Free Climbers: A Novel by M. John Harrison Page A

minutes a voice like the station announcer at Preston says something nobody can understand and they all walk off down a different corridor. Can the Doctor help them?
    ‘For fuck’s sake shut up,’ said Gaz, ‘and let’s go somewhere we can
climb
.’
    Though the climbs were easier we had a much better time at Jack Scout Cove, a narrow defile at the end of a caravan site which opens out on the sudden shocking spaces of Morecambe Bay near Silverdale. As you face the sea the cliff goes up on your left, whitish, dusted with the same lichen you can see on any other limestone crag, say at Giggleswick or Malham: custard yellow, dry and crusty. You get to the top among the yew trees bent and shaved by the sea wind.
    I had been there once as a boy. I knew that, but you couldn’t say I remembered it.
    The right bank of the cove is a clinted slab overgrown with whin, short turf and hawthorn bushes. From there the tourists can gaze out to sea or at the weed-covered rocks at the base of the cliff like green chenille cushions in the front room of a fussy old woman. They murmur and laugh, their children shout. When Gaz and I were there the hawthorn wasn’t yet in blossom. Sheep moved about on the turf.
    ‘You see those green tags in their ears?’ said Gaz. ‘I’ll be cutting them out on Monday morning. One quick slit of the knife and out they come!’
    ‘For Christ’s sake, Gaz.’
    ‘I could get you some eyes to put in people’s beer.’
    They have given the climbs in this cosy place queer existentialist names, Victim of Life, Unreal City, Lemmingsville.
    ‘What’s
your
name, Louise?’ asked one little girl confidingly of another.
    Gaz got out his cheap denim shorts and faded Union Jack T-shirt and undressed shyly. The women eyed him. They were out from Leeds and Bradford for Whit Week by the sea, with their bare red shoulders and untalkative husbands. Gaz’s arms and legs were peculiarly white, as if he spent all week in the cold store. He always looked underfed but full of uncontrollable energy.
    ‘Mummy, those men are in
our cave
!’
    We traversed the whole cliff a few feet above the tideline, our shadows bobbing on the rock, dwarfing then stretching themselves, sending out an elongated arm or leg. All morning the water rose steadily, the colour of the water in the Manchester Ship Canal. ‘You wouldn’t like to fall in that,’ said Gaz. And then: ‘What are these fucking little shrimps doing up here?’ Laying away off a big white flake with his feet tucked negligently up and to one side so that he looked as intelligent as a gibbon, he probed about one-handed in a narrow crack full of things like lice with long springy tails. Suddenly he shrieked and threw himself backwards into the air, landing in the sea with a huge splash. When he came up blowing and laughing the children stared at him in exasperation. He said: ‘One of them jumped in me eye! Right in me eye!’ He rubbed his face vigorously.
    Whenever anybody mentioned Jake Scout Cave after that he would wink at me laboriously and say, ‘Those fucking shrimps, eh?’
    In the afternoon we lay on the clints in the sun. The tourists accepted us companionably. The tide was on its way out and a transistor radio somewhere down on the damp sand played ‘Green Tambourine’.
    When you hear an old song again like that, one you have not thought about for years, there is a brief slippage of time, a shiver, as if something had cut down obliquely through your life and displaced each layer by its own depth along the fault line. Without warning I was able to recall being in Silverdale as a child. In the cafe hung a picture by a local water colourist, of two rowing boats apparently moored in a low-lying street: he wanted eleven pounds for it but it was worth more. I sat rigid with delight beneath it, a thick slab of steak and kidney pie cooling on an oval plate in front of me. ‘Eat your lunch, eat your lunch.’ Great channels of slowly moving water in the mud; strange