‘Nina’s name was going to be “Ellen”,’ Pauline said to me later. ‘That’s the funny thing. I was going to call her “Ellen”, but then we thought of Nina.’
I was angry with her.
I remembered her boasting to the American boy Martin (spécialité de maison of another part of her life): ‘I left the poor man sitting on the running board with his head in his hands. I’d got the Morris off him for twenty-five pounds less than he wanted!’
But when I reminded her of this she only shrugged. She was watching the Sony with the sound turned down. She started to comb her hair then stopped. ‘He does better than you ever did at reading minds,’ she said quietly. On the television a car turned out of some factory gates, slowed down and then raced away suddenly.
I couldn’t understand her. It seemed to me that she had abandoned the protection of an innate, almost provincial shrewdness for the flimsiest and most obviously flawed of reassurances. But I kept going to the demonstrations. One week I was convinced the psychic’s pallor was real, the next that he had himself made up before the women arrived – that even his illness was an act, the pretence of being closer to the dead than we were. Pauline was nervous and eager by turns. His presence, anyway, seemed to relax her. She sat hunched forward in the front row with her chin on her hand, and when he came on to the platform he advised her that nothing could be more trouble than your teeth.
‘There are other aches though, dear, aren’t there?’
He asked her if she had a cat.
If you untie an old knot, Bob Almanac showed me, the original colours of the rope shine out again from a nest of convolutions – pink, yellow, green, orange, much as they were in a quiet shop on a wet afternoon in winter.
‘You release the light that was caught up in the knot,’ he said. ‘I think of it as releasing the light.’
He smiled shyly.
‘I thought you’d like that.’
Out running in the early morning to avoid the heat, I found three pairs of women’s shoes someone had thrown into a ditch at the top of Acres Lane where it bent right to join the Manchester Road. Delicate and open-toed, with very high heels that gave them a radical, racy profile, they were all size four: one pair in black suede, an evening shoe with a brown fur piece at the toe; one in transparent plastic bound at the edges with metallic blue leather; and a pair of light tan leather sandals with a criss-cross arrangement of straps for the upper part of the foot. Inside them in gold lettering was the brand name ‘Marquise’. It was a little worn and faded, but otherwise they seemed well kept. They were still there when I went back the next day, but by the one after they had gone. I couldn’t imagine who would have thrown them there; or, equally, who would pick them up from a dirty ditch full of farmer’s rubbish at the edge of the moor.
June had emptied itself ungrudgingly. July was following it. Embarrassed by Normal’s evasiveness, afraid that in some sense the summer was slipping away from me, I telephoned him.
He seemed cheerful. That morning, he told me, he had taken the front brake shoes off his car. Now it turned out he had bought the wrong size replacements. ‘Otherwise I’d have called for you, youth. I want to go and have a look at this so-called “crag of the future” they’ve found near Buxton.’ He didn’t mention his wife.
‘Look, Normal, I think I’ll go out with Sankey this weekend.’
After a pause he said, ‘Suit yourself.’
PART THREE
SUMMER
TEN
Escapees
The world receives you and recedes from you in the same moment. ‘So much depends on perspective, doesn’t it?’ Pauline used to say. That was some time before I started climbing. She meant, perhaps, that the moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.
On Sunday mornings the Railway Cafe at Grindleford is full of school teachers, up from the Midlands by Ford Fiesta to do climbs in the Hard Very Severe and low Extreme grades. They squeeze between the tables in the hot steamy air, shouting and talking and clattering their plates. The men, in their middle thirties, with longish hair and aggressive but neat beards, often teach maths or geography; some of them can play the guitar. They make thoughtful, steady climbers. Though they lack the imagination, the edge of nervous excitement, to be outstanding, they form the backbone of the sport. They occupy its middle ground. They decide its shape. If they have a fault it’s that they are too minutely concerned to use in the same way the same holds everyone else has used.
‘You won’t need chalk for that, Simon,’ they call to one another peremptorily.
(The local daredevils look down guiltily at their hands then mimic, ‘ “If you haven’t done the mantelshelf, Simon, you haven’t done the route.” ’)
They were out at Burbage yesterday, climbing until late: they’re really quite pleased to have led Long Tall Sally at last, a bit of a squib but a real calf-wrecker if you hang about on it too long. Today they are going to try something a bit bigger, Welcome To Hard Times at Staden Quarry. ‘Might as well have a go as not!’ Last week, although they know it’s pretty hard to believe, they were rained off Tremadoc; next week they thought they might go and have a look at Subluminal Cliff, Swanage, start getting some ticks in Rock Climbing in Britain!
‘How much salt are you going to put on that egg?’
‘Yes, come on now,’ his wife reminds him, ‘leave some for the rest of us, Tom! Tom!’
Laughter.
‘What delights have you got in store for us today then, Tom?’
‘How do I know?’ grunts Tom. ‘Until I get a sight of the guidebook?’
