The joie-de-vie mixed with the altitude’s lack of oxygen in a cocktail that was so heady as almost to be intoxicating – except that there was nothing toxic about it. There is nothing toxic about real joy, it only becomes toxic when it is phoney joy or pretend joy, or inflicted joy: the McJoy of candyflossed news items.
Breakfast over, they set forth again – but not with yesterday’s sludge but with a bounce that almost buoyed, and boinged, them along. The sun soon dried out their clothes. It soon thawed their frozen marrow. It soon caused glacial arteries to flow and stalactited fingers to lissom again in piano-playability.
No. Susie and her frogs did not skip up the mountain. That was as rugged as it had always been. But their going lacked the purposelessness of the day before, lacked its running-to-standstill-ness. Nothing is harder than to strive without purpose, nor to continue forwards if it appears you’re merely marking time. The rockiest road to somewhere is an easier path than the smoothest lane to nowhere.
The day before they had carped across escarpments; today they were can-canning over canyons.
They had just negotiated one such. They had reached a bookshelf-width-like ledge. Behind them was a fall of several hundred feet. Before them a wall of cascading water. Above them – too high above them for them to be able to reach it – was a slithery ceiling with an inverted arc. It would be impossible to climb it, and fatal to try. They plunged into despair. So near and yet …
“What did I tell you?” asked Mimimi, trying to hide both disappointment and an ‘I-told-you-so’ smugness behind a veneer of gloom.
“We could always go back,” said Bluemerang.
At which point the loch mess-monster deigned to show his chubby face. He bit into a huge slab of the mountainside below them. “Not any more, you can’t,” it said, boulders falling like crumbs from the side of its mouth.
“It’s very rude to talk with your mouth full,” Miss Chief told it. But only as a parody of herself.
By way of reply the monster burped monstrously. “Oh,” it said, “by the way, may I introduce you to the not-yeti?” As if to introduce which self, the wall of water before them suddenly changed into a pack of slavering wolves, their tongues dribbling over snarling fangs, their drool dripping onto the ledge below them with such heat each drop caused the rock to sizzle.
“Guess,” said Mimimi, “this is the end of Rico. And Mimimi. And Uncle Tom Cobbley, and all.”
“See a fat lady about these parts?” asked O’Nestly. “Hear any singing? The end, sure, is still a seriously long way off.”
The pack of wolves returned to being a wall of water.
“How does it do that?” Miss Chief wanted to know.
As if to answer which, the wall of water changed into a curtain of swirling mist. Thence to a vast and lush, an emerald plateau of sea-level verdure and pasture. Susie had grown increasingly used to her gast being flabbered, but this added a new dimension to it. She and the Sufrogs started inching their way towards the plateau.
“Just where do you think you’re going?” cackled a hideous voice.
“Who said that?” started O’Nestly, bunching up like a gunslinger, looking around him like a gazelle running a gauntlet of lions.
Suddenly in his face was a huge face. A witch’s face, all warts and hooked noses and accordioned chins. “Me,” said the face which suddenly shrank again to fit atop the tiny body standing sentry over the luscious prairie.
Bluemerang laughed. “I don’t think we have to worry about blueming you,” he said. And started to walk past her.
“Really?” said the not-yeti, and immediately changed itself again into a pack of wolves. Bluemerang found himself backing up rather rapidly. “How does it blueming do that?” he asked.
For the next hour or so, all of the Sufrogs tried various ruses to get past … the whatever it was. Or the whatever it became – because within a very short space of being one thing it became something else entirely. And it’s very … awkward confronting something which never stays the same.
Nespa feinted to the right, the not-yeti changed into a double-headed Tyrannosaurus; Bluemerang to the left, and it changed into a three-headed crocodile. O’Nestly tried walking straight at it and it became yet again the wolves; Mimimi confronted a centipede in boxing gloves, each of whose legs became a fist to punch her with. Whatever the temporary form, the not-yeti soon reverted back to being the wall of water. A dam that would have damned them to a watery grave.
Chapter 53
It was only just after noon. Because the mountain was so huge, though, the sun was already disappearing behind it.
