We found a brand new shiny rope on the floor behind Cleveland’s, and some other stuff, but we just took the rope and sneaked off up our secret path. We made a massive death slide in Bluebell forest which should have been ace but the stupid rope stretched and you hit the ground.
I always saw climbers on the walls. They were just part of the quarry, up there for ages, not moving and shouting signals to each other. It was then that I found out how to make petrol bombs and I loved throwing them off the top of the cliff. There was one time I did something really daft and threw one down at a bunch of climbers. The milk bottle smashed on the cliff face and fire showered down on them. They started pointing and shouting and I ran for it with my heart beating dead fast.
We went back with the stretchy rope and tied it to the top of the cliff face. Then we threw the rest off and went round to the bottom. We swarmed up the rope one at a time, trying to be like the climbers, but it cut into our hands. Then one of the climbers came over with a proper helmet on and everything and said he’d take us up a route. We weren’t sure what a route was but he tied the rope around our waists with a proper climber’s knot and showed us how to use the cracks and that with our hands and feet. It was loads easier than trying to grab the rope.
We had to leave the big old house when mum and dad split up and go into a flat on the main road in town, above a hairdressers. But I still wagged off school and went up over the moors to the quarry. I took new mates with me though. I’d lost touch with my old ones. Cooksy had moved to another town and Lloydy had killed himself joyriding. He got drunk on cider and nicked a car and when the pigs came after him he hit a tree going dead fast. I can’t drive. We’d take cider and drink it as fast as we could and lie in the warm heather ’till late, our mothers wondering where we were. Three days a week the gun club would come to the quarry. Grown Lancashire men dressed as American cops, shades and bomber jackets. They’d chew gum and shoot automatic pistols at cardboard cut-outs of people. When they stopped to change cartridges we’d shout “Waaaaankeeeeers” … and leg it.
We saw a man chasing a woman around the slag heaps and we crawled over to the edge. They lay down behind Cleveland’s Edge, amidst the tin cans and whirlpools of crisp packets, and she pulled up her skirt. We watched them doing it for a while, biting our collars to stop the giggles, but shy too, in front of each other, with longing. Then Judd shouted something and we rolled on our backs laughing so much that we couldn’t breathe. I saw our house at the end of the quarry with strangers in the garden, and stopped smiling. We walked back along Scout Road, the lovers’ lane from where you can see the whole of Manchester, Jodrell Bank space telescope and right across to the Snowdon mountains, where we played spot the used johnny, and where we once saw a car rocking to and fro with a pair of bare feet at the window. I didn’t want to go back there. I went to town instead ’cos that’s where my new mates hung out. We did loads of shoplifting. We’d nick anything for a laugh and sometimes have to run out of Woolys or somewhere being chased by security, and we’d turn our jackets inside out and our hats around as a disguise. We moved on to half bottles of Bells and hung around the town centre, drunk. We acted like stupid buggers when we were drunk. “When all the lights are flashin’ we’re goin’ Paki bashin’” a bunch of skins were singing. They were old lads, maybe eighteen. I shouted something to them, I don’t remember what, and they ran over and swiped me round the head with a bike chain. When I went down they all put the boot in and I woke up in some woods, bruised and all covered in dry blood. I told my mum I’d fallen out of a tree. She always pretended to believe me.
I didn’t like the secondary school. I’d never really been to school that much before ’cos we always lived in Spain in the winter and my mum would teach me the stuff I needed to know. The white kids called me Paki because of my tanned skin. They were just jealous. But I did have my mates and we’d wag off together and go and play space invaders or go robbing. So I don’t know why I jumped down the stairs. I just looked down the well, four storeys from Mr Wooley’s Physics lab, like a spiral tunnel, and slid over. I didn’t want to kill myself – more like I did it to live, to prove I could do it. I knew I could do anything and I’d jumped off loads of things for dares. But that wasn’t for a dare. Something gripped me as I stared over the edge. Something drew me over and I knew I wouldn’t hurt myself. A teacher saw me as I was clambering over the rail and moved to stop me, so I just let go and dropped. I saw his face recede into the distance. The banisters echoed as I bounced between them and my hands ripped as I clutched at them. I remember seeing Wingnut on my way past and trying to shout to him, but my breath was taken. I remember hitting a big grey radiator down in the pool changing area and seeing the red floor tiles for a second, but nothing else. I woke up in hospital. At first I couldn’t move. My body was rigid and aching. I trembled. My hands were all torn and bandaged, like after I’d jumped I’d regretted it and was trying to stop myself. I think I do that a lot, throw myself into things and then wish I hadn’t. It’s hard to believe I didn’t break anything and I was back at the school in a few days, but I kept having these breakdowns where I’d start crying and shaking. But everyone wanted to be my mate then and they even put metal studs on all the banisters in the school, like a special memorial to me.
