Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  And then again, all we are going on is mask marks and a hunch. She could still be wrong. There is always that hope. But she sleeps now with the dog on her bed because however loud the storm and however soft the tread, no one will get past Tîr without us knowing. It should let her sleep for tonight, at least. She needs it more than most.

  The storm is close now: bright, bright lightning searing through closed lids and the thunder soon after, a hard crack, like breaking wood, nearly overhead. A horse screams in the darkness. The colt. I know his voice. In all his short life there has never been a storm like this. If I could move, I would go to him, but if I try to move now, at the very least I will throw up. He’s safe where he is. All the horses are safe in the barn and it’s stood worse storms than this one. Only once have I been caught on a night like this with them all outside. Now, I feel the storms coming in time to get them into the barn.

  The cat sings old cat songs in his sleep, low, like the thunder. He is nearly gone now, and I have a promise, a binding promise, to the living cat, to a dead man, to my lover, to myself, not to let him go on too long. Still, each morning, I reach down for him and feel the stark bones under harsh fur and I am glad that he’s there. I reach down now without thinking and feel a rough tongue on the back of my hand. There is some relief in that. I moved and I didn’t break. And the cat still lives. The night could be worse.

  The storm moves on. More lightning. Less thunder. The pressure is easing. The air is not as heavy as it was. The pain in my head has moved. It runs back now, from my eye to the small point in my head where it started. Claire Hendon has a tumour, a distant metastasis, growing inside her head. Her pain is constant; even morphine doesn’t change it. Mine comes from the alcohol and the heaviness of the storm and a period three days overdue, and it will go, in time, if I can sleep.

  Sleep is not so impossible now. I turn over in the bed and feel Nina turn over beside me, her arm wrapping round my waist, drawing me in to the warmth and the dark, away from the pain. The clock on the bedside table glows white in the dark. Dawn is two hours away. There is time, still, to sleep.

  The morning dawned dull and damp, dripping with the aftermath of the storm. It wasn’t raining, exactly, just a steady smirr that filled the air so that it was wet, like a sauna, and cold, like the inside of a fridge. I slept late and then slept again in the car as Lee drove us out towards Knapdale. The traffic was bad and my car hasn’t got the best acceleration in the world, so when we got caught behind a queue of caravans on the way across from Tarbert, there was nothing to do but sit it out in third gear, all the way through to Inveraray. Not the best way to start a morning. I woke once or twice and thought of offering to drive, but Lee’s a worse passenger than I am and, in any case, I was having serious trouble staying awake. The headaches were beginning to fit a pattern by then: a screaming session with the power drill followed by three or four hours of sedated semi-consciousness that were, in many ways, more debilitating than the pain. I don’t think I could have driven even if I’d wanted to.

  We were at the turn-off for the headland before I woke up enough to care about what was going on. Lee pulled the car in under the trees and cut the engine. The mist gathered closer—the headlights made curtains of it and drew them shut. If you looked carefully, you could see the ghosted silver of the birch trunks on the edge of the beam, but only if you knew where to look. Lee opened the door and the cold flowed in like melt-water. She stepped out, tested the ground and then stepped back in and shut the door. She tapped a finger on the steering wheel for a moment. ‘It might be safer to walk,’ she said.

  ‘With the gear?’ It’s a good mile from the turn-off to the cliff. I am not fond of walking with a full rucksack if I don’t have to. ‘Your car’s wider than this one. You still got it through.’

  ‘My car had solid ground under the tyres. I wasn’t driving on an ice rink.’

  ‘Let me look.’

