Climbers: A Novel

by M. John Harrison

  To distract them I said: ‘I used to live round here somewhere.’

  Mick was impressed against his will.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said after a moment or two, ‘I thought you lived in Manchester.’ He looked dispassionately down at Normal, floundering about in the area. ‘I thought that was where you met this dickhead.’

  ‘It was,’ I said.

  PART FOUR

  FALL

  FIFTEEN

  A Haunted House

  When I arrived in Manchester I didn’t know anyone. I got work in a bookshop, two or three days a week. I lived with a family in Salford (they had an ummarried daughter who worked at the Colgate factory and slept in the room next to mine: at night I could hear her turn over heavily in her sleep on the other side of the partition wall), then on an impulse moved into a bedsit near the top of a detached house near the East Lancs Road. There I had my own door and my own coal fire, and on my first night found myself, mysteriously exhausted by a winter spent gazing into lighted shop windows, writing a letter which began, ‘We’re all cobbled together like Frankenstein’s creatures from the outside more than the in – we’re what other people make of us.’

  It was to Pauline.

  ‘Wales is less than two hours away,’ I sometimes still boasted to her, without explaining that I had no-one to go there with: ‘All that rock!’

  She would reply, ‘I’m glad,’ or, ‘I’m so glad you’re enjoying it.’

  That Christmas she sent me a collection of climbing photos taken in the late nineteenth century. Strings of heavily bearded men in nailed boots struggled up gullies and ridges in Gwynedd or Borrowdale. By 1920 these adventures were already domesticated, a part of the Other absorbed into the Self; now we have abandoned them altogether, like a cottage industry, and they are repeated only by beginners. On the flyleaf of the book Pauline had written, ‘Brrr! Looks chilly! Be careful!’ Did she think climbing was still like that? I sensed a little wistfulness behind her hurriedly scrawled, ‘Best wishes as ever’. But that was perhaps because, in the end, I had been the one reluctant to lose touch.

  ‘You spend Christmas,’ I wrote, ‘surrounded by other people’s assessment of you: a book about Ouida. Some Korean thermal socks wrapped in green crepe paper. Roget’s Thesaurus.’ This was dishonest. I had bought the biography of Ouida myself, from a stall in the Shude Hill second-hand market.

  Behind me the fire ticked and crackled in the grate. Fossils emerged from the landlady’s cheap slaty coal as it split into thin leaves in the smoke. The bedsitter had nylon carpets and a modern wardrobe; but the plastic veneer was springing off the surfaces of the kitchen unit, and this had made some of the drawers difficult to open. Across the street, where builders had been at work all day stripping the mock-Tudor beams off the house directly opposite, I could see furniture piled up under dustsheets in the glare of an unshaded hundred-watt bulb. A man was working there. As I watched, he walked about aimlessly, picking up tools and putting them down again; then the shrieks and groans of a masonry drill came faintly and clearly to me.

  ‘You wonder how you came to represent these things in someone’s mind.’

  Suddenly I was so tired I left the letter on the table and went to bed. I didn’t know how to end it anyway. Next morning I added, ‘Thanks for the book. We can do a bit better than that nowadays!’ I couldn’t admit, ‘I haven’t been climbing since I got here,’ so in the end I put, ‘Happy New Year! We ought to meet up again some time, for a drink.’ Over the road, I saw, the old woodwork was being burned: but a dusty pinkish fan remained on the bricks as a reminder of the pattern it had made.

  All that winter the air was dark, with bits of sleet in it. At night I dreamed of interminable conversations between women; or of Nina, who in the dreams was neither alive nor dead, but out of perplexity occupied some ground common to both states. I would hear a voice I couldn’t identify say, ‘She was teaching them the way they knit in Germany. Well of course knitting is knitting to me.’ Another answered, ‘I know,’ dragging out the last syllable into three. All the while the child would look on in silence, her attempt to understand in itself a commentating presence. She was dressed in little velvet dungarees with a bib front, across which an appliqued hummingbird stretched its beak; her hair hung evenly to her shoulders, shaped like a bell.

