A Walking Guide Read online

  “One day I’ll climb these hills right to the top again.”

  “I dare you,” she said then, and wished now she had not.

  DOW CRAG

  from Coniston Old Man

  Chapter Three

  TAPE ONE, SEGMENT ONE

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2000, 11:00 A.M.

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. These are my notes, my observations, my record. No more than that. No less. My aide-memoire if things go well, my legacy if they don’t. Perhaps I’m fooling myself. Perhaps what I should admit about these tapes is that they are my myth, my construction, my lies. But that would not tell the whole story either because I do intend them as a record, as grist to whatever mill I can make of them: my life as a gimp. After a life of turning experience into commercial portions of printed matter, how could it be otherwise? Except that this is personal. This is my testament. Meant for whose ears? Mine, of course. And if anything should happen, then for Eva’s of course. And anyone else? She will hear them when all this is over, if she wishes. And what could happen? Disaster, triumph, sudden deterioration, slip, fall, summits. Whatever happens, it will be in slow motion, an underwater ballet.

  It’s eleven A.M. Day one. Three hours out. GPS coordinates SD 26396 98245. Weather’s looking a bit dicey. Dow Crag is just one of those places. Gets the morning sun. Chills like a freezer later on. Up at the top of the crag, from where I’m sitting—five hundred feet, four hundred feet up, whatever—there’s cloud just sort of spilling over. Shouldn’t be a problem. Famous last words. OK. So I made one choice. Now another. I can go right, up over the shoulder and onto the ridge. Grass most of the way. Or there’s South Rake, to the left, just beyond Great Gully. Climbers’ easy way down, South Rake. Used to run down that one, too. Now I’ve got to get up it. That’ll bring me up onto the summit ridge. So go for it. Prove you can do it. Next stop Dow Crag, 2,555 feet. And going with some alacrity for the summit. Work that one out, dear listener.

  —

  The binoculars scanned the summit with cloud spilling over and roamed down over the great, gray buttresses. She had followed his route after he left, breaking free of the woodlands to reach the upper fells, beyond the farm houses and narrow mine cottages, trailing him with the thought that he might need her help to advance or retreat. Through the powerful glasses, at the base of the crag, she picked out Joe Shelby. He had shed his fleece and parka, tying them under the top flap of his black and red rucksack. She knew he would be perspiring through his tee shirt and woolen overshirt, because his illness did that—made him sweat with all the extra effort of moving limbs that could no longer propel themselves in the way they had been designed by the deity he had conveniently adopted as his own. Go right, she murmured. Take the easy option. But, throughout this initial part of his journey, he had not taken any of the easier choices.

  She was not surprised to see him lever himself upright on his aluminum poles, swaying slightly as he sought his balance against the counterweight of his pack.

  She was not surprised to see him begin moving to the left, a dwarf figure under the lowering walls and slabs and gullies of the east face.

  Despite the magnification of the glasses, she saw the crag as only a broad, incoherent mass of deep fissures and precipices, chasms and blank faces. The summit ridge looked like the gable of a home, not really a mountain—not in the way you would look at the twin spires of Mount Kenya, or the soaring symmetry of Kilimanjaro and say: now that’s what I call a mountain. But a tutored eye, a climber’s eye, would have deconstructed the crag into its components—broken ground and true rock face, gullies and rakes, routes that took lines of resistance measured in varying degrees of difficulty. In miniature, perhaps, an expert would have said, but certainly, this qualified as a mountain.

  —

  When Joe Shelby first climbed here, the most tasking of climbs bore the label “hard very severe,” a qualification of “very severe” that followed on from the lesser gradings—mild very severe, hard severe, severe, mild severe, very difficult, difficult, moderate—a descending scale of potential terror. Nothing was categorized as easy, although, of course, to the practiced climber, the lesser gradings were preliminaries, warm-ups, nursery slopes. Only against the climbs graded very severe and hard very severe, in Joe Shelby’s day, did the climbers begin to take their true measure, weighing their worth against the technical and physical difficulties of gradient and paucity of holds, strenuousness and smoothness of rock, and, worst of all, exposure to the chasm of emptiness below, the drop that increased with every upward move, every dance across the chessboard of finger grips and cracks and protrusions that formed the inner logic of a climb. The slender holds and smooth planes of the rock, the crevices and excrescences were physical, quantifiable challenges to be countered with acquired skill and brute strength. But the exposure was a different matter, psychological warfare. No matter how artfully the climbers arranged their running belays—their protection—threading the rope that led to a second climber anchored on a tiny ledge below through carabiners and slings, the emptiness below their heels never let them forget the stakes, the finality of a slip, an error. Then, like the turning point of a great, heroic story, the moment came where the climber was “committed,” making a move that could not be reversed. Beyond that single step into the unknown, there were no further options. She assumed, now, that he was committed, that he had taken a step he could not reverse, just as his condition seemed to have carried him from a world where everything was possible to one where the possibilities narrowed, progressively, implacably. If he needed a guide, it was through this new, nether world, not through the crags or the mountains, and she doubted her abilities as Beatrice to his Dante.

