Read Climbers: A Novel for Free Online

the way down through the darkening air.
    ‘Pretty desperate, that dream!’ he said.
    He thought for a minute.
    ‘I hate hand jamming anyway.’
    Some climbers will tell you that, like hang-glider pilots and steeplejacks, climbers never have falling dreams; others that they always do. Every climber has a version of Normal’s dream. In some, that disembodied hand shakes yours, or grips your wrist and
pulls you in
; in others you are placing a key runner when the hand snatches it away into the depths of the rock so that you are left without protection on the hardest move of the route. The hand is cold and white, or warm and covered with hairs, and sometimes it is only the hand of a dead man seen inaccessible and rotting at the back of a crack on some eerie traverse of the Eiger, omen of a deteriorating situation – bad weather, doomed bivouacs, a glove lost, a dropped stove, a broken axe. In a pub near Oldham one night Bob Almanac told me a version in which there was no hand at all: but the crack itself closed on you and you hung there in the void unable to move up or down while the entire weight of your body slowly shifted itself on to your one trapped arm and you saw that worse than falling is not being allowed to fall. They tell it as a dream, a joke, an anecdote of the old Creagh Dhu Club, something once read. It is the expression of a deep-seated anxiety.
    ‘What do you think of
Take it to the Edge
?’ Normal asked me. ‘As a title?’
    He stirred the sugar bowl and smiled over suddenly at the marmosets, one of whom had just said to the other, ‘I mean eggs.’
    I dreamed about climbing the wall of a warehouse in Camden Town, high above an abandoned inlet on the Grand Union Canal. Below me, rotting wooden houseboats shifted on their dirty mooring ropes, and one or two brownish ducks huddled in the cold wind on the towpath, among the dock leaves and the hedge mustard stark as a tangle of barbed wire. At the base of the wall grew ivies with strange-shaped leaves. It was coming on to rain from the south, where I could see the white confectionery fretwork of the gasometer cradles, the spire of the St Pancras Hotel. An airliner slipped across the dusty sky. Over the inlet, on the bare packed earth of the scrapyards, they were breaking up a car.
    All at once I clutched the empty metal frame of a window. My heart was in my mouth. I was aware that the life was leaking tragically out of all these things.
    In the middle distance where the light made it hard to tell the water from the banks I saw a man walking under a bridge, harvesting a kind of rubbery weed. I would not go back down to look. Next he offered me a handful of pink shells. Eighty feet below me his face was an indistinct oval beneath the brim of his hat. He was determined I should go down. He held up his hands and they were full of flowers – orpine, ‘midsummer men’. A voice said, ‘Into the mirror to die, root and flower.’ Inside the empty shell of the building something tapped aimlessly and the draughts blew the dust along the floor. The window ledge creaked as I moved; it shifted a little.
    I told Normal this dream, and he was silent for a minute or two. Then he nodded matter-of-factly, and with the air of someone opening up a new subject said,
    ‘I once knew two lads who called their rope Phillip.’
    I had worked in London for three years. On weekdays I ate in the restaurants near the university, queuing at cinemas in the evening to see the latest French and Russian films. At the weekend I would walk along the bank of the canal to King’s Cross to buy a paperback from the station bookstall; or, in the other direction, to Regent’s Park or the maze of streets behind Tesco where in a heat like a kind of jelly poured in between the buildings, Greek and Turkish Cypriot widows, the shortest women I had ever seen, toiled along with bulging patchwork shopping bags and huge, slow-moving buttocks, or sat by an open door stroking a black cat.
    There were