I must have gone back to sleep, because the next time I looked at my watch it was well past ten: an event unheard of in my regulated world. I gulped down two glasses of water, put the coffee on, then ran down the road to fetch a copy of the Sunday Times, but when I got back found I couldn’t sit still for long enough to get halfway down the front page. I felt filled with some kind of hungry energy that made me want to run and leap, to stretch and climb.
I called Eve. ‘Let’s go climbing.’
Had there been the geographical possibility of such a thing, I’d have selected a sea-cliff or a moorland tor, somewhere elemental and unfrequented where I could hang off my hands from a rock ledge, or pad up a sunlit slab, laughing with glee at the yawning spaces beneath my feet; but the closest possibility of wild climbing lay several hours’ drive away, so half an hour to the Westway climbing wall would have to suffice.
While I was waiting for her to arrive I looked up the word ‘amulet’ on the internet. The Online Etymology Dictionary offered me this:
amulet
1447, amalettys, from L. amuletum (Pliny) necklace or brooch worn as a charm against spells, disease, etc. Of uncertain origin, perhaps related to amoliri, to avert, to carry away, remove. Not recorded again in English until 1601; the 15th century use may be via Medieval French.
I frowned at the entry, feeling none the wiser. Perhaps the necklace wasn’t an archaeological find after all. Perhaps it had been something passed down through my late mother’s family, though I couldn’t imagine my petite, chic French mother ever wearing any piece of jewellery like it; nor, with her chilly pragmatism, ever resorting to superstition.
I had meant to look up ‘Tin Hinan’ and ‘Abalessa’ too; but I simply couldn’t sit still for long enough: I had to move, to find an outlet for the monstrous energies that filled me. In the end I leapt in the car and picked up Eve at the corner of the road.
The climbing wall was packed: there were people hanging from ropes all over the place like stranded spiders, kids treated to a birthday celebration being tutored up the practice wall, shrieking their heads off with excitement and terror; serious soloers and boulderers applying themselves fiercely to the problems at the back of the hall. A miasma of loose chalk hung in the air, invading the lungs within minutes. I remembered the place when it had just been a scruffy outdoor facility: a basic traverse wall and a couple of large slabs of concrete bristling with holds from which you could see the traffic speeding past on the A40 flyover; at the top you could surprise drivers by being at eye-level with them. Now it was a state-of-the-art modern climbing gymnasium, its fifty-foot white translucent polyurethane walls anchored to the underside of the underlit flyover like a circus arena, lending real height and a sense of exposure to the routes inside.
At university I’d joined the climbing club but I never enjoyed being under someone else’s control, especially that of the lads of the club, who liked to lord it around on the crag, showing off their superior strength and shoulder construction, barking instructions at us feeble women as we failed to reach the holds they pointed out to us, or swinging monkey-fashion in their flashy, slap-dash style. Having honed our rope technique, a couple of us girls sneaked off to try our better balance and more delicate footwork on some hard slabs. Ross Myhill, the worst chauvinist in the group, went straight up an easy crack system in the same rock face and deliberately pissed down the slab ahead of us, like a dog asserting its territory rights. We never climbed with the men again.
I watched Eve now make her way along the traverse wall. She had good technique and dancer’s feet, and she moved neatly, avoiding the bulges and overhangs with an undercut here, an interim toe-dab there. I followed, faster and stronger from pulling weights and circuit training at the gym, and soon caught her up. By the time I had covered the traverse wall three times my forearms felt as hard as wood.
Eve raised an eyebrow. ‘Got energy to burn off or something?’
‘You could say that.’ I felt full of vigour and ready to take on anything. Warmed up now, we put on our harnesses, fetched the rope and worked our way up half a dozen routes of varying degrees of difficulty, clipping the in situ bolts and lowering off from the top with pumped muscles and a sense of easy achievement.
I enjoyed working out on climbing walls. I liked the sheer artificiality of them, the reduction of an outdoor adventure sport to a games board of coloured holds, delineated by French technical grades, by rules and protocols, and all in a controlled environment. Climbing in the outside world demanded a lot of you: expertise, risk and judgement, and a total trust in your climbing partner. It was the latter that had always been my sticking point: placing your life in the hands of another human being. At a climbing wall, you trusted your partner to hold the rope and not to let go if you fell: but even if they suffered a lapse in attention you’d still be hard pressed to kill yourself, with all the supervisors and crash mats around.
When we took a break I went off to buy some cold drinks and fortifying flapjacks; when I returned it was to see Eve’s blonde head bent over a magazine someone had left on the café table. She looked up and beckoned me over. ‘Look at this article about this place they’re calling the new climbers’ paradise: it’s very laid back and easy-going, the weather’s brilliant, and the climbing looks amazing. See this crag here: there’s a fantastic 5a line going right up the front of it. It’s called the Lion’s Face or something.’
My gaze locked on to the photo in the double-page spread. The rock was the precise rose-red of the landscape I had seen in my dreams, and there was the very cliff that had towered above the caravan traders, its rugged features carved as distinctly as those of any Disney lion. For a moment it felt as if the world spun. My nostrils were filled with the scent of saffron; my skin felt hot and dusty. I became aware of a strange rhythm in my head, like a slow drumbeat, and for a moment the blood was so loud in my ears that it was like a sea, or like the wind over sand dunes, a susurrus turning to a roar, and I heard a nonsense word again, over and over and over: Lallawa, Lallawa, Lallawa …
I blinked and shook my head. Eve was staring at me. ‘Are you OK?’
