Psychovertical Page 2

  Lateral thinking gets me below a small ledge. Holding my breath on nothing foot-holds I tickle at a frozen tuft of grass with my pick. The pick bites with a dull, shallow thwack. With time running out, I blindly swap feet, then hang off one tool as I bring the other across to join it. I feel the dice roll. Will they rip out when I pull?

  My brain does some quick calculations and says no. I do. They don’t. I’m there.

  I mantle up onto the arête. I’m so aware of everything around me: the snowflakes blowing across my face, the line of sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, a twist of frozen heather emerging from the snow, the wind, the darkness, the cold. My body is hot, my brain burning as I suck in the speeding snow. The next thirty feet is unprotected. If I fall I’ll die, but there is no time for melodrama; this is where I have always wanted to be. I think how strange it is that brain power can get me here, yet it still fails to do so many other things. I know now that all things are balanced, but on the mountain such details no longer matter. There is no need for words here. With the pieces together I can see the picture. Who needs to know its name?

  Hooking both axes onto a flake I pull off the ledge and head into the darkness.

  The doctor showed me to the door and handed me a brown envelope containing my results. ‘Andrew, with a score of 99 per cent you should find something you enjoy that involves three-dimensional problem-solving, something creative, where you can turn these things into an advantage.’ I shook his hand and I said thank you, then walked home through the snow, wondering where such a strange gift would lead me.

  All rising to great place is by a winding stair.

  Francis Bacon

  Hard work kills horses

  THE TAXI CAME at 6 a.m., beeping twice. It was a Sunday morning early in June 2001, the beginning of my journey to solo one of the hardest climbs in the world, certainly the hardest climb of my life.

  And my life was falling apart. I was running away.

  I’d lain awake on the settee most of the night waiting, my mind a mess; in part this was the usual jumble of worry and doubt about the climb, and in part it was the presence of darker clouds, the worry of what it meant to be sleeping down in the living room alone while my wife slept upstairs.

  Did she sleep?

  All night I’d tried to order my thoughts, put things in perspective, get my life straight in my head before I left. It was impossible. I thought about writing her a letter, to try to explain why I was going, why I was so compelled to climb. But I just knew those words would be transparent and wouldn’t come close to how I really felt. No words could explain why. Nothing I could say would make her understand. There was no sense to it, only the absurdity of travelling halfway round the world to climb a lump of rock.

  You don’t have to go.

  A pendulum swung within my thoughts, its point rising and falling, one moment making me feel invulnerable, the next draining away all my self-belief, making me just want to stay here forever with my wife Mandy and my daughter Ella.

  How can you leave them?

  It would be easy to tell the taxi to go away, to creep up the stairs and slip into our bed. I could hug Mandy and whisper that I wanted to stay. For once she would know that I put her first. I could still be here when Ella woke up. See her smile.

  But what about tomorrow?

  You have to go.

  I lay and imagined myself lying in a pool of my own blood, shattered bone sticking out of me at crazy angles, slowly dying on the climb, imagined the feeling of loss, knowing I would never see them again, their world shattered like my body.

  What will you find there that will justify risking everything you have here?

  The taxi beeped again.

  I wished it was still dark. In the night I would often feel the most level-headed about climbing hard routes. Getting out of a warm bed to go to the toilet, I would stand naked in the dark, shivering with cold, knowing all I wanted to do was get back under the covers with the woman I loved. The thought of being anywhere else, sleeping in a snow hole, perched on the side of an icy north face, or forced to abseil through the night would seem ludicrous. Pointless.

  You sound like her.

  There is a point.

  I could think of no rational reason for climbing anything. I just knew I had to do it.

  The climb is the question.

  I would be the answer.

  I was about to leave, and travel halfway across the world to solo one of the longest routes on the planet, a climb only a handful of people had ever dared to attempt, one which had taken one of the greatest climbers in the world a staggering fourteen days to solo. I knew the route was out of my league. I knew I could die, or worse, yet I slept alone on the settee.

