Psychovertical Read online

  I could be down in a few hours.

  Maybe I could just go home.

  A mouse scuttled across the ledge at my feet, and stopped for a second, perched on the lip of the ledge before darting up a crack and up the wall.

  Even a mouse can scale a big wall.

  I wondered how much bigger a big wall was to you if you were a mouse.

  Maybe you can do it?

  I thought about Royal Robbins and his ground-breaking first solo ascent of El Cap in 1968. He’d started the climb knowing that only a handful of teams had ever scaled El Cap, teams comprising the cream of North American climbing. Robbins had made many of these early ascents, but now he stood alone, with 3,000 feet of climbing above him – the route, the Muir Wall, hadn’t even had a second ascent. It was a giant step into the unknown, both in terms of climbing, and in self-belief, but perhaps Robbins knew there was no one else in the world who had the experience or skills to pull it off. In terms of world climbing this would be equivalent to landing on the moon.

  Several days later Robbins was not sure if this was an attempt too far. His confidence and belief were leaving him bit by bit, metre by metre, peg by peg. The work involved, leading, cleaning, hauling, combined with the difficult climbing – not to mention the loneliness and self-doubt caused by having no one to share the experience – had convinced him that it was beyond him.

  ‘I dug into the rucksack of my soul and found it was just an empty husk.’

  Robbins decided he would abseil off the following morning.

  Yet when morning came he decided to place one more peg. Just one. In it went. Perfect. He clipped his aiders into it and stepped up. It didn’t seem right to place just a single peg, and so he placed another, then another, never thinking any further than the next.

  Ten days after leaving the ground Robbins reached the summit, his hardest climb over, a turning point in his life.

  All soloists think about Robbins and his ascent of the Muir, his antiquated gear, no portaledge, only pegs, no chance of a rescue. What he wanted was more than just a first, or to break a record, or to be famous. He wanted something deeper and more meaningful than that. The closer he came to failure, the closer he came to finding what all soloists are looking for: to break themselves apart on the wheel of a climb, to know what they have chosen to do is beyond them, to discover they are empty and wanting, yet somehow to find the strength to push on regardless. To dare and try their best. To overcome every instinct and rational thought. To push on. To travel alone to the height of themselves. To believe such a thing is possible.

  I thought about Robbins’s peg.

  I stood up and ran my fingers up the wall, looking for something, anything, a reason to carry on, an excuse to go down. The Russians had passed this way: there must be something.

  With the tip of one finger I found an edge no bigger than half a fingernail. I had my first move.

  I sat back down and looked up the wall.

  Just do one move, that’s all.

  I racked up all my skyhooks, hanging them from my harness like the tools of a torturer, spiked curved hardened steel, clipping a small one to my aiders, its point no bigger than the tip of a Biro.

  I went back to the hold, and placed the skyhook. I gently tested it, half expecting it to spring out and bash me in the face. It flexed. It held. I slowly stepped up.

  I clipped my harness into the hook, which was now at waist level, and sat there a few minutes, trying not to think about the drop below, even though a fall now would only be short.

  I moved up the aider until the hook was above my knee and, balancing, felt for a second hook and my next move. My fingers touched an edge only the thickness of a matchstick.

  I placed the second hook, smaller than the first, and, clipping in my other aider, slowly stepped up after again gently testing it. The ledge was only six feet below, but my heart was beating. It was high enough to bust an ankle, with the drop below the ledge adding to the feeling of exposure.

  I tried not to think about the fact that I was actually climbing the Reticent Wall. Somewhere above were two bolts, but between us lay 200 feet of the most difficult climbing, and beyond them two thousand more feet. As in a game of chess I couldn’t allow myself to focus on winning, or even on a few moves ahead, but only on the next move and no further.

  I stepped up and felt for the next placement.

