It was quite popular.
It was called Out There.
“Rock climbing is theatre,” I once wrote.
It had all the qualities of theatre, I went on, but a theatre-in-reverse:
“In obedience to some devious vanished script, the actors abandon the stage and begin to scale the seating arrangements, the balconies and hanging boxes now occupied only by cleaning women.”
“Oh, very deep,” said Ed Johnson when he read this. “Shall I tell you what’s wrong here? Eh? Shall I tell you?”
“Piss off, Ed.”
“If you fall on your face from a hundred feet up, it comes off the front of your head and you don’t get a second go. Next to that, theatre is wank. Theatre is flat. Theatre is Suicide Coast.”
Ed hated anywhere flat. “Welcome to the Suicide Coast,” he used to say when I first knew him. To start with, that had been because he lived in Canterbury. But it had quickly become his way of describing most places, most experiences. You didn’t actually have to be near the sea. Suicide Coast syndrome had caused Ed to do some stupid things in his time. One day, when he and Moscow still worked in roped-access engineering together, they were going up in the lift to the top of some shitty council high rise in Birmingham or Bristol, when suddenly Ed said:
“Do you bet me I can keep the doors open with my head?”
“What?”
“Next floor! When the doors start to close, do you bet me I can stop them with my head?”
It was Monday morning. The lift smelled of piss. They had been hand-ripping mastic out of expansion joints for two weeks, using Stanley knives. Moscow was tired, hungover, weighed down by a collection of CPTs, mastic guns and hundred-foot coils of rope. Her right arm was numb from repeating the same action hour after hour, day after day.
“Fuck off, Ed,” she said.
But she knew Ed would do it whether she took the bet or not.
Two or three days after she first introduced me to Ed, Moscow telephoned me. She had got herself a couple of weeks cutting out on Thamesmead Estate. “They don’t half work hard, these fuckers,” she said. We talked about that for a minute or two then she asked:
“Well?”
“Well what, Moscow?”
“Ed. Was he what you were looking for, then? Or what?”
I said that though I was impressed I didn’t think I would be able to write anything about Ed.
“He’s a mad fucker, though, isn’t he?”
“Oh he is,” I said. “He certainly is.”
The way Moscow said “isn’t he” made it sound like “innie”.
Another thing I once wrote:
“Climbing takes place in a special kind of space, the rules of which are simple. You must be able to see immediately what you have to lose; and you must choose the risk you take.”
What do I know?
I know that a life without consequences isn’t a life at all. Also, if you want to do something difficult, something real, you can’t shirk the pain. What I learned in the old days, from Ed and Moscow, from Gabe King, Justine Townsend and all the others who taught me to climb rock or jump off buildings or stay the right way up in a tube of pitch-dark water two degrees off freezing and two hundred feet under the ground, was that you can’t just plug in and be a star: you have to practise. You have to keep loading your fingers until the tendons swell.
So it’s back to the Mile End wall, with its few thousand square feet of board and bolt-on holds, its few thousand cubic metres of emphysemic air through which one very bright ray of sun sometimes falls in the middle of the afternoon, illuminating nothing much at all. Back to the sound of the fan heater, the dust-filled Akai radio playing some mournful aggressive thing, and every so often a boy’s voice saying softly, “Oh shit,” as some sequence or other fails to work out. You go back there, and if you have to fall off the same ceiling move thirty times in an afternoon, that’s what you do. The mats give their gusty wheeze, chalk dust flies up, the fan heater above the Monkey House door rattles and chokes and flatlines briefly before puttering on.
“Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I do this.”
Caitlin telephoned me.
“Come to supper,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Mick, why?”
“Because I’m sick of it.”
“Sick of what?”
“You. Me. Him. Everything.”
“Look,” she said, “he’s sorry about what happened last time.”
“Oh, he’s sorry.”
“We’re both sorry, Mick.”
“All right, then: I’m sorry, too.”
There was a gentle laugh at the other end.
“So you should be.”