  You might never come back.

  The taxi beeped once more.

  I stood up and, already dressed, began lifting the huge vinyl haul bags that held my climbing gear out of the house and to the taxi. Each one was the size of a dustbin, made from indestructible material designed to line landfill sites and adapted to withstand being scraped against rock for miles of climbing. For the next few weeks they would be my only company. Half carrying, half dragging them out of the back door, I went round the side of the house to where the car waited. The taxi driver got out slowly and helped me lift the first bag into the boot, then pushed the second one sideways onto the passenger seats in the back.

  Each bag was the size of a small person. It weighed around fifty kilos and contained the equipment I’d need for my coming climb: ropes, karabiners, slings, pegs, nuts, storm gear, sleeping bag, my portaledge (a folding bed used to sleep on vertical walls), and a hundred other vital items, a decade’s worth of accumulated climbing equipment.

  The bags were hard to lift and painful to carry. They had to be moved in relays unless I could find wheels, whether taxi, bus or trolley, but even when I felt my knees were about to buckle or my vertebrae compress down like an empty Coke can, I enjoyed carrying them. Pain like that is simple, honest, and feels invigorating as muscles and mind are pushed beyond their norms. Carrying stops you thinking.

  The longer you go without thinking the better it feels when you experience it again.

  Each bag made the car sag further, and the taxi driver’s eyebrows rose as his wheel arches dipped towards the gutter.

  ‘You might need another taxi, mate,’ said the driver, kicking his tyres with concern.

  ‘Only got one small one left,’ I said, as I nipped back down the alley to my house.

  I walked through the back gate, past Ella’s frog-shaped sandpit and small red scooter, and in through the back door of our tiny Sheffield terraced house.

  My last bag lay on its side surrounded by Ella’s toys.

  There was one more thing I had to do. I crept up the steep narrow stairs and slipped into her bedroom. She lay on her side, her thumb in her mouth. Perfect. Nothing in my life seemed to fit together properly any more, my marriage, work, climbing. Nothing but her. She was the only thing in my life that I didn’t doubt.

  But even she wasn’t enough.

  You have to go.

  I wanted to kiss her, but knew if she woke up I wouldn’t be able to leave.

  I spent a lot of time wondering what she would think when she grew up, if I were to die climbing, and I thought about it again now: the selfishness of what I was about to do, risking my life once more, and in turn, risking her life and future. Many climbers, or people who do dangerous things, give it up once they have kids, but for me her birth had come at the start of it all.

  At that time, people made judgements about me as a climber and a father, often asking me how I could do it. I didn’t know, all I had was excuses. I’d said that you shouldn’t sacrifice who you are for your kids, but I wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t it be me sacrificing them for what I wanted? But I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be a person worth having as a father, and in a way that was why I was here now, about to set off on another climb. The more I tried to quit, the more the pressure b
uilt inside me.

  What if you never see her again?

  I told people I didn’t want to die before she was born, just as much as after she was born. But the truth is dying is never in any climber’s plan.

  She made sense, but she also made what I loved even more senseless. Mountains don’t care about love.

  I wanted to stand there forever. I could. But I wouldn’t.

  I crept out of her bedroom, closed the door, and turned to see the stairs leading up to our bedroom, where Mandy probably lay awake. She would be angry with me, leaving her again to go climbing. She wanted so little: a normal life, a normal husband. I couldn’t give her that, but we were both stubborn and we’d been together for ever. We didn’t quit, so here we were. Still fighting. We also loved each other.

  I knew she would be lying in bed hating me now, yet wanting me to climb the stairs and say goodbye, or even to say I’d stay – not because she was weak, but because she loved me.

  I was about to solo a climb so hard only the best had attempted it, a route I doubted I could do. Yet in that moment the thing I most feared was climbing those stairs, climbing up to face her and say goodbye.

  What if you never see the baby growing inside her?

