The Fall (2 page)

After a pause—resting? Was it possible to be resting on that vertical and hostile face?—the man had begun to move once more.
The remainder of the wall soared up above him to where safety was represented by a thin diagonal terrace. There was a hint
of grass up there, a faint green mustache to break the monotony of gray. It was still far above him, but it seemed to signify
safety. His body swayed and moved up, his feet touching rock with something of the assurance, something of the habitual skill
and poise of a dancer. You could see that he had fair hair. Not much else about him. An anonymous performer on a Welsh crag,
sometime after noon on a dry and blustery day. Who
was
he?

And then he fell.

There was some argument later whether it was he who shouted. Someone certainly shouted. It may have been one of the walking
party; it may have been one of the pair on White Slab, looking across from the first stance right out in space, way over to
the right on the other buttress. There were no specific words —just a cry of surprise.

He fell and there was something leaden and inevitable about the fall. After the grace and agility of the ascent, the dull
fact of gravity and weight. A sudden sharp acceleration. Thirty-two feet per second faster every second. About three seconds.
And then he hit the broken slope at the foot of the wall, rolled a bit, and stopped.

People got to their feet and ran, scrambled, slithered up the slopes. A pair of climbers on another part of the crag began
to fix a rappel rope. One of the girls in the walking party had begun to weep. Despite the hurry, no one really wanted to
get there. Of course they didn’t. But when they did, quite absurdly they found that he was still alive, unconscious but alive.
And they were surprised to discover that he wasn’t some reckless youth, the kind that has no respect for the traditions of
the place, the kind that doesn’t care a damn about doing anything so bloody stupid as soloing a route as hard as the Great
Wall—he was middle-aged. Lean, tough, weather-beaten complexion (bruised horrendously, his jaw displaced raggedly to one side),
middle-aged. Bleeding from his mouth and one ear. His limbs were arranged anyhow, like those of a rag doll tossed casually
out of a window to land on the grass below.

Someone crouched over him and felt for a pulse in his broken neck. One of the walkers was on his mobile phone calling the
police. Others just stood by helplessly. The pulse was there for a moment beneath the middle finger of the would-be rescuer,
and then it faded away. He died as they stood and watched.

I
WAS DRIVING HOME
when I heard the news. I was somewhere on that winding nightmare of motorway and expressway and overpass that crosses and
recrosses the city of Birmingham: ribbons of lights stretching away into the gathering dusk, the long necklaces of housing
estates, the pendant jewels of factories and warehouses. Design without intention; a strange sort of beauty without any aesthetic
to support it. Over it all, the traffic moved in columns toward Liverpool and Manchester, toward London and the southeast.

The radio was on, and the story was big enough to make the national news on a day when the news wasn’t special, the murders
a mere one or two, the rapes only half a dozen and date rapes at that, the peace negotiations stalled, the elections indecisive,
misery and poverty quotidian.
Noted climber killed in fall,
said a disembodied and indifferent voice from the radio, and I knew at once who it was even before I heard the name. Curious,
that. I knew it would be him.

Jim Matthewson, who lived in North Wales, had spent a lifetime tackling the highest and hardest climbs in the world but died
after falling from a local crag where he had first cut his teeth over thirty years ago…

I decelerated and pulled into the slow lane behind an articulated truck.
LIKE MY DRIVING?
a sign on the tailgate asked; it gave a phone number, just in case you didn’t. The next exit was for the A
5
and North Wales, and I let the car slow down and drift leftward down the slip road. The newsman was talking about helicopters
and multiple fractures and dead on arrival. I hadn’t really made a decision, no conscious decision anyway, but that was just
like it had been with climbing — movement being everything, movement being a kind of thought, body and mind fused into one,
the mind reduced perhaps, but the body exalted surely. Nowadays in the ordinary round of life there was separation of mind
and body: but in those days it had been different.

As I dialed home, the radio news had become a broken oil pipeline in West Africa. Villagers had sabotaged the thing in order
to collect the crude oil that spilled out. The phone rang in the hallway of my house while West African villagers ranted on
about the corruption of the government and the high prices they were forced to pay for what was flowing for free through the
metal tube just outside their village. You had to see their point of view.

I’d hoped to get one of the girls, but of course it was Eve’s voice that answered: “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Where on
earth
are you?” The overemphasis in her voice.

“Have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“On the radio. Jamie. He’s dead.”

An eloquent silence. How can silence on the end of a telephone line be eloquent? But it was. “How?”

“No idea. A fall, that’s what it said. Look, I’m somewhere around Wolverhampton. I’m going.”

“Going?”

“To Wales.”

“Wales?”
A note of incredulity. “Where will you stay? For goodness’ sake, Allie’s got to go to choir practice this evening. She was
relying on you taking her. And you haven’t got anything with you.”

“That shouldn’t be much of a problem. And I reckon I can get a bed at the Center.”

Another silence. “What’s the point?”

“He was a friend. Christ alive, Eve, he was my
best
friend.” It sounded ridiculous, the kind of thing children say.
Best friend. Make friends, make friends, never, never break friends.
It’s girls who do that kind of thing, mainly. Boys find it all a bit embarrassing, don’t they?

“And now he’s dead. And you haven’t seen him for years. What’s wrong with a letter, or a phone call or something? You don’t
have to go running to the rescue like a Boy Scout, for God’s sake. And anyway, there’s no one to rescue.”

“There’s Ruth.”

“I know there’s Ruth. And how do you propose to rescue her —?”

There was one of those awkward pauses, made more awkward by the fact that we were just voices, stripped of face or feature.
We spoke over each other: “Rob.”

“Eve.”

“Go on. What were you going to say?”

“No you.”

“When…”

“Yes?”

“When will you be back?”