  The knot

  Chamonix, France. February 1996

  FOR TWO YEARS Aaron and I had been planning another winter trip to the Alps. On our days off we climbed together on the tiny gritstone crags around Sheffield, starting early and climbing and soloing as many routes in a day as we could. Generally this was midweek, so Mandy would drop us off before going to her teaching job, and then pick us up on her way home. That summer seemed to be full of long days and sore fingertips. Aaron became my first real climbing partner, and we progressed through the grades together, willing each other on as we went from easy classics to harder, more scary routes, leap-frogging up the grades past one another. He was never a talker, and so we climbed with mainly me talking, scheming our return to the Alps that coming winter.

  Aaron was coming to the end of his physics Ph.D. in Sheffield, and his thoughts were primarily about things that made no sense to me: particles of matter, equations and computer models. He was working towards a career as a professional, either academic or commercial, his big analytical brain in demand in an analytical world. I on the other hand remained a simple shop assistant at Outside, my thoughts only of mountains and hard routes, karabiners and ice axes. Aaron was more cautious than me, always thinking things through methodically, aware of his limitations and areas where his skills were lacking. I on the other hand thought I had made strides to becoming a great alpinist, and had big plans for that winter. Even though these strides were purely in my head, my ambition was boundless, unconstrained by reality. I seemed to have perfected the art of visualisation, a technique much used by sports people and athletes, who imagine themselves as winners and record breakers long before whistles or start-lines are crossed. I spent my days thinking of nothing but climbing, doing pull-ups on ice axes in the boot store, making plans, tinkering with gear, an alpine version of Billy Liar, a fantasist using his imagination in order to get through the boredom of work.

  Mandy was bound up with her work, teaching children about their bodies, touring Sheffield in a mobile classroom. She was a great teacher, and loved children, and many would say at the end of their morning or afternoon in the mobile classroom that it had been their best-ever lesson at school. She threw herself into her work, and at times we seemed to have separate lives. She dreamed of hotel-holidays with me, and the normal things that couples do, while I dreamed of hard climbs and big walls in foreign countries. Often when we lay in bed, she would ask me what I was thinking about, to which the answer was generally something like ‘crampons’ or ‘ropes’.

  I felt the pressure that she wanted me to get another job, as I was forced to work most weekends, but I could think of nothing else I could do. The only qualification I had was my obsession with climbing, and the only place it was valued was at Outside. However, I knew that working in a climbing shop was not a long-term option, something Dick Turnbull had told me on my first day.

  Increasingly, Mandy had also been dropping hints that she wanted to have a baby, but my mind was only full of ice faces, so I didn’t really think too much about what she wanted, or what having a baby would mean. All I could think about was going back to the Alps in February, and making who I thought I could be, and what I could do, a reality.

  For the first time in my life I sat at a computer. It was old, slow and second-hand, a cast-off from Mandy’s mum and dad, but a computer nevertheless. Mandy said I might find it useful, as she’d been researching and discovered that people with dyslexia often found it easier to get their thoughts down via a keyboard rather than with pen and paper. I was excited at the possibility that it could help me write, because the older I got, the more I
wanted to describe how I felt, my thoughts, my ideas, the things you can’t say to another person, the secret things you can only write and then run away from before they are read.

  People think that for dyslexic people a computer is needed simply for its spellchecker. Spelling mistakes don’t ruin lives. For me it was the fact that the ideas I had to communicate seemed trapped and broken, they were non-linear, and would need digging out one by one and reassembled, something impossible to do with pen or typewriter. This computer was the tool required to fit the mosaic of my thoughts together again, even though I didn’t even know what the pieces were. All I knew was that perhaps this computer could help me tap into something that needed to be released.

  I switched it on, and listened to it hum into life, watching as it slowly woke up. I’d only ever sat behind computers, never in front, generally wondering what was being typed in by housing benefit or DHS officers, glad I didn’t have to sit in a grey-green dimly lit office like them. But now I was prepared to do that.

