The Beckoning Silence

by Simpson, Joe

  ‘Did he throw his reserve?’

  ‘No, he did nothing. Peter thought he might have passed out under the G-forces. At one point it looked as if it had sorted itself out and then the canopy went into a strange sort of parachutal stall, folding into a u-shape. Then he hit the ground.’

  ‘Who got to him first?’

  ‘Peter did. He flew over and landed beside Tat. He said he knew it was serious because Tat just lay there motionless, wedged in the rocks. The rest of the group were running up from the take-off. Tat was unconscious, bleeding heavily, when Peter got to him. There was nothing they could do. Tat had massive head injuries. He never regained consciousness and died within fifteen minutes of Peter reaching him.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ I could scarcely believe what John was telling me. Stupid thoughts ran through my mind. Tat gave up climbing so this wouldn’t happen any more. This isn’t right.

  ‘At least he won’t have known anything about it,’ John said. ‘No fear either. He would have been working hard to sort the problem out and then – bang, lights out. Wouldn’t have felt a thing.’

  ‘I suppose that’s something,’ I agreed. ‘How’s Peter? He must be in a terrible state.’

  ‘He is,’ John agreed. ‘He feels awful that he couldn’t save Tat. Keeps thinking there was something he should have been able to do.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ I thought of Peter standing there helplessly and then six of them carrying Tat slowly down the hill. ‘So Tat was just unlucky then?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, very,’ John said bitterly, ‘He just landed badly, rolled back and hit his head. I mean, you could do that falling off a step ladder.’

  ‘What about his helmet?’

  ‘It was undamaged. The injury was low down below the back edge of the helmet. You know how they’re made? They cut them high at the back so you can get a good field of vision.’ I knew exactly how they were made. The chances of being injured like that were always possible but very unlikely.

  ‘Oh, Christ … not Tat …’

  ‘I know,’ John agreed. ‘This is all wrong …’

  ‘It’s always fucking wrong,’ I said bitterly. I suddenly thought of Tat’s wife and his two boys, Paul and Jamie. ‘What about Jane and the boys?’ Tat doted on them. During every trip I had been on with him he had constantly referred to them. There was always a frantic last-minute effort to buy them the right presents; always models of racing cars, I remembered. He delighted in the way that as they had got older their relationship was maturing into a deep friendship rather than the roles of father and sons. ‘Does Jane know?’ I asked and John paused.

  ‘No, not yet.’ I could sense his hesitation. Who would have to be the one to tell her the dreadful news? I said nothing. I was still stunned.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ John said at last. ‘I’ll give her a ring now. It’s already out on the radio. I don’t want her to hear like that.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I agreed. ‘Actually it might be better if you rang Tat’s colleague, the Irishman?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Good idea,’ John said. ‘That way he could do it in person rather than over the phone.’

  ‘Who else have you told?’

  ‘Just you at the moment,’ John replied. ‘I was going to ring Richard next and then all the pilots we know.’

  ‘Look, why don’t I call all the climbers and you call the pilots?’

  ‘Would you? That would help.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll ring Ray now,’ I said. ‘He’ll be devastated. And Pat and Liz Duff, and Kate … Oh, God, and Andy Perkins as well. Jeez, this will be hard on him.’ Last time Andy and Kate and Tat and I had been together we had stood in a crowd of mourners by Mal Duff’s grave as Tat had stood bare-headed and recited a poem hoping, as always, that this would be the last time. Some hope.

  After innumerable phone calls all around the country listening to the stunned reaction to my news and the tears and the disbelief, I became hardened and detached as if I was telling some other news. I stood up, pushing the photos to the side of my desk, and turned to leave. There in the corner of my office lay my brand new paraglider with all the gadgets strewn untidily on the floor. I looked at my helmet and I felt sick and empty inside and wondered if I would ever fly again. Then I walked downstairs and saw the lovely photograph of Alpamayo that Tat had taken in 1995 after we had climbed, laughing with joy, up the south-west face of what had been dubbed the most beautiful mountain in the world.

