Incurable

by John Marsden

  Funny, I never thought for a moment of going back up. Instead I shifted down to another stone, still slow to learn that these soft little protruding stones were death traps. At least it fell immediately, doing me a favour, because I hadn’t yet put any real weight on it. I hastily pulled my leg back up and tried to get it back to its previous position, but it was too late. I’d already lowered my centre of gravity too far. I had to find another foothold, and fast. I saw a button of rock away to the right and stretched across to it.

  At some point I realised what was happening. All those stories on the news about drownings . . . so often it seemed like one person would get in trouble, be carried out to sea by the rip, and one or two or even three others would jump in to save him, men usually: fathers and uncles and brothers, who could not swim and knew that they could not swim, but in their hearts was another knowledge, that they could not stand and watch, they had to be with the person in the water and share whatever was coming to them.

  I had to be with Gavin, or as close as I could get. I decided I could not take so long to move down towards him. If I did I would lose too much strength and energy and by the time I reached him I would have nothing left to offer. Already my arms and legs were vibrating with the nervous and physical energy I’d put out. I couldn’t just go crazy and skedaddle across the cliff face. I’d fall to my death with the first false move. But I had to do better than this.

  I tried so hard to get some control of my mind. I told myself that I had to become a skilled rock climber. I had to learn on the job. I tried to concentrate on technique. I had a vague memory of a moment with Jeremy, when he’d been talking about rugby and how he’d won some best-and-fairest awards, or man-of-the-match awards, whatever, and I asked him how, when he’d already told me that his main job was to pass the ball to other players, to be a link, and he said it was because of his tackling. This was an unusual conversation with Jeremy by the way, cos if there’s one thing he is, it’s modest, but anyway, he managed to get across the idea that he was a pretty good tackier. And he said something about how he had been too scared to tackle properly when he first played rugby, so I asked him, ‘How did you get over that? How did you make yourself not scared?’ And he said he would look at the player and think about how he was going to tackle him, what would be the best way to go about it, and somehow while he was doing that he didn’t get frightened.

  I said to him, ‘So you concentrate on technique?’ and he said, ‘Yeah I guess.’

  It was the struggle between the mind and the instincts again.

  I didn’t hang on the cliff for half an hour having a good think about that conversation with Jeremy. I thought about it for as much time as it took to write two words of it. But the little flicker of memory helped.

  I got grim. I used my eyes with more concentration, more focus. I fixed on a crevice, a crack, about four metres to my right. If I could get there I could just about get to Gavin. What happened after that didn’t bear thinking about so I didn’t think about it. I knew now about the soft stones so I avoided those. I concentrated on technique, getting fingers and toes to grip little indentations and bumps. Funny how these tiny freckles, invisible normally, of no interest or importance to any human in the history of this mountain, were now major features for me. As big and important as mountains themselves.

  My hands were getting tired and my fingers were forcing themselves into a more open position. Spreading, like I couldn’t control them. Cramping, kind of. I had to keep moving. Halfway to the crevice I got in such a good position that for a moment I could give my left hand time off; my right hand and both my feet were secure, so I stretched my fingers and shook them, trying to make them work better. Even my mind took a few seconds off.

  During the war there had been a time when I turned from Ellie into someone or something else. I guess the long and the short of it is that I became a soldier. At first I’d done a lot of blundering around, all the time in danger of being caught or killed or both. I’d thought I was being very professional and clever, but later, when I looked back on those months, I couldn’t believe how we survived. Then one day I changed. I no longer had to think so much about what to do and how to do it. I became part of the environment, as much as a fox or a brown snake or a tawny frogmouth. But I was different to them. I became part of the environment of a war. After that I always moved quickly and quietly. From then on I was always aware – deeply aware – of every sound and smell and tiny movement. I didn’t disturb anything, because I didn’t want to leave any trace of where I’d been. I was cunning and scared and angry and determined and awake. It became second nature.

