SANDY PULLED A tin from his pocket, put the lozenge on his tongue to try to wet it. He could hardly believe he’d made the Second Step and George was pushing on, not even allowing him a moment to rest. He had to go with him. Had to. In another minute he’d get back up. Just a minute. Two.
“Come on, slowpoke,” Marjory teased him. She was standing in the doorway, beckoning him with her finger. “Someone might see you.”
What was he doing? She was right. Dick might see him. Still, his head was bubbling from the champagne at dinner and the whisky after, the hangover already thumping behind it.
“Just one foot in front of the other,” she encouraged, opening the door wider. She had changed, from the pale silk dress into a robe. It was belted loosely, plunged open to reveal the long drop between her breasts.
“No.” He pressed his eyes closed, shook his head. He couldn’t go to her. He wouldn’t. When he opened his eyes again, his mother was standing there.
“I asked you not to go, Sandy. Now please, just come home.”
He stepped towards her but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, but then his mum was gone and George’s fingers were digging into his arm, hauling him back from where his foot hung over empty space, pulling him back to the ridge. Sandy fought to get away.
“Jesus, Sandy. Jesus.” George’s breath was hot on his face, his arms clasped around him, pinning him down. Slowly he calmed and collapsed to the ground. “You’re all right,” George was saying, over and over again. “You’re all right.” But he wasn’t. He needed George to turn around; they should have already.
“Sandy, I need you to stay here. You’re moving too slow. We won’t make it at this pace. But there’s still a chance. I can go on my own. I can make it. But you have to stay here and not move.”
Why wouldn’t George listen to him?
“Do you understand?” George’s voice creaked, slipped in and out with the wind. George leaned close to him, tightened the muffler around his neck, tugged at the earflaps of his hat. It felt as though George was dressing him, preparing him.
“No,” he said, as George folded his arms against him, pulled his legs up. “No.”
“Sandy, I need you to stay here.” George was fumbling at the knot at his waist, undoing it so that they would no longer be tied together. George was leaving him behind.
He couldn’t. He’d get up. Go with him. They had to do it together. He didn’t want to be left alone. Not here. Struggling, he made to rise, but George’s hand was on his shoulder. There was a squeeze, and a thump. “If I’m not back in an hour, two, go down.” George pointed past him, down the way they’d come.
George turned up the ridge, moved off. Slow. So slow. As if he was barely moving. He could still catch him. He’d get up and follow. After a minute. A few minutes.
Sandy stared out at the horizon – at the curvature of the Earth. He was so high. He tried to work out the numbers, calculate how high they must be, how far away George was. The highest thing on Earth. There were things he had to remember to do: factor the angles, their rate of ascent. It had been so slow. They’d been climbing all day. All day and they still hadn’t reached the summit. It was two hours away. Maybe three. He wouldn’t reach it, but George might. How long had George told him to wait?
It didn’t matter. He’d wait.
His heart pounded and he thought of his blood, mapped the course of it in his system – tracing its dark red colour from his heart, through the aorta and then his arteries, twisting and turning. Carrying warmth. Oxygen. He pulled off his glove and watched as what little oxygen remained in his blood was leached away as it crept back towards his heart. But it was too sluggish. It would get caught up in his heart. He would die.
He didn’t want to die here.
Where was George? How long had he been gone?
He numbered the hours by the angle of the sun. Time slowed. Everything slowed. The sun was getting low. Low. Nearing the peaks to the west. “We don’t want to be caught out after dark,” George had said. “You’ll tell me when to turn around. Can you do that?”
He was supposed to turn George around and he hadn’t. And if George wasn’t back soon the dark would come. The temperature would plummet. He was already so cold.
He heard his brain cells dying from the lack of oxygen. From the cold. Each of them ended with an audible pop, his mind bubbling like champagne. His lungs filled with fluid.
“Darling?” Marjory was curled next to him, champagne flute in her long fingers. He wanted a drink, but she brought the glass to her lips and swallowed it down, smiling. There was sun streaming through white curtains. Everything was soft, white. She smelled clean, like snow. He didn’t want to talk. Wanted to lie there next to her. Sleep. “Darling, do you love me?”
Why was she asking that now?
“When you come back,” she purred, “what will happen? To us?”
Hadn’t they already had this conversation? What had he told her before? Something that made everything all right. But he couldn’t remember.
He didn’t love her.
Sandy jolted awake on the mountain.
“Then why, Sandy?” Dick stood in front of him, arms crossed. He was wet, must have just come in from the rain.
“You need a towel. You should dry off. You’ll catch your death.”
“I’d be more concerned about you.”
“I’ll be all right. I just have to wait,” he explained. “I have to wait for George to come back.”
Nodding, Dick sat next to him, the cold radiating from his wet clothes. He wanted to move away, but didn’t want to upset Dick, who stared straight ahead at the white cloud that enveloped them.
“You know, Sands, he’s not really your friend.” Dick jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing up, the way George had gone. “Not the way I am. He just left you here. He wanted the summit for himself, so he left you here. And you’re dying. Do you know that? You’re dying, Sands. That’s what he left you to.”
