Climbers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was brand new and pinned elegantly to the rock below him by a few well-spaced runners. Later, I was to hear shots like this called ‘the pornography of risk’, but this seemed a little too apt to be true, or anyway useful.)
    While we waited for the better weather at the hinge of March we spent the mornings in a cafe in the town, drinking tea. Out of one window you could see the estate agent’s and, across the Huddersfield Road, a shop selling motor parts; out of the other a very fat boy mopping a Volvo under the revetment of local stone, green with lichen and pocked with rusting bolts, at the back of the car-park. He paused to stare emptily ahead; reached inside the car suddenly and switched on the radio, which then made sobbing complaining noises like someone in the middle of a petty but damaging confession. The little man at Walker’s Men’s Wear, with its rattan screens and ailing
Monsteria
, jumped out smiling and waving his arms like a thing on a stick. A bit further down was Riverbank Antiques, a nice oblique building across a bridge. It had once been the abattoir but now they only slaughtered the middle-class tourist.
    ‘Where have all these chairs come from?’ the woman who served in the cafe would sometimes say. ‘I’m sure we’ve got too many this morning.’
    Like most climbers Normal was thinking about writing his autobiography.
    ‘I’d call it
Out on the Limits
,’ he said.
    I suspect he hoped I would help him with it.
    Dabbling in the sugar bowl with a spoon he said he had once had a dream (this would be part of the book) in which he was jamming his way up an endless perfect crack in some warm part of the world – he thought it might be Yosemite National Park in California. He knew by the very length of the crack that he wasn’t on a British cliff. ‘It was incredible. I was a thousand feet up and still going!’ The sun blazed down on his back, the air was as bright as alum solution held up in a glass, he felt as if he had been climbing for days. ‘But I wasn’t tired. Only thirsty.’ He was dressed in blue nylon shorts and his rock boots were of a new, efficient type with grey suede uppers, made in Spain. The crack was deep and cool, exactly the right size for his hands. ‘It was just off-vertical.’
    While he was telling this story two women came in. They had the soft golden-orange fur, turned-up noses, and complex, delicate, transparent little ears of marmosets.
    ‘I wonder how they go on for burials nowadays?’ said one of them.
    They laughed.
    ‘There’s hardly any call for it I suppose. They all get cremated.’
    They were sisters or cousins; mother and daughter. Normal gave them a long speculative look, and they cast like marmosets quick nervous glances at him as they sat down.
    ‘I felt totally confident,’ he went on. ‘It was hard work but every few moves I got a terrific foot-jam in and had a rest.’ The rock stretched away endlessly on either side of him empty of feature except for the crack, and a pale sandy colour much like freshly quarried millstone grit. ‘Imagine! A thousand feet of grit! More! That was how I knew it was a dream. I was on the biggest piece of gritstone the world had ever seen. I knew it would never end, and I would never put a foot wrong. It was the dream climb.’ There was empty space all round him, it ached away beneath the soles of his feet to the screes a thousand feet below: vibrant, receiving into itself his elation as he moved, only to give it back as a blessing.
    ‘It sounds ideal,’ I said.
    As he was looking into the crack to place his next jam, though, he saw something move. It was another hand, and it was reaching out for his own.
    ‘It wasn’t attached to anything. It crept out of some ferns growing in the back of the crack, where there was water sweating out of the rock. It got closer. I knew it lived in the crack: I knew everything about it.’
    It was this ‘knowing everything about it’ which made him let go and fall, all