I went along all the deserted roads and got there at about eight, to find a brand-new motorcycle parked on the pavement outside the house. It was a Kawasaki Ninja. Its fairing had been removed, to give it the look of a ’60s café racer, but no one was fooled. Even at a glance it appeared too hunched, too short-coupled: too knowing. The remaining plastics shone with their own harsh inner light.
Caitlin met me on the doorstep. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. “Mm,” she said. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a soft dark blue sweatshirt.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.
She smiled and pushed me away.
“My hands smell of garlic,” she said.
Just as we were going inside, she turned back and nodded at the Kawa.
“That thing,” she said.
“It’s a motorcycle, Caitlin.”
“It’s his.”
I stared at her.
“Be enthusiastic,” she said. “Please.”
“But –”
“Please?”
The main course was penne with mushrooms in an olive and tomato sauce. Ed had cooked it, Caitlin said, but she served. Ed pushed his chair over to the table and rubbed his hands. He picked his plate up and passed it under his nose. “Wow!” he said. As we ate, we talked about this and that. The Kawa was behind everything we said, but Ed wouldn’t mention it until I did. Caitlin smiled at us both. She shook her head as if to say: “Children! You children!” It was like Christmas, and she was the parent. The three of us could feel Ed’s excitement and impatience. He grinned secretively. He glanced up from his food at one or both of us; quickly back down again. Finally, he couldn’t hold back any longer.
“What do you think, then?” he said. “What do you think, Mick?”
“I think this is good pasta,” I said. “For a cripple.”
He grinned and wiped his mouth.
“It’s not bad,” he said, “is it?”
“I think what I like best is the way you’ve let the mushrooms take up a touch of sesame oil.”
“Have some more. There’s plenty.”
“That’s new to me in Italian food,” I said. “Sesame oil.”
Ed drank some more beer.
“It was just an idea,” he said.
“You children,” said Caitlin. She shook her head. She got up and took the plates away. “There’s ice cream for pudding,” she said over her shoulder just before she disappeared. When I was sure she was occupied in the kitchen I said:
“Nice idea, Ed: a motorcycle. What are you going to do with it? Hang it on the wall with the Klein?”
He drank the rest of his beer, opened a new one and poured it thoughtfully into his glass. He watched the bubbles rising through it, then grinned at me as if he had made a decision. He had. In that moment I saw that he was lost, but not what I could do about it.
“Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it just a fucker, that bike? I haven’t had a bike since I was seventeen. There’s a story attached to that.”
“Ed –”
“Do you want to hear it or not?”
Caitlin came back in with the ice cream and served it out to us and sat down.
“Tell us, Ed,” she said tiredly. “Tell us the story about that.”
Ed he
ld on to his glass hard with both hands and stared into it for a long time as if he was trying to see the past there. “I had some ace times on bikes when I was a kid,” he said finally: “but they were always someone else’s. My old dear – She really hated bikes, my old dear. You know: they were dirty, they were dangerous, she wasn’t going to have one in the house. Did that stop me? It did not. I bought one of the first good Ducatti 125s in Britain, but I had to keep it in a coal cellar down the road.”
“That’s really funny, Ed.”
“Fuck off, Mick. I’m seventeen, I’m still at school, and I’ve got this fucking projectile stashed in someone’s coal cellar. The whole time I had it, the old dear never knew. I’m walking three miles in the piss-wet rain every night, dressed to go to the library, then unlocking this thing and stuffing it round the back lanes with my best white shortie raincoat ballooning up like a fucking tent.”
He looked puzzledly down at his plate.
“What’s this? Oh. Ice cream. Ever ridden a bike in a raincoat?” he asked Caitlin.
Caitlin shook her head. She was staring at him with a hypnotized expression; she was breaking wafers into her ice cream.
“Well they were all the rage then,” he said.
He added: “The drag’s enormous.”
“Eat your pudding, Ed,” I said. “And stop boasting. How fast would a 125 go in those days? Eighty miles an hour? Eighty-five?”
“They went faster if you ground your teeth, Mick,” Ed said. “Do you want to hear the rest?”
