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  I turned around and watched Ian, kicking at the long red portaledge bag as he came down the slabs, until he too reached the bottom, and slumped in the snow. We just sat there. Both of us were knackered, the last gram of energy expended.

  ‘We’d better get a move on if we’re going to get the train,’ he said.

  The sun had begun to set and a cold wind blew down the Mer de Glace. We’d missed the train, our slow descent not helped by me throwing my haul-bag off the edge of cliffs that blocked our way, only to find the ropes we needed had been inside it.

  ‘I guess it’s only fair that it should end like this,’ said Ian, pulling the bags under a large boulder, ready to be picked up later, the plan to walk down in just our clothes.

  I took off my fleece jacket and stowed it with the bags, knowing I’d get hot on the way down, not used to moving hundreds, even thousands of metres an hour rather than a handful. We both stank, and the cold wind rushing over us felt like a wash. ‘What’s happened to your body?’ exclaimed Ian as he switched on his headtorch, looking at me in a state of shock. I looked down, for the first time in ten days, at my body. My thermal top hung off what looked like someone else’s torso. I had a waist. You could see my ribs. I’d been transformed by the climb. It was as if I’d set off fat and unfit, not looking the part, not fit to try the Alps’ hardest climb, and come back looking just like you’d expect such a climber to look, like the climber I’d always dreamt of being. This was a hell of a way to go on a diet. My stomach grumbled. We had to get a move on, and set off down what would no doubt feel like a death march in our state, down the trail in the dark to Chamonix. Although I felt fragile, my head dizzy and spaced out, I also felt invulnerable, as if I could walk for a week without food, through storms and cold. There was nothing I could not endure after this.

  We sat in the bar, the cleaner sweeping up from the night before. Ian and I were dressed in our normal clothes again, clothes that no longer fitted, each wearing belts improvised from a sling to stop our trousers falling down. Outside the door the early morning traffic moved slowly through a snowstorm, but inside it was warm. Just looking at snow made me feel cold, my body hyper-sensitised, as if it had held the line against a cold siege, and was now exhausted, and in need of tender care. I thought about my realisation on the Reticent Wall, that to survive on a hard climb you must treat yourself like someone you love. The Lafaille was proof; with love you could overcome most things. Love for yourself, for your partner, treating him like you must treat yourself; and for the mountain, as something to be loved, not hated.

  Ian had the look of a veteran, face and lips chapped, his fingers swollen and battered, happy like me just to sit awhile, to set a mug of tea down and not worry it would spill as the other shifted, or fall from the table and tumble forever. In a month he was going to Alaska with Kenton Cool, another strong British alpinist. I wondered if he felt he was on a roll now, that the Dru had armed him for harder climbs, one built upon the next, or exhausted, the idea of another trip so soon too much to bear. I guessed he probably felt the latter. Both of us were mentally and physically shattered, feeling that limbo of not being on the climb, but also not quite back in the world, and missing both and neither at the same time. In a week our strength would return and the suffering would be just another pub story, only a slide to back it up, our camera smiles tricking us into believing it wasn’t so bad.

  Maybe it wasn’t?

  I looked forward to going home. Not once had I regretted being here, or wished to be home instead. It just felt right. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to feel. I knew though that when Ian left for Alaska, with no big climbs for me for another six months, I’d feel as if I’d been left behind.

  In an hour we would drive home to England, but before then we had someone to see. He walked in through the door, his curly hair flecked with snow, his skin tanned and lined by a life in the mountains, mobile phone to his ear. I wondered if he would even see us, expecting to see someone else. That he’d walk straight past us, thinking we were skiers getting over a hangover – which in a way we were. But his eyes flashed as he saw us, his hand waved. Maybe he could see the mark of his route on us.

  ‘Ian. Andy,’ he said, walking over.