‘What? I …’ I frowned. I focused on the picture again. It was just a place, I told myself, a place in the world, a place someone had taken a photo of for a climbing article. What was so unnerving about that?
‘It’s in Africa,’ Eve said. ‘In the south-west of Morocco, to be exact, a day away from the Sahara.’
I stared at her, then back at the photo. A crawling sensation started halfway down my spine and worked its way up to the nape of my neck until my whole head was buzzing. ‘Morocco?’ I echoed, and it felt as if my voice were coming from a different continent. Morocco, land of gold and spices; and maybe the starting point for the ‘story’ mentioned in my father’s letter. The idea was intriguing, intoxicating, and suddenly I was engulfed by a wave of positivity, sweeping away all doubts.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, taking us both by surprise. ‘Let’s go there, Eve. Take a holiday, go climbing, maybe even drive into the desert. I can take the amulet with me; we can do a bit of detective work, find out something about it …’
‘What’s got into you?’ Eve was round-eyed.
‘I don’t know.’ My grin started to fade. I felt confused, hijacked by the force of an idea that did not even feel like my own. ‘I don’t even know if I want to find out more about the amulet. And I’ve never had the slightest interest in going to Africa.’ A headache was starting to insinuate itself into the bones in my head: I felt as if opposing forces were trying to pull my skull apart.
On the way back I suffered a full-blown migraine attack, complete with little sunbursts and flashes of internal neon lightning. I managed to get home, somehow, as if the car were on auto-pilot. In the kitchen I grabbed a glass of water and turned to walk with it to the bathroom, where I would find the Migraleve. But there, in the middle of the table, was the box, just as I had left it. For some reason I found myself putting down the glass and picking up the pouch. The amulet within slid out on to my hand and nestled there comfortably. There was something reassuring about the solidity of it, the way it weighed in my hand, as if it had been made to fit there.
Suddenly, I had put it on. It lay heavy against my ribs, but not unpleasantly so. When I blinked, it was as if the neon sunbursts had become bright silver gazelles flickering past my eyelids. I went to find the Migraleve.
In the bathroom, instead of hitting the main light-switch, I activated the one that controlled the lights around the mirror. The brightness of the bulbs illumined my face and cast the background into shadow. I had never really appreciated the odd effect of this until now. I looked as if I had been cut out and pasted in somewhere else, on to a different background. My face and eyes glowed above the navy T-shirt I had on; and so did the amulet. Together, we were super-real, and the rest of the world was dark and indistinct.
The jewellery I usually wore was barely noticeable, never showy. I had never owned anything that made such an emphatic statement as the amulet. But it suited me. I could see that now. There was something powerful about its solid lines, something uncompromising and individual about its unashamed ethnicity. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was rather pleased with my reflection. I looked like a different me: striking and confident.
I had inherited a darker than usual colouring from my French mother. Amongst the pale, golden-rose girls at the private school to which I was subjected between the ages of eleven and sixteen, those most sensitive of formative years, I had always felt myself to be the odd one out. They teased me for my differences, made fun of the shading of soft, dark down on my arms, the wiry blackness of my hair. I hated them for it; and soon began to hate myself. My breasts grew in more quickly than those of my peers, as did the dark triangle of hair that began to sprout between my legs. I took to undressing in the corner of the changing rooms, facing away from everyone else. I was the last out on the hockey pitch, the last to take a shower. I began to starve myself, taking pleasure in seeing my curves diminish. No one noticed, not for a long time; no one but Eve, and she thought thinness was a fashion statement rather than a problem. Then one day in the kitchen I turned around, aware of scrutiny, to find my father watching me.
‘You’ve lost weight.’
I nodded, non-committal. I was thirteen and awkward: it wasn’t something I wanted to discuss.
‘You shouldn’t, you know. Skinny women -’ He made a face. ‘Not attractive. And you’re a beautiful young girl. Young woman. You shouldn’t be ashamed of the body God gave you.’
I was startled by this. No one had ever called me ‘beautiful’, and it was certainly not how I thought of myself. But it was a word you couldn’t trust, coming from your own father. Don’t all parents think their children beautiful?
I put my hand to my face now and watched as my reflection mirrored the action. Beautiful. I hadn’t thought of myself as even attractive, not for a long time, and yet the reflection told another story. In the mirror I glowed. It was the amulet that did it: it lit me with its own light.
I don’t remember what I did with the rest of my day. Perhaps I watched TV; perhaps the migraine returned with a vengeance. I do remember that when I closed my eyes, flashes of another landscape flickered past my inner vision. At one point, with the clarity of hallucination, I saw the face of a girl with bold black eyes, who touched me on my arm as if she had something to tell me and I was not paying proper attention. She said my name, over and over and over.
Except that it wasn’t my name she was saying. The word was foreign, unfamiliar; a syllable repeated into absurdity. I strained to hear better, and it was as if someone were speaking to me, telling me a story I couldn’t quite hear …