‘Nina was never that spoiled,’ she maintained, ‘though I daresay my mother would have liked her to be.’ She went on to describe a dream of her own – ‘I had this while Nina was still alive’ – in which she had seen the little girl standing alone in a corner of an empty room, pulling faces at nothing.
‘I realised after a moment she was practising expressions she had seen us use, my mother and I.’ Converted into theatrical frowns and grimaces, these complex adult looks of anger or irony or sympathy followed one another without logic. ‘Her face was amazingly elastic. Every so often would come that brilliant, candid smile she could give you when she wanted something—’ It was like punctuation. The effect was not so much of duplicity as of emptiness. ‘I suppose all children mimic their parents. But all the time she was alive I had a horror that Nina would never really grow up, and that when she was older I would see those overdone winces and grins and tics pass over her face without anything underneath to support them. It made me shudder even in the dream.
‘Was it a bit harsh of me to think of her like that? It was, you know. It was a bit harsh.’
She had never admitted it before. Realising this, perhaps, she ended the letter suddenly. ‘Yes, we should meet. I’d like that.’ I telephoned her a few days later, and arranged to go down to London at the end of the month.
It wasn’t much of an April in the North. Yorkshire was sodden, the limestone soaked and striped like a zebra with seepage lines. At Easter Normal got snowed off Stanage, or so he claimed. He had gone over there with a friend of his called Dirty Derek.
Dirty Derek always boasted that he had started ‘low down the grades’ and worked his way up, as if this prolonged candidacy or struggle-to-achieve not only set him apart from the flashier Lancashire kids who had led their first Extreme in Wilton One aged thirteen, but also recapitulated the very logic of the sport. Within five years this model of climbing as a basically sequential activity – beginning at the bottom of a route because it was the bottom and then going to the top because it was the top – was historical. Derek fell into eclipse, and we grew used to seeing him like a ghost in the Stoney Middleton cafe, advising bored teenagers in silkskin tights,
‘You’re a steadier climber for working your way up.’
What did they care about steadiness? The word ‘Redpoint’ was written in the magazines – they’d heard it spoken on the campsites around Buoux and Verdon, brought it home to Sheffield with them wonderingly. Redpoint: it was like cradling something brand new in your hands, a stainless steel bolt, or a T-bar karabiner light as a plastic whistle. Redpoint.
Derek washed up by accident or design in America, which saved his reputation with the generosity of a continent. In Colorado, where he prowled the Canyonlands wearing a new gold stud in his ear (it itched and burned for weeks in the powerful sun), he became quite suddenly the darling of the Boulder social scene, memorable among its scalp locks and dark glasses for his long curly hair and Lancashire accent. Once rescued three times in a day off Edge Lane, the E5 testpiece at Millstone Quarry, he now soloed The Naked Edge – a mythological act even in the inflationary climate of Normal’s rhetoric, proving that while some lives flare up from the first, others move steadily towards a prefigured redemption.
When I knew him Derek had smooth olive skin and a black moustache so sparse you could clearly see every individual hair. This made him look more innocent than he was. Normal called him Dirty Derek because he was always so clean. On Stanage that Easter Sunday he had gone off to solo Milsom’s Minion, an obsolete problem abandoned long ago above the Plantation. ‘The weather was perfectly clear,’ Normal insisted, ‘and he wasn’t thirty yards away. I was standing at the bottom of Paradise Wall. I watched him walk to the bottom of the route.’ Snow had whirled down out of nowhere, pouring between the buttresses like Bold Automatic out of a burst launderette dispenser, and Derek simply vanished into it. ‘It was like the Pyrenees out there!’ said Normal.
They had walked about for a while, shouting – ‘Normal!’ ‘Derek!’ ‘Normal!’ ‘Derek!’ – and then, as their voices grew fainter and fainter to one another, given up and gone home separately. They didn’t bump into one another again until two weeks later, on Deansgate near the junction with Peter Street.
‘What happened to you, then?’
‘I got turned around in the white-out and walked into Sheffield.’
‘Very funny, Derek.’
