The knot

Chamonix, France. February 1996

FOR TWO YEARS Aaron and I had been planning another winter trip to the Alps. On our days off we climbed together on the tiny gritstone crags around Sheffield, starting early and climbing and soloing as many routes in a day as we could. Generally this was midweek, so Mandy would drop us off before going to her teaching job, and then pick us up on her way home. That summer seemed to be full of long days and sore fingertips. Aaron became my first real climbing partner, and we progressed through the grades together, willing each other on as we went from easy classics to harder, more scary routes, leap-frogging up the grades past one another. He was never a talker, and so we climbed with mainly me talking, scheming our return to the Alps that coming winter.

Aaron was coming to the end of his physics Ph.D. in Sheffield, and his thoughts were primarily about things that made no sense to me: particles of matter, equations and computer models. He was working towards a career as a professional, either academic or commercial, his big analytical brain in demand in an analytical world. I on the other hand remained a simple shop assistant at Outside, my thoughts only of mountains and hard routes, karabiners and ice axes. Aaron was more cautious than me, always thinking things through methodically, aware of his limitations and areas where his skills were lacking. I on the other hand thought I had made strides to becoming a great alpinist, and had big plans for that winter. Even though these strides were purely in my head, my ambition was boundless, unconstrained by reality. I seemed to have perfected the art of visualisation, a technique much used by sports people and athletes, who imagine themselves as winners and record breakers long before whistles or start-lines are crossed. I spent my days thinking of nothing but climbing, doing pull-ups on ice axes in the boot store, making plans, tinkering with gear, an alpine version of Billy Liar, a fantasist using his imagination in order to get through the boredom of work.

Mandy was bound up with her work, teaching children about their bodies, touring Sheffield in a mobile classroom. She was a great teacher, and loved children, and many would say at the end of their morning or afternoon in the mobile classroom that it had been their best-ever lesson at school. She threw herself into her work, and at times we seemed to have separate lives. She dreamed of hotel-holidays with me, and the normal things that couples do, while I dreamed of hard climbs and big walls in foreign countries. Often when we lay in bed, she would ask me what I was thinking about, to which the answer was generally something like ‘crampons’ or ‘ropes’.

I felt the pressure that she wanted me to get another job, as I was forced to work most weekends, but I could think of nothing else I could do. The only qualification I had was my obsession with climbing, and the only place it was valued was at Outside. However, I knew that working in a climbing shop was not a long-term option, something Dick Turnbull had told me on my first day.

Increasingly, Mandy had also been dropping hints that she wanted to have a baby, but my mind was only full of ice faces, so I didn’t really think too much about what she wanted, or what having a baby would mean. All I could think about was going back to the Alps in February, and making who I thought I could be, and what I could do, a reality.

For the first time in my life I sat at a computer. It was old, slow and second-hand, a cast-off from Mandy’s mum and dad, but a computer nevertheless. Mandy said I might find it useful, as she’d been researching and discovered that people with dyslexia often found it easier to get their thoughts down via a keyboard rather than with pen and paper. I was excited at the possibility that it could help me write, because the older I got, the more I wanted to describe how I felt, my thoughts, my ideas, the things you can’t say to another person, the secret things you can only write and then run away from before they are read.

People think that for dyslexic people a computer is needed simply for its spellchecker. Spelling mistakes don’t ruin lives. For me it was the fact that the ideas I had to communicate seemed trapped and broken, they were non-linear, and would need digging out one by one and reassembled, something impossible to do with pen or typewriter. This computer was the tool required to fit the mosaic of my thoughts together again, even though I didn’t even know what the pieces were. All I knew was that perhaps this computer could help me tap into something that needed to be released.

I switched it on, and listened to it hum into life, watching as it slowly woke up. I’d only ever sat behind computers, never in front, generally wondering what was being typed in by housing benefit or DHS officers, glad I didn’t have to sit in a grey-green dimly lit office like them. But now I was prepared to do that.

I opened up Microsoft Word and looked at the screen, all grey on the tiny monitor, and placed my fingers on the grubby keyboard as you would if you could actually type. The screen wanted to be filled, like one of those pieces of wood I’d painted on at college. My mind was as full of images and ideas as it had been then, but it had been so long since I’d written anything more than a cheque. How could I translate these thoughts into words when words always failed me? But I knew that nothing else would do.

I wrote my name.

Where would I begin? Why would I even want to try? I wasn’t a writer. I always said that when you think about taking a photograph, you should ask yourself if anyone would ever want to look at it. I asked about my story, the first I would write about a climb, ‘Who would ever want to read this?’

But this wasn’t just a climb. It was an event that I had thought about every day since, maybe even every hour. This climb had changed me. It had made things make sense. It was more than just a climb. I just had to write something. I looked for the letter W on the keyboard and began to type with one finger.

After a while, I ran the spellcheck, and the page came alive with red lines, each disappearing one by one as I went back over the text until it was all black-and-white again. I scrolled down and marvelled at the words, how perfect they seemed, forming up to be my thoughts. Alone with this computer, I had all the time in the world to craft my story, to get my thoughts in order. I could hide my inadequacies behind the words.

