Читать книгу The Fear Bubble: Harness Fear and Live Without Limits - Ant Middleton, Ant Middleton - Страница 7

‘Light?’

‘Cheers, buddy.’

I took a few rapid, light puffs of my cigar and heard it crackle into life between my fingers. The smoke that licked the back of my throat was rich and smooth, almost spicy. I took a deeper draw and peered at its glowing end. You could taste that it was expensive. But was this really £400 worth of cigar? That would make it, what, five quid a puff? I settled more deeply into the leather club chair and drew again, this time luxuriating in the experience, allowing the smoke to slide out through my lips gradually and wreathe about my face in silky ribbons. Before it dissipated, I took a sip of the rare single malt whisky my new barrister friend Ivan had also bought me, this time at the bargain price of £60 a shot.

‘So, how are you enjoying your new life?’ he asked me, his accent as cut-glass as the tumbler in my hand.

His wry expression told me he probably wasn’t expecting an answer. After all, wasn’t it obvious? To all outward appearances my new life was going brilliantly. I’d seen my face on billboards, and my latest TV show Mutiny had been broadcast to millions of viewers and enjoyed critical acclaim. If that wasn’t enough, I was in the middle of a sold-out tour of the UK. Every night, in a different town, I’d spend a couple of hours on stage, talking thousands of fans through some of my favourite moments, not just from Mutiny but from two series of SAS: Who Dares Wins. I’d then be whisked away in a black Mercedes with tinted windows to a five-star hotel where an ice-cold beer and twenty-four-hour room service were waiting for me.

And here I was being wined and dined by a top barrister in one of the most exclusive and secretive private members’ clubs in the world. If you’ve not heard of 5 Hertford Street, it’s because the owners like it that way. If you walked past it, you wouldn’t know it was there. It’s set in a warren of closely packed streets in Shepherd Market, Mayfair, a corner of the capital that used to bristle with high-class vice and scandal but now, aside from a red light bulb or two that shines out of an upstairs window, is polished and prim and postcard perfect. Downstairs, I could hear the faint bass throb of music coming from Loulou’s, its nightclub. Next door, the beautiful faces of London high society ate Sicilian prawns or duck with broccoli in the restaurant, their scrubbed and trimmed dogs at their side. This was where billionaires, moguls and the aristocracy of both Hollywood and Britain’s most gilded families went for their Friday-night drinks. And tonight I was among them.

‘So, you’re enjoying it, I take it?’ Ivan asked again.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Is everything all right, Ant? You’re miles away.’

‘Oh, sorry, bud,’ I smiled. ‘Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s OK. I’m bedding in.’

Ivan was one of the elite. He fitted right in to this place, gliding over the sumptuously patterned carpets and past the heavy, gilt-framed paintings with graceful ease. The fact was, with his blue pinstriped Turnbull & Asser suit, his wide pale yellow tie rakishly unknotted and his long fringe swept back, he’d have fitted right in anywhere in the monied world – London, Singapore, Frankfurt or Dubai.

‘Well, yes, I can quite imagine,’ he said. ‘It must be a rather different experience being entertained here than it was back in the mess.’

‘The mess?’

‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ He swirled the golden liquid in his glass and absent-mindedly watched the lights dance across its surface. ‘In the military. Where you ate. The mess. That is what you call it? I’ve always thought that rather odd.’

‘Why odd?’

‘Well, it’s a joke, I take it. Irony. Military humour.’ His eyes flicked up. ‘I mean, you know, are they messy places? One would rather imagine not.’

Between us there was a small mahogany table on which sat a heavy, polished-iron ashtray in the shape of a leaf. I tapped my cigar onto its edge and found myself mentally weighing it. It was big. Hefty.

‘It’s French,’ I told him. ‘From the word “mets”, meaning a dish or a portion of food. It’s not because it’s …’

‘Oh, is that so!’ he said, laughing. ‘Of course. Yes, I should have known. Yes, yes, how silly of me. The French.’ He kind of half-winked in my direction. ‘That was an impressive stab at a French accent there, by the way, Ant. It felt, just for a moment, as if I’d been whisked away to the harbour at St Tropez.’

