Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  All the way down to London, immense columns of smoke rose from the burning stubble in the fields. Near at hand they were a thick greyish white; on the horizon, faint, brown, dissipated smears through which the late sun burned like a blood orange. Misty lenses and feathers drifted over the dark stripe of woodland, the flint churches and comfortable houses between Newark and Peterborough. A little further south Pauline counted twelve plumes of smoke. ‘You can see the flames now!’ But the other passengers seemed not to care . . . Near Peterborough in the twilight, everything became fluid, deceptive: a charred field with small white puffs of smoke hanging just above the ground revealed itself as a long field of fresh water, fringed with reeds and dotted with swans; even the stubble, burning in the middle distance like a line of liquid fire, sometimes resolved into the neon signs of factories and cinemas. It was soon dark. I went to the buffet, and when I came back Pauline asked me,

  ‘Doesn’t it break your heart to see anything so beautiful?’

  It is extraordinary prose: using a precision of utterance to evoke desperate bewilderment. What appears at first to be sheer description is in fact reactive in its every phrase and detail to the terrible loss that the pair have sustained. The ‘blood orange’ of the sun hangs as a sanguine reminder of the scene they have just left behind; the ‘comfortable houses’ are in view but out of reach. Pauline distracts herself tragically with counting games. Even as Mike’s perception closes in on specificities – the ‘misty lenses’ of smoke, the ‘charred field’ – they slip away, shape-shift, deceive. There is no resting point for the eye or the unquiet mind; nothing for it but to go to the buffet. In this way – in this style – the everyday shades into the lyric, which tends to the allegorical, which becomes the surreal, which at last curves round to reveal itself again as an aspect of the heart-breakingly actual.

  – Robert Macfarlane, November 2012

  PART ONE

  WINTER

  ONE

  Mirrors

  I went by bus on a wet day in January to the indoor practice wall of a private sports centre near Leeds. It wasn’t very successful. Some of the problems there are quite intimidating, with crux moves well up on them, in damaging situations if you inadvertently let go. The return of my sense of balance had given me secret dreams. I would work the winter out of my muscles. I would dance. But hanging high above the badminton players in that huge cold echoing hall with its stink of sweat and rubber soles, I could only pant and groan and slither back down to the floor.

  I sat in the changing rooms afterwards tired out, listening to a repetitive noise which I thought at first must be the sound of children shouting or singing in the swimming pool. Then I realised it was the wind I could hear, rising and falling about the bizarre cantilevered roof of the place.

  Two fat boys were washing their hair in the shower. The soap and water made them shine. They stood close together and watched me guardedly as I swilled the gymnast’s chalk off my hands so I could look at the cuts underneath, and only began to talk again, about different kinds of lager, when I went to get my clothes. They were just like fat pink seals, backing away from the hand outstretched on the ice. Was I a tourist or a sealer? Either way, shreds of skin hung off three fingers of my left hand where I had jammed and twisted the knuckles into a crack in the concrete wall. I am never quite clear what makes you hang on so hard, even when there is such a short way to fall.

  ‘Prawn cocktail crisps here, nice—’ said an oldish woman to her friend, walking up and down in front of the Vendepac machine on the floor above.

  ‘– yes, I’ve seen them dear, very nice.’

  They put some coins in, nothing happened, someone showed them what to do. When they had sat down again one of them said, raising her hands to the side of her head, palms inward, and moving them rapidly backwards and forwards as if demonstrating some kind of blinker, ‘I’m just not straightforward with a mechanical thing. You know.’

  (As I looked down at the badminton players their white faces had for a moment seemed to be swinging slightly to and fro above me.)

