Touching the Void (25 page)

‘Yes.’ He said it in a choked whisper, and I felt the unstoppable flood of hot tears filling my eyes. How much he had been through I could only guess at. A second later I was asleep. I awoke to a hubbub of voices and laughter. Girls’ voices chattered excitedly in Spanish close by the tent, and I heard Simon talking to Richard about the donkeys. I opened my eyes slowly to the unfamiliar glow of the tent walls. Sun dappled the red and green fabric, and shadows passed by every few seconds. It seemed as if there were a bazaar in full trade outside the tent. I remembered with a shock the events of a few hours before. I was safe; it was true. I smiled drowsily and moved my arms against the silken downy sides of the sleeping bag, luxuriating in the feeling of homecoming. It had been so bad, I thought idly in half-sleep, so very bad.

An hour later I started from sleep to a voice calling my name from far away. I felt confused. Who was calling me? Sleep dragged me softly back to the warmth of the bag, but the voice kept calling: ‘Come on, Joe, wake up.’

I rolled my head to the side and looked Wearily at the heads crowded into the doorway. Simon knelt there with a steaming mug of tea in his hand, and behind him the two girls peered curiously over his shoulder. I tried to sit up but couldn’t move. A great weight was pressing down on to my chest, pinning me to the ground. I swung my arm feebly in an effort to haul myself up but it flopped limp at my side. Arms reached round my shoulders and pulled me into a sitting position: ‘Drink this, and try to eat. You need it.’

I cupped the mug in my gloved hands and crouched over it, feeling the steam wetting my face. Simon moved away but the girls remained squatting near the door smiling at me. There was something unreal about them sitting there in the sun, watching me drink tea. Their wide-hipped peasant skirts and flower-strewn hats seemed very strange. What were they doing here? My mind seemed to be running off at tangents from second to second so that I couldn’t fully grasp what was happening. I had got here safely. I understood the tents, and Simon and Richard, but not these weirdly dressed Peruvians. I decided that the best thing to do was ignore them and concentrate on my tea. It scalded my mouth with the first sip. The gloves which protected my frozen fingers and the lack of sensation in my hands made me forget how hot it would be. I gasped and blew quickly, trying to cool the tip of my tongue. The girls giggled.

An endless stream of food and drink followed during the next half-hour, along with quick snippets of encouragement and information about what was happening. There was some delay because Spinoza was being bloody-minded about payment for the mules. I could hear Simon’s voice getting louder and more infuriated with every passing minute. I heard Richard translating calmly to Spinoza. The girls occasionally looked over at Simon and frowned. Then suddenly they were gone, and there was no more need to stay awake. I slumped forward and drifted into sleep, letting the chaotic Spanish-English row fade into the background.

A hand shook me awake again. It was Simon:

‘You’ll have to get out of the tent now. We’re packing up. He’s finally agreed on a price, and if he changes his mind again I’m going to rip his bloody head off!’

I tried to shuffle round to move out of the tent and I was horrified by how weak I had become. I fell sideways as my arm buckled beneath me when I was half out of the tent, and I couldn’t push myself up again. Simon lifted me gently and dragged me clear of the sun.

‘Simon, I’ll never be able to cope with the mule. You don’t know how weak I am.’ ‘It’ll be all right. We’ll help you.’

‘Help me! I can hardly stay awake, let alone sit up. How can you help me ride a mule, for Christ’s sake? I need rest. I really do. I need sleep and food. I’ve only had three hours’ sleep since I got down…I…’

‘You’ve got no choice. You’re going today and that’s that.’

I tried to protest but he was having none of it. He walked over to the tent and returned with the firstaid box. Richard passed me another mug of tea while Simon handed me my quota of pills. Then they left me and began dismantling the camp. I lay on my side watching them until I couldn’t fight off the appalling drowsy weakness any longer. The deterioration scared me deeply and made me wonder anxiously whether I had burnt myself out completely. It occurred to me that I was nearer to death than when I had been alone. The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life. I tried to stay awake, fighting to shake the sleep away and keep my eyes open, but the sleep won. I dozed fitfully, waking to the babble of different languages and dozing off again to the recurrent thoughts of comas, collapse and unwaking sleep. It seemed a long time before Simon came to me again. I heard his voice talking to Richard and looked up. He stood by my side examining me with a worried expression on his face: ‘Hello. Are you all right?’

