Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  ‘I’m not on call.’

  ‘You will do him, though, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ No question. ‘Yes. I’ll do him.’ Because Eric was more than a friend.

  Time slowed down for a while after we found him. I sat with my legs dangling over the edge, my fingers still tight on the red rope. Lee sat there behind me, her legs crossed at the ankles, one hand in his, the other somewhere up on his arm, as if any minute now she would stand and he would stand with her and we’d walk off the ledge, a thin line of climbers and a sheep. They talked together, I think. At least, she talked and there were gaps for him to answer and the cadence of it sounded like a late-evening natter. The kind of conversation you’d have in the pub after any day’s climb, chewing through the route and the holds and the protection and whether it’s really safe to be lying on a ledge, even a wide one, four hundred feet up from the sea with no belt and no rope and no one there to hold the belay if you fall.

  I sat out of the way and gave them time to be together and watched the sun crack open on the southernmost Pap, spilling all the light of the first half-year down into the cleavage of Glen Astaile. Down below, the water of the Sound caught the overspill and spread a carpet of living fire from tide-line to shoreline and out into the open sea beyond. Somewhere in all that ardent brilliance is the moon, an invisible sliver of calm.

  In time, the dark pushed forward over the top of Kintyre, shrinking the daylight. Rounded shadows flowed out over the Sound and wrapped clammy fingers across the bare skin of my legs. Even the longest day has to end eventually and the night, when it comes, is just as cold as the rest. My skin warped into goose-flesh and my fingers whitened to senseless wood. I lost the memory of my feet. Behind me the murmuring conversation petered out. When I turned to look, she had her forehead bent to his hand, the short, dark hair falling forward, moulded with sweat and salt spray into a rough-spiked halo. The dying light of the sun caught them then and cast them together, a half-cut statue moulded from living rock, the kind of image that becomes permanent if you leave it too long. It seemed a good time to call it a day.

  I swivelled round on the ledge and moved in closer to the belay, pulling my feet up underneath me for warmth. If she heard me move, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Lee. We need to get off here and call the Rescue. So we can get him to Glasgow tonight.’

  She could have been deaf. Or dead. For a while, I thought that, at the very least, she had fallen asleep. But she unwound her fingers from his, then stood up and stepped back to look up at the rock above his head. I watched while she weighed the height of the cliff against the depth of her conscience. It wasn’t easy. If it had been anyone other than Eric, there would have been no question, we’d have picked up the gear and taken the last two pitches to finish the route. It’s nine months since she first sat in the kitchen and spun me this climb. Almost twice that since the first time she and Eric took the small-boat out from West Tarbert to have a look at the height of the coastline. She spent the winter climbing ice on Ben Lui to stay fit for this. You wouldn’t get me to climb on ice if the world’s end depended on it. And the fourth pitch was the crux. The rest should be a walk in the park. It could be faster, in fact, than the path. I blew hot breath on my hands and stamped some life into my feet, just in case.

  ‘Lee? We can go on up if you want. The light’ll hold.’

  It won’t. We both know that. But the fourth was still the crux.

  She said nothing. Just stood there, flexing and un-flexing her fingers, her eyes moving from Eric to the rock and back again. In time, they reached some kind of consensus, the three of them, and she shook her head, once and sharply. Her hand moved to her waist, fingers fighting to untie the salt-stiff rope from her waist. Without it, she stood unprotected four hundred feet over water. There has to be something about this ledge that inspires insanity in the otherwise sane. She waited without comment for me to unhitch the belays and then stood there coiling the rope as if we were safe up by the car with a hundred yards to the edge. I watched and coiled and watched and waited and tried to work out if I could catch her in time if she fell. She didn’t, but when I bent to fix the blue rope to my sack, she had stepped back and when I looked up again I saw her walk out on the far side of the sheep as if there was no chance it might wake and move and take the feet out from under her. I have known this woman for nearly two decades. For most of that time, we have climbed together. I have never in all that time seen her take risks for the sake of it.

