Above All Things (36 page)

Maybe he should write to someone too, Sandy thought. He’d write to Dick. Or his mum.

“My mum,” he said, “stopped talking to me. Before I left. She wouldn’t even say goodbye.” His voice kept catching in his throat. He worried he might cry, but he kept talking. George was staring at him now. “She lit a candle in her window. She keeps it lit, day and night. She told Evie she’d keep it there until I walked back in the door.”

She must still love him. Must have forgiven him.

“She’s scared, is all,” Sandy continued. “Scared I might not come back. I never thought about that before. What will she do if I don’t come back?” He looked down. There were words scrawled on the paper in his lap. He couldn’t make them out. Somes had told him he’d have to make a decision. What price was he willing to pay?

“I don’t want to die here, George. I can’t do that to my mum.”

“You’ll be fine, Sandy. Just do as I tell you. You’ll be safe. You believe me, right?”

He nodded at George. “Of course.” His voice caught again in his throat. He cleared it, said “of course” again.

George pushed the canteen at him. Sandy swirled the water in his mouth, imagined the dry ridges of his tongue, his cheeks, and the water filling them.

George spoke again. “Do you believe Somes, Sandy? About the avalanche?”

He tried to remember what Somervell had said. That was so long ago. Before the drowned boy. Before Lapkha.

“He thinks I’m reckless,” George said, “because of Bowling Green. Have you been? The little green outcropping at Pen-y-Pass?” Sandy nodded, even though he didn’t know it. “We go at Easter. Even Ruth used to come. But not anymore. Not since the children. But Easter. And Christmas. You could come. Someday soon.”

“We were climbing,” George went on. “Will and I. And Geoffrey. Back before he lost his leg. We stopped and had lunch on the Green. We’d taken this long, circuitous route to get up there. There was a more direct route I wanted to take, but Will and Geoffrey said no. Said it wasn’t climbable. When we were done with lunch I left my pipe at the Green. On purpose. I’ve never told anyone that, Sandy. Never. When we got to the bottom I said I’d forgotten it, that I had to go back for it. Sentimental value.”

“Did someone give it to you?” he asked. “Someone you loved?” He had a locket of Evie’s he’d brought with him. And an earring from Marjory. She had pinned it inside his jacket herself. He’d forgotten about it. He felt for it now, but it was gone.

George shook his head at him. “They said I couldn’t go back for it, it would take too long.” George leaned into him, as though conspiring, dropped his voice even lower. Sandy leaned towards him. “But I told them there was another route and I put up the climb. It was straight and tough. The hardest climb
I’d done ’til then. Gorgeous. They named the route after me.”

George leaned back, smiled slow and long, nodding.

“Somes was there. At the lodge. When we got back. And when Geoffrey told him what I’d done, he said it was reckless. He and the guide both. The next morning I saw
George Mallory is a young man who will not be alive for long
written in the guest-book.” George fell silent and the smile drifted away.

Sandy was shivering. His sleeping bag had slumped down around his waist. He pulled it up, burrowed down into it.

“But I’ve survived everything,” George said. “I keep surviving.”

“You’re lucky, I guess.”

George nodded, pulled his pack around and laid his head on it.

GEORGE COULDN’T SLEEP
. It was all he wanted. Sleep. A brief respite. He was exhausted, whittled down to only bone and narrow muscle, a filament of will. Sandy hadn’t spoken for what seemed like hours, though it might have been only minutes. His own consciousness was coming in flickers, in and out, a shoal of river fish. He was numbed, stupefied in the thin air.

The tent was dark now. The lantern had gone out. It was welcome, the darkness. They couldn’t see each other. Couldn’t see the summit. Nothing existed in the darkness.

Everyone else was below them. At Camp V, Odell would be staring upwards for a light, the dull smudge of a lantern in the night. Odell and Virgil. He would leave a note for Odell. Tell him when to watch for them. Tell him when they’d be back.

Farther down, at Camp IV – Teddy and Somervell. Both of them broken and ready for home.

Noel across the Col, in his Eagle’s Nest. He would watch the skyline tomorrow. George had written him to say he’d go up
skyline. The ridge was the surest way. He would have to remember to turn and wave to Noel, to his camera.