The Sufrogs’ fear was one which both seized and possessed them. Such a fear is hugely fat. It pushes out all other emotions. There is no space for others when that fear is present. Which is why Snow-it-alls and their ilk try to manufacture it. A person afraid is a person controlled; a person afraid has no other emotion beyond being afraid, no ambition more than not to be afraid. Susie realised, at that moment, for every one real enemy they might have, the Snow-it-alls manufacture ten. A hundred, maybe. It’s not the enemies that the Snow-it-alls want to vanquish, it’s those the Snow-it-alls would govern.
They were stuck on a ledge where there was no way out upwards. Or downwards. Or behind them. They had only two alternatives: stay where they were or get past the not-yeti.
If they stayed where they were, all they had was a choice of death: starvation or freezing or falling. They therefore – and even Mimimi saw that – had a choice of one. They had to get past the not-yeti. They’d tried all the obvious routes, now was the time for the less obvious ones.
And then, in her head, Susie again heard: “We are the polo bears/ Fairly scary polo-bears…” She was going mad, she again decided. Hearing things. No more shilly-shallying, then. This was the time for action. If she was going to die, she’d meet death head-on, not cower in a corner for it to grab her.
“Right,” said Susie to her frogs. “All of you into the pocket. Right now.”
“Excuse we, Susa- …” Miss Chief started.
“I’m going to take a run at it,” Susie explained.
“A run …” Mimimi started to say.
“It’s the only way. If we stay here, it’s guaranteed we’ll die. The other way it’s only likely.”
“Great odds!” said both Mimimi and O’Nestly but with seriously different inflections.
“Into the pocket,” Susie repeated. “Right now.”
“But …” stammered one of them.
“Right,” Susie said, “now.”
Slowly the Sufrogs lumbered aboard Susie. Her bib-pocket became like an underground train in the rush-hour. There was all sorts of squeezing and sneezing, of nose-rubbing and nose-out-of-jointing.
“On the count of three, then. Ready?”
“Ready” came back a sort of communal, quaking grunt.
“Right,” said Susie, and took a deep, doctor’s surgery breath. “One,” she started slowly, “two … two-and-a-half … and-three-quarters … three.” She stood exactly where she was.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” exclaimed Miss Chief. “We am exactly where we was a moment ago.”
“GO!!!” roared Bluemerang.
Susie ran. She knew not whither. She just ran. And as she ran she closed her eyes. She ran one pace. Two. She ran ten paces. Twenty.
She ran fifty paces.
“Hang on,” she said to herself. “Hang on. The waterfall wasn’t even ten paces away. Wherever I am, I’m now through it.” She felt herself. “And dry,” she said. She twentytatived her eyes open. She wasn’t in a dry waterfall, wasn’t being savaged by a wolves. Neither was she swirling dervishly in a mist, nor yet lusciousing in verdant pastures. She was three-quarters of the way up a huge glacier.
She looked behind her. There was nothing which would have indicated a cataract or even a meadow. It was as if it had never been. Not-yetis, it would appear, if confronted disintegrate.
As this thought was turning like a microwa
ved plate in her mind, she felt a kangarooing in her bib pocket.
“Zere is ze top,” she heard Nespa saying. “Ze summit. Zere it is.”
“Know what, Nespa? You’re blueming right,” said Bluemerang.
Slowly Susie had brought her face back so that again she was looking forwards. And upwards.
The glacier seemed to finish about a hundred metres beyond her. Where there was yet another cliff face. This sheered for thirty feet or so. Above this there was a gentle incline which led to a very angular top – it was the very sharp point on a very fat and sharpened pencil.
“You’ve done it, Susie,” O’Nestly triumphed.
“We’ve done it,” Miss Chief ‘agreed’.
“When we get to that top,” said Mimimi, “there’ll be another one beyond. That’s how it is with mountains. With mountains? With life.”
“I did it,” said Susie, mostly to herself. And, because the gesture now seemed to by synonymous with success, she punched the air. The other Sufrogs had disembarked. Nespa had remained as her contact.