  I opened up Microsoft Word and looked at the screen, all grey on the tiny monitor, and placed my fingers on the grubby keyboard as you would if you could actually type. The screen wanted to be filled, like one of those pieces of wood I’d painted on at college. My mind was as full of images and ideas as it had been then, but it had been so long since I’d written anything more than a cheque. How could I translate these thoughts into words when words always failed me? But I knew that nothing else would do.

  I wrote my name.

  Where would I begin? Why would I even want to try? I wasn’t a writer. I always said that when you think about taking a photograph, you should ask yourself if anyone would ever want to look at it. I asked about my story, the first I would write about a climb, ‘Who would ever want to read this?’

  But this wasn’t just a climb. It was an event that I had thought about every day since, maybe even every hour. This climb had changed me. It had made things make sense. It was more than just a climb. I just had to write something. I looked for the letter W on the keyboard and began to type with one finger.

  After a while, I ran the spellcheck, and the page came alive with red lines, each disappearing one by one as I went back over the text until it was all black-and-white again. I scrolled down and marvelled at the words, how perfect they seemed, forming up to be my thoughts. Alone with this computer, I had all the time in the world to craft my story, to get my thoughts in order. I could hide my inadequacies behind the words.

  I printed it out and felt a thrill at seeing my name at the top, the words I’d written placed on the page, my thoughts and experiences now expressed as I had imagined them. The words looked so neat, so much more perfect than my dunce handwriting. I read it again and thought it was perfect. I couldn’t wait for Mandy to read it.

  Mandy groaned. ‘It’s terrible,’ she said, having read only the first paragraph, wincing as she read on. ‘It’s sort of sub-sixth-form angst.’

  I was crestfallen. What was I thinking?

  ‘There are loads of spelling mistakes,’ she went on, proving that although a computer can check for the right spelling, it can’t check for the right word. ‘It needs lots of work.’

  I returned to the computer. It frustrated me that I could get it so wrong. I didn’t have an ounce of talent. I was deluded. I had conned myself I had something to say. I switched off the computer, clicking ‘No’ when it asked if I wanted to save my untitled document, grumpy with my first rejection.

  February finally came and we arrived in Chamonix on the bus, stepping down to high pressure and good conditions. As we walked through town, I pointed up at the Rouse-Carrington route on the Aiguille du Pélerin, a hard and scary ice smear, and suggested we warm up on that. Aaron took it as a joke, not realising I was serious.

  We got to the chalet we were sharing with a group of climbers and skiers from Outside, and after dumping our gear started looking through the guidebook. My route choices were outlandish and ridiculous, while Aaron’s were feasible and sensible, if a little pedestrian to me. I had two weeks to realise my potential. I didn’t have time for warm-up climbs or easy classic snow plods.

  ‘How about the Frendo Spur?’ I suggested, knowing that on paper this might look like a suitable compromise to him.

  The Frendo Spur was a jagged buttress of rock, a spine of shattered pillars and stepped walls that terminated at a steep ice arête as it neared the Midi téléphérique station at its summit. It was first climbed in 1944 by Edouard Frendo and René Rionda, with its first winter ascent coming in 1967, and had become a plum classic introduction to the longer and more committing summer routes. As a winter route there wasn’t a lot of information about it, but on paper at least, the moderate climbing gave the impression it wouldn’t be too hard. There was a cable car that went up from Chamonix to a small free hut close to the start of the route, making the approach simple, and once on the route it looked objectively safe if we ignored the hanging ice cliffs on each side. Once we’d summited we’d be able to ride the cable car back down to town. It would be a perfect warm-up.

  In reality the route, even in summer, was way beyond our capabilities or experience, and was no easy tick. It seemed to generate a great many epic tales, perhaps due to its attraction as a stepping stone from easy to hard routes. One of the best was of a solo climber who had fallen close to the top, and been seen shooting down the ice arête and then down the gully on one side. The following day, the rescue helicopter could find no sign of his body at the base, but they found him alive as they flew up the fall line. He was hanging from his jacket hood which had snagged on a spike of rock.

