Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  Before I knew Sankey, Normal always talked enthusiastically about him, urging me, ‘You must meet him, I’ll arrange it.’

  Sankey, he said, had been climbing for twenty years, and during that time he’d been all over the world, bolting routes in Colorado in the early Sixties, freeing them later in Verdon when the first big push of exploration was going on in that enormous gorge, putting up new ones in Kenya and Norway on crags no one had ever heard of. He had been an acquaintance of Harding, and Layton Kor; he still knew Jill Lawrence. He had once spoken to the legendary technician John Gill, who invented modern climbing on boulders not twenty feet above the ground. All the hardest local problems were of Sankey’s invention. Besides, he was mad. And so on. But as soon as I did meet Sankey, Normal began to pretend he had some dark reservation about Sankey’s character; and when I said, ‘I really like Sankey,’ or, ‘Sankey’s a real lunatic isn’t he?’ he would reply after a long, thoughtful pause –

  ‘The trouble with Sankey is . . . well, he’s a weird guy, that one.’

  Like calls to like:

  Sankey was once on his way to the Lake District along the A65. The weather was hot and the hawthorn blossom, still thick on the roadside hedges, filled his three-wheeler with a smell like drugged sweets. He stopped in a crowded lay-by to get himself a sandwich and when he had finished it decided to sit for ten minutes in the sunshine before he went on. Motorcycles glittered in rows under the trees. Behind the lay-by and a little below it was a wide pool where it flowed under a bridge. Elderly tourists, enchanted by the clean counter and mint-green awning of the Hot Snacks van, wiped bacon fat off their fingers and smiled reminiscently down at the water. A few mentally retarded teenage boys, on a day out from some institution in Bradford or Rotherham, stood in the queue for cups of tea, clutching their money in hands that seemed too big or not quite the right shape. One of them murmured suddenly,

  ‘I’m a new farm worker on this farm, and this is my dog.’

  He stood expectantly in front of Sankey.

  ‘I’ve just got to get to know which fields to spread on. I don’t know the buildings but I do know the fields.’

  He was fifteen or sixteen years of age, dressed in frayed denim shorts and a white singlet, and all his features were very close together in the centre of his face. He carried his teacup with exaggerated care but at an odd angle, as if he didn’t quite understand how it worked. His voice was slow and determined.

  ‘I’m new here.’

  Waiting painfully for Sankey to answer, he screwed up his eyes and tried to read the sign which pointed along the river to ‘Ruskin’s View’; then gave equal attention to the discarded film packs and squashed soft drinks cans on the bank. The light shining through the branches of the trees on to the parked motorcycles seemed to confuse him.

  ‘The dog knows the buildings. He knows the buildings better than me.’

  ‘Which farm is that, kid?’ Sankey said eventually. ‘Is it round here?’

  But the boy was already walking off, slopping his tea on his white shoes. After he had drunk what remained of it he went into the lavatories, where Sankey found him trying to wash his behind. It was quite clean, but he had his shorts down round his ankles and he was fiddling helplessly with the washbasin taps. ‘Hey mister!’ he appealed. ‘Do you know if this works? I can’t get anything out.’ The lavatory cubicles were full of the smell of hawthorn, strange and lulling in a place like that, which overpowered even the reek of piss.

  ‘I advised him to try pressing,’ Sankey would later maintain. ‘He did have a dog though. I saw it. He did have a dog. Ha ha.’

  Although I had first heard it from him Normal claimed not to believe this story, which was typical of Sankey’s gentleness and obliquity. I couldn’t understand why. Two months before, it had been, ‘Sankey does boulder problems in his back garden,’ Sankey could do no wrong, ‘Oh you must meet Sankey!’ Now I had, it was, ‘Well . . .’

  It snowed again before the end of February, poor sleety stuff at first, driven in from the south-west on a blustery wind. It settled for an hour or two, then mud like melted brown sugar became visible through it in streaks and feathers on the hillsides; and down in Huddersfield the raw damp air soon turned it transparent and flushed it into the drains. Old men shuffled through the slush to collect their pensions at the Northumberland Street post office, which they left smelling strongly of clothes stored for a long time in a damp place.

