Climbers: A Novel Read Free Page A

the winter out of my muscles. I would dance. But hanging high above the badminton players in that huge cold echoing hall with its stink of sweat and rubber soles, I could only pant and groan and slither back down to the floor.
    I sat in the changing rooms afterwards tired out, listening to a repetitive noise which I thought at first must be the sound of children shouting or singing in the swimming pool. Then I realised it was the wind I could hear, rising and falling about the bizarre cantilevered roof of the place.
    Two fat boys were washing their hair in the shower. The soap and water made them shine. They stood close together and watched me guardedly as I swilled the gymnast’s chalk off my hands so I could look at the cuts underneath, and only began to talk again, about different kinds of lager, when I went to get my clothes. They were just like fat pink seals, backing away from the hand outstretched on the ice. Was I a tourist or a sealer? Either way, shreds of skin hung off three fingers of my left hand where I had jammed and twisted the knuckles into a crack in the concrete wall. I am never quite clear what makes you hang on so hard, even when there is such a short way to fall.
    ‘Prawn cocktail crisps here, nice—’ said an oldish woman to her friend, walking up and down in front of the Vendepac machine on the floor above.
    ‘– yes, I’ve seen them dear, very nice.’
    They put some coins in, nothing happened, someone showed them what to do. When they had sat down again one of them said, raising her hands to the side of her head, palms inward, and moving them rapidly backwards and forwards as if demonstrating some kind of blinker, ‘I’m just not straightforward with a mechanical thing. You know.’
    (As I looked down at the badminton players their white faces had for a moment seemed to be swinging slightly to and fro
above
me.)
    The first time I went to that wall was for its official opening. Schofield, who had financed it, looked away when he spoke to you; his venality was deeply impressive. ‘Enjoy yourselves, lads!’ he called. It was free for today, or at least for an hour, so that the climbing press would write him up. ‘Remember we close at two.’ Sunday lunch time: thirty or forty of us stood in the hangar-like space, watched disapprovingly by some people who were trying to have a game of tennis, waiting for one of the great working-class climbers of the previous generation to christen it, then bless us as the inheritors of his tradition. Bemused-looking and pissed he made one or two jerky moves on the easiest of the problems and went back to the bar. In a low voice Schofield assured him he would never have to pay for his drinks here again. Any time he wanted to come he would be welcome here. They had wheeled out this exhausted man, with his Durham accent and his memories of death by stonefall on the Freney Pillar under the relentless telescopes of European journalists, so that the adventure sports trade could have its last good squeeze of him before he was forgotten; and as we left the hall the tennis players were already lined up to complain.
    ‘Tennis, badminton, squash, a sauna: you can have them all for twelve pounds more on your sub. Don’t forget, lads,’ said Schofield. ‘Don’t forget.’
    On the way back Normal parked the car on the edge of the moor, to photograph the things which had been dumped there. Normal had a gap in his teeth, he was hyperactive, full of suppressed violence: we had done rock climbs together all over Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Peak District, but nothing yet in Wales or Scotland. He had climbed whenever he could for fifteen years. He had worked on the railways until he fell off a train, then at a Manchester climbing shop, where I met him. On Mondays I signed his unemployment form for him. ‘I’ll never go back now.’ He ran about on the moor, appearing and disappearing in the rain and cloud. It was wet weather, killing weather. The south-west wind, full