The Climbers

by Keith Gray

  For no real reason this morning I chose the south-side trunk. The sun was strong and by the time I made it to the top I was sweaty and wished I had a bottle of water. I’d been looking forward to the view. But it was totally spoiled by Nottingham, who was sitting on the north-side trunk.

  CHAPTER 14

  Nottingham and I looked like a pair of gargoyles as we faced each other on the tree’s split trunk, clinging to the highest branches. I wanted to leap across and knock him off his perch, but the gap was too wide. There was nothing around us except clear blue sky, and the grass below seemed very far away.

  Nottingham was wearing the same cap and clothes as yesterday, and I reckoned he looked much more like a gargoyle than me. The spider bites on his face and neck had swollen up all red and nasty. They looked painful. It was like he had rotten bubbles pushing up from under his skin. A couple were scratched bloody. I guessed he’d say the bites were my fault, but I refused to feel guilty.

  “What’re you doing up here?” I shouted across to him.

  “Free tree, free park, free country,” Nottingham said. “Just doing the same as you, I guess. Enjoying the view.”

  I thought that really he’d come here to practise for tomorrow’s contest, like me.

  “Your face is ruining my view,” I said.

  Nottingham touched one of the painfully bloated bites on his forehead and winced. He turned and pointed at Crazy Ash Bastard. “I see you got your bike down.”

  “My bike’s wrecked,” I said. “It fell.”

  He looked honestly shocked. “I didn’t mean that to happen,” he said. “It was meant to be a joke.”

  “No one’s laughing,” I said.

  “I would’ve got your bike down for you again,” Nottingham said. He touched his face again and added, “But after the Spider Trap, I just wanted to get my own back and piss you off.”

  “Well done, it worked,” I said. “Yesterday I just thought you were a knob-head, but today I totally hate you.”

  “I just said I didn’t mean for your bike to get wrecked, didn’t I? But you started it.”

  “Started what? How?” I asked.

  Nottingham pointed at his face. “With this?”

  “I didn’t start anything,” I said. “Because of you I had to carry my bike home.”

  We glared at each other, our anger reflected in each other’s faces.

  “Why don’t you climb down and get lost?” I said.

  “Why don’t you?” Nottingham replied.

  We both sat down on opposite branches, our legs dangling. Neither of us was going to climb down just yet.

  “The only reason you don’t want me around is because you know I’m a good climber,” Nottingham said. “That’s true, isn’t it? You feel threatened.”

  “You’ve not got reach,” I said.

  “Don’t you think reach is about more than just how high you can climb?” Nottingham asked.

  I ignored his question and asked one of my own. “Why did you even come here? Everything was good until you turned up and started climbing our trees.”

  “Whose trees? They’re not anybody’s. And believe me, I didn’t choose to come here. All I wanted to do yesterday was join in with what you do around here. I was trying to make friends. How was I to know that climbing your trees is something precious that only true-blood villagers are allowed to do?”

  “You were showing off,” I said. “You reckon that you’re a better climber than me.”

  Nottingham looked away into the distance, but I heard him say, “Maybe I am a better climber than you.”

  I swayed on the branch I was sitting on, leaning forward as much as I dared. I wished again I could reach him, grab him, punch him.

  Nottingham turned to glare at me across the gap. “You were showing off just as bad,” he said. “Worse. Getting all up in my face and saying you’d get my cap back.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  “Bollocks. You were showing off too. I’m the best climber in the village,” Nottingham mimicked me.

  I ripped a handful of acorns off the closest branch.

  “You know, I’ve been asking a couple of the other kids about you,” Nottingham said. “There’s some people around here who think you’re a right arsehole.”

  I shook my head. “As if.”

  But then I thought about when Nottingham asked the other climbers yesterday, “Who wants to see me beat Sully to the top of this tree?” I remembered feeling surprised by how many of my so-called friends had put their hands in the air. I thought about how Marvin or Harvey or Zoe could have easily stopped him from hauling my bike up Crazy Ash Bastard. Hadn’t Marvin said he’d thought it was funny?

  I glared across at Nottingham, wanting to say he was talking rubbish, but I kept my mouth shut. I squeezed the acorns tight in my fist.

  Nottingham sneered at me and said, “Don’t you think the others get sick and tired of you going on about how you’re the ‘best climber in the village’? Over and over again. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “They’re just jealous,” I said.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Nottingham repeated.

  I felt hurt and anxious. I didn’t know what else to do, so I chucked my handful of acorns at him. “You’re the arsehole.”

  Nottingham ducked and wobbled on his branch. But to be honest, me throwing them was pointless and pathetic. One bounced harmlessly off his chest and the rest flew wide.

  He grabbed a handful of his own acorns from the nearest branch and threw them at me. One hit my cheek, another clonked off my thick skull, but they didn’t hurt.

  We spent five minutes chucking tiny acorns at each other. I chucked, he chucked. They were the worst weapons in the world. No one was ever going to win. It was weirdly funny. I realised we were both smiling and I stopped throwing them.

  “Why don’t you piss off back to Sherwood Forest or wherever?” I said, trying to sound at least a bit tough.

