The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  That year, Jamie seemed driven to greater things. It was like catching the right moment when you’re surfing, catching the big wave, going with the mass of water that is so much greater than you but using it to your own ends. “Matthewson and Dewar,” they said in the climbing pubs, in the bars and the huts and the bothies. “Heard of them. Doing some good stuff. Isn’t he the son of Guy Matthewson, the one they found on Kangchenjunga? Like father, like son.”

  That summer, we went to the Alps. We lived in medieval squalor in a muddy campsite in the Chamonix Valley. For a few days we joined up with a couple of Australian girls who appeared one evening and pitched their tent alongside ours, but for most of the time we led a monastic life, fitted to the rhythm of the days and the exigencies of climbing. The weather settled into one of its rare spells of calm. We divided our days between the valley and the high huts, between intense physical activity and indolence. There was the simplicity of unquestioning faith about what we did. Everything in the mountains could be explained, everything could be understood, every dilemma resolved. It was almost as though we were on a pilgrimage and were searching for revelation, and like any pilgrimage, the journey was more important than reaching the goal.

  “I don’t want this to end, Rob,” Jamie told me on one occasion. We were huddled together on a bivouac ledge two thousand feet above the Frêney Glacier, with the gas stove roaring in the dusk and the stars scattered like ice crystals across a darkening sky. He might have been talking of a love affair. And if love is what people need to explain the world, to make it rational and comprehensible, then I guess that he was.

  “It will end, though,” I warned him. “When we run out of money.”

  He laughed in the darkness. “You’re a bloody cynic, Dewar.”

  “An idealist needs a cynic. It’s the only thing that keeps him within the bounds of reality.”

  “But does a cynic need an idealist?” he asked.

  “Probably not. A cynic can usually get by well enough by himself — he just doesn’t climb so high or so hard.”

  That season we did, among other things, the Northeast Spur of the Droites, the North Face of the Grand Dru, and the Central Pillar on the Frêney Face of Mont Blanc; we retreated from high up on the Brouillard Face in a storm that rampaged across the range for five days, killing four other climbers in the same area. Storms are like that: frenzied monsters that devour the pilgrims with complete indifference. When we finally emerged from the blizzard and staggered into the Monzino Hut, we were greeted with amazement by the climbers who had been stranded there. It was as though we had come back from the dead.

  2

  ON MY RETURN from the Alps I holed up in my flat in London to try to pick up some pieces of my vagrant life. I had to earn some money; I had to catch up with my university work; there was Eve to see. Jamie’s call a few weeks later seemed an intrusion on an existence that was, in some way, returning to normality. “I’ve made a discovery, Rob. You’ve got to come up and have a look.”

  “I can’t get away that easily.”

  “Take the weekend off.”

  “Weekends are the most difficult time.”

  “Midweek, then. Just come and have a look, Rob. Don’t let me down.”

  I argued a bit, but I knew from the start that it was no good. Jamie was committed, and there was no respite. So I hitchhiked up the A5 to North Wales, and we met up that same evening at a pub in Llanberis. He was sitting alone, nursing a pint of beer in a corner of the bar and wearing a secretive smile. The daft thing was that I was pleased to see him, pleased to see that conspiratorial grin, those hooded, thoughtful eyes, the hands that were never still.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked. “It’d better be good. Eve thinks I’m crazy. I’m not sure I don’t agree with her.”

  “You are, Rob. Crazy. Both of us are.” He glanced around to see that we weren’t overheard and then leaned forward and spoke in a whisper: “I’ve found a cliff. A sea cliff. Virgin. It’s fucking marvelous.”

  I laughed. I felt angry at being dragged back into his plans so soon, but still I laughed at the sheer bloody-mindedness of the man. Even after our campaign in the Alps, he could still find delight in the diminutive British crags. It was a measure of his obsession.

  So we drove to see. The place was away from the mountains and over the bridge to the island of Mona, where the Druids had once reigned. We wound through narrow lanes and past undistinguished villages, out onto the deserted cliff top. There was an empty car park and a notice warning walkers about DANGEROUS CLIFFS. Beyond the rim of the world was Ireland.

  Jamie pulled on the brake. The wind rocked the van on its suspension. “Here we are. No one around — no climbers, no one shitting behind a rock, no sardine tins, no orange peel, nothing. Virgin.”

  Ducking our heads against the gale, we left the van and climbed over a fence. Noise was all around us, the distant abstract noise of the waves and the closer noise of the wind, which is not the wind’s noise at all — it’s your own noise, the wind rushing past your own ears, roaring and gusting against your mind. The bull roar of nature. And above it all, the crying of seabirds — a desolate, anguished sound.

  A slope of coarse grass led down to the edge of the cliffs. “Watch out!” I yelled against the racket. “The grass is wet.” We slithered down, grabbing at each other’s hands, clutching at rocks, clutching at straws. Herring gulls and kittiwakes shrugged their shoulders at our arrival at the edge of the cliff, leaning and tilting into the updraft and jeering at us as we peered over the edge. A precipice of pink gneiss fell away from blistered lips of grass and stone: at the base of the cliff the sea dashed upward in clouds of spray.