I wasn’t good at games and when we had to go on cross-country I’d always throw up, or we’d sneak off to Judd’s house, which was on the circuit, and smoke a fag. We got caned for that when they caught us. But then they had this new scheme where we could go rock climbing with Mr Wooley instead of getting killed trying to play rugby. I thought it was great. I hadn’t been up to the quarry for ages and every week we did a different climb from the guidebook. I wanted to do every climb in that book, each with its own name and grade, either jamming or chimneying or laybacking. Some of the lads hated it, getting scared and dirty and the midges and everything, but I wanted it to go on loads longer. I loved the taste of that dust from the rock, just like when I was a kid, and I knew these holes like the back of my hand. Now I was sitting on ledges that I could never get to before.
I went and bought a pair of proper rock boots and started traversing around the walls after school. Sometimes I met climbers who would take me up a route on Cleveland’s Edge, the climbers called it The Prow, and sometimes I brought my sleeping bag and kipped on top of the crag. I went and looked over the garden wall of our old house, I had to, and they had pulled up the fruit bushes and chopped down the orchard to make a lawn. The giant oak I swung in with my farm mates had been chopped down, and one of those new estates had been built. It made me feel hollow inside, but it was easier to let go of now that they had made it ugly and all the nooks and crannies of adventure had been demolished.
On a summer’s day, just before they sent me on the Youth Training Scheme, I was sat in the familiar heather, picking hardened chalk from behind my fingernails with a piece of grass, when I noticed a thin man bobbing along the top of the crag with a sack on his back. He stopped, peered over the edge and then climbed down a smooth overhanging face. I flicked through the guidebook and stopped at the right page: The Grader, E3! I didn’t know this sort of climber existed. I saw him another time, with some friends, climbing up and down a leaning wall again and again, with the sack on like last time. I kept my distance, like I was scared of these superclimbers, but they called me over and explained to me that they were training and the bag was full of rocks. John, Tony and Monksy said if I did the same I’d get better, too. That was it. I quit the scheme after fighting with the caretaker of the technical college I was at. He broke my nose with his broom handle. I spent all my time in the quarry, traversing there and back and trying all the problems the superclimbers had shown me. Before long I was going up and down The Grader, too, with my other dole mate, Phil, and a bag of rocks.
At sixteen I was in the Black Dog with the hard guys, nursing tired, bloody hands and supping bitter. Monksy was telling a story of when they were all bouldering, years ago mind, and some kid lobbed
a petrol bomb over the crag, right at them. They didn’t find him but if they had, they would have given him a right good hiding.
CHAPTER TWO
RUBBLE MERCHANTS,
SLATEHEADS AND OTHERS
Wales, 1987
Cigarette butts, crumpled beer cans, the Captain’s been on the sofa for weeks. The carpet’s still damp under stocking feet since the pipes burst in the winter. No gas, no fifties for the leccy meter, no window in the front door, hardly any food in the cupboard and no one’s washed up for a month. But there’s thirty bottles of spirits in the kitchen. Sell some of them and we’ll have some dosh. It’s daft having all those bottles of evidence in here though. The house is dark and smells of sweat and breath and mould. A muffled cough comes from upstairs. I creep up there for the bog. The door to Carlos’s room is lying on the floor. That’s it, I remember, Gwion kicked it in last night to make him go and sort Karen out who had put a bottle through the front door window and was making a scene in the street. The broken glass crunches under my All Stars as I step outside. The sun’s been up for ages and pricks hot needles into my eyes. Spring’s doing its thing now and the Snowdon railway whistles good morning. Its sulphur smell catches my nose. I’m uneasy on my feet down the steep hill of Rallt Goch. I spit as I turn into Goodman Street and ruffle my hair. That wakes me up a bit. The kids in the park slide and swing with their young mums. There’s the Professor. He makes me shiver as he stops and watches the children through the mesh fence. All those things you hear are only rumour though. You’ve not to forget that around here.