  I remembered the abseil descent of the face when we had been bombarded by falling ice dislodged by two German climbers above us. I had been standing beside an old snow stake protruding from the ice tying a piece of tape through the eye in the stake. There was no ice screw to make myself safe and as Tat abseiled towards where I stood, I hurried to complete the fiddly knot so that I could clip myself in. Just as Tat arrived at my side a football-size lump of solid water ice hit him squarely on the helmet. As his head was inclined to the side he managed to expertly glance it off onto the back of my exposed neck as I bent over the snow stake. It struck me a stunning blow momentarily blocking the flow of blood on the side of my neck, and I found myself subsiding into unconsciousness. I came to seconds later to find Tat holding me up by the hood of my jacket as I tried to shake the dizziness from my mind.

  ‘I think I just passed out, Tat,’ I said, groggily.

  ‘Oh, no doubt about it, kid,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘It made a hell of a thump on my helmet.’

  ‘Did it hit you first then?’

  ‘Yes, right on the noggin, but hey, what a header. What skill, eh? They should have me on the England team, don’t you think?’

  ‘Some bloody doctor you are,’ I muttered grumpily and clipped myself to the snow stake.

  ‘Why? How are you feeling? NTC?’ he asked, using his familiar abbreviation for his favourite medical expression – none too crisp.

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘Of course you will.’ He had laughed and clapped me on the back. ‘You’re good at that, kid.’ And on we went down, happy to be alive, elated to be there. I stood and stared at the photograph, seeing the faint line of our tracks leading up to the foot of the face that we had climbed the previous day. Now I would always notice those shadowy tracks from a delighted past etched on the photograph and know we had made them. They had been our footsteps into a special world. We had sat on a high col having a last lingering look at the mountain rising serenely into the morning sky when Tat had taken the photograph. We had sat quiet and reflective at the realisation of how very lucky we were to be able to do and see such things. It had been a wonderful trip.

  As I turned away I saw, in the periphery of my vision, a man’s face etched into the snow. It appeared to be benevolently watching the two tiny figures as they followed our tracks to the start of the climb. A trick of the light, a fortunate coincidence of shadows and crevasses, had created a startingly familiar face in the snowy flank of the mountain. I stared intently at the bearded face with the eyes and nostril picked out by the dark recesses of crevasses and the shadow thrown by an ice cliff. It had a familiar proud aquiline nose. I wondered why I had never seen it before. Why now, when he had left us? I went downstairs and poured a strong whisky and cried.

  That evening we gathered in the pub and drank too much beer and tried to work out how it had all come to this, and why he had died, why they had all gone. It still didn’t make much sense. When Peter at last got back from Greece we did it again and were no more enlightened. Peter looked haunted and kept apologising because, he said, we had known Tat for so much longer and it must be so much harder for us, which of course was not true.

  Tat and Peter had been great friends, rivals in the air, and the quality of friendship is not judged on the length of time you have known each other but simply on what you know to be true. Friends do not care about how much you know, as long as they know about how much you care. It is as simple as that.

  Peter said he had kept trying to do something but Tat was bleeding heavily and he coul
dn’t stop it and then Tat was gone and it was over. We tried to reassure Peter that there was nothing he could have done but the bleakness of his gaze said that he did not believe us. He would come to terms with it in his own time.

  Tat hadn’t done anything daft or dangerously ill-judged. He took off just exactly as every pilot does and worked his way up in a climb. It was commonplace and it killed him. As John said, it was as if someone had just gone on a light-hearted skiing holiday and been killed. These things don’t happen. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, he said, looking confused and angry.

  I thought of the time when we had been abseiling off Alea Jacta Est and I was scared of the fragile knife-blade pegs pulling out so I had made some jocular remark about how abseil points had never pulled out on me. It was a feeble attempt to bolster my courage and Tat had looked at me.

  ‘I have,’ he had said quietly. ‘Twice.’

