Psychovertical Read online

  Mandy had continued to prove a hard critic so I gave a copy to my lodger Jon, another climber, who said it was good.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Mandy said, later that night in bed, ‘he’s a climber, he doesn’t know anything about writing.’ I watched as she read my story again, wondering if we were both wrong and she was right, and I knew she was as I looked at her grimaces and raised eyebrows, the objective teacher in her coming out. I’d given her books to read by the climbing greats, Joe Simpson, Jim Perrin, Greg Child, writers I aspired to be like. She’d sometimes stop after a chapter or even a single paragraph and say, ‘Oh I can’t read this; it’s introspective rubbish.’ Every time I gave her something of mine to read, she would give me a low mark. Sometimes I’d lose my temper and unfairly accuse her of being a terrible critic or teacher, giving nothing in the way of praise to nurture the tiny bit of talent I might have. ‘Well you want to be a good writer, don’t you?’ she’d ask. She was right. I did. I wanted this story to be perfect, an impossible task I knew.

  I had always thought of myself as a wimp, simply wanting an easy life, but through writing this story I discovered something inside me that I found surprising: not my ability to write, or the depths of despair when I was rejected – something I was used to – but my unending ability to try again, and again, and again. No amount of rejection or criticism, both external and internal, seemed to quell this spark within me. Was I just deluded? Was I simply blindly stupidly stubborn?

  I wasn’t sure, but the next day I started again.

  We climbed slowly, the rock either buried under deep powder or steep and strenuous. We took turns belaying each other, growing cold through lack of movement, watching the cable cars moving up and down high above us, seeing the Day-Glo blur of tourists and skiers through their windows, wondering if anyone had spotted us down here at the toe of this climb. It was a surreal experience, struggling on this route while tourists passed overhead, probably not even aware we were there.

  We hoped to make a summer-style ascent, and climb the first eight hundred metres in a day, so moved as fast as we could – but our plans had assumed summer conditions, clean rock, and no bivy gear. As the day drew on we realised our pace was pitiful and the plan unrealistic. We barely ate into the distance we needed to cover.

  As we climbed I saw that Aaron was slowing down, as if his mind didn’t want to leave the ground, probably aware that the higher he climbed the more committed he was. We had only one sixty-metre rope, having left the other in the valley in order to save weight. Two ropes would have meant we could make full-length abseils, using one rope to pull the other down at the end of each rope length we descended. With one, we would only be able to abseil thirty metres at a time, thus requiring more anchors and making slower progress.

  It was Aaron’s lead. He eyed the difficulties for longer than was necessary, so I offered to carry on leading before he had the chance to persuade me to retreat. We were silent with each other, only communicating when we needed slack on the rope to move up, or to say when it was safe to follow. The tension grew throughout the day. We both knew that we didn’t really have a chance, that our one-day supply of food and gas wouldn’t last the route, which at our pace would take three times as long as we’d planned. I knew we should go down, but part of me wouldn’t let go. This could be our only chance.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ Mandy said, handing it back, ‘but it still needs a lot of work.’

  I had poured my heart and soul onto the paper, written and rewritten it dozens of times, analysed every word and sentence to eradicate any fat and gristle. ‘Not bad’ was not enough for me. It had to be great.

  ‘There are still quite a few spelling mistakes,’ she added, as I pulled it from her fingers. I had no satisfaction. I felt I was simply grinding her down. I wanted to write something she would think was good. That was all that mattered. I wanted to show her that although I just worked in a shop, and had no trade, or skill, or degree, I had talent.

  I kept writing, and the thing that drove me on was my need to prove her wrong. I believed she didn’t think I had it in me to write something good enough for her, and people like her, people with degrees and good jobs. I was trying to prove something, never realising that she needed no proof from me.

  ‘Aaron!’ I shouted down into the dark, my body wedged awkwardly in a steep flared groove, feet scraping as they tried to stab into a thin vein of ice that trickled down the back. ‘Watch me, I might come off here.’