Yeah, that ashtray had to weigh a good three or four kilos. Maybe more. You could do some proper damage with that. Put a door in. In fact, you could put someone’s head in with that thing. Easily. I’d use the bottom edge. Curl my fingers into the bowl, get some proper purchase on it and wear it like a knuckle-duster. Wallop.

‘I grew up in France, as it happens,’ I told him.

‘In France? Well, I never. Whereabouts?’

‘So I’m fluent in French.’

‘Well, bravo,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Cheers to you. And I do hope we can come to some arrangement over this company retreat in April. We’ll fly you in first-class. It would be a real morale booster for the firm to have you come along and speak to the troops, even if they’re not of quite the same physical calibre as the troops you’re used to working with. Although, saying that, some of the chaps and chapesses in the office are terribly into the fitness scene – it’s quite impossible to get them out of the gym at lunchtimes. But it gets harder as you get older, doesn’t it? I expect this new phase of your career has come at just the right time for you. Even if you do miss the military life, when you get to our age, it’s … I mean, you’re clearly in very fine shape. I try to keep in reasonably decent order myself. But the selection process. The SAS. Do people our age do it? People in their forties?’

‘Ivan, mate, I’m thirty-seven,’ I said.

‘Of course you are. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to imply … Of course you could still pass Selection. You’d fly through it. You’ve only got to see your television programmes …’ He was beginning to bluster.

‘Ivan, mate, it’s totally fine,’ I said, laughing. ‘Forget it. Fucking forties! What are you like?’

As he relaxed once again, he began telling me about his own fitness regime. No carbs after 6 p.m., forty-five minutes in his home gym three times a week, a personal trainer called Samson. As I listened, enjoying my cigar, I found myself beginning to wonder, what would happen if it all kicked off in a place like this? What if Isis came through the door? A lone shooter or a guy in a bomb vest? What would Ivan do? How would that waiter over there respond? Rugby tackle him? Go for his legs? Or shit himself and dive under the table? I scanned the people around me. They’d go into a flat panic. Every single one of them.

I know what I’d do. I’d head-dive into cover, down there in the corner, and then I’d come around and try to disarm him. I’d use the ashtray as a weapon. I’d crack it right over him. Right around the fucking face. Smack. Cave in his cheekbone and then go straight into a backswing, push his chin up into his nose. God, I would love to see it kick off in here. That old geezer in the corner in the bow tie just turning around head-butting that fat dude with the pink hanky in his top pocket – landing it perfectly between the eyes, knocking the cunt into the fire. That woman in the lily dress giving the terrorist a proper crack in the jaw, bursting his nose open with that massive jewel on her finger. Some old Duke being kicked down the stairs by a minor royal in stilettos. Yes. Yes! What would it take for this place to go up? I would pay good money to see that.

‘To success!’ said Ivan. Suddenly, I was back in my body. The room instantly reorganised itself back into its hushed, murmuring and peaceful state. There was no blood on the walls or scalp on the carpet. The stairs were empty of violence. I was no longer crouched on that £10,000 rug de-braining a terrorist.

‘Success!’ I replied.

I raised my glass and downed it all.

Success. Is this what it was? Warm rooms and expensive dinners? Small talk with top barristers about personal fitness and fat cheques for corporate events? An hour later, as I strode down to Green Park tube past pubs and art galleries and dark human forms hurrying along the wet pavements, I found myself brooding. When I left the Special Forces in 2011, I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. What could I possibly achieve that would be better than the buzz of leading a Hard Arrest Team in the badlands of various war zones over two intensely frightening and violent tours of duty? Life back home in Chelmsford, I quickly discovered, was not like life in Helmand Province. I found it difficult to adjust, ending up physically assaulting a police officer and serving time in prison. The easiest thing I could have done, when I hit those lows, was to join my friends and associates in their criminal gangs. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried hard and repeatedly to recruit me. Someone with my background, I knew, had enormous value to those kinds of organisations – and I’d be handsomely rewarded. I would certainly have ended up wealthier than I was now. And the excitement? Oh, that would have been there, no doubt about it.