“Of course I want to hear it, Ed.”
“Walk three miles in the piss-wet rain,” said Ed, “to go for a ride on a motorbike, what a joke. But the real joke is this: the fucker had an alloy crankcase. That was a big deal in those days, an alloy crankcase. The first time I dropped it on a bend, it cracked. Oil everywhere. I pushed it back to the coal-house and left it there. You couldn’t weld an alloy crankcase worth shit in those days. I had three years’ payments left to make on a bunch of scrap.”
He grinned at us triumphantly.
“Ask me how long I’d had it,” he ordered.
“How long, Ed?”
“Three weeks. I’d had the fucker three weeks.”
He began to laugh. Suddenly, his face went so white it looked green. He looked rapidly from side to side, like someone who can’t understand where he is. At the same time, he pushed himself up out of the wheelchair until his arms wouldn’t straighten any further and he was almost standing up. He tilted his head back until the tendons in his neck stood out. He shouted, “I want to get out of here! Caitlin, I want to get out!” Then his arms buckled and he let his weight go onto his feet and his legs folded up like putty and he fell forward with a gasp, his face in the ice cream and his hands smashing and clutching and scraping at anything they touched on the dinner table until he had bunched the cloth up under him and everything was a sodden mess of food and broken dishes, and he had slipped out of the chair and onto the floor. Then he let himself slump and go quite still.
“Help me,” said Caitlin.
We couldn’t get him back into the chair. As we tried, his head flopped forward, and I could see quite clearly the bruises and deep, half-healed scabs at the base of his skull, where they had cored his cervical spine for the computer connection. When he initialized Out There now the graphics came up live in his head. No more screen. Only the endless V of the perspective. The endless, effortless dip-and-bank of the viewpoint. What did he see out there? Did he see himself, hunched up on the Kawasaki Ninja? Did he see highways, bridges, tunnels, weird motorcycle flights through endless space?
Halfway along the passage, he woke up.
“Caitlin!” he shouted.
“I’m here.”
“Caitlin!”
“I’m here, Ed.”
“Caitlin, I never did any of that.”
“Hush, Ed. Let’s get you to bed.”
“Listen!” he shouted. “Listen.”
He started to thrash about and we had to lay him down where he was. The passage was so narrow his head hit one wall, then the other, with a solid noise. He stared desperately at Caitlin, his face smeared with Ben & Jerry’s. “I never could ride a bike,” he admitted. “I made all that up.”
She bent down and put her arms round his neck.
“I know,” she said.
“I made all that up!” he shouted.
“It’s all right. It’s all right.”
We got him into bed in the back room. She wiped the ice cream off his face with a Kleenex. He stared over her shoulder at the wall, rigid with fear and self-loathing. “Hush,” she said. “You’re all right.” That made him cry; him crying made her cry. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. I sat down and watched them for a moment, then got to my feet. I felt tired.
“It’s late,” I said. “I think I’ll go.”
Caitlin followed me out onto the doorstep. It was another cold night. Condensation had beaded on the fuel tank of the Kawasaki, so that it looked like some sort of frosted confection in the streetlight.
“Look,” she said, “can you do anything with that?”
I shrugged.
“It’s still brand new,” I said. I drew a line in the condensation, along the curve of the tank, then another, at an angle to it.
“I could see if the dealer would take it back.”
“Thanks.”
I laughed.
“Go in now,” I advised her. “It’s cold.”
“Thanks, Mick. Really.”
“That’s what you always say.”
The way Ed got his paraplegia was this. It was a miserable January about four months after Caitlin left me to go and live with him. He was working over in mid-Wales with Moscow Davis. They had landed the inspection contract for three point-blocks owned by the local council; penalty clauses meant they had to complete that month. They lived in a bed-and-breakfast place a mile from the job, coming back so tired in the evening that they just about had time to eat fish and chips and watch Coronation Street before they fell asleep with their mouths open. “We were too fucked even to take drugs,” Ed admitted afterwards, in a kind of wonder. “Can you imagine that?” Their hands were bashed and bleeding from hitting themselves with sample hammers in the freezing rain. At the end of every afternoon the sunset light caught a thin, delicate layer of water-ice that had welded Moscow’s hair to her cheek. Ed wasn’t just tired, he was missing Caitlin. One Friday he said, “I’m fucked off with this, let’s have a weekend at home.”