  I tried to relax and pressed my crampon points into the ribbon of ice. I couldn’t tell if they were well placed, their security blocked from view by my body. I felt as if I could fall at any moment. My shoulders were wedged against smooth-sided walls – if any single part of me slipped, I was off. I breathed hard and tried to stay calm.

  It was late, it was dark, it was incredibly cold, and Aaron was pissed off. The afternoon had been squandered as I’d wrestled up a fantastic icy crack, the evening lost break-dancing around in a mixed couloir, and now the cold Alpine night arrived abruptly, without the decency to let me put on my headtorch, as the real climbing began. Aaron hung below me on a large spiky flake as I began fighting my way up the groove, hoping we would find somewhere to sleep at the top.

  The higher I climbed, feet stacked one above the other, the more noticeable the weight of the rope became. It hung, unhindered by protection, down to Aaron, who silently shivered as the temperature dropped off the end of our cheap thermometer, the halogen bulb of his torch tracing out my flight path above his spike belay. He remained silent.

  I pressed on, promising myself I would climb just one more metre, each metre leading to another. I was hoping to find some gear so I could lower off, getting to the top now replaced by the need simply to get down in one piece, but after each metre there was none. Attempting to stay calm, focused and in balance, I tried to step carefully back down into my last crampon placement, but as I reweighted it, the ice buckled and fell away, sending my crampon screeching and sparking down the granite, until it miraculously caught a blob of stubborn ice. As I pressed my head into the groove, my tired, hungry body tried to puke up with fear, only managing a pathetic dry heave.

  ‘How’s it going?’ shouted up Aaron, code for ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Won’t be long,’ I croaked, lying.

  I climbed across into a secondary groove, close to losing control and falling. I scraped away the snow to find a crack, placed a peg, and lowered back to the belay, defeated. I was exhausted, desperate for water after a day where there had been no time to drink. I could make no decisions, so Aaron took charge. All I wanted was a pan of cold water and my warm sleeping bag, but there seemed little chance of either.

  Aaron scanned around with his headtorch until he spotted a blob of snow below, the size of a wheely-bin lid.

  ‘OK, we’ll abseil down to there and use this spike as our anchor,’ he said, preparing the rope as I just hung there pathetically.

  What seemed like aeons later I was squirming, pulling, pushing and grunting as I tried to get my sleeping bag out of the rucksack without dropping anything important or falling off my narrow perch. Aaron was in his bag, boots off and stove on, long before I’d even had time to find my headtorch. It would have been easy to imagine we were in the Himalayas or Antarctica, if it hadn’t been for the lights of Chamonix twinkling up at us. My tired mind imagined the friendly laughing groups huddled around warm crêperies, wandering from bar to bar, then returning to beds warmed by blonde Norwegian goddesses, and wondered what I was doing here.

  ‘Andy!’ Aaron woke me up from my cold daydream, ‘Are you OK? Get in your bag.’ With great difficulty I removed my right boot’s plastic outer shell, leaving just the foam inner boot on my foot, and clipped it into the rope. Then I proceeded to wrestle with the other. For some reason my mind wandered for a moment to the implications of dropping a boot so high on a winter route. I had heard of climbers doing this and shuddered at what such a fumble would mean on such a cold
route.

  The shell refused to budge, probably due to a thin layer of ice building up between inner and outer, and my hands were too cold to take my slippery gloves off, forcing me to push harder. All I wanted was to get the boot off and get into my sleeping bag.

  The shell shot off my foot and disappeared into the dark below.

  I was dumbstruck, uncomprehending. Aaron remained silent beside me, looking down into the dark. My first thought was about how we could carry on with just one boot. I’d not yet grasped the reality that this was it.

  ‘Fuck!’ I shouted.

  ‘I suppose we’ll be going down now,’ said Aaron, as calm as could be.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ I repeated, hardly believing what I’d just done.