I printed it out and felt a thrill at seeing my name at the top, the words I’d written placed on the page, my thoughts and experiences now expressed as I had imagined them. The words looked so neat, so much more perfect than my dunce handwriting. I read it again and thought it was perfect. I couldn’t wait for Mandy to read it.

Mandy groaned. ‘It’s terrible,’ she said, having read only the first paragraph, wincing as she read on. ‘It’s sort of sub-sixth-form angst.’

I was crestfallen. What was I thinking?

‘There are loads of spelling mistakes,’ she went on, proving that although a computer can check for the right spelling, it can’t check for the right word. ‘It needs lots of work.’

I returned to the computer. It frustrated me that I could get it so wrong. I didn’t have an ounce of talent. I was deluded. I had conned myself I had something to say. I switched off the computer, clicking ‘No’ when it asked if I wanted to save my untitled document, grumpy with my first rejection.

February finally came and we arrived in Chamonix on the bus, stepping down to high pressure and good conditions. As we walked through town, I pointed up at the Rouse-Carrington route on the Aiguille du Pélerin, a hard and scary ice smear, and suggested we warm up on that. Aaron took it as a joke, not realising I was serious.

We got to the chalet we were sharing with a group of climbers and skiers from Outside, and after dumping our gear started looking through the guidebook. My route choices were outlandish and ridiculous, while Aaron’s were feasible and sensible, if a little pedestrian to me. I had two weeks to realise my potential. I didn’t have time for warm-up climbs or easy classic snow plods.

‘How about the Frendo Spur?’ I suggested, knowing that on paper this might look like a suitable compromise to him.

The Frendo Spur was a jagged buttress of rock, a spine of shattered pillars and stepped walls that terminated at a steep ice arête as it neared the Midi téléphérique station at its summit. It was first climbed in 1944 by Edouard Frendo and René Rionda, with its first winter ascent coming in 1967, and had become a plum classic introduction to the longer and more committing summer routes. As a winter route there wasn’t a lot of information about it, but on paper at least, the moderate climbing gave the impression it wouldn’t be too hard. There was a cable car that went up from Chamonix to a small free hut close to the start of the route, making the approach simple, and once on the route it looked objectively safe if we ignored the hanging ice cliffs on each side. Once we’d summited we’d be able to ride the cable car back down to town. It would be a perfect warm-up.

In reality the route, even in summer, was way beyond our capabilities or experience, and was no easy tick. It seemed to generate a great many epic tales, perhaps due to its attraction as a stepping stone from easy to hard routes. One of the best was of a solo climber who had fallen close to the top, and been seen shooting down the ice arête and then down the gully on one side. The following day, the rescue helicopter could find no sign of his body at the base, but they found him alive as they flew up the fall line. He was hanging from his jacket hood which had snagged on a spike of rock.

In winter the difficulty would be massively increased, the easy rock climbing transformed to difficult mixed climbing, with snow and sub-zero temperatures requiring axes and crampons to be used the whole way. In summer the route usually took two days, with climbers racing up the rock spur and bivying below the ice arête, climbing it in the morning when it was well frozen. In winter the speed would be halved.

I put it to Aaron and after reading the description he simply nodded. He was really clever but on this occasion not quite as clever as I’d assumed.

‘We could sort out our gear and head up there after tea, and get on the route in the morning?’ I suggested, ignoring the facts that we were unacclimatised and still tired from our twenty-four hour bus journey, and that leaving after tea would mean missing the cable car and breaking trail until midnight to get to the hut, zig-zagging up the steep, snow-covered paths that led up the valley.

I sat at the computer again. All week, biking to work, I had thought about my story, and why it hadn’t been any good. Maybe it was because I hadn’t read enough books, but books had never been a major part of my life. Outside school, I’d only voluntarily read one book in my youth, and James Herbert’s The Rats was not the ideal material for a young writer’s mind. My childhood had mainly been full of comics, ideal material as I didn’t start reading until much later than everyone else at school. Comics had been good in many ways, their visual story-telling perfect for my visual brain. I thought in pictures, so stories in pictures work well. I wondered if my lack of story-telling skill was that I tried to provide too much detail. Maybe the trick was to paint the story rather than write it, use the words lightly, to provide the colour as in an impressionist painting, and allow the watcher room to feel what it was like, perhaps to know why this was more than just a climb.

‘It doesn’t look very easy,’ said Aaron, planting his axes at the bergschrund, the moat-like crevasse formed between the base of the Frendo and the moving glacier. ‘It looks really difficult.’

It was dawn and we had arrived below the hardest climb of our lives.

‘It looks great,’ I said, panting as I moved up the steps Aaron had made on the approach slope, feeling utterly done even before we’d begun.

‘It doesn’t look like fun … like I said, it looks massive and hard.’

I joined him, rested on my axes, and looked up. I had never stood below such a huge wall of rock and ice. The climbs we had been doing all summer had been ten or twenty metres at the most, not such great training for a wall over a thousand metres high. Also, it now didn’t seem to be objectively safe, with huge overhanging ice cliffs on either side of the top of the Spur, the ice blocks we’d passed on the way evidence they were active.