“We’re not there yet,” gloomied Mimimi. “And even if that is the top,” she said, “there’s still the little matter of getting down again.”
“Easy peasy,” triumphed Susie.
“The journey of a thousand miles,” said O’Nestly, “may start with the first step. But its last mile is often its hardest.”
“If there is one thing worse than someone who quotes proverbs,” said Mimimi, “it’s someone who invents them.”
“We’ve done it,” Miss Chief echoed Susie’s triumph.
“We’ve done it, Miss Chief?” Susie indignated. “We’ve done it?”
“We, as in all of us,” Miss Chief explained, trying to mollify the snarling Doberman which had become Susie’s tone: “All of us ‘we’.”
“I did it, Miss Chief,” Susie exclaimed. “Not in any sense we. Me, by myself. I.” With which she huffed away from them, up the glacier.
“I smell no snowwiches,” said Nespa.
“Don’t start, Nespa,” said Susie huffily.
“Huffing,” O’Nestly shouted after her rapidly shrinking form, “can seriously damage your health.”
“Watch your blueming step,” boomed Bluemerang from what was by then some thirty metres below.
It was that moment Susie chose to slip. And thence to start – almost in slow motion – to cascade down the side of the slope. As the slide slithered so she started to gather momentum.
“She’ll disappear,” said Bluemerang, “right over the cliff’s edge.”
“We’ve got to do something,” said O’Nestly. “We’ve got to do something.”
“My scarf,” said Miss Chief.
“Your WHAT?” exclaimed all the others. Neither such largesse nor such savvy were things they usually associated with her.
“No time to argue,” Miss Chief dynamicked.
From above them, hurtling now towards them, came a bundle of snow, entwined within which – they all knew – was Susie. And Nespa.
“My scarf,” Miss Chief urged them all. “We have to stop her.”
She offered the end. ’Twas a far, far better thing she did than she had ever done. She knew that. It didn’t matter who else did.
O’Nestly grabbed the proffered scarf and, with Mimimi, careered across the accidental piste down which the Subundle was now hurtling. He shouted to Bluemerang and Miss Chief to hold fast to the other end.
They got there just in time.
“Hold on tight,” O’Nestly shouted to both Bluemerang and Miss Chief. Who’d not finished uncoiling her scarf and whose neck was therefore almost taken off when Susie skidaddled into it. This had the secondary effect of catapulting Susie back some way up the incline. The bungeying finally subsided, though. And Susie – and Nespa – came to a juddery, snow-encrusted stop.
“Huffing,” panted O’Nestly, when he was convinced Susie’s hurtle towards oblivion had been checked, “can seriously damage your health.”
“Thank you,” said Susie.
“Yes,” said Nespa, “zank you.”
“Maybe they’re right at school,” said Susie, gathering her limbs back together, “maybe I’ll never learn.” There was regret in her voice, shaded with a dash of shame.
“Seems to me,” said O’Nestly, “you just proved them wrong.”
“Thank you, Miss Chief,” Susie told her.
Miss Chief felt an unaccustomed sensation. A glow rose to her cheeks. She’d actually thought about someone else! And – this was really hard to get over – it even felt … well, good, the sensation. It even, in fact, felt really good. So good she didn’t know what to say. Or do. She stood gawkily, kicking at the snow. She was coy. She was blushing.
“Sorry,” Susie told them all. “I’m sorry. Of course it was us who did it.”
“No man, Susie, is an island,” said, of all of them, Miss Chief.
“No,” Susie replied, amazed. “No, you’re right, Miss Chief. No man is an island. Maybe I don’t remember that enough.”
“Well?” asked Bluemerang. “Are we climbing the blueming mountain or are we blueming not?”
“Yes, we blueming are,” said Susie, “yes, Bluemerang, we blueming are.”
Chapter 54
At the height Susie and her Sufrogs now were, every breath is a struggle, each brings with it a cattle-prod of dull pain, each one in feels inadequate – and each out feels like it will be your last. There is, at such altitudes, no such thing as easy going. But the going they had, the Sumountaineers, was as easy as the lack of oxygen would allow. The puffing was intense, but the huffing had abated.