“No. He’s coming back. He had to leave me here. I’d never make it.”
“Was it worth it, then?” He tried to figure that out. Was it? Maybe. “If you don’t even love her?” Dick finished.
“I’ll put it right, Dick.”
“I don’t see how.”
“If you’d been here sooner,” he said, “you would have seen everything. From here the Earth curves away.” Sandy raised his arm, described the arc in the air. “Like that.”
God, it was so cold. He tried to draw breath, call for George, but choked on the dry air. His body convulsed, racked with coughing. He tried to peer through the cloud. What if George had fallen? What if he’d turned back and passed him in the gloom? He had to go down. If he went down, he could go home and he’d set everything right. Sandy struggled to his knees.
He looked down the ridge in the fading light. It wasn’t that late, was it? It was the clouds making the sky dark. The sharp edge of the ridgeline blurred into sky. He couldn’t make it down the Step on his own. He couldn’t do it.
He collapsed back to the rock and the anger ebbed out of him into the cold. Dropping his head to his chest, Sandy breathed into his scarf, tucked his hands between his legs. One of them was bare. Where was his glove? His hand was numb. Sandy prayed for it to end soon.
ALONE, GEORGE CLIMBED above the cloud that stretched out around him in every direction. No peaks broke the banks of moisture, the dense softness of it. He reached for Odell’s camera. There was nothing here except Everest. The cloud was so thick he was sure it would hold him up if he stepped out into it. He could drift and float on the currents like tides.
He spread his arms for the drop and the camera tumbled from his hand, plummeting into the whiteness at his feet. Disappearing soundlessly. He watched after it.
It was gone. There’d be no record, then. No proof if he made it. Only his word. His and Sandy’s. He crumpled to the mountain and peered at the long snow slope.
What did it matter, then?
“I won’t go on like this, George.” Her face was blotchy, she’d been crying. How often had he made her cry? “I’ve waited and waited. I won’t wait for you anymore.”
He couldn’t feel the paper between his frozen fingers.
When he opened his eyes, the wind was fingering the corner of the photograph. He grasped at it, but the wind slipped the paper from his hands. It disappeared into the cloud.
He shifted his body slightly on the ground and stretched out his arm, palm up, reaching towards the peak. At this angle, he could hold the summit in his hand. So close. He could taste the wind that roared down from it, the jet stream that swept up from the Indian Ocean, carrying the scent of tropical rain, cleansing, warm. He could see the route drawn out in front of him. Just the long climb of the snow slope. There was nowhere to go but up or down. Maybe he didn’t have a choice anymore.
“Is this it, George?” his father asked, towering over him. “Is this what it was all for? All the sacrifice?” The cold had moved past temperature to pain. George rocked against it as it crept into his veins, his heart. It curled and snaked the length of his spine. “Not that you ever made any sacrifices yourself.” His father turned to glare down the ridge, his black coat stark against the cloud cover. He followed his father’s stare. Sandy was down there somewhere, waiting for him.
“They all paid the price for you,” his father continued. “Trafford. Ruth. Your children. That boy down there. He will wait for you. He won’t leave you behind as you have him. He’ll follow orders – just like the rest of them – and he will die. For this, for you. If he isn’t already dead.” There was a long pause. “And for what? What was it all for again?”
There was the bright explosion of a flashbulb. “Because it’s there.”
“Right. Because it’s there. You’ve always been focused on what’s out there, George. It’s high time you focused on what’s here.”
“That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard,” Stella sighed into his ear. Her hands were in his hair, long nails scratching at him, under his fur helmet. She leaned in to kiss him. George turned away from her and pressed his hands to his face, squeezed his eyes closed.
“What will they do?” Sandy whispered to him. “What will they do if we don’t come back?”
He tried to imagine it. Ruth in black. His children. He pictured the candle Sandy’s mother had set in her window. The flame flickered.
He couldn’t just sit here. If he sat here much longer he would die. He had to make a decision, but there was no easy choice. No good ending.
Through the cloud below him he couldn’t see Sandy anymore. Sandy was still alive. He had to be. The summit above the cloud was a perfect snow cone. A small, white pyramid. Clean, untouched.
It was so close.
THE SUN HAD not quite set, but it would soon, behind the banks of clouds that smudged the edges of everything. They shouldn’t be up here. They should be back in their tent, with tea, the chocolate he’d kept in his pack for when they returned. When Sandy took off his goggles, the wind stung his eyes, scraped across them. He squinted. There was a shape on the ridge. Beside him. Someone next to him. George. He’d come back. But he was just sitting there. In a stupor, eyes open, staring out over the clouds. Sandy shook him then struggled to his feet, hauled George up with him. The clouds were now rising up around them, brighter than the darkening sky, as though they trapped the light. He was drowning in them.
As Sandy watched, George wavered on his feet and seemed to double before his eyes – two of him standing there. Sandy tried to focus; he had to know what happened. “Did you make it? You did, didn’t you?” He nodded at George, his head pounding with the effort. Sandy closed his eyes against the doubled vision. When he opened them again, George stood in front of him, raising his head to meet Sandy’s gaze. Had he nodded? He must have.
