Climbers: A Novel (21 page)

Mick shrugged. They had been having this argument all the way back to his house. ‘You’re talking blood loss either way,’ he said. He drank some beer. ‘If unattended, death in ten minutes.’

‘He was still alive when he was found.’

‘Yes, but ’ow long ’ad he bin there? Anyway, all that useless dickhead Andy did was to see that he was still breathing, then ring police. If he’d had the sense to listen for bowel sounds, feel for guarding, whatever, we’d ’ave ended up knowing
summat
. I thought,’ he said angrily, ‘he was supposed to have been on the first aid course.’

‘Come on. He throws up if he cuts his finger.’

They couldn’t agree. Earnshaw himself arrived, but would only look at the ornaments on the mantelpiece and mumble shyly, ‘I couldn’t see how he’d fall. Not from there.’ He was seventeen or eighteen, a boy with a big red face and very short hair, who had once been a punk but who now – he confided to me – wanted to join the RAF and fly fighter planes. He was an enthusiastic climber but rarely did anything more sophisticated than pull himself about with his meaty, powerful hands. ‘You know how you are when you see something like that,’ he tried to remind us. ‘I was talking to him all the time, as if he could hear me. I was all fingers and thumbs taking his pulse.’

Later, when the evening paper reported the accident under the headline
LOCAL CLIMBER IN DEATH PLUNGE
, we learned nothing new.

‘They’re giving it out as a broken back,’ Mick said in disbelief.

He read out, ‘ “. . . died immediately from back injuries . . .” ’ He screwed the paper up suddenly and threw it at Andy. ‘Broken back’s the last bloody thing it was,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t know why they called us out anyway. It’s only four hundred yards from a road.’

Just after the paper was delivered there was a knock at the back door and we heard a cheerful voice say,

‘Here’s your sausages, Betty. Can I borrow his spare crash helmet?’

Before his mother could get a word in Mick shouted, ‘No he fucking can’t!’ More quietly, he said to the rest of us, ‘Let the fucker shell out for his own fucking crash helmet.’

After that everyone started to go home for their tea. Mick asked me to stay behind. The others said goodbye to his mum from the kitchen doorway, while the dog, pushing its way agitatedly back and forth between them, trod heavily on their feet. It was ‘team night’ that night anyway; though, as Bob Almanac said, they wouldn’t do much but talk about Sankey. ‘We’d be better discussing what’s going to ’appen when some fucking holiday flight misses Manchester airport in the fog and fetches up on Black Hill,’ Mick warned them, ‘and we’re the poor fuckers that ’ave to decide who’s worth fetching off and who isn’t—’

‘Now I’ve had enough of that language,’ his mother said.

‘I only have to cut me finger to spew up,’ Andy Earnshaw explained to me when it was his turn to go. Then he said apologetically to Mick, ‘You know me, Mick.’

‘Piss off home, Andy,’ said Mick. ‘You did well enough.’

As soon as the front room was empty again he told me, ‘Trouble is, there’s no real need for a rescue team on these moors. There’s not the traffic. Only reason they keep us on is in case of a big air disaster. If summat came down between here and the Woodhead Road there’d be upward of a hundred casualties to find and bring off.’ He picked the local paper up, gave it a tired look. ‘ ’Ow much use we’re going to be is a different matter if they won’t give us full responsibility. Look at Andy, it’s a hobby to him.’ After a pause he said, ‘Look, do you want a cup of tea or owt? Thing is, I told police I’d get Sankey’s sister’s address, save someone else going over there. I’ve got the key to his back door, but I’m not just right keen to go on my own.’

Outside Sankey’s cottage the trench was baking quietly in the sun, a few flies buzzing over the parapet of hardened earth thrown up in front of it. Inside, the cottage was cool and still; it smelled faintly of Sankey’s feet.

Downstairs a jar of Nescafé stood in the sunlight in the middle of the table near the window, breakfast crumbs scattered around it; copies of
Exchange & Mart
and
Which Car?
lay in a drift on the floor by his chair, which was still pulled up to the fireplace as if it was March. (‘No sense in getting cold, kid.’) Upstairs we found the bath full of washing, a knotted mass of stuff soaking in five inches of brown water. Mick stared into it and said, ‘See them trousers? He got them off Bob Almanac’s father, oh, two or three years since. They were knackered then – Bob’s father were going to bin them.’ He stirred the washing vaguely with one hand, in case something else he recognised came to light; it turned and rolled slowly, baring an underbelly of yellowed shirts and tangled underpants.