Telling stories like this cheered Normal up. But for the most part of that month he stared – whenever the streaming rain permitted it – out of the big High Adventure display window, his eyes yellow and watery with boredom. It made him fey and incompetent. He wandered out into the midday traffic like a dog, grinning feebly at the motorists as they braked to avoid him; or if he was driving swung the Rover unpredictably from lane to lane. Trying to service a caving lamp, he cracked the battery case. A few days later holes blossomed in his jeans, where tiny spots of acid had consumed the fabric; in a pile of brand-new windproof jackets (subsequently he gave me one on the grounds that it was shop-soiled); and even in some of the rope stock, which had to be written off. In the end I was to grow as impatient with Normal as everyone else. But at the time such incidents were precious hints, and not just at the state of his temper.
One lunch time I found him and Dirty Derek, along with a Warrington climber I knew only as ‘Gob’, competing to see who could do the most one-finger pullups from a Petzl bolt driven into the stockroom wall. Before they located a breeze-block that would accept the bolt, they had made five two-inch exploratory holes in what turned out to be a plasterboard partition. It looked pocked and ugly.
‘Oh come on now, Normal!’ they were shouting. ‘One finger!’
Even as I walked through the door there was a snapping sound, a puff of dust, and the bolt pulled out again. Normal looked up at me from the floor. He rubbed his elbow. ‘How do, Mike. Want a brew? Just put the kettle on then.’ When I took the kettle to the sink to fill it I discovered they had burned the bottom out of it that morning, testing a new range of Alpine stoves.
‘Pity it was an electric kettle,’ Dirty Derek said.
‘I think I’ve cracked my kneecap.’
‘There’s a customer out here,’ said Gob loudly. ‘Shall I tell him to fuck off?’
Normal considered this.
‘Unless he’s buying chalk,’ he decided. ‘If he’s buying chalk, give it him free. Up here in Manchester we approve of chalk.’
Moments like this spoke to me in a special language, an invitation to decode a whole way of life. The brand-new equipment fluorescing in the gloom, the snow whirling round a black wet crag I had never seen, the events which mythologised themselves as they occurred – one day all this would arrange itself inside me. I would possess it the way they possessed it, easily. I would deploy it without effort. Until then, how could I gauge its ironies, its hysterias forever undercutting one another into nothing? I had only ever climbed on a top-rope at Harrison’s Rocks in East Sussex in brilliant sunshine in July. To me, Stanage Edge was equal with the Annapurna Sanctuary.
‘If you’re fetching sandwiches,’ Normal reminded me, ‘I’ll have cheese salad in a bap.’
He waited until I was halfway to the door then called across the shop, ‘No I won’t, I’ll have tuna and salad cream. Derek, where’s that peg hammer?’
If you look straight down an Inter-City second-class carriage, the landscape on both sides of the train flies past in your peripheral vision like images in a split-screen film. You have only an instant in which to recognise an object before it becomes a blur. The day I went down to see Pauline everything was dissolving into water anyway, bridges, houses, trees.
On the telephone we had agreed to meet in the Bistro Europa at King’s Cross.
‘It’s just the station buffet, really,’ I remember her apologising. ‘The pizza’s awful but at least they’ll give you a glass of wine with it. I don’t suppose we’ll want to eat anything anyway.’ There was a pause, in
which I could hear irregular tappings on the line, hesitant and far-off, as if someone else was trying to communicate on it. ‘Anyway, at least we both know where it is,’ Pauline finished.
Neither of us had remembered that the Manchester trains come in at Euston: I had to walk along the Euston Road, which was shiny with rain, as dark at eleven o’clock in the morning as a winter afternoon, and choked with buses.
‘I’ll probably be late,’ she had warned me. I was already an hour too early. I didn’t want her to arrive without my seeing her. We would both be nervous, I told myself: I must make sure there would be somewhere we could sit.
