Climbers: A Novel (10 page)

Though he made a considerable impression on me, I didn’t actually see a great deal of Gaz. I was out with Normal a lot of the time; Gaz climbed mostly with Sankey.

Sankey was always so cautious and indirect, so ready to defer to your opinion. He wondered casually if you had a couple of days free that week: he knew full well you were on the dole. With him everything was open to negotiation. If, driving to a cliff he had known all his life, you asked, ‘Do we turn right here? ’, he would consider for a moment and then say, ‘Yes, yes, you can. Or of course you can go up round Ilkley if you want to. It’s sometimes quicker that way.’ And when you stared at him: ‘Well it probably is further to go. But now you
can
get on to the A650, some people do prefer that way—’

By then you had missed your turning.

This drove Gaz mad, and he wouldn’t have Sankey in the front seat of the Vauxhall with him. They got on all right in Sankey’s car, a three-wheeler van about which he was very defensive. To improve its fuel consumption even further he had taken the passenger seat out, so that you sat in the back in the dark with the ropes and piles of equipment. They took me to Almscliffe in it one day: it bumped and banged along the Yeadon by-pass, rocking from side to side. ‘I’m going to puke up!’ shouted Gaz. He gave me a wink. ‘I keep thinking, what if we get a puncture in the front wheel? I mean, you’ve only got the one, haven’t you?’

Sankey screwed himself round in the driver’s seat.

‘They’re very safe, these,’ he said. ‘Very safe cars.’

Horns blared at him from the approaching traffic, into whose lane he had wobbled. For a moment all we could see of him was his elbows jerking about in silhouette as he sawed at the steering wheel. Gaz clutched himself among the rucksacks; it was an old joke, you could see, but a good one.

At Almscliffe you can’t get out of the wind. It hisses in the greenish cracks and flutings. It blows from all directions at once even on a summer day. The dust gets into your eyes as you pick your way down the cold dark gullies that dissect the main mass of rock, while all around you Lower Wharfedale spreads its legs in the sunshine – farmland, spires, viaducts, hedges and trees. It might be a landscape much further south, much earlier in the year, great swags of blossom at the edge of every field. But up on the horizon the power-stations lie hull-down in ambush among the East Yorkshire coal pits.

Gaz got straight into his harness and on to the rock.

‘I’m scared!’ he complained after he had hand-jammed about forty feet up into the wind. He was just passing a thing like a melted, dripping end of an old candle. The crack he was climbing arrowed above him into the blue sky. Soon he would get his foot stuck in it.

Being there is like watching an old elephant, dying split-skinned in its own tremendous ammoniacal reek, gazing patiently back at you in a zoo. It hasn’t moved for a long time, you judge, but you can still detect the tremor of its breath – or is it your own? Meanwhile the children shout and try to wake it up with buns. At Almscliffe the visitors walk about bemusedly, shading their eyes, wondering perhaps why the zoo-keeper has let them in on such a tragic occasion. They are generally middle-class people, careful not to drop their sandwich papers from the top. The crag bears them up passively, while bits of route description, boasts and obscenities circle round them on the wind.

‘No you go left there and then swing round again.’

‘. . . Syrett . . . Pasquill . . .’

‘Go left from where you are!’

‘. . . Black Wall Eliminate in the rain, nowhere to rest, that fucking bog waiting for you underneath . . .’

‘Left! You go
left
you maniac. Oh fuck, look at that.’

This has never been a quiet place. It was the first of the great outdoor climbing walls, the model of a local crag. Its enthusiasts – parochial, cliqueish, contemptuous of the performance of outsiders and resentful of their cheery unconcern for precedent – believe that the sport was invented here. Generations of them have brought the rock to a high polish, like the stuff that faces the Halifax Building Society. Every evening local men – Yorkshire men, who hardly ever speak – do the low-level traverses until they learn to allow for the shine of the footholds, the flare and brutality of the cracks. Their arms and shoulders grow strong. Their clothes fray. They develop a slow way of looking at you. Down Wharfedale they have wives and kiddies and bicycles just like anyone else, but all they think about is which one of them will solve the last Great Problem.

It won’t be Gaz, anyway.

In his orange-dyed karate trousers, with his runners jangling and clanging mournfully, he gingerly unlocked his foot. ‘What grade is this? Rubbish!’ Fucking and blinding he made his careful way up: pulled in a few feet of rope: vanished somewhere among the bottomless clefts and queer boulders of the summit, where picnickers looked at him like owls. After a moment his head popped back over the top. ‘Come on! Never mind sitting on your arses down there, get some climbing done!’