  The first time I went to that wall was for its official opening. Schofield, who had financed it, looked away when he spoke to you; his venality was deeply impressive. ‘Enjoy yourselves, lads!’ he called. It was free for today, or at least for an hour, so that the climbing press would write him up. ‘Remember we close at two.’ Sunday lunch time: thirty or forty of us stood in the hangar-like space, watched disapprovingly by some people who were trying to have a game of tennis, waiting for one of the great working-class climbers of the previous generation to christen it, then bless us as the inheritors of his tradition. Bemused-looking and pissed he made one or two jerky moves on the easiest of the problems and went back to the bar. In a low voice Schofield assured him he would never have to pay for his drinks here again. Any time he wanted to come he would be welcome here. They had wheeled out this exhausted man, with his Durham accent and his memories of death by stonefall on the Freney Pillar under the relentless telescopes of European journalists, so that the adventure sports trade could have its last good squeeze of him before he was forgotten; and as we left the hall the tennis players were already lined up to complain.

  ‘Tennis, badminton, squash, a sauna: you can have them all for twelve pounds more on your sub. Don’t forget, lads,’ said Schofield. ‘Don’t forget.’

  On the way back Normal parked the car on the edge of the moor, to photograph the things which had been dumped there. Normal had a gap in his teeth, he was hyperactive, full of suppressed violence: we had done rock climbs together all over Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Peak District, but nothing yet in Wales or Scotland. He had climbed whenever he could for fifteen years. He had worked on the railways until he fell off a train, then at a Manchester climbing shop, where I met him. On Mondays I signed his unemployment form for him. ‘I’ll never go back now.’ He ran about on the moor, appearing and disappearing in the rain and cloud. It was wet weather, killing weather. The south-west wind, full of sulphur from the badly managed factories in Stockport and Stalybridge, plastered his thin hair to his face, and his arms and legs stuck out of a long, bulbous waistcoat made of Chinese down. As he hopped about trying to attract my attention he looked like an overgrown insect, a species doomed, unknown, used to a better climate.

  ‘What’s out there?’ I called, pointing at the slimy ribbon of the Pennine Way, but not quite meaning that.

  ‘Floating Lights Quarry,’ he said. ‘Where I died. Come out of that car before I drag you out. Look at this.’

  He laughed.

  Abandoned to the streaming mist, there on the exact watershed of the grouse moor, the exact border between Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, sixteen hundred feet above sea level, giving to these surroundings the rakish, cosy, fake-surrealist air of a cigarette advert, was a three-piece suite out of someone’s front room in Hyde: light tan; moquette; sodden. We sat in the armchairs, facing out towards Stand Edge and Floating Lights, across lines of peat hags like black combers rolling in from an infinitely polluted sea. The car-park bobbed gently on the psychic swell. All around its edges at our feet was the site of a murder. The icy pools of the watershed were full of children’s clothing. Acrylic dungarees and tracksuits; jumpers and quilted polyester dressing gowns; cotton dresses, slips with a bit of cheap broderie, knickers and little teenage bras. Dozens of plastic dustbin bags had burst and were slowly spewing their contents out on to the moor. Whoever had put them there had preferred bright colours. It looked as if whole families of Asian children had been murdered among the collapsed cardboard boxes, the heaps of industrial sawdust, the used Durex and detached pages of Spank. Bare buttocks popped out into the weather. Grey smiles woke up suddenly among the pulp.

  We poked about half-heartedly in this stuff for a bit, then went home. We had the photographs, we’d had our free go on Schofield’s wall. Who knew what might be buried further out, among the more distant pools beyond the NO TIPPING sign?

  ‘I still can’t believe tha
t bloody sofa!’

  Some climbers Normal had introduced me to:

  Bob Almanac looked like an ageing butcher’s boy – tough, stocky, round-faced and cheerful, impeccably polite and very competent. I watched him cleaning a new route at Running Hill Pits, chopping turf and loose rock out of the crack-system with quick deft strokes from the pick of an obsolete ice-hammer. The rain soaked his curly hair as he dangled patiently from the abseil rope, forty feet up in a quarry like a dark slot in the hillside above Diggle. ‘Anyone else would have gone home an hour ago.’ Bob had spent his life getting wet in places like this – steep, cold, greasy with a kind of bright green lichen which turns into paste as soon as your hand touches it; places which greet your human energy with resentment – and he didn’t seem to notice it any more.