  “What do you reckon?” he shouted.

  “It looks promising.”

  “Promising? It’s bloody brilliant.”

  “How the hell do we get down?”

  “Abseil.”

  “And if we can’t climb out? I mean, what’s the rock like, for God’s sake? What happens if it just comes to pieces in our hands?”

  Jamie laughed, his expression a mixture of the delighted and the demonic. “We swim, youth. We swim.”

  We clambered back up the slope to the car park. The wind was less here, and we could talk without shouting. “When can we start?” Jamie was asking. “We don’t want some other bastards coming along and stealing it, do we?”

  “I’ve got the job to think about.” I was working for a security firm as a watchman at various depots in London suburbs. It was night work, and the idea was that I could catch up on my university studies and earn a bit of money at the same time.

  “Fuck the job,” Jamie said. “I’ll lend you some money.”

  “I can’t always be cadging off you.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  So I rang the firm to tell them I wouldn’t be available for a week or two and called Eve to say that I was staying up in Wales for a while, and for the next few days Jamie and I lived in his camper van once again, among the usual litter of sleeping bags, canned food, and hardware. They were days of high wind and sun, careless days imbued with that strange freedom that climbing brings, where the only rules are the physics of friction and the only law is the law of gravity. Each morning, we made some kind of breakfast of tea and bread and jam, before shouldering our gear like workmen — plumbers, maybe, or stonemasons — and tramping across the rough meadows to the nearby edge where the land finished. Gulls circled in the wind as we climbed, complaining at our presence and shouting derision at our puny efforts.

  “What a place!” Jamie yelled into the wind as he lowered down to the tidemark. “What a fantastic fucking place!” That’s how I remember him, grinning like that, a cross between the beautiful and the malicious, pale hair, blue eyes like the pale sky toward the horizon, his sunburned lips that were somehow like his mother’s, his face still scorched from the Alps, alight with whatever it was he and I searched for in any kind of climbing: something sensual, something almost sexual, a physical charge tha
t would find its echo in memory and give us something to recall, just as someone in the shadows of age recalls a past love.

  Not far from the cliff, we found a pub where we could drink in the evenings. There were just the old boys from the village and the occasional motorcyclist in greasy leathers. “What you lads doin’ then?” the landlord asked as he drew our pints.

  “Climbing.”

  “Climbing what? There’s no mountains here.”

  “The sea cliffs.”

  “Messin’ about on the cliffs? That’s dangerous. You want to watch it.”

  He was called Arthur. Each evening he’d listen patiently to our account of the day’s work. “Seems daft to me” was his opinion, but as time went on and we didn’t drown and didn’t fall and didn’t need rescue, his respect for us seemed to grow. “Clever bastards, I suppose,” he admitted.

  One evening, Arthur’s daughter was there, pulling at the beer taps and listening with half an ear to what we said but saying nothing herself. She wore her hair ragged and tied in a bandanna, and her blouse had a tattered, gypsy look to it. “I guess she’s got a man,” Jamie suggested. When she came around the bar to clear away empty glasses, you could see her calf-length skirt and narrow feet in leather sandals. There was a thin gold chain around one ankle.

  “What’s a girl like you doing here?” he asked. He reddened as he asked it. He always did that, blushed when first talking to a girl.

  “Biding my time,” she said, taking little notice of him.

  “Till what?”

  “Till a knight in shining armor comes along.” She had just come back from Egypt and wore an ankh on a leather thong around her neck to prove it. Judging by what came over the speakers, she liked the Stones and the Incredible String Band and Leonard Cohen. She had a tough face, sharp-featured. Scorched faintly by the sun. Maybe that was Egypt.

  “Why you boys lookin’ so pleased with yourselves, then?” she asked when we came in the next evening.

  “We’ve just done a new route.”

  She placed the glasses in front of us. “What’s the point? Going down to the bottom just to come back up. What’s the point?” Her accent made her words seem mocking.

  Jamie eyed her. “What do you enjoy?” he asked. I knew that belligerent tone. A challenge, like when he slagged me off when I was climbing: “Finding it difficult, then, Dewar? You’re not resting on that runner, are you, youth?”

  She returned his look without flinching. “I enjoy smoking,” she said. She paused. “And sex.”

  There was no one else in the pub. Her old man was out back fixing something. Electrics, he was always messing about with the electrics. We reckoned he’d bypassed the meter or something and was taking the power direct from the mains. So her old man was out in the back, and there weren’t any other customers that early, and this girl called Ruth had just told two almost strangers that she enjoyed smoking and sex.

  “Well, climbing’s rather like both of those,” Jamie said evenly. His cheeks were flushed, but he kept his tone level. “Smoking and sex, both at the same time. You should try it.”

  “Tell me when.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  She took the money for our pints and rang it up on the till. “My day off,” she said.