  Sometimes Nina herself would be the subject of the dream. ‘I don’t have soap at home,’ she would tell me happily, running on ahead into the bathroom and shutting the lavatory seat with a decisive bang. ‘They don’t wash me with soap.’

  One night I dreamed that Pauline, Nina and I went to visit Nina’s grandmother, who was recovering only slowly from some unexplained operation, in a hospital day-room crowded with women and their relatives. Swagged in bandages to the knee, eyes set in blackish sockets, she looked very much frailer and older than when I had known her. It was the hour of the afternoon reserved for television. ‘I was following it,’ she explained, ‘before you came.’ Whenever the conversation lapsed, her attention wandered back to the screen, which showed George Raft in a long, incoherent dream of Shanghai gangsters. In these moments, lapped in the faint fake Chinese music of postwar Hollywood, she looked ill, used-up, haunted by close escapes.

  ‘I can touch the back of my head,’ she announced suddenly. ‘But I don’t think I could fasten a zip.’

  Balanced on the arm of her chair she had open to the view a box of Roses Assortment. Nina went and stood in front of her and stared up at it. ‘Oh dear, I am sorry,’ said the grandmother. ‘There aren’t any left.’ Nina stared up and swallowed, her hands clasped behind her back. After a moment or two the old lady hauled herself to her feet and shuffled with difficulty out of the room and down the corridor. She returned, carefully carrying half a box of Smarties, which Nina stuffed into her mouth with her fists.

  ‘Isn’t she sweet?’

  This dream recurred more frequently than the others, so I wrote a letter about it, which I sent to Pauline. ‘I’ve hammed things up a bit, of course,’ I warned her. The letter took most of a Saturday afternoon to write. If I hoped this act would bear on the dream in some way, close it out or make it meaningful, I was wrong. I sometimes have it even now, when much more recent dreams have faded. (The little girl stares demandingly, passively up at the grandmother. The grandmother’s attention wanders feebly to the television set. Pauline sits apart from us all, occasionally giving the side of the set an elaborately ironic glance, as if she can see through to the picture, and George Raft’s innocent world of love and violence, Chinese-style. She searches her handbag for a Kleenex. She taps her fingers. She has all the same hollows and lines of physical strain as her mother, but they make her seem irritable rather than exhausted. She sits back and closes her eyes, her face white and empty: slowly the colour leaks back into it.)

  All night I followed Nina down the corridors of some imaginary hospital in the north, filled with guilt by our condition, hers and mine, yet never quite sure how we had come to be there. By day I worked at the bookshop, which by reason of its own guilt was tucked away in the blackened labyrinth south of Tib Street.

  I was on my own much of the time, with the broken stockroom lavatory. Cold air seeped down the stairs to pool round the till, where I sat scorching my legs on an undependable electric fire and couldn’t get warm. The proprietor, who had other interests in the city, rarely spent a full day there: instead, he was in and out at odd hours, cheerful but harassed-looking, to count the take or have a look at some new stock. Sometimes he would be waiting for me on the pavement at half past eight in the morning; more usually I would find myself fetching his ‘lunch’ – fish, chips and gravy – as it got dark.

  In those days the whole area was still given over to street markets and novelty shops; wholesale clothiers, by then mainly Pakistani-owned; and NCP ‘car-parks’, bleak sloping patches of waste ground, sometimes concreted sometimes not, hemmed with chain-link fence and the uneven waist-high brick walls which had once been people’s houses. Negotiating
this waste land on the way back from the chippie, I would see the bookshop sign only at the last moment, a swirl of neon-coloured paint steady as a beacon through the sleet and rain. Old men, wearing two or three torn overcoats each, gathered to drink cider or meths while they stared vacantly into the window of Nova Pets next door, where the exotic goldfish swam round and round on fins like scraps of torn polythene. Mongrel dogs slipped between the boarded-up buildings or nosed cautiously about in the road, looking up suddenly when they smelled the food – occasionally one of them would follow me inside and I would drive it out again with a piece of wood I kept behind the counter.

  ‘Give the bastard no quarter, Mike,’ the proprietor would encourage me, scooping up gravy with quick deft movements of a throwaway chip fork.

