Wales, 1987
Cigarette butts, crumpled beer cans, the Captain’s been on the sofa for weeks. The carpet’s still damp under stocking feet since the pipes burst in the winter. No gas, no fifties for the leccy meter, no window in the front door, hardly any food in the cupboard and no one’s washed up for a month. But there’s thirty bottles of spirits in the kitchen. Sell some of them and we’ll have some dosh. It’s daft having all those bottles of evidence in here though. The house is dark and smells of sweat and breath and mould. A muffled cough comes from upstairs. I creep up there for the bog. The door to Carlos’s room is lying on the floor. That’s it, I remember, Gwion kicked it in last night to make him go and sort Karen out who had put a bottle through the front door window and was making a scene in the street. The broken glass crunches under my All Stars as I step outside. The sun’s been up for ages and pricks hot needles into my eyes. Spring’s doing its thing now and the Snowdon railway whistles good morning. Its sulphur smell catches my nose. I’m uneasy on my feet down the steep hill of Rallt Goch. I spit as I turn into Goodman Street and ruffle my hair. That wakes me up a bit. The kids in the park slide and swing with their young mums. There’s the Professor. He makes me shiver as he stops and watches the children through the mesh fence. All those things you hear are only rumour though. You’ve not to forget that around here.
I grind the gravel of the pavement under my shoes. It feels real – more real than anything that happened last night. In Pete’s Eats the tea’s too hot for my lips. I hunch quietly and watch the others through the steam. There’s the Fly, bent over his plate. He’s called that because he sometimes throws his food up and then eats it again. But I don’t think he’ll do that this morning. The Lobster looks as though he’s had a long night. I try and avoid the Lobster, all red and shiny, short in his long robbing coat. He’ll get anything for you, dead cheap. Give him your order in the café and he comes back half an hour later with the goods. Pulled two ice axes out yesterday and dropped them on the table. They say he’s the most well endowed man in the village. I rub my eyes and try and push the hideous image out of my mind. The juke box is playing Jimmi Hendrix too loud and the smell of burnt liver makes me gag.
“Number twelve. Fried egg and beans.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Women, aged before they should have, sag at the next table and push Embassy Regals into their mouths, tired of it all. Their husbands are in the betting office. They’ll meet up at the chippy and chatter in a high pitch Creole of Welsh and English. Dafydd Chips, the second biggest boy in the village, will scoop their deep fried offerings into newspaper packets for them to rush home with up the steep side of Llanber’. Meeta comes in. Looking happy, she snaps her tobacco tin down on the table top. I have to hang on her words at this hour to decode her Swiss accent and she entrances me with tales of Bolivian jails and Indian mystics. I gaze outside and imagine distant places.
Rain is spitting onto the glass now. Looks like another slate day. The slate’s best when it’s showery, it dries in minutes. It’s where it’s all been happening of late, why I came here. I saw a picture of a moustachioed, muscley guy manteling these tiny edges, trying to put both feet next to his hands, grinding his nose into the purple rock, and not a runner in sight. Now I’m living with him, Carlos they call him because of his Spanish waiter looks, and Gwion. They’re letting me doss there till I find a place of my own. No luck yet though, and I’ve been there six months. We did have an ace place before but we got kicked out after we got caught with a pin in the meter.
I asked Carlos about the photo and he told me he’d fallen off just after it was shot and went sixty foot. When I got here the slate scene was already big. The days when the mysterious Rainbow Slab was spoken about in hushed voices, a top secret location, were near since gone. The falls you could take off the hard slate routes were already legendary and I wanted to take one. I didn’t have to wait long before I was emulating Redhead and Carlos by falling eighty feet off a new route I was trying, drunk on the Rainbow. When I came to a stop, four feet off the ground with my nine ripped nuts stacked on the rope at my waist and Gwion higher up the crag than I was, I was content, and later bruised. I need to buy some chalk.