‘I’ll just let water out, then ’ave a look round.’

I left him to it and went back downstairs, where in the sideboard drawer I unearthed two building society passbooks and some cheque stubs. There was Sankey’s passport, with its curiously boyish photograph taken years ago in preparation for some trip to Colorado or the Ardennes. (The wavy golden hair, brushed back, made him look like John Harlin, the ‘young god’ sacrificed by his own myth to the Eiger Direct in 1966; but then Sankey was of that generation.) There was his medical card.

Other than that, only old copies of
Mountain
magazine. If you sent Sankey a postcard, he propped it on the back of the sideboard. He had cards there two or three years old, from Norway, Morocco, the Cairngorms – ‘Well this trip we got King Rat 950 feet on Creag an Dubh Loch see you, Gaz’ – some of which were quite curled and faded. I found a pair of spectacles I had never seen him wear. All Sankey’s things – the chipped Baby Belling on the draining board; the bits of unmatched blue and fawn carpet; the one-bar fire, the transistor radio, the stereo with its handful of dog-eared albums from the early Seventies – had a used but uncooperative look. He had assembled them, and while he was still alive his personality had held them together; now they were distancing themselves from one another again like objects in a second-hand shop. The electrical equipment had old-fashioned cloth-wound flex.

‘He didn’t seem to keep letters,’ I called up to Mick. There was no answer, but I heard a drawer sliding open. My knee had begun to ache.

I sat back on my heels to look at the Nescafé jar in the sunlight. At the beginning of every day Sankey had boiled a kettle of water to make coffee; and then, to save the cost of boiling it again, carefully poured what remained into a Thermos flask, which in winter he stood in the hearth. I thought that if I narrowed my eyes I might just be able to see him at the table. ‘Sugar, kid? I always have a bit myself. I like a bit of sugar! Hah ha.’ A fly settled on the table: rose up uncertainly: settled again. A car went down the village street. I heard Mick say to himself in a low, astonished way,

‘Fucking hell, look at this.’

He had found a pile of magazines under the bed. They went back several years, copies of
Men Only
,
Whitehouse
, and something called
Young Girls in Full Colour
which featured smiling but haggard twenty-year-olds in pleated school skirts. Mick turned the pages, giving every so often an awkward laugh; and then, encouraging me to put into words something he couldn’t, said, ‘What do you mek of it, eh?’ and ‘What do you mek of that?’

This reminded me so clearly of Normal that when I looked at the bright, slippery, heavily laminated covers it was Normal I could see, running about in the teeming rain on the moor at Greenfield, taking snaps of scattered children’s clothes. For a moment, I could see his wife, too.

I tipped the pile over so that it spilled across Sankey’s bedroom carpet, which was newer than you would expect, with a dense, violent, foliate pattern in blacks, reds and greens.

‘People have to do something,’ I said.

Mick stared at me.

‘Put them back under the bed,’ I advised him.

Was I annoyed with him for noticing them at all – valeting the scenic car-parks, he must see worse every day – or only for drawing them to my attention? ‘Do what you like,’ I said irritably. ‘I’m going out for a minute.’

That evening the air was so still I could hear rooks cawing and people mowing lawns a mile down the valley; everything was caught up in the heat like a landscape embedded in glass. On a hot evening the rock itself seems to sweat, making an easy move quite desperate and insecure. Up behind the house, some children were running about in the grass between the boulders. They stopped to watch me while I tried to repeat the problem Sankey had fallen off. From a precarious mantelshelf near the top of the overhanging wall, you had to make a long reach, feet off, the whole of your weight bearing down through the heel of one hand. Every time you stretched upwards to touch with two fingertips the crucial flaky hold, you felt your whole body twist and shift uneasily: because of this, local climbers had named the problem The Torquer. I went up; came down again to tighten my laces; went up again. I suppose people had been doing the same thing all afternoon, most of them better climbers than me. ‘Can’t you even do that, mister?’ the children shouted.