  ‘Lee?’

  She turned back towards me. The shadows bisected her face. The half I could see was closed, inaccessible. ‘No,’ she said. Her voice was flat, cut from old newsprint, bereft of colour and tone. ‘We can’t do it now. We’ll walk out and call from the top. The signal’s better from the car.’ She turned on her heel and started picking her way over the loose rock-fall cluttering the path. I followed, more slowly, and with my shoulder pressed to the rising wall of the cliff. The sheep belched in its sleep as I passed.

  She was right, the signal was better from the car. We changed clothes, turned on the heating and called the Mountain Rescue and they promised us a helicopter from the naval base at Prestwick to take him off. Not because there was any urgency—they were happy to take the word of two doctors that the casualty was gone beyond all hope of resuscitation—but because it was late and a long drive back into Glasgow and there was a team on stand-by, waiting for something more exacting than another weekend walker weather-bound on the Cobbler. And then of course it was Eric and even the lass on the phone had heard of Eric. They weren’t about to send him off without a bit of a spectacle.

  We met the advance team at the head of the sheep-path: a couple of the lads in regulation Rescue beards and Day-Glo yellow jackets who brought in a bigger flare and a radio and more climbing kit than I’ve ever seen outside of the shop. They shared out their ration of mint cake and we destroyed their evening for them with the news that they didn’t have to climb down to bring up the body. In a while, we showed them the way in to the ledge and you could see life gradually made worth living again as they worked out the route we had taken to get up to there from the sea. They were local, both of them, and they must have known the lines of the cliff better than I know the road into the farm. New climbs are like gold dust in Scotland. Folk scour the Hebrides and live in tents on small pieces of ocean rock just to find a new route they can put their name to. To have something unclimbed within three hours’ drive of Glasgow city centre is a jewel beyond price and a second ascent of any route is almost as good as the first. We didn’t get around to telling them that we hadn’t completed the final section.

  They liked the ledge. They would, in fact, have been perfectly happy to guide the helicopter in and have them winch us all up from there but Lee had her pact with the gull and wasn’t about to let them blast it clean off its scrape, so we helped them unpack their kit and put the stretcher together and carried Eric out to the flat ground beside the car. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Rigor had long since set in and Dr Dalziel had moulded to his sharp-angled bed with all the flexibility of the rock around him. It would have taken a bone saw, by then, to get him lying flat out the way they wanted him. We stood out of the way and let them try the various permutations, and it was only when there seemed a reasonable risk of losing him over the edge that Lee stepped in. She rolled him on to his side with the one broken arm folded under his head for a pillow and his one knee bent up towards his chest and they cross-tied him that way for the jog up to the car, a sleeping bear, curled up to dream.

  The cavalry arrived not long after that. They could have landed, I have no doubt; the ground is flat at the top of the cliff and even with the car in the way there was room to spare. But naval exercises aren’t done the easy way and so they stayed in the air and ran it all as a sea-cliff manoeuvre. We fired our small flare and the lads fired their big one and the thing homed in between the fire-flower and the mortar and hung in the air above us, blasting wind and sound on to the qui
et of our crag, scattering grass and gorse and sheep-droppings and calling down Armageddon on the late-evening rabbits. Given the choice, I would have taken the car at that point but Lee was winched up ahead of me and she had the keys, and so, when they lowered the rope for the third time, I let the lads with the jackets strap me in and then the pulley jerked tight and my feet left the ground and I fell the long haul up into hell.