I grind the gravel of the pavement under my shoes. It feels real – more real than anything that happened last night. In Pete’s Eats the tea’s too hot for my lips. I hunch quietly and watch the others through the steam. There’s the Fly, bent over his plate. He’s called that because he sometimes throws his food up and then eats it again. But I don’t think he’ll do that this morning. The Lobster looks as though he’s had a long night. I try and avoid the Lobster, all red and shiny, short in his long robbing coat. He’ll get anything for you, dead cheap. Give him your order in the café and he comes back half an hour later with the goods. Pulled two ice axes out yesterday and dropped them on the table. They say he’s the most well endowed man in the village. I rub my eyes and try and push the hideous image out of my mind. The juke box is playing Jimmi Hendrix too loud and the smell of burnt liver makes me gag.
“Number twelve. Fried egg and beans.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Women, aged before they should have, sag at the next table and push Embassy Regals into their mouths, tired of it all. Their husbands are in the betting office. They’ll meet up at the chippy and chatter in a high pitch Creole of Welsh and English. Dafydd Chips, the second biggest boy in the village, will scoop their deep fried offerings into newspaper packets for them to rush home with up the steep side of Llanber’. Meeta comes in. Looking happy, she snaps her tobacco tin down on the table top. I have to hang on her words at this hour to decode her Swiss accent and she entrances me with tales of Bolivian jails and Indian mystics. I gaze outside and imagine distant places.
Rain is spitting onto the glass now. Looks like another slate day. The slate’s best when it’s showery, it dries in minutes. It’s where it’s all been happening of late, why I came here. I saw a picture of a moustachioed, muscley guy manteling these tiny edges, trying to put both feet next to his hands, grinding his nose into the purple rock, and not a runner in sight. Now I’m living with him, Carlos they call him because of his Spanish waiter looks, and Gwion. They’re letting me doss there till I find a place of my own. No luck yet though, and I’ve been there six months. We did have an ace place before but we got kicked out after we got caught with a pin in the meter.
I asked Carlos about the photo and he told me he’d fallen off just after it was shot and went sixty foot. When I got here the slate scene was already big. The days when the mysterious Rainbow Slab was spoken about in hushed voices, a top secret location, were near since gone. The falls you could take off the hard slate routes were already legendary and I wanted to take one. I didn’t have to wait long before I was emulating Redhead and Carlos by falling eighty feet off a new route I was trying, drunk on the Rainbow. When I came to a stop, four feet off the ground with my nine ripped nuts stacked on the rope at my waist and Gwion higher up the crag than I was, I was content, and later bruised. I need to buy some chalk.
The sky is sagging and dark now and the village seems to be resonating at a low frequency. The Lard (the biggest boy in the village)’s new van is throbbing to house tunes and he’s sat inside his shell suit on double yellows, menacing. Last week he knocked Manic Ben over, right there in the street, in front of everyone. I don’t return his stare. I must take care not to tread in dog shit on the pavement. There’s Tatan on the other side of the street, “Hi, Tat.” He looks ghastly. The other week on the way back from a day trip to Dublin, lashed up, the lads ripped his clothes off him and threw them overboard into the Irish Sea. He’s always the brunt of their jokes, but they love him really. When he showed up at customs starkers, and the officials had to kit him out with a too small pair of nylon football shorts, they all had a good laugh. Climbers in yellow and pink tights and ripped jumpers are in the street, some live here, some are visiting. They pace around like peacocks, too colourful for a dark Welsh village. The old quarry men don’t know what to make of them. The young locals react against them. I got pushed around in the street after hours a couple of times, but Gwion’s a good man to know. He’s a local himself, one of the few who hasn’t gone the other way and doesn’t want anything to do with the mountains. He’s our mediator. He let the guys know I was OK and now I can drink a pint with the same blokes who hated me before. Outsiders aren’t always accepted here, especially big-time climbers with inflated egos. I’ve become the same, wary of newcomers, safe in our group.
