Psychovertical Page 20

  ‘The ice gets thicker up here and I can see a peg!’ he shouted down, but his voice was wobbly.

  I looked down at Jim and Nick and felt cheered by their smiles of relief.

  The whole baby-making thing turned out to be quite fraught. Nothing was happening. All of a sudden it went from a love thing to a chemistry thing. I hated it, hated the way I was suddenly forced to produce a baby.

  As time passed I began to worry that maybe I couldn’t, and with that came the crushing reality that maybe it wasn’t my choice.

  Midnight. I fell onto my bruised knees and hacked furiously at a tiny patch of sloping frozen gravel, my home for the night. I was exhausted after twenty-four hours of non-stop climbing.

  We knew we were close to the top, but experience told us that we should get a few hours of sleep instead of pushing our bodies any further into the red. We needed to ration our strength. After all, getting to the summit might not turn out to be the easy part.

  Moving around, drunk with fatigue, each of us selfishly tried to manufacture some luxury for ourselves in the overpowering cold: a sling to wrap around the knees, a rucksack to stand in. We didn’t ask for much.

  The ledge was tiny, our feet dangled over the immense black drop.

  Exhausted, Paul untied from the rope then snagged a crampon on Jim’s sleeping mat and nearly fell over the edge. They screamed at each other, but I was too tired to care. All I wanted was the sanctuary of my sleeping bag and a hot drink.

  The temperature had dropped off the scale of our thermometer.

  None of us had drunk more than half a litre of water since we’d left the tent the day before, so once in my bag I forced myself to attempt to get a brew on. Tired, strung out and with zero blood sugar, Nick and Jim argued beside me, as I sat with a numb bum and cold feet trying to stay awake long enough to melt a pan of grit-filled snow.

  I wondered what she was doing right now, if she was awake or sleeping. I wondered if she was thinking about me.

  Jim sat next to me and slurped down some half-cooked noodles, passing comment on their unusual gritty texture. Until this trip I’d never met Jim, or even heard of him for that matter, yet I was told that he could suffer. On the flight from Britain he’d told the story of how he and a friend had made an unsupported alpine-style ascent in Alaska, of Denali via the South Buttress and South East Spur. The ascent and descent, followed by the walk out to the highway, had taken twenty-eight days. I’d asked him how you climb a route with that much food and fuel. ‘It basically involved carrying enormous rucksacks and eating next to nothing, which was just as well as the food got soaked in fuel anyway,’ he explained.

  On the death march out, half-starved and stalked by bears, they’d lost what little food was left, as well as most of their equipment, while crossing the McKinley River. When they reached the Alaskan highway they were more dead than alive.

  ‘How does this compare?’ I asked.

  ‘This was nothing compared to that crazy trip,’ said Jim as he cast the sandy dregs of his noodles into the darkness and slumped over asleep almost immediately.

  Although forced to sleep in the most ridiculously uncomfortable manner possible, my feet standing in my rucksack so I didn’t slide off the ledge, my head resting on my knees, I soon joined him.

  Pregnancy began as a blue band almost too faint to see, but there was no doubt. Mandy jumped around with glee; her dream was finally coming true. I tried to look happy, and do the things that fathers and husbands are supposed to do. Deep down I felt a growing sense of unease. I was scared. The only thought I had was of escape.

  The baby growing inside her was simply that, four letters that meant nothing to me. It was Mandy’s, not mine, it was what she wanted, not what I needed. I began to think that I had to leave, we had to split up before it came. A friend told me that kids did signal the end of your life, but also the beginning of a new one. It sounded like a nice idea, but I could only see the negative.

  I realised I had a problem with commitment. I found it hard enough being committed to one person, I couldn’t handle the responsibility of a baby as well. Why? What held me back? I hated feeling like this. I wasn’t a bad person, but my thoughts were so dark. All I could do was keep my head down as Mandy’s baby grew.