  Joe Shelby moved in the direction she did not wish him to take, stumbling across boulders that would not have troubled a child. Damn him. Damn.

  —

  She returned to the car, lighting up a cigarette as she switched on the engine to build up warmth. He had left her with the road map and scribbled instructions of the route she was to take toward the valley where they would be reunited in three days’ time: Ambleside, Grasmere, Keswick, Borrowdale. Suite booked in both our names, he had said: no subterfuges, no false names or noses. He had meant it as a joke, as if to imply their relationship still contained a seed of tremulous clandestinity when, in fact, the formula was set in habit and familiarity—he departing, she remaining. No matter how he depicted it, insisted that both had their freedom of movement, she, invariably, was the one who stayed behind. Naturally, she had her business—an electronic extension of her work in Kenya that required an investment of time and money in projecting her offerings into the unfamiliar markets of cyberspace. Since arriving in London with Joe Shelby—was it really less than a year ago?—she had learned to deal with software engineers and venture capitalists and bankers. She had learned well and successfully. Everybody said so. Her Web site was among the premier attractions in the business of buying African art and artifacts through the Internet. She had been interviewed and photographed, not just for the African editions like Style and Cosmo, but also in Forbes and Business Week: “Survival on the Web: Putting Africa Online,” one headline enthused. The photographs showed both aspects of her running her operation: clad in jeans and khaki in the Rift Valley, among the patients at the clinic—looking, the writer of the article said, like a redheaded Princess Diana—and in London, in business attire, posed in front of a computerized catalog of her wares. If this was success, then she had achieved it, far beyond her ambitions when she had first ventured among the Masai as a teenager, feeling that history obliged her to offer something in return for the Kimberly family’s bounty—its estates and paddocks, its homestead and airstrip and the herds of long-horned cattle that were Africa’s equivalent of a blue-chip portfolio. She had, one magazine writer gushed, fused technology and compassion.

  Her site provided eclectic links to game-watching cameras and itemized cat
alogs, an archive of newspaper clippings and the chronology of primary health care projects in Kenya. You could use it to send messages or get the news headlines from Zanzibar or Zimbabwe. You could order antique masks or malachite eggs. You could even download the chants of Zulu mine workers or the thrilling rhythms of Kinshasa’s virally challenged nightclubs. Its revenues, coupled with those of her boutique in Nairobi, provided a steady flow of income both to sustain her financial independence and enable her to expand the business so that her projects might prosper. But, essentially, it was an operation that did not move, conducted—to cut down on overhead—from their shared apartment, where one room, used by previous owners as a nursery, had been converted into the current headquarters of @Africa: home was where the order books were.

  Eva Kimberly learned the obfuscations of business with relative ease: she would tell investors that software and ISP solutions were outsourced, rather than say she left the technical side to a bright, young Ethiopian asylum-seeker in a basement in Camden. She said her receivables were positive going forward when what she meant was: we’re making more than enough to get by. From Kenya to South Africa and Zimbabwe and Mozambique she created a network of women making or buying every kind of artifact—arm bracelets and exotic kikoyis, vrai-naif paintings and wrist blades and carved masks. That was product. Her accountants told her that her net was in good shape and pre-tax looked sound, but, in the current tech climate, she shouldn’t risk an IPO. That was all so much camouflage for the fact that she was making money for all of them, so why rock the boat? To her male business partners—depending on the level of privacy at which they offered their assessments—she was dynamic, smart, sexy, gorgeous, highly fuckable, pushy, arrogant. But she wondered how she ever became so entwined in matters that meant far less to her than the smell of burned goat’s fat and eating from the communal pot around a fire and feeling that, for all her family’s history, one small corner of the continent could make use of her talents to make things a little better.

  Indeed, looking at balance sheets and business model projections, she no longer knew whether she enhanced the continent, or patronized it, exploited it as her forebears had done—only the nature of the magic had changed, from Bibles to laptops.