As I reached the end of the dark, narrow corridor of White Horse Street, a young couple were walking in my direction. The girl, her pale face framed in a white parka hood, gave a slight double-take when she saw me. I hunched my shoulders and sent my gaze to the floor. Please don’t ask for a selfie. Not now. When they were safely in the distance I went to cross the road and waited at the kerb. The usually busy lanes of Piccadilly were at a rare lull. I looked left and then right. There were a couple of double-decker buses, one coming in each direction, both trailing a stream of taxis and vans behind them. I waited. And then I waited some more, allowing them to get even closer. At the final instant, just as they were about to roar past my face, I darted out, dodging one and then the other, feeling their fumes billow around me as I danced between them.

I knew only too well why so many former Special Forces operators ended up either on the street, traumatised and addicted, or working for a criminal firm. Because success in civilian life lacks something that we’ve come to crave. You can’t take it out of us. It’s in there for life. And it’s not the fault of the military training, either. You can’t blame that. The fact is, we’re simply those kinds of men. We exist on that knife edge. Go one way, they’ll end up calling you a hero, a protector of the public and the nation. Go just a little in the other direction and you’ll find yourself in prison, an enemy of the same public and the same nation. The extreme forms of training that admittance into the Special Forces demands don’t cause us to be these kinds of people. It just takes what’s already there, hones it, draws it out and teaches us to control it. The problem is, this quality doesn’t simply evaporate when you leave the SAS or, in my case, the SBS. It’s still in there. It’s in your blood. It’s in your daydreams. It’s in how you walk. It’s in the way you scan a room the moment you enter it, looking for entry and escape routes, pockets of cover and potential aggressors.

And it’s also in how you cross the road. I’d noticed myself doing that increasingly over the last few weeks. If I was in London, or in one of the traffic-choked streets in the centre of Chelmsford, and I saw a pedestrian crossing with the green man flashing, I wouldn’t run to catch it like everyone else. I’d slow down. I’d wait until the traffic was fast and raging again, and only then would I cross. I’d never do this in front of my wife Emilie and certainly not in front of my kids. To be honest, I was only half-conscious of doing it myself. I hardly even knew how to explain it, apart from to say that it was that edge I was after, that edge I would go looking for anywhere – a brief moment of danger to keep my heart beating and my spirit alive. That threat, that trouble, that fear. I was constantly looking for opportunities to push myself, test myself and add a little dose of risk to my otherwise overwhelmingly safe days.

So that was it. That was why Ivan had provoked a host of strange and uncomfortable emotions to come bubbling out from deep within me when he’d asked if I was enjoying what he called my ‘new life’. Of course I enjoyed its trappings. Who wouldn’t? It felt great to achieve so much in these areas of popular culture that I’d never have even dreamed of entering just a few years ago. You couldn’t deny I was successful. But this wasn’t my kind of success. I felt as if I were somehow losing my identity. And the problem was, my identity was beginning to fight back. I could feel it punching and kicking, whenever I was in meetings with guys like Ivan or in places like 5 Hertford Street. The warrior inside me would rise out of nowhere and take over my thoughts. I’d find myself daydreaming about terrorist attacks or mass brawls breaking out, building my strategy for dealing with the madness, assessing everyone around me in terms of how much of a threat they’d be and how I could take them out. This could happen to me anywhere – in the ground-floor canteen at Channel 4 or on the set of This Morning, waiting to be interviewed by Phil and Holly in front of millions of viewers. It was like I was being possessed by the ghost of the man who used to be me. And the really worrying thing was, these weren’t waking nightmares that left me in cold sweats. They weren’t PTSD-like moments of dread and horror. They were fantasies. I was willing them to happen.

After the deep orange darkness of London’s November streets, the lights inside Green Park tube station felt too bright, and I squinted a little as I ran down the long flights of stairs towards my platform, racing the people descending the escalators on either side of me. I found a quiet seat at the end of a carriage and jammed my hands into the pockets of my jacket. A few seats away from me a couple of girls sat opposite each other. They looked to be in their early twenties, and were giggling and laughing in that drunk schoolgirl way. One had taken her high heels off, and her bare toes were now blackened from the tube floor. An unopened bottle of WKD Red stuck out of her lime-green handbag. Another, open and half drunk, was clutched in her hands. The other girl wore a tight white mini-dress and had a tattoo of Michael Jackson on her arm. Her faux leather jacket lay on the seat beside her, along with their crumpled Burger King wrappers and boxes.

