Psychovertical Read online

  I continued to lay out the karabiners, then noticed two climbers were watching me from a nearby picnic table, arms folded, checking out my gear, no doubt wondering what I had planned.

  Everyone wants to climb El Cap, but, although many try, the majority fail. I used to joke that there are two types of climbers in Yosemite: those who want to climb El Cap and those who have failed. I wondered what group the climbers that watched me were in. Had they just failed and were now looking for some beta from a fellow big-wall climber, or had they just climbed it, and wanted to bask in the glory of telling someone else? Climbing El Cap by any route is an achievement, so any glory is well earned.

  They walked over.

  ‘What you planning?’ asked the taller climber, his grubby shorts and dirty sandalled feet showing he’d been here a while.

  Don’t tell them!

  ‘Not sure,’ I said, lying.

  Ignore them.

  ‘We’ve just got down off the Shield,’ said the other climber, a scab on the bridge of his nose a sign that he’d smashed a piece of gear into his face on the climb: probably a peg while he was testing it.

  ‘Well done.’

  The Shield was one of the harder classic routes on El Cap, a line that shot up one of the steepest parts of the wall. It had been my first big wall, but keeping this a secret and not bursting their bubble was more rewarding than telling them that.

  ‘Yeah, 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 sky hooks, 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 birdbeaks 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.

  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 up worlds of imagination. The dim and dark corners of our world turned into something exciting and startling. Sacred amongst all these places were the green open areas: the playing fields, the small park, the squares of dog-shit-covered green grass, and the trees. We gobbled these places up, our skin tingling for nature even though we didn’t know it then. I imagined myself an alien who had come from a different world from the other kids, a world that made me different from them and to which I would have given anything to return.

  School was amazing. The teachers were experienced and positive, able to deal with a lot of problem kids with a firm but supportive hand. Somehow they made every child feel unique, special and wanted. Nevertheless I struggled in many subjects, finding it hard to do what many of the other kids took for granted, both academically and, more embarrassingly, socially, unable to master reading the time or tying my shoe laces. I began special lessons, the teachers helping me to catch up, and learn new ways of learning. There was never a name given to my slowness of understanding, or stigma, only acceptance that I required help.

  Luckily my saviour was the fact that I could draw, a fantastic outlet for my out-of-control imagination. Unable to read, I looked at comics, a braille of pictures becoming my language, the stories I wanted to tell produced in images. I was a real daydreamer, finding it hard to concentrate in class, and I was forever in trouble for scribbing in book margins and on desks, rather than getting down to work. I always seemed to be somewhere else. I spent all my spare time drawing, lying on my stomach in front of the TV. My mother’s brother, who owned a printing company, kept me supplied with off-cuts of paper and card.

  My dad’s visits were erratic. Often he went months without seeing us, something that’s hard to understand when you’re a child – or a father. I wonder if perhaps it would have been better to have never seen him again, because of the amount of upset it caused when he had to leave – two days or a week not being enough to fill the hole inside us. Even so I loved him unconditionally, and held on to his image, both because he was my dad, and because he was the only link back to my old life. We, however, were changing fast. Joanne was out of her plaster and a cheerful little girl, and both Robin and I were growing up. In the early days I would pray that Mum and Dad would get back together, but as the years moved on I knew they never would.

  When I knew my dad was going to visit us, I’d count down the days as if to Christmas. Then I would stand on a chair and look out at the road, the height of the flats allowing me to see for a long way, waiting for his car to turn off the main road and drive into the flats’ car park. I would pine for him. Nothing else mattered. I could feel the pain of longing, and wondered if my heart was broken like my mum’s and if hers felt like this. But I always forgave him.

  When he came to see us he would often take us to the park, and occasionally we’d go climbing and camping in the Peak District, a few hours away. The camp site was only a few miles from Sheffield, but for me it was a magical place of valleys, forest and streams, and a real escape from the city.

  One morning I woke up early, crept out of the tent and walked up the hillside, through the wet ferns, and scrambled up a band of rocks called Stanage Edge. It was dawn, and mist hung in the valley below. I didn’t want to go home to the city. I wanted to stay, but I knew I couldn’t. I promised myself that one day I wouldn’t have to leave.

  Perhaps it was the memory of Tywyn, or the visits to the Peak District, but I yearned for adventure – wherever it could be found.

