Other than that, only old copies of Mountain magazine. If you sent Sankey a postcard, he propped it on the back of the sideboard. He had cards there two or three years old, from Norway, Morocco, the Cairngorms – ‘Well this trip we got King Rat 950 feet on Creag an Dubh Loch see you, Gaz’ – some of which were quite curled and faded. I found a pair of spectacles I had never seen him wear. All Sankey’s things – the chipped Baby Belling on the draining board; the bits of unmatched blue and fawn carpet; the one-bar fire, the transistor radio, the stereo with its handful of dog-eared albums from the early Seventies – had a used but uncooperative look. He had assembled them, and while he was still alive his personality had held them together; now they were distancing themselves from one another again like objects in a second-hand shop. The electrical equipment had old-fashioned cloth-wound flex.
‘He didn’t seem to keep letters,’ I called up to Mick. There was no answer, but I heard a drawer sliding open. My knee had begun to ache.
I sat back on my heels to look at the Nescafé jar in the sunlight. At the beginning of every day Sankey had boiled a kettle of water to make coffee; and then, to save the cost of boiling it again, carefully poured what remained into a Thermos flask, which in winter he stood in the hearth. I thought that if I narrowed my eyes I might just be able to see him at the table. ‘Sugar, kid? I always have a bit myself. I like a bit of sugar! Hah ha.’ A fly settled on the table: rose up uncertainly: settled again. A car went down the village street. I heard Mick say to himself in a low, astonished way,
‘Fucking hell, look at this.’
He had found a pile of magazines under the bed. They went back several years, copies of Men Only, Whitehouse, and something called Young Girls in Full Colour which featured smiling but haggard twenty-year-olds in pleated school skirts. Mick turned the pages, giving every so often an awkward laugh; and then, encouraging me to put into words something he couldn’t, said, ‘What do you mek of it, eh?’ and ‘What do you mek of that?’
This reminded me so clearly of Normal that when I looked at the bright, slippery, heavily laminated covers it was Normal I could see, running about in the teeming rain on the moor at Greenfield, taking snaps of scattered children’s clothes. For a moment, I could see his wife, too.
I tipped the pile over so that it spilled across Sankey’s bedroom carpet, which was newer than you would expect, with a dense, violent, foliate pattern in blacks, reds and greens.
‘People have to do something,’ I said.
Mick stared at me.
‘Put them back under the bed,’ I advised him.
Was I annoyed with him for noticing them at all – valeting the scenic car-parks, he must see worse every day – or only for drawing them to my attention? ‘Do what you like,’ I said irritably. ‘I’m going out for a minute.’
That evening the air was so still I could hear rooks cawing and people mowing lawns a mile down the valley; everything was caught up in the heat like a landscape embedded in glass. On a hot evening the rock itself seems to sweat, making an easy move quite desperate and insecure. Up behind the house, some children were running about in the grass between the boulders. They stopped to watch me while I tried to repeat the problem Sankey had fallen off. From a precarious mantelshelf near the top of the overhanging wall, you had to make a long reach, feet off, the whole of your weight bearing down through the heel of one hand. Every time you stretched upwards to touch with two fingertips the crucial flaky hold, you felt your whole body twist and shift uneasily: because of this, local climbers had named the problem The Torquer. I went up; came down again to tighten my laces; went up again. I suppose people had been doing the same thing all afternoon, most of them better climbers than me. ‘Can’t you even do that, mister?’ the children shouted.
Nobody knew I was up there. Anyone not at ‘team night’ would be over on the cool, lichenous, north-facing crags at Pule Hill and Shooter’s Nab, struggling with unfamiliar bulges and overhangs until sore hands drove them to sit down and watch the sun, a flat orange disc in a sky the colour of pigeon feathers, preside over salients of moorland which seemed to be painted on separate, endlessly receding panes of glass. Another day, Sankey would have been there himself. ‘I hate the first two months of the year,’ he had told me. ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’
I remembered myself answering: ‘Nothing like the summer.’