The Bistro Europa was decorated a sort of mauve colour. ‘Edwardian’ fitments on curved brass stems illuminated cream panels let into the walls at intervals, but left the rest of the place rather dim. It was almost empty – one or two tourists on their way home from Australia and the Middle East; a fat man in a two-piece beige suit who sat laughing at a paperback book – but despite this I couldn’t settle. I went out to the concourse to study the Arrivals board (as though it was Pauline who was coming in by train: as though somehow I had been the one to remain in London while she lived aimlessly in the provinces waiting for something to happen to her). I came back in again. A couple began to quarrel dazedly among their luggage with its bright Cathay Pacific labels.
‘I’m with you,’ the woman said suddenly.
She got up and stood in front of the man to attract his attention.
‘I am with you, you know.’
‘I know,’ he acknowledged. He stared up at her glumly. ‘I know that.’
The rest of the tourists sprawled across the dull red nylon-plush banquettes, stunned by the heat, the smell of food, and the steam from the coffee machine behind the counter. Local trains pulled in and out of the nearby platform. A woman came in and sat down by the door. She looked up at the clock.
It was Pauline. She had arrived early, too. She had on a Guernsey sweater a bit large for her, a faded grey skirt and cheap white plimsolls. Her hair had been cropped short and, I thought, dyed black. It made the bones of her face stand out strongly. Otherwise she was exactly as I had first met her. She placed her large soft leather handbag on the table in front of her and regarded it for a moment – her hands seemed to be a little larger-knuckled than I remembered, reddened as if she had just finished the washing-up – then took out a copy of The House in Paris which she began reading inattentively, pausing every minute or two to look round the Europa, fidget with her handbag, or cross and uncross her legs.
The second I recognised her a kind of reluctance, a kind of languor overcame me. It was pleasant and dreamy, like the onset of anaesthetic, and I associated it with childhood.
If I had waved, if I had stood up and called, ‘Here! I’m over here!’ or walked across to her table and said, ‘Hello. Didn’t you see me when you came in?’, I would have broken out of it there and then. Instead, I allowed it to harden into paralysis. Though the Europa was more crowded now, and its commonplace noises – voices, plates, the rattle of cutlery and plastic trays – quite loud, everything seemed to reach me only with effort, from a great distance.
Pauline went to the telephone and put some money in it. She was forced to dial the number twice before she got through, then shout to make herself audible.
‘What is your name?’ I heard her ask. ‘Oh, Chris. Chris, of course. Chris, I’m so scatty. Isn’t that awful, forgetting names?’
Chris, another book dealer perhaps, had nothing for her.
‘OK, Chris, see you, listen I’ll ring you back, don’t bother to ring me.’
And she sat down again.
By now it was half past twelve, but she seemed more puzzled than impatient. Why did I make her wait like that? Because every movement of hers only extended my paralysis. She checked her watch. She examined her face in a small make-up mirror, touched the inner corner of one eye with a Kleenex. Bending over her cupped hand, she made the unconsciously graceful gesture of someone removing a contact lens. I knew that when she dropped cleaning fluid on to the lens, which she had transferred deftly on to the back of her hand, it would look like a pearl. There seemed to be a pane of glass between me and events; the longer I sat watching Pauline through it, the longer I would have to sit.
Suddenly I thought, It’s because I don’t know what to say.
I thought: If I could leave without being seen, and then come back in again! I could apologise for being late, as if my train had only just arrived, and break out of this. It’s only because I don’t know what to say.
The Bistro Europa has two doors, hidden from one another partly by the internal architecture of banquettes and partitions; partly by the dim lighting. They slam monotonously as you sit there in the half-light trying to guess what is in your omelette. They open on to the same platform, but one is closer to the station entrance, so that you are more likely to use it if you have come by taxi, or up the steps from the Underground station, than if you have got off a train. Pauline was sitting by that one. I managed to make myself get up and go out of the other.
Outside, I stood on the platform for a minute or two listening to the announcements – this train was late, that one early, another one had problems with its power car but was expected on time. When the ten a.m. from Sheffield Central arrived, and the platform became crowded with people bumping the corners of their suitcases into one another’s legs, I went to the lavatory.