As he brought me up he dangled his legs over the top like Pinocchio and stared out over the plain towards York, where the tourists would be making their way from shop to shop in a muzzy, good-tempered dream. He was in one himself. ‘You want to jam that crack, mate,’ I heard him advise someone on another climb, ‘not layback it.’ After a moment he kicked his legs disconnectedly and sang in a maudlin voice, ‘I don’t know what to do when you disappear from view . . .’ Soon a great loop of rope hung down in front of me.

‘For Christ’s sake, Gaz, pay attention. Take in. Take in! If I fucking fall off—’

‘You’re not going to. Stay steady. Steady. You’re all right. Can you get your hands in the break? Just stay steady and you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘It’s easy.’ He took the rope in tight anyway. ‘Look,’ he said, leaning out at an odd angle against his belays so that he could see down the climb; it made him look as if he had been photographed in the act of throwing himself off. ‘See there? Just above that bit of a rib there? . . . No
there
, above you, you wollock! . . . That’s it, just there. Can you see a tiny little layoff?’

I said I could.

‘Well don’t use that, it’s no good.’

The sun came down and scraped into the irregular corners like Gaz’s mother scraping an oven. He moved his shoulders uneasily and exchanged his pullover for a T-shirt with a design advertising a northern equipment firm: ‘Troll Gets You High’.

We had something to eat. Then, forced into inhuman, expressionistic postures by its grim logic, Sankey strained and contorted up Wall of Horrors, until his impetus ran out just under the crux. He stretched up: nothing. He tried facing left, then right, grinding his cheek into the gritstone. His legs began to tremble. All the lines on the rock moved towards him, in a fixed vortex. When he lurched suddenly on his footholds everyone looked up: he was only sorting through the stuff on his rack for something to protect his next two moves. If he took too long to find and place it he would come off anyway. His last runner was lodged in a crack like a section through a fall pipe, fifteen or twenty feet below him.

‘Can you get something there?’

‘Can you get anything in higher up?’

He didn’t hear us.

He was fiddling about in a rounded break, his eyes inturned and panicky, his head and upper body squashed up as if he was demonstrating the limits of some box invisible to anyone else. Under the impact of fear, concentration, physical effort, his face went lax and shocked, his age began to show. By 1970 he had climbed all over the world; he had done every major route in Britain; the ‘new’ climbs were his only hope – violent, kinaesthetic, stripped of all aid. ‘Wall of Horrors!’ he would say. ‘John Hart talked me up that, move by move, first time I led it. Years ago. It overfaced people then. Ha ha.’ He was forty, perhaps forty-five. As I watched him I wondered what he was doing it to himself for.

All the time Gaz was watching him too.

He had to predict when Sankey would go. He had to mother him. The runner in the fall pipe was too close to the ground to be much good: if Sankey boned off, could Gaz run back far enough quick enough to shorten the rope? I didn’t think he could. He fidgeted it backwards and forwards through the Sticht plate, which clicked and rattled nervously.

Up in his invisible box Sankey twisted one arm behind his back to get his hand into his chalk bag. His shadow moved uneasily on the buttress over to his left, the shadow of the rope blowing out behind it. Chalk smoked off into the turbulence as he shifted his feet.

The sun went in.

‘OK, kid,’ he said. ‘Watch the rope.’

Suddenly we saw that he was calm and thoughtful again. He stood up straight and went quickly to the top, reaching, rocking elegantly to one side, stepping up.

Things have moved on now, of course, but Wall of Horrors was still a test-piece then. When he came down several people were waiting to congratulate him. Most of them were boys of fourteen or fifteen who would one day solo it; against that time they were willing to give him uncontrolled admiration. They were dressed in white canvas trousers, sweatshirts and pullovers with broad stripes, in imitation of the American and Australian climbers whose pictures they saw in the magazines; in two or three years they would be wearing silkskin dance tights, courting anorexia in search of a high power-weight ratio, exchanging the magic words of European-style climbing: ‘screamer’, ‘redpoint’, ‘Martin Atkinson’.

One of them said, ‘Are you Stevie Smith? I’ve seen you climb before, haven’t I?’

Sankey gave his nervous laugh.

‘No,’ he said.

