driving down a road on a housing estate.
‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘You can keep
that
thing turned down.’
I prodded him in the stomach.
He looked at me and swallowed. ‘If you do that I’ll shit myself,’ he said.
‘Christ.’
I only ever went to Morecambe once.
Even though it was late in the day the sky was like brass. I had been climbing all through July further up the coast. I remember the placid muddy water of the boating pool, beyond which rotting piles go out into some great slow tidal stream slipping past to join the Kent Channel; sleeping women on the sand, their dresses pulled up to expose their thighs to the thick hot light; the giant cone above the ice cream stall. In a fish restaurant they advertised ‘best butter’ on the bread. A man finished his meal then stared ahead with his mouth open while two teenage couples took snaps of each other across the table with a cheap camera. Music hung in the air in the amusement park, with diesel smoke and the smell of fried onions. ‘Blue Moon, now I’m no longer alone.’ A dog trotted by. Nobody was playing Catch-a-Duck.
I felt relaxed and elated both at once. The heat, the smells, the music, the signs on the sea front might all have been one thing, one stimulus appealing to a simple sensory organ we all used to have but have now forgotten we possess.
All the time Ed was there he dreamed of South America.
At a BMC lecture in Lancaster two or three years earlier he had overheard the visiting speaker say, ‘Magnetic anomalies affected our compass . . .’ and then later the same evening ‘. . . at sunset, behind the Col Mirador.’ Attracted by these two strange half-sentences, which afterwards became joined in his mind, he started to read widely in mountaineering accounts of Cerro Torre, Roraima, the Towers of Paine; and to collect expensive early editions of Whymper and Shipton. ‘We put a camp in the lee of the small moraine there, and began to fix ropes.’ But he soon found it wasn’t the climbing that interested him so much as the unearthliness of the place itself.
In 1895 evidence had turned up at Last Hope Inlet near Puerto Natales, Chile, of a ground-living sloth the size of a rhinoceros. Found in conjunction with human remains, it had died only recently. It had perhaps been domesticated. Only just discovered, it was only just extinct . . . in fact the Tehuelche Indians believed it could still be found alive. It was nocturnal, they said, covered with coarse hair; and it had huge hooked claws.
Because of this blurring-together of geological and historical time, plants as well as animals teetered on the brink. ‘The puya,’ Ed read, ‘is a living fossil. With its inturned spines it can imprison and kill a small dog as easily as a bird. The Indians burn it wherever they find it, so that their young children are not at risk.’ The Andean landscapes, too, had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air. Cerro Puntiagudo hung, with its snowfields like a feather necklace, in a sky blue enough to make your teeth ache.
Ed never went there.
He would have liked to do a climb in the Paine National Park. He thought of following the itinerary of the Hesketh-Prichard expedition, which at the turn of the century had gone in search of a living megatherium only to falter before it even reached Last Hope and turn for home furious and dispirited. He had always meant to go. Somehow he was never able to save the money; or, if he did, his friends let him down. The Falklands Crisis intervened. He turned to the television natural history programmes, where a chance alignment of rock peaks nearly broke his heart.
The pictures were so clear. He caught his breath as the camera
‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘You can keep
that
thing turned down.’
I prodded him in the stomach.
He looked at me and swallowed. ‘If you do that I’ll shit myself,’ he said.
‘Christ.’
I only ever went to Morecambe once.
Even though it was late in the day the sky was like brass. I had been climbing all through July further up the coast. I remember the placid muddy water of the boating pool, beyond which rotting piles go out into some great slow tidal stream slipping past to join the Kent Channel; sleeping women on the sand, their dresses pulled up to expose their thighs to the thick hot light; the giant cone above the ice cream stall. In a fish restaurant they advertised ‘best butter’ on the bread. A man finished his meal then stared ahead with his mouth open while two teenage couples took snaps of each other across the table with a cheap camera. Music hung in the air in the amusement park, with diesel smoke and the smell of fried onions. ‘Blue Moon, now I’m no longer alone.’ A dog trotted by. Nobody was playing Catch-a-Duck.
I felt relaxed and elated both at once. The heat, the smells, the music, the signs on the sea front might all have been one thing, one stimulus appealing to a simple sensory organ we all used to have but have now forgotten we possess.
All the time Ed was there he dreamed of South America.
At a BMC lecture in Lancaster two or three years earlier he had overheard the visiting speaker say, ‘Magnetic anomalies affected our compass . . .’ and then later the same evening ‘. . . at sunset, behind the Col Mirador.’ Attracted by these two strange half-sentences, which afterwards became joined in his mind, he started to read widely in mountaineering accounts of Cerro Torre, Roraima, the Towers of Paine; and to collect expensive early editions of Whymper and Shipton. ‘We put a camp in the lee of the small moraine there, and began to fix ropes.’ But he soon found it wasn’t the climbing that interested him so much as the unearthliness of the place itself.
In 1895 evidence had turned up at Last Hope Inlet near Puerto Natales, Chile, of a ground-living sloth the size of a rhinoceros. Found in conjunction with human remains, it had died only recently. It had perhaps been domesticated. Only just discovered, it was only just extinct . . . in fact the Tehuelche Indians believed it could still be found alive. It was nocturnal, they said, covered with coarse hair; and it had huge hooked claws.
Because of this blurring-together of geological and historical time, plants as well as animals teetered on the brink. ‘The puya,’ Ed read, ‘is a living fossil. With its inturned spines it can imprison and kill a small dog as easily as a bird. The Indians burn it wherever they find it, so that their young children are not at risk.’ The Andean landscapes, too, had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air. Cerro Puntiagudo hung, with its snowfields like a feather necklace, in a sky blue enough to make your teeth ache.
Ed never went there.
He would have liked to do a climb in the Paine National Park. He thought of following the itinerary of the Hesketh-Prichard expedition, which at the turn of the century had gone in search of a living megatherium only to falter before it even reached Last Hope and turn for home furious and dispirited. He had always meant to go. Somehow he was never able to save the money; or, if he did, his friends let him down. The Falklands Crisis intervened. He turned to the television natural history programmes, where a chance alignment of rock peaks nearly broke his heart.
The pictures were so clear. He caught his breath as the camera
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