‘Yes. I’m okay.’ I had abandoned any idea of resisting the plan to leave.

‘You don’t look it. We’ll be leaving soon. Perhaps it would be better if you sat up and tried to liven yourself up a bit. I’ll get you some tea.’

I laughed at the thought of being livened up but managed to sit up unaided all the same. Eventually Spinoza led his old mule to me and Simon helped me to my feet. Leaning heavily on his shoulder, I hopped towards the mule, which waited patiently. It looked a pleasant-natured, calm old animal, which encouraged me. As I was about to be lifted into the saddle Richard suddenly called out: ‘Hang on, Simon! We’ve forgotten his money.’

A hobbling search then began with Richard and Simon supporting me on either side as I directed them from rock to rock, vainly trying to remember where I had hidden the money belt. Spinoza and the girls looked puzzled. We laughed happily until at last we found the belt, and held it up for them to see. They smiled politely but clearly didn’t understand what was so important about a tattered piece of tubular climbing tape.

The saddle was one of those old-style high-pommelled Western affairs with huge cups of carved leather for stirrups and ornate silver inlays round the pommel. A Karrimat had been bent over the saddle as a cushion and to keep my injured leg swinging out free from the mule’s flank. We set off down the river bed at a steady walk, with Simon and Richard walking on each side of me, keeping a watchful eye on my condition.

The next two days were a blur of exhaustion and pain. I couldn’t squeeze my thighs together to steer the mule, and it seemed to walk into every tree, boulder and wall that we passed in the twentyhour journey to Cajatambo. Even with Simon spiking it with a sharpened snow stake, it still blundered on, and I screamed and howled impotently until the pain died. Somehow I managed not to fall. The familiar landscape drifted past me blurred by pain and exhaustion. At the end of each day childish tantrum feelings would rush through me. I no longer had the strength, or desperation, to cope with this added torment. I wanted it finished, wanted to get home. Simon mothered me down through the bad times, walking back and forth on the trail, goading the donkey driver to increase his pace, exhorting the man pulling my mule to take care, and walking close by my side when sleep and weakness threatened to topple me from the saddle. He took my watch from me, and halted the march every time a new drug had to be administered. Painkillers, Ronicol, antibiotics, and the inevitable tea. Tempers frayed around me as I drifted in and out of sleep while the mule walked doggedly on through high passes, steep rocky valleys and lush pampas, but Simon stayed close by my side, encouraging some faint boost of strength whenever I pleaded for a rest. Cajatambo was a mayhem of hassle as Simon battled with the police to hire a pick–up truck, and then both he and Richard fought off the hordes of villagers trying to climb into the back for a free lift to Lima. At the last minute a young man approached the truck. I lay stretched out on a mattress in the open back. He looked sorrowfully at me, seeing the crude splint on my leg. A policeman with a machine pistol slung across his chest stepped forward and stopped Richard trying to remove the last villager from the truck.

‘Señor, please for you to help this man. His legs are bad. Six days he waits. You take him to hospital…yes?’

There was a shocked silence as we all turned to examine the old man slumped beside me in the back of the truck. He looked imploringly at me, and then, grimacing with pain, he rolled his hips and flicked aside the crude sacking covering his legs. The crowd was suddenly deathly silent, and I heard the sharp intake of breath from Simon close by me. The man’s legs were smashed. I had a brief glimpse of two distorted legs, ripped-open raw wounds, bloodstains, and the deep angry purple colour of infection. A sharp, sweet stench rose from the blanket as he replaced it gingerly over his legs.

‘My God!’ I felt sick.

‘He is bad. Yes?’

‘Bad! He hasn’t a hope!’

‘I’m sorry. My English is not good—’

‘It’s okay. We’ll take him, and this man,’ I interrupted.

‘Thank you, Señors. You are kind men.’

