The Fall (25 page)

Not far from the cliff, we found a pub where we could drink in the evenings. There were just the old boys from the village
and the occasional motorcyclist in greasy leathers. “What you lads doin’ then?” the landlord asked as he drew our pints.

“Climbing.”

“Climbing
what?
There’s no mountains here.”

“The sea cliffs.”

“Messin’ about on the cliffs? That’s dangerous. You want to watch it.”

He was called Arthur. Each evening he’d listen patiently to our account of the day’s work. “Seems daft to me” was his opinion,
but as time went on and we didn’t drown and didn’t fall and didn’t need rescue, his respect for us seemed to grow. “Clever
bastards, I suppose,” he admitted.

One evening, Arthur’s daughter was there, pulling at the beer taps and listening with half an ear to what we said but saying
nothing herself. She wore her hair ragged and tied in a bandanna, and her blouse had a tattered, gypsy look to it. “I guess
she’s got a man,” Jamie suggested. When she came around the bar to clear away empty glasses, you could see her calf-length
skirt and narrow feet in leather sandals. There was a thin gold chain around one ankle.

“What’s a girl like you doing here?” he asked. He reddened as he asked it. He always did that, blushed when first talking
to a girl.

“Biding my time,” she said, taking little notice of him.

“Till what?”

“Till a knight in shining armor comes along.” She had just come back from Egypt and wore an ankh on a leather thong around
her neck to prove it. Judging by what came over the speakers, she liked the Stones and the Incredible String Band and Leonard
Cohen. She had a tough face, sharp-featured. Scorched faintly by the sun. Maybe that was Egypt.

“Why you boys lookin’ so pleased with yourselves, then?” she asked when we came in the next evening.

“We’ve just done a new route.”

She placed the glasses in front of us. “What’s the
point?
Going down to the bottom just to come back up. What’s the point?” Her accent made her words seem mocking.

Jamie eyed her. “What do you enjoy?” he asked. I knew that belligerent tone. A challenge, like when he slagged me off when
I was climbing: “Finding it
difficult,
then, Dewar? You’re not
resting
on that runner, are you, youth?”

She returned his look without flinching. “I enjoy smoking,” she said. She paused. “And sex.”

There was no one else in the pub. Her old man was out back fixing something. Electrics, he was always messing about with the
electrics. We reckoned he’d bypassed the meter or something and was taking the power direct from the mains. So her old man
was out in the back, and there weren’t any other customers that early, and this girl called Ruth had just told two almost
strangers that she enjoyed smoking and sex.

“Well, climbing’s rather like both of those,” Jamie said evenly. His cheeks were flushed, but he kept his tone level. “Smoking
and
sex, both at the same time. You should try it.”

“Tell me when.”

“Tomorrow.”

She took the money for our pints and rang it up on the till. “My day off,” she said.

She came despite my protests. Perhaps because of them. Ruth had a hard core of belligerence, just like Jamie. If she thought
that she was being belittled, or that her sex was being belittled,

you saw that light come into her eyes, the smile that wasn’t a smile so much as a challenge. “Fuck you, Dewar,” she said when
I suggested that taking a novice down that cliff was a daft thing to be doing.

She’d found an old pair of gym shoes, black gym shoes that she had last worn when she was at school. “They’ll do,” Jamie had
said.

“But how the hell is she expected to climb an XS route wearing shoes like that and never having climbed before in her life?
I mean, there’s no other way out. We’d have to get her off by boat if she can’t climb out.”

“If you two can do it, Dewar, then so can I.”

“Like hell you can.”

It was only by threatening a strike that I persuaded them to be a bit sensible. “Rob is like a father to me,” said Jamie sarcastically.
So the next day we drove to Llanberis to buy her a pair of rock boots, and we got her to try them out on a couple of routes
in the Pass — Carreg Wastad and the Grochan, that kind of thing. Ruth was, it was clear, a natural. “This is great,” she cried,
startled to find such an experience on her doorstep, a thrill that you didn’t have to travel halfway around the world for.
Jamie was enjoying himself, delighted with having this strange and ragged girl on the end of his rope — “at the end of my tether”
as he put it. Other climbers stopped to watch. They knew Jamie, of course, but it wasn’t him they were looking at, it was
Ruth: her limbs catlike on the rock, her spine drawn taut like a bow as she leaned back to see the next moves, the mane of
hair hanging down her back like some kind of medieval banner. Oh, you noticed Ruth all right.

Afterward we took her to one of the pubs in Llanberis. The bar roared like a storm. A cloud of cigarette smoke shifted above
the heads, and the room was humid with damp wool and slopped beer. The talk was of climbing, of grades and grips and plans
for the future, of new routes that were desperate and old routes that had been found a piece of piss. Ruth was amused by the
place and its subculture, almost as though it might be something encountered on one of her expeditions: a yak drivers’ tavern,
perhaps. “So how long have you guys been doing this?” she asked.

Jamie laughed. “Rob and me? Climbing? Forever, off and on. From when we were kids mucking about.”

I watched how she looked at him and how he returned her gaze — the same amused and analytical examination that he gave a pitch
he was about to climb, as though he knew all the trouble it would bring, and that was part of the entertainment.

“And what are your plans?”

He feigned incomprehension. “Plans?”

“You must have plans of some kind.”

“You mean finish my degree, find a wife, get a mortgage, those sorts of plans?”

“I mean climbing plans.”

“Oh, those.” He glanced around at the crowd in the bar and lowered his voice conspiratorially “Climb out this new cliff before
the rest of these bastards get onto it; that’s the first one.”