“We agreed we’d have to work weekends,” Moscow reminded him. She watched a long string of snot leave her nose, stretch out like spider-silk, then snap and vanish on the wind. “To finish in time,” she said.
“Come on, you wanker,” Ed said. “Do something real in your life.”
“I never wank,” said Moscow. “I can’t fancy myself.”
They got in her 1984 320i with the M-Technic pack, Garrett turbo and extra-wide wheels, and while the light died out of a bad afternoon she pushed it eastward through the Cambrians, letting the rear end hang out on corners. She had Lou Reed Retro on the CD and her plan was to draw a line straight across the map and connect with the M4 at the Severn Bridge. It was ghostly and fog all the way out of Wales that night, lost sheep coming at you from groups of wet trees and folds in the hills. “Tregaron to Abergwesyn. One of the great back roads!” Moscow shouted over the music, as they passed a single lonely house in the rain, miles away from anywhere, facing south into the rolling moors of mid-Wales.
Ed shouted back: “They can go faster than this, these 320s.” So on the next bend she let the rear end hang out an inch too far and they surfed five hundred feet into a ravine below Cefn Coch, with the BMW crumpled up round them like a chocolate wrapper. Just before they went over, the tape had got to “Sweet Jane” – the live version with the applause welling up across the opening chords as if God himself was stepping out on stage. In the bottom of the ravine a shallow stream ran through pressure-metamorphosed Ord
ovician shale. Ed sat until daylight the next morning, conscious but unable to move, watching the water hurry towards him and listening to Moscow die of a punctured lung in the heavy smell of fuel. It was a long wait. Once or twice she regained consciousness and said: “I’m sorry, Ed.”
Once or twice he heard himself reassure her, “No, it was my fault.”
At Southwestern Orthopaedic a consultant told him that key motor nerves had been ripped out of his spine.
“Stuff the fuckers back in again then!” he said, in an attempt to impress her.
She smiled.
“That’s exactly what we’re going to try,” she replied. “We’ll do a tuck-and-glue and encourage the spinal cord to send new filaments into the old cable channel.”
She thought for a moment.
“We’ll be working very close to the cord itself,” she warned him.
Ed stared at her.
“It was a joke,” he said.
For a while it seemed to work. Two months later he could flex the muscles in his upper legs. But nothing more happened; and, worried that a second try would only make the damage worse, they had to leave it.
Mile End Monkey House. Hanging upside down from a painful foot-hook, you chalk your hands meditatively, staring at the sweaty triangular mark your back left on the blue plastic cover of the mat last time you fell on it. Then, reluctantly, feeling your stomach muscles grind as they curl you upright again, you clutch the starting holds and go for the move: reach up: lock out on two fingers: let your left leg swing out to rebalance: strain upwards with your right fingertips, and just as you brush the crucial hold, fall off again.
“Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I come here.”
You come so that next weekend you can get into a Cosworth-engined Merc 190E and drive very fast down the M4 (“No one drives themselves any more!”) to a limestone outcrop high above the Wye Valley. Let go here and you will not land on a blue safety mat in a puff of chalk dust. Instead you will plummet eighty feet straight down until you hit a small ledge, catapult out into the trees, and land a little later face-first among moss-grown boulders flecked with sunshine. Now all the practice is over. Now you are on the route. Your friends look up, shading their eyes against the white glare of the rock. They are wondering if you can make the move. So are you. The only exit from shit creek is to put two fingers of your left hand into a razor-sharp solution pocket, lean away from it to the full extent of your arm, run your feet up in front of you, and, just as you are about to fall off, lunge with your right hand for the good hold above.
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