  With Almanac you always met his friend David. David was a fireman, whose prematurely white hair gave him a kind but slightly overdressed look, like a professional snooker player. The story was that he once caught another climber, who had fallen off while soloing in the quarry above Dovestones Reservoir.

  Normal explained, ‘It’s his training. They’re trained to instinctively save life, firemen.’

  David had never said anything to me about it, and whether he was being shy or noncommittal wasn’t clear. Dovestones Quarry is loose. Most people would wince away from the shadow of a bird there. David had held out his arms, so there was more to it than training. I observed him discreetly, perhaps hoping things would repeat themselves.

  ‘Too wet to make anything out of this today,’ conceded Almanac eventually, dropping his hammer in disgust. ‘Look out below.’ Mucking around underneath, Normal had got himself showered with earth.

  Sankey was frail, lantern-jawed, pale-cheeked. It was as if he had outgrown his strength while he was still a boy, and never grown into it again. He had once been the best climber in the valley. He had a nervous laugh, and a way of saying something ordinary that showed he thought of it as a new and desperate observation. He always wiped his friction boots carefully with a piece of frayed towel before he started to climb. He said: ‘This is the sort of move you really need chalk for. It seems easier if you put a bit of chalk on your fingers first. Ha ha.’ It was as if he had invented chalk himself, a long time after the rest of us. We had proper little tailored bags to carry ours in, brightly coloured, suspended from a bit of nylon tape so our hands were free, bought over the counters of outdoor sports outlets in Sheffield or Manchester. Sankey’s chalk bag looked like the inside of a trouser pocket. He carried it in one hand, walking in his stiff way from problem to problem, craning his neck to look up at the difficulties, rubbing his fingertips together thoughtfully.

  He lived in a terraced cottage below the local cliffs. I can still imagine him wandering about there rather vaguely at night, or in very bad weather, a mild man full of frustrations, his feet slipping suddenly near the top in the dark wind and rain. In my imagination he looks out of his windows at the stone walls dipping down into a dry valley where the ewes move uneasily in the wind. One of them has a chocolate brown patch, like a saddle slipped to one side, which gives her what he describes to himself as a risky, escaped air, like an old-fashioned divorcee. All the walls and rutted tracks seem to meet at the head of the valley, by the flimsy wooden sheds which last year and the year before sheltered the new lambs. The wind has started to knock one of them down. Two or three massive gritstone gateposts lie foundering in the waterlogged mud. The air is saturated. The steep moorside gullies over by Ramsden Clough are still full of damp snow. But Sankey can often sense the end of February now, and feel that dry cold wind which sometimes accompanies it.

  In a week, in two, the year will have picked up. Or so he hopes.

  When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. Looking at the colours in an ice cream I caught my breath just as if I had jumped into cold water up to the waist: they had somehow been made fluorescent by the sky at Skegness: it had entered them. After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence. Most children feel like that, I suppose.

  My mother took me with her to the cafes and hairdressers of Ilkley, or into Leeds and Bradford for a day’s shopping. When I think of Littlewoods, or Marks & Spencer’s I remember straight away the clatter of pots, the smell of a match just struck, cigarette smoke, wet woollen coats, voices reduced by the damp warm air to an intimate buzz, out of which you could pick a woman at another table saying, ‘Enough to realise how miserable things are going to be—’ On a wet afternoon in November it sent you to sleep. My mother tore the top off a sachet of sugar and tapped it into the ashtray. I dabbed my finger in it and looked at her sulkily, wondering where we would have to go next.

  There was a tinted plate-glass window the whole length of the place we were in. Through it you could see the car-park in the Bradford rain – long shallow puddles ruffled by the wind, one or two cars parked at careless angles, the back entrance of Smith’s or Menzies’. On the inside of the glass was the reflection of the cafe. By an optical accident they were superimposed. It was as if someone had dragged thirty plastic tables out there, and a hundred plastic chairs. The women behind the stainless steel counter wiped their faces with a characteristic gesture in the steam, unconscious of the puddles under their feet.

