Cold Wars Read online

  I tried to work out how big the flake was, but could only see that behind it were several smaller blocks ready to tumble after it.

  ‘IAN!’ I shouted, trying to sound calm. ‘There’s a big loose rock here. I’m holding it but I’m going to have to let it fall. Can you move?’ I already knew the answer.

  ‘Erm… not really,’ came the reply. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘Big enough,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to chuck down some smaller stones so watch out.’

  With the flake still on my shoulder I reached behind it and fished out the smaller rocks and threw them over my shoulder. Each fell without making a sound, only a dull, distant ‘thwunk’ as they landed far below us.

  I threw the last one, but this one hit something, probably the top of the corner above Ian, sending down a shower of fragments. Ian let out a yelp. He’d been hit.

  While I couldn’t see him I could hear him moaning. Fine, I thought, if he can complain he’s still breathing. When all the stones were gone, I squatted down and took the big rock entirely on my shoulder, allowing it to roll out of the crack. As it did I stood up, and with a yell pushed it away as hard as I could.

  It fell for a moment then hit something with a loud boom, followed by a cascade of smaller crashes and bangs that lasted for several seconds as the remains of the flake tumbled down the face.

  I looked down. Ian was looking up. He’d stopped moaning. He was okay. The rock had missed him. I guessed he’d also forgotten about his feet.

  I climbed on, reached the belay and stripped the gear on the way down. Now we were only two pitches from the top.

  ‘Are your feet okay?’ I asked, looking over the top of my book. Ian was sat rubbing his stinking feet longer than was usual, tea having to wait until he was done. Ian had once told me that he hated people who complained, so I guessed it was worth asking.

  ‘I don’t seem to be able to get my foot warmed up,’ said Ian, rubbing hard at the yellow flesh. The toes were white and seemed dead.

  I sat up on one elbow and watched, knowing how horrible it was, that moment between having cold feet, and the warmth returning, that uncertainty, not knowing if the blood will return, that your toes really are dead and will just rot away.

  Ian rubbed on.

  ‘Do you want to stick it on my stomach?’ I asked, knowing it would be the only way to get the blood moving.

  Ian looked at me, thinking I was joking, having spent the last few days doing nothing but complain about the smell. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes if you want,’ I said, knowing this was going way beyond the realms of normal friendship, way above sharing a girlfriend or donating a kidney.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ian, shuffling near, straightening his leg, his foot moving closer.

  I sat up, and moved closer. Taking his foot in one hand, I lifted up my fleeces with the other, and pressed it onto my warm belly, feeling his almost dead flesh imprint its cold shape on my warm skin, sucking in my heat.

  Neither of us looked at each other, the moment embarrassingly intimate: two men, never more than sixty metres apart, sleeping in the same bed and pissing in the same bottle, their bodies now… touching. I could tell he was keeping his foot rigid, the slightest toe wriggle beyond the pale.

  And there we sat, until the blood returned, and dinner could be started.

  As usual it snowed the next day, and it was a long jumar up the ropes to our highpoint. We were leading two pitches each go, so it was still my turn, and this would most likely be the second-hardest pitch on the route.

  At the bottom of the jutting buttress there seemed only one way to go, up right to a thin crack. The problem was it looked hard and lay above a big ledge, the famous ‘jammed block’ on the classic American Direct. I climbed over and saw a peg high up with a karabiner on it. He had obviously been here. It was only later that we discovered this peg was an abortive attempt, and he’d lowered off it to climb up the other side of the buttress, a line obscured by snow as I looked up. Climbing on, I reached the peg, the crack above closing down to just a hairline, meaning I had to use one of the smallest pegs I had, a birdbeak, a peg no bigger than a coin, shaped like a tiny ice axe, with a fingernail blade designed to be tapped into the thinnest cracks. With total concentration I moved up, piecing the pitch together, big clouds of spindrift showering down. The climbing was great, and not once did I think I would fall, or consider what would happen if I did.

