Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick
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it was cool,’ the climber carried on, ‘but I sure could have done with a rack like yours though. You must be planning on something hard . . . Aurora, Pacific Ocean Wall, maybe Lost in America?’ He reeled off some of the harder routes.
Don’t tell them.
‘Not sure,’ I said, not adding that I’d ticked those routes over the last five years.
‘Wyoming Sheep Ranch?’ asked the other, crouching down to sift through my rack of skyhooks, tiny hooks of steel designed to latch onto holds as small as a matchstick. The Ranch was one of the hardest and most sought after routes on El Cap, its crazy myth-busting name giving away nothing of the danger involved.
‘No, sounds a bit too loose,’ I said, as I started laying out my knife-blade pegs, sorting them in size from the smallest scalpel-thin pegs, up to those of butter-knife thickness, each invaluable for hairline cracks.
‘Come on, tell us what you’ve got planned,’ said the tall climber, now looking at my birdbeaks, tiny tomahawk-shaped hooked pegs, their blades as small as a fingernail, to be used when knifeblades were too fat to fit. ‘You must be planning something hard with this lot. We won’t tell.’
I set down a couple of Lost Arrow pegs, thick chunky steel pegs for cracks too large for knife-blades, and felt their weight as they passed from my fingers to the tarp, imagining the sound of them driving home in the rock.
A ranger passed by on a mountain bike and smiled at us, no doubt making a mental note to come back later and check we’d all paid our camping fees.
‘We know who you are,’ said the climber with the scabbed nose. ‘You’re Andy. You’re hardcore.’
If only he knew.
I laughed, but it felt nice for someone to think I was good at something for a change. For most of the last few years I’d just felt more and more useless—the harder the route, the greater my apparent inadequacies. I didn’t see myself as a climber, yet climbing consumed me. Perhaps my problem was being married to someone who saw climbing only as a negative; there was no room for hero worship or ego with Mandy. She saw through the bullshit. The greater the climb the greater the pain for her. She saw it as an end-game. Her mother had died when she was six. Her father had kept them apart so as to make it easier. She didn’t remember her, only the loss. Now she thought I would die and leave her too. No climb, no matter how hard, would impress her, only my return.
‘The Reticent Wall,’ I said almost sheepishly.
Their jaws dropped, their mouths opened, but the words were almost too scary to say in the confines of this valley where they meant so much.
‘Holy fuck, Andy,’ the tall climber said as he dropped the bird-beaks and straightened up. ‘You seem like a nice guy, be careful.’
‘I will,’ I said with a laugh that was designed to hide my embarrassment, turning my head back to the task at hand to signal I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘I mean it, man.’ He paused. ‘Be careful.’
I finished selecting gear and began placing each rack of hardware in haul bags ready for tomorrow, when I’d carry them up to the base of the climb and then begin fixing my ropes over the next two days.
When the gear was packed, I sat on a nearby picnic table and sketched out the food I would need, how much water to take, and anything I had to buy before I left—wet wipes, batteries for my Walkman, sun-cream.
I pulled out the book I’d brought for my trip—The Periodic Table by Primo Levi—and opened it to reveal two photos. They were poor-quality shots of Ella and Mandy, poor quality because I knew they would get trashed on the climb and probably lost. One was of Ella sitting in her high chair, red tights poking out beneath the table, a cowboy hat on her head. It was her second birthday. The second was the reflection of Mandy, Ella and me in a shop window, taken in Scarborough a few months before. Ella is on my shoulders, her hands resting on my head, Mandy is standing beside me, her arm through mine. We’re all smiling. The smiles seemed so long ago.
Why weren’t they enough?
They were then.
They are now.
I sat for a while and tried to feel the calmness of the place around me, the call of birds, the gentle creak of the trees, the low hum of the occasional car passing by. It would be nice to stay a while and be normal, to sit with other climbers and talk shop, maybe even get my ego stroked some more.
There would be no peace. The drums were beating inside me.
If you want to be happy again, you have to go.
FOUR
Pebbledashed
The perfect life I had known changed when I was seven, my tiny seaside house swapped for a damp top-floor maisonette in a tower block in the city of Hull. I retreated inside myself and fed on memories. I wanted my old bedroom. My old house. My school. My friends. My toys. To turn back the clock and sit on our garden fence and see my dad coming home across the field. I wanted things to be as they had been. I wanted my dad. My old life became nothing more than a film in my head that I would watch for the rest of my life.
From my bedroom you could see the Humber estuary to the south, its waters brown like cheap chocolate and slow with silt, pollution, and history. The hills and ocean of my past, with its freedom and space and happiness, had changed overnight to mountains of concrete, tower blocks with families packed in tight; a world of spiralling stairs and piss-stinking lifts, a dark and dirty world beside a dirty river, a body of water that matched my surroundings perfectly, just as the sea had matched my previous life.
We had stepped down from the train into a dark city. We might as well have landed on an alien world.
We had had very little before, and had been poor, but now we had even less and were poorer still. My mum, however, was forever strong and positive. She never let her guard slip, even when I knew she was crumbling to nothing inside. She had lost more than we had. We were all she had left. Now she had to find a new map of our future. From her I learnt that often the only way to get through life is to hide how you feel when others depend on you appearing strong.
The only time my mum ever articulated how she felt was when she told me she could physically feel that her heart was broken. I imagined her heart, red and solid, unbeating, like a piece of broken pottery, and knew I could do nothing to help except be as strong as she was.
Council housing had been in short supply, but she found us a new home on an estate of pebbledashed tower blocks nicknamed ‘the misery maisonettes’ by the local paper. They were set out like a prison, and it had been some city planner’s sick joke to name them after villages in the Lake District. We moved into Buttermere House. It was only on the day she got the key and we moved in that she found out from the next door neighbours why the flat hadn’t been snapped up. The previous tenant had hanged himself in the maisonette’s stairwell. He’d tied the rope to the banister that would soon stand a foot from the head of my bed, and the mark was still there to see. At night when the building cooled, the banister would begin to creak. The flat had two small balconies, and sometimes I would dream I saw the dead man, who looked like the Yorkshire Ripper, standing there looking through the curtains.
It would be easy to look back and feel hard done by in such difficult times, but, like most poor children, on the surface at least, we slowly adapted, started new schools and made do with a new world. Inside, I was bewildered and lost, but we had the gravity of our mum’s love to pull us all in, and we knew that this would never change. The years passed and I adapted who I was to where I was. The space of my childhood in Tywyn expanded with my imagination, becoming just as boundless as any landscape. The Hull estate, in my mind fed by films like Star Wars and comics such as 2000 AD, changed from a collection of pebbledashed flats into some post-apocalyptic city. My new friends and I began to play ever more complex games, and build