By the time I got back to the cottage Mick had done the washing in the bath and pegged it out. ‘I thought I might as well rinse it through,’ he said. ‘Save someone else the trouble.’ We watched it for a moment or two, hanging slackly from the line in the gold light. It was already beginning to dry, Mick thought. He would never have done his own washing, which he left to his mum. ‘What else ’ave I done, then?’ he said. ‘I bet you can’t tell me.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What?’
‘Well at least ’ave a look, you dozy sod.’
While I fought with The Torquer he had filled Sankey’s trench in and stamped the earth down on top of it.
‘I put them magazines in it,’ he said. ‘Buried them. Be best.’ When he saw my expression, he lost his confidence again. ‘It’s just that his sister might not have wanted to see them,’ he explained. ‘Look here.’ He had found Sankey’s address book in the top flap of a rucksack. ‘She lives in London,’ he said. ‘I never expected that.’
The funeral took place down there about a week later.
‘We were all chaotically pissed the day Doug Ainley got buried,’ Normal told me on the phone the night before. ‘I’ve never seen a food fight like it. I took some great photos.’ When he turned up at Huddersfield station the next morning he was carrying a huge Russian five-by-three plate camera he had bought a week ago. He was late, and he thought he might have packed the wrong film for it. All the way to London on the train he drove Bob Almanac mad.
‘For Christ’s sake, Normal. Point it somewhere else.’
‘Click,’ Normal said.
‘It’s his new toy,’ Mick told Bob. ‘He won’t stop playing wi’ it now till he’s broken it.’
‘Piss off, Mick,’ Normal said equably. He decided that, after all, the film he had would work. ‘It ought to anyway. Click.’
Climbers came down from all over Yorkshire and Lancashire, people Sankey had known since he started climbing in the late Fifties with the old Phoenix Club. There was a suggestion that, for old times’ sake, Pete Livesey and Jill Lawrence might be there; Normal said later that he saw them in the cemetery, but they left early. I didn’t notice them.
Sankey’s sister had decided to have him buried at Nunhead in South London. She lived nearby. Behind its high eroded brick walls the cemetery was being reclaimed continually from a waste. Even as the service took place, gangs from Southwark council were working off the wider, less overgrown gravel paths, chopping out bramble and elder from the half-forgotten graves nestling under the Ivydale Road wall. Sankey’s blond wood coffin, with its bouquets of yellow dahlias, was wheeled out of the hearse on a kind of height-adjustable trolley, his grave disguised to the last with strips of florist’s grass. Rain dripped mercilessly into the hole, fogging the cellophane on the bunches of flowers laid out in rows beside it like the equipment of some expedition into unknown country.
The climbers had turned up in their best suits. They were shy. Already a little speechless to find themselves in London, they were further bemused by having to wear clothes which they had come to associate with the licensed anarchy of wedding receptions and team dinners. I felt sorry for them. They stood in a restless, downcast group in the rain, genuinely upset by Sankey’s death yet barred by convention from pushing each other into the grave to relieve their distress. Normal’s photographs show them grinning seedily and apologetically above the flared trousers, brown safari-style jackets and kipper ties of Manchester market traders in 1978.
As soon as the ceremony was over the chainsaws started up again. In the general drift towards the gate on Limesford Road I found Mick talking
to an old woman. ‘I came from a generation that didn’t travel,’ she was telling him loudly. Sixty or sixty-five years of age, she had a perfect grey goatee beard and moustache. This, combined with her round spectacle frames and a pale green hat like a furry turban, gave her the air of some near-Eastern thinker at the end of his life: saintly, androgynous, but still vitally interested in the world. ‘It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t afford it, you see,’ she was at pains to assure him, ‘as that we didn’t regard it as a right.’
‘Oh aye?’ said Mick politely. ‘I’ve bin everywhere wi’ Scouts when I were a lad,’ he boasted. ‘They feed you well in the States, I’ll say that – beefburgers this size.’ He demonstrated with his hands. ‘I’ve bin to see Space Shuttle on one of them trips.’