  The sound of the wind forced itself into my dreams like the roar of a jumbo jet. I didn’t know it was real until I woke to find there was no moon, no stars, only that unreal sound in the black emptiness of space above us.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I said, waking the others. A storm was approaching. I knew that we should head down; this route was a well-known death trap in bad weather – but we had put in so much effort to reach this point, with over a kilometre of climbing below us. How could we turn back now when we knew we were so close?

  The wind was striking the other side of the mountain, so we still had time to escape. There was no doubt that would be the right course of action. Everyone wanted to go down. Yet because we took this for granted no one said so, and so each of us assumed the rest wanted to carry on. Insanely, this is what we did.

  With no time for food and water, we stuffed our sleeping bags away and set off, almost robotic with fear, gambling that the really tough weather might hold off for one more day.

  Very quickly we were back into the thick of the climbing, scratching together a line through thin ice-streaked slabs, grooves and dead ends, that led out of the couloir. The face opened up to form a vast amphitheatre. Climbing in such epic terrain was exhilarating, and soon the storm and the fear receded from our minds. We were now high above the surrounding mountains, climbing fast, looking down onto peaks that two days before we had gazed up at in wonder. The trouble was, here we also got our first sight of giant anvil-shaped clouds advancing fast across the ice cap towards us. All I could do was turn away and try to put the image out of my mind. Then we saw it, white with hoar and incredibly close, the summit of Fitzroy. I could hardly believe it was so close.

  Moving together, Paul and I scrambled over huge icy blocks that led us out of the couloir and up to a notch on the East Ridge. We held on tight as we pushed our heads into the ferocious winds and looked down on Cerro Torre far below on the other side. Unable to congratulate each other under the white noise of the wind, we sheltered behind a block and waited for Nick and Jim, our faces warmed by big stupid grins.

  When we were all together again, Paul took a deep breath and led an exposed pitch on weather-formed nubbins out of the notch, traversing up onto the north side of the ridge and back out of the wind. Gear flapping, his ropes arching out horizontally, he looked like a stunt man climbing out onto the wing of an aeroplane.

  Once back in the shelter of the ridge, we tiptoed out above the couloir, traversing towards the final col from where we could scramble up to the summit. It looked as if we could be there in minutes – until we found our traverse had ended and we had to climb up onto the ridge.

  Nick went up, but was soon back, unable to breathe in the wind let alone climb. It was 4.30 p.m. and already the sky was growing darker as we huddled together, aware that it would be impossible to reach the summit before nightfall.

  I wanted to go down. I’d fulfilled my half of the bargain, but the others wanted to try and sit it out, gambling that in the morning the wind might abate enough to let us make a dash for the summit. I knew that Patagonian storms often lasted for months; the thought of staying here any longer made me feel sick.

  Telling people your wife’s having a baby is a real rite of passage, like telling them you’ve just pulled off a big climb. They know that you’re a man. Having children means you’re different, you’ve made it, fulfilled your biological duty. The only problem was that I’d see dads at work, looking fat, tired and fed up, complaining how having kids had quashed all their dreams. People would tell me that I’d have to settle down and stop climbing, that once you have kids your priorities change. No more hard routes.

  But I still had so many things I wanted to do.

  Scrambling down to a pat
ch of ice perched above the 1½-kilometre drop to the glacier, we began hacking out a ledge for our tiny three-person bivy tent. Within a few minutes of the four of us squeezing inside, the flimsy fabric strained against its ice-screw moorings as the first titanic gust hit us.

  As the wind moved around and began to blast our side of the mountain, we realised we were trapped until the storm blew itself out, or we were blown off the face. The fabric began buckling wildly, as if a million scared seagulls were striking it from the outside. The edge where our feet lay was lifting and falling as fingers of wind found their way beneath us.

  The wind grew. It roared louder than I’d ever heard, then roared even louder again.

  The tent lifted and we were airborne.

  I imagined her face. If this was the end, I wanted it to be the last thing I’d see.

  Mandy started bleeding in the morning. She was only eight weeks pregnant. It was a bad sign. We were staying in London, so went down to the local hospital and waited in the Accident and Emergency department. Mandy cried, fearing her baby was dead. I put my arm around her and felt like crying too but stopped myself. I had to be strong. I felt a deep sense of sadness at the thought of her baby dying. I knew how much it meant to her. I wondered if she would fall apart, if we would fall apart, if it died.