We’d had very little sleep. The walk up through the woods, with the trail buried under deep snow, meant we hadn’t made it to the hut until 2 a.m. Another party had been asleep when we arrived, and I woke them again a few hours later when I had to run outside and be sick, the combination of a thousand metres of altitude gain and a belly full of half-cooked potatoes scoffed down before we’d left. After only a couple of hours’ sleep we’d woken again and started up towards the Spur.

I had spent a year thinking of nothing but climbing a route like this, of putting myself against something hard and proving that my faith and passion for climbing weren’t misguided, but now I was here, the rock cold, the face silent, the air stinging, my mouth still tasting of sick, my bowels churning, thirsty, all I could think of was the valley. The climb dwarfed me.

Part of me still revelled at the scale of the climb, a part that grabbed at the opportunity it provided and told me I could climb it, but there was just so much unexpected fear. I had forgotten just how scary this all was.

I looked at Aaron. Our friendship was strong enough for me to say that I was scared, but that word could dissolve our climb before it had even begun. I knew he really didn’t want to climb it either. But to say it, and fail now because of my fear, would betray the dream I’d had, this opportunity I had been given.

The weather was good. We were fit enough. We could climb it. We simply had to try. I had to give everything I had. And so we began to climb up the Frendo Spur.

I printed out the story again, and reread it, spotting countless mistakes I’d missed. I had been rewriting the story for months, yet I never seemed to get any closer to finishing it. I made my changes once more and printed it out again, the thick stack of paper I had started with now down to a few tatty sheets.

Mandy had continued to prove a hard critic so I gave a copy to my lodger Jon, another climber, who said it was good.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Mandy said, later that night in bed, ‘he’s a climber, he doesn’t know anything about writing.’ I watched as she read my story again, wondering if we were both wrong and she was right, and I knew she was as I looked at her grimaces and raised eyebrows, the objective teacher in her coming out. I’d given her books to read by the climbing greats, Joe Simpson, Jim Perrin, Greg Child, writers I aspired to be like. She’d sometimes stop after a chapter or even a single paragraph and say, ‘Oh I can’t read this; it’s introspective rubbish.’ Every time I gave her something of mine to read, she would give me a low mark. Sometimes I’d lose my temper and unfairly accuse her of being a terrible critic or teacher, giving nothing in the way of praise to nurture the tiny bit of talent I might have. ‘Well you want to be a good writer, don’t you?’ she’d ask. She was right. I did. I wanted this story to be perfect, an impossible task I knew.

I had always thought of myself as a wimp, simply wanting an easy life, but through writing this story I discovered something inside me that I found surprising: not my ability to write, or the depths of despair when I was rejected – something I was used to – but my unending ability to try again, and again, and again. No amount of rejection or criticism, both external and internal, seemed to quell this spark within me. Was I just deluded? Was I simply blindly stupidly stubborn?

I wasn’t sure, but the next day I started again.

We climbed slowly, the rock either buried under deep powder or steep and strenuous. We took turns belaying each other, growing cold through lack of movement, watching the cable cars moving up and down high above us, seeing the Day-Glo blur of tourists and skiers through their windows, wondering if anyone had spotted us down here at the toe of this climb. It was a surreal experience, struggling on this route while tourists passed overhead, probably not even aware we were there.

We hoped to make a summer-style ascent, and climb the first eight hundred metres in a day, so moved as fast as we could – but our plans had assumed summer conditions, clean rock, and no bivy gear. As the day drew on we realised our pace was pitiful and the plan unrealistic. We barely ate into the distance we needed to cover.

As we climbed I saw that Aaron was slowing down, as if his mind didn’t want to leave the ground, probably aware that the higher he climbed the more committed he was. We had only one sixty-metre rope, having left the other in the valley in order to save weight. Two ropes would have meant we could make full-length abseils, using one rope to pull the other down at the end of each rope length we descended. With one, we would only be able to abseil thirty metres at a time, thus requiring more anchors and making slower progress.

It was Aaron’s lead. He eyed the difficulties for longer than was necessary, so I offered to carry on leading before he had the chance to persuade me to retreat. We were silent with each other, only communicating when we needed slack on the rope to move up, or to say when it was safe to follow. The tension grew throughout the day. We both knew that we didn’t really have a chance, that our one-day supply of food and gas wouldn’t last the route, which at our pace would take three times as long as we’d planned. I knew we should go down, but part of me wouldn’t let go. This could be our only chance.

‘It’s not bad,’ Mandy said, handing it back, ‘but it still needs a lot of work.’

I had poured my heart and soul onto the paper, written and rewritten it dozens of times, analysed every word and sentence to eradicate any fat and gristle. ‘Not bad’ was not enough for me. It had to be great.

‘There are still quite a few spelling mistakes,’ she added, as I pulled it from her fingers. I had no satisfaction. I felt I was simply grinding her down. I wanted to write something she would think was good. That was all that mattered. I wanted to show her that although I just worked in a shop, and had no trade, or skill, or degree, I had talent.

