Climbers: A Novel (28 page)

‘Go up there and have a look.’

Bob sat on a boulder and rummaged about in his rucksack until his sandwich box turned up. Staring out over the valley, he slowly and methodically ate half a Kit-Kat. Then he took his T-shirt off and folded it away. He found some thinner socks and pulled his red and yellow Hanwag ‘Crack Specials’ on over them. He opened the drawstring of his chalk bag and looked inside. He unwrapped a fresh block of light magnesium carbonate, white as talcum in the sun! By the time he had done all this, his breathing was even again: he could turn round and face the crag and let the excitement mount inside him. He chalked his hands carefully, rubbing them first against the block and then against each other; reached up; swung himself on to the rock with a quick pull and a heel-hook.

Ears
fringed every crack!

Some were so fragile and tiny you could almost see through them. The larger ones hung off the pinkish rock like fruit ready to fall. In some places they had stretched themselves into dangling lobes, huge polyps, massive dewlaps: ears, ten or fifteen feet high! Elsewhere they were frilled and fretted like an old tom cat’s; while beneath them, and in the crevices behind them, pale ochre veins ran through the stone like the marbling on the end papers of an old book. ‘There’s some really weird erosion up there,’ Sankey had told him: ‘You ought to see it just for that.’ But Bob Almanac had never expected to be swinging from one baby’s ear to another high in the air on a hot day the end of summer; locking off on an ear with his right hand while he dipped his left in the chalk bag; laybacking up the side of an elephantine ear! By the time he got to the top he was laughing delightedly.

‘Bloody hell, Sankey, what a place!’

He climbed in these Daliesque zones all morning, slowly adapting to them until he could pull fluidly from one ear to the next, trying out harder and harder moves. At noon when he stood on the slopes above the crag, a long ripple seemed to cross the valley, as if its image was wavering in the hot clear air. Long grasses streamed in the wind. The sheep cropped unconcernedly, then moved a few paces on.

‘What a place!’

Earlier in the day, at Birch Services on the M62, he had bought a can of Coke. He was looking forward to a drink from it: but a couple of sips coated his mouth like raw syrup. Then, reaching for something else, he knocked the can over. He forgot it with a shrug; ate his sandwiches; and – to give his muscles something different to do before he started climbing again – wandered off up the valley with the guidebook. ‘There’s one or two other good spots around there, kid,’ Sankey had told him: ‘If you can just find them.’ All Bob found was a line of overgrown boulders. When, perhaps half an hour later, still thirsty, he returned to the Coke can to see if there was any left, a dozen half-dead wasps were crawling laboriously around inside it. Bob let out a shout of surprise. One of them had touched the inside of his bottom lip as he tilted his head back to drink.

SEVENTEEN

‘I was nearly sick,’ he told us when he got home. ‘I looked in and there they were, flopping about in half an inch of the thing they most desired.’ He used this phrase repeatedly all evening – as though he had been considering it ever since:

‘The thing they most desired.’

‘So what did you do with them then?’ Mick asked interestedly. ‘Kill ’em, or what?’

We were sitting with Bob and David the fireman in the lounge of the Farmer’s Arms. David was often there, with his best jacket on and his silver snooker-player’s hair combed back. he liked it because on a Sunday night there were always two girls serving at the bar. They wore dresses designed to slip down off the shoulder: one girl was tugging hers back into place every time she reached up for the spirit optics; before she could achieve the same effect, David observed, the other had covertly to pull hers off. A few local boys stood at the bar with bottles of foreign beer, staring emptily at this performance and talking about cars.

Bob Almanac shook his head.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he admitted. He drank some of his Tetley’s.

In the end, he said, he had tipped the wasps carefully on to a rock: there, they writhed helplessly over one another like newborn puppies or kittens. ‘At first they were
stuck
to one another. I couldn’t stop watching, I was so disgusted.’ Five minutes later they had pulled apart and a few of the stronger ones were flying away, yawing groggily off into the bracken: the others seemed less likely to survive. ‘I’ve never seen insects so pissed!’ Other wasps were soon arriving to drink from the spilled Coke. Such a mêlée developed that Bob found it hard to tell what was going on: but in the end only one of the original dozen was left, walking round and round in circles or grooming its antennae with its forelegs in an increasingly confused fashion.

