Climbers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

is the same colour as the sky, and only a row of little outcrops marks the division between the two.
    These few buttresses of rough grit, heavily pebbled with quartz and perched like boulders on the skyline, are nice to come to on a summer evening, when the hang gliders lie out on the shallow slopes beneath them in the golden light like exhausted butterflies. The day I took the Polaroid we could hear each separate gust of wind building up miles across the moor before it burst round the arêtes on to us, whipped Normal’s rope out into a tight parabolic curve, and whirled off down the valley to strafe the sheep. There was snow packed into all the cracks. When we excavated it we found hard ice underneath, as shiny as solidified Superglue. Our noses ran. The wind pulled the strings of mucus out grotesquely, so that during the instant before they snapped they floated with all the elegance of spider-silk. Our fingers went numb, only to come back to life twenty or thirty feet up, at just the wrong moment, the size of bananas and throbbing with hot-aches.
    Eventually Normal had to give in and come down.
    ‘It’s no good. I can see what to do but I can’t convince myself to do it.’
    His hands were curled up and broken-looking from the cold. They were bleeding where he had knocked them without knowing on the rock. He pulled his mittens on with his teeth and for a while all three of us huddled beneath a big undercut, where it was a bit warmer. But the wind got in under the lip of it and drove ice into our faces, and soon that became a misery too.
    ‘It’s no good.’
    Normal and Sankey began to pack up the gear, stuffing ropes and harnesses untidily into their rucksacks.
    ‘It seems a bit brighter over there,’ I said.
    ‘It always seems a bit bloody brighter over there.’
    I was determined to climb something before I went home.
    ‘Why don’t we try the big corner?’ I suggested.
    I pulled myself up on an awkwardly sloping ledge, from which I would be able to reach out left for a good flake.
    ‘This looks easy enough. I’ll lead it.’
    Both feet shot from under me as I was trying to stand on it. I lowered myself down again quickly. In this way I went along the base of the outcrop trying climb after climb and never getting any higher than five or six feet above the ground. As usual I left a trail of equipment behind me – a coat thrown over a boulder, a Sticht plate hanging from a bush on a bit of coloured line, a small alloy wedge stuck in a crack. This neglect had become a kind of trademark. The other climbers had soon got used to it, and now they scoured the crag after me at the end of every day, picking up the things I had forgotten.
    ‘Got your Thermos flask, Mike, got your hat?’
    ‘Better check before we go.’
    ‘Is this Mike’s glove?’
    They egged me on.

 
     
     
     
    THREE

     
Dreams
     
     
     
     
    Normal’s obsession with litter prompted him to bring me photographs his wife had taken of cars and bedsteads and other junk half buried in the sand on the coast between Barmouth and Harlech, where they had recently spent a week in a caravan together. Empty ground stretched away to the caravan site under a heavy sky. Everything – the shingle belt, the frieze of corroded side panels and deformed chrome window frames, the sky itself – had a brownish tinge, as if she had exposed the film in an atmosphere of tars.
    ‘It would have been a really nice place,’ said Normal. ‘Apart from that.’
    His own photographs, of the moquette sofa on the Pennine Way, he had sent to the climbing magazines – there were three of them at the time, two monthly and one bi-monthly, all glossy – but he knew they would be returned. What these magazines wanted, he said, was good colour shots of well-known climbers laybacking on the tips of their fingers above an exotic valley. They weren’t interested in anything else. (Ideally, the climber should be soloing, but you could sometimes get away with a rope, as long as