I kept writing, and the thing that drove me on was my need to prove her wrong. I believed she didn’t think I had it in me to write something good enough for her, and people like her, people with degrees and good jobs. I was trying to prove something, never realising that she needed no proof from me.

‘Aaron!’ I shouted down into the dark, my body wedged awkwardly in a steep flared groove, feet scraping as they tried to stab into a thin vein of ice that trickled down the back. ‘Watch me, I might come off here.’

I tried to relax and pressed my crampon points into the ribbon of ice. I couldn’t tell if they were well placed, their security blocked from view by my body. I felt as if I could fall at any moment. My shoulders were wedged against smooth-sided walls – if any single part of me slipped, I was off. I breathed hard and tried to stay calm.

It was late, it was dark, it was incredibly cold, and Aaron was pissed off. The afternoon had been squandered as I’d wrestled up a fantastic icy crack, the evening lost break-dancing around in a mixed couloir, and now the cold Alpine night arrived abruptly, without the decency to let me put on my headtorch, as the real climbing began. Aaron hung below me on a large spiky flake as I began fighting my way up the groove, hoping we would find somewhere to sleep at the top.

The higher I climbed, feet stacked one above the other, the more noticeable the weight of the rope became. It hung, unhindered by protection, down to Aaron, who silently shivered as the temperature dropped off the end of our cheap thermometer, the halogen bulb of his torch tracing out my flight path above his spike belay. He remained silent.

I pressed on, promising myself I would climb just one more metre, each metre leading to another. I was hoping to find some gear so I could lower off, getting to the top now replaced by the need simply to get down in one piece, but after each metre there was none. Attempting to stay calm, focused and in balance, I tried to step carefully back down into my last crampon placement, but as I reweighted it, the ice buckled and fell away, sending my crampon screeching and sparking down the granite, until it miraculously caught a blob of stubborn ice. As I pressed my head into the groove, my tired, hungry body tried to puke up with fear, only managing a pathetic dry heave.

‘How’s it going?’ shouted up Aaron, code for ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Won’t be long,’ I croaked, lying.

I climbed across into a secondary groove, close to losing control and falling. I scraped away the snow to find a crack, placed a peg, and lowered back to the belay, defeated. I was exhausted, desperate for water after a day where there had been no time to drink. I could make no decisions, so Aaron took charge. All I wanted was a pan of cold water and my warm sleeping bag, but there seemed little chance of either.

Aaron scanned around with his headtorch until he spotted a blob of snow below, the size of a wheely-bin lid.

‘OK, we’ll abseil down to there and use this spike as our anchor,’ he said, preparing the rope as I just hung there pathetically.

What seemed like aeons later I was squirming, pulling, pushing and grunting as I tried to get my sleeping bag out of the rucksack without dropping anything important or falling off my narrow perch. Aaron was in his bag, boots off and stove on, long before I’d even had time to find my headtorch. It would have been easy to imagine we were in the Himalayas or Antarctica, if it hadn’t been for the lights of Chamonix twinkling up at us. My tired mind imagined the friendly laughing groups huddled around warm crêperies, wandering from bar to bar, then returning to beds warmed by blonde Norwegian goddesses, and wondered what I was doing here.

‘Andy!’ Aaron woke me up from my cold daydream, ‘Are you OK? Get in your bag.’ With great difficulty I removed my right boot’s plastic outer shell, leaving just the foam inner boot on my foot, and clipped it into the rope. Then I proceeded to wrestle with the other. For some reason my mind wandered for a moment to the implications of dropping a boot so high on a winter route. I had heard of climbers doing this and shuddered at what such a fumble would mean on such a cold route.

The shell refused to budge, probably due to a thin layer of ice building up between inner and outer, and my hands were too cold to take my slippery gloves off, forcing me to push harder. All I wanted was to get the boot off and get into my sleeping bag.

The shell shot off my foot and disappeared into the dark below.

I was dumbstruck, uncomprehending. Aaron remained silent beside me, looking down into the dark. My first thought was about how we could carry on with just one boot. I’d not yet grasped the reality that this was it.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted.

‘I suppose we’ll be going down now,’ said Aaron, as calm as could be.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ I repeated, hardly believing what I’d just done.

I put my head in my hands and tried to pretend I’d just imagined what had taken place. This couldn’t really be happening, it had to be a nightmare. Different emotions shot through me. I couldn’t accept we would have to give up all the ground we’d just made. It seemed so unfair, and yet there was no fighting it.

Aaron, seeing I was in distress, tried to comfort me. ‘Never mind,’ he said.

All I could think about was how would I get down without getting frostbite as I had only my inner boot, and how were we going to retreat with only one fifty-metre rope and a minimal rack? I sat there for a long time, shaking my head, vowing that once down I’d give up climbing for good. This was it. I’d sell all my gear, return home to Mandy and go somewhere sunny for the rest of the holiday instead. If this was winter alpinism I didn’t want any of it. I’d wasted three years dreaming about it, but in reality it was just grim, and I was far too weak and useless for it.

Just at that moment a huge spotlight came on, shining up from the building beside the hut we had started from that morning, illuminating the whole of the North Face of the Midi for the tourists. Aaron shifted in his sleeping bag.