‘What happened to that one?’ we wanted to know.

‘I’ve no idea. It didn’t look well. But half the Newcastle Mountaineering Club had suddenly decided to have their Saturday afternoon outing at that particular crag. As soon as I heard them coming through the woods I packed up and left. God knows why Sankey thought it was quiet. It’s a great place though, if you’re into ears!’

‘Ears!’ said David the fireman scornfully.

Voices in a pub can recede so abruptly and become so meaningless that you think you are dreaming. People stare comfortably into their glasses. The pub cat goes to sleep on the bench close to you; looks up nervily when they drop something behind the bar; turns round twice and sleeps again.

‘That cat’s breathing far too fast,’ Mick said. ‘Pant, pant, pant, just look at it.’

Behind him one woman was telling another, ‘I get quite passionate about being wrong – I mean really passionate: I hate it!’, firmly italicising ‘passionate’, ‘really’, ‘hate’.

Mick grinned contemptuously.

‘I don’t see why we can’t drink in the Public,’ he announced to the room at large. Then he asked us: ‘What would you do if you had money?’ He looked round the table. ‘Eh? Just as a matter of interest.’

‘I wouldn’t piss it away every night the way you do,’ David told him.

‘Look who’s talking. Look who’s fucking talking!’

Mick got up and put his Helly jacket on. ‘I’m fucking off home,’ he said.

‘Be like that then.’

‘It was only a joke, Mick,’ Bob explained.

‘It’s half past ten,’ said Mick. ‘I’ve to mek a phone call anyway.’

He was always on the phone, people began to complain. Whenever you needed him he was in the middle of some tale, talking to someone you didn’t know about someone else you didn’t know:

‘They’d bin to the Bradford Wall, see. They always go for a curry afterwards apparently, I don’t know where, in some cellar next door to Bradford City mortuary if you hear them tell it. Oh aye, it’s a good spot, or so they say: only one pound fifty for spinach and dal and three chapatis.’

A momentary expression of greed would cross his features.

‘But listen, listen! They wanted something to drink, you see, so they asked what there was. “Special tea,” the bloke says. “What’s that?” they ask. “Tea wi’ milk,” he says. It sounded all right, so they thought they’d ’ave that. But listen – no, listen – when it came it were a cup each of sterilised milk, lukewarm, wi’ a teabag in it—!’

You’d hear some tinny laughter at the other end of the phone, and then Mick would say:

‘Oh aye, they’re all going to work for him. Denny Morgan and all that lot from up at Pigshit Quarry, the whole Halifax team. I ’ad it from that bloke who says “heavy duty” all the time. I forget his name. What? You know who I mean. “Heavy duty, heavy duty,” he says it all the time. Aye, well: I’ll keep you posted. Right. Cheerio.’

One morning I heard his mum shout from the kitchen, ‘When are you ever going to think about my telephone bill?’

Mick put the handset down and went over to the stereo. ‘Watch this,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll get a bollocking for this now, just wait.’ He found a tape of Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and put it on so loud that the little red and blue lights on the graphic equaliser jammed solid. His mum came in and roared:

‘And you can turn that off too!

‘Whatever am I going to do with him?’ she appealed to me. ‘He always used to hate the telephone.’

His temper was patchy.

Someone at a rescue-committee meeting had convinced him that you could drop a cat seventy feet on to a concrete floor before it was certain to be killed. As he understood it, this was to do with body weight, air resistance, and the relative strength of bony structures.

‘After that height, you see,’ he explained, ‘so many of its bones and organs would be damaged it couldn’t go on. Seventy feet. That’s the splat-height for a cat.’