  In winter the difficulty would be massively increased, the easy rock climbing transformed to difficult mixed climbing, with snow and sub-zero temperatures requiring axes and crampons to be used the whole way. In summer the route usually took two days, with climbers racing up the rock spur and bivying below the ice arête, climbing it in the morning when it was well frozen. In winter the speed would be halved.

  I put it to Aaron and after reading the description he simply nodded. He was really clever but on this occasion not quite as clever as I’d assumed.

  ‘We could sort out our gear and head up there after tea, and get on the route in the morning?’ I suggested, ignoring the facts that we were unacclimatised and still tired from our twenty-four hour bus journey, and that leaving after tea would mean missing the cable car and breaking trail until midnight to get to the hut, zig-zagging up the steep, snow-covered paths that led up the valley.

  I sat at the computer again. All week, biking to work, I had thought about my story, and why it hadn’t been any good. Maybe it was because I hadn’t read enough books, but books had never been a major part of my life. Outside school, I’d only voluntarily read one book in my youth, and James Herbert’s The Rats was not the ideal material for a young writer’s mind. My childhood had mainly been full of comics, ideal material as I didn’t start reading until much later than everyone else at school. Comics had been good in many ways, their visual story-telling perfect for my visual brain. I thought in pictures, so stories in pictures work well. I wondered if my lack of story-telling skill was that I tried to provide too much detail. Maybe the trick was to paint the story rather than write it, use the words lightly, to provide the colour as in an impressionist painting, and allow the watcher room to feel what it was like, perhaps to know why this was more than just a climb.

  ‘It doesn’t look very easy,’ said Aaron, planting his axes at the bergschrund, the moat-like crevasse formed between the base of the Frendo and the moving glacier. ‘It looks really difficult.’

  It was dawn and we had arrived below the hardest climb of our lives.

  ‘It looks great,’ I said, panting as I moved up the steps Aaron had made on the approach slope, feeling utterly done even before we’d begun.

  ‘It doesn’t look like fun … like I said, it looks massive and hard.’

  I joined him, rested on my axes, and looked up. I had never stoo
d below such a huge wall of rock and ice. The climbs we had been doing all summer had been ten or twenty metres at the most, not such great training for a wall over a thousand metres high. Also, it now didn’t seem to be objectively safe, with huge overhanging ice cliffs on either side of the top of the Spur, the ice blocks we’d passed on the way evidence they were active.

  We’d had very little sleep. The walk up through the woods, with the trail buried under deep snow, meant we hadn’t made it to the hut until 2 a.m. Another party had been asleep when we arrived, and I woke them again a few hours later when I had to run outside and be sick, the combination of a thousand metres of altitude gain and a belly full of half-cooked potatoes scoffed down before we’d left. After only a couple of hours’ sleep we’d woken again and started up towards the Spur.

  I had spent a year thinking of nothing but climbing a route like this, of putting myself against something hard and proving that my faith and passion for climbing weren’t misguided, but now I was here, the rock cold, the face silent, the air stinging, my mouth still tasting of sick, my bowels churning, thirsty, all I could think of was the valley. The climb dwarfed me.

  Part of me still revelled at the scale of the climb, a part that grabbed at the opportunity it provided and told me I could climb it, but there was just so much unexpected fear. I had forgotten just how scary this all was.

  I looked at Aaron. Our friendship was strong enough for me to say that I was scared, but that word could dissolve our climb before it had even begun. I knew he really didn’t want to climb it either. But to say it, and fail now because of my fear, would betray the dream I’d had, this opportunity I had been given.

  The weather was good. We were fit enough. We could climb it. We simply had to try. I had to give everything I had. And so we began to climb up the Frendo Spur.

  I printed out the story again, and reread it, spotting countless mistakes I’d missed. I had been rewriting the story for months, yet I never seemed to get any closer to finishing it. I made my changes once more and printed it out again, the thick stack of paper I had started with now down to a few tatty sheets.