  I got out as she had done and walked to the far reach of the headlight beam, then a step or two farther into the mist and the trees. The track here is not a real track. The Ordnance Survey has it marked as a footpath and even that is stretching the point. A mixed plantation of birch and pine covers most of the headland, and if you were to explore it for a while, you would find that other folk had gone ahead and that the worn state of the grass shows the line of least resistance through the trees. That’s as far as it goes. It would be tedious, not difficult, to walk. If you wanted speed, you could call it a bridleway, and find a way through with a horse or a bike. Only Lee, in her wilder moments, would seriously contemplate taking a car. But she did, and she made it, and where one can go, another can follow. Except for the ground. The last time we came up here, we drove on bone-dry earth that crumbled to dust under the weight of her wheels. Now, I walked through the mist on a slurry of pine needles and mud, holding on to the trees for support. Not the best terrain for precision driving. Still, it’s a good mile out to the headland.

  I walked carefully back down the line of the lights. ‘We can give it a go.’

  ‘You want to drive?’

  ‘If you like.’ In my car, I take the more ludicrous risks. It would work the same the other way around.

  The mist thickened as we pushed forward; it changed steadily from a damp, grey veil to the full smoke-dense white of a sea-haar. The headlights bounced back off the wall of it, blinding us both. I switched them off and slid on forwards on side lights, instinct and memory, all of them hazy. I didn’t hit anything badly enough to do any damage.

  Even in clear daylight with a decent surface to drive on, I don’t know the way in well enough to navigate the last quarter-mile. I got out at a turn in the track and Lee took over, weaving slowly through the trees towards the place where we usually park. A patched hulk loomed out of the mist beside us. Her car. It’s in this kind of weather that a camouflaged tarpaulin comes into its own. Even if you knew what to look for, I don’t think you’d have found it without a hand-drawn map showing every tree in detail. We pulled up and sat for a while in silence, staring out at the tree-shapes and the curved mound of the tarpaulin. I kept the car heating on full. You can’t store up heat any more than you can store up sleep. I know this but it never keeps me from trying.

  Outside the car, the world was every bit as grim as it looked. The air, without the mutter of the engine, hung very still. Even the wash of the waves on the cliff came up softly, filtered through cotton wool. I blew on my hands and dragged my cuffs down over my fingers to keep warm.

  ‘Eric’s bike was in here.’ Lee emerged from denser scrub beyond the car. No tracks showed a route in or a pathway out, but then, until last night, the ground was like concrete. A bikers’ convention could have spent the weekend driving across it and they wouldn’t have left any tracks. She held back a tangle of bramble and thorn and I looked in at the bed of crushed nettles and flattened grass. A good place, like a nest. You could imagine a dog turning in circles, beating it down for a bed. Several dogs. ‘There’ve been a lot of folk in here.’

  ‘One bike. Half a dozen of MacDonald’s minions with size twelve Doc Martens. If there was anyone else, we’re not going to see anything now.’

  So maybe we should have come up on Sunday morning after all. These things are always easiest in retrospect.

  ‘Any sign of the friend?’

  ‘I can’t see it.’ She let go of the thorns and the knotwork re-formed in front of us. ‘If it’s anywhere, it’ll be in the rock.’

  Which is, of course, why we are here. To climb the top two pitches of an E2 on dripping rock in a world where I can barely see my hands at the end of my arms.

  I looked past her, out towards the headland. The fog swirled around us like smoke from a greenwood fire, a cold fire that ate at the lungs and bit sharp on the tongue with the salt from the sea. I walked out towards the edge. A single, well-aged rowan loomed up, a dozen yards out, twisted and bent from the decades of Atlantic weather but solid all the same. I leant on it, hands in pockets, and called b
ack over my shoulder: ‘Could we abseil down to the ledge from here?’

  ‘We could.’ I heard the smile of it through the mist. She had the ropes out, lying in ordered coils on the rucksacks. Her belt hung from her hand. ‘And we could probably check out all the possible placements for the friend. But I didn’t come all this way out not to finish the route.’ She looked up. ‘I need a belay—I’m not going up it without, but I can do both pitches on my own and you can walk out when I get to the top. There’s nothing says you have to come up the climb if you don’t want to.’

  Right.

  Challenge. It’s all to do with challenge. I am no more immune than she is. ‘No. If we’re doing it, we’ll do it together. As long as you promise me the fourth pitch was the crux.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Fine.’ I skirted half-buried roots and the odd misplaced stone on the way back to the car and lifted my harness and spare over-trousers from the boot. ‘We’d better get going, then, while I can still feel my hands.’