  I put my head in my hands and tried to pretend I’d just imagined what had taken place. This couldn’t really be happening, it had to be a nightmare. Different emotions shot through me. I couldn’t accept we would have to give up all the ground we’d just made. It seemed so unfair, and yet there was no fighting it.

  Aaron, seeing I was in distress, tried to comfort me. ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  All I could think about was how would I get down without getting frostbite as I had only my inner boot, and how were we going to retreat with only one fifty-metre rope and a minimal rack? I sat there for a long time, shaking my head, vowing that once down I’d give up climbing for good. This was it. I’d sell all my gear, return home to Mandy and go somewhere sunny for the rest of the holiday instead. If this was winter alpinism I didn’t want any of it. I’d wasted three years dreaming about it, but in reality it was just grim, and I was far too weak and useless for it.

  Just at that moment a huge spotlight came on, shining up from the building beside the hut we had started from that morning, illuminating the whole of the North Face of the Midi for the tourists. Aaron shifted in his sleeping bag.

  ‘Bloody great! How am I going to sleep with that shining in my eyes all night?’ I said, wondering how things could possibly get any worse.

  A moment later the answer came with a boom that shook the air all around us. A serac weighing hundreds or thousands of tons had carved off the glacier above our heads. There was a long roll like thunder that rose as the avalanche smashed its way down the side of the Frendo, blocks of ice the size of houses breaking apart and exploding into a whirring wave of debris. The noise grew into the roar of a train, freezing us with fear as it rumbled closer. Both of us shrank onto our already tiny ledge, sure we were going to be hit, as giant blocks of ice shot past and ice and snow filled the air.

  All of a sudden, my lost boot, and being denied this route, didn’t seem all that important.

  I sat at the computer every night for an hour making changes. The story grew to five thousand words, then to none as I accidentally deleted it. At the time, I didn’t realise you could simply undo the deletion. I cursed my bad luck and felt like smashing the computer to tiny pieces: six months of hard-fought work simply blinked out of existence. I screamed at the computer, rather than myself, and cursed not backing up. The last print-out had been months ago.

  Later, however, when I’d calmed down, I found I could tell myself that this was an opportunity to make it right. The best pieces of my story remained in my head. As with any good story, being retold would be good for it.

  And so I started again, the strong sections coming back to me, the weaker sections remaining lost. The story grew even larger. Every word, every paragraph became sacred. My work became a work of art. It was perfect.

  No. It was shit. I cut it down to a thousand words; my long rambling detailed account, written in a code only a climber could translate, was transformed into a Haiku poem. I began to be my hardest critic and to see my mistakes. I had tried too hard to make people understand how difficult climbing was. I had too many similes, everything was like something else, when simply being what it was was good enough. The story was swamped under a landfill of unimportant details. Lines like ‘The cold white snow fell down’ suddenly jumped out at me. ‘Of course it’s cold, it’s snow, and snow only falls down, plus we know it’s white.’ The line would be deleted and replaced with ‘It snowed.’

  A year went by, hundreds of hours, tens of thousands of single-finger keyboard taps, the story ebbing and flowing, as slowly I learnt how hard it is to write, how bad I was, how published words would be there forever and had to be perfect. I had to trick the reader into thinking these words had come easily, and hide the work in the spaces between the words. Yet the more I wrote, and the more I thought about what I wrote, the further away the end seemed to be.

  The avalanche crashed by until the roar finally slid into a long and deafening hiss.

  Coughing up ice crystals, we opened our eyes and found to our surprise that we were still alive. Stunned, we sat and watched in amazement as a great cloud of ice particles and debris rolled across the glacier far below, fanning out for hundreds of metres, destroying our tracks, shimmering spectacularly in the beam of the spotlight as it swirled slowly in the air, forming a galaxy of halos. My heart beat hard. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  I felt more alive than at any other time in my life. I forgot about my boot, which would now be buried under the ice. I knew in that moment we would be able to get down in one piece, and, more importantly, that alpine climbing wasn’t for me.