A man asked me if he could use my comb, because he had left his in Newcastle at seven o’clock that morning. (I imagined him waiting for the train, passing a styrofoam cup of tea thoughtfully from hand to hand to warm himself up as he walked along the platform in the raw cold; but he had no luggage.) He had come down for a job interview. ‘Me hair’s quite clean,’ he said anxiously. ‘It war washed only last night.’ He was as nervous as an animal; but speaking to him gave me an obscure sense of relief.
Outside the Europa again I looked in through the window, to see Pauline still there, head bent over The House in Paris. I was struck by the vulnerability of the nape of her neck now that her hair was so short. Then, instead of going back inside as I had planned, and starting everything from the beginning again, I left the station, turned right along Euston Road and caught the next Inter-City to Manchester. It was quiet and cool; until Wilmslow I had the carriage all to myself.
May ignited briefly, then doused itself. I was walking past the registry office when after a week of sunshine it began to rain again, without warning, straight down out of an apparently clear blue sky. It was lunch time. The bright light fell without interruption across the tender new leaves of the horse chestnut tree in the forecourt. Underneath it a wedding party, mainly women in thin summery blouses, shivered and looked upward. Would the bride come out at all now? I took my sandwich back to the bookshop, where the owner gave it a contemptuous glance then stared out across the waste land the other side of Tib Street at half a dozen drunks standing about in a circle in the rain, and complained:
‘Punters’re a bit slow this week.’
He slid the wooden cash drawer in and out speculatively, as if testing a new idea.
‘You’d think the spring would stir them up a bit,’ he went on. The second-hand trade was buoyant, but his major suppliers were giving him trouble. ‘Get the juices flowing. That’s what we want, Mike, eh? Those juices flowing.’ He made a ring with his right thumb and forefinger and moved it eloquently up and down. ‘Jesus Christ, look at that lot out there.’
When I wasn’t working I would sit all afternoon in Piccadilly Gardens – because I couldn’t be in High Adventure all the time – until the starlings gathered to scrape and shriek in the trees; or wander up and down the fantastically-tiled corridors of the Corn Exchange. By half past five the streets were full of secretaries in fur coats the colour of marmalade, with boots to match. They hurried past, heads down, laughing. ‘Do you know, I looked at my watch and it was three o’clock!’ In the window of John Lewis’s, two assistants wrestled irritat
edly with a mannequin. Eventually it came in half at the waist and they left the naked torso sticking up out of the carpet like a woman standing in a pond.
‘Sorry I couldn’t get down to see you,’ I wrote to Pauline, ‘the day I said I would. I had the chance to go to Wales with a really hard climber called Normal.’
We had driven to Tremadoc on impulse, I told her, at seven o’clock in the morning, in Normal’s three-litre Capri with its giant back tyres, then climbed at Extreme (then called ‘XS’) ‘and above’ all day before racing home through the night, our one good headlight glaring drunkenly down the carnivorous throat of the A498. Prenteg, Beddgelert, Glanaber went behind us in clusters of lights. ‘Normal’s a complete maniac. We were on the outskirts of Betws by nine!’ I described how he had eaten eight Mars Bars; how at the junction with the Llanberis road, I had hung out of the side window of the car at ninety miles an hour, suspended inside the intensity of the moment, gazing out into the cloudy spaces of Pen-y-Pass and wishing – however windy and cold it was, however much it frightened me – we could go and climb Cenotaph Corner in the dark.
‘Normal took three twenty-five foot bombers off The Mongoose. He thinks he might have popped a tendon in one of his fingers, his idea of a perfect day.’
I had great hopes of Normal then, so I constructed him boldly for Pauline, in broad sweeps, from the monolithic materials that came easiest to hand – speed and the night, the traditional and the new, his own hyperbolic tributes to other climbers. I felt able to tell such lies because by then he had taken me climbing at last; although hardly to North Wales. Normal could never separate events from places. Boredom lit him up with nostalgia for his old Black Pudding Team stamping-grounds: domestic, almost urbanised venues scattered across Lancashire and the north-west, many of which turned out to be memorable only for something which had already happened to him there –
Climbers: A Novel Page 19