‘Bloody great! How am I going to sleep with that shining in my eyes all night?’ I said, wondering how things could possibly get any worse.

A moment later the answer came with a boom that shook the air all around us. A serac weighing hundreds or thousands of tons had carved off the glacier above our heads. There was a long roll like thunder that rose as the avalanche smashed its way down the side of the Frendo, blocks of ice the size of houses breaking apart and exploding into a whirring wave of debris. The noise grew into the roar of a train, freezing us with fear as it rumbled closer. Both of us shrank onto our already tiny ledge, sure we were going to be hit, as giant blocks of ice shot past and ice and snow filled the air.

All of a sudden, my lost boot, and being denied this route, didn’t seem all that important.

I sat at the computer every night for an hour making changes. The story grew to five thousand words, then to none as I accidentally deleted it. At the time, I didn’t realise you could simply undo the deletion. I cursed my bad luck and felt like smashing the computer to tiny pieces: six months of hard-fought work simply blinked out of existence. I screamed at the computer, rather than myself, and cursed not backing up. The last print-out had been months ago.

Later, however, when I’d calmed down, I found I could tell myself that this was an opportunity to make it right. The best pieces of my story remained in my head. As with any good story, being retold would be good for it.

And so I started again, the strong sections coming back to me, the weaker sections remaining lost. The story grew even larger. Every word, every paragraph became sacred. My work became a work of art. It was perfect.

No. It was shit. I cut it down to a thousand words; my long rambling detailed account, written in a code only a climber could translate, was transformed into a Haiku poem. I began to be my hardest critic and to see my mistakes. I had tried too hard to make people understand how difficult climbing was. I had too many similes, everything was like something else, when simply being what it was was good enough. The story was swamped under a landfill of unimportant details. Lines like ‘The cold white snow fell down’ suddenly jumped out at me. ‘Of course it’s cold, it’s snow, and snow only falls down, plus we know it’s white.’ The line would be deleted and replaced with ‘It snowed.’

A year went by, hundreds of hours, tens of thousands of single-finger keyboard taps, the story ebbing and flowing, as slowly I learnt how hard it is to write, how bad I was, how published words would be there forever and had to be perfect. I had to trick the reader into thinking these words had come easily, and hide the work in the spaces between the words. Yet the more I wrote, and the more I thought about what I wrote, the further away the end seemed to be.

The avalanche crashed by until the roar finally slid into a long and deafening hiss.

Coughing up ice crystals, we opened our eyes and found to our surprise that we were still alive. Stunned, we sat and watched in amazement as a great cloud of ice particles and debris rolled across the glacier far below, fanning out for hundreds of metres, destroying our tracks, shimmering spectacularly in the beam of the spotlight as it swirled slowly in the air, forming a galaxy of halos. My heart beat hard. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I felt more alive than at any other time in my life. I forgot about my boot, which would now be buried under the ice. I knew in that moment we would be able to get down in one piece, and, more importantly, that alpine climbing wasn’t for me.

The following afternoon the rope slithered from our final abseil. We had made it down. All my socks were on my bootless foot, which was further encased in a mountain mitt and had a crampon strapped on with abseil cord. I ran for my life across the glacier, praying we’d be spared any more trundling seracs.

Three hundred metres from the face I stopped dead and rubbed my eyes.

There before me, standing upright on a pile of ice debris, was my boot.

As I picked it up I instantly forgot last night’s thought of selling gear, sunny holidays in Spain, and the stupidity of winter climbing. I’d got myself down alive and in one piece. I felt stronger, mentally more able to cope with the stresses of winter, plus now I had two boots again. I was back in business.

Dick came into work and I asked him to read my story. He promised he would at dinner time.

All day I waited nervously for his opinion. He was well read and a climber. Who better to give the nod to my talents? No doubt he’d be shocked that such genius had gone unnoticed in his shop.

‘I just don’t understand what you’re trying to say,’ he said, handing it back, the paper covered in question marks and corrected spelling mistakes. ‘It can’t have been as hard as you make out. You seem to be trying too much to impress. It’s only the Frendo Spur.’

I told him it was hard, and that difficulty was relative to experience anyway. Dick was an old-school climber and his climbs were simply climbs, not metaphors for life. I knew he thought I was bullshitting, laying it on thickly. I just wanted to tell it how it was, how the route had affected us. Yes it was just a climb, but I had thought about it every day since then. It was more than that.

‘Maybe read a few more books,’ he said, ‘instead of climbing magazines.’

‘My arse will never be the same,’ I groaned, shifting in my sleeping bag. It was another alpine dawn, and I sat with my back against the Frendo, the lights of Chamonix thousands of feet below me still shining as I shifted my weight from bum cheek to bum cheek. It was our second night on the Frendo since our return a week after retreating that first time. I wondered if the crux of alpine climbing was getting a good night’s sleep.

‘How’s your arse?’ I asked, directing my question to the half-sitting, half-lying sleeping bag beside me. It looked like a misplaced body bag. I knew full well what the answer was, but this was a nicer way to ask if he was awake.

‘I think I’d just managed to fall asleep,’ came the reply.