When I stepped into the carriage they’d been cackling loudly, but once they clocked me they fell into a hushed chatter, interspersed by periodic piggy, nasal snorts of laughter.

‘Here we go,’ I thought. ‘I’ve been spotted.’ But then I checked myself. Maybe not. One of the things about finding yourself unexpectedly well known – among certain parts of the general public, at least – is that it’s easy to become paranoid. You start to think that everyone’s watching you, wherever you go, even though most members of the public would never have even heard of you. Anyone who’s been on the TV for more than ten minutes has an embarrassing story to tell about a stranger coming up to them in the street, and them presenting their finest prime-time Saturday-night smile and preparing to quickly scribble out an autograph, only for that person to ask if they know the directions to the nearest McDonald’s.

The girls were now leaning into each other and whispering intensely. I wondered what they were they doing. Plotting their next assassination? I kept noticing their eyes swivelling out from their dark huddle and looking in my direction. Then they abruptly sat back, now not saying anything. Suddenly a phone appeared. It was in a black case with Michael Jackson picked out in fake diamonds, one hand on his trilby, the other on his crotch. The girl in the mini-dress was holding it directly in front of her face, but some distance away from her, like an old lady squinting at a book. Then it turned slowly in my direction. The girl looked upwards, now apparently closely examining the advert for student home insurance above the window opposite her. There was the faint electronic sound of a shutter being clicked. Her mate snorted with laughter. ‘Shut up!’ the first one hissed.

I wouldn’t mind if they’d asked. I never complain about being recognised or having to pose for selfies, as that would be ungrateful and disrespectful. And I’d hate – more than anything – to be perceived as being rude to anyone. Having said that, I always try to keep my head down when I’m out and about. I never pretend that I’m someone. I hate being in that mindset, thinking that I’m the centre of attention. But more and more, things like this kept happening. I’d leave the house and be reminded very quickly that my existence had changed. There wasn’t much I could do about it. This was the reality of the ‘new life’ that Ivan had been asking about.

It was a life that didn’t come without its own peculiar risks. I only had to walk out of a pub looking unsteady and some newspaper somewhere would print a story that I was an alcoholic. I only had to scowl in someone’s direction and it would be reported that I was in the middle of a heated argument. So I needed to make sure that my behaviour in public wasn’t merely immaculate – it could never even be perceived to be anything less than immaculate, even down to the expression on my face.

Maintaining that level of good behaviour wasn’t easy, especially for someone with a past like mine. It wasn’t a comfortable combination, all those eyeballs, all that stress – and my personality. The more I felt watched, the more that old, raucous version of me wanted to kick back. The intense pressure to behave immaculately – in trains, on the street and within private members’ clubs – taunted that unstable ghost living inside me. It goaded him and mocked him and motivated him to take me over. I felt him writhing around, pushing at me, tempting me to make chaos. As the girl took another photo, and this time barely bothered to pretend she wasn’t, I buried my fists deeper into my pockets and pushed my chin into the collar of my coat, as my left leg bounced up and down in nervous, aggravated motion. ‘I should’ve got a car back,’ I thought to myself. ‘Fuck this. I’m not taking the tube any more. I’m going to stop taking public transport.’

By the time I got to Liverpool Street station I’d done a lot of serious reflecting. What on earth was I thinking? Who was I turning into? Some TV celebrity puffing on £400 cigars who refuses to go on the underground? In that moment with the girls and the photos, it felt as if everything I was, everything I’d fought so hard to become, was at risk of getting lost. I didn’t want to fall head first into this new life, with its new definition of success. It wasn’t just that I was worried I’d change for the worse and become some spoiled ‘celebrity’. I was afraid that if I didn’t grab hold of the situation, the old me would fight back in a way that I couldn’t control. There was a genuine danger that I would revert to finding my buzzes elsewhere. That could be drinking. That could be fighting. That could be getting myself killed by a double-decker bus. Too many people were relying on me these days for that to happen. It wasn’t only my wife and five children. My life had somehow turned into a small industry. There were teams of people making serious parts of their livelihoods off the back of me, and all of them needed me out of prison and off the tabloid scandal pages, not underneath ten tonnes of steel and rubber in the middle of Piccadilly. My success and theirs were intertwined. I felt a responsibility to every single one of them.