The driver was an alcoholic who supplied us with generous quantities of beer. Beer, cigarettes and painkillers gave a cloudy film to my memory of those three days struggling back to Lima. Late that night we arrived at the hospital. The old man, we were told, could not afford a good hospital like this. We said it was no problem and paid the driver for the hire of the truck, with instructions to take the man to his hospital. As Richard helped me out of the truck, Simon gave the man’s son our last remaining supplies of painkillers and antibiotics. The truck pulled away into a muggy hot Lima night, and from my wheelchair I saw the old man trying feebly to wave his thanks before it turned the corner of the street.

The hospital was frighteningly out-of-date by our standards, but there were clean white sheets, tinned music from the ward speakers, and pretty nurses, none of whom spoke a word of English. They wheeled me briskly down the green and white corridors, with Simon hurrying beside me unable to relinquish me from his care. The enormity of what we had been through was just beginning to sink in.

An hour later, Simon and Richard had been brusquely told to leave. After being X-rayed, my stinking climbing clothes had been taken away to be washed, and I was sat, naked, on a set of chairscales as a pretty nurse took my pulse, noted my weight and drew a blood sample from my arm. I turned to see the scales and was horrified. Seven and a quarter stones! Three stones…God, I’d lost three stones! She grinned cheerfully at me before scooping me off the chair and lowering me gently into a deep bath of hot disinfected water. When she had done with me I was put to bed, and instantly fell asleep. An hour later she was back, this time with a concerned-looking doctor. He explained something frightening and complicated about my blood sample while she punctured a vein in my wrist and set up a glucose drip. I woke in the night from dreadful nightmare memories of the crevasse, soaked in sweat, and panicked to screaming point until the nurses came with words of kindness that I couldn’t understand.

I lay there for two indescribable days without food, painkillers or antibiotics until my insurance was confirmed by telex and they deigned to operate on me. They came for me early in the morning. A pre-med injection in my arm an hour earlier had reduced me to a familiar enfeebled, barely conscious state. Two people, masked, wearing green, muttered unintelligibly at me as they wheeled me down seemingly endless tiled corridors. It wasn’t until we neared the operating theatre that the fear in my stomach rose up as panic. I mustn’t go through with this! Must stop them. Wait until you get home, for the love of God, don’t let them do it.

‘I don’t want the operation.’

I said it calmly. I thought that I had said it clearly, but they did not answer. Perhaps the drug has affected my speech? I repeated the sentence. One of them nodded at me, but they didn’t stop. Then it hit me. They don’t understand English. I tried to sit up but someone pushed me back on to the pillows. I shouted, panic-stricken, for them to stop. The trolley clattered through the swing doors of the operating theatre. A man spoke to me in Spanish. His voice was melodic. He was trying to calm me, but the sight of him checking a syringe made me struggle to a half-sitting position. ‘Please. I don’t—’

A strong hand pressed me back. Another gripped my arm and I felt the slight pain of the needle. I tried to lift my head but somehow it had doubled in weight. Turning to the side I saw a tray of instruments. Above me bright lights came on, and the room began to swim before my eyes. I had to say something…had to stop them. Darkness slipped over the lights and slowly all sounds muffled down to silence.

Postscript

June 1987. Hunza Valley, Karakoram Himalayas, Pakistan.

I watched the two small figures gradually dwindle into invisibility on the bleak hillside above me. Andy and Jon were going for the summit of the unclimbed 20,000-foot Tupodam. I was alone again in the mountains, but I had chosen to be.

I turned away and tended the little gas stove heating my second cup of coffee. The movement made my knee ache. I swore irritably and leant forward to massage the pain away. Arthritis. The scars of six operations stood out lividly on the distorted joint. At least the wounds in my mind had healed better than these.

The doctors had told me I would get arthritis. They had said the whole knee-joint would have to be removed within the next ten years: but then they had said a lot of things, few of which were true. ‘You will never bend the knee again, Mr Simpson…You will have a permanent limp. You’ll never climb again…’

They were right about the arthritis, though, I thought ruefully as I turned off the stove and glanced anxiously back to the hillside. The first sharp stab of fear for them tremored through me. Come back safe. At least do that, I whispered to the now silent hills. Given fine weather they should be down in three days. I knew it would be a long wait.