a great mass of forged aluminium alloy designed to channel the heat away from the rope as you shot down it a hundred feet clear like a spider on the end of its string; or, whooping and shouting, pushed yourself out from the cliff in gigantic leaps and bounds as you dropped. I loved the light they seemed to generate, orange, blue, neapolitan lime, a glitter like chrome; and the memory they brought back, like a physical event, of the climbs I had done a week or a month before.

I went to High Adventure whenever I could. I tried on and bought this harness or that pair of boots. Normal watched with a kind of amused benevolence from behind the counter. I encouraged him to talk. Often he would turn up where I lived on a Friday night to lend me a book or show me a photograph of a new climb. One night he told me about a climber he knew called Ed, who had made a reputation in the Lake District while he earned his living as a beach photographer at Morecambe.

Ed had found it a good business, Normal said. All you needed for it was a reasonable camera and a monkey: there was a small grey type with clean fur that would sit fairly quietly on your shoulder even in a crowd, and in general the beach photographers used that. The idea was to get among the people on the sea front so that the women and children spotted the monkey. As soon as one of them picked it up or made a fuss of it – snap!

‘ “Like the photo, madam? ” ’ Normal mimicked. ‘ “I’ll post it on. One of the kiddy? Ten quid to you!” ’

‘Ten pounds?’ I said. I didn’t know how much of this was Normal’s fantasy. ‘How did he get away with it?’

Normal looked into his coffee.

‘Oh you rarely got one that wouldn’t pay,’ he said vaguely but with a suggestion of menace. Then something made him laugh. ‘People like a monkey until they find out about its habits.’

‘I suppose so.’

Ed was at Morecambe for two or three seasons running. He found that he could make enough in a day to live, and enough in two or three to live well. When he was out on the front he wore to attract attention to himself a velvet coat a nice colour of maroon, cut very long and flared, and a green neckscarf. He had his Olympus OM–
I
round his neck and the monkey, attached to a length of shiny chain, on his shoulder. The monkey, Normal said, had a strange smell when you got close to it, strong but not unpleasant, and its fur had in some lights a real green tinge. Ed looked very smart, on the whole; very smart indeed. The older women loved him.

‘But guess what he had on his feet?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Rock boots,’ said Normal. ‘He had his rock boots on! Because when he’d made his money for the day, he’d go down on to the sand and do slab problems on the sea wall!’ He chuckled reminiscently. ‘Have you seen the size of that sea wall? He was a mad bugger, Ed.’

Everyone Normal knew was mad. It was a diploma he awarded without reserve. When I met Ed later I found that he was a fattish powerful man, rather quiet and withdrawn, who still climbed very well indeed though he was less interested in it than he had been. Every time I saw him in the Peak District, picking his way up Artless or Downhill Racer or one of the other unprotected gritstone climbs there, I thought of the little grey complaisant monkey, and the children on Morecambe pier watching mystifiedly as Ed worked out careful balancey moves five feet up on the flaking concrete of the steep but minute sea wall: shifting his weight slowly, slowly, then scuttling crabwise up to grasp the thick polished railings at the top and heave himself over with a satisfied grin. ‘Like the photo, madam?’

‘Does he still do it?’ I asked Normal.

‘No.’

‘What happened to the monkey?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it hung itself in its chain one day.’ And he got up to rinse his cup out in the sink. When he had finished he said, ‘How’s the cat?’

I couldn’t tell. It was ill. It was eating as greedily as ever then vomiting the food up in fits which frightened and disgusted me. It crouched on the living room floor, coughing out fur balls and swallowing them again in great bronchitic heaves, staring warily at me in case I put it outside the door. During the close, thundery afternoons it sidled about under the furniture and was sick by the bookshelves. I was always too late: a rhythmic gulping sound, a croak, a grey puddle spreading on the carpet. Between these fits it purred and watched the flies, much as it had always done. I discovered that the old man had begun to feed it fishbones from the side of his plate.

I cornered him on the landing outside his flat. It had been a long hot day and a foul smell hung in the air. Over his thin sloping shoulder I could see into his front room. Thick piles of hair-clippings lay on the pocked green lino. He cut his hair himself, and often left it there for days on end. Through his window was a view of the road, where a few children were playing desultorily on bicycles. On the wall opposite, one of them had chalked, ‘Whoever redes this is a cunt.’

‘You must never give it fishbones,’ I explained patiently. ‘It will choke on them.’

‘I can’t stop it stealing, can I?’ he complained. ‘Cats eat fish. The poor little thing.’

He licked his lips and watched me. He had on a cotton vest, wrinkled over a pot belly peculiarly swollen and hard. His arms were thin – though they had once been muscular – the skin loose and sore in the creases of his elbow. I noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. Suddenly I had had enough of him.