  The following afternoon the rope slithered from our final abseil. We had made it down. All my socks were on my bootless foot, which was further encased in a mountain mitt and had a crampon strapped on with abseil cord. I ran for my life across the glacier, praying we’d be spared any more trundling seracs.

  Three hundred metres from the face I stopped dead and rubbed my eyes.

  There before me, standing upright on a pile of ice debris, was my boot.

  As I picked it up I instantly forgot last night’s thought of selling gear, sunny holidays in Spain, and the stupidity of winter climbing. I’d got myself down alive and in one piece. I felt stronger, mentally more able to cope with the stresses of winter, plus now I had two boots again. I was back in business.

  Dick came into work and I asked him to read my story. He promised he would at dinner time.

  All day I waited nervously for his opinion. He was well read and a climber. Who better to give the nod to my talents? No doubt he’d be shocked that such genius had gone unnoticed in his shop.

  ‘I just don’t understand what you’re trying to say,’ he said, handing it back, the paper covered in question marks and corrected spelling mistakes. ‘It can’t have been as hard as you make out. You seem to be trying too much to impress. It’s only the Frendo Spur.’

  I told him it was hard, and that difficulty was relative to experience anyway. Dick was an old-school climber and his climbs were simply climbs, not metaphors for life. I knew he thought I was bullshitting, laying it on thickly. I just wanted to tell it how it was, how the route had affected us. Yes it was just a climb, but I had thought about it every day since then. It was more than that.

  ‘Maybe read a few more books,’ he said, ‘instead of climbing magazines.’

  ‘My arse will never be the same,’ I groaned, shifting in my sleeping bag. It was another alpine dawn, and I sat with my back against the Frendo, the lights of Chamonix thousands of feet below me still shining as I shifted my weight from bum cheek to bum cheek. It was our second night on the Frendo since our return a week after retreating that first time. I wondered if the crux of alpine climbing was getting a good night’s sleep.

  ‘How’s your arse?’ I asked, directing my question to the half-sitting, half-lying sleeping bag beside me. It looked like a misplaced body bag. I knew full well what the answer was, but this was a nicer way to ask if he was awake.

  ‘I think I’d just managed to fall asleep,’ came the reply.

  It was hard to understand our keenness to hike back up and have another go at the Frendo, but something had clicked last time, and through the fear and trepidation of that first day
and night, I’d felt a powerful force stir within me. As soon as I’d found my boot I knew I had to go back. Failing and then getting down under our own steam had proved we were strong enough to succeed, but now we had spent another night on the Spur, with more than half the route left to do, I wondered if it had just been youthful testosterone, mistaking the relief at getting down for belief we should go back up.

  I moved carefully on our tiny chopped-out ledge, ropes feeding in and out of my sleeping bag, trying to dig out the stove and get our breakfast brew of lemon tea started. I scooped up a pan of snow, careful to dodge the yellow patches close to our feet.

  I lit the stove and sat with my head bowed looking into the pan, hypnotised by the slow breakdown of the snow crystals which turned from white to grey, grey to transparent, a pan full of snow slowly shrinking down to a small puddle of water that warmed, then bubbled, then boiled and steamed. I dropped in another handful of snow and watched again as it transformed into water.

  Aaron unzipped his bivy bag, sticking his nose out to sniff the air. ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, I needed a piss all night but couldn’t work out how to go without getting it on myself, my sleeping bag or you – and I was gripped in case I fell off the ledge.’

  ‘Do you still want one?’ he said.

  ‘No, I went in my cup.’

  ‘In your cup?’

  ‘Yes, I think it was my cup.’

  I passed Aaron the pan to drink out of, the metal warming his hands for a minute or two before the air chilled it. I took a sip of the tea and felt nauseous, and wondered if I’d poisoned myself with fumes from the stove. Then I munched my small muesli bar. Once the snow is melted breakfast is a short affair.

  Aaron craned his head and looked above us. ‘I hope we get to the top today, I don’t think I can last another bivy like that.’