Everyone was below them. Waiting.

“Somes will be writing the dispatches for the
Times
about now,” George said.

“What dispatches?”

“It should be Teddy who does it, but he won’t be able to. Not with his snowblindness. Together they’ll prepare telegrams for the possible outcomes. There will be two of them. One that says we succeeded. That we’ve returned triumphant from the summit. And one that concedes defeat, says we’re coming home.”

He didn’t tell Sandy there should be a third one. One that said that the final summit team was lost and all hope was gone. Teddy wouldn’t write that one. He wouldn’t want to tempt fate.

“They’ll be written in code,” he said. “So no one will know what happened until the
Times
decodes the message.”

It had grown even colder. His muscles ached from constant shivering. Jesus Christ, he cursed under his breath. Beside him Sandy’s breath was laboured. A long exhale followed by a jerk, a coughed gulp of air, his body shaking. Sandy pressed against him in the cramped space, trying to keep warm. They were utterly alone in the world.

It hardly seemed possible that it was just yesterday he’d said his goodbyes to Somes and Teddy. Or just this morning that they’d left Odell and Virgil behind.

He was surprised when Virgil sought him out before he left. “Sahib?”

“What is it, Virgil?” He hadn’t meant to sound so short. Virgil had been a solid companion, but he felt betrayed by what Virgil had done at the monastery, going to Teddy behind his back, warning him away from the mountain.

“You not go.”

“Virgil, we’ve been over this before.” He bent to fiddle with the straps of his pack. He just wanted to be gone. He was going to climb this bloody mountain and be done with it. “I thought you wanted this too. I guess I was wrong.”

“Go home to family.” Virgil pointed first at himself and then at George.

“I’ll go back to them when this is done.”

Virgil nodded, started to step away. George watched his shadow on the snow, saw Virgil shift and then move back, the silhouette of his arm reaching towards him. He looked up. “I don’t need any good luck totems.”

“Not good luck. For hope.” Virgil held out folded, bright-coloured flags. A tied packet of rice flour.

“You keep it. You pray.”

“No. You, Sahib Sandy, leave at the summit. When you reach.” When. Virgil had said
when
. “For her. Not you.”

“Do you really think this will make a difference? That this will be enough if Chomolungma doesn’t want us there?”

“Maybe you give to her, she let you pass. Maybe not. I hope.” Virgil smiled at him, his face crinkling with it. “I pray.”

George rolled over now, his back to Sandy. Unbearable cold crept in through the tent flap, up through the ground and the bedroll beneath him. Behind him, Sandy choked and gasped, waking himself with a violent jolt. His convulsions jostled George, sending a sharp wave of pain from his head to his kidneys. He gritted his teeth, tried to catch his own breath, and turned around to face Sandy.

There was panic in Sandy’s gasping. His eyes were open, unseeing, bulging as his jaw worked around his stuttered breath, his arms flailing against George. He was clawing at him, climbing him.

For a brief instant the boy was Gaddes looking up at him from the bottom of the crater, through the heavy green of the
gas. Gaddes ripped off his faulty mask and pleaded with him with a gaping mouth, gulping down great lungfuls of gas. Trying to breathe. He clawed at the sliding mud walls, at his own throat, leaving streaks of blood and dirt there. In his own mask, George’s breath was deafening. Eventually Gaddes stopped struggling and collapsed again to the bottom of the crater, his body shaking in violent tremors, until those stopped too.

He pressed Sandy’s hands down and leaned over his face, his gasping mouth. His breath smelled spoiled, thick. “Breathe, Sandy. Breathe.”

He cradled Sandy while he coughed and sputtered, tried to find his breath. “Shhhh … Breathe. Be calm. Breathe.”

It was like soothing Clare when she was having one of her nightmares. He loved when she awoke from dreams and burrowed into him, how just his being there could calm her. “What did you dream, love?”

“You fell, Daddy.”

“Shhhhh … It’s all right. I’m right here …”

Sandy’s breathing steadied.

Shhhhh …

In the black of the tent George shivered.

