We came to the crag, and the others selected the pitch, three parallel routes to the top of a cliff creased with cracks and wrinkles like an ancient petrified brown face. I had hoped I might climb with Luce, but it quickly became apparent that I was to be paired with Damien, which I saw made sense, for we were about the same weight and strength.
He said he’d lead for the first half of the climb, and I took my stance as his second at the foot of the crag, paying out his rope while he worked his way steadily upward. After five metres or so he jammed a wedge into a crack in the rock, and clipped his rope to it as an anchor in case he fell. Then he continued across what looked like a difficult section with few apparent handholds, until he reached a ledge on which he found a steel bolt that he used as a second anchor and tied himself to it. Then he called down to me, ‘On belay,’ the signal to let go of his rope. I released the belay brake at my waist and shouted up, ‘Belay off,’ and he began to haul up the rope until I felt it tug at the carabiner on my harness to which I’d tied its end with my much-practised retraced figure-eight and stopper knot. Up above, Damien was feeding the rope through his belaying plate, then shouted ‘On belay,’ again. I called out, ‘Climbing,’ then dug my hands into the chalk bag hanging in the small of my back and stretched for the first hold.
By the time I reached the first anchor, I was breathing hard and sweat was trickling down my back. I’d grazed my cheek and scraped my fingertips on the hard granular rock. But I was moving all right. I eased the wedge out of the crack and clipped it to my belt, then looked up at the smooth bulge above me. From here it swelled out much more than I’d realised from the ground, like a pregnant belly, and I couldn’t see Damien at the end of the rope that stretched up across it. For a moment I was at a loss, unable to read the surface for places to grip, but then I noticed the traces of chalk where he’d placed his hands, and I stretched out across the warm rock to the first. There was a small indentation, and I pressed my fingers in and shifted my weight upwards.
‘You all right?’ Damien asked as I finally hauled myself up onto the ledge beside him.
‘Sure,’ I panted. Even after such a short climb, my hands and shoulders were aching, with tension as much as effort.
‘Let’s keep going then.’
I looked across the cliff at the others, Owen leading Curtis on their second pitch, and Luce beyond them already nearing the top of her climb. I glanced down and caught a glimpse of Marcus in his camp chair, watching us through a pair of binoculars, and felt myself sway. I turned back and gazed up at the cliff rising above us, and my heart sank. Climbing isn’t just about stamina and technique, it’s also about reading the rock face and understanding its possibilities. With time and experience this becomes second nature, matching your body’s abilities to the subtle variations in the rock’s surface. I didn’t have that experience. There were no chalk marks to follow now, and my mind went blank. I thought I’d have to ask Damien, but I felt his eyes on me, waiting, and I guessed that might be a mistake.
Then I noticed a series of shallow depressions leading up to the left, followed by a thin vertical crack. I knew that if I stopped to think about it I’d never go, so I abruptly tied onto the anchor, took the gear he offered me to hang on the rack around my waist and set off.
The important thing was to maintain momentum, I thought; momentum and focus. And not to look down. This wasn’t like the gym-I was suspended in an airy void, with no well-designed grips thoughtfully placed by human hand and no safety rope ready to support me from above. If I made a mistake now, I would fall twice the distance that I was above Damien before the rope caught me, assuming that the bolt held. If it didn’t, that was me gone.
Arms aching, I reached the base of the crack and fumbled a small wedge into it. I tugged, it held, and I hooked on and breathed a sigh of relief. After that the going became easier, and I finally scrambled over the lip and rolled onto the broad flat rock at the top of the pitch, heart pounding.
As I waited for Damien to follow me I gazed out over the treetops to the hazy horizon, then looked down. The snapping whoop of a whipbird sounded far below. I felt the nauseating tug of the void, the familiar weakening in my knees and stomach as if it were literally sucking at my insides. But I had made it, and a sense of relief flooded through me.
Perhaps the shot of adrenaline cleared my brain, for as I pulled in Damien’s rope a very obvious thought occurred to me. For most purposes you climb in pairs, one supporting the other with the safety rope, but without me-and without Marcus-they had been five. Later I learned that there had been a sixth during the previous year, but he hadn’t fitted in with the group and had moved on. When I came along they must have been looking for someone to even the numbers. It was a sobering thought. Was that all that Luce had seen in me? You could tell, just by watching them, that the other pairs, Luce and Anna, Curtis and Owen, understood exactly what their partners were going to do without a word being spoken. Damien and I, however, clearly had a relationship to work out. We abseiled back down to the foot of the cliff and moved on to another route, neither commenting on the other’s performance.
Again he took the first pitch, and as I waited for him to move off I looked up and saw the dark shadow of a substantial overhang, a ‘roof’, halfway up the cliff. Damien climbed to about five metres below it and anchored himself on a shallow ledge. I followed.
There was little room to manoeuvre on the ledge, and the roof above us now projected alarmingly.
He repeated his earlier question, expressionless. ‘You all right?’
‘Sure.’
Luce and I had practised on overhangs on the cliffs at Clovelly, but I hadn’t attempted hauling myself over an obstacle like this before. I set off cautiously to the base of the shelf, then stretched out beneath it, clinging to the surface like a bat. If I lost my grip now I’d drop clean past Damien to bounce on the cliff face beneath him. As I reached one hand out to the lip of the roof I felt one foot lose its purchase, then the other slipped away, and in a moment I was swinging on my fingertips, dangling helplessly. The momentum of my fall took me out and then back, and I arched my back, straining every muscle, and brought one foot up over the ledge, and hauled myself over. It wasn’t the most elegant of moves, but it got me there.
I was shaking with effort as I reached the next belay point, and collapsed back against the rock for a moment, catching my breath. Down below I saw the glint of Marcus’s binoculars. Though he was roped, I was pleased to see that Damien wasn’t too smooth on his manoeuvre over the shelf, and his face was red, his beard bristling and gleaming with sweat, by the time he stood beside me, breathing heavily. I asked if he wanted me to lead the final pitch to the top, which looked straightforward enough, but he shook his head impatiently, annoyed with himself I think, and set off without taking a break. He should have done, though. He’d gone barely a couple of metres before he made a mistake with his footing and began to slide. He scrambled to correct his balance but couldn’t, and now he was falling. I caught him, hauling his rope tight before any damage was done, and he clambered back onto my ledge.
‘Aah …’ He stood gasping for breath, face turned up to the sky, then muttered, ‘Thanks, mate.’