  I went out to the garden and tried to compose myself, not wanting the taxi driver to see I was upset. I was everything I despised.

  They will be better off without you.

  As I’d done so many times before, I opened a box in my head and placed the feelings inside, closed the lid, and moved on.

  ‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asked as I sat next to him and clipped in my seat belt.

  ‘The station, please.’

  We drove down the hill, and through the empty streets.

  ‘Where you off to?’

  ‘America, to a place called Yosemite.’

  ‘Oh aye, I’ve heard of that. Are you a climber, like?’

  ‘Yeah … sort of.’

  ‘Are you going by yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, ‘just more work.’

  ‘You want to be careful with those bags of yours, they’re bloody heavy.’

  ‘Oh, they’re OK, they keep me fit.’

  ‘No mate,’ the driver said, looking at me with concern, ‘remember, hard work kills horses.’

  Bird rock

  I WAS HANGING in space, my fingers clamped tight, holding on, above a new and startling world of light and sound. People often ask me how long I’ve been climbing and I suppose it all began here. It was 1971 and I had just squeezed my way out of my mother.

  The doctor held me above my mum, my tiny untested fingers wrapped around his and hanging on in terror, something that is often mistaken as strength.

  ‘My, Mrs Kirkpatrick,’ said the doctor, dangling me before her like a zoo keeper dangles a baby chimpanzee in front of a TV crew. ‘You have got a very strong baby here. He’s as strong as an ox.’

  My childhood was full of high places, of holding on, hanging, swinging, and falling, and so it’s no surprise that as an adult I would be drawn towards the heights and a life off the horizontal.

  My first high place was a hill named Bird Rock, a mountain carved in half by some geological fluke, exposing a limestone face set in a valley not far from our house, and visible from our tiny garden. It always seemed strange and exotic, always there on the horizon, mysterious, its summit seemingly inaccessible amongst the more pedestrian rolling green hills that surrounded the Welsh village where I grew up. I’d seen films like King Kong, Tarzan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, where strange rock faces yielded prehistoric lands and lost species. I wondered if Bird Rock was the same, its craggy face perhaps hiding dodos, pterodactyls and giant eagles that would have to be fought off.

  I was five and it was my first mountain, and my dad always promised that when I was a little older we would climb it together.

  My father was a mountaineering instructor in the RAF, based at a Joint Services camp in the Welsh seaside town of Tywyn, running courses for the army, navy and air force. That is the perfect job for a sadist: running poor recruits around the hills in the rain, making them shimmy across greasy ropes above ponds of vile green liquid, pushing them to near hypothermic death in foaming rivers, all in the name of training. My dad threw himself into the job with gusto, thinking up increasingly devious ways of scaring and stretching recruits in the outdoors, always setting an example by going first. I can still remember creeping into my parents’ warm bed on dark winter mornings, as my dad got up to take a load of recruits down to the sea for an early morning swim, his face grinning with the craziness of it all. You could say he was very pre-health-and-safety.

  He was pretty unconventional for someone in the RAF in the 1970s. Rather scruffy and prone to bend the rules, he never went too far in his long career, generally being placed out of harm’s way in the outer reaches of the RAF: mountain rescue teams, officer development, and outdoor education. His only advice to me growing up, apart from how to tie knots, roll kayaks or light a stove, was ‘Only work hard when people are looking.’ No doubt this tongue-in-cheek approach didn’t serve him well when it came to making air chief marshal, but fundamentally all he wanted to do was just go climbing.

  He was charismatic, a fantastic story teller and a great ‘people person’, which is probably why they didn’t just boot him out. These skills trumped a pair of well-ironed trousers or polished shoes any time. His enthusiasm for the mountains was also infectious, whether you liked it or not. He pursued climbing and adventure with a passion, and at that time the only way to do this was to work as an instructor in the forces, where you could use the system to go away on trips you would never have been able to afford otherwise. Throughout those early years there were big gaps when my dad was away on courses or expeditions, but I never stopped idolising him, and still remember my heart leaping when, sitting on our back fence, I saw him for the first time in weeks, coming out of the base and across the playing field to our house. Coming home.