Some try too hard to be accepted. One guy, the Weird Head we called him, who appeared for a while, said he’d base jumped the Troll Wall. He just wanted to fit in, that was all. When Bobby confronted him and told him that we knew he hadn’t, he broke down and sobbed. There’s a lot of crazy people here, people who can’t sit still. The place is like a magnet, and for some there’s this perceived pressure to be crazy too. The ones that try too hard don’t seem to last long, they disappear. This old slate mining village has many good people. It just seems unavoidable that it should make winners and losers.
There’s a distant brass band and a voice from a tannoy. It’s carnival day. I’ll run up the hill and wake the guys and head across to Vivian or up to The Lost World maybe. “Yahoo, guys. Who wants to climb?” Gwion’s psyched. Carlos isn’t moving – he’s turned nocturnal, stays in his room all day reading horror stories. Gwion apologises for hitting me last night (I was only trying to stop him from slashing his wrists on the broken glass) and then we’re back out on the street. The carnival floats by, children in outfits with paint all over them looking self-conscious and, at the head of it all, this year’s carnival queen. Graham Sis they call him, a fat man, very effeminate in his long red halter-neck. He drifts by waving in his lipstick, his dream come true. The village is heaving now and we hurry across the fields toward the big holes.
In the quarry they’re all there; new routes going up all the time. Things getting repeated and talked about. The Captain’s having a tormegamite experience on something loose as hell, sweeping as he goes. The Dawes is trying a horizontal double dyno with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. There’s JR creeping up the rock, thinking about genitalia. Nicky is psyching up for her ninety foot leap into the steel black water of the pool and Skeletor is wrapping his vast ape index around the purple rock. The Giant Redwood is on a rope, trundling blocks to uncover a modern classic. Harms the Stickman prances up the Rainbow looking unhealthy (how can he do this on his diet of chip butties and Newcastle Brown?). The Horn pops in and flexes his tattooed biceps on Colossus Wall. Moose is soloing like a maniac ’cos
his girlfriend’s left him and Bobby’s bouncing around like a thing on a spring. And there’s the Tick, recording all these antics through the lens and turning them into history. Uncle Alan watches from the bridge and reminisces about the thirties, when he was blasting and pulling the slate out of there. He warns us of the dangers, the giant rock falls, but he’s glad to see the quarry alive again. It’s why Llanberis exists and why it had prospered for a hundred years, until the sixties, when it shut down and all the men had to look elsewhere. That’s why, now, so many shops are boarded up around here. But this is a real village, with real struggles, not tarted up, making concessions for the tourists.
There’ll be teams out on the island today, it’ll be baking out there. I feel like I’m missing out teetering around in this man-made scar, and for a moment I want to be above the sea, brushing lichen off crimps with my finger tips, searching for ways through uncharted territory, studied by seals. But you can’t be two places at once and it could be worse. I could have a job. Big G and the Waddy will be out there with car inner-tube knee pads on, bar-ring their way across some incomprehensible ceiling with sea-reflected sunshine dancing on their backs in a dark cavern. Pengo and Manuel could be taking a trip to the moon on the Yellow Wall and the Crook will have invented new jargon with which to describe an obscure nook or cranny which will be the scene of an even more obscurely named new route. Tombs the mathematician could be with him. “No money, no job, no girlfriend. Might as well be dead,” he had said. Ben and Marion will still be on Red Walls, moving in and out of the quartz, smooth and solid after all these years. And there’ll be Craig, making his name in a splash of colour as the sun sinks into a receding tide. Up in the mountains Cloggy is turning gold and Mr Dixon will be up there doing his own thing on the cathedral of rock.
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