  Sometimes younger kids say they wish they could have done what we did during the war, but with most of them I think, ‘You don’t notice enough, you’re so super-aware of yourself you wouldn’t notice a dozen blokes with rifles coming at you from fifty metres away, let alone a freshly disturbed bit of rotting wood on a track, or a cry of alarm from a magpie who’s been distracted.’

  For me, the change happened quite suddenly, I think when we were escaping at maximum speed from the airport we’d trashed, somewhere just after that, when we abandoned the truck and took to the river.

  On the cliff face I tried to get back into that way of being. I realised that it was the same as concentrating on technique in this way at least: you are no longer absorbed in yourself. You become part of a greater environment than your own mind and body. As well as thinking about each move and each step and working out how best to place each finger and toe and the whole of my body, I had to earn my right to be on this cliff by melting into it so that no-one would notice that I didn’t belong. If someone was watching us through binoculars they’d be able to say to themselves, ‘There’s a rock and there’s a lizard and there’s a tuft of grass and there’s an ellie and there’s another rock and there’s a little blue wildflower . . .’

  Still lodged into the crack, I considered the possibilities. I have to say there weren’t many. I was so close to Gavin that if I stretched out my arm and he stretched out his I reckon there wouldn’t have been a metre between us. But so what? The little mound he was caught on looked about half the size it had been when I started. Maybe that was the erosion caused by his weight, or maybe I’d had a false impression of it from the top, but I knew one thing – it couldn’t support both of us. It wasn’t going to support him much longer. The thin shower of soil continued steadily, sometimes just a few sandy particles, sometimes a serious trickle. It was like putting a plastic liner in a new dam and having a kangaroo puncture it with its feet when it wandered in for a drink. Only a few little holes, but that was a dam which would never hold water. Drip drip drip.

  Gavin continued to be . . . to be what? I didn’t know. In shock? Waiting bravely and calmly? Had he broken his back and was lying there wondering about the best model wheelchair for kids living on farms? Probably not. He was conscious and he seemed to see me, but as far as I could tell, he was making no movement. That was good, as long as he wasn’t completely paralysed by his fear. His eyes were still fixed on me, though, and still following me, and I had the feeling that he hadn’t taken them off me the whole time I’d been inching towards him.

  I was fairly certain that if I got close enough it’d be just like those stories about people drowning. He’d reach out and grab me and not let go and like the mad drowning people who pull their rescuers under he’d pull me off the cliff and we’d fall together, fall forever, and hit the rocks below still locked onto each other.

  Without any plan or a sane idea of what to do I spied out a route along the face that would take me below him. I didn’t want to come in above him because if I fell I’d take him too and in the last few seconds of my life I didn’t want that on my conscience. And I didn’t want to come in beside him, for the reason I just said.

  I did talk to him, meaningless babble like the songs you sing when you’re guarding a mob of cattle at night, and of course he didn’t hear any of it. But I thought it might calm him a little when
he realised I was chatting away like I was on the school bus and sitting next to Homer and in a good mood. ‘Nice day for it . . . if by some miracle we survive this let’s not do it again, OK . . . just stay right there my little thrill-seeking friend, don’t be going anywhere now . . .’

  My brief rest was over. I had a bit of strength back in my arms and legs, which had been the general idea of clinging there for those few moments, but my overall condition was weakening. In other words I was getting too tired. So I did a bit of manoeuvring and, with shaking legs, started going straight down the crack. It struck me suddenly that if and when we fell we would drop into Hell, the northern end of it where I’d never been, and how strange was that, to die in the place called Hell that had saved us so many times, that had been our refuge, but now in a final good joke was turning on us to claim the doomed souls that had never understood it properly. Clever Hell, such a smart trick to give comfort and help and then betray us. Much better than just killing us in the first place. How boring for the king of hell would that have been?

