Authors: M. John Harrison
‘I wondered who he was.’
‘Well now you know,’ said Normal. ‘He’s seriously disturbed, is Stox.’
‘Really?’ I said ironically. But Normal had more to tell.
Stox was eighteen or nineteen years old but looked much older, a small, powerful, sinewy climber with very short hair. Outdoor work had thickened his fingers, thinned and hardened his face. He gave you a direct look when he spoke, as if he didn’t think much of you – or at any rate hadn’t yet made up his mind – but it was often tempered with sly humour. His family were Catholics: by the age of sixteen he had already spent three months at a detention centre, for some juvenile crime they didn’t talk about. He had got his Asian girlfriend pregnant when they were seventeen – ‘She’s nice,’ Normal said. ‘Very nice.’ – and now they lived with their son on a weatherbeaten housing estate near Hyde in Cheshire. Since he came out of the detention centre he had earned his living as a steeplejack – he called it ‘jacking’ – a trade by which, even at his age, and in 1984, he could earn between four and five hundred pounds a week: but he didn’t care about the money, which, Normal claimed, he spent on stock-car racing, bar-fights, and expensive suits: the real reason he did it was the danger. Before he got into rock climbing he had been an amateur boxer. As a boy he had longed to be a stunt man.
‘The problem was,’ Normal told me, ‘he thought they
did
the things you see in films.’
Stox’s first stunt involved the family Austin (which he was subsequently to write off on the A57 ‘Snake’, two days after he took his driving test). He came home from school to find some of his brothers reversing it over one another outside the garage. They were lying longitudinally, so that the wheels passed them on either side. ‘You wimps,’ Stox told them; and, after some loudmouthing and psyching-up, stretched himself directly across its path.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘It stalled,’ Normal said, ‘luckily. He should be in a straitjacket.’
This was Normal’s highest accolade.
Since then, Stox had enjoyed many adventures, perhaps the most characteristic of which was also the most recent. He told us about it on the way to Rothwell Sports Centre, which sticks up suddenly out of muddy fields somewhere near Wakefield. We rarely used Rothwell. Odsal Top was more convenient for the Huddersfield climbers. Stox lived close to Sid’s Sports in Stalybridge. Normal, though, fancied a change. He had managed to borrow his wife’s car, and drove it with random gusto through the flat agricultural land east of Wakefield. I was so used to moors and gritstone walls that I found the hedges and red-brick farmhouses quite strange and nostalgic. Normal must have felt something of the same.
‘I haven’t been here for years!’ he said. ‘Great, eh? It’s like a real trip out!’
Stox looked at me and winked.
‘Wakefield,’ he said. ‘Vineyard of the North.’
‘What’s it like, being a steeplejack?’ I asked him.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been so scared I couldn’t shit.’
In early December, lightning had blown eight square feet out of the 380-foot Shell Oil stack at Sale, then run down the lightning conductor into the chimney itself. Most of the damage was about ten feet from the top, but after Stox and his foreman had taken a video camera inside, they decided to rebuild with brick the whole of the last sixty feet.
Inside, the stack was freezing cold, misty with condensation; water ran down the bricks, and all you could hear was the electric hum of the power-climbers as they took the inspection cradle down two 8mm steel cables in the pitch dark. ‘It was well eerie in there,’ said Stox. ‘Well eerie.’ Outside, they had problems with the weather. Snow plastered itself on to the stack, then kept falling on them in great sheets; and as they went up and down the ladders, carrying rolled alloy joists to anchor the outside cradle, they could hear the wind rushing towards them across the dark Cheshire Plain.
‘What do you
do
in a high wind?’ Normal wanted to know.
‘Hang on,’ said Stox laconically. ‘You can hear the ladders rattle.’ He gave us his sly, cocky grin. ‘It’s not like climbing,’ he said. ‘You have to have a bit of a head for heights.’
He gazed pensively at the landscape for a moment, then leaned forward and said to Normal:
‘These Rovers’ll go faster than this, you know.’
The most nerve-racking thing about steeplejacking, for most jacks anyway, he explained, was moving about at the top of a stack. It exhausted you. Shell Oil at Sale was thirty-five feet in circumference and a foot wide, with a steel capstone in bolted sections. If you could make yourself look down, you would see the chimney tapering in towards its base, like something out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Crushed by this exposure, most of the jacks couldn’t stand upright at all, but had to crawl round
à cheval
, with their legs hanging over the sides.