  The crack finished, but I was able to hook up some flakes until they too ran out. Looking down at the distance between me and the last beak, and below that to the last piece of gear that would hold a big fall, I realised I would go miles, but instead of feeling scared, I simply revelled at my own nerve and control.

  A body’s length above me the rock eased back, and I could see an obvious spot where Lafaille must have belayed. But between me and it there was nothing.

  Except there always is.

  I stepped up as high as I dared and found a tiny horizontal overlap in the rock, not a crack, just an upside down edge no wider than the top of a skirting board. Running my fingers along its length I felt a little hollow spot, a horizontal widening the size of half a penny. It appeared and was gone, almost small enough to miss. I looked through my rack and fished out a RURP, a square peg the size of a large stamp with the thickness of a credit card, one edge sharpened. It’s name stood for Realized Ultimate Reality Piton, which had always sounded a bit daft to me, but now made sense as I pushed one edge into the gap.

  The amount of metal it took was no more than a little fingernail. This was a joke placement, something I’d conjure up in the climbing shop by sticking it into the edge of the counter and asking my mate: ‘What if you had to trust your life to that?’ There was no way something so fragile could hold a thirteen-stone climber; and yet I believed it would. So I clipped my etrier to it, along with my daisy chain, and started to ease onto it. My weight twisted the RURP, this force being the only thing holding it in place. The hook below, clipped to the rope, would have no chance of holding me if the RURP now ripped.

  Finally, all my weight hung from it.

  It held.

  I hung there for a moment, ignoring the urge to rush away before this time-bomb exploded, marvelling that someone could make something so little and yet so strong. I stared at it, the entire time expecting it to bend or break in front of my eyes.

  It held.

  Reality had been altered.

  I stepped up, oh so carefully, but for some reason took out my camera and took a picture to capture the moment.

  I stepped higher.

  The gap between my outstretched hand and the good crack was just one placement.

  There was nothing. Except, of course, there is always something.

  I fingered the rock and felt a little flat spot, fingernail sized, a little geological flaw that offered itself to me.

  I took my smallest skyhook, placed it on the edge, clipped in an aider, and stepped up, feeling no need to test the hook, just eager to get off the RURP.

  Bang! The hook popped. I dropped onto my daisy chain, the sling snapping tight onto the crazy RURP, and I waited for the gear-ripping ride to start, and for its end, as my body smashed into the jammed block.

  Only it didn’t.

  The RURP held.

  ‘IAN!’ I shouted looking down at him hunkered over at the belay, about thirty metres below me. ‘Hey Ian! I just took a daisy fall onto the edge of a RURP. And it held!’

  Ian didn’t look up, but simply began paying out rope, his brain too frozen to imagine my shouting could be about anything but a demand for slack.

  I stepped up, replaced the hook with a more pointed one, tested it this time, and finally made the last move to the good crack.

  Stuffing in two cams, I tied off the ropes and shouted for Ian to follow. Looking up, I thought the sight of the next pitch – his lead – should warm him up. It looked easy. As I stood waiting I noticed that small rays of sun were shining through the clouds as the sun began to set,
and wondered if perhaps it was a sign that good weather was at last on its way – a bit late seeing as we only had one more pitch to go.

  Ledge life seemed more desperate than ever that night. With the end in sight, our guard had begun to fall. Ian dropped his mug and his spoon and had to make do with an empty milk powder container, which promptly turned semi-liquid itself once hot water was poured in. He replaced his spoon with a peg. My head spun when the stove was running, but ventilation meant cold air, and so we just poisoned ourselves. Things got so bad we burped fuel vapour.

  ‘Ian, we need to look out for each other,’ I said, knowing that we were in a dangerous situation, that we had become too blasé about where we were, as if gravity no longer effected us. A few days before Ian had fallen out of the ledge in the morning, and only luck and a tangled rope had saved him, having neglected to clip in properly. If we weren’t careful it wouldn’t be a spoon that would be lost.

