Climbers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

washbasin taps. ‘Hey mister!’ he appealed. ‘Do you know if this
works
? I can’t get anything out.’ The lavatory cubicles were full of the smell of hawthorn, strange and lulling in a place like that, which overpowered even the reek of piss.
    ‘I advised him to try pressing,’ Sankey would later maintain. ‘He did have a dog though. I saw it. He did have a dog. Ha ha.’
    Although I had first heard it from him Normal claimed not to believe this story, which was typical of Sankey’s gentleness and obliquity. I couldn’t understand why. Two months before, it had been, ‘Sankey does
boulder problems
in his back garden,’ Sankey could do no wrong, ‘Oh you must meet Sankey!’ Now I had, it was, ‘Well . . .’
    It snowed again before the end of February, poor sleety stuff at first, driven in from the south-west on a blustery wind. It settled for an hour or two, then mud like melted brown sugar became visible through it in streaks and feathers on the hillsides; and down in Huddersfield the raw damp air soon turned it transparent and flushed it into the drains. Old men shuffled through the slush to collect their pensions at the Northumberland Street post office, which they left smelling strongly of clothes stored for a long time in a damp place.
    ‘Wind’s in thaw quarter,’ they advised one another.
    ‘Aye, it’s in thaw quarter all right. They can’t get these causeways cleared of it soon enough for me.’
    That night in the villages along the edge of the moor, spindrift eddied stealthily in the almost lemon yellow light of the sodium lamps, plastering the walls, furring the doors and padlocks of the coal sheds, piling up in the straw-filled ruts of the farm yards until they were covered up bland and spotless. When Sankey came home from work the wind had changed, thunder growled and banged distantly above it. By the next morning he thought the waterfall in Issue Clough might be frozen hard enough to climb: there were jackets of ice on the electricity supply cables where they drooped slackly from barn to barn, icicles developing along them at intervals like the spines and barbels of pale exotic fish; long lines of icicles hung from the corrugated roof of the milking shed. But by mid-day when, bundled up like a middle-aged farmer’s wife in a dirty nylon anorak, he plodded through the village to get coal, his hands hanging in front of him, they had begun to melt. Light poured in over the blackened threshold of the old smokehouse, falling among the eroded beams on to a clutter of broken ladders. A few dry beech leaves blew about in the heap of coal. As he stood there looking in, thunder banged tinnily again over towards Huddersfield.
    We went to see him at the weekend and found him drowsily watching
Grandstand
. In the winter the downstairs room of his cottage was always full of fumes from the grate which slowly sent him to sleep. ‘The young man,’ said the television, ‘whose odds have fallen so dramatically from eighty to one to ten to one overnight.’ Sankey turned it off and gave us instant coffee grey with powdered milk, then hunched his shoulders and folded his arms, bending forward in his chair to gaze into the hearth.
    ‘No drink seems hot enough to me today,’ he apologised. ‘Ha ha. Everything seems to go down lukewarm today.’
    Normal eyed the coffee dubiously.
    ‘As long as it doesn’t come up the same way.’
    ‘You’d have to be mental,’ Sankey said, ‘to go climbing in this.’
    Nevertheless you can see him on the Polaroid picture I took that afternoon, his bright orange waterproof jacket blowing out behind him like a comic book cape as he stands anxiously looking up at Normal who is stalled out halfway up the crag. The picture deteriorated in some way – perhaps because of the cold – soon after it was taken, chemical changes giving the light a dead green cast and making the rock look black and featureless. Normal seems to be pasted on to it, one arm raised wearily. The snow