But what could I do? How could I exorcise this ghost when I had all these eyeballs on me? Perhaps I could take a spell out of the limelight and go back to West Africa, where I’d carried out some security work before life in the media found me. That might be fun – I’d get into some interesting scrapes – but there was no way I’d get it past Emilie. It was too sketchy. I thought about running a marathon or taking up boxing in a serious way, but neither of these would really test me. I needed that perfect balance, somewhere I could feel fear but actually be relatively safe.

As soon as I had that thought, an incredibly vivid memory came to me. It was so powerful it was like being in a momentary dream, one that took me back all of twenty years, when I was seventeen. It was my first adventure training package in the army, and we’d climbed Snowdon in Wales. Before that day, during basic training, my life in the military had been extremely controlled. We’d been spit-polishing boots, doing drills and press-ups and running around in the mud, all under the instruction of barking troop sergeants, with almost every minute of every day being tightly regimented. Even though I’d been pushed to my limits, it had all been done in an environment of safety. I’d been scared and intimidated, but the only things I’d really had to fear were failure and humiliation – threats to my feelings. It had been fake danger. And then we’d climbed the mountain.

And it wasn’t just any mountain. It was Snowdon, at 3,560 feet the highest peak in England and Wales. It was said to be where Sir Edmund Hillary himself had trained for his successful assault on Mount Everest. When we reached the summit that day I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve just climbed a mountain!’ It felt like the greatest achievement of my life. I’d never experienced getting out into the world like that before. I’d never felt as if I’d truly conquered anything. And there I was, on top of the world, breathing the air of the gods.

But that wasn’t the only reason my memory of Snowdon was so precious. After my father suddenly died at the age of just 36, on 31 December 1985, my mum and her young boyfriend Dean moved the family from our three-bedroom council house in Portsmouth first to an eight-bedroom mansion outside Southampton, and then to northern France. Flush with money from my dad’s life-insurance payout, they bought a huge house that had once been a children’s home on a large plot of land on the outskirts of a town called Saint-Lô, twenty miles from Bayeux. Life with my mother and new step-father was tough, and my happiest times were the hours I’d spend tearing around in the fields and woods playing soldiers. I had a wild time, and even at that age I began to wonder about being an actual soldier when I was older.

As wild as those days had felt to me, however, they had really been lived within a controlled environment. Even when I stayed in one of my dens for two or three nights, someone would always have to know where I was. If I ever got into trouble I’d feel it. Part of why I wanted to join the army was my urge to re-create those experiences of wild adventure under open skies. But in the early weeks and months after I joined up, the experience had been more like being at home with my stepfather. I was always watched and pushed and corrected by a figure of authority.

All of that changed on my ascent of Snowdon. My most vivid memory of all, even more than of reaching the top, was when I saw the lad in front of me almost fall off a narrow track, right off the side of it. I’d seen the fear first grip him, then overwhelm him, and watched him give up the climb completely, fumbling his way back down to safety. I’d become infected with that same fear. It had soaked into me like a heavy, disabling liquid. I looked around me and realised I was on the edge of death. Anything could have gone wrong. I could have slipped. The weather could have come in. I could have got hypothermia or been blown off the mountain. I’d never experienced such vulnerability. For the first time, I felt that I had my own life in my hands. As the fear washed through me I had to make that decision. Do I listen to what it’s telling me? Or do I trust myself to do this? Do I go up? Or down?

It was that fear I remembered most. As I paced up and down the platform at Liverpool Street waiting for the Chelmsford train I was in a trance of memory, feeling it again as if it was all happening to me right now. That fear had almost beaten me. But the moment I’d committed to the decision to climb, an incredible transformation had taken place. My perception changed. It had been as if the mountain itself had stopped trying to hurl me down its precipitous flanks. Now, instead, it was drawing me up to its summit and I no longer felt as if I were on the edge of death.