“That seems pretty limited.”

He laughed. “There are other ideas. We’ve been doing good stuff in the Alps as well, big routes: the Central Pillar of Frêney,
the Dru, things like that.”

“Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t. Anyway, we’re ready for something really major. The Eiger, maybe.”

“I’ve heard of that…”

“And then…” His voice drifted away. “Who knows? The Himalaya, maybe. What about the Himalaya? What do you reckon, Rob?”

I was caught up by the fantasy. “Why not?”

He nodded, sitting there behind a small barricade of beer glasses, with Ruth listening to him in that way she had, a sharp
interest blended with an air of detachment, as though she was listening, yes, and taking you seriously, but laughing at your
small conceits, your boasting, your sense of importance. “Maybe Kangchenjunga,” he said. “Maybe Kangchenjunga.”

She had something, Ruth did. Nerve. Bottle. The next morning, she stood at the edge of the cliff and gritted her teeth and
held on to the rappel rope while Jamie screamed instructions at her — how to let the rope run gently, how to slow it down; she
got it, more or less, this slight figure in wide flares and some old fisherman’s smock that she had found in a secondhand
sale, and her hair tied back in a bandanna but flying in the wind just the same. She went down the rope screaming with delight — a
banshee scream that frightened even the gulls: “This is
fantastic,
Jamie! Fantastic!”

There was laughter and a strange tension underlying that morning. You could tell what was happening. You could see the looks
Jamie gave her and the way she returned them, that level, thoughtful gaze. You could tell, all right. It hadn’t been like
this with the Australian girls in Chamonix.

“How the hell are we going to get out of here if I can’t climb it?” she asked as we stood on the wave-washed rocks at the
foot of the cliff. There was a steep wall directly above us and then an overhang that guarded the way onto a slab of pink
gneiss. The slab was polished by the elements to a geometrical smoothness, but you couldn’t see that from below. That was
what you discovered when you were up there, clinging to small flake holds and looking to move left onto the slab, the cliff
leaning into you as though trying to prize you off. I resisted the temptation to say that I had warned her, but she didn’t
really seem to care anyway. “We’ll find a way,” Jamie assured her. “Even if we have to haul you up.”

She looked up at the line we had chosen, shielding her eyes with her arm. I noticed the dark hair on her arm, the suntan,
the female angles that mollified her tough muscles, the novel
presence
of her, suddenly in the midst of my partnership with Jamie. “So what are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s go.”

She climbed it. Of course she did. I led to the first stance and then brought her up, giving her a tight rope on the hard
moves and landing her like a gasping fish on the ledge beside me.

“Wow,” she said.

“You wait for the next pitch, my darling,” I warned her.

“Don’t you
darling
me,” she replied.

Jamie followed her up. There was a tight squeeze on the ledge, so Jamie went straight through to climb the second pitch. His
hair blew in the wind, plastered across his forehead. “All right, kids?” he asked as he left the ledge and set off up the
rock, climbing easily, going up with that casual, fluid grace. There was something of the circus performer about him, something
of the ballet dancer, something of the mountebank with bells and ribbons, something of the plain fact of the manual laborer.
We watched him move methodically upward, the gear jangling at his waist, his fingers feeling into narrow spaces, his body
laying away from his holds, his toes smeared against the rock.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” Ruth said.

I wondered about her, wondered about her vagrant manner, the undercurrents of aggression, the glances she gave him. “Yes,”
I agreed. “He’s all right.”

“You jealous?” she asked.

“Jealous? What do you mean?”

“Of him.”

“Why should I be?”

“You like him a lot, don’t you?” she said, and her expression said
more than like.

“Of course I do. We’ve known each other for years. As kids. Sometimes,” I added unnecessarily, “I love him.” And I was angry
at the momentary lowering of the barrier, the moment’s vulnerability.

“Is that so?”

“Not what you’re thinking. Not that.” I was looking upward, following Jamie on the crux, paying out the rope as he moved,
ready to hold him if he came off, ready to save his
life,
for God’s sake. I watched the swaying of his body, the outrageous way he moved up as easily as if he were climbing a ladder.
He found a sweet combination of holds and almost danced across onto the slab, and then vanished from our sight.

Ruth touched my arm. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I replied. “It’s okay.” But I wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for.

Jamie began taking in the rope. His voice came to us above the sound of the sea and the laughing of the gulls: “I’ll keep
it tight!” he yelled. “Ruth! Climb when Rob tells you, and I’ll keep the rope tight.”

I turned my attention to the ropes and explained to her how she was to do it. “He’s got a runner up above the hard moves so
that you’ll be held from above. But you’re going to find it damned difficult.”

She ran her tongue over her lips. Although she tried not to show it, I could see she was nervous. “I’ll manage.”

I held her shoulders as she shuffled past me. There was the sudden breath of some perfume she was wearing, a dark, exotic
smell. Patchouli oil. She glanced at me mere inches from my face and gave me a faint smile. Then she moved a fraction forward
and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m climbing,” she called out, just as we had taught her. And she began to pull herself up the rock. Her ascent wasn’t the
most beautiful thing in the climbing world, nor was it the purest. She took a tight rope some of the way, and once or twice
she came adrift and hung back on it. But she never gave up, never surrendered to panic or fear or any of those things. “Take
a pull on the rope!” Jamie’s voice called out at one point, and she was game enough to shout back to him to piss off, and
to scrabble up unaided. “Christ alive!” she yelled when she was once again in balance. I could see her knees shaking. “Christ
alive! That was scary, Jamie. That was fucking scary!”