It was hard to understand our keenness to hike back up and have another go at the Frendo, but something had clicked last time, and through the fear and trepidation of that first day and night, I’d felt a powerful force stir within me. As soon as I’d found my boot I knew I had to go back. Failing and then getting down under our own steam had proved we were strong enough to succeed, but now we had spent another night on the Spur, with more than half the route left to do, I wondered if it had just been youthful testosterone, mistaking the relief at getting down for belief we should go back up.

I moved carefully on our tiny chopped-out ledge, ropes feeding in and out of my sleeping bag, trying to dig out the stove and get our breakfast brew of lemon tea started. I scooped up a pan of snow, careful to dodge the yellow patches close to our feet.

I lit the stove and sat with my head bowed looking into the pan, hypnotised by the slow breakdown of the snow crystals which turned from white to grey, grey to transparent, a pan full of snow slowly shrinking down to a small puddle of water that warmed, then bubbled, then boiled and steamed. I dropped in another handful of snow and watched again as it transformed into water.

Aaron unzipped his bivy bag, sticking his nose out to sniff the air. ‘Did you sleep?’

‘No, I don’t think so, I needed a piss all night but couldn’t work out how to go without getting it on myself, my sleeping bag or you – and I was gripped in case I fell off the ledge.’

‘Do you still want one?’ he said.

‘No, I went in my cup.’

‘In your cup?’

‘Yes, I think it was my cup.’

I passed Aaron the pan to drink out of, the metal warming his hands for a minute or two before the air chilled it. I took a sip of the tea and felt nauseous, and wondered if I’d poisoned myself with fumes from the stove. Then I munched my small muesli bar. Once the snow is melted breakfast is a short affair.

Aaron craned his head and looked above us. ‘I hope we get to the top today, I don’t think I can last another bivy like that.’

‘I think it’s good,’ said Mandy, and my heart leapt. ‘There are a few spelling mistakes, but I really liked it.’

I gave it to Dick at work. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘much better than last time.’ His praise, although not glowing, was good enough.

I passed it on, and tweaked it as each new reader found things they didn’t understand, or thought it too over the top. The story shrank to an easy-to-handle two thousand words: long enough to tell the story, short enough for people to complete it before they switched off. I deleted all the other versions from my computer, dozens of foldersful, the result of nearly two years’ work. Two years of work just for one short story about a climb! But what next?

I thought about sending it to a UK climbing magazine, but part of me wanted better than that. I knew the best in the US was called Climbing, a publication that set the standard for climbing journalism, with articles written by the very top outdoor writers. It was a long shot I knew, and by sending them my story I was setting myself up for yet more rejection, but what if …? After scribbling work’s fax number on top with the words ‘Wondered if you like this piece I’ve written. Andy K’, I tapped Climbing’s number into the fax machine and pressed Send.

One week later I cycled into work, by this time already convinced I should try another avenue, but as I walked into the office I saw a fax with my name on it sticking out of the machine. The Climbing logo was clearly visible.

‘Hi Andy, love your piece. Would like to publish it. A few spelling mistakes, but almost perfect, what’s your number? Michael Kennedy’

It was the greatest news I’d ever had.

We climbed as fast as we could, up grooves and along steep arêtes, the climbing hard enough to be fun, but easy enough not to be scary. I revelled in the height and position on the Spur, the knowledge that every move made put us closer to the top and success. I wanted this climb so much. I would be lying if I said I was completely enjoying myself, as the stress and tension of being there was intense, and I was in no doubt I was overreaching myself, but that was what made it so exciting. Here I was, on the Frendo Spur, and in winter, the only other mountains I’d climbed just those in my head. I began to realise that mountains are climbed just as much in the head as with the hands. We arrived below the crux.

Promising not to be long, I set off up the pitch, a vertical wall. We didn’t know it, but we were off route, the pitch above us much harder than we knew, harder than we had ever climbed, a compact vertical wall that barred the way to the easy climbing above us.

It started with difficult hooking with axe picks and crampon points, each move feeling irreversible, each move unprotected. I pushed on, Aaron belaying me from a huge sword-like flake that promised to spear me if I fell.

Twenty feet above Aaron I mantled up onto a narrow ledge no wider than my boot. It crossed the wall, leading to a corner that looked like the way on. With no hand holds or protection I began shuffling my feet along, my crampons scratching as I went. It felt as if I was traversing along a thin balcony on the side of a sky scraper, a suicide jumper with second thoughts, a daredevil, a cat burglar. I was surprised at my boldness, but it seemed the only way. Each step felt more insecure than the one before, but each step put me closer to the corner where I would gain the security of the facing wall. There was no going back.

The last few steps were hurried, I felt as though my rucksack was about to pull me off. My hand shot out to steady me against the other wall just before I fell. I stood there in balance and tried to calm down before looking for the next move, mindful of the time, hoping I could find some protection and climb the next section quickly, just several metres between me and easy ground above.

Using a shoulder pressed into the opposite wall, I pulled back my mitt and looked at my watch. I had already been climbing for an hour.

‘Not long now, Aaron,’ I shouted down, trying to convince us both I was nearly there. Once this pitch was in the bag it would be plain sailing.