  The tent tumbled as if it was in wild surf. I heard people screaming and realised I was one of them. I held on to Paul at my side, convinced we were now tumbling out into space, about to be smashed to pulp as we rattled down the face.

  We crashed back onto the ledge.

  The anchors had held us.

  The doctor slid back the curtain, smiling, and told us that everything seemed fine, that he’d examined Mandy and that the unborn baby looked very healthy. There was nothing to be worried about. I felt relieved, wanted to shake his hand. Everything was OK. Mandy wiped away the tears. She looked beautiful when she was happy.

  Midnight. Time stretched on, long and terrible. The tent was blown in the air every ten minutes, while the inescapable noise of the wind and the flapping fabric drove us crazy. My body’s supply of adrenaline soon ran dry. Unable to cope with the stress, my brain began to shut down. All I could think about was my foolishness, about her love, about what this would do to her if I was to die. I wished I didn’t care, wished I could just be remorselessly selfish.

  Dawn arrived but the wind only intensified. I shouted that we should fight our way down while we still had some energy, but the others out-voted me, saying we should stay where we were. Fear gave way to numb resignation and we began to shout out stories of other epics we’d come through. We all doubted we’d live to tell this story.

  After seventeen hours, the conversation slipped from epics to the mundane and inevitably to women. Nick began describing an ill-starred romance, telling a story of how once, on a climbing trip to Poland, he had been propositioned by a beautiful and famous ballet dancer in Warsaw. ‘She was gorgeous, but I already had a girlfriend in England and I told her I couldn’t be unfaithful.’

  ‘Did you tell your girlfriend about it?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Yeah, when I got home and rang her to tell her how faithful I’d been, she told me she’d met someone else and it was over!’

  In our heightened state of fear, we started to laugh hysterically, not only at Nick’s misfortune but at the thought of four crazy men talking about sex and ballerinas while trapped on Fitzroy in winter. Tears rolled down our cheeks.

  It was then that the tent began to rip apart.

  Our lodger Jon took us to the hospital.

  Mandy lay in bed in pain while I tried to stay awake beside her. The day dragged on with no sign of any birthing. Busy doctors and nurses popped in every now and then to check on her condition. I walked up and down the corridor, looking at other tired dads. None of them seemed too keen on the whole deal. I went down the hall and rang all the people I needed to keep informed, then sat next to Mandy, again. I tried to talk to her, to do what fathers are supposed to do, but I was only a distraction, so I sat and read instead.

  One minute we were in our sleeping bags laughing, the next we were screaming as the tent filled with spindrift and then began to disintegrate around us. My sleeping bag turned into an icy windsock. Furiously, I stuffed it into my rucksack and then squeezed out into the raging storm, holding on to a tangle of frozen ropes. It felt as if I was in the rigging of a ship battling around the Horn.

  Hoar frost instantly covered everything. I watched as Nick and then the others appeared, each face hidden behind multiple balaclavas and goggles, all of us dressed in our huge belay parkas. The summit was totally irrelevant now. With wind and snow blowing up, we found ourselves at the top working out how to climb downwards. Gravity had seemingly reverted. Holding on to anything we could, we slowly retraced our steps towards the brèche and the couloir. We had no idea where the other descent routes were; we had no choice but to go back down the way we’d come. It was the last place on earth you would want to visit in such a storm; it was a death sentence, but it was our only escape route.

  In the hospital I had flicked through an Australian magazine and done a bit of homework, reading about a winter ascent of Fitzroy’s Super Couloir, a route I planned to try that summer. I was uneasy about the trip, my first proper expedition. I wondered how I would get on with Nick, Jim and Paul, guys I’d only met through work. I’d thought about going to Patagonia in winter for a long time, but I’d never found anyone to share my enthusiasm until I mentioned it to Paul one day when he came in to buy some new crampons. His uncle had travelled around Patagonia one winter and he’d said the weather was much more stable, so Jim and I began to organise the trip. Patagonia in winter – it was still a crazy idea. I thought how I’d now be the only dad in the team, wondered if being a father would make any difference, slow me down or make me more cautious?