  They dropped us off at the Western. If you say it quickly enough, it sounds like a late taxi home, not a man-made monster that covered a two-and-a-half-hour drive in forty minutes with a fair proportion of that spent negotiating with air-traffic control for the right to fly across their air space. By then I had thrown up everything I had ever eaten and was paralysed with the same kind of post-nausea catalepsy that comes sometimes after a migraine. I could have lived without another dangle on the winch but the Western Infirmary was built before helicopters were ever invented and there’s no convenient landing pad within reach, so they hovered over the rooftop and lowered us down to the handful of white-coated clinicians who braved the screaming havoc of the blades and came forward to help in a blur of well-meaning hands. Mike Bailey was there, I remember, Lee’s protégé, the failed student turned pathology technician. He stood in front of the others waving the glowing end of his cigarette like a beacon, his wild hair made wilder by the helicopter and his narcotic grin damped for once to nothing by the news of who it was. Of the others, I remember no one except Dee Fitzpatrick, the tall, crew-cut Irishwoman, on call from anaesthesia and there, she said, to see were we wrong and was Eric still within reach of a ventilator. He wasn’t. He had never been, but she stayed anyway and helped us lift him across on to the new trolley and made sure that there weren’t too many of the others trying to follow us down to the mortuary. For that, if nothing else, we were grateful.

  He was a good climber, Eric. There are no scars on the backs of his hands. No scrapes or fresh lacerations from hanging too long on insecure jams. No bruised knees from the ungainly scramble on to the ledge. The skin on the back of his hand is a deep, weathered brown, the fingers tight curled as if he were still holding the rope of the belay. Although, of course, he had no rope, no belt and no belay. If he hadn’t been wearing his climbing shoes, you would have thought he was up there for the view and the sunset. Which maybe he was. It was worth seeing, after all.

  He’s softening now; I can stretch out his fingers if I try. I can mould his hand, make it less of a fist and more of a hand-shake, something to hold on to while the pathologists do what they have to do to get themselves ready. Something solid and real to keep away the freezing, bright-light hell of the autopsy room. It is so very cold in here. Even before we reached the mortuary, you could feel it: the kind of biting, psychological chill that goes with white tiled walls and fluorescent lights and the shiny precision of steel. A cold that flows into the lungs on a searing tide of preservative and disinfectant, neither of them quite strong enough to smother the smell of the dead.

  The smell is less, though, now. Sitting here, this close to him, I could have imagined the smell. And if Eric is cold, he is no colder than I am, and there is still some comfort in holding his hand, in studying the neat-clipped fingernails and the roughened skin on the pads and the layering of coarse red-blond hair along the back of his fingers that turns white suddenly as the lamps above the autopsy table flick on and two hundred watts of artificial daylight flood down over the slab. And then, if you look more closely, you can see that he does, after all, bear the scars of learning, old and faint, a crisscrossed lattice of whispered lines engraved half a lifetime ago on the knuckles and tendons and then weathered in by the rock and the rain of a hundred weekend climbs. It’s good to know not all the scars are new ones.

  I’ve never been present for the post-mortem of someone I know. It makes it all so very different. Lee and her technician do this every day of their lives, although I don’t believe they remove the clothes with that kind of care from someone they haven’t met. It was like undressing a friend before bed, fast and smooth and with a kind of modest courtesy that did no harm to what was exposed underneath. Gradually, what had been clothed was made unclothed and the breaks and the scars and the lumps that had been covered were there to be seen and to be measured and photographed and then, later, where it mattered, to be weighed. There were breaks—more than I had imagined. Not just the obvious one in his upper arm that left his elbow crooked out as if there was a new joint halfway down from his shoulder, but others in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect: a fracture dislocation of the femoral neck that showed only when they rolled him over on to his side and gently lifted his leg, a shattering of the bones of one ankle that had been held together by the rising rubber of his climbing boot so that the foot flopped over, grating gently, when the boot joined the rest of his clothes in the bag. And then finally, the one that mattered, the one that only really showed up on X-ray so that we all crowded into the dark room and made fog of our breath round the dry-processor and then had to wait for the full ninety seconds until the leading edge of the film poked out between the rollers and we were able to drag it out and hold it up to the light box and see for ourselves the great glaring gap between the atlas and the axis that showed where Eric Dalziel had broken his neck.