‘It helps if you’re stoned,’ Stox maintained, fumbling in the pockets of his leather jacket.
‘Speaking of which, let’s have a roll-up.’
Ostentatiously, Normal wound down his window.
‘Piss off, Normal,’ said Stox. ‘Anyway, eventually they get the outside cradle working and start using it to look at the damage under the cap.’ Climbing ladders at half past three in the afternoon, Stox had seen the outside cradle coming down past the blow-out, which was about fifteen feet to his right. ‘If it’d been earlier in the day, I’d have been a bit sharper. I could hear the wind about to hit, but I didn’t put the two things together. The cradle took me clean off. Bastard.’ He contemplated this. ‘Three hundred and sixty-odd feet,’ he said, picking a shred of Old Holborn off his lower lip.
He considered the implications.
‘What can you do?’ he said, with the air of someone stating some more general problem.
What he had done was to grab one of the trail-cables, wrap his arm round it and, dangling above the abyss, start shouting as loud as he could.
‘I was too scared even to shit myself.’
Eventually the other jacks heard him, pulled him into the cradle, and took him to the top. As you stood on the edge of this huge black hole, he said, the refinery flares were plumes of orange flame five hundred yards away in the growing darkness. Further out were the housing estates, with their kitchen lights coming on. Further still, you could pick out the constant stream of headlights on the M62. And if you looked north-east you might see Manchester. ‘I couldn’t stop laughing. You can’t, can you? What’s this Rothwell wall like then, Normal? Anything good on it?’
He threw the glowing end of his roll-up out of the window past Normal’s ear.
‘Anything good high up?’
‘One of the things I really like about Stox,’ Normal had told me on the phone earlier in the day, ‘is this theory he’s got that all sports centres are the same one. You just drive to different entrances, in Bradford, Leeds, Stalybridge.’
Certainly they’re all made of the same ashy grey brick; they have the same low, square-cut corridors; the same plump girls with cropped blonde hair and powerful legs, who carry their badminton rackets in identical maroon plastic holdalls. They have the identical sign on the door of the facility you want:
DO NOT ENTER UNTIL YOUR ALLOTTED TIME
, with the same vague purgatorial implications. The air in them is dusty and too hot, and when you get to the wall, the winter has driven in the same lot of rock-climbers, who smell of sweat and chalk and look like a hundred dull migratory birds on the banks of the same grey estuary. A shared eccentricity is quite soon disappointing. You would expect climbers to make space round themselves. But in numbers they gather under the same bit of wall, gazing up at the same young star failing on the same 7a problem. They whisper:
‘He won’t crack it like that.’
‘I’m really going to practise this winter,’ I promised Normal. ‘I’m going to learn to dance.’
Normal didn’t hear.
‘This mad fucker’s looking for the one sequence that links all sports centres,’ he was explaining to someone. ‘It’s common to them all, and if you do it you can travel from one to the other without getting a bus.’
I didn’t see if Stox found the sequence. He and Normal soon joined a group of locals working on a figure-four twenty feet above the crash-mats, and I was too shy to have a go. In a figure-four move, you try and sit on your own arm to extend your reach. I finished early. In the entrance hall at Rothwell there are some miserable-looking plants in pots; and, under the broad open staircase, a shallow rectangular pool with goldfish. Coins shine up through the water: the fish nose unexpectantly at them. Bone tired, I hung over the pool while I waited for Normal and Stox to get changed.
‘Who would want to throw money in
here
?’
‘These Star Bars are excellent, but they don’t half clog you up!’
Normal’s wife telephoned me.
‘We haven’t seen you for such a long time,’ she said. ‘Hello?’
The call was to invite me to Christmas dinner. Stox would be coming too, she thought. ‘We’ll have all kinds here for the afternoon. We always do!’ It was open house as far as she was concerned, just so long as Normal gave her fair warning. But Stox was definitely going on somewhere else in the evening.
‘One of the parties in Buxton!’ she guessed. ‘A cavers’ party: you know what that means!’