  Trying to make like a spider, I inched across. I came in under Gavin like I’d wanted. That was good I suppose, except that it meant I’d committed myself to a plan that I really did have in my brain, in my subconscious anyway, but which seemed so stupid and impossible that I couldn’t take it out and look at it, not even for a moment. But there was nothing else to do. Gavin shifted his head slightly and looked down at me. It was the first real movement I’d seen him make since I started. I was pretty sure that his stillness was more than caution: he was frozen by the knowledge that soon he would drop to an awful death.

  I braced myself. I had a toe that felt fairly secure, on the bottom curve of a biggish boulder. Nothing else felt secure. My other toe was trying to worm into hard-packed dirt and my fingers were basically on sheer rock. But I would need those anyway, need my arms, so it didn’t matter much. I spoke to Gavin calmly, knowing again that he couldn’t hear but knowing there was a good chance that he would lip-read me.

  ‘OK, Gav, just wriggle down here to me. I want you on my back.’

  CHAPTER 16

  THERE, I’D SAID it. Said the mad thing. Even the words brought me out in a sweat from every microscopic pore in my skin. You know how you squeeze a sponge and a drop of water appears at every point? Simultaneously? That’s what happened to my body. It didn’t worry me except that I knew my hands were suddenly slippery again, which wasn’t good.

  Technique. Concentrate on technique. Your balance, your angle to the cliff, the left toe that’s trying to make a hole for itself. Try not to think about Gavin who actually twitched like he understood. At least half of you devoutly hopes he didn’t understand. That way you could get out of this crazy offer.

  He still hadn’t moved but there was a different tension in him now. I kept drilling that left toe in. Then I looked up at Gavin again. I stared at him so hard I’m surprised I didn’t bore holes in his face. But I had to know if he understood. And I thought he did. I said to him again, a little impatiently, ‘Come on, get on my shoulders.’

  I was scared that he would be too paralysed to do anything. If anything, it was the opposite. He made a sudden movement, as though he thought that all his problems were solved and all he had to do was step down to where I was and do the piggyback thing.

  Immediately half the mound of dirt that supported him fell apart and soil showered over me. A bit got in my throat but I tried not to cough. A cough, a spasm, a hiccup, or worst of all a sneeze, any of those would be enough. Action and reaction.

  With the mini-avalanche Gavin suddenly had no choice about whether to join me. He was about to fall. The big danger was that he would be so unable to move that he would leave everything to gravity. If he did, then we were both gone. He would knock me from my precarious spot and we would fall to the rocks. I felt my eyes dragging downwards, to look at those rocks, and it took all the strength I had to force them in the opposite direction. I wanted to see death but I mustn’t let myself.

  Gavin hovered over me but at the last moment some kind of desperate instinct cut in, and he did move voluntarily, well, a little bit at least. He swung a leg down to near my head, and then, as he started to slip, tried to get some control over the rest of his body. He scrabbled for handholds and footholds, with no real success, but the scrabbling for them meant that he stuck to the face of the cliff for a few seconds, instead of plummeting like a rock.

  Those few seconds were just enough for him to reach me. I braced as I felt his swinging left foot touch my hair, then kick the side of my head on the way back.

  A terrible silent wrestle followed. He continued to slide down, but now he used my body for his handholds and footholds. Although this was what I wanted, the struggle and the strain and the tension were almost impossible. I had known that he would wreck my balance, changing my centre of gravity, but I hadn’t realised how severe it would be. He was so heavy! And he did cling to me like a drowning person.

  For half a minute I fought with him, with the cliff, with death itself. But the main fight was with me, to find new strength, deeper strength, the physical strength to stay upright and to fuse my fingers and toes with the dirt and rock, and the mental strength to keep energy flowing to my body.

  Within a second or two I realised that I couldn’t fight Gavin, but that I couldn’t help him either. I had to think of myself as made of wood or stone, a tree or old rock. I had to leave it to him to scramble all over me, dig into me, hang on to me. If he couldn’t, that was his concern. If he failed, he fell. There was nothing I could do about that. I just had to concentrate on being solid, being strong.