  JADINI, KENYA. SEPTEMBER 1999

  He pulled the Windsurfer into the shelter of the palm trees. From the reef, he had been looking for distinctive blue shutters and the white stucco of a gabled Cape Dutch facade—the landmarks of the Kimberly place, they had told him at his hotel. It had been farther south than he had been led to believe and the hired board was a clunky old thing with a big, flapping sail that had lost half its battens and wasn’t really nimble enough to be out on the waves crashing over the coral. Scudding along the inner rim of the reef, though, locked into the waist harness and propelled by a blessedly steady, onshore wind, Joe Shelby was jubilant, as if the wind and the sun were finally chasing away the recurrent dreams and memories of burned villages, spread-eagled corpses. If that was the heaviest, least affordable price of his job, then this was the reward, the upside. “The last of the adolescent professions,” an old friend still liked to call this illogical mix of elation and horror, of freedom from and enslavement to events in other people’s lives. Today, his satellite phone was switched off, locked in a hotel safe, and he was free.

  There are moments in everyone’s life when actions become decisive, when choices are made that change the whole course of existence. Some, he had made long ago. While school friends headed for the management trainee appointments at Unilever or Shell or General Motors or IBM, he had taken his notebooks and secret writings to the newsroom of the local newspaper and followed the trail from there.

  Meeting Faria Duclos in Gaza long before they ventured together into Rwanda, Joe Shelby had cast his fate in stone: he would be not just the shitholes man, but the fireman, the knight who rode into the thickest of battles and emerged with his damsel. It had been his choice, and she had reinforced it. Every single marker of their life together, every single turning point they had reached together had been set in places where most other outsiders did not go—in Kosovo, or Bosnia, Freetown or Ramallah. Now, another choice was speeding and bucking toward him as the rental board bore him along the reef on a spume of spray that caught the tropical sunlight and turned it into a thousand bright, refractive spangles. Eva Kimberly was light where Faria Duclos was dark. Eva Kimberly seemed the essence of sanity regained, her being defined in the sharpest of ways: a white in Africa, her identity thrown into relief by its chromatic environment, a woman conscious of place and time and responsibility, a reprieve from the craziness that had overtaken him and Faria Duclos on their final odyssey.

  He was, he thought with some jubilation, windsurfing across the Rubicon.

  TAPE ONE, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2000, 11:45 A.M.

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Fell. Just seemed to lose balance. Not far. Maybe twenty, thirty feet, slipping and sliding down the South Rake. Tore my gaiters on something or other. Sharp rock probably. One hand, left hand, useless thing, bleeding slightly. Otherwise no damage to report, Captain Norton. I just slipped because, stepping up with my right leg, my left leg couldn’t take the strain. On the South Rake, for sweet Jesus’ sake. So it caved in, bent, and I stuck my pole out to balance and missed what I was prodding at. Stuck the pole out into thin air, and that was it. Arse over tit. On the easy way down. Easy as gravity can make it. But no substantive harm other than to the ego and that’s taken some incoming in the past six months. Like at the outdoor shop near The Strand. I went because I knew the name from way back when it was a climber’s shop up north where you bought crampons and pitons, rock boots, carabiners, rope, helmets. Now it’s all snowboarding and winter wonderland stuff. But they still had some mountain gear so I went in all the big high-roller with my corporate Amex gold card and my list after Eva threw down the gauntlet. Quite excited really, though I’m not sure what the attraction was. Making the list. Selecting the gear. Poring over the catalogs. How much does this tent weigh, or that one? Down or synthetic in the sleeping bag? Fabric or leather boots? Enough stuff on the list to take on the Mother Goddess herself. Self-inflating mattress, stove, water bottle, fleece and waterproof. And the boots of course, had to be top-of-the-range Austrian things. And what else? The GPS, with coordinates downloaded from the web. Things sure have changed since you had a little brass Boy Scout’s compass and the ordnance survey one-inch-to-the-mile. Didn’t tell them where I was going, of course. Didn’t want to say: I’m buying all this stuff to go up the Lakes. Just kind of dropped hints about Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya and the Mountains of the Moon. But it was the boots that got me, now I remember. I was choosing the boots. I was worried about weight and took a fabric boot in one hand and a leather boot in the other. In the left hand. Sitting down there, in the basement, surrounded by all this macho stuff—rucksacks and high mountain boots, slings, crabs. I’m weighing them like the scales of justice and I can see the shop assistant rolling his eyes: why doesn’t he just buy the most expensive ones and fuck off? And there’s something wrong. The leather boot in my left hand seems much too heavy. So I switch them around and now it’s the lightweight fabric boot in my left hand that seems too heavy and I realize that when I hold them both out, my left arm starts to unbend and there’s this weird quivering in the biceps. The big, left-handed biceps, big from rock climbing and windsurfing and working out. Under my shirtsleeve I can feel it dance and I put the boots down quick and say I’ll take the leather ones and all the other stuff I’ve picked out, the tent and sleeping bag and rucksack and socks and gloves and walking poles. Like Boot of the Beast heading for Africa. In Scoop. Evelyn Waugh and all that. With the collapsible boat and the cleft hockey sticks. Except mine is all hi-tech fabrics and designer names. But it’s my arm that’s bothering me. When I come to sign the Amex bill it’s there again. And it doesn’t go away. Quiver quiver quiver. Like I’ve got little demons under my skin pulling at the muscle tissue, out o
f control. I remember I go to the Harley Street doctor the comic pays for and he takes one look and scratches his head but he doesn’t fool me. I can see he’s thinking: oh shit, I hope that’s not what it looks like. But he keeps up the facade in his—what does he call them—his rooms. Not clinic, or practice, or surgery. His rooms. Having rooms puts about fifty quid onto the bill. “I’m going to call a colleague, in the London Clinic, where he has rooms.” I see the cash register beginning to spin like a slot machine. “He’ll take a look at you and then we’ll have a chat.” So it’s on again to the next lot of rooms and I know it’s pricy because there are no lines, no hanging about. You go up in a tiny cage of a lift and into the narrow corridors with discreet nameplates on the doors and there are none of your harridans bellowing about how you can have an appointment next year some time and who do you think you are anyhow to waste my time? And then there’s the neurological routine. Spread your fingers. Make a fist. Push me away. Pull me towards you. Mmm. Straighten your leg. Don’t let me straighten your leg. And the quickfire phone call Harley Street–style to the places where they have all the fancy machines to peer into the mysteries, intercept the signals along the strings of axons and sheaths of myelin that are constantly wired, constantly trilling with instructions from brain central to the outlying garrisons of the anatomical empire. Or not in some cases. Sending a patient over. EMG. MRI. Tests.

