Читать книгу Psychovertical - Andy Kirkpatrick - Страница 10

The taxi came at 6 a.m., beeping twice. It was a Sunday morning early in June 2001, the beginning of my journey to solo one of the hardest climbs in the world, certainly the hardest climb of my life.

And my life was falling apart. I was running away.

I’d lain awake on the settee most of the night waiting, my mind a mess; in part this was the usual jumble of worry and doubt about the climb, and in part it was the presence of darker clouds, the worry of what it meant to be sleeping down in the living room alone while my wife slept upstairs.

Did she sleep?

All night I’d tried to order my thoughts, put things in perspective, get my life straight in my head before I left. It was impossible. I thought about writing her a letter to try to explain why I was going, why I was so compelled to climb. But I just knew those words would be transparent and wouldn’t come close to how I really felt. No words could explain why. Nothing I could say would make her understand. There was no sense to it, only the absurdity of travelling halfway round the world to climb a lump of rock.

You don’t have to go.

A pendulum swung within my thoughts, one moment making me feel invulnerable, the next draining away all my self-belief, making me just want to stay here forever with my wife Mandy and my daughter Ella.

How can you leave them?

It would be easy to send the taxi away, to creep up the stairs and slip into our bed. I could hug Mandy and whisper that I wanted to stay. For once she would know that I put her first. I could still be here when Ella woke up. See her smile.

But what about tomorrow?

You have to go.

I lay and imagined myself lying in a pool of my own blood, shattered bone sticking out of me at crazy angles, slowly dying on the climb, imagined the feeling of loss, knowing I would never see them again, their world shattered like my body.

What will you find there that will justify risking everything you have here?

The taxi beeped again.

I wished it was still dark. In the night I would often feel the most levelheaded about climbing hard routes. Getting out of a warm bed to go to the toilet, I would stand naked in the dark, shivering with cold, knowing all I wanted to do was get back under the covers with the woman I loved. The thought of being anywhere else, sleeping in a snow hole, perched on the side of an icy north face, or forced to abseil through the night would seem ludicrous. Pointless.

You sound like her.

There is a point.

I could think of no rational reason for climbing anything. I just knew I had to do it.

The climb is the question.

I would be the answer.

I was about to leave and travel halfway across the world to solo one of the longest routes on the planet, a climb only a handful of people had ever dared to attempt, one which had taken one of the greatest climbers in the world a staggering fourteen days to solo. I knew the route was out of my league. I knew I could die, or worse, yet I slept alone on the settee.

You might never come back.

The taxi beeped once more.

I stood up and, already dressed, began lifting the huge vinyl haul bags that held my climbing gear out of the house and to the taxi. Each one was the size of a dustbin, made from indestructible material designed to line landfill sites and adapted to withstand being scraped against rock for miles of climbing. For the next few weeks they would be my only company. Half carrying, half dragging them out of the back door, I went round the side of the house to where the car waited. The taxi driver got out slowly and helped me lift the first bag into the boot, then pushed the second one sideways onto the passenger seats in the back.

Each bag was the size of a small person. It weighed around fifty kilos and contained the equipment I’d need for my coming climb: ropes, karabiners, slings, pegs, nuts, storm gear, sleeping bag, my portaledge and a hundred other vital items, a decade’s worth of accumulated climbing equipment.

The bags were hard to lift and painful to carry. They had to be moved in relays unless I could find wheels, whether taxi, bus or trolley, but even when I felt my knees were about to buckle or my vertebrae compress down like an empty Coke can, I enjoyed carrying them. Pain like that is simple, honest, and feels invigorating as muscles and mind are pushed beyond their norms. Carrying stops you thinking.

The longer you go without thinking the better it feels when you experience it again.

Each bag made the car sag further, and the taxi driver’s eyebrows rose as his wheel arches dipped towards the gutter.

‘You might need another taxi, mate,’ said the driver, kicking his tires with concern.

‘Only got one small one left,’ I said, as I nipped back down the alley to my house.

I walked through the back gate, past Ella’s frog-shaped sandpit and small red scooter, and in through the back door of our tiny Sheffield terraced house.

My last bag lay on its side surrounded by Ella’s toys.

There was one more thing I had to do. I crept up the steep narrow stairs and slipped into her bedroom. She lay on her side, her thumb in her mouth. Perfect. Nothing in my life seemed to fit together properly any more, my marriage, work, climbing. Nothing but her. She was the only thing in my life that I didn’t doubt.

But even she wasn’t enough.

You have to go.

I wanted to kiss her, but knew if she woke up I wouldn’t be able to leave.

I spent a lot of time wondering what she would think when she grew up, if I were to die climbing, and I thought about it again now: the selfishness of what I was about to do, risking my life once more, and in turn, risking her life and future. Many climbers, or people who do dangerous things, give it up once they have kids, but for me her birth had come at the start of it all.

At that time, people made judgments about me as a climber and a father, often asking me how I could do it. I didn’t know, all I had was excuses. I’d said that you shouldn’t sacrifice who you are for your kids, but I wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t it be me sacrificing them for what I wanted? But I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be a person worth having as a father, and in a way that was why I was here now, about to set off on another climb. The more I tried to quit, the more the pressure built inside me.

What if you never see her again?

I told people I didn’t want to die before she was born, just as much as after she was born. But the truth is dying is never in any climber’s plan.

She made sense, but she also made what I loved even more senseless. Mountains don’t care about love.

I wanted to stand there forever. I could. But I wouldn’t.

I crept out of her bedroom, closed the door, and turned to see the stairs leading up to our bedroom, where Mandy probably lay awake. She would be angry with me, leaving her again to go climbing. She wanted so little: a normal life, a normal husband. I couldn’t give her that, but we were both stubborn and we’d been together for ever. We didn’t quit, so here we were. Still fighting. We also loved each other.

I knew she would be lying in bed hating me now, yet wanting me to climb the stairs and say goodbye, or even to say I’d stay—not because she was weak, but because she loved me.

I was about to solo a climb so hard only the best had attempted it, a route I doubted I could do. Yet in that moment the thing I most feared was climbing those stairs, climbing up to face her and say goodbye.

What if you never see the baby growing inside her?

I went out to the garden and tried to compose myself, not wanting the taxi driver to see I was upset. I was everything I despised.

They will be better off without you.

As I’d done so many times before, I opened a box in my head and placed the feelings inside, closed the lid, and moved on.

‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asked as I sat next to him and clipped in my seat belt.

‘The station, please.’

We drove down the hill, and through the empty streets.

‘Where you off to?’

‘America, to a place called Yosemite.’

‘Oh aye, I’ve heard of that. Are you a climber, like?’

‘Yeah . . . sort of.’

‘Are you going by yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘No,’ I lied, ‘just more work.’

‘You want to be careful with those bags of yours, they’re bloody heavy.’

‘Oh, they’re OK, they keep me fit.’

‘No mate,’ the driver said, looking at me with concern, ‘remember, hard work kills horses.’