  ‘Hello Jean-Christophe,’ Ian said, standing up and shaking his hand, towering over him, like a schoolteacher and a child. I stepped up as well, feeling awkward to meet a hero in the flesh, this man we had tracked for fifteen days, attempting to think and act as he had, believing we could be his equal. Lafaille was indeed short, a pocket deity, only one with the hands of a giant, which he held out smiling. I put mine in his and expected a bone-crunching squeeze, something to confirm our rankings, but instead felt only his warmth.

  We sat down and he asked us about the route, how we had found it, if we had difficulty due to the weather, which bits were dangerous and which bits were safe.

  ‘We needed a better topo,’ said Ian, laughing. ‘We missed the crux pitch so we don’t know how hard it was, but there was lots of hard climbing for sure. It would have been nice if you’d have left the bolts in.’

  As Ian talked I could see something in Lafaille’s eyes, a little fear from this fearless man. He really just wanted to know one thing: was it as hard as he’d thought, or were we going to make a name for ourselves, as many have done, by claiming it wasn’t so bad. That was an easy trick to pull when you’re two nobodies, worse still, British nobodies. Both of us had climbed much harder big walls than Lafaille, and so we probably had found it easier, shown by the fact we climbed it in such bad weather. If it had been as hard as he had said, this god, it would have been too hard for us mortals.

  ‘I think it was very hard,’ I said. Ian nodded.

  Lafaille sat back on his chair and relaxed, and began to tell us about his real life, not about climbing. About trying to build his house, about his children and his wife’s attempts to organize her man. ‘Like you, really I just want to climb, but such things are difficult sometimes, no?’

  We walked outside and I stood next to Lafaille while Ian took a picture, then a portrait of the man alone, the snow resting on his hair, the eventual slide looking slightly out of focus, as if it was misted over with the emotion of meeting him.

  ‘These will make good obituary shots,’ I said. Ian pulled a slightly cross face at such a vulgar remark, which Lafaille didn’t hear, distracted by his phone ringing.

  ‘My wife,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘I must go – maybe we can climb a wall together some day?’ And with a wave he was gone into the storm.

  Ian’s photo, Lafaille standing solid outside the bar, snow flakes knocking the focus out just a touch, did get used a few years later, our hero, lost and never found on a solo winter ascent of Makalu.

  ‘What a nice man,’ said Ian.

  And he was.

  THREE

  Black Dog

  It’s past midnight and I’m sitting in A&E, under the strip lights, hair matted with blood, feeling woozy and sick from a cracked and throbbing head. Around me sit – or slump – the sick and deranged, all of us waiting to see the doctor, waiting to be mended. I look at the clock, and wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that ‘patients’ rhymes with ‘patience.’ Four hours in, with only my fellow sufferers to read, I wish I’d brought a book.

  I look at them, each with their own trauma. This room is a lens on mortality.

  Over the last few months, as I’ve watched Ella and Ewen grow, death has come to preoccupy me, making me consider the risks I’ve taken, the ones I’m about to take.

  But here, in these faces, I see another truth, one that soothes these feelings: that people suffer and die living safe lives just as much as dangerous ones. When people ask me how I can risk my life, the only answer I can give is: ‘How can you not take risks?’

  I would often think about my uncle Doug, a great man, a radio operator on Baffin Island, a hunter in New Zealand, dying in the prime of life, just about to enjoy his retirement. I told myself you have to live your l
ife now, and not wait for some later date. Futures can be easily cancelled.

  ‘Mr Samuels?’ says a doctor, an old man standing painfully to follow him to the cubicles.

  I look around the room at the others, many who looked used to A&E, pissed up, every night out ending here. Some are time-wasters, hypochondriacs, who are easy to spot trying to look ill while at the same time seeming at ease among familiar surroundings. I wonder why such people are drawn to hospitals, the one place most people try and avoid. Maybe they’re lonely, looking for the warmth that attention brings, for someone to notice them, to take an interest in lives transparent to all but those paid to see them.

  ‘Mrs Nugg?’ says the doctor, the old man shuffling away, a new patient standing to follow him.

  Half past twelve.