  There’s something completely unique about climbing in fog that’s so much more disorienting than the simple blindness of night. In the dark, your mind compensates for the lack of input, your eyes carve faint shapes from the black. In the white-out of fog, like the hiss of white noise, there is so much input, it swamps everything else. At times like this, it’s probably safer to close your eyes and go up on the feel in your fingers. But that way, you are more likely to miss the small bit of metal that might be the link to a death. So you don’t. You keep your eyes open and climb the way you always climb, only more slowly and with more deliberate care and you pray that you don’t lose the feel in your fingers anytime before you reach the top.

  Lee took the first pitch. There was no discussion about that. The fourth was mine and so the fifth was hers. Tradition and habit combined. We roped on in the close confines of the fog and muttered the calls, softly, as if the world lay asleep on the other side of the veil. I stood on the ledge, feeling the ropes drag out through my hand, and her head was out of sight before her feet passed the level of my eyes. I was standing maybe twenty feet from where I first found Eric. There was no sheep.

  The rope tugged in my hand. A whisper, from nowhere: ‘I need some slack.’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘Clipping in on blue.’

  ‘Fine.’ So if she falls now, she will not crack her skull on the ledge. Not unless I let go. The ropes slid on out. The air clung close, a second skin, whispering seatales into both ears; truth in the left, the lies in the right. She loves you. She loves you not. Come on down, the water’s lovely. Stand still, it isn’t safe. He fell on his own. He fell with a friend. He didn’t fall, he was pulled.

  Pulled. If I pulled now, Lee would fall. It wouldn’t take that much. If she’s balanced on a fine hold, with one hand searching her rack for a hex, maybe, or a sling, then it would take almost no pull at all. It’s a sixty-foot drop from there to the ledge. Only fifteen feet less than Eric. Far enough, probably, to die.

  ‘Clipping in on red.’

  ‘Fine.’

  The ropes slid on out. I locked them when they needed locking and let them slip when they needed slack. I didn’t pull.

  She made a hanging belay fifty metres up: three large hexes wedged in a broad horizontal crack with a couple of small runners out at angles above and below. Overkill and then some. You could hang her car off that and it would stay put. I joined her there, clipped on and sat back in my belt, braced on the rock.

  ‘You were right. The fourth was the crux.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled through the mist, a flicker of fire in the damp. ‘You OK to go on up?’

  ‘Sure.’ I can’t see the rock more than five inches above my head, but at this stage, all I need to do is to check out gravity and go the other way.

  ‘It’s a straight crack all the way to the top.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I clipped spare slings into my belt. ‘You didn’t find the friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll keep a lookout.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I climbed up on wet rock. I am not fond of wet rock. I am particularly not fond of wet, white rock with invisible hand-holds—altogether too much like climbing ice. Remind me, if I ever suggest otherwise, that climbing on ice is the end-point of madness. The crack was wide. It took my fist, nicely jammed, and my feet, one over the other, edged in at angles. It took a hex, for protection, that was easily as wide across as my fist. From there, I couldn’t see anywhere, I couldn’t feel anywhere that would take something as small as a 5-mm friend.

  ‘Clipping in on blue.’

  ‘Got you.’

  Move on up. This is not so precarious. It would take a serious pull now for Lee to peel me off this rock. It could be done, but she’d have to pick her moment, and from here, unless she cut the rope first, I’d probably drag her off as I fell. Eric’s ropes had not been cut.

  Another hex, smaller than the last. Still not anywhere near the thumb’s width of the friend. ‘Blue again.’

  ‘Fine.’

  And blue, and blue and once on red and nowhere in reach of my fingers, a friend.

  It was a good pitch. I was warm when I reached the last hold. My fingers tingled with the cross-currents of fresh circulation. I felt the surging rush of endorphins as I stepped over the top, bright, tingling and alive: the best feeling in the world. It’s the challenge: the race fought and won; the exam passed. The enemies, inside and out, defeated. This is still why I do it.