Normal had been a caver for a while, in the mid-to-late Seventies, when it was still possible to be good across the board at ‘adventure’ sports. Distinctions weren’t so clear-cut then; less commitment was necessary. (Now only Boy Scouts and army officers are left between the zones of obsession, high and dry, trudging along under a burden of manful, cheery ineptitude like maroons who haven’t yet seen the ship sail off without them.) Cavers, anyway, are proud of their parties, which are predicated on a greater despair than climbers can ever experience, the knowledge that you are going down into the ground the next day, where it is dark and cold and smells like a hole in the road; or on a greater joy, which is that you have come up again.
‘Anyway,’ Normal’s wife said, ‘if you aren’t doing anything else, the invitation’s always open.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I—’
‘There’ll be one of my cakes,’ she promised hurriedly. ‘And I thought that instead of just sitting around in the afternoon we could go for a walk round Digley.’
When I didn’t speak she added:
‘You know, the reservoir. Is this a bad line?’
‘No, I can hear you quite well,’ I said. ‘How’s Normal?’
‘You know Normal!’ she said.
He had taken her car to pieces in the road outside the house again. This time it was the wrong rotor arm.
‘
Just
what I needed!’
‘I’d love to come,’ I said in the end.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. As soon as she had rung off I caught a bus into Huddersfield. Lights were already on in the big old gritstone houses behind their holly trees and laurel hedges, curtains already drawn on warm yellow rooms. From the top deck of the bus the square lawns and strings of fairy lights had the look of a comfortable Christmas, intimate and far away. ‘I’m trying to enjoy life to the full,’ said a local girl two or three seats behind me to the boy sitting next to her. She was perhaps sixteen, and had the air of someone repeating a piece of received wisdom. ‘What happened to me?’ She laughed. ‘That’s a good question. I got fed up with education, so I found myself a job.’ It had been a good season for the shops. At first I couldn’t find any Christmas cards; then only Old Masters with cracked glaze over dead pheasants, Brueghels full of greed and bustle. I took what I could get, and filled them out in the Merrie England cafe. That year all the women shoppers on New Street seemed to be dressed in imitation of Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana or Princess Anne. Against the steamy, pseudo-medieval clutter of the Merrie England, this made them seem old; fey, stupid and shrewd all at once; or bored and stolid, their peasant faces heavy with greed. They had looked quite different the year before as they advised each other, ‘No dear. I’ve got some Sweetex you can use if you don’t want sugar!’ A child banged its cup on the table. Through the windows at the end of the cafe you could see into Woolworth’s across the road, where two or three Pakistanis were moving aimlessly about. Later I bought a little intricate basket of paper flowers, then struggled back through the crowds – remembering Nina who had once come back from Christmas shopping with her grandmother shouting, ‘People and pigeons were everywhere!’ – and arrived home in time to hear the wife from the farm down the road fetching in the cows:
‘Kop kop kop,’ she cried. ‘Coom on then! Kop kop kop.’
I often heard her calling like this, patient and urgent at the same time. ‘Come on then, love,’ she would vary her rhetoric, as the animals shambled and slithered towards her through the mud, stopping to groan and stare at one another in slow surmise: ‘Coom on int’ yard!’
Sometimes she was so persuasive I wanted to go myself.
Steeplejacking has only a little in common with climbing for fun. The work is hard and the safety precautions minimal. Jacks could protect themselves – on the continent they are required to by law – but it is easier (and quicker, when you are working against a contract deadline) not to bother; and anyway they have a myth of themselves which precludes this. Fearless at the age of eighteen they find themselves, as the juices and daft appetites of youth dry up, trapped in an increasingly irrelevant and dangerous self-image. They take to drink to keep them reckless, or just to get them up in the mornings; or drift away into other kinds of labouring, where they go sour remembering what demigods they used to be. As an apprentice, Stox had ignored the ladders one day and climbed instead the steel reinforcing bands of a 150-foot incinerator chimney on a waste tip near Birmingham. ‘It was quicker,’ he claimed; but really he had done it out of mischief, and a desire to stir up his elders. The other jacks, he said, had been ‘well surprised’; but generally they would admit to no interest in rock-climbing, and seemed unimpressed by his photographs of London Wall and Coventry Street.
Stox phoned me at seven in the morning on Christmas Eve and asked me if I’d like to see what jacking was all about. I’d known him for a fortnight. I was so flattered and surprised I could only answer ‘Yes.’