When was the last time he had been warm? He couldn’t remember the sweltering heatbox of the Cwm, the way the sun had reached into him. He tried to count the days backwards to when they’d been somewhere lush in Tibetan valleys.

In a dream he conjured the feel of sweat dripping between his shoulder blades while sitting in the shadow of rhododendrons, the flowers like massive bloody fists weighting the stalks. He plunged into glacial pools, his skin tightening. The heavy heat of hidden forests sloughed off his skin as he dropped into the water. When he stepped out again, the water evaporated, the heat settling like a blanket across him.

He couldn’t count the days. Could only count one day to the summit. A day to the summit. It was the rhythm of his breath.

He couldn’t remember a time before cold.

The mountain was leaching heat from his skin, his blood, his bones. He dreamed wind like ice picks.

He drifted. He walked along a ridge, ice sharp on both sides. Then tripped. He jerked awake in the tent, his breath caught in his throat, and groped for matches. He was clumsy with them, breaking the head off one before striking another successfully against the box. It flared into a needle of light that hurt his eyes. He squinted and cupped his hands over the scant heat and thought of the candle in Sandy’s mother’s window.

He lit the lantern and settled it on the tent floor.

He watched the shadow outline of Sandy breathing as the match flickered out, and thought of Ruth in their bed at home. Crisp white sheets. The damp outline of her body where she had come in and lain down after bathing. He lay down next to her. It was warm.

She moved to slip away from him and sit up.

“No,” he said. “Stay.”

“I can’t, George. The children will be up. They’ll want to see you.”

“Yes, but not yet,” he said. “Stay.” She settled back into bed, her body pressed against the length of him. This close, her eyes were flecked with sparks, like gold.

“Let’s pretend,” she said, “that’s it’s just you and me. That we’re on holiday and no one can find us.”

“No,” he nuzzled her throat. “Let’s just be here.”

“Yes. Let’s just be here.” She rolled over and pressed her back against him. He held her there, as close as he could, her head tucked under his chin, so that after a beat he couldn’t tell where she ended, where he began. She smelled nothing like rock or snow.

The mountain below him was restless; ice cracked and tumbled in the glacier, echoed up to him. He wondered when the sun would rise. They should be away before it did. Sandy’s breath was rasping, shallow, but steady beside him. The boy’s arm across his chest was a dead weight, making it hard for him to breathe, but he didn’t want to wake Sandy yet. Wanted to allow him these last easy moments.

There was a pounding in his head, the pain concentrated somewhere deep above his left ear. It throbbed with his quickened pulse. He imagined building a brick wall between the pain and the rest of his mind, but he couldn’t concentrate, kept losing his place. The wall crumbled.

He pulled his journal out of his pack again and flipped through it for the sheet of paper he’d tucked inside. The page from Ruth’s book.

“What are you doing?” Sandy asked, as he coaxed the lantern to a low light.

“Just writing to Ruth.”

“Now?”

“It has to be now. There are things I want to say.” Things he needed to say.

Sandy seemed to think about that, then sat up next to him, pulled his own notebook to his lap. “But what should I say? I’d really like to set things to rights. With Dick. Before we go.”

He wasn’t the right person to ask. He had no advice for Sandy. He had none when the boy first told him about his affair, weeks ago. He felt even less able to offer advice now. He thought of Ruth. Poor Ruth. How to tell Sandy not to do what he did. Not to be absent. Lost.

“I guess write that.”

Sandy nodded, stared down at the paper in front of him for a few moments, then said, “Are you scared?”

“It’s not an easy thing we’re about to do, Sandy.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know.” So was he. But he’d been scared before. It was impossible not to be in the trenches, and he’d talked men into other, much more terrifying situations. He talked them into standing up into machine-gun fire. He’d convinced them it was their duty, that fear was best swallowed down, if it had to be acknowledged at all. He couldn’t do that anymore. “So am I,” he said. “But we’ll be fine, Sandy. Remember?” He took Sandy’s notebook from his lap, flipped through for the drawing Sandy had made weeks ago at Advanced Base Camp, the whole summit ridge in clear etched lines.