We continued in this way, stage by stage, through the day. Our climbing styles were very different, Luce free and confident, swinging out into space on the end of a sling, while I stuck as close to the wall as I could. Anyone studying us would have wondered what a natural climber like her was doing with a dunce like me, but at least, slowly and doggedly, I was getting there. At each belay point the views became more breathtaking, and the sense of being suspended on a vast white vertical surface more intoxicating. By the time I climbed up to join Luce at the head of the fifth pitch we were three-quarters of the way to the top, and I was finally confident that I was going to make it, weak as my body felt, and terrifying as the void beneath me looked. She said something about leading the next pitch again, but I felt it was time I showed some initiative, and I waved her aside and moved to the first hold. She spoke again, but there was a singing in my ears and I didn’t hear her properly. It was late afternoon now, and the wind was sharper up there, and cold. She repeated something about a tricky corner about fifteen metres above us, and I nodded and set off, muttering to myself, ‘Balance and rhythm, focus and momentum …’
When I came to the tricky corner I suddenly realised what she’d meant. I looked down, and saw that it was bottomless. I had to step from one face to the other across a thousand feet of void-the height of the Empire State Building. I hesitated, trying to clear the giddiness from my head, and then my legs began to shake violently. They call this ‘sewing machine leg’ or ‘disco leg’, when your weight concentrated on the edges of your feet causes the leg muscles to spasm and convulse uncontrollably. Afterwards Luce told me that as soon as she saw it she knew I was going to fall. I urged myself to move forward, but I simply couldn’t. For a breathless moment I was suspended there, and then, gripped by sick panic, I felt my feet give way, my fingers drag across the rock, and my body topple backwards off the wall.
Once I realised that I was gone, that there was absolutely nothing I could do, my terror faded. In a kind of appalled calm I watched the cliff face accelerating past me and then jerk to a violent stop as my rope caught in the highest of the three wedges I’d driven in on my way up. But the brutal force of gravity wasn’t going to give me up so easily, and with a sickening ping the wedge flew out of its crack and I continued down, moving faster. The rope snagged the next wedge and it too failed-ping-and the next-ping. All my protection was gone now, ripped out of the rock by the accelerating momentum of my fall and I was tumbling free, past Luce who was desperately trying to haul my rope through her belay brake. Too late, I thought, the belay anchors will go and then she’ll be pulled off too. We’re going to die together on Frenchmans Cap.
But the belay anchors, solidly implanted in the rock by Luce, didn’t give way. My rope jarred abruptly tight and I bounced and spun and smacked my head against the rock, and finally was still, dangling fifteen metres below her. I’d dropped the height of a ten-storey building.
I hung there, dazed and shocked, and gradually became aware of distant shouts. Then I made out Luce’s voice. ‘Josh? Are you all right?’
I opened my eyes, groggily trying to orientate myself, and saw a distant haze of dull green. It took me a moment to realise that I was staring at the tree canopy far below. I was hanging upside down.
‘Josh!’ Luce called again.
I called back, ‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Not much.’ Blood was running into my eyes from a cut on my cheek where I’d hit the rock face, but my bones seemed intact.
‘Can you climb up?’
My first thought was, how? Even if I could get myself the right way up, we weren’t carrying Jumars for climbing the slender ropes. Then I remembered I had a prusik loop somewhere in my gear, though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to remember how to use the bloody thing. It took a while to twist myself upright while the others shouted questions and advice to each other. Should they try to get help? But the mobile phones didn’t work. Should they try to lower me to the ground? Three hundred metres? I thought, no way. So I rigged up the ascender and began to inch my way painfully up the rope.
The evening sun had set the forest ablaze in golden light and purple shadow when Luce finally hauled me onto her ledge, and I thought how cruel of nature, indifferent to my fate, to put on such a show at a time like this. The others wanted to lower ropes and haul me up, but Luce was worried about the condition I was in, shaking with cold and shock, and also about the approach of darkness.
‘We’ll spend the night here,’ she said.
‘Sleep together?’ I stammered through chattering teeth. ‘Is that all you think about?’-for it was true that our lovemaking had taken on a certain intensity of late. She laughed, and began shouting instructions up to the others. One of them, Owen I think, had abseiled part-way down and about twenty metres away to the left, and Luce gave him a list of things we needed, as we’d come up with the minimum of kit. He climbed back up to the top and a couple of them set off on the summit walking track back down to the hut to fetch them for us.
I looked at the narrow ledge we were on, only a few centimetres wide, and wondered how the hell we were going to sleep on that-like bats perhaps, hanging upside down with our toes jammed into cracks. But Luce was placing wedges and flexible friends into the rock all around us, and lacing rope between them to form a sort of cradle. When she was satisfied, she perched beside me and held my hand, and we watched the great shadow of the mountain creep out across the wilderness. The dark was absolute by the time the backpack came bumping down the cliff on the end of a line-a sleeping bag, thick jumpers, a flask of hot soup, water, a couple of packs of dry rations, a first-aid kit and a torch. With them we built our nest safe inside Luce’s rope cobweb, had a meal, then zipped ourselves inside the bag and fell deeply asleep.
We woke to a gleam of golden light. It was the dawn sun, rising directly in front of us. We were pressed very close, our bodies warm despite the chill wind on our faces.
‘My nose is freezing,’ I whispered.
‘Mine too.’ She turned her head and we rubbed our noses together like Eskimos, then lay there watching the world beneath us take shape in the gathering light. Small glinting lakes appeared through the dark forest, and crags, like the stumps of ancient teeth, caught fire in the morning sun. I felt enveloped by the natural world, in a way I never had before. When I thought about it, I was amazed to realise how totally insulated my life had been from this world until I’d started climbing with Luce. Nature to me had been no more than a marginal risk of hurricanes or floods that could be managed with a range of financial instruments. I had only ever seen true wilderness through the filter of a TV screen or an aeroplane window. And now I was about as fully exposed to it as one could be, suspended in a gossamer net high up a mountain face in bright air. Credit derivatives and hedging positions weren’t going to be much use to me here. For the first time I felt I understood about Luce. The wilderness absorbed her utterly; she studied it, experienced it, loved it. It was the one big thing this hedgehog knew. She’d often told me about it, its beauty and its tragedy-the decimation of its forests, the poisoning of its rivers, the murder of its species-but to me it had been just another rather boring greenie lecture. Now I felt I understood. Climbing was her way of addressing it, risking herself against it, gripping it close like a lover.
There was a shout from above us, and we disentangled ourselves, had a little breakfast, and climbed out, Luce leading, as I should have let her do in the first place. The rain returned soon after, and I was spared any further tests of my overstretched climbing abilities. I had been transformed by my experience on Frenchmans Cap. I felt that Luce and I were true partners now, dizzyingly in love, constantly touching, looking at each other. The others were in high spirits after their successful climb, too, and I heard Anna say something about ‘the highest ever’. I said, ‘But what about the DNB? That was even more, wasn’t it?’ and she confessed with a laugh that they hadn’t actually done the full ascent, just a short section.