Her question hung in the balance. “A day or two,” I said finally. “Time to sort things out. Time to see Caroline. That kind
of thing. Eve…”

“Yes?”

“Give the girls a kiss from me. Tell Allie I’m sorry about the choir. Next week.”

“Is that a promise?”

It was hard to read her tone. Hard to read mine too, I guess. “Look, I’m parked on the hard shoulder. I’d better be going.
I’ll give you a ring later. Love to the girls. And to you.”

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

Birmingham is something of a border territory. You wouldn’t think it to look at the place, but the fact is that beyond Birmingham
you are quite suddenly out of the embracing clasp of London, that disproportionate city, that selfish city that wants everything
and everybody, that steals almost the whole of the south of England to itself and looks with covetous eyes on the rest. But
beyond the lights of Birmingham there are the Marches, where blood was spilled, and the thin ribbon of the A
5
that leads to Wales. London suddenly seems far away. I drove into the gathering dusk, past familiar names and familiar landmarks:
Telford, Shrewsbury. Ahead there were black hills against the sky. Offa’s Dyke was signposted for tourists. At Oswestry came
the first hint of a change of language and landscape,
CHIRK
and
NEWBRIDGE
giving way to
PENTRE
and
CEFN-MAWR,
and the road abruptly turning westward and finding a narrow gorge into the hills, and there was the sign to Llangollen, which
is the farthest many outsiders get into the narrow, crabbed, secretive land that is Wales. The walls of the valley crowded
in on the car. Headlights cut into the thick Welsh evening and spotlighted Celtic names now —
CERRIG-Y-DRUDION, PENTREFOELAS, CAPEL GARMON
. With the window down I could sense the difference, that sharp scent of melt-water, the hostile chill of height, the snatch
of cold mountain air at the lungs.

It all came back as I drove: an awful muddle of memory and forgetting. Eve and the children suddenly seemed very far away
and in another country, a safe, literal place where nothing is left to chance and no one takes risks. But this was different:
this was a haunted landscape, trampled over by the ghosts of the past. Ahead was the familiar silhouette of the mountain that
was most familiar of all — Yr Wyddfa, Snowdon. Overhead were the stars, Orion setting in the wake of the sun, a planet — Jupiter
I guessed — gleaming down on the sublunary world with a baleful eye. One of our routes had been called Jupiter. I could even
recall the words in the guidebook:
Dinas Mot: start to the right of Gandalf, Extremely Severe.
I remembered Jamie floating up on invisible holds while I sweated after him on the blunt end of the rope. I felt the sweat
now in memory, even after thirty years.

I turned off the main road into a high valley. A long, narrow lake was pressed into the darkness of the mountains like an
ingot of silver. At the only lighted building, I pulled the car over and parked. A warm and soporific atmosphere of tradition
greeted me as I pushed open the door of the bar. There was brown wooden paneling and an old hemp rope in a glass case and
the signatures of history written across the ceiling: Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans.
And another name scrawled somewhere there as well: Guy Matthewson.

I ordered a beer. At the bar two men were talking in low and authoritative terms about the accident. They were tweedy and
pipe-smoking. This hotel and all its traditions had always been a different world from ours, a parallel universe of breeches
and heavy boots and pipes. We had been down at the Padarn Lake in Llanberis. We were jeans and canvas rock boots that they
used to call PAs, and ciggies. Spliffs sometimes. A world away. “What can you expect?” they were asking each other. “These
days people have no respect for the mountains. Of course, his father was one of the old school…”

There was a phone in the corner. I found the number in the phone book, and when my call was answered it was Jamie speaking.
It was a shock to hear his voice: “This is the Matthewson Mountain Center,” he said. “We can’t answer at the moment, but if
you leave your name and number after the beep, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

I didn’t leave a message. I finished my beer and left the customers to their complacency.

The road from the hotel wound uphill and over the head of the pass. The lights of a youth hostel loomed out of the blackness.
There might have been a trace of snow on the hillside behind the building. On the left, the bulk of Crib Goch rose up to block
out the stars. Then the descent into the pass began, and the names of the climbing crags crowded in from memory — Dinas Mot,
Dinas Cromlech, Carreg Wastad, Clogwyn y Grochan. A narrow valley littered with boulders and outcrops and legends, a cradle
and a crucible. Nant Peris with its little straggles of cottages.

The turn off the main road was vividly familiar, as though time had no dimension in memory and I had last taken that route
only a week ago, when we had been looking for a place that was for sale. And then the headlights picked out the slab of engraved
slate announcing

BRYN DERW — MATTHEWSON

MOUNTAIN CENTER

and the low-slung gray house with the outbuildings that had been converted into sleeping quarters, and a rough car park with
no vehicles. I climbed out into the chill night air, feeling at the same time part of the place and alien, an adept and an
intruder.

There were lights in a few of the downstairs windows. When I rang the bell, footsteps sounded inside and a male voice called
through the door: “You the press?”

“I’m a friend.”

“That’s what they all say. You’d fucking better be.” The door opened with reluctance, and a face peered out. Sallow skin and
a scattering of stubble like iron filings across the chin. Long hair pulled back with a bandanna.

“Where’s Ruth?” I asked as I stepped inside. There were familiar photographs on the walls of the hall, stark monochrome ones
of angular rock and scrawny climbers plastered across in balletic poses; color shots of dark rock and enamel-blue skies and
untrammeled snow. One of the rock climbers was Jamie himself, poised on fingerholds on some overhang; the couple of guys in
down jackets and helmets and cheesy grins with an apocalyptic sunset behind them were Jamie and me together; the girl climbing
a steep rock wall, with long hair streaming out below her and a skintight T-shirt was Ruth over a quarter of a century ago,
all of them three decades ago, when we were all much younger and less foolish.