The sky is sagging and dark now and the village seems to be resonating at a low frequency. The Lard (the biggest boy in the village)’s new van is throbbing to house tunes and he’s sat inside his shell suit on double yellows, menacing. Last week he knocked Manic Ben over, right there in the street, in front of everyone. I don’t return his stare. I must take care not to tread in dog shit on the pavement. There’s Tatan on the other side of the street, “Hi, Tat.” He looks ghastly. The other week on the way back from a day trip to Dublin, lashed up, the lads ripped his clothes off him and threw them overboard into the Irish Sea. He’s always the brunt of their jokes, but they love him really. When he showed up at customs starkers, and the officials had to kit him out with a too small pair of nylon football shorts, they all had a good laugh. Climbers in yellow and pink tights and ripped jumpers are in the street, some live here, some are visiting. They pace around like peacocks, too colourful for a dark Welsh village. The old quarry men don’t know what to make of them. The young locals react against them. I got pushed around in the street after hours a couple of times, but Gwion’s a good man to know. He’s a local himself, one of the few who hasn’t gone the other way and doesn’t want anything to do with the mountains. He’s our mediator. He let the guys know I was OK and now I can drink a pint with the same blokes who hated me before. Outsiders aren’t always accepted here, especially big-time climbers with inflated egos. I’ve become the same, wary of newcomers, safe in our group.
Some try too hard to be accepted. One guy, the Weird Head we called him, who appeared for a while, said he’d base jumped the Troll Wall. He just wanted to fit in, that was all. When Bobby confronted him and told him that we knew he hadn’t, he broke down and sobbed. There’s a lot of crazy people here, people who can’t sit still. The place is like a magnet, and for some there’s this perceived pressure to be crazy too. The ones that try too hard don’t seem to last long, they disappear. This old slate mining village has many good people. It just seems unavoidable that it should make winners and losers.
There’s a distant brass band and a voice from a tannoy. It’s carnival day. I’ll run up the hill and wake the guys and head across to Vivian or up to The Lost World maybe. “Yahoo, guys. Who wants to climb?” Gwion’s psyched. Carlos isn’t moving – he’s turned nocturnal, stays in his room all day reading horror stories. Gwion apologises for hitting me last night (I was only trying to stop him from slashing his wrists on the broken glass) and then we’re back out on the street. The carnival floats by, children in outfits with paint all over them looking self-conscious and, at the head of it all, this year’s carnival queen. Graham Sis they call him, a fat man, very effeminate in his long red halter-neck. He drifts by waving in his lipstick, his dream come true. The village is heaving now and we hurry across the fields toward the big holes.
In the quarry they’re all there; new routes going up all the time. Things getting repeated and talked about. The Captain’s having a tormegamite experience on something loose as hell, sweeping as he goes. The Dawes is trying a horizontal double dyno with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. There’s JR creeping up the rock, thinking about genitalia. Nicky is psyching up for her ninety foot leap into the steel black water of the pool and Skeletor is wrapping his vast ape index around the purple rock. The Giant Redwood is on a rope, trundling blocks to uncover a modern classic. Harms the Stickman prances up the Rainbow looking unhealthy (how can he do this on his diet of chip butties and Newcastle Brown?). The Horn pops in and flexes his tattooed biceps on Colossus Wall. Moose is soloing like a maniac ’cos his girlfriend’s left him and Bobby’s bouncing around like a thing on a spring. And there’s the Tick, recording all these antics through the lens and turning them into history. Uncle Alan watches from the bridge and reminisces about the thirties, when he was blasting and pulling the slate out of there. He warns us of the dangers, the giant rock falls, but he’s glad to see the quarry alive again. It’s why Llanberis exists and why it had prospered for a hundred years, until the sixties, when it shut down and all the men had to look elsewhere. That’s why, now, so many shops are boarded up around here. But this is a real village, with real struggles, not tarted up, making concessions for the tourists.