  ‘Safe,’ the best word in the climbing vocabulary. I called it down. The mist swallowed my voice and, a while later, spat it back, moulded and changed.

  ‘You’re off.’

  ‘OK.’

  I fixed the belay and called again into the gloom. ‘Climb when you’re ready.’

  ‘Climbing.’

  Take in on blue. Take in on red. There could be anything or anyone on the end of these ropes. If you wanted to kill someone, today would be the day. They’d never see you coming.

  But there was no death that day. I took in and I took in, and when the ropes ran out, it was something like the old Lee who came over the top with her hair damped down tight to her head, black and sleek, so she looked like a soot-painted otter emerging from water.

  ‘Hey, we did it.’

  ‘Was it good?’

  ‘Not bad.’ It was her climb; she would say that. But she was smiling as she made the final step over the edge.

  We hugged, because we always hug at the top of a climb, to share of the joy of it, the final release from fear, the sheer, spectacular, mind-numbing thrill of the challenge. It was good. Even on a day like this, on a climb like this, after a month like this, it was good. I held her tight, her head on my shoulder, and felt the tone of her under my hands. I would like to say she was back at peace, the way she was when we first started all of this, the way she usually is at the top of a climb, but I’d be lying if I went that far. She was relaxed, she was cheerful, she was alive and the fire was burning. But she was not at peace.

  ‘Have we got a name for it, Adams?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She drew back, her hands linking through mine. It was always hers, the naming of this climb. She found it, she mapped it, she planned it. She will have named it, too, in her head, if not on paper. ‘I need to think about that.’ She dropped her hands and began to untie the knot at her belt. ‘Maybe after we’ve done the E5 variant.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I didn’t hear that. It was the buzz in my ears from the cold.

  She was chewing her bottom lip, her eyes focussed somewhere far off in the fog. ‘There’s a second route up. The first pitch goes up the overhang and then off to the right. We haven’t done it all the way but it’s E4 as far as we’ve done and it gets harder going on up. Eric’s pretty sure the crux is E5.’

  Wrong tense but I didn’t correct it. I was still trying to believe I hadn’t heard. In my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t do an E5, whatever the weather.

  ‘He w
ouldn’t have … ?’

  Her eyes narrowed. She looked out beyond the edge. ‘I don’t know. He might have done. They run pretty close together in places. You couldn’t tell from the floor which one he’d gone up.’

  ‘Lee, we can’t do this now.’

  ‘I know.’ She stretched out an arm, away from us both. Her hand disappeared in the fog. ‘I’d want to be able to see more than six inches in front of my face before I think about that one.’ She pulled in the rope to her feet. ‘I thought maybe you could top rope me from the tree. It’s not so far off the line and I could go down and have a look, at least as far as the length of the rope.’ She bent down and picked up the free end of the rope. ‘Trust me. It won’t take long.’

  It took half an hour and my fingers were white and insensate long before she reached the full length of the rope and turned round to come back up. She found nothing, but then I’m not sure she was expecting anything different. I stood up as she came over the edge. ‘You’re sure you don’t want to go down to the ledge and try the bottom bit?’ There is, after all, a good eighty feet beyond the end of the rope to the ledge.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Good. I’d have you committed if you did.’ I started coiling the ropes. ‘Are we going to get the cars out without a tractor, do you think?’

  ‘Of course.’ She grinned, still high from the climb. ‘And if we don’t, we can always call the Rescue and get another air lift off.’

  She was right. Her battery was flat and we had to jump start her car, but once it was going, the way out was, in many ways, easier than the way in. I followed her tail-lights down the track and out through the trees on to the road. The mist was clear there and the traffic lighter than when we drove up. I kept her in sight while we were still on the peninsula, but she has a bigger car with a bigger engine and she drives it in the same way she drives her motorbike and I lost sight of her tail-lights ten minutes after we reached the open road.