  A nurse came in and said I should go home. I’d been up for twenty-four hours and she doubted Mandy would have the baby until tomorrow. Glad of the chance for some sleep, I slipped away.

  Down-climbing and lowering each other, in order to avoid letting go of the ends of the rope, we arrived at the top of the couloir and clung onto the rocks while we set up the first abseil. Tired and hungry, I imagined we were about to descend over the edge of the world, cloud streaming up out of the void beneath us. The wind ripped at our clothes. We knew full well that in the narrow confines of the couloir the force of the storm magnified tenfold, and there was no chance of escape from rock fall or avalanches. I remembered reading how the climber Gino Buscaini had once photographed a tornado in the couloir. I wondered what horrors waited for us below, and whether I was strong enough to face them. We began to descend.

  Midnight. The phone rang. I had been in bed for less then fifteen minutes.

  ‘Mr Kirkpatrick, you need to get here as soon as you can, your wife’s giving birth.’ I put the phone down and laid my head back on the pillow.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Mr Kirkpatrick, are you on your way?’ This time I jumped out of bed.

  When I reached Mandy’s room she was in full labour with a doctor and midwife helping her. The birth had been long and with complications, the baby twisting inside her. I stood next to the bed and tried to hold her hand. I sat passively and watched. It went on and on. I felt detached. I felt nothing.

  Watches froze, time stopped for all of us as we slowly descended. Each of us was alone with our fears. There was nothing to say, and very little chance of anyone hearing it anyway. We thought no further than the next rappel and blessed our gods each time the ropes came down. Losing our ropes to the storm, blown off and snagged on unreachable flakes, or chopped by falling rocks, was unthinkable.

  Trying to avoid the couloir as much as we could, we risked a faster plumb line down blank walls: quicker, but totally committing. We could only guess where we were. The walls were now uniformly white with feathered hoar, and thick cloud swirled all around us. At one belay, three of us hung from a small wobbly flake and a
single peg, our feet dangling in space as Paul looked for another anchor below. We knew there was worse to come, but accepted it for the chance it gave.

  The midwife looked worried and began to sweat. The doctor came back in the room. They talked. I stood up and tried to work out what was going on.

  ‘Mrs Kirkpatrick … Mandy … we think the umbilical cord might be around the baby’s neck. We need you to really push.’

  I started to cry. I grabbed Mandy’s hand tight and squeezed it. I willed the baby out. Her face turned red. I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t want our baby to die.

  Unwilling to break out the two other ropes and risk them becoming stiff and frozen too soon, we descended slowly together, rejoined the couloir and scratched across the wall to a familiar belay. Once we were all there, we stayed silent until we retrieved the ropes and then relaxed a little. Now we had a familiar route to travel, even if it was a bowling alley of rock and snow, and held many dangers.

  I took a photo and Jim smiled. I wanted to believe I’d live to see it.

  ‘I think it should be about thirty rappels from here,’ Nick said, as he slowly lowered Paul into the upwards-driven hail. The wind dropped for a second and we were immediately blasted by express trains of spindrift. Resigned to our misery, the three of us hung limply off the belay as Paul searched below for another anchor. All of us were half buried in the swelling tide of snow. Don’t think any further than the next anchor, I thought. It was a good strategy.

  Mandy was urged to push harder, and somehow she did. Then the midwife said she could see the baby’s head. I looked away, being a coward, because I was terrified about what I might see. Maybe if the baby was dead, and I never saw it, it would remain unreal to me.

  Only the arrival of night signalled that time was still passing. The world was now no bigger than the flickering circle of light from our headtorches. We had lost count of the number of rappels we’d made. I was numb, both physically and mentally. I thought about reaching the glacier and our tent, but the thought was torture: the possibility seemed no nearer than when we had begun. I wondered if we had already died and this was how we would spend eternity.