  We woke in the dark and slowly tried to gather our wits about us, knowing that it could all be over today. Slowly and methodically we ate our starvation rations, put everything away, got our boots on, checked harnesses, the whole operation completed under the usual shower of falling ice. Ian went first, stepping out onto the ledge and slowly jumaring up as I waited below, my stiff sleeping bag draped around my shoulders until it was my turn to climb.

  I lay there, everything around me frozen, sustained by a fading ember of comfort still burning inside. This could be our last morning on the wall, yet thinking so was foolish. Even if we reached the top of the route, the summit still lay another day away at least, probably two or three with all our gear, plus another to get down. We had one more night’s food at most, but neither of us had broached the subject. I guess we had put the mountain to one side and focused on the route, that thinking beyond this was just too much. I couldn’t dwell on the idea that even in success we would fail.

  ‘Rope free,’ Ian called, and I cast off my bag, swung my legs off the ledge, clipped in my jumars and started to climb. It was a clear day at last.

  Ian racked up while I tried to find a comfortable spot, putting on the usual double belay jackets. The corner above didn’t look hard at all, curving up and out over an overhang. Easy but very, very exposed, with the whole route under Ian’s toes as he climbed.

  ‘Guess I’ll be off,’ said Ian, placing the first runner and stepping up.

  He climbed fast, and I filmed him, but there wasn’t much to see until he got to the overhang and began thrashing around.

  ‘I can see the belay,’ he shouted down, ‘just a few moves and I think I can free climb up to it. A couple of bolts.’

  ‘When you get there,’ I shouted back, ‘make a big noise, as I’m filming, but I won’t see you.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, looking back up as the sun broke through the clouds. A few rays hit our upturned faces.

  I felt a sense of relief, knowing that he was almost there, that we were almost there, that it was easy, and we were both safe, with no more stings in the tail. Never in my life had I tried so hard for something, or given so much. But it wasn’t about the route. As is always the case, the gift was in the giving, that it was the pursuit of the climb that mattered, not the climb itself.

  I looked up. Ian was almost out of sight, kicking free of his aiders and grunting up some unseen crack. I took out the video camera and tried to capture his last movements, and then the whoop that would follow, with the climb in the bag.

  His feet disappeared.

  A few bits of grit fell past.

  Then some snow.

  I tried to hold the camera still, imagining him reaching up for the belay, envying him the psychological release of clipping those fabulous bolts.

  ‘I’m there,’ he rasped. It was hardly the rebel yell of victory I was waiting for. But it was enough.

  ‘The higher I get the better I feel’ I shouted as I jumared up the last few feet. Ian came into view, standing on a wide ledge, the whole of the Alps spread out for us.

  I flopped down and lay in the snow, my arms out, no longer caring about anything, just ecstatic that it was over, Ian laughing at my total disregard for where I was, my legs hanging over the edge. I felt drunk, no longer caring about anything. Nothing could touch me now or ever again. We had followed in the footsteps of a god. We were in his heaven.

  ‘We’re not going to the top are we,’ I said, my eyes still closed, feeling the gentlest warmth on my face.

  ‘No,’ said Ian. There really wasn’t anything to talk about.

  ‘I guess we’re going back down the way we came then,’ I said, feeling the snow melting under me, one leg growing cold as the sun moved out of sight and the shadows returned.

  ‘Yep. We might be back down for lunch tomorrow.’

  You can’t sit on sunny ledges forever, so I went first, aiding down the last pitch as the sun set so I could reach the belay. Ian joined me as once again the darkness fell. I felt paranoid, that we were going to undo ourselves through some minor error, the exhaustion returning. The next abseil was down the crux pitch, a plumb line. My toes could just scuff the rock as I slipped back down the ship’s prow. The belay was out of reach and it took a few swings for me to grab the mess of ropes attached to it; a strand that led back down to the portaledge hidden somewhere in a mass of loops and coils. My headtorch was almost out of juice and I thought that instead of hanging there and sorting out the loops and knots to make it easier to retrieve the ropes, I’d leave them for Ian to sort out, now just wanting to get back to the portaledge. I felt for the thin strand I needed, attached my abseil device, unclipped from the belay and leaned back.

