39

The Consequences of Frostbite

“No,” said Borthy. “You need your toes, you know. We take them for granted, of course, but you just try walking without your toes. Just try it. You go all over the place. It’s to do with your balance.”

Bruce took a deep breath. The journey was not yet over, and he was not sure that he could tolerate Borthy’s conversation without showing his irritation. But I have to, he told himself; I have to be kind to this poor chap, who’s never really had a proper girlfriend and who drives everybody up the wall with his wittering on about toes and such things. Take another deep breath, Bruce; remember that this is the new you.

“Did you ever meet that guy who lived between Crieff and Comrie?” asked Borthy. “His place was on the left as you drove towards Comrie…no, hold on, it was on the right. Yes, it was on the right.”

“Does it matter?” muttered Bruce.

“Does it matter? Does it matter losing your toes?”

“No, does it matter whether his place was on the left or right? I mean, in the eternal scale of things…”

Borthy looked puzzled. He negotiated a bend in the road. “In the eternal scale of things? I’m not with you, Bruce.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bruce. “What about this guy who lived on the left or right of the Comrie road? What about him?”

“He was called Tom something-or-other. Mac-something, I think. My father knew him. He used to sell him hay for his horses.”

Bruce sucked in his cheeks. “And?”

“No, just hay. He had some cows, I think, but one of them got that disease that makes them blow up and burst. There was something about it in the Strathearn Herald.” He paused. “Somebody said humans could get it too. Have you heard of anybody bursting like that?”

Bruce sighed. “No. Not recently.”

“But earlier on? Somebody burst some time ago?”

Bruce gave his answer between clenched teeth. “It doesn’t matter, Borthy. What about this guy – the one who bought the hay from your old man? What about him?”

“Oh, him. Yes, well, he only had four toes. Yes, four. I think he had three on his left foot and one on his right. Or it might have been the other way round – I can’t actually remember. You know how it is: you hear something, and the next minute you’ve forgotten what you heard.”

Bruce attempted to steer the conversation back to toes. In spite of himself, he wanted to know about this unfortunate man on the Comrie road, with his paucity of toes and his bursting cows. Once he was in the monastery he could forget about these petty things, but until then it had somehow become important to know.

“So he had only four toes?”

“Yes. And you usually have ten. Most people have ten.”

Bruce let that truism pass uncommented upon.

“Anyway,” Borthy went on, “he told my dad what happened. He used to be a keen mountaineer. He’d done over one hundred Munros and had even gone to Everest – not to get to the top – he didn’t have the money to do that – but at least to get up above Base Camp. You know there’s this big ice field there. You go to Base Camp and it’s the next stage up. Have you seen the pictures?”

Bruce nodded.

“You wouldn’t catch me going up there,” said Borthy. “Not on your life! Base Camp, okay, although I wouldn’t go there myself. Why bother? What’s there to do but sit around in tents and get cold? No thanks. Would you go, Bruce?”

Bruce shook his head. “Not to Base Camp, no. Definitely not.” And yet, he thought, I’m going into a monastery…

“So this chap, Tom what’s-his-face, goes up there and is taken by a bunch of Sherpas up onto this ice field. They find a place to spend the night and they put up tents and he gets into his tent, zips it up, and climbs into his sleeping bag. They have these special sleeping bags that have a very high thermal rating, you see. But his has a faulty seam down at the bottom and during his sleep he kicks through it without thinking, and his toes are exposed. He had socks on, but they’d come off and the next thing he knows is that he wakes up to find that he has bad frostbite on his toes. Disaster.

“They take him down – the Sherpas carry him because they feel a bit bad about it – not that it was their fault, but they’re really conscientious about taking people up the mountains and they don’t like it when they get frostbite. So they get him down, and there’s this Belgian doctor at Base Camp and he looks at Tom’s feet and shakes his head and says it’s too late to save most of the toes.”

Bruce winced. “Bad news.”

“Yes. It took months for him to get back to walking properly, and even then he had to use a stick to steady himself.”

“Not good,” said Bruce.

Borthy became silent. Then he said, “Are you sure about this, Bruce? We’ll be there in five minutes. If you want to turn back, all you have to do is say so.”

Bruce did not reply immediately. He realised that this was a watershed moment in his life. He had once read a poem about such moments of decision – somewhere or other – when he was at school, he thought. Yes, it was there, at Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, and Borthy might have been in the class too. They must have been seventeen, or thereabouts – it was just before they left. And the English teacher, whom they all liked, read a poem to them at the end of each lesson. What was it? Something about being at the junction of two roads and having to decide which one to take. Frost. That was him. Funny, that it should come to me, he thought, when we had been talking about frostbite. But that was how life was: everything was connected in some way or another; one thing led to another, and then to another after that. And then we came to a point where the road forked in an unambiguous and unavoidable manner and we had to decide.

“Just keep going,” he said to Borthy. “Straight ahead.”

“Oh, jeez, Bruce,” said Borthy. “This is taking me back five centuries. Jeez.”

“At least seven,” said Bruce.