  But he doesn’t send me back to number one doc. No little note to say: this chap’s a malingerer, this chap’s making it all up, this chap needs a spoonful of medicine three times a day for ten days and he’ll be right as rain. He tells me he’s going to have A WORD with another colleague, Nigel Lampton, and see if Nigel can take a look at me when they’ve done the EMG and the MRI and God knows what else and at least Nigel will be able to rule things out because—now, don’t be put off by the name—he’s the top MND man in Britain and he’ll at least be able to say what it isn’t, exclude the worst, so to speak. So you get home and look up on the Internet what the fuck MND is and suddenly you are drowning in words like incurable, progressive, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s and asymmetric lateral sclerosis, or ALS, which means the progressive removal of your muscular functions—arms, legs, fingers, hands, neck, tongue—until the only ones still working are the ones that move your lungs and they finally slow down so that your lungs fill up or your throat collapses and that’s it. It’s not clean and swift like a well-aimed bullet. It takes no prisoners. You are constantly in its sights, unable to duck and weave but it saves the coup de grace until the humiliation is unbearably driven home by platoons of Zimmer frames, divisions of complicated wheelchairs with headrests and voice boxes. It chips away, nicks you, but won’t show you the exit until you are incapable of motion, your muscles withering and wasting by the second and your mind screaming: release me from this dying body, this mockery of the two-fisted, brass-balled image of myself that I never quite lived up to. I remember, once, before it all started, seeing a guy in a restaurant in Rome whose arms both hung limp at his side, totally immobile. He was beautifully dressed in one of those navy blue suits with a windsor-knotted silk tie and wide cut collar of a cotton shirt. He was groomed to kill, too. Tanned features. Black hair swept back. Like some Florentine prince. But he couldn’t move his arms. Not an inch. I watched him surreptitiously and perhaps I was so fascinated because some snide little receptor already knows and is tipping me off: that’s where you are going, buddy, so get used to it. And this beautiful woman is feeding him his soup, one spoonful at a time. He sits erect, and haughty, and immobile, being fed like a damaged child, or a very old person who has just forgotten all the lines. And he is peering into the candlelit middle distance of a restaurant with eyes full of a pain that only the intimates know. And, God, I don’t want that. And, of course, it may not be that at all. You don’t know. I still don’t know. But it might be, and your arms or legs may be on the very point of packing up like the guy’s in the restaurant, and you’ve just dropped a grand and some on designer mountain gear and your boss is indelicately suggesting a quick revisit to Grozny or Sarajevo or Gaza and you can’t say no to her because you can’t admit it, not even to yourself.