There’ll be teams out on the island today, it’ll be baking out there. I feel like I’m missing out teetering around in this man-made scar, and for a moment I want to be above the sea, brushing lichen off crimps with my finger tips, searching for ways through uncharted territory, studied by seals. But you can’t be two places at once and it could be worse. I could have a job. Big G and the Waddy will be out there with car inner-tube knee pads on, bar-ring their way across some incomprehensible ceiling with sea-reflected sunshine dancing on their backs in a dark cavern. Pengo and Manuel could be taking a trip to the moon on the Yellow Wall and the Crook will have invented new jargon with which to describe an obscure nook or cranny which will be the scene of an even more obscurely named new route. Tombs the mathematician could be with him. “No money, no job, no girlfriend. Might as well be dead,” he had said. Ben and Marion will still be on Red Walls, moving in and out of the quartz, smooth and solid after all these years. And there’ll be Craig, making his name in a splash of colour as the sun sinks into a receding tide. Up in the mountains Cloggy is turning gold and Mr Dixon will be up there doing his own thing on the cathedral of rock.
So as hands tire and blood sugar levels drop in the twilight, the climbers home back to Llanberis, to eat badly and rush for last orders. In the Padarn they’re all drinking – the farmers, the girls from the chemist and the Co-op, the hairdressers and the builders, the walkers and the climbers. That builder I’ve seen doing one-arm pull-ups on a door frame at a party and laughing at the supposed climbers who couldn’t get near it. And there’s big Tommy forcing his weight against the bar, as if trying to stop it toppling over, as he sinks his pints. Gabwt’s standing on a chair shouting “Hash for cash” with his Nunchakas in his hands, terrifying those who don’t know him, as merrymakers sneak out to the Broccoli Garden for some extra stimulation. That’s Dewi playing pool. He killed the vicar with the end of a snapped off pool cue that looked very much like the one he’s holding now. Once he was beating Bobby at a game when Bobby remarked without thinking, “Bloodyhell, Dewi, you’re a killer with a pool cue!” We all stepped back and waited for the explosion, but he mustn’t have heard ’cos he just missed the black and sat down. Those climbers over there are standing cool and not talking about routes and moves, even though they want to. I ask Johnny for the numbers on some route or other up the Pass. “Three, five, two, eight, one,” he says and makes me feel about this small. But me, Carlos and Gwion are buzzing. We downed a load of our spirits before coming in ’cos we haven’t any cash to buy drinks. Those Giros only seem to last a day or so and then you’re skint for a fortnight until you post your next slip in. Tonight’s dinner was a rotting cauliflower that we got from the Co-op for 10p, boiled up with five strands of pasta and a stock cube which we found in the bottom of the cupboard. We called it cauliflower surprise. But Carlos has usually got some scam or petty crime worked out to keep us in food and other stuff. Never mind. Tonight people will be queueing to buy vodka and gin and tomorrow we can eat full sets in Pete’s. As last orders is screamed out Kenny the Turk erupts in a fury and starts spinning a cast iron table around his head. The crowd sweeps backwards in a wave and tries to paste itself to the nicotine-stained walls of the room. The guy who has fallen out of his wheelchair in the crush pulls out a baseball bat and lashes out at anybody who tries to help him. For a moment things are completely out of control until Ash the barman, five ten and thin as a rake, gets in there and calms the Middle-Eastern stand-up comic’s temper. Just another night in the Pad really.
Out in the street drunks mumble to themselves, dossers look for dosses and the partiers want to know where ‘the scene’ is. So it’s off to some terraced house under an orange street lamp to try and prolong the day, wishing sleep would never have to come. The house is throbbing with the beat and those inside are giggling and dancing and you can tell, by the look in their eyes, that some people will be up all night. But if you eat those ’shrooms you won’t get to Gogarth tomorrow, you’ll sit around and waste your day away. Next to some hot knives on the stove we swap our stories of bricking it miles out, or talk of the moves on some slate horror and how you should try it like this or like that next time. But some of the others are bored by your keenness and wish you would shut up and you suddenly feel self-conscious as the herbs take effect. You realise you’ve overdone it and are incapable of speech, and the girl you’ve wanted to work up the courage to ask is talking with that other guy. So you leave for home without saying your goodnights, tripping over your own feet as you head down the hill. In the dark house you get into your pit, lie on your back and drift off, your head swimming, dreaming about tomorrow.