  The day had started well, my first as a genuine, certified professional climber, signing my first contract with clothing company Patagonia. This was a proper deal, not just gear but money too, something I’d never dreamed could happen to me. I’d worked for Patagonia for a few years, getting clothes to test out, sometimes a jacket made from two different fabrics, one half made from fabric A, the other fabric B, making me look like a jester, or someone who made his own clothes out of remnants. Now I quite literally was the real deal.

  Soloing the Reticent Wall meant little to anyone in Britain. I doubt there were more than twenty people who had heard of the route in the country. The Lafaille had been different. People took notice. Climbers had heard of Lafaille, and although his climb was little reported beyond France, its moniker of ‘hardest wall in Europe’ was shorthand magazine editors understood. Even the Independent covered our climb, although they did focus on why it had taken us fifteen days to climb just eight hundred metres.

  Not everyone was so quick to pat us on the back. The editor of On The Edge magazine was quick to stir up a stink of contrived controversy, saying that we didn’t go to the summit, and that better climbers would have free-climbed the route, which showed his ignorance of climbing beyond single-pitch routes in the Peak District. Ian was uncharacteristically enraged, but justifiably so considering the effort that had gone into the climb. Ian wrote a letter to the editor asking if he’d ever had frostbite, or slept in a sleeping bag with more ice than feathers, or jumared a rope you thought might break in a storm.

  It was a good response, but the whole affair showed the lack of understanding of what was involved. It’s why modern mountaineering is so poorly understood. Walking to the North Pole or reaching the summit of Everest are comprehensible, and can be shoehorned into a couple of paragraphs. Explaining something new, however, seems beyond the media, unless someone dies. If Ian had died, his stock would have been very high.

  Despite all that, we had both turned overnight into minor climbing celebs, with people like Doug Scott and Chris Bonington saying nice things about us, and magazines running our pictures, which were pretty darned good even if I say so myself.

  The highpoint for me came while queuing for the toilet at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. A total stranger coming out of the cubicle I was entering shook me by the hand: ‘Well done on the Lafaille, mate. Awesome effort.’ For some reason this meant a lot, although I wish he’d washed his hands first.

  ‘Mr Green?’ says the doctor. Another man stands.

  I shift in my easy-wipe orange plastic chair. I’ve been sat here for four hours now, and my arse is as sore as my head. I touch the wound every now and again, feeling the huge bump, the split skin, imagining my fingers brushing the bone of my skull, telling myself not to be melodramatic.

  I think back to the Lafaille, and wonder how hard it really was, and how much harder I could push things. We could push things, me and Ian. It had seemed pretty grim, the photos testament to that, the unseen hunger being the worst of it, but I’d been happy to be there, with none of the usual soul-searching.

  Without that weight I could climb anything.

  I could climb anything.

  ‘Mr Kempster?’ the doctor calls. He looks tired.

  No one stands up.

  ‘Mr Kempster?’

  No one stands up.

  ‘Mr Rasheed then?’

  Someone stands, and the rest of us keep on waiting.

  After getting back from the Alps I’d been asked to speak at a climbing symposium organized by the Alpine Club, a day of amazing climbers from around the world – and me – talking about their climbs.

  I talked about the Lafaille and the Reticent Wall, which I guess were state of the art, and as hard as anything being climbed by other European climbers. Although having done them, I didn’t see it like that. I wasn’t proud of these climbs. I was only proud of the stories that stemmed from them.

  After the talks, we were all transported to a pizza restaurant, its small bar buzzing with high-level climbing chat. I found myself standing in the bar, beer in hand, next to two of the most amazing climbers on the planet: Silvo Karo and Voytek Kurtyka. Silvo, with his cropped hair and barrel chest was a Slovenian who had set the benchmark for extreme climbing in the 1980s. It had been Silvo who had coined our Dru mantra ‘do a little every day.’ Every climb he’d put up was long, technical, bold and dangerous – and most remained unrepeated. His name had become shorthand for a ‘death route,’ the archetypal crazy eastern European. You’d imagine he’d be wild-eyed and longhaired, like a crazy Mexican from a Spaghetti Western. In reality he was modest and softly spoken, the routes he’d done not down to craziness, but talent, strength and experience in all the arts of climbing.