Why had that change occurred? How had it happened? Partly, I realised, it was because, in making the decision to continue on upwards, I’d fully embraced the responsibility of my task. There were no rules on that mountain except for the ones I gave myself. There was no drill instructor telling me where to look or put my feet. There was no stepfather telling me what time I had to be in or where I could or couldn’t go. It was lawless up there. Amid the freezing blasts of wind I found an ecstatic sense of liberation on Snowdon that was completely new to me. I was in real danger on that narrow, icy track. If I made the wrong decision it was entirely down to me, and I alone would pay the price. That was petrifying. But it was also exciting. I was my own god up there. I felt completely alive in a way that I never had done before. I felt afraid – and I felt free.

I found a quiet seat on the train where no stray eyeballs or selfie cameras were likely to find me and excitedly pulled my phone out of my pocket. How long did it take to drive to Snowdon? I’d go up it again. Do it solo. The next weekend I had free. That’s it, it was decided. I wondered if I could remember the exact route we’d taken twenty years ago. It wasn’t one of the normal tourist routes. It was … I didn’t know. Well, what was the toughest way up? I opened up my web browser and typed in S.N.O. … I stopped. Snowdon? Really? I was seventeen when I’d done it. I was thirty-seven now, and a completely different man. I could walk up Snowdon in silk slippers. It just wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t give me what I needed. So what would? What’s the ultimate Snowdon? I went back to the web browser on my phone and deleted S.N.O. … In the place of those letters, I pecked out a new word.

E.V.E.R.E.S.T.

As the train wobbled to a start and began to rattle out of the station towards home, I excitedly scanned the results on Google. One page leapt out at me. A Wikipedia article: ‘List of people who died climbing Mount Everest’. I began reading.

Mount Everest, at 8,848 metres (29,029 ft), is the world’s highest mountain and a particularly desirable peak for mountaineers. Over 290 people have died trying to climb it. The last year without known deaths on the mountain was 1977, a year in which only two people reached the summit.

Most deaths have been attributed to avalanches, injury from fall, serac collapse, exposure, frostbite or health problems related to conditions on the mountain. Not all bodies have been located, so details on those deaths are not available.

The upper reaches of the mountain are in the death zone. The ‘death zone’ is a mountaineering term for altitudes above a certain point – around 8,000 m (26,000 ft), or less than 356 millibars (5.16 psi) of atmospheric pressure – where the oxygen level is not sufficient to sustain human life. Many deaths in high-altitude mountaineering have been caused by the effects of the death zone, either directly (loss of vital functions) or indirectly (unwise decisions made under stress or physical weakening leading to accidents). In the death zone, the human body cannot acclimatise, as it uses oxygen faster than it can be replenished. An extended stay in the zone without supplementary oxygen will result in deterioration of bodily functions, loss of consciousness and, ultimately, death.

Why did people die on the mountain every year? There must be something special up there. And what was this ‘death zone’ they were going on about? What did a death zone actually look like? What would it feel like to tackle one? It sounded as if you only got a certain amount of time to climb the mountain before you ran out of oxygen – that climbers used ‘oxygen faster than it can be replenished’. So it was like a race for your life. I felt my heart lurch with excitement. I scrolled down the page to the seemingly endless list of fatalities. The deaths started with the very first expedition to attempt to climb the mountain, undertaken by a British team in 1922. Seven Nepalese guys, who I guessed were helping them get to the top, died on the same day in an avalanche. Two years later, there was a Brit, Andrew Irvine: ‘Disappeared; body never found; cause of death unknown’. He was twenty-two. With him, another Brit, the famous George Mallory. ‘Disappeared; body found in 1999; evidence suggests Mallory died from being accidentally struck by his ice axe following a fall.’