They always begin here, or at Eric’s cafe, Stoney Middleton or Pete’s Eats in Llanberis or Eric Jones’s on the A498, places confusingly similar, with an ideal smell of exhaust smoke and deep-fat frying, where there are faded climbing photos curling from the walls and a new-routes book on the counter by the sugar bowl and you can get a pint mug of tea to wash down your full set breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, baked beans, tomatoes, fried bread, bread and butter. In the evenings you will find them drinking in the Radjel, the Moon, or the Pen y Gwrd.
It’s a bit of tradition with them. The women, older than you think in their stretch nylon Tracksters and striped singlets, subscribe to it especially. Most of them climb a little. More than anything, they have adapted nicely to the demands of a sham-peripatetic existence. They are doing a sort of part-time degree in English at Solihull. As well as climbing they are interested in printing for the community.
Today, though, one of them looks ahead suddenly as the food is passed across the tables. She’s inexplicably bored and lonely. Yesterday she sprawled all afternoon among the warm boulders in the sun. She didn’t feel like climbing, although Derek had found a really good Hard Severe for her at Burbage, with an apt name, Amazon Crack. That morning he had met, quite by accident, a friend of his from Sheffield University years ago. Of all things he turned out to be in computers! They decided to go on to Gardom’s Edge. She laughed at their private jokes, watched them top-rope Moyer’s Buttress – ‘I’m running out of strength!’ ‘Go on Derek, push!’ – and read Herman Hesse (The Glass Bead Game). Then she fell asleep, half-listening to the insects in the bracken. When she woke it was suddenly, with the warm dusty smell of the rock in her nostrils, surprised that time had passed, desperate for a pee but not daring to go with so many tourists about.
She noticed the most beautiful little beetle, climbing up the back of one of Derek’s boots, a perfect shiny metallic green colour, like anodised aluminium. After a moment or two it dropped off and waved its legs in the air.
‘Derek, it’s eight o’clock!’
Now she watches him pushing the fried bread fussily across his plate with a fork; and he says to his friend:
‘Remember the Doncaster half-marathon, Simon?’
‘1981! I was about a second behind Duckham and you were about eight seconds adrift. Oh, seven was it, I remembered it as nearer eight.’
They laugh in unison and look at h
er.
‘Anyway, that was when he lost his shoe!’
If she slides her chair back she can see out of the window: a part of the railway bridge, trees, a car parked with its nearside wheels in a long puddle. Some hikers come past with their trousers tucked into their socks. The cafe dog, a big alsatian, looks up. More climbers are eating out there, grouped round the weathered grey tables in the ten o’clock sun. A boy nineteen or twenty years old stands out from the rest. His hair is dyed dark red and worn in plaited rats’-tails down his back; his arms are thin and white, and will show no muscle until he locks them off later in the day soloing Quietus Stanage, which he nearly falls off; he has on elegant dirty fatigue trousers and a T-shirt with the sleeves torn out. He is teasing the dog with the remains of his breakfast.
‘Look at this!’ he shouts. And then to the dog, ‘Hey!’, snatching the food away at the last moment, offering it and snatching it away until with a look of understanding the dog loses interest and moves away.
He gets up and begins to walk about, hissing and whistling, scuffing his feet, sits down again. ‘Where we going? Where we going today?’ he asks his friends. ‘Are we going now? Let’s go!’ then, sensing perhaps that she is watching him, reaches out quickly and catches a wasp with his fingers. ‘Hey! Look! I got it!’ He blinks ecstatically; she turns away with a sudden feeling of amusement, only to hear,
‘Are you sure it was seven? I definitely had the impression it was eight.’
‘Have some Rice Krispies on your sugar!’
Someone farts.
‘Oh God, that’s just antisocial, Tom!’
‘Yes, if you’re going to do that, turn your bum in another direction!’
‘Ha.’
‘A ha ha ha.’
You meet her two years later at Burbage in June, and find her climbing with the boy. She leads a Difficult while he sits boredly underneath holding the rope, occasionally looking up her shorts. Woven into her bootlaces are little hearts; into his, stars. ‘Because,’ she tells you seriously, ‘he’s a star.’ And although you’ve never heard of him, he does climb well.
All through August the teachers are in France or Italy, climbing at Buoux or in the Alps or Verdon. They always try to get away somewhere different in the summer. In the packed lay-bys beneath the popular crags, their Fords and Renaults and Fiats are immediately replaced by the ‘Sunshine Coaches’ of the Variety Club of Great Britain. You find these white minibuses full of city children parked half-on and half-off the grass verges of narrow roads all over the Peak District: Stanage, Bamford, Baslow; all along the A57 ‘Snake’; as far north as Pule Hill and as far south as Dovedale. From them, harassed men and women dressed in the fashion of Fifties hairdressers lead walks round the local beauty spots.
The children always seem emotionally as well as socially deprived: big vague boys with a hit-and-miss way of walking, as though they needed all their attention to oversee their legs; enormously fat girls in early adolescence, panting and sweating and suffering with their huge breasts in the heat, who wear a red skirt and a yellow cardigan; a small boy dawdling at the back, surreptitiously pulling at the seam of his trousers as if it is chafing his bottom.
‘Come down off there, Joan. I don’t think that’s very clever.’
They wind away up through the bracken, yelling and getting smaller. At the end of the afternoon there are inevitably one or two missing. The minibus drivers waits twenty minutes; he shrugs and drives off slowly towards the Ladybower Dam, Glossop, and from there to Salford.