  ‘Wind’s in thaw quarter,’ they advised one another.

  ‘Aye, it’s in thaw quarter all right. They can’t get these causeways cleared of it soon enough for me.’

  That night in the villages along the edge of the moor, spindrift eddied stealthily in the almost lemon yellow light of the sodium lamps, plastering the walls, furring the doors and padlocks of the coal sheds, piling up in the straw-filled ruts of the farm yards until they were covered up bland and spotless. When Sankey came home from work the wind had changed, thunder growled and banged distantly above it. By the next morning he thought the waterfall in Issue Clough might be frozen hard enough to climb: there were jackets of ice on the electricity supply cables where they drooped slackly from barn to barn, icicles developing along them at intervals like the spines and barbels of pale exotic fish; long lines of icicles hung from the corrugated roof of the milking shed. But by mid-day when, bundled up like a middle-aged farmer’s wife in a dirty nylon anorak, he plodded through the village to get coal, his hands hanging in front of him, they had begun to melt. Light poured in over the blackened threshold of the old smokehouse, falling among the eroded beams on to a clutter of broken ladders. A few dry beech leaves blew about in the heap of coal. As he stood there looking in, thunder banged tinnily again over towards Huddersfield.

  We went to see him at the weekend and found him drowsily watching Grandstand. In the winter the downstairs room of his cottage was always full of fumes from the grate which slowly sent him to sleep. ‘The young man,’ said the television, ‘whose odds have fallen so dramatically from eighty to one to ten to one overnight.’ Sankey turned it off and gave us instant coffee grey with powdered milk, then hunched his shoulders and folded his arms, bending forward in his chair to gaze into the hearth.

  ‘No drink seems hot enough to me today,’ he apologised. ‘Ha ha. Everything seems to go down lukewarm today.’

  Normal eyed the coffee dubiously.

  ‘As long as it doesn’t come up the same way.’

  ‘You’d have to be mental,’ Sankey said, ‘to go climbing in this.’

  Nevertheless you can see him on the Polaroid picture I took that afternoon, his bright orange waterproof jacket blowing out behind him like a comic book cape as he stands anxiously looking up at Normal who is stalled out halfway up the crag. The picture deteriorated in some way – perhaps because of the cold – soon after it was taken, chemical changes giving the light a dead green cast and making the rock look black and featureless. Normal seems to be pasted on to it, one arm raised wearily. The snow is the same colour as the sky, and only a row of little outcrops marks the division between the two.

  These few buttresses of rough grit, heavily pebbled with quartz and perched like boulders on the skyline, are nice to come to on a summer evening, when the hang gliders lie out on the shallow slopes beneath them in the golden light like exhausted butterflies. The day I took the Polaroid we could hear each separate gust of wind building up miles across the moor before it burst round the arêtes on to us, whipped Normal’s rope out into a tight parabolic curve, and whirled off down the valley to strafe the sheep. There was snow packed into all the cracks. When we excavated it we found hard ice underneath, as shiny as solidified Superglue. Our noses ran. The wind pulled the strings of mucus out grotesquely, so that during the instant before they snapped they floated with all the elegance of spider-silk. Our fingers went numb, only to come back to life twenty or thirty feet up, at just the wrong moment, the size of bananas and throbbing with hot-aches.

  Eventually Normal had to
give in and come down.

  ‘It’s no good. I can see what to do but I can’t convince myself to do it.’

  His hands were curled up and broken-looking from the cold. They were bleeding where he had knocked them without knowing on the rock. He pulled his mittens on with his teeth and for a while all three of us huddled beneath a big undercut, where it was a bit warmer. But the wind got in under the lip of it and drove ice into our faces, and soon that became a misery too.

  ‘It’s no good.’

  Normal and Sankey began to pack up the gear, stuffing ropes and harnesses untidily into their rucksacks.

  ‘It seems a bit brighter over there,’ I said.

  ‘It always seems a bit bloody brighter over there.’

  I was determined to climb something before I went home.