  The rope didn’t go tight. It just fed out.

  I was falling.

  ‘…?!’

  With a lurch I stopped a few metres lower, my hand locked down on the rope. I let out a scream, as much at myself as the fall. I’d clipped into the wrong strand, a loop that was just hanging from the belay, but not directly attached. Somehow it had knotted up and held me. It could easily have just let me slip off its end. Quickly I reached for the correct rope, clipped a jumar in, and, resetting my abseil device, set off again. I didn’t have the energy to consider it further.

  Collapsing into the portaledge, I double-checked I was properly tied in before getting off the rope, and then brushed the ice from my sleeping bag while I waited for Ian. All sense of relief at getting to the top was gone; now I felt on the wrong side of safe, as if something awful would creep up and squash me now it knew my guard was down. Frightened, I switched off my headtorch and just lay there. Hiding.

  I heard the slip of belay plate on rope, then the plastic clunk of Ian’s feet as he arrived, seeing the beam of his headtorch flashing over their black plastic. I heard him sigh. He too was having a moment.

  ‘You in there?’ he said.

  ‘Just warming your slippers.’

  ‘One, two, three… Away you go!’ I shouted, throwing our biggest haul-bag off the ledge.

  It tumbled down, and down, and down, spinning over and over, twisting and falling. It fell free, filled with all our soft gear, or gear we didn’t mind losing, until it finally struck the edge of the bottom buttress, and shot out away from the wall, lost from sight.

  ‘I hope we find it,’ said Ian, lowering the video camera.

  ‘I don’t really care. I just want to get down.’

  ‘We’ve got one more thing to do,’ said Ian, pulling out something small from his pocket, wrapped in plastic. ‘I promised I’d throw this off as well.’ Ian unwrapped a small plastic Superman complete with parachute. The figure was about four inches high.

  ‘Is that a life-size model of Lafaille?’ I asked.

  Ian gave a guilty laugh, knowing he shouldn’t.

  Pulling out the plastic parachute, its dozen strings tied to the model’s rubber shoulders, Ian threw it out over the drop. It fell for a second, then stopped as the chute filled with air, then rose up, past us, the tiny blue figure spinning in the breeze, until it slipped into
a wide crack and just hung there.

  We set off down, me going first with the little haul-bag clipped to my harness. Ian followed with the portaledge clipped to his. We picked up the line of the American Direct and rapped off its anchors, each one getting us closer to the ground.

  All the way I focused on not making a mistake, making sure every knot was perfect, doing everything in my power not to fuck up now we were so close to being safe again.

  I thought, as I often did, about the story Doug Scott had told me many years ago while sat eating breakfast in Fort William, the two of us having been the star turns at a climbing film festival. We sat in the empty dining room as his young kids played around under the tables.

  ‘You always have to take care on the way down youth’ said Doug, then in his late fifties. ‘On Shishapangma I was done in and just wanted to sleep, but I knew I had to get down.’ His alpine-style ascent of the peak had been one of the great first ascents. ‘I kept imagining my mother telling my kids not to worry, that I was being really careful, taking care with every last step and that I would be home soon.’

  I let myself be weak and thought about Ella and Ewen, for all our sakes.

  Three hours after starting we reached the snow terrace.

  An hour later we reached the ground.

  I hit the snow and walked down until the rope ends slipped through my belay device, freeing me from the wall. I staggered on, my legs unused to the flat, unused to walking, carrying me away, dragging the haul-bag towards a mess of kit where the thrown bag had exploded. The bottom panel had blown out on impact. The bag’s last journey would be back down the snow slopes to the glacier then up to the little station at Montenvers and the train ride down to Chamonix.