  Voytek was Polish, and his list of achievements was enough to make any climber’s jaw drop, starting with the first winter ascent of the Troll Wall, and then on to the Himalaya where he defined a new level of commitment, climbing the hardest faces in the purest style. He’d been one of a handful of climbers in the 1970s and 1980s pushing the boundaries of what was humanly possible – perhaps morally too, since some of his climbs looked almost suicidal.

  Although Voytek survived, many of his contemporaries did not, something he shared with Silvo. Voytek had a striking face, like Rudolf Nureyev, and an ethereal quality that gave one the impression he wasn’t really human at all. He was climbing’s very own Achilles.

  Standing there, between these two men, I felt myself diminished, as if I had nothing at all to say to them that could do justice to their greatness, neither able to ask them about themselves, or tell them about me, as either would diminish me further.

  Instead I just stood there and felt myself to be invisible.

  A young woman came up and began asking Silvo about his most famous routes, scribbling down notes as she probed him with the usual questions: ‘when did you start climbing?’ and ‘have you ever had an accident?’ The topic of his hardest routes came up, and John Porter, one of the symposium’s organisers, explained to the journalist some of Silvo’s climbs, and their context within the world of extreme climbing. Silvo was as tough as they came. The Devil’s Dihedral was mentioned, Silvo’s fearsome route on Fitz Roy, a route he’d climbed with the equally gnarly Janez Jeglič and Franček Knez in 1983. The climb had been nicknamed ‘The Flushing Slovenian Death Couloir’ by western climbers, twelve hundred metres of looseness and danger. Karo and his friends had doggedly pieced together the route over two months, retreating down fixed ropes between storms, the siege style testament to the climb’s seriousness. ‘It was hard,’ was Silvo’s one-line description.

  If I climbed his route with Ian, in winter, just me and him, in alpine style, maybe I wouldn’t feel invisible. At that moment, another climb began.

  ‘Mr Kirkpatrick?’ the doctor asks, emerging from the cubicles. ‘Mr Kirkpatrick?’

  I follow him past the timewasters, hobbling, stiffening up.

  ‘Sit down on the chair,’ says the doctor, his manner robotic as he ticks his way through the sick. ‘I see you’ve bumped your head,’ he says, looking down at my bloody scalp like a man checking to see if a toilet is flushed. ‘What happened?’


  I’d not been on my bike for a long time, but decided that morning I would cycle to my historic meeting with Patagonia in Matlock, a distance of about twenty-two miles. There I’d have lunch with one of their top people and sign the contract.

  As usual I underestimated both time and distance, and got hot and sweaty as my legs tried to remember how to go round, the bike feeling like a car that has stood for too long. Everything had seized up and not in a good way. I’d also lost my bike helmet, and cycling without one made me feel exposed, like driving without a seat belt.

  Turning up damp, knackered and wheezing didn’t seem a good start to my pro-athlete career, and I wasn’t looking the part as I went into the meeting. Then again, I guess looking a state is part of my charm. I signed on the bottom line and we went for lunch.

  It wasn’t a huge amount of money and only a fraction of my old wages, but it was a start, and gave me a little more freedom to go climbing. As I signed I told Hervé, the French manager in charge of the British market, that it was odd to get paid to wear clothes, as when I was a kid my mum got money from the council to buy me clothes, and that risking your life didn’t seem so bad if you looked good doing it. As usual, I spoke too quickly and he just smiled, having no idea what I was talking about.

  Lunch over, I said my goodbyes and jumped back on my bike for the ride home, needing to be back by half five to take over from Jean, our child-minder. I was in for another hot and sweaty ride.

  Cycling along that afternoon my imagination raced ahead of me. This was just the start. With more hard climbs I’d be able to get better sponsorship deals, and more money meant more climbing, because if climbing was a well-paid job, there would be no guilt involved. Signing a contract, just like climbing a hard route, had become just another step along the road. Already the excitement had gone, my mind on the next milestone.