  “I wish I could,” Nottingham said, looking miserable.

  “So why don’t you?” I pushed.

  He hesitated a long time before saying anything. I reckoned he was deciding whether to tell me the truth or not.

  “Because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” Nottingham admitted. “I got dumped here, at my cousin’s house, and I don’t even know where here is.”

  “So why come in the first place?” I asked.

  “I keep telling you,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.” And I thought he was going to scratch at the spider bites on his face but instead he touched his scar. I didn’t think he even knew he was doing it.

  “Did you get that falling out of a tree?” I asked. “A Sherwood Forest tree?”

  Nottingham jerked his fingers away from his face and the look in his eyes made me wish I hadn’t asked. He didn’t look angry. He was scared, or maybe sad. Both at once.

  “My dad did it,” Nottingham said. “I got him mad. I was always making him mad even if I didn’t mean to. And so now I’m stuck here, wherever here is, so he can’t find me.”

  We both swayed a bit on our tall branches. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if he wanted me to say anything. A silence stretched across the gap between us. There was no strong breeze up here, but I felt cold anyway. I looked down. It was a long, long way to fall.

  I looked back across at Nottingham and he met my stare with a challenge in his eye. I didn’t know if it was a challenge to laugh at him or attack him or run off and spread his secrets around the whole village. I wasn’t sure why he’d even wanted to tell me anything so honest and personal.

  At last I said, “I don’t know where my dad is. He left years ago. When I was a kid, I used to write to him without my mum knowing. I wrote him so many letters I had to steal stamps from the Post Office so she wouldn’t find out. He’s never written back. Not once.”

  Now it was Nottingham’s turn to look awkward. We mirrored each other on our branches of Double Trunker.

  “I won’t tell anyone about your dad
,” I promised.

  “I won’t tell anyone about yours either,” Nottingham said.

  I laughed but didn’t smile. “Don’t worry, everyone around here knows about my messed-up family. But it’s only Mish who knows about all the letters I wrote. She used to help me steal stamps.”

  “She seems cool,” Nottingham said. “How long’s she been your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. “But we’re best friends.” There was a stab of sharp splinters inside me as I said it. I hoped Mish was still my best friend. “She’s totally brilliant and very cool.” I shrugged. “But she’s not my type. Not really. Why? Do you fancy her?”

  Nottingham shrugged too. “Not really my type either.”

  I shuffled on my branch. He fidgeted on his.

  “Listen,” Nottingham said. “I swear, I honestly didn’t mean for your bike to get smashed up.”

  “I totally wanted you to get a faceful of spiders,” I said. “But maybe I didn’t think it would be so damn bad.”

  “I itch like hell,” he said.

  I gazed out over Double Trunker’s canopy across the park, towards the streets and houses of the village. Then I shifted myself around on the high branch so I could look away from the village, over the roads and fields into the distance.

  “How far is it to Sherwood Forest?” I asked. Maybe I was thinking about Zoe saying Mish wanted to go to university one day. Maybe I was trying to come up with somewhere I might want to go one day too.

  “Four or five hours by car,” Nottingham said. “Hopefully far enough for me, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded, knowing he meant far enough away from his dad. And I realised I couldn’t ever imagine leaving the village. At least not for good.

  “You seriously don’t reckon you could be the best climber in Sherwood Forest as well, do you?” Nottingham asked.

  “With you as my only competition, it’ll be a doddle,” I said.

  “If you say so.”

  I shuffled around on my branch again. Now I could see the last of the Big Five trees, looking so tall it might poke holes in a passing cloud. I pointed at it.

  “Sullivan’s Skystabber,” I said.

  “King Big and Tall,” Nottingham replied.

  “Guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” I said.

  “Guess we will,” he agreed.

  I climbed down, leaving him up there.

  PART 5

  Yew (Taxus baccata)

  Evergreen – Europe, North Africa, Asia – 30 metres

  CHAPTER 15

  By Sunday morning, word about our competition had spread. The crowd around the last tree was twice as big as the one we’d had at Spider Trap on Friday. Faces all turned to watch me as I walked across the park towards them. I could feel the excited tension in the air. Most of the time I would have loved such a large audience. This morning it made me nervous. I felt like I had a lot to prove.

  There was one face in the crowd I wanted to see more than any other. Mish. I didn’t know if she’d be here after what had happened at Crazy Ash Bastard. I was happy and relieved when I spotted her standing to one side with Zoe, Marvin and Harvey. Zoe and Marvin were holding hands and Harvey was fiddling with his phone.

  I moved past the crowd towards Mish, and a couple of kids patted me on the back or wished me good luck.

  One of them shouted, “Sully for the top!” I waved and grinned.

  Then someone else shouted, “It’s the second-best climber in the village!” I ignored that as best as I could. But I remembered Nottingham telling me what some people had said about me behind my back. I didn’t feel any happier if they were now going to say it to my face.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here,” I said to Mish.

  “I’m always here,” she said. “Where else would I be?”

  “Doing homework?”

  “What’s wrong with me doing homework all of a sudden?” Mish asked.