  He applied many of his military training techniques to my upbringing, such as exposing people to danger in a controlled environment, so as to better prepare them for real danger in the future: war in Europe, global Armageddon, primary school. My mother still tells the story of her coming home to our flat when we were posted to Sardinia, and finding him watching the TV, while I sat in my nappy in the kitchen playing with the largest carving knife in the cutlery drawer. I was two at the time. On being challenged by my mum, my dad’s only response was, ‘You have to cut the apron strings some time.’

  Very often in my childhood, while I was standing on a tiny ledge, walking across a plank above a big drop, or about to jump into an icy lake, my dad would shout, ‘A real man would do it,’ to which I would always reply, ‘But I’m not a man, Dad.’

  The closest this exposure came to unravelling was one Christmas afternoon, when he took me down to the sea for a walk as a huge winter storm raged, and surf crashed over the sea defences. The most hazardous spot was the boat ramp that led into the sea, the waves rushing up it and fanning out behind the sea wall. Dressed in my black donkey jacket and red wellies, I ran backwards and forwards, trying to race the waves down and back again without getting too wet, when all of a sudden a huge wave overtook me, knocking me over and sucking me back into the sea.

  Luckily my dad was close by, and was used to swimming in the cold Irish Sea. He dived in and managed to pull me back to shore. I was frozen, my eyes were full of sand, but I was alive. My strongest memory is of being run home in his arms and then plonked in a warm bath, the remaining contents of a bottle of Matey bubble bath being added to the water as a treat. I suppose it was an early lesson that when you survive a life-threatening trauma, people tend to treat you nicely.

  My dad had joined the air force at seventeen. It’s strange he found himself having a role in the mountains, since he was born in Hull, one of the flattest places in Britain. I often wonder i
f having an adventurous spirit is genetic, as my dad’s father and grandfather had also been in the military, his dad fighting in Egypt and in Ireland during its civil war. It’s hard to imagine now how limited people’s lives and careers were back then, born and dying in the same town, taking up the trade of their fathers. For most, joining the navy or army was the only way to break free.

  My dad’s two brothers were also rather unconventional. Eddy Kirkpatrick had been a salvage diver whose hair-raising adventures deserved their own book: diving on sunken German U-boats in primitive gear for their brass torpedoes, and searching for Nazi gold lost in the North Sea. His life must have been lived by the seat of his pants. Doug Kirkpatrick had worked on Baffin Island in the Arctic as a radio operator, and later as a hunter in New Zealand, before he settled down to normal life as an insurance salesman.

  Maybe this wanderlust comes from the place where you are born. The fictional adventure of Robinson Crusoe had begun in the port of Hull and I wonder if maybe this spirit for adventure was part of the genetic heritage of the city. It is a place from where boats sailed all over the world, where seamen once signed on for white-knuckle rides to hunt whales in Greenland, and to fish on the violent northern oceans, a city whose heart was laid waste by the cod wars. Whatever the reasons, the Kirkpatricks are a strange breed, a mixture of many roaming people, Russian, Scottish, Romany. Whoever they were, they all seemed to be afflicted with wanderlust, and were single minded and incredibly stubborn.

  Since I had been born we had moved around the country several times, and a lot of my early memories involve playing in wooden RAF-issue packing cases. However, my dad’s posting in Tywyn was long enough for it to become the place I see as my first home, and I can think of no better place to grow up. It was nestled between mountains and ocean, and we lived next to the camp. The military and mountaineering seem to produce larger than life characters, men who jumped straight from the war films on the telly, and many of them made an impression on me. Our next-door neighbour was a man called John Bull, who seemed to be able to communicate only by shouting. He was in the army and was a lifer like my dad. He was a fellow instructor and would always be thinking of new ways to torture the recruits. In his house he had a full-size Greenlandic kayak he’d brought back from an expedition.