As I kept scrolling, the deaths mounted up. Wang Ji, China, 1960, ‘mountain sickness’; Harsh Vardhan Bahuguna, India, 1971, ‘succumbed after falling and being suspended above a crevasse during a blizzard’; Mario Piana, Italy, 1980, ‘crushed under serac’. My eyes flicked across to the column that noted the causes of death. There were hundreds of entries, page after page: avalanche, avalanche, fall, fall, exposure, exposure, exposure, drowning, heart attack, high-altitude pulmonary oedema (HAPE), high-altitude cerebral oedema (HACE), exhaustion, organ failure due to freezing conditions. And these people were from all over the planet: Australia, Germany, Taiwan, Canada, Bulgaria, South Korea, the United States, Vietnam, Switzerland … Finally, I reached the end of the list. 2017. This year. Six deaths. An Indian, a Slovakian, an Australian, an American, a Nepalese and a Swiss guy. Causes of death? Everything from altitude sickness to ‘fall into a 200m crevasse’.

Of all the names I’d seen on that page, I’d only heard of one: George Mallory. I knew, of course, that Hillary had been the first man in, up on Everest’s summit, but why was Mallory so famous? I clicked on his name and began reading the article about him. It turned out that he’d taken part in the first three expeditions to the mountain, the first a reconnaissance expedition in 1921, the second two being serious attempts to ascend the peak in 1922 and 1924. He was last seen alive just 245 feet away from the summit, and it remains unknown whether he reached the top before his death. He’d served in the military, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, and fought at the Battle of the Somme. I noticed his age on the day he died.

Thirty-seven.

‘But Ant, you said Mutiny was your last thing.’

It was the following morning, just after 7.30 a.m., and I was disappointed to discover that 5 Hertford Street £60-a-shot whisky gives you exactly the same hangovers as the stuff from Tesco at £6.99 a bottle. My wife Emilie was at the counter with her back to me, preparing breakfast for our one-year-old boy. I’d forgotten I’d made that promise to her. But she was right. Mutiny, the TV show I’d filmed the previous year, re-created the 4,000-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean in a twenty-three-foot wooden boat undertaken by Captain Bligh and eighteen crewmen following the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789. That had been a tougher-than-expected sell when I’d first run it past her. Looking back, the idea was borderline insane. Together with the nine men I was responsible for, we’d braved wild storms, twenty-foot waves, starvation, dehydration and the onset of madness, and I’d only just made it back in time for the birth of the amazing boy – named Bligh – whom Emilie was now spooning mashed bananas into.

‘Well, I actually said Mutiny was the last stupid thing I’d do,’ I told her. ‘Everest isn’t stupid. Hundreds of people do it every year. It’s just a holiday, really. A camping trip.’

‘And how long will you be gone on this camping trip?’

‘Er, it takes about six weeks, give or take.’

‘Six weeks?’

‘Yeah, because you need to acclimatise. The air up the mountain is so thin you’ve got to give your body a chance to get used to it. So you go up a little way, rest and get used to the altitude, then you go down, rest some more, and then you go up again, but a bit higher.’

‘Sounds annoying.’

She was still in her pyjamas and had her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. I often think of the word ‘angelic’ when I see Emilie. She has a perfect, heart-shaped face – her cheekbones are wide and high, and her chin forms the cutest little bump. Her eyes are large and dark green, speckled with brown that sometimes, in the right light, seems to glisten like pale gold. She has exactly the kind of face you’d imagine on an angel.

‘It’s just being careful,’ I told her. ‘It’s the safest way of doing things.’

I took the spoon off her and began feeding Bligh myself.

‘I’m not up for taking any risks up there, babes. This isn’t for a TV show or anything, so there’ll be no drama. It’s just a bit of fun. An old pal of mine from the military takes people up there every year. He’s got a company that does it. Proper professional outfit. Here you go …’

I unlocked my phone. The website of my friend’s organisation, Elite Himalayan Adventures, was still on my web browser from when I’d last looked at it. I passed it over to her and she picked it up warily. I’d spent the rest of my train journey the previous night reading pretty much every page of it. Elite Himalayan Adventures specialised in expeditions up the world’s fourteen highest mountains including Kangchenjunga on the border of Nepal and Sikkim, K2 in Pakistan, and the king of them all, Mount Everest. The page I showed Emilie highlighted the company’s emphasis on not putting their clients in any undue danger: ‘Safety will always be our priority, and all of our Sherpa guides are expert climbers and expedition leaders in their own right, who then undergo a rigorous selection and training process to ensure you get the safest, most informed and most professional climbing experience possible.’

