Climbers: A Novel Read Free Page B

of sulphur from the badly managed factories in Stockport and Stalybridge, plastered his thin hair to his face, and his arms and legs stuck out of a long, bulbous waistcoat made of Chinese down. As he hopped about trying to attract my attention he looked like an overgrown insect, a species doomed, unknown, used to a better climate.
    ‘What’s out there?’ I called, pointing at the slimy ribbon of the Pennine Way, but not quite meaning that.
    ‘Floating Lights Quarry,’ he said. ‘Where I died. Come out of that car before I drag you out. Look at this.’
    He laughed.
    Abandoned to the streaming mist, there on the exact watershed of the grouse moor, the exact border between Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, sixteen hundred feet above sea level, giving to these surroundings the rakish, cosy, fake-surrealist air of a cigarette advert, was a three-piece suite out of someone’s front room in Hyde: light tan; moquette; sodden. We sat in the armchairs, facing out towards Stand Edge and Floating Lights, across lines of peat hags like black combers rolling in from an infinitely polluted sea. The car-park bobbed gently on the psychic swell. All around its edges at our feet was the site of a murder. The icy pools of the watershed were full of children’s clothing. Acrylic dungarees and tracksuits; jumpers and quilted polyester dressing gowns; cotton dresses, slips with a bit of cheap broderie, knickers and little teenage bras. Dozens of plastic dustbin bags had burst and were slowly spewing their contents out on to the moor. Whoever had put them there had preferred bright colours. It looked as if whole families of Asian children had been murdered among the collapsed cardboard boxes, the heaps of industrial sawdust, the used Durex and detached pages of
Spank
. Bare buttocks popped out into the weather. Grey smiles woke up suddenly among the pulp.
    We poked about half-heartedly in this stuff for a bit, then went home. We had the photographs, we’d had our free go on Schofield’s wall. Who knew what might be buried further out, among the more distant pools beyond the NO TIPPING sign?
    ‘I still can’t believe that bloody sofa!’
    Some climbers Normal had introduced me to:
    Bob Almanac looked like an ageing butcher’s boy – tough, stocky, round-faced and cheerful, impeccably polite and very competent. I watched him cleaning a new route at Running Hill Pits, chopping turf and loose rock out of the crack-system with quick deft strokes from the pick of an obsolete ice-hammer. The rain soaked his curly hair as he dangled patiently from the abseil rope, forty feet up in a quarry like a dark slot in the hillside above Diggle. ‘Anyone else would have gone home an hour ago.’ Bob had spent his life getting wet in places like this – steep, cold, greasy with a kind of bright green lichen which turns into paste as soon as your hand touches it; places which greet your human energy with resentment – and he didn’t seem to notice it any more.
    With Almanac you always met his friend David. David was a fireman, whose prematurely white hair gave him a kind but slightly overdressed look, like a professional snooker player. The story was that he once
caught
another climber, who had fallen off while soloing in the quarry above Dovestones Reservoir.
    Normal explained, ‘It’s his training. They’re trained to instinctively save life, firemen.’
    David had never said anything to me about it, and whether he was being shy or noncommittal wasn’t clear. Dovestones Quarry is loose. Most people would wince away from the shadow of a bird there. David had held out his arms, so there was more to it than training. I observed him discreetly, perhaps hoping things would repeat themselves.
    ‘Too wet to make anything out of this today,’ conceded Almanac eventually, dropping his hammer in disgust. ‘Look out below.’ Mucking around underneath, Normal had got himself showered with earth.
    Sankey was frail, lantern-jawed, pale-cheeked. It was as