Free Climbers: A Novel by M. John Harrison

stretcher bearers as if for encouragement; while a small ambulance drove up and down the road below, sometimes flashing its blue light at the moorland sheep. He was a tall, fair boy, about eighteen years old, who looked as if he had the makings of a good athlete.
    Later the foil blanket which had covered the casualty caught the light as someone folded it up. By that time the ambulance was going back to Sheffield, not at a great rate, and we had started climbing again.
    ‘I didn’t see blood,’ I said. ‘Do you think it was bad?’
    ‘Keep your eye on the rope,’ Normal recommended quietly. ‘I’m on the hard bit.’
    He was a long way above me but the wet air gave his voice close, conversational qualities. He stood up delicately on one toe and with his back curved in a strange, graceful S-shape reached for the rounded holds at the top. ‘They’re here,’ he explained. ‘But they’re awkward to use.’ When it was my turn the rock looked very black.
    We climbed all day. Rags of mist came up through the plantation, where a kind of humid softness or distinctness of the air made the trees seem as if they were hiding something, and the rock never really dried out; but though it threatened to rain it never did. All day long the cement factory above Hope pumped heavy moist smoke straight up into the cloudbase, then at nightfall it vanished without warning, to be replaced on the obscure hillside by a constellation of orange lamps which suggested the shape of an ocean liner.
    ‘Never mind that,’ said Normal. ‘Let’s get to the pub.’
    Though it looks remote, and in some lights romantic, Stanage is only two miles from the suburbs of Sheffield. When the wind is right you can smell dinners cooking in the Kelvin Flats.

 
     
     
     
    SEVEN

     
Gaz & Sankey
     
     
     
     
    An awkward grinning lad called Gaz worked at the butcher’s in the town. You often saw him at dinner time, a head taller than anyone else in the street, clumping over the zebra crossing by the health food shop in the steel-rimmed work clogs favoured by generations of local slaughtermen, his red hair cut in a kind of savage brush. He was eighteen or twenty. He had transport, a fawn Vauxhall which he sometimes drove like a maniac. When he spoke he made aggressive bobbing movements of his head and shoulders; this was out of shyness. He was always impatient to get to the crag, and he came out with one or another of us whenever he could take a day off.
    At the beginning of May he and I went to Trowbarrow Quarry in Lancashire, where I wanted to try a route called The Coral Sea. Coral Sea is fun not because it is hard but because it’s a steep slab covered with tiny delicate fossil imprints, so that you are climbing even more than usual on a kind of frozen time. We found that ICI had closed it and put up trespass warnings. We wandered about anyway to emphasise what we thought of as our clear right to be there, scuffing the wood sorrel and craning our necks in astonishment at the evil zinc-grey face of the old workings. ‘It’s meant to be limestone, but it never looks like it to me,’ said Gaz. ‘All the books say it is but it never looks like it to me.’ Trowbarrow Main Wall, a hundred feet high, totters on one pediment of rock: as it slips inevitably away to the right, Jean Jeanie, Cracked Actor, Warspite Direct, all the cracklines are widening stealthily . . .
    ‘You just can’t settle down in a place when it’s banned,’ he complained.
    He went twenty feet up the oppressive Red Wall in his torn and dusty running shoes; warned himself, ‘Oops! Don’t look down!’; jumped off with a thud and stared sulkily across at the abandoned explosives store with its fringe of rank weeds.
    ‘Looks like bloody
Dr Who
.’
    Earth, 1997: everyone lives under the ground and wears identical clothes. Something appalling has been done to their sexuality and they walk round staring directly ahead of themselves. ‘Not much different to now.’ Every fifteen