  ‘Goo on,’ he said to the dog, which looked up at us tiredly. ‘Goo on out.’

  When he was in the shop he made a point of taking over the till. This was to demonstrate how our relationship was organised: master to apprentice. ‘The trick is,’ he would advise me as he peeled my wages carefully off the brick of five-pound notes he kept in his trousers pocket, ‘to give the punters what they want.’ Here he would grin. ‘Exactly what they want, mind—’ making a broad gesture to indicate the loaded shelves around us – ‘and nowt more.’ It worked. In just a few months I had seen him open shops in Bradford and Bolton; he was looking for premises to rent in Liverpool. He had a quiet authority over the customers, and after years of dealing with them knew many of them by name.

  ‘Charge them three times what it’s worth,’ he believed, ‘and they’ll thank you as they go out the door.’ When I asked him if he’d ever tried a wider range of books, he said: ‘No room for anything else since Maggie got in!’

  He chuckled.

  ‘Give ’em what they want. The stronger the better!’

  What they wanted was imported science fiction, mysticism, anything to do with drugs, sex, murder or pop music. Above all they wanted Spank and Playbirds; Rustler, Count and Whitehouse: what he described as ‘fun’, sealed in plastic bags to make it seem stronger than it was, and to keep the fingermarks off the double glossy pages of spread legs and splayed buttocks. THESE BOOKS FOR ADULTS ONLY! exclaimed the hand-lettered sign on the back wall. ‘Not that I’ve met an adult in here,’ he complained cheerfully; the spankers were the worst.

  ‘We prefer to deal new,’ he had instructed me on my first day. Second-hand stuff – which I might take at my own discretion, but only for credit never cash – was thrown into a bin next to the door, marked up a thousand per cent; and if I didn’t have my wits about me, he promised, the old drunks would have it right out from under my nose. ‘I’ve cured them of trying to sell it back to me. But you want to see them in the rush hour, flogging used copies of Fiesta to businessmen on Piccadilly station! Some of those mags have been wanked over so many times the pages are stuck together.’

  He wore a woman’s fur coat – ‘I’ve had this since I was a hippy. Can’t imagine me with hair down to here, can you?’ – and flared trousers. He paid me by the day. I wasn’t sure I liked him at first, but in the end we became quite friendly. He had that energy and ambition some men find from nowhere in their forties, as if middle age suited them better than being young.

  Two or three times a week Normal would burst into the shop and say:

  ‘Got any real books in yet?’

  By day Normal stood jaundiced with boredom behind the counter at High Adventure. At night he sorted through his colour slides, or watched television with his wife. She had encouraged his interest in mountaineering literature, and now he had a collection that ranged from Annapurna Sanctuary and the memoirs of Aleister Crowley to a mint signed copy of Rock Climbers in Action in Snowdonia. I think he had read one or two of them. He visited me less to break up the tedium of the long winter afternoons than because he still cherished the idea that he might stumble across a first edition of Caves & Crags of the High Peak among the stained and dog-eared stuff in my bin. All bookshops were the same bookshop to Normal. Anyway, he never found anything, and always ended up at the rear shelves, leafing through Silky or Journal of Sex.

  ‘This is some filthy stuff, you know.’

  I was under no illusions. I had met him accidentally. But I hoped that if I was patient he would ask me to go climbing with him.

  He used to say, ‘You take your life in your hands coming to this place!’

  Sometimes his wife picked him up on her way home from work. I don’t know what she made of the shop. Later, when modern developments like the Arndale Centre replaced all those bruised old streets, she told me, ‘ “Human factory farms” is what I’ve christened them.’ But then added, ‘At least they’ve given people somewhere clean and warm to go,’ as if she believed they had been planned not for the lower middle-class shopper but for the socially disabled and uneasy of heart – all the dossers she had glimpsed under the car-park lights when she came to collect Normal, whom she still at that time called ‘pet’. They hadn’t long been married; they lived in a flat near St George’s Park, but were already saving so she could move the twenty-five miles back to Yorkshire. She drove a Rover 2000 her father had owned, and it reminded her of home.