  We teetered outwards. There was a dreadful second when I lost three of my four points of contact with the cliff and we were about to drop. It was no use shouting at Gavin, but I shouted at him anyway, and I think he actually felt the vibration of air around him, because he did calm down a little and get a better grip on me. He was still half strangling me, but as I recovered my balance, all I could do was wait and hope that he would work out how impossible the position was.

  More seconds passed before he began to slowly, agonisingly, adjust himself. He needed to get a move on, because I couldn’t hang on much longer. I simply didn’t have the strength to stay there forever. No-one would. But he got his right arm from across my throat, which gave me a bodyful of fresh pure air again, and he got both legs around me, so that he was in a reasonable piggyback position, except for his left arm, which was around my stomach, and which meant that I was slewed to one side all the time.

  But I knew I couldn’t hope for anything better. And I sure as hell knew that I had to start going down, because I couldn’t hang on any longer.

  The first movement was painful in one way, because I was still shocked at the weight of him, and how much strength I needed. But it was good in another way, because I think both of us were relieved to be moving at all. That little sideways shuffle, where I managed to get both my hands and both my feet to a new position, thirty centimetres to my left, was like an action that ended a paralysis. I felt that he was slightly calmer, although his grip was still so intense that if we fell we would fall locked together and hit the ground like that. Well, we were pretty locked together in our lives now, and it seemed we would go into the next world the same way.

  We began the grimmest journey of our lives. We’d been on some pretty grim ones, but this was the worst. Inch by inch, crevice by hole by tiny indentation, lump of rock by pimple of dirt by protruding root. Down a few inches at this point, but sideways for the next three moves. At one time I had to go back up about a metre, to get out of a dead end route, and I think those were the worst few minutes of all. I could almost feel Gavin’s groan of disappointment and fear when I started climbing again.

  He didn’t actually make a sound during the whole time, but his grip never slackened. If anything it got tighter, although I wouldn’t have thought that were possible. I began to wonder if, assuming we got to the ground, I’d ever be able to get him off
me.

  New muscles started to hurt. The backs of the knees, the arches of my feet, the joints of my shoulders. Sweat streaming down my face made my hair wet and dank. I couldn’t see any more for the sweat that blotted my vision and stung my eyes. I refused to think of this ever ending because I was scared the knowledge would weaken me.

  My left foot landed on something unexpected. I bounced my leg a little and realised it was wood; a branch or a root. It felt soft but I needed its help so much that I relaxed onto it. For a wonderful moment it took my weight. Then it broke.

  We started sliding. Dust rose around me. Little landslides of gravel came with us. I grabbed madly with open palms and with fingertips. We passed the broken stick and I saw that it was an old root, quite rotten. Grab, grab, grab, there had to be something. My hands must be getting mangled but I didn’t feel anything and didn’t care. Grabbed at a protruding rock, caught onto it for a moment but couldn’t hold it. At least it slowed me down. And a moment later I got my fingers into a split and held on.

  I felt like an old snail. Do snails have a three-second memory? I had to forget the terror of the slide and just resume my journey. With the weight on my back. On and on, sobbing now, muscles locking up, slower and slower, can’t go on, can’t do it, it’s too hard, just give up, fall away into freedom.

  And then we were there. Even though I had longed for the moment when we would be three or four metres from the bottom and could separate and jump, it didn’t work out that way. Gavin was still clinging so tightly that I couldn’t risk jumping with him wrapped around me, so I had to grit my teeth and force my screaming muscles to move again. Until we were not much more than a metre from something that looked more like dirt than rock. And then I let go and dropped.

  We hit the ground fairly hard and rolled a couple of times. There was quite a slope, and it wasn’t until we were rolling that he started to release me. I shook him off and crawled away, then collapsed. I had no thoughts of triumph or success, no thoughts of anything really, only a complete and utter exhaustion, as though I could never move, never do anything again. Gavin crawled over to me and kind of slopped on top of me, and at some stage we both went to sleep, because when I woke up, the shadows had already reached us and it was getting cold.