  It must have been fast; that at least is worth knowing. For every doctor I know, the worst thought in the world is a long and lingering death. We see too much of it in the wards to want it for ourselves or each other. I remember the conversation in the canteen the day Maisie Allen died in the Unit, three months after any one of us would have chosen to go. Dee was more pragmatic than the rest of us, but then Dee has lived longer in a world of different values. Eric was the one who said what everyone else was thinking; that he’d rather die tomorrow in a fall from a climb—short, sharp and unknowing—than wait out the months for a slow, dragging end. So he got what he wanted, that much at least.

  It still doesn’t explain what the hell he was doing there in the first place.

  ‘Kellen? Kells, he won’t mend by looking at it.’

  It’s Lee. Lee who has changed out of her climbing things and is standing, not at all cold, in her fine cotton theatre pyjamas with the ghastly white plastic over-gown that never quite washes clean and the long, elbow-length gloves that on her come halfway up her biceps. She is standing in the doorway to the dark room and Dee is behind her and both of them are looking at me as if I’m more fragile than I think I am.

  ‘Kellen, there’s coffee next door; I think maybe we should go and sit down.’ Dee Fitzpatrick spent her childhood in an Irish convent and it shows still in her voice. South of Dublin and west a little. Farther south and farther west as the night gets later and she gets more short on sleep. By this time of night it is utterly beguiling. I’m not in the mood to be beguiled.

  ‘Why should I want to sit down?’ My hands are curled tight in the pockets of my fleece. For the warmth. I may be tense but I am not fragile.

  ‘I’m going to open him up. You don’t need to stay.’ Lee. With the extra layer to her voice that opens into the lines below the surface. She said this to me once before, the same kind of words, the same kind of tone, the same vertical groove cut deep in the space between her eyes. We were upstairs in her office then, five floors up, and it was Bridget down here on the slab. She didn’t tell me not to come down then, but she gave me the option not to. I took her advice that time and stayed in her room and read old journals while she did what she had to do, so I never saw the things I didn’t need to see. I didn’t think about it much at the time, I just acted on instinct, but I have never regretted it since and my dreams have been the more peaceful for it these past few years, I have no doubt.

  But that was a long time ago. I am different now and this is different and, most importantly, Eric may have been close but he was never a lover. Not for me. I didn’t think through any of this, up there on the ledge. I was thinking of him and what he had asked for, not of her. But Eric is dead and what he wanted doesn’t matte
r. Lee is alive and she matters a lot.

  I turned and leant against the dry-processor, letting the warmth of it thaw the frost inside. My hands relaxed with the heat. I pulled Eric’s last X-ray from the viewer and held it up between us so that we were both looking at it, Lee and I, so that our eyes met through the gaps in the spinal column. So that the question was there to be seen.

  Dee looked at us both and nodded, once, before she left. The door swung shut behind her. The room was warm and the air smelled of developer and fixer. We could have been anywhere else in the hospital. Not all X-rays are of the dead.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said, because one of us had to to say something. ‘We could call in someone else.’

  ‘No. I want to do it.’ She’s almost a head shorter than I am but there are times when her eyes are on a level with mine. Professional eyes, inward turned, absorbed. Like they were at the start of the climb. If you didn’t know her better, you might believe this was just another routine stiff to be put through the mill.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Then I want to stay.’

  ‘You haven’t had the practice, Kells.’ She isn’t saying no, she’s just warning. Layers on layers of warning. She may be right. But I may not be the only one who hasn’t had practice enough for this. I’m not walking out now.

  I reached round and slid the film back up on the viewer. It hung there, stark, simple, black and white, saying all of the things that no one was ready to say out loud. My hands felt their way back into the padded depths of my fleece, fingers wrapped tight over thumbs. For the heat.

  ‘I’ll cope.’

  I followed her out of the dark room and back to the slab. Today is my day for following. On other days, it will be different.