  Later in the bar he told me the stories. Once, when abseiling off a winter climb in North Wales, his abseil peg had ripped out. Tat had gone first and his partner had stood on the ledge clipped to the same abseil peg as Tat slid 20 feet down the rope. Then he was gone, flipping over backwards, twisting around as he plunged downwards. In an instant he hit a small ice-covered ledge feet first, facing outwards, with his back to the cliff face. How he managed to spot the landing he never knew, but the moment his crampon points bit into the ice on the ledge he instinctively threw himself backwards and braced himself against the rock to regain his balance. Almost at the moment he let out a sigh of relief there was a rushing sound and the shadow of his partner flashed past. He had been pulled off as the peg pinged out and tightened instantly on the sling clipped to his harness. Tat was still holding the ropes running through his abseil device; he was locked into the system and there was no time to grab anything, not that there was anything to grab anyway. His partner thumped heavily onto the rope. Tat somehow held the fall standing on a two-foot-wide ledge with no belay, no anchors whatsoever.

  The second fall came as he and a friend were descending from the summit of the Lotus Flower Tower, a stupendous 2000-foot pillar of rock in the Cirque of the Unconquerables in Canada. They had placed an abseil peg and Tat clipped into the ropes and stepped back off the edge. He had barely descended any distance when the peg flew out and once again Tat found himself airborne. After falling about 30 feet he hit a chock-stone wedged in a vertiginous rock gully cutting down the pillar. Tat stopped dead, winded, but otherwise unhurt, perched above thousands of feet of space. Fortunately his partner had not been clipped to the peg.

  I wondered at the probability of surviving two such catastrophic abseil failures. By comparison the slight impact of his paragliding accident should have left him unscathed. Perhaps he had simply run out of luck.

  All the risks Tat had taken on mountains, ice climbs and rock faces all over the world and got away with by skill or judgement or fortune had become meaningless in one bad landing on a hillside in Greece.

  Tat had been a good friend, a wonderful, caring, life-loving man whom I wished I had known for so very much longer. I wished I had told him how much I admired him, how astounded I was at his climbing record, how proud I was that he was my friend. I wished that I had told him that just to see him walking towards me after a short absence filled me with happiness. His presence was a pleasure, a gift I treasured and had now lost for ever. We all felt the same. It is difficult to articulate, hard to pin down the inexpressible emotion he generated. Perhaps it was just that when we met he made it so obvious that he liked you; that he was delighted to be with you. It made you feel special, content.

  In many ways we were like chalk and cheese but somehow our differences seemed to complement each other. I was short, stocky and abrasive. Tat was tall, gangly and laid-back. I could be argumentative and obdurately pig-headed. Tat hated confrontation. I drank too much and he drank too little. Once after an ice-climbing holiday he laughed and said that it had been the most intensive drinking session he’d had in years and yet I felt we had been verging on abstinence.

  I was lazy. Tat was driven, impetuous, always wanting to be doing something, never able to settle if he had time on his hands. I had always regarded myself as an impatient individual but Tat made me seem like serenity incarnate. Sometimes, as on Alea Jacta Est, his driven impatience and my lazy acquiescence led to near disaster, but for most of the time we climbed well together and our differing strengths seemed well matched. His zest for adventure and his infectious enthusiasm for another good day out always prompted me into suggesting yet another trip. Whether it had been saving a dying baby in the Langtang or night-clubbing in Huaraz, succumbing to his own wrong prescriptions on Pumori or trying to kill me in La Grave my overwhelming impressions had been Tat’s irrepressible and unlimited humorous passion for life. For most of the trips I had been on in the last decade those with Tat had always seemed the most fun-filled and memorable.

  I wished he was still here with his big enveloping one-armed hugs and his ‘Hiya, kid’ greeting, and the look of delight in his eyes at the prospect of another adventure. Of course I never did express these simple honest thoughts to him; we just don’t do that sort of thing. Who would hug us now, I wondered? There would never be another Tat.

  Life didn’t seem cruel at that moment but frighteningly transient. It sometimes seems that we are beyond the grasp of our consciousness, mute witnesses to something we cannot comprehend until death, at last, snuffs out the dilemma. We strive to make death a stranger, to live safe lives, to hope against our reason for immortality, and yet death is the one thing that defines us all. It is never far distant from life and the dead are never far from the living. The problem is that we shut death out of our lives and so our dead become strangers to us instead of the friends they once were.