Over the following months, the escaped children learn to live by begging from the long lines of ramblers which lie permanently across the moors on Sundays like florists’ ribbon. They begin by asking for money – ten pence, twenty pence – ‘to get home’, although they are already forgetting where their homes were. They end up fighting over the discarded sandwich wrappers which float in the updraughts on the edge of the Kinder Escarpment. The fat girls soon become lean and muscular, and move with a fiercely agile gait between the piled boulders; while at the slightest sound the awkward boys make off farting, with a sudden breathtaking burst of energy, to some cave beneath the summit of the rocks. In the mornings they find themselves looking at a flower or a cloud; they see themselves by accident in the ‘Mermaid’s Pool’ and pause for a second, puzzled. Their clothes have long ago deteriorated and fallen away.
In winter, the death toll is savage. Those that survive learn to cope with the continual wind and rain, the bitter nights and damp blowing snow of the watershed, by forming loose unhierarchical groups. They know the insulating power of dead bracken. When there are no more ramblers, the girls might run down a sheep: three or four flicks of naked white speed against the rain and the endless black peat rollers: a fire in the night. A girl on her own will not light a fire, but get into the warm carcass and curl up instead, to conserve heat.
Air Force Cadets, Boy Scouts and teenage charity walkers, lost on the long hikes which would have initiated them as useful members of society at large, are adopted eventually by this regime of wild children. Who hasn’t caught a glimpse of them at one time or another on the moor, pale and naked, running with that supernaturally confident gait between the tracts of bog cotton?
Living along the gritstone edges, and soon forgetting any other existence, they become like lemurs, like ghosts. In some way the rocks and the climbs come to belong to them. They allow us to see only dream rocks, dream climbs. This is what Sheffield climbers believe. Silent Spring, The Knock, Above & Beyond the Kinaesthetic Barrier with its eerie tangle of 6b moves: all only shadows. To have had first ascents at all, they must already have been climbed by the escaped girls. In this way, it is maintained in Sheffield, areas of rock hitherto unclimbable are ‘released’ to the hardest and most visionary technicians, who, to encourage the children, leave them gifts of food, cigarettes and equipment.
When Bob Almanac told me about the Variety Club children, I felt a sudden unbearable compassion for their adolescence as it passed: the mornings by the pool, the light blonde down on the arms, the eyes narrowing bemusedly in the bright sunlight, the dumb awareness of the sexual organs. I asked him: ‘What happens when they grow up?’
‘They become people like you and me,’ said Bob. ‘They reinstate themselves slowly into human affairs.’ He winked. ‘After a few years no one knows.’
ELEVEN
The Numbers
There are climbs whose secret is a succession of moves – like the enchained steps of a ballet – sometimes so intricate that the likelihood of your working it out by trial and error is directly dependent on the number of falls you are prepared to take from it. Yorkshire climbers often call this sequence ‘the numbers’. Tourists watch them in the evening at the bottom of the great central wall of Malham Cove, pivoting suddenly away from the little holds as if they have grown shy, one arm thrown backwards, an expression halfway between surprise and excitement on their faces. They seem to hang there forever in the soft warm quiet air, like photographs of themselves, before they begin to fall. Learning the numbers: to what end, perhaps, they are less and less sure.
TWELVE
Sankey and His Sister
‘What are you doing with all that money you’re making, Sankey?’
For a moment Sankey, leaning forward over the pub table, had a look on his face as delicate as a girl’s. Then he said,
‘Buggered if I know, lad. Tax man gets most of it I suppose.’
No one expected more. Some kind of evasion, a covering of his tracks, had always been normal to him. He had once told me, for instance, that his teeth were false. ‘They’re more trouble than they’re worth, kid, your own teeth,’ he said. One night after a dream in which he was looking down a deep stinking hole, he’d woken up to find an awful smell in his cottage. ‘I thought, “That’ll be why I had the dream, then.” I got up and looked round for a bit, but I couldn’t find anything. I even went downstairs and had a look in the sink. Then I realised it was my own mouth. Nearly puked. Went
and had them out the next day.’
But later when I referred to this story he insisted,
‘I don’t know where you got that idea from, kid. I’ve always taken good care of my teeth.’ He seemed huffy.
How much of himself did he conceal behind manoeuvres like this? I don’t remember wondering. It was a long time before I learned what he did for a living. Bob Almanac told you one thing, Normal another, and soon I saw that neither of them actually knew. Some climbers thought he was in computing, others that he worked for a firm of electrical engineers on Chapel Hill in Huddersfield. From the hints he dropped it could have been either. Whatever it was, he was notoriously mean with what he earned at it.
Every Christmas Day he went to a sister of his. She gave him a woollen hat to climb in. What he gave her in return I can’t imagine. When I knew him, he was still wearing the first one she had ever given him. The rest were in a drawer, perhaps a dozen woollen bobble hats, a bit stretchy on the head, in white and one other colour: hats going back for years, enough hats for the rest of his life.
‘They’re good hats these, kid,’ he would say. ‘Really last well.’
Climbers: A Novel Page 12