‘Looks fun.’ She put the phone down and started noisily unloading the dishwasher. ‘But six weeks, Ant?’

‘Well, the entire trip, with actually getting to the mountain in the first place … I mean, you’re probably talking more like two months, if I’m honest.’

‘And how much is this two-month holiday going to cost?’ she said, over the sound of bowls being stacked in the cupboard.

‘It’s not exactly cheap. But we’re doing OK, aren’t we? I’ve been working hard.’

‘I know, Ant,’ she said, still not looking at me. ‘You have. It’s totally up to you. What are we talking, though? For the trip?’

‘It’s probably … I don’t know.’ I did know. ‘Sixty grand? Give or take?’

There was a silence. I watched her put a pile of plates down, slowly and gently on the counter, and then pull a chair out opposite me.

‘This isn’t a wind-up, is it?’ she said in disbelief once she’d sat down. ‘I can tell by your face it’s not a wind-up.’

I spooned another mouthful of banana into Bligh.

‘It’s just what it costs, babe.’

‘But why does it cost sixty grand?’ she said. ‘I mean, sixty grand? For a camping trip? How did they work that one out?’

‘Emilie, you’ve got to trust me. I need to get away. This new life we’re building is great but I’m beginning to feel claustrophobic. I keep having these thoughts. It’s hard to explain.’

I put the sticky spoon down and looked her in the eye.

‘I don’t want to muck anything up for us. I don’t want to do anything stupid. If I manage to behave myself, it’s just onwards and upwards for us and the kids. There’ll be no stopping us. But there’s a lot of steam building up. I can feel it. And if I don’t let it off up that mountain, I might end up doing it outside some bar or something. If I don’t get the buzz I need, I’m going to find that buzz myself, whether it’s breaking the law or offending someone or fighting someone. I can’t end up back in that place again. We’d lose everything. It is sixty grand. But you should see it as an insurance payment.’

‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’

‘Not for me it isn’t. I could walk up Everest backwards. They’ve had all sorts up there on the summit. Postmen. Celebrities. It’s just an adventure holiday. Just something to sort my head out.’

To be honest, there was never really any chance of Emilie standing in the way of my going. Although she sometimes worried about me, she always trusted me, and I always respected her enough to run anything I wanted to do past her. When I’d served in the military, she hadn’t been like the wives and girlfriends of some of the other men, worrying and fussing and distracting them with the anxieties and problems of home life. As had been my wish, Emilie just let me get on with serving my country when I went away, and that allowed me to keep my head clear and focused on the job in hand. She didn’t call. She didn’t write letters. And that’s exactly how I liked it. Her strength of character helped keep me alive. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Emilie has always been the perfect partner for me. We instinctively understand what each other needs and we always do our best to provide it. Me and her are an unbreakable team.

She also knew I wasn’t lying when I told her I could walk up the mountain backwards. In Everest I’d found the ideal challenge to tame that warrior ghost inside me, at least for the time being. Nobody could deny that climbing the world’s highest mountain was dangerous. Its list of confirmed kills was impressive. But I wasn’t just anyone.

I’d often told Emilie that I was invincible, and I wasn’t really joking. I didn’t really believe anything could kill me – and it was this belief that had kept me in one piece. Nothing that had ever been thrown at me had taken me out. All those people I’d read about on Wikipedia who’d fallen down crevasses or succumbed to exhaustion or organ failure or a cerebral oedema, whatever that was – I felt bad for them, but they weren’t me. Everest would give me a taste of the danger that I’d begun to crave, that was probably true, but it wasn’t going to pose me any genuine problems. If anything, it would be too easy. This would be a camping trip. A walk in the park.

‘Thanks, Emilie,’ I said, lifting Bligh out of his seat and cradling him against my shoulder. ‘I’ll get it booked.’

A sudden wave of excitement washed over me and I grinned in her direction.

‘How good is it going to be, standing on top of the world?’