  She came despite my protests. Perhaps because of them. Ruth had a hard core of belligerence, just like Jamie. If she thought that she was being belittled, or that her sex was being belittled,

  you saw that light come into her eyes, the smile that wasn’t a smile so much as a challenge. “Fuck you, Dewar,” she said when I suggested that taking a novice down that cliff was a daft thing to be doing.

  She’d found an old pair of gym shoes, black gym shoes that she had last worn when she was at school. “They’ll do,” Jamie had said.

  “But how the hell is she expected to climb an XS route wearing shoes like that and never having climbed before in her life? I mean, there’s no other way out. We’d have to get her off by boat if she can’t climb out.”

  “If you two can do it, Dewar, then so can I.”

  “Like hell you can.”

  It was only by threatening a strike that I persuaded them to be a bit sensible. “Rob is like a father to me,” said Jamie sarcastically. So the next day we drove to Llanberis to buy her a pair of rock boots, and we got her to try them out on a couple of routes in the Pass — Carreg Wastad and the Grochan, that kind of thing. Ruth was, it was clear, a natural. “This is great,” she cried, startled to find such an experience on her doorstep, a thrill that you didn’t have to travel halfway around the world for. Jamie was enjoying himself, delighted with having this strange and ragged girl on the end of his rope — “at the end of my tether” as he put it. Other climbers stopped to watch. They knew Jamie, of course, but it wasn’t him they were looking at, it was Ruth: her limbs catlike on the rock, her spine drawn taut like a bow as she leaned back to see the next moves, the mane of hair hanging down her back like some kind of medieval banner. Oh, you noticed Ruth all right.

  Afterward we took her to one of the pubs in Llanberis. The bar roared like a storm. A cloud of cigarette smoke shifted above the heads, and the room was humid with damp wool and slopped beer. The talk was of climbing, of grades and grips and plans for the future, of new routes that were desperate and old routes that had been found a piece of piss. Ruth was amused by the place and its subculture, almost as though it might be something encountered on one of her expeditions: a yak drivers’ tavern, perhaps. “So how long have you guys been doing this?” she asked.

  Jamie laughed. “Rob and me? Climbing? Forever, off and on. From when we were kids mucking about.”

  I watched how she looked at him and how he returned her gaze — the same amused and analytical examination that he gave a pitch he was about to climb, as though he knew all the trouble it would bring, and that was part of the entertainment.

  “And what are your plans?”

  He feigned incomprehension. “Plans?”

  “You must have plans of some kind.”

  “You mean finish my degree, find a wife, get a mortgage, those sorts of plans?”

  “I mean climbing plans.”

  “Oh, those.” He glanced around at the crowd in the bar and lowered his voice conspiratorially “Climb out this new cliff before the rest of these bastards get onto it; that’s the first one.”

  “That seems pretty limited.”

  He laughed. “There are other ideas. We’ve been doing good stuff in the Alps as well, big routes: the Central Pillar of Frêney, the Dru, things like that.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t. Anyway, we’re ready for something really major. The Eiger, maybe.”

  “I’ve heard of that…”

  “And then…” His voice drifted away. “Who knows? The Himalaya, maybe. What about the Himalaya? What do you reckon, Rob?”

  I was caught up by the fantasy. “Why not?”

  He nodded, sitting there behind a small barricade of beer glasses, with Ruth listening to him in that way she had, a sharp interest blended with an air of detachment, as though she was listening, yes, and taking you seriously, but laughing at your small conceits, your boasting, your sense of importance. “Maybe Kangchenjunga,” he said. “Maybe Kangchenjunga.”

  She had something, Ruth did. Nerve. Bottle. The next morning, she stood at the edge of the cliff and gritted her teeth and held on to the rappel rope while Jamie screamed instructions at her — how to let the rope run gently, how to slow it down; she got it, more or less, this slight figure in wide flares and some old fisherman’s smock that she had found in a secondhand sale, and her hair tied back in a bandanna but flying in the wind just the same. She went down the rope screaming with delight — a banshee scream that frightened even the gulls: “This is fantastic, Jamie! Fantastic!”

  There was laughter and a strange tension underlying that morning. You could tell what was happening. You could see the looks Jamie gave her and the
way she returned them, that level, thoughtful gaze. You could tell, all right. It hadn’t been like this with the Australian girls in Chamonix.

  “How the hell are we going to get out of here if I can’t climb it?” she asked as we stood on the wave-washed rocks at the foot of the cliff. There was a steep wall directly above us and then an overhang that guarded the way onto a slab of pink gneiss. The slab was polished by the elements to a geometrical smoothness, but you couldn’t see that from below. That was what you discovered when you were up there, clinging to small flake holds and looking to move left onto the slab, the cliff leaning into you as though trying to prize you off. I resisted the temptation to say that I had warned her, but she didn’t really seem to care anyway. “We’ll find a way,” Jamie assured her. “Even if we have to haul you up.”

  She looked up at the line we had chosen, shielding her eyes with her arm. I noticed the dark hair on her arm, the suntan, the female angles that mollified her tough muscles, the novel presence of her, suddenly in the midst of my partnership with Jamie. “So what are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s go.”