He rummaged about in his sandwich box. ‘Hey, look! Ginger cake!’ Chewing steadily, he stared out across the valley through the teeming rain. It was Saturday afternoon. A month or so after Sankey’s death the weather had closed down on us, gales from the south-west wiping out most of October. ‘A doctor told me that,’ Mick said with satisfaction. ‘About the cat. Of course, that doesn’t rule out killing the bugger first time you drop it. It’s just that it isn’t bound to die until that height.’

It seemed a cruel and unnecessary example to me, and a pointless thing to know.

‘What’s the height for a dog?’ I asked.

‘He never said.’

I looked in my own sandwich box, but I had eaten everything.

‘He was having you on,’ I said.

‘Seventy feet,’ he said, ‘on to a concrete floor. If it didn’t break its neck straight out. That’s what he told me. They’re tough little sods.’

We were sitting under the prow of Ravens Tor in Millers Dale. Mick would go anywhere on a wet day rather than face the indoor wall at Odsal Top. He had temporary work on one of the ‘community projects’ that were springing up all over the North. ‘I see enough fucking bricks during the week.’ Water dripped off the huge leaning shield of rock above us, the overhang causing it to fall twenty or thirty feet out. When we arrived we had found the low, shallow cave under the crag full of little piles of half-dried shit and pink tissue paper. No one thought of Ravens Tor as a free-climbing venue in those days. It was nothing like the outdoor gymnasium it has become since. Hikers and tourists used it as a lavatory and the only reason climbers went there was to do an easy aid route called Mecca, the first pitch of which forced its way round the roof of the cave. The second pitch could be done free, but most people aided that as well. Bob Almanac and David were still on it. For some reason they had been there since three o’clock, and now it was gone five. A dull light still fluoresced in the rock where it faced west, but the stars were coming out.

‘I can’t mek head or tail of it,’ Mick kept saying irritably. ‘ ’Ave they got summat stuck, or what? It’s only a hundred and thirty feet, that route.’ Every so often he shouted up to them to get a move on; but since he wouldn’t go out into the rain, the whole dull lump of rock absorbed his voice, and they never heard.

‘I can’t seem to mek meself understood,’ he would repeat. ‘I can’t seem to mek meself understood at all. Is that Orion up there? No, there, you dozy pillock.’

He sat back comfortably against his rucksack and sighed. The stink of the River Wye, terminally polluted all the way from Buxton, wafted gently up to us.

‘Get a move on up there, you fucking pair of cripples! Any coffee left in your flask, Mike?’

Bob and David were soaked to the skin. On the way home their clothes filled the car with steam, but Mick complained he was cold, and refused to have the windows open to clear it. Instead he rolled his pullover up for a pillow and fell asleep in the back, as he often did – only to sit up suddenly as the car lurched round some slippery dog-leg on the Strines Road, stare without hope out of the misted-up windscreen at the sodden, leafless trees reeling past in the dark, and say in the voice of someone who has woken up in hell: ‘It’s only forty feet for a human being. You only ’ave to fall forty feet to be sure of major damage.’

‘Oh come on,’ argued Bob Almanac. ‘Use your common sense. You’ve seen people walk away from worse.’

‘No I haven’t,’ said Mick. ‘No I haven’t.’

He shivered, and seemed to nod off again, with his mouth open.

David, who was driving, turned round and asked me, ‘I wonder what that noise was?’

All afternoon at Ravens Tor we had been hearing a deep thud, like an immense door swinging to in the distance, which seemed to resonate through the limestone itself at four- or five-minute intervals. At first we had assumed it was the sound of quarry operations at Stoney Middleton or King Sterndale. ‘Be your age,’ Mick had suggested: ‘Who’s going to be blasting every two and a half minutes?’ Whatever it was, it left a faint impression of itself, a fossil in the rock, the sound of thunder quite a long way away on a July day. Sometimes it seemed to come from up the valley, towards the Angler’s Rest and the B6509, sometimes from Lytton Mill in the other direction. But you never heard it when you were listening for it. Your analysis was always behind the event.