The corner was full of snow, so I raked it clear with my axe, and found, with dismay, that instead of a narrow crack that would take some protection, there was only a wide four-inch crack. I had nothing that big.

I looked back at the way I’d come and knew I couldn’t get back. I also knew that without any protection I could neither climb up, nor be lowered back down. I leaned into the corner and tried to think what to do. No ideas came. My biggest pieces of gear were only about two inches wide.

I had a thought.

I took a hex 7 and Rock 10, my two largest nuts, and placed them side by side. As I’d hoped, together they spanned the crack. I placed one nut, then slid in the second and hammered it into place. Mechanically it looked as if it could work. Emotionally it didn’t. I gave it a small tug to convince myself, then clipped it into the rope. It was all there was, but it still wasn’t enough.

I began making a check list of items that might fit: helmet, too big; pan, in Aaron’s rucksack; plastic boots, yes, but not really an option.

I ran my fingers on my thin rack: nuts, a few cams, pegs. I pulled off a long thin angle peg and, instead of inserting the tip, turned it sideways and saw that it fitted from tip to eye instead. I hammered it into place and clipped it into the rope. It was far from text-book, but again it should work.

‘How’s it going?’ Aaron shouted up, his words slightly slurred with cold.

‘Nearly there,’ I shouted back, knowing I wasn’t.

Another hour passed and I hadn’t moved from the spot.

‘Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on,’ I shouted. ‘Fucking DO SOMETHING!’

The corner above was too wide to climb. The gear was too bad to lower off and find an alternative line. I’d climbed myself into a dead end. The word ‘dead’ seemed highly appropriate. The only option was to see what lay around the corner.

I held onto the gear I’d placed, trying to put as little weight on it as possible, and peered round. I could see a steep wall, with what looked like a good crack running up it, leading to a ledge maybe only seven feet higher. The crack was too far away to reach with my hand to place some gear, but close enough to hook my pick into. I pulled up my axe and tried. The pick slid in. I pulled down on the shaft and it lodged tight, probably on a jammed pebble.

I couldn’t imagine trusting it, so slipped it back out and returned to the corner. I knew it was the only option, but I was in no doubt that if I fell off I would rip this gear and fall onto the jagged rocks below. But I had to. I had no other choice.

I leaned out and slipped in my pick again, then got cold feet and slipped it out once more, repeating this several times. I knew I was too weak for this, too timid, but I also knew that this was my only option. I was more afraid than I had ever been before. This was life and death. This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t climbing.

Do it, said a voice in my head. It startled me. It was stronger than I was. Do it, it repeated. I felt panicked, the voice pushing me to the edge. Do it. The words were impossible to ignore. I leaned out and slipped the pick into the crack again, then to my horror and surprise felt my body follow it, swinging out onto the axe, everything I was or could be hanging from this blade of steel wedged on nothing more than a jammed pebble. I was doing it, but it wasn’t me, it was someone else. This was beyond anything I could do.

I hung one-armed from my axe, crampons pedalling against the rock for purchase, the smell of granite and steel filling the air around me. Move, the voice shouted. I hooked my other axe over the pick of the first, pulled up and locked off. I tried to move it up and slot it higher up the crack. It slid out. I tried again, my bicep burning under the strain. It slid down the crack once more. ‘Climb back to the corner,’ I told myself, but I knew I couldn’t, I was committed. All I could do was give this 100 per cent. If you want to live, climb, shouted a voice. My arm screaming, my hand losing its grip, I slammed the pick in again. Sparks shot out as it wedged against something. I pulled down on it. It held. I pulled up on it and locked my arm on the tool, trying not to dwell on what it was actually hooked on. I manipulated the axe out below it, then hunted for the next hook. I could see the ledge above, perhaps four moves away, but yet again I could not get my higher axe to stick. I screamed out as I tried and tried. There was nothing. My arm was unable to stay locked off with my shoulder beside my pick, and slowly began extending. Without the height I wouldn’t be able to find a good placement. I bit down on the wrist of my sleeve to help me retain my position. I could have been biting my hand off for as much as I cared as I almost threw the axe into the crack. The pick stuck with a twang.

Without testing it, I pulled up, pushing a point of one crampon onto a crystal in the crack, desperate to take some weight off my arms. Find some gear, the voice shouted. No, keep going, contradicted another. If I had been stronger in body and soul I knew I’d have been able to make it, but I wasn’t. I had to find some gear. My whole body was shaking with the build-up of lactic acid as I grabbed a karabiner with some nuts racked on it, sized from small to large. Without the time or mental capacity to find the correct nut and place it, I stuffed the lot into the crack and fumbled the rope into the karabiner.

I screamed again, hoping some primal rage would get me up the last couple of moves. Hand shaking, I pulled out the axe from below and reached back to smash it into the crack once more.

BANG.

The axe I’d been hanging on sheared out of the crack and smashed me in the face.

Unconscious I fell.