  ‘Why don’t we try the big corner?’ I suggested.

  I pulled myself up on an awkwardly sloping ledge, from which I would be able to reach out left for a good flake.

  ‘This looks easy enough. I’ll lead it.’

  Both feet shot from under me as I was trying to stand on it. I lowered myself down again quickly. In this way I went along the base of the outcrop trying climb after climb and never getting any higher than five or six feet above the ground. As usual I left a trail of equipment behind me – a coat thrown over a boulder, a Sticht plate hanging from a bush on a bit of coloured line, a small alloy wedge stuck in a crack. This neglect had become a kind of trademark. The other climbers had soon got used to it, and now they scoured the crag after me at the end of every day, picking up the things I had forgotten.

  ‘Got your Thermos flask, Mike, got your hat?’

  ‘Better check before we go.’

  ‘Is this Mike’s glove?’

  They egged me on.

  THREE

  Dreams

  Normal’s obsession with litter prompted him to bring me photographs his wife had taken of cars and bedsteads and other junk half buried in the sand on the coast between Barmouth and Harlech, where they had recently spent a week in a caravan together. Empty ground stretched away to the caravan site under a heavy sky. Everything – the shingle belt, the frieze of corroded side panels and deformed chrome window frames, the sky itself – had a brownish tinge, as if she had exposed the film in an atmosphere of tars.

  ‘It would have been a really nice place,’ said Normal. ‘Apart from that.’

  His own photographs, of the moquette sofa on the Pennine Way, he had sent to the climbing magazines – there were three of them at the time, two monthly and one bi-monthly, all glossy – but he knew they would be returned. What these magazines wanted, he said, was good colour shots of well-known climbers laybacking on the tips of their fingers above an exotic valley. They weren’t interested in anything else. (Ideally, the climber should be soloing, but you could sometimes get away with a rope, as long as it was brand new and pinned elegantly to the rock below him by a few well-spaced runners. Later, I was to hear shots like this called ‘the pornography of risk’, but this seemed a little too apt to be true, or anyway useful.)

  While we waited for the better weather at the hinge of March we spent the mornings in a cafe in the town, drinking tea. Out of one window you could see the estate agent’s and, across the Huddersfield Road, a shop selling motor parts; out of the other a very fat boy mopping a Volvo under the revetment of local stone, green with lichen and pocked with rusting bolts, at the back of the car-park. He paused to stare emptily ahead; reached inside the car suddenly and switched on the radio, which then made sobbing complaining noises like someone in the middle of a petty but damaging confession. The little man at Walker’s Men’s Wear, with its rattan screens and ailing Monsteria, jumped out smiling and waving his arms like a thing on a stick. A bit further down was Riverbank Antiques, a nice oblique building across a bridge. It had once been the abattoir but now they only slaughtered the middle-class tourist.

  ‘Where have all these chairs come from?’ the woman who served in the cafe would sometimes say. ‘I’m sure we’ve got too many this morning.’

  Like most climbers Normal was thinking about writing his autobiography.

  ‘I’d call it Out on the Limits,’ he said.

  I suspect he hoped I would help him with it.

  Dabbling in the sugar bowl with a spoon he said he had once had a dream (this would be part of the book) in which he was jamming his way up an endless perfect crack in some warm part of the world – he thought it might be Yosemite National Park in California. He knew by the very length of the crack that he wasn’t on a British cliff. ‘It was incredible. I was a thousand feet up and still going!’ The sun blazed down on his back, the air was as bright as alum solution held up in a glass, he felt as if he had been climbing for days. ‘But I wasn’t tired. Only thirsty.’ He was dressed in blue nylon shorts and his rock boots were of a new, efficient type with grey suede uppers, made in Spain. The crack was deep and cool, exactly the right size for his hands. ‘It was just off-vertical.’

  While he was telling this story two women came in. They had the soft golden-orange fur, turned-up noses, and complex, delicate, transparent little ears of marmosets.

  ‘I wonder how they go on for burials nowadays?’ said one of them.

  They laughed.

  ‘There’s hardly any call for it I suppose. They all get cremated.’