  After I had made this discovery a kind of tranquillity came over me. My mother receded, speaking in charged murmurs. The rattle of cutlery and metal trays reached me only from a great distance as I watched people come into the car-park laughing and hang their coats up on ghostly hooks between the cars. They rubbed their hands and sat down to eat squares of dry Battenberg cake and exclaim ‘Mm,’ how good it was. There they sat, out in the cold, and smiled at one another. They certainly were a lot more cheerful out there. The wind and rain had no power over them. A man on his own had a letter which he opened and began to read.

  ‘Dear Ted,’ it said.

  Waitresses went to and fro round him in their dark blue nylon overalls, for the most part girls with white legs and flat shoes. Some buttoned the top button of their overalls, some didn’t. They carried the trays of food with a thoughtless confidence. When they spoke to one another it was in a language full of ellipses, hints and abrupt changes of subject, in which the concrete things were items and prices. I wanted to go and join them. Their lives, I imagined, like the lives of everyone out there in the car-park, were identical to their way of walking between the tables – a neat, safe, confident movement, a movement without a trace of uncertainty through a less restrictive medium than the one I was forced to inhabit.

  ‘You know what Jackie’s like with money,’ I would say to introduce myself. ‘No, not big Jackie, Carol’s Jackie up at Mason’s. She bought herself a new ski-jacket for work, Asda actually, only ten ninety-nine—’

  ‘Well you know Pam!’ they might reply. Or with a quick shout of laughter, ‘By the time you’ve been you-know-where, and bought all those cakes!’

  Soon, there was only one car left in the car-park, drops of water trembling in the wind on its polished orange bonnet. One of the girls walked up and put her tray down on top of it. She wiped her hands on a cloth which she took out of the driver’s seat without opening the door; and then stood staring ahead as if she had begun to suspect that she was caught up in two worlds. Her image dominated both of them, a patient girl of seventeen with chipped nail varnish and a tired back from sorting cutlery all morning. Suddenly she gave a delighted laugh.

  She looked directly out at me and waved.

  She stood straight up on tiptoe and beckoned. I could see her mouth open and close to make the words, ‘Here! Over here!’

  She’s alive! I thought.

  It was a shock. I felt that I was alive, too. I saw in quick succession in the back of my mind: grains of sand from very close up, with the sense that behind me was a broad space of sea, mud, salt and gulls; muddy water i
n a bucket, like thick smoke turning over and over itself; an ice cream in the sunshine.

  ‘Over here!’

  I got up and ran straight into the plate-glass window and was concussed. Someone dropped a tray of cutlery. I heard a peculiar voice, going away from me very fast, ‘What’s he done? What’s he done now?’ Then those first eight or nine years of my life were completed – sealed away from me neatly like the bubble in a spirit level, clearly visible but strange and inaccessible, made of nothing.

  There are days when, driving home from some gloomy hole in the hillside near Bolton, you wish the whole word was like this:

  White bungalows on a hill, floating against a blue cloud full of rain. A one-track road looping across the moor. Old pop music on the radio. Sore fingertips. Nothing ever again but crags you have never seen before, made of a wonderful new kind of rock.

  TWO

  February: Mental Weather

  Driving through Huddersfield one lunch time we saw Sankey walking slowly along the pavement outside the Yorkshire Bank. He had on a black and white woollen hat and there was an electrical screwdriver in his top pocket. We wound down the windows and waved but he didn’t seem to recognise Normal’s car. Ten minutes later we passed him again in exactly the same place. When we stopped and shouted he gave a disoriented start, as if he’d just been woken up.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Was that you before? I knew someone was waving but I didn’t know it was you. Ha ha.’

  Had he been into the bank? Or had he been standing there all along, trying to decide who would wave at him at half past twelve in the middle of Huddersfield? Normal was jealous of this vagueness, also of Sankey’s habit of wearing a running shoe on one foot and a cheap suede boot on the other.