  We had many trips to Switzerland as children: not the country, but a disused quarry named Little Switzerland set beside the mighty Humber Bridge. We would go there in a big gang and explore its overgrown depths and flooded pools, sometimes abseiling with the rope and home-made harness my dad had given me. I took on the role of twelve-year-old climbing instructor, the rope tied off to some railings, designed to stop people falling over the edge. Now it makes my blood run cold just thinking about it. After we’d done our exploring, imagining we were in the jungles of Vietnam, following in Rambo’s footsteps, we’d make the long nine-mile march home. Often we’d return to the estate looking like a rag-tag army, covered in mud, with dads on bikes shouting at us because they’d been out looking for us for several hours. Generally my mum would send us to bed, having yet again been made sick with worry.

  Between the river and our flat lay the docks, vast and sprawling over tens of miles. Once part of one of the greatest ports in the world, like most of the nation’s industrial strongholds they had slowly fallen into a decline. The North Sea trawlers, Arctic whalers, the ships full of wood, wool and, at one time, slaves, had been replaced by rusting prams, oily bobbing polystyrene, and bloated dead dogs.

  These docks, along with the bombed-out buildings at the edge of the estate, became my wilderness, a place as dangerous, remote and grand as any Arctic wasteland, an expanse of freedom and possibility.

  In those days there was no reason to go to the docks, and the only people you would find there were prostitutes, tramps, anglers and the kids who lived in our estates along their northern edge.

  Most of the prostitutes came from our estate, with their children going to our school, and it was not uncommon for one kid to taunt another in the playground with the line, ‘Your mum’s a prozzie,’ to which they would reply ‘Yes … what about it?’

  I knew about prostitutes long before I knew about sex, and their trade was often a good source of fun as we sped around on our bikes at dusk like the BMX bandits, flushing out all the local working spots such as the old graveyard that bordered the docks, and watching the punters either run or stand their ground and shout and chase us.

  The tramps who inhabited the docks came from the Salvation Army building on the estate, and were of the old variety; the hospitals had yet to be cleared of the mentally ill, so the down-and-outs were mainly elderly, smelly, bearded men – no doubt soldiers who never made it home. They drank meths – or at least that was what we believed – and huddled together on the stairs of the church, waiting for the off-licence to open. They would often fall into the docks, either to be plucked out by the fire brigade or to sink below the quick mud and drown. One story at school was of a tramp who survived a jump one night from the sixth floor of Grasmere House – but the bones of his legs went right through his feet. He was left sticking out of the ground, a foot shorter, screaming, until the fire brigade could dig him out.

  Although I didn’t actually see this event, the image that it conjured haunted me through my childhood, especially when we were older and would dare each other to climb onto the roof of the flats by squeezing up behind the rubbish chutes, with an unsurvivable drop waiting below.

  We were always climbing things, running along walls, messing around on roofs, the heights being the domain of the brave or of policemen with ladders. The bigger the drop, the bigger the thri
ll.

  The estate was full of stories of derring-do and disaster: kids falling from balconies when their washing-line ropes snapped, or people falling down lift shafts. One landmark was a cracked paving stone below one of the ‘proper flats’. It was said to have been the impact point of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from the twentieth floor. This was perhaps the reason the ‘proper flats’ had more respect from us kids; they guaranteed death from the top. The word ‘maisonettes’ was also deemed to be a bit pretentious, not that we knew what that was. I thought a lot about death as a child – perhaps I was a bit disturbed, maybe it was thinking too much about the man who had hanged himself in our maisonette.

  In the docks, the anglers fished for the eels which seemed to thrive on the decay. This was also a popular pastime among us kids, once we could afford a rod, although most fishing trips to the docks involved very little fishing. We’d cycle down there with our rods tied to our bikes, and after the initial excitement threading hooks and bait, our attention would soon wander. One popular activity was finding druggies’ hypodermic syringes down within the oily Victorian gears of the rotating bridges that joined up the docks. We’d stick them in our bait maggots, and pump these up till they popped. There was always loads of junk that could be thrown in the water, glass windows to break on derelict buildings, or we’d use catapults and see who could hit far-off dead animals that floated like bloated pigs in the water.

  When they drained the dock a few years later, to make way for a shopping centre, the workmen came across a dying giant fish over two metres long. Unidentified and looking darkly prehistoric, the fish was held up for a photo to go in the local newspaper. It must have lived in the sealed-up dock for decades, feeding off eels and rats.