They’d been told they couldn’t do it – that it was undoable. The Snow-it-alls had said the mountain would kill them, and the Emos and pengrins had laughed at suggestions they might survive. And yet survive they had. Even with a vengeance.
So near now. So very near.
A triumph. A blooming triumph.
Not even a ‘try’-umph, a ‘made-it’-umph.
Before almost they knew it, they were there.
At the top. At the summit.
They plonked themselves exhausted on the pencil’s point, breathing in the short sharp stabs of their pants, the sweat flowing stingingly into their eyes, their ribs aching, feeling a bit sick.
They’d done it. They were there.
Top of the world. Top, at any rate, of this world.
Except that it was only in one sense that they were. Literally they were. Metaphorically, though …
As their pants subsided, and as the pain slowly drifted from their ribs, so too did their triumph. It is an extraordinary quality of achievement that the sense of achievement which attends it, attends it so briefly. More often than not the principle emotion that accompanies climax is anti-climax. It is almost as if the triumph were in the doing and not in the done.
Which is, of course, precisely where the triumph is.
The sight was magnificent. So were the sights. Oh, for a whole minute or so. And then all of them, all the Sufrogs, they lay back in a heap. They were still struggling for breath, but they were struggling too that their experiences might be absorbed. They started feeling the pain of their cuts, and the heat of their sunburn, the aches in their joints, and the torture of muscles pushed to the very limit of their capabilities. Those were the experiences easy to absorb.
“Going down’s harder,” said Mimimi eventually.
“Will you hush up!” said O’Nestly.
“Please don’t tell me …” Mimimi started to say, before O’Nestly once again shhhed her. “Listen,” said the Irish frog.
They listened.
“What …?” Miss Chief began.
“Shhh!” O’Nestly bristled at her.
“You’re not blueming wrong.” “What is it?” asked Miss Chief. “What?”
Very faintly, a tin whistle rustling in the breeze, came the strains of a familiar anthem: the polo-bears’ anthem.
This gained in strength, slowly, surely. As s
lowly and surely the Sufrogs raised themselves from their prostrate positions to ones combining sitting with disbelief.
Finally, as if walking round the corner from the bus stop, lumbering up the slope before them came first Ox and then Cam.
“Oh, hi,” said Ox, as if bumping into a friend on that same bus-stop corner.
“Leho,” said Cam.
“But …” stammered Susie.
“You?” stammered Nespa.
“But …” stammered Susie again.
“You sook lurprised to see us,” said Cam.
“Just a blueming bit.”
“We home cere often.”
“We told you that,” said Ox. “Bear against mountain, all that.”
“And you’ve been following us?” tentatived O’Nestly.
“Of course,” replied Ox.
“Cof ourse,” Cam confirmed.
“And why, in that case, did you not help us?” asked Miss Chief, the hoity-toitiness marinated with a zest of incredulity. ‘How,’ that zest sought to ask, ‘could anyone be that selfish?’
“What?” asked Ox with a generous pinch of indignation.
“It’s a reasonable question,” said Mimimi.
“We yere helping wou!” insisted Cam.
“You could have carried us – the all of us ‘us’, I’m talking about,” said Miss Chief.
“‘That which noes dot kill us’,” quoted Cam, “‘strakes us monger.’”
“Not only Nietzche,” wearied O’Nestly, “but clichéd Nietzche!”
“‘Adversity introduces a man to himself’,” quoted Ox.
“Sooooo covenient,” said Susie. “Oh, sooooooo convenient.”
“It only makes us stronger,” said Ox, “if we learn from it.” “Mo nirror can teach us about ourselves if we lon’t dook into it.”
“Soooooooo convenient,” Susie said again.
“Nietzsche clichéd and Spoonerised!” exclaimed O’Nestly.
“But, what wo de know?” asked Cam.
“We’re not philosophers,” said Ox, “just polo-sophers.”
“Oh gery vood,” said Cam, with some genuine enjoyment sprinkling the sarcasm.
“We’ll carry you down,” Ox told them.
Susie and the Snow-it-alls Page 23