  Normal was wary of both vagrants and stray dogs, especially if they were at all self-possessed. He overemphasised their fierceness and undependability, their size and dirtiness. At the same time he envied it. He was less afraid of them, I thought at the time, than of his own tendency to stray. He had, after all, once fallen off a train.

  ‘You take your life in your hands.’

  ‘That’s an odd pair of punters,’ my boss said one night after they had gone.

  He stared out after them into the falling sleet.

  A step in the street, a scuffed front door, stained paint beneath the keyhole. Inside, some wear of the staircarpet, a chip in the skirting board, the sound of a bunch of keys returned endlessly to a coat pocket. The water heater darkens the wallpaper above the sink – this can be said to be wear and tear but not precisely use. A milk float drifts past each morning – this can be said to be motion but it isn’t change. The hall and the stairs begin to smell of disinfectant – but this isn’t really a record of occupation, only an enigma.

  ‘Visit a street you used to know,’ someone once said to me, ‘and you can’t even remember which house you lived in. All it does is remind you again of something that happened there: something you’ve always remembered anyway.’

  Pauline answered my letters in early April.

  She was, she said, well.

  Work was taking up her time, as usual, but the main reason she had been slow in replying was that she had moved into a new flat. The address was at the top of the letter. She had been offered a ninety-nine year lease on an old-fashioned service flat on the third floor. ‘It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things that always work out so well for me.’ One day the place in Camden had begun to seem shabby and oppressive, she was having difficulty with the landlord, difficulty with a broken window, difficulty sleeping; the next, this had turned up.

  ‘I feel so excited!’

  She wasn’t sure whether she was in Bloomsbury or Fitzrovia, or some shadowy neglected quarter which had a share in both. I would probably remember the area, she said. I did. It was one of the quiet, expensive streets between the University and Tottenham Court Road. She had been lucky to get something there.

  ‘The front room is lovely, very tall and elegant, with a shallow bay window which looks out on to a garden. You can see the attic windows at the back of one of the little Gower Street hotels. People are already throwing them open in the evening and staring across London as if it’s the Promised Land!’ She always tried to spend part of the morning there. Spring had come early; the sun shone through the houseplants on the window sill, turning their leaves transparent and luminous; she read all morning, Elizabeth Taylor, V. S. Pritchett, ‘or I just stare at all my furniture, which is completely transfigured by such posh surroundings. The cats adore it!’r />
  The only fly in the ointment was what she called ‘the Pit’.

  The building had a deep central well, the tiled walls of which were shadowy even in the middle of the day and covered with a mass of thick black waste pipes. All the flats had at least one room which faced this well, and as soon as you opened a window on to it, Pauline complained, ‘to air the dining room or something’, you would smell everyone else’s cooking suddenly and very clearly for a moment – then it was gone – or hear their voices as if they were in the room behind you, ‘having some endless dreary argument about money, or an opera’. Down the Pit at all times of the day and night would come a cry – short, but very loud and penetrating – she could never identify.

  ‘Can you imagine?’ she asked me. ‘Especially on your own in the lavatory at half past two in the morning! It sounds exactly like a peacock.’

  Sometimes an even more unnerving noise would float down the Pit, halfway between human speech and the barking of a dog, like an animal trying to talk. This was always accompanied by considerable coming and going in the flat immediately above hers – hurried footsteps, water turned on and off, furniture moved about.

  Was it someone’s pet? She had no idea. ‘We all hear it, but if they’re ill up there, or they’re keeping some mad old relative, no one else in the building knows,’ she concluded, and turned the letter to other things. She was sorting out stock for the Harrogate Fair. She had got hold of a mint copy of The Vodi by John Braine, not valuable but one of her favourite books, ‘and signed. I shall never sell it on!’ She was in the middle of transferring stock from the fruit store in Stucley Place, which had become a bit too damp, to a basement in N9. ‘I’ve had to have heaters and dehumidifiers in there for a month, and a proper carpenter to build the shelves.’ Selling books was harder work than people supposed. ‘Just the sheer physical effort of moving them about.’ She was so worn out by all the to-ing and fro-ing she was thinking of buying a small van of some sort of make things easier. She took issue with my dream about Nina.