Sandy tried to smile. His swollen lips cracked.
“We have to go,” George said at last.
Sandy tried to imagine the view from the summit. What would it have felt like? He tried to remember his proudest moment, but couldn’t. Maybe this was it. He wished he’d been there, seen what George had seen. Everything was going to be all right. They’d done it.
George shook him roughly. “We have to go.”
The world swayed. He was on a boat, waves chopping beneath him, around him. No. On the mountain. George was tying the rope around his own waist again. They were face to face on the mountain, the rope between them. George turned him, let the tension play out on the rope. He felt it go taut at his back. It held him up. He began to stumble down the ridge.
It didn’t matter. George had done it. They would go down and everything would be different. Everything would be fine.
GEORGE WAS WADING into the dim light reflecting around him, flattening everything to two dimensions. He was leading now, Sandy close behind, the rope short between them. He didn’t want to lose Sandy in the gloom. Didn’t want to leave him alone again on the mountain.
Feeling for his footing, he stepped, shifted his weight forward. The scree slipped out from under his boot and rattled down the mountain. He settled his foot again and moved forward. They’d been climbing from dawn to dusk but he didn’t remember the climb up. Nothing seemed familiar. There was, he remembered, a mushroom-shaped rock. He had to find that rock again. He was parched. Hungry. Nauseous. They had been climbing for more than fifteen hours. They had to be nearing the crack into the Yellow Band. Must be. He strained for the rock, the small gully they’d followed up. If he missed it in the dark …
“Where’s the torch?” Geoffrey asked him.
“Must have left it in the tent. Shouldn’t have needed it.”
“Bloody stupid, George.”
Yes. Bloody stupid. There was nothing for it but to keep moving. The only choice now. If he stopped he’d never get up again. He shuffled his foot blindly forward, sucked the thin air into his lungs.
The cold radiated up through the hobnails in his boots and burned into him in freezing points. His hand was stiff around his ice axe, weak. Humiliating – how weak he was. What must Sandy think of him?
He squinted against the blackness, against the snow that was beginning to kick up. Thick flakes of it, like moths against a window.
He could hear his breath in his lungs. Cells were bursting, like tiny fireworks in his brain. He could see them, feel them, small explosions coursing through his body.
The cold and wind washed over him like water. He could feel it everywhere. Against his skin, against his legs where they pushed through the thin air, at the seams of his clothes. The cold clawed its way in. His body shivered, contracted. Tightened around him.
He stepped forward, the mountain dragging him downward.
There was tug at the rope. By the time he turned around Sandy had righted himself and was watching the gravel and snow tumble away from him. They plodded on, stopping every step to inhale.
He stepped forward, felt the loose fall of stones.
They had to be nearly there.
He tried to count the hours back in his head. They couldn’t go on for much longer.
Ahead there was a smudge of rock. The Yellow Band. They would make it. George moved imperceptibly towards the spot, his eyes fixed on it. It shifted in the clouds and darkness, the scattershot of snow. What if he was wrong?
He stepped forward.<
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SANDY TRIED TO place his feet where George had, each step a labour. Ordered his muscles to be ready, lift, shift his weight. He couldn’t believe his legs still held him; he could barely feel them. All he was was the burn in his lungs, his head, the cold burrowing into his ears, ice picks of pain. He wanted to sit down, dig into the rock and snow. Sleep. He would finish this tomorrow.
And then there was the pull of the rope and the mountain slamming into him. The last of his breath was torn from his lungs and something seized him around his chest and stomach, crushing him. He scrambled at breaking stone that ricocheted down into the inky void. He strained against the rope tearing at him, tried to grasp at anything, his last glove ripping from his hand. He clung to the ridge.
He stilled against the weight of the rope. Nothing moved except for the wind across his body and his hands, uncurling his fingers where he tried to hold on to the rope. He was cold and wet. As he tried to breathe against the rope gripping him, his head exploded in bursts of light, of colour.
“George!” It was a rasp. No sound. He held the rope. His bare hand shuddered, a pale white claw. The thought came slowly. George had fallen. George was on the other end of the rope. He leaned his weight back against it, tried to reel it in. His head was fogging, his sight contracting to a pinpoint. He knocked his head back against the mountain so the pain would keep him focused. No. George had made the summit. They had to get down.
He moved his hand on the rope. Forwards. Forwards.
And then it was over.
He was flung back, his spine and skull bashed against the ridge of the mountain. There was no sound but the wind and his gasping in the heavy dark. He lay there swallowing air into empty lungs, feeling the pressure on them ease slightly. Still he couldn’t breathe. There were streaks of colour in his eyes.
“What do I do?”
“You die. Alone. Like me.” Lapkha was beside him, his eyes bulging out at Sandy, who felt his own with his frozen hand.
“No. I can’t.”
Lapkha’s breath rattled in his throat and lungs. “You not help me. No one help you.”
Above All Things Page 31