He winked at me over her head; took her arm solicitously.
‘Mind you don’t fall down this kerb here,’ he advised.
Most of Sankey’s relatives seemed to be women. They crowded into his sister’s house, where the reception was held, the old tottering about from cold buffet to sofa under great vigorous bouffants of bluish-white hair, the newly middle-aged rigid with self-control and homely as pudding. Young girls whose beautiful immobile faces looked like the cosmetics advertisements in Honey or Elle soon turned out to have been married a year or two before. ‘I throw a lot of frombies,’ I overheard one of them say. ‘At least that’s what my husband calls them. Frombies.’ The very meaninglessness of this released the grotesque in things, as if the damp air were a battery charged with it. I had no idea who they were, or in what relation they had stood to Sankey. I couldn’t imagine him here among them, with a plate of cake and a paper napkin. The youngest had sponged themselves as clean of life as the sides of a brand-new plastic bath. In contrast, the old women heaved with it, screaming with laughter to disguise a sudden deafness; fidgeting violently but quietly in a corner with their clothes; and always making odd excessive gestures in the region of their hair.
Bob Almanac eyed them slyly.
‘Look at this,’ he whispered. ‘Nightmare time in South London.’
‘Fuck off, Bob,’ I warned him. They were only women, drinking sherry and eating salmon sandwiches. I didn’t want to know what a ‘frombie’ was.
‘Oh,’ someone said loudly. ‘She supports cats, does she?’ And then: ‘It’s voluntary. Eight o’clock at the Lower Houses.’
Bob grinned triumphantly at me and went off to get something to eat. He seemed quite at home. The rest of the climbers, though, wandered about as if they couldn’t quite understand why we were there, looking along the shelves of books or out into the back garden with its well-groomed conifers and little stone path. They had tried the creamed avocado; brightened up a little at the cheese dip. ‘They’ve done us well here, you’ve got to give them that,’ Mick said to Normal. ‘They needn’t ’ave ’ad us at all, really.’ They were staring up at a print of Munch’s Spring, which shows a dying woman sitting near sunlit net curtains.
‘What do you make of this, then?’
Believing perhaps that people should be as responsible for what they witness as for what they do – determined anyway to take no comfort from the unhinged or the immature, Sankey’s co-conspirators in an inexplicable act – his sister was defiant and suspicious.
With me I had a Polaroid of Sankey (the only photograph any of us, even Normal, could find at short notice), taken that January on the indoor wall at the Richard Dunn Centre in Bradford. It was an eerie-looking shot, its colours skewed by the fluorescent lighting, in which the climber could be seen suspended, not very high up, in a kind of threatening luminous greyness. A whole section of the wall appeared to be falling outwards and downwards as he scuttled across it to the debatable security of blurred rectangular forms. His determination seemed like panic. White light from the Polaroid flash had done nothing to clarify matters, only spilled uselessly off the pillar which leaned slightly off the vertical in the left-hand edge of the frame. For this reason Sankey had always called it ‘the Dr Who picture’.
‘Who’s this?’ asked his sister when I showed it to her. ‘Is that water underneath him?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I explained. I explained again that it had been taken inside a sports hall. ‘I think it’s the floor. They polish it. I’m sorry it’s not much of a photo; but we thought you’d like to see something.’
‘Well it looks like water,’ she said. ‘I suppose you all encouraged him to do this?’
And she pushed the Polaroid roughly back into my hand, incapable of comprehending how or where it had been taken; or why. For a moment I couldn’t understand, either –
Some of the Lancashire quarries have no name, only a number. The local council uses them as waste tips. You struggle through the weeds with your green towelling headband, your rucksack and your rack of equipment, hoping for tall clean gritstone buttresses the colour of a sandy beach. Instead clouds of blackish flies swarm up to greet you from the heaps of domestic rubbish on the bare quarry floor. I remember Sankey turning away from the baking, unearthly walls of Wilton Two – where he would soon be confronting a fifty-foot fall on to his hands and knees – and murmuring, ‘Not much of a view, kid.’ It isn’t far from this kind of climbing – gymnastics in a rubbish dump – to the holds of an artificial wall in Leeds or North London, made polished and greasy by the passage of innumerable sweaty fingers, and without any virtue but the combinations they can be strung into. Out of some confused view of climbing, people always ask you what region of the Alps your snaps show; out of an idea of communication equally confused, you always try to explain why the Alps no longer necessarily play a part.
