Climbers: A Novel (25 page)

Two or three times a week Normal would burst into the shop and say:

‘Got any real books in yet?’

By day Normal stood jaundiced with boredom behind the counter at High Adventure. At night he sorted through his colour slides, or watched television with his wife. She had encouraged his interest in mountaineering literature, and now he had a collection that ranged from
Annapurna Sanctuary
and the memoirs of Aleister Crowley to a mint signed copy of
Rock Climbers in Action in Snowdonia
. I think he had read one or two of them. He visited me less to break up the tedium of the long winter afternoons than because he still cherished the idea that he might stumble across a first edition of
Caves & Crags of the High Peak
among the stained and dog-eared stuff in my bin. All bookshops were the same bookshop to Normal. Anyway, he never found anything, and always ended up at the rear shelves, leafing through
Silky
or
Journal of Sex
.

‘This is some filthy stuff, you know.’

I was under no illusions. I had met him accidentally. But I hoped that if I was patient he would ask me to go climbing with him.

He used to say, ‘You take your life in your hands coming to this place!’

Sometimes his wife picked him up on her way home from work. I don’t know what she made of the shop. Later, when modern developments like the Arndale Centre replaced all those bruised old streets, she told me, ‘ “Human factory farms” is what I’ve christened them.’ But then added, ‘At least they’ve given people somewhere clean and warm to go,’ as if she believed they had been planned not for the lower middle-class shopper but for the socially disabled and uneasy of heart – all the dossers she had glimpsed under the car-park lights when she came to collect Normal, whom she still at that time called ‘pet’. They hadn’t long been married; they lived in a flat near St George’s Park, but were already saving so she could move the twenty-five miles back to Yorkshire. She drove a Rover 2000 her father had owned, and it reminded her of home.

Normal was wary of both vagrants and stray dogs, especially if they were at all self-possessed. He overemphasised their fierceness and undependability, their size and dirtiness. At the same time he envied it. He was less afraid of them, I thought at the time, than of his own tendency to stray. He had, after all, once fallen off a train.

‘You take your life in your hands.’

‘That’s an odd pair of punters,’ my boss said one night after they had gone.

He stared out after them into the falling sleet.

A step in the street, a scuffed front door, stained paint beneath the keyhole. Inside, some wear of the staircarpet, a chip in the skirting board, the sound of a bunch of keys returned endlessly to a coat pocket. The water heater darkens the wallpaper above the sink – this can be said to be wear and tear but not precisely use. A milk float drifts past each morning – this can be said to be motion but it isn’t change. The hall and the stairs begin to smell of disinfectant – but this isn’t really a record of occupation, only an enigma.

‘Visit a street you used to know,’ someone once said to me, ‘and you can’t even remember which house you lived in. All it does is remind you again of something that happened there: something you’ve always remembered anyway.’

Pauline answered my letters in early April.

She was, she said, well.

Work was taking up her time, as usual, but the main reason she had been slow in replying was that she had moved into a new flat. The address was at the top of the letter. She had been offered a ninety-nine year lease on an old-fashioned service flat on the third floor. ‘It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things that always work out so well for me.’ One day the place in Camden had begun to seem shabby and oppressive, she was having difficulty with the landlord, difficulty with a broken window, difficulty sleeping; the next, this had turned up.

‘I feel so excited!’

She wasn’t sure whether she was in Bloomsbury or Fitzrovia, or some shadowy neglected quarter which had a share in both. I would probably remember the area, she said. I did. It was one of the quiet, expensive streets between the University and Tottenham Court Road. She had been lucky to get something there.

‘The front room is lovely, very tall and elegant, with a shallow bay window which looks out on to a garden. You can see the attic windows at the back of one of the little Gower Street hotels. People are already throwing them open in the evening and staring across London as if it’s the Promised Land!’ She always tried to spend part of the morning there. Spring had come early; the sun shone through the houseplants on the window sill, turning their leaves transparent and luminous; she read all morning, Elizabeth Taylor, V. S. Pritchett, ‘or I just stare at all my furniture, which is completely transfigured by such posh surroundings. The cats adore it!’

The only fly in the ointment was what she called ‘the Pit’.

The building had a deep central well, the tiled walls of which were shadowy even in the middle of the day and covered with a mass of thick black waste pipes. All the flats had at least one room which faced this well, and as soon as you opened a window on to it, Pauline complained, ‘to air the dining room or something’, you would smell everyone else’s cooking suddenly and very clearly for a moment – then it was gone – or hear their voices as if they were in the room behind you, ‘having some endless dreary argument about money, or an opera’. Down the Pit at all times of the day and night would come a cry – short, but very loud and penetrating – she could never identify.

‘Can you imagine?’ she asked me. ‘Especially on your own in the lavatory at half past two in the morning! It sounds exactly like a peacock.’

Sometimes an even more unnerving noise would float down the Pit, halfway between human speech and the barking of a dog, like an animal trying to talk. This was always accompanied by considerable coming and going in the flat immediately above hers – hurried footsteps, water turned on and off, furniture moved about.

Was it someone’s pet? She had no idea. ‘We all hear it, but if they’re ill up there, or they’re keeping some mad old relative, no one else in the building knows,’ she concluded, and turned the letter to other things. She was sorting out stock for the Harrogate Fair. She had got hold of a mint copy of
The Vodi
by John Braine, not valuable but one of her favourite books, ‘and
signed
. I shall never sell it on!’ She was in the middle of transferring stock from the fruit store in Stucley Place, which had become a bit too damp, to a basement in N9. ‘I’ve had to have heaters and dehumidifiers in there for a month, and a proper carpenter to build the shelves.’ Selling books was harder work than people supposed. ‘Just the sheer physical effort of moving them about.’ She was so worn out by all the to-ing and fro-ing she was thinking of buying a small van of some sort of make things easier. She took issue with my dream about Nina.

‘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.