‘You know bloody well it isn’t the cat that’s stealing!’ I shouted in his face. I was trembling too. ‘It’s ill. It’s ill, you stupid old idiot!’

I stepped round him and went quickly through his door. I was practised at this. Every day I had to get my milk back, or look for my letters. I had caught him with my groceries. I had caught him with a dish of Kit-E-Kat Meat & Liver Dinner. ‘It’s filthy in here,’ I said. ‘Can’t you clean it up a bit? I can smell it from upstairs when you open the door.’ He came in behind me and stood in the twilight biting his lips, his weak eyes sliding sideways to the television screen, which showed a factory, a mechanical process of one sort or another, and then a man driving down a road on a housing estate.

‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘You can keep
that
thing turned down.’

I prodded him in the stomach.

He looked at me and swallowed. ‘If you do that I’ll shit myself,’ he said.

‘Christ.’

I only ever went to Morecambe once.

Even though it was late in the day the sky was like brass. I had been climbing all through July further up the coast. I remember the placid muddy water of the boating pool, beyond which rotting piles go out into some great slow tidal stream slipping past to join the Kent Channel; sleeping women on the sand, their dresses pulled up to expose their thighs to the thick hot light; the giant cone above the ice cream stall. In a fish restaurant they advertised ‘best butter’ on the bread. A man finished his meal then stared ahead with his mouth open while two teenage couples took snaps of each other across the table with a cheap camera. Music hung in the air in the amusement park, with diesel smoke and the smell of fried onions. ‘Blue Moon, now I’m no longer alone.’ A dog trotted by. Nobody was playing Catch-a-Duck.

I felt relaxed and elated both at once. The heat, the smells, the music, the signs on the sea front might all have been one thing, one stimulus appealing to a simple sensory organ we all used to have but have now forgotten we possess.

All the time Ed was there he dreamed of South America.

At a BMC lecture in Lancaster two or three years earlier he had overheard the visiting speaker say, ‘Magnetic anomalies affected our compass . . .’ and then later the same evening ‘. . . at sunset, behind the Col Mirador.’ Attracted by these two strange half-sentences, which afterwards became joined in his mind, he started to read widely in mountaineering accounts of Cerro Torre, Roraima, the Towers of Paine; and to collect expensive early editions of Whymper and Shipton. ‘We put a camp in the lee of the small moraine there, and began to fix ropes.’ But he soon found it wasn’t the climbing that interested him so much as the unearthliness of the place itself.

In 1895 evidence had turned up at Last Hope Inlet near Puerto Natales, Chile, of a ground-living sloth the size of a rhinoceros. Found in conjunction with human remains, it had died only recently. It had perhaps been domesticated. Only just discovered, it was only just extinct . . . in fact the Tehuelche Indians believed it could still be found alive. It was nocturnal, they said, covered with coarse hair; and it had huge hooked claws.

Because of this blurring-together of geological and historical time, plants as well as animals teetered on the brink. ‘The puya,’ Ed read, ‘is a living fossil. With its inturned spines it can imprison and kill a small dog as easily as a bird. The Indians burn it wherever they find it, so that their young children are not at risk.’ The Andean landscapes, too, had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air. Cerro Puntiagudo hung, with its snowfields like a feather necklace, in a sky blue enough to make your teeth ache.

Ed never went there.

He would have liked to do a climb in the Paine National Park. He thought of following the itinerary of the Hesketh-Prichard expedition, which at the turn of the century had gone in search of a living megatherium only to falter before it even reached Last Hope and turn for home furious and dispirited. He had always meant to go. Somehow he was never able to save the money; or, if he did, his friends let him down. The Falklands Crisis intervened. He turned to the television natural history programmes, where a chance alignment of rock peaks nearly broke his heart.

The pictures were so clear. He caught his breath as the camera swooped up and burst over this ridge or that to reveal San Pedro, Licancabur or the Los Patos Pass beyond, then raced over flat and stony plains covered with strange tussocks of grass and fading into the purplish line of the volcanoes; or dwelt on the death of a guanaco foal beneath the Paine Towers. He blinked back tears at the sound of pan-pipes, because something in it brought the entire Andes to him like a scent on the wind. It was a kind of nostalgia, but for a place you have never been. Through the open window at night he heard not the funfair, though he could easily see its wheeling lights, but the wind lifting the soil off the stony terraces of the Inca Altiplano. He would tease the monkey gently with his forefinger, whispering to it, ‘We placed bolts in the Red Dierdre, the sandstone girdle, the exit ramps . . . The wooden box with the wireless set and microscope slides is missing . . . Today as we retreated from the ice bulge I felt so far away from home . . .’ Generally it was calmed by this, but sometimes instead it would be goaded into an infantile fury and race round the room screeching and chattering and tearing up his photographs.