Nobody knew I was up there. Anyone not at ‘team night’ would be over on the cool, lichenous, north-facing crags at Pule Hill and Shooter’s Nab, struggling with unfamiliar bulges and overhangs until sore hands drove them to sit down and watch the sun, a flat orange disc in a sky the colour of pigeon feathers, preside over salients of moorland which seemed to be painted on separate, endlessly receding panes of glass. Another day, Sankey would have been there himself. ‘I hate the first two months of the year,’ he had told me. ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

I remembered myself answering: ‘Nothing like the summer.’

By the time I got back to the cottage Mick had done the washing in the bath and pegged it out. ‘I thought I might as well rinse it through,’ he said. ‘Save someone else the trouble.’ We watched it for a moment or two, hanging slackly from the line in the gold light. It was already beginning to dry, Mick thought. He would never have done his own washing, which he left to his mum. ‘What else ’ave I done, then?’ he said. ‘I bet you can’t tell me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What?’

‘Well at least ’ave a
look
, you dozy sod.’

While I fought with The Torquer he had filled Sankey’s trench in and stamped the earth down on top of it.

‘I put them magazines in it,’ he said. ‘Buried them. Be best.’ When he saw my expression, he lost his confidence again. ‘It’s just that his sister might not have wanted to see them,’ he explained. ‘Look here.’ He had found Sankey’s address book in the top flap of a rucksack. ‘She lives in London,’ he said. ‘I never expected that.’

The funeral took place down there about a week later.

‘We were all chaotically pissed the day Doug Ainley got buried,’ Normal told me on the phone the night before. ‘I’ve never seen a food fight like it. I took some great photos.’ When he turned up at Huddersfield station the next morning he was carrying a huge Russian five-by-three plate camera he had bought a week ago. He was late, and he thought he might have packed the wrong film for it. All the way to London on the train he drove Bob Almanac mad.

‘For Christ’s sake, Normal. Point it somewhere else.’

‘Click,’ Normal said.

‘It’s his new toy,’ Mick told Bob. ‘He won’t stop playing wi’ it now till he’s broken it.’

‘Piss off, Mick,’ Normal said equably. He decided that, after all, the film he had would work. ‘It ought to anyway. Click.’

Climbers came down from all over Yorkshire and Lancashire, people Sankey had known since he started climbing in the late Fifties with the old Phoenix Club. There was a suggestion that, for old times’ sake, Pete Livesey and Jill Lawrence might be there; Normal said later that he saw them in the cemetery, but they left early. I didn’t notice them.

Sankey’s sister had decided to have him buried at Nunhead in South London. She lived nearby. Behind its high eroded brick walls the cemetery was being reclaimed continually from a waste. Even as the service took place, gangs from Southwark council were working off the wider, less overgrown gravel paths, chopping out bramble and elder from the half-forgotten graves nestling under the Ivydale Road wall. Sankey’s blond wood coffin, with its bouquets of yellow dahlias, was wheeled out of the hearse on a kind of height-adjustable trolley, his grave disguised to the last with strips of florist’s grass. Rain dripped mercilessly into the hole, fogging the cellophane on the bunches of flowers laid out in rows beside it like the equipment of some expedition into unknown country.

The climbers had turned up in their best suits. They were shy. Already a little speechless to find themselves in London, they were further bemused by having to wear clothes which they had come to associate with the licensed anarchy of wedding receptions and team dinners. I felt sorry for them. They stood in a restless, downcast group in the rain, genuinely upset by Sankey’s death yet barred by convention from pushing each other into the grave to relieve their distress. Normal’s photographs show them grinning seedily and apologetically above the flared trousers, brown safari-style jackets and kipper ties of Manchester market traders in 1978.

As soon as the ceremony was over the chainsaws started up again. In the general drift towards the gate on Limesford Road I found Mick talking to an old woman. ‘I came from a generation that didn’t travel,’ she was telling him loudly. Sixty or sixty-five years of age, she had a perfect grey goatee beard and moustache. This, combined with her round spectacle frames and a pale green hat like a furry turban, gave her the air of some near-Eastern thinker at the end of his life: saintly, androgynous, but still vitally interested in the world. ‘It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t afford it, you see,’ she was at pains to assure him, ‘as that we didn’t regard it as a
right
.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Mick politely. ‘I’ve bin everywhere wi’ Scouts when I were a lad,’ he boasted. ‘They feed you well in the States, I’ll say that – beefburgers this size.’ He demonstrated with his hands. ‘I’ve bin to see Space Shuttle on one of them trips.’