  Was Tat now to become a stranger as we lived on without him? I hoped not. I have always been astonished at how quickly time passes by after a loss and how soon our memories fade even to the point that within a few years we could scarcely remember when that death had occurred. I often wondered why we had chosen to play such risky games with our lives. The nearest explanation that I had for why we climbed was because it let us edge along that fine line between life and death, because for a brief moment it changed our perspectives on life. That chance encounter with the dark side made us realise quite how important it was simply to be alive; it made us live.

  We did it because we loved it and for no other reason. We didn’t philosophise our way up frozen waterfalls or ponder the great mysteries of life as we endured storms and hard times on the hills. We just took whatever enjoyment we could glean from the experience.

  That was the point; it was a very simple game. We played it because it seemed the best way of living. John Huston, the film director, once wrote, ‘The most important thing about life is to avoid boredom at all costs. If you find that what you are doing is uninteresting, then you had better change your routine. I’m held together by things that fascinate me.’

  The hills had always fascinated us, held us in thrall so we went to them. Maybe that was all we had ever tried to do – played games on a dangerous stage to avoid boredom at all costs. I thought that I had no illusions about what we were doing, but I had been forced to realise that the man who says he has no illusions has at least that one.

  I didn’t fly for a long time after Tat’s death. I was unnerved. Only when spring came round and the weather improved did I realise that either I had to sell all the brand-new flying gear or give it a try. The thought scared me deeply. John and Richard, Les and Peter were wonderful, encouraging me not to give up. They were right, I knew that instinctively, but Tat’s death had shaken me to the core. They had a lot of flying under their belts. They had been in big thermals, flown through turbulent thermic winds, and had experienced the joy of long cross-country flights. They knew and understood why Tat had loved flying so much.

  ‘Why don’t you just wait until you’ve had one really good flight?’ Richard suggested. ‘Something
you’ve never done before, big thermals and a cross-country, say, and if after that you still don’t like it, well then, go ahead and sell the gear.’

  ‘At least that way you’ll be making a decision based on facts and not emotion,’ John added. ‘If you give up now you might regret it because you would never be certain whether you were right or not.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right,’ I agreed reluctantly.

  When the good weather arrived I made a few tentative and very nervous attempts at flying and to tell the truth I was pretty disappointed. We didn’t seem to do anything different from before. I popped the wing up and took off and flew around in circles ridge-soaring and landed on the top of the hill again. It wasn’t the wonderfully exciting adventure that John had promised.

  I knew that flying conditions in Britain were always much harder than in Europe so in the end I decided that the only thing to do was book a holiday in central Spain, based in Piedrahita, about two hours’ drive north of Madrid. I was assured that it was one of the world’s very best flying sites.

  A few weeks before Richard, John, Les and I were due to fly out to Spain John broke his ankle in a botched take-off on Mam Tor. I visited him in hospital the next day. He looked grey and sickly from the morphine and the pain and his yellow bruised foot with the livid scar and bristling stitches reminded me of all the operations I had undergone on my knee and ankles. Whatever frail confidence I had managed to regain evaporated at the sight of him lying in his hospital bed. I never wanted to go through that again. Consequently the holiday wasn’t a great success. I was too worried to enjoy myself. The weather was indifferent and most of the flying was ridge-soaring but I did catch my first thermals and climbed up in the presence of two watchful hawks swinging in fast circles on the lifting air.

  On our last day and last flight Richard had his best flight ever travelling over the pass en route to Avila and landing some 30 kilometres from our take-off point. I had dropped down to the valley in sinking air, watching in dismay as Richard disappeared into the far distance. When I landed I was absolutely livid. For a short period I was so frustrated and disappointed I stomped around the landing field furiously cursing the local wildlife. It was only when I calmed down that I realised I must be getting hooked on this flying game if it could mean so much to me to have failed. What would it have been like if I had succeeded and followed Richard over that distant pass?