‘Did you encourage him?’ Sankey’s sister asked me directly.
Suddenly she shouted, ‘I hate water!’
‘Try not to think about it,’ her husband recommended. ‘It’s just the polished floor.’
He put his arm across her shoulders, but this gesture only made it seem as if she were supporting him, and the weight of it depressed her further. I was surprised not so much by their large house as their age. They were ten or fifteen years older than Sankey and comfortably settled in East Dulwich, so that it was like talking to someone’s retired parents. She had been a teacher; he still worked for the Polytechnic of Central London. The snap-framed Expressionist prints on the walls were hers. (‘Her idea of art,’ he told me later with a short laugh.) Neither of them had a trace of a northern accent left, which also surprised me.
‘People do what they do,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘It’s their own choice.’
‘Oh yes,’ she agreed bitterly. ‘I heard all about that from him. Every Christmas.’
I could see her and Sankey as children, laughing out of the same bone structure, the same mouth of large but even teeth, the same black and white Kodak print with the sea at Morecambe or Blackpool a thin horizontal line in the background. ‘I know how we can get an ice cream, kid,’ I could hear him say conspiratorially (or so I thought). The same eyes which had made him look shy and retarded at one moment, sly and childlike the next, lent her an intelligent, impatient, disbelieving look, as if she had had enough of children and childhood for good. The jaw which had made him resemble in his late twenties and early thirties the young John Harlin now gave her a bony, mannish appearance.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to me. ‘I think someone’s disarranged my flowers.’
She walked away abruptly, looking straight ahead. At the other end of the room a vase of asters was going off like a firework in the dim mid-afternoon air, yellow and white stars and silent crackles of light. She stopped by them for a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen. The guests stared after her; at me; at the other climbers. Though I tried to talk to her again, she avoided me.
Later, washed up somehow in the empty breakfast room with Sankey’s brother-in-law, I showed him the Polaroid. He barely glanced at it before passing it back.
‘Interesting,’ he said.
Trying to think of something else to say to one another
about it – or anything else – we stood by the bay window and watched the rain beading his neat lawn. It was raining that Wednesday in a long diagonal band across the south-east and much of the Midlands. By the weekend it would have spread to the north. The hot spell was over. This side, the garden was large, with steps down to the lawn, some holly trees and shrubbery at the end away from the house, and a short drive which led to the old-fashioned wooden garage. Three robins were hopping about on different parts of the lawn in the rain, ignoring one another.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen three together in a garden all at once like that,’ I said.
‘We had eight here last winter.’ He looked at me as if he thought I might not believe him, then went on, ‘But they fought until there was only one left. Mid-air fights, feathers floating down, the lot, until there was only the cock-robin left.’
This was produced with such relish and premeditation I couldn’t think of a reply to it. In the end, just for something to say, I asked him,
‘Do you miss the north at all?’
‘I’ve never been there myself,’ he said dryly, ‘but I’ve heard a lot about it.’
‘What part of Yorkshire was your wife born in?’
‘Kent,’ he said. ‘The Kent part. Didn’t you know?’ He stared at me and then began to laugh. ‘They were both born in Kent,’ he said. ‘He went to grammar school in Tunbridge Wells until he was eighteen, and then got a degree in electronics at Cambridge. It’s one of the things that makes her so bitter. It’s not just the waste of a good career. It’s that he never saw Yorkshire until he was nineteen, on some university coach trip.’ He laughed again. ‘Can you tell me why someone with a good Cambridge degree buries himself away up there and pretends to be as thick as two planks?’
Climbers: A Novel Page 16