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

flat peninsulas with the sheep chewing the tough grass; the empty thin hull of a crab in a pool shaped like a waving boy.
    At about four o’clock Gaz sat up and clapped his hand to his face. ‘Fucking sunbathing!’ he said. ‘I’m going to regret this tomorrow.’ And he examined gloomily the reddening patches on his thighs. ‘Better get going I suppose.’ We drove to Junction 28 on the M6, where we squatted at the base of a wall in our patched baggy tracksuit trousers and headbands, like the remains of a punitive expedition gone native among the tribes in the killing humidity. ‘Junction 28,’ runs the advert, ‘the best place to eat, sleep and be merry.’ Everything was closed. Only the takeaway was open, and they had no Danish pastries.
    ‘That would be a “small” in America,’ Gaz told me with a kind of sneering nostalgia, remembering the Pepsi-Colas of Pasadena where he had been, it turned out, with the Venture Scouts. He put some chips in his mouth. ‘What you’ve got there would be a “small”.’ He brightened up. ‘You get to the bottom of it there and it’s
full of ice
.’
    Teenagers, out for an afternoon in the car in their tight clean jeans and striped cotton tops, eyed his burnt arms nervously. Old people walked past, pretending to ignore us but carefully avoiding our feet. ‘Closed,’ they murmured, staring numbly straight ahead. ‘Closed.’ The caravans rolled south along the motorway, full of children and dogs. Little Asian girls with great laughing eyes and white teeth caught sight of our bruised and chalky hands and immediately became thoughtful: the women, in paper-thin lamé trousers, hurried them past.
    ‘Another hole in me shirt,’ said Gaz. ‘What a fucking sight I look.’
    We ate our chips and even threw a few of them at one another in a sort of desultory slow motion, while the teenagers looked on, prim, embarrassed.
    Gaz walked off to the car.
    ‘I’m sick of being stared at now,’ he said.
    So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’ already a nostalgia number. How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton.
    Gaz never simply threw a rope down a crag; he ‘cobbed it off the top’. He didn’t fall: he ‘boned off’. If the moves on a climb demanded as well as strength or delicacy that kind of concentration which leaves you brutalised and debilitated when you have done the moves, he called them ‘poiky’. ‘That was a bit bleeding poiky,’ he’d say, hauling himself desperately over the top and trying to control the tremor in his left leg. ‘Fuck me.’ He soon recovered though. ‘A bazzer that. A bloody
bazzing
route!’ He had made up some of these words himself. Others, like ‘rumpelstiltskin’, which he used to mean anyone eccentric or incompetent, he had modified to his own use.
    I saw a picture of him when he was a baby.
    His parents kept it on the sideboard at home by the clock with the brass pendulum and the long chains. It was in a wine-coloured cardboard frame with gold edging and in it he looked older than his own father.
    One Sunday we were sitting in a steep gully at Tissington Spires. It had been sunny all the way down in the car. Now if you looked into Dovedale you could see a feeble light bleaching out the moss and stones. The water was a gelid blue-grey colour in its