  “Because it’s all of a sudden,” I said. “You’ve never been bothered before. Zoe said you’re going to go to university.”

  “Maybe. I hope so. But not until I’m eighteen.”

  “So it’s true? You really do want to?” I asked.

  “So what if I want to? Miss Jaden said I could go if I did well enough this year and stayed at school to do my A levels.”

  Why did the thought of Mish leaving the village and going to university scare me so much? It was worse than even the most difficult climb, even the most painful fall. “But you said it yourself, you’re crap at school,” I said.

  Mish looked hurt, like I’d punched her in the guts. “Miss Jaden doesn’t think so. She says I’ve just got to catch up with the lessons I missed when I was looking after my mum. And Harvey’s helping me. We finished all the French stuff yesterday and I’m beginning to get it now.”

  I glared at Harvey, but he didn’t notice because he was staring at his phone like always.

  “What about us? The best climber in the village needs a support crew,” I half-joked.

  Mish didn’t find it even half-funny. “It gets kind of boring just being support crew all the time. And I’ve realised that’s all I’ll ever be for you, right? So why stay here? I want to do something special with my life.”

  “So do I,” I said, jabbing a finger at the tree right in front of us. “I’m going to beat Nottingham to the top – show everyone I’m still the best climber and name the last tree. I’m going to prove just how much reach I’ve got.”

  Mish sighed. “Great, for you. And I’ll always be known as just some girl who hung around with the climber who named the last tree.”

  “But don’t you want me to name the tree?” I asked.

  “Of course I do,” Mish said. “Obviously. But that’s not the whole point, is it?”

  It was for me.

  Harvey finally looked up from his phone. “Don’t you think having reach should mean more than just how high you can climb?” he asked.

  “Ferme ta bouche,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was ten o’clock and still no Nottingham. A few people began to whisper that maybe he’d chickened out. I didn’t think he’d dare to chicken out. But the crowd was getting restless and I wondered what on earth he was up to. All this hanging around was just making me more nervous. And I wondered if that was Nottingham’s plan. He wanted me worked up, stressed out, anxious, nervous. Then I’d make more mistakes climbing.

  So I told myself to relax.

  I’d been up early preparing. I’d used a knife from the kitchen on the soles of my Swift Runs, cutting slashes to deepen the treads. I’d taken a pair of Mum’s leather gloves and rubbed sandpaper on the palms and fingertips to make them extra rough and grippy. Not only was I wearing my favourite baseball cap but I also had an old pair of swimming goggles for added eye protection. Under my jogging bottoms I was wearing skateboard pads on my knees. Finally, I had a water bottle on a strap across my chest. But I’d filled it with Red Bull, not water.

  I was ready for the climb of my life.

  “If Nottingham’s not here by ten past,” I told the crowd, “I’ll climb without him.”

  He arrived at nine minutes past. And he was riding a bike. My bike.

  Nottingham came through the park gates pedalling hard and sped across the footy pitch towards us. The crowd around the last tree parted for him when they realised he wasn’t going to slow down. He pulled a big roundhouse skid in the grass to stop in front of me.

  “What?” I asked. “What the hell …?”

  His face was still messed up and blotchy with bites, but he was grinning like the Pope had promised to make him a saint or something. “I fixed your bike,” he said.

  “Is this some kind of trick?” I asked.

  “I felt bad,” Nottingham told me. “Like I said yesterday, the last thing I meant to happen was for your bike to get smashed up. So I sneaked into your back garden and stole it. Again. I used bits from my cousin’s bike. He’ll never notice beca
use he never uses it. I replaced the back wheel, the seat and managed to get your frame as straight as possible too. It took me all night. But …” Nottingham waved his arm as if he was the world’s greatest magician. “I fixed your bike.”

  Marvin came over to have a look. “That’s so cool,” he said. “You really did this by yourself? It looks almost new.”

  I glanced across at Mish and all she could do was shrug. I turned back to Nottingham. “Why?” I said. “I don’t get it …”

  His big wide grin slipped a bit. “I just told you why,” Nottingham said. “I felt bad.” He wheeled the bike towards me, trying to make me take it from him.

  But no way was I going to touch it.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” I said. I poked a finger in his chest. “If you’re trying to get out of climbing … You were the one who wrecked my bike in the first place.”

  “To be fair,” Marvin said. “You and Zoe wrecked it.”

  Zoe punched him in the arm.

  “I’m not trying to get out of anything,” Nottingham said. “I thought I was doing you a favour.”

  Harvey took the bike to one side and looked it over. “Now this is reach,” he declared, impressed.

  But it was a hundred per cent not the way I’d expected things to be. Even after what Nottingham and I had told each other at the top of Double Trunker yesterday we were still enemies, weren’t we? He was still an outsider. And I was protecting our tree from being named by him.

  “Nothing’s changed,” I said. “I’m still going to beat you to the top of the tree.”

  Nottingham pulled his baseball cap down low, hiding his eyes in the shadow of the cap’s peak.

  “If you say so,” he replied.

  CHAPTER 17

  Zoe held her closed fists out towards Nottingham and me. “Which hand?” she said to Nottingham.