  They were sisters or cousins; mother and daughter. Normal gave them a long speculative look, and they cast like marmosets quick nervous glances at him as they sat down.

  ‘I felt totally confident,’ he went on. ‘It was hard work but every few moves I got a terrific foot-jam in and had a rest.’ The rock stretched away endlessly on either side of him empty of feature except for the crack, and a pale sandy colour much like freshly quarried millstone grit. ‘Imagine! A thousand feet of grit! More! That was how I knew it was a dream. I was on the biggest piece of gritstone the world had ever seen. I knew it would never end, and I would never put a foot wrong. It was the dream climb.’ There was empty space all round him, it ached away beneath the soles of his feet to the screes a thousand feet below: vibrant, receiving into itself his elation as he moved, only to give it back as a blessing.

  ‘It sounds ideal,’ I said.

  As he was looking into the crack to place his next jam, though, he saw something move. It was another hand, and it was reaching out for his own.

  ‘It wasn’t attached to anything. It crept out of some ferns growing in the back of the crack, where there was water sweating out of the rock. It got closer. I knew it lived in the crack: I knew everything about it.’

  It was this ‘knowing everything about it’ which made him let go and fall, all the way down through the darkening air.

  ‘Pretty desperate, that dream!’ he said.

  He thought for a minute.

  ‘I hate hand jamming anyway.’

  Some climbers will tell you that, like hang-glider pilots and steeplejacks, climbers never have falling dreams; others that they always do. Every climber has a version of Normal’s dream. In some, that disembodied hand shakes yours, or grips your wrist and pulls you in; in others you are placing a key runner when the hand snatches it away into the depths of the rock so that you are left without protection on the hardest move of the route. The hand is cold and white, or warm and covered with hairs, and sometimes it is only the hand of a dead man seen inaccessible and rotting at the back of a crack on some eerie traverse of the Eiger, omen of a deteriorating situation – bad weather, doomed bivouacs, a glove lost, a dropped stove, a broken axe. In a pub near Oldham one night Bob Almanac told me a version in which there was no hand at all: but the crack itself closed on you and you hung there in the void unable to move up or down while the entire weight of your body slowly shifted itself on to your one trapped arm and you saw that worse than falling is not being allowed to fall. They tell it as a dream, a joke, an anecdote of the old Creagh Dhu Club, something once read. It is the expression of a deep-seated anxiety.

  ‘What
do you think of Take it to the Edge?’ Normal asked me. ‘As a title?’

  He stirred the sugar bowl and smiled over suddenly at the marmosets, one of whom had just said to the other, ‘I mean eggs.’

  I dreamed about climbing the wall of a warehouse in Camden Town, high above an abandoned inlet on the Grand Union Canal. Below me, rotting wooden houseboats shifted on their dirty mooring ropes, and one or two brownish ducks huddled in the cold wind on the towpath, among the dock leaves and the hedge mustard stark as a tangle of barbed wire. At the base of the wall grew ivies with strange-shaped leaves. It was coming on to rain from the south, where I could see the white confectionery fretwork of the gasometer cradles, the spire of the St Pancras Hotel. An airliner slipped across the dusty sky. Over the inlet, on the bare packed earth of the scrapyards, they were breaking up a car.

  All at once I clutched the empty metal frame of a window. My heart was in my mouth. I was aware that the life was leaking tragically out of all these things.

  In the middle distance where the light made it hard to tell the water from the banks I saw a man walking under a bridge, harvesting a kind of rubbery weed. I would not go back down to look. Next he offered me a handful of pink shells. Eighty feet below me his face was an indistinct oval beneath the brim of his hat. He was determined I should go down. He held up his hands and they were full of flowers – orpine, ‘midsummer men’. A voice said, ‘Into the mirror to die, root and flower.’ Inside the empty shell of the building something tapped aimlessly and the draughts blew the dust along the floor. The window ledge creaked as I moved; it shifted a little.

  I told Normal this dream, and he was silent for a minute or two. Then he nodded matter-of-factly, and with the air of someone opening up a new subject said,