I came round with a start, finding to my disbelief that I was hanging from the rope, not crumpled on the ledge below. I was alive. I looked up and saw that a single nut had held me. The rest had ripped out and were dangling uselessly from the crack. I noticed I couldn’t see properly out of one eye, and that my face stung. Lifting my fingers to my face, I could feel a hole in my cheek, and that one lens of my glasses was missing. It had deflected a blow that would otherwise have blinded me. I felt a power race through me, adrenaline mixed with fear. I was alive.

The magazine came in the post a few months later, printed after a few weeks of editing, which introduced me to the luxury of someone being paid to make me look as if I knew what I was doing. Feeling like Charlie Bucket looking for his golden ticket to the chocolate factory I opened the thick airmail envelope and slid out the magazine. I flicked open the glossy pages, and found it: my story, my name, my words. ‘Broken Promises’ by Andy Kirkpatrick. I wondered what I was more proud of, that climb or this story, the climber or the writer. I thought about all the hard work and doubt that it had taken for both, and it had been worth it! I had believed I could climb that route, and I had believed I could learn to write, and tell my story. I had learnt that belief was in me, and now I would find it harder to doubt myself again.

I arrived at the ledge and collapsed, utterly exhausted. I saw a black bird close by, and wondered if it was real. Surely birds wouldn’t be able to survive up here?

Aaron jumared the pitch, swearing at the stupidity of mixed climbing, until he saw the stacked gear and then the blood. He was silent after that. Pulling onto the belay, he looked tired, cold and as strung out as I was. He knew this was beyond us – but so was the ground. We had to push on. I realised that this route was changing us both. After every pitch I felt stronger and more confident in myself, confounding what I thought was possible, feeling more and more in my element, whereas Aaron seemed less sure. I knew after each pitch he became more and more convinced that this wasn’t for him. It suddenly struck me that this was going to be the last route we’d do together.

An hour later, I mantled onto the summit of the last tower. The oppressive blackness and complexity of the lower rock spur finally gave way to the simple white landscape of the upper ice field. The relief at arriving at the ice arête was indescribable. We stood together, and for the first time in three days, relaxed a little. I smiled, not because I knew we’d make it, but just because I was happy. I wondered for a moment whether I’d shake Aaron’s hand or hug him when we reached the Midi, imagining this would make everything all right. All the pushing, anxiety and resentment of being dragged onto such a route would have been worth it, wouldn’t it? Anyway it hadn’t been all that bad.

‘Your lead, Aaron, a nice bit of ice to see us home.’

‘Maybe this isn’t such a bad route after all,’ he said, giving a laboured smile. He looked out of place here. I wondered if I did too.

Letting down our guard, thinking it was almost over, Aaron led off up the ice arête as the first flecks of snow fell and a major storm blew in from the east, warm Mediterranean winds clashing with Arctic cold.

With the last of our energy, we bashed against the ice-coated door, the entrance to the high mountain téléphérique station. The north face we had climbed dropped away behind us into the darkness and the storm. Snow spun around us, caught in the eddy where the door appeared out of the mountainside. We smashed into it again, knowing we wouldn’t survive unless we got inside quickly.

It remained solidly closed.

I dropped to my knees and tried to prise it open with my ice axe, its pick already bent and blunt after the kilometre of hard climbing it had taken to get here. I twisted it hard into the metal reinforcing on the door, but it snapped and I fell back defeated. After all we’d gone through, we were going to die because of a fucking locked door.

Frustrated and too frozen to care, Aaron flung himself at the door and disappeared inside with a bang. I crawled in after him.

The door blew shut as we rolled onto our backs, sealing out the storm and putting a loud full stop to the strain of the last three days. Both of us lay there for a long time, staring at the icy ceiling, neither of us wanting to speak and spoil the overwhelming return of peace and safety.

My hands were frozen and dried blood covered my face. The rope lay at our feet; new a week ago, it was now a frozen torn mess, its core strands bursting out like loose intestines. Most of our climbing hardware was gone, left strung along the final section of the 1,200-metre face, left without a second thought as we battled to reach the top through the violent storm. If we had reached the last pitch an hour later we wouldn’t have made it.

Slowly we began to move, knowing we had to find something to eat, something to drink, and we had to tell people we were still alive.

Standing carefully, creaking like old men, we looked down at the knot that joined us and began to untie ourselves, our fingertips starting to throb as they warmed. The rope, our rope, the one we had climbed on all these years, which had kept us alive, kept us together, at first simply as partners, and then as friends, was now only fit for a washing line.

I haven’t seen Aaron for many years. He works in IT and has a nice house, a wife and children near Bradford. I know he doesn’t climb any more because I’ve still got his gear.

After our climb his girlfriend told me he’d realised that alpine climbing wasn’t for him. On the Frendo he’d realised it just wasn’t worth it. He’d grown up, she said. And me?

Sitting on some god-awful ledge, hungry, cold and nervous of what is to come, I often think about Aaron and our ascent of the Frendo in winter, my first climb. I think about him spending his holidays on beaches, in forests, having fun – happy, healthy, relaxing in the sun and sleeping with the woman he loves, while I cuddle up to some rock.

I wonder what life would be like for me now, if, below the Frendo, I’d failed to find my boot and just walked away from it all.