He sat down tiredly among some boulders and began sorting through his equipment, strewing orange tape slings about in the dust as if looking for something that had let him down. Then he just sat, absentmindedly clicking the gate of a snaplink until Gaz brought him some coffee from a flask. As we walked away from the cliff the backs of my hands smarted in the wind. I saw the shadow of a dove flicker over the rock in the warm slanting light. These birds live in the high breaks and caves. They ruffle their feathers uncertainly, hunch up, explode without warning over your head; they come back in the evening. Sankey’s eyes were losing the empty, exhausted look that had entered them on the wall.

On the way home Gaz said, ‘I wouldn’t mind being an owl in my next life.’ Then he said, ‘I’m getting married next month.’ He had to shout to make himself heard over the engine of the three-wheeler.

I didn’t go to the wedding – something intervened – but I needn’t have worried, because Normal told me about it later.

‘You should have been there,’ he said. ‘All the lads were there. What a send-off! And after they’d gone we went over to Running Hill Pits in Sankey’s car and
climbed a route.
In our penguin suits!’

He showed me a photograph he had taken of Sankey nearing the top of a climb called Plum Line, in a hired morning suit and polished black shoes. From what I could make out Sankey had tied on to the rope with a couple of turns round his waist. His face was a white smear. Runners hung out of his trouser pockets.

‘We were pissed out of our minds!’

Normal shook his head reminiscently as I leafed through the rest of the prints. They were all blurred: Gaz, with an appalled grin like an expressionist self-portrait, standing as if he had one leg shorter than the other; Normal himself, holding up a glass of beer and a chalk bag; someone I didn’t recognise looking back over his shoulder as he came out of a door marked ‘Men’.

‘We shook chalk over them instead of rice. We were well pissed!’

‘You didn’t take any of his wife,’ I said. ‘I’d like to have seen her.’

‘She’s very nice,’ said Normal sentimentally. ‘Very nice. They went to the Isle of Man, she’ll enjoy that.’

That night Sankey rang me up.

‘I wondered if you were going out with Normal in the week?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure,’ I answered. ‘You know Normal.’

‘Only that I thought we could go to Millstone,’ he said cautiously, ‘and do Time for Tea. If you feel like it. If you’ve got nothing else on.’

I lost touch with Gaz, although I had a postcard from him on his honeymoon at Douglas, and another one about six months later from the Verdon Gorge in Provence, which said in deeply indented block letters,
WELL HERE WE ARE IN VERDON
,
WEATHER IS WICKED KEEPS SNOWING
,
HARRY
&
DAVE GOT BENIGHTED
300
FT FROM THE TOP THEY HAD TO SLEEP IN A TREE THE FIRST DAY. THE ROCK IS INCREDIBLE POSTCARD DOESN
’
T DO IT JUSTICE. SEE YOU GAZ
. (I didn’t know who Harry and Dave were but the Défile des Cavaliers, with its luxuriant vegetation and slightly pink limestone, looked nice: it might have been Symonds Yat, or Trow Gill in Yorkshire, but I suppose that was an effect of scale.)

I met him again by accident in Lodge’s supermarket one Saturday morning about three years after the wedding. He didn’t seem to have changed. His wife was with him, a short girl in dungarees, with one breast noticeably larger than the other and long hair which she pushed back continually from her face. She put her arms round his waist from behind and rubbed her cheek against his back. They had a toddler which sat in its pushchair watching them silently.

‘Fucking hell,’ Gaz said to me. ‘I’ll always remember you leading that – what was it! – Wall of Horrors. Wall of Horrors, what a name! Poiky stuff!’

‘That was Sankey,’ I reminded him. For some reason I felt flattered anyway. ‘Wall of Horrors is a big strong for me.’

‘You don’t want to do yourself down,’ Gaz told me. ‘You were always a good climber. You just needed that bit of steadiness.’

After they had done their shopping, they said, why didn’t we go upstairs where you could have a cup of tea? That was what they usually did. Gaz paid, and his wife insisted we have cakes. They gave the little boy a drink of something bright red, but he couldn’t seem to manage the glass well, and he didn’t take much interest in it. He seemed bemused. The clatter, the steam, the Saturday-morning laughter made him blink. Gaz looked out of the window at the phone boxes in the square. ‘Same old place,’ he said with his typical grin. He still worked at the butcher’s: I wouldn’t have seen him there because he still worked in the back. He winked. ‘Still fetching the green tags out!’