Section Eighteen
Notebook
I remember a day.
I remember a day when all was white.
White as this page.
I see it now all white when my eyes clear through.
Cold blindness.
A deserted mountain top.
A man in a silly hat.
He stretches ahead. Silent.
I follow, a dutiful ten yards behind, trying to keep my footing on the frozen meltwater.
-Still angry, my Angel?
The clouds dragged down from the sky meet the snow heaved up from the ground and I am fused in all this white.
I am here and I can't get off. We are walking through a dome of invisibility.
He seems so calm.
So am I. Outside.
But the white panic flurries inside my brain, kicks up the confusion, yet numbs me as the frost takes grip as all grip goes from my mind and I relinquish control and my veins clog to a stop and my head cloys to zero and my frozen feet freeze to self-destruction.
Where are we?
What am I doing here?
An ice-curtain of cloud wraps us together then separates us then wafts away to reveal dark peaks zig-zagging up ahead like teeth gone bad for good.
He stops. Check of the compass. Nod of the hat. The bobble bobbles in the still air. We inhale deeply together. Three fingers of cold in the lungs. A good measure - helps me to keep the night out. I feel the night twisting ever closer - the short shrift of these winter days.
"You OK? I think that we'd better be moving."
-OK, Mr. Calm-voice.
"We'll keep going diagonally upwards to the left of that knoll. I've taken a bearing, and we'll take another one when we get to the top. At least we know where we are."
"I'll take your word for it."
We start the trudge, and the blizzard begins.
A track, twisting sideways round the mountain.
I suspend my stupid survival faculties and stick to the path.
We are a two-person mule-train, snow-trudging in eternal boredom.
I trudge behind him, my eye-lashes crusted by fragments of blizzard, trying to dodge between the flakes - they are inexorable; they are floating malevolent cells, white and voracious.
-What is the point of all this? -Turn around. -Turn around! -Look at me, you bastard! -I could be hundreds of yards back here and you wouldn't care!
His boots clomp ahead - tiny showers of powder snow and pounded rock - I watch it fray and spray.
And then the sun hacks through and the blizzard gives way for a while and reveals this cursed big stone in all its banal glory.
A wet rock.
A bloody big wet rock.
The rock-edged lines creep back through the gloom to threaten but he is hunched into the journey, blinded by adherence to direction, forgetful of this poor sap lingering behind; his rucksack shoulders weave into and out of the sun, blocking and revealing in two, and his skittering footprints continue to mark the alien white.
-Still in a sulk, then, Mr. Bobble-hat.
(Slivers of ice slow-drip from the back of his woolly hat.)
And still no respite from the route-march.
Do the trudge trudge trudge.
The latest dance trudge trudge.
Easy to learn trudge trudge
If you get the chance trudge trudge.
One foot in front trudge trudge.
The other behind trudge trudge.
Don't need no rhythm trudge trudge.
You can do it blind.
"Ow! You clumsy bitch! - you might just as well be blind!" -Ow, that really hurt! -Sod! -Probably lose a toenail now. -Why didn't I get proper walking boots? -Not even that makes you turn around, mister? -You sealed in your ice-coated hat, too deaf to hear? -Hello, anybody in there? -Earth calling! -Earth calling!
Earth gets no response but the heavens open again.
White white flakes down on me every damn last thing is white.
And I am floundering up this slope, ducking and weaving, cold stinging my fingers. -Why has he got proper gloves and why haven't I and why doesn't he give me his, the selfish bastard? -No, but let's be reasonable, now: you know his need's greater than yours - when it all comes down to it with him - isn't that typical? - there's always a reason.
And the corner of the bloody plastic mapcase jagging my nipple.
And blisters pushing through on both heels.
And the see-saw noise of this nylon cagoule grating deep down in my ears.
-Oh, you've finally stopped, have you?
He stands.
Pulls off his mittens.
Rubs his beard with the back of his hand, shards of ice sent flying.
Three fingers push his woolly hat back.
He fumbles for something.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?"
"I gotta stop. Take some glucose. Hang on."
I see him wait and fumble with his lousy fumbling fingers at the goddam wrapper making me wait in my frostbitten fucking misery as he crams the white tablets in. I see them crumble like uncold snow, smearing his natty red thermal inner-gloves.
He makes an offer. "Want one?"
Its chalky-whiteness repels me. "No thanks."
I turn aside. I see something. I touch it with my boot, appalled.
A skull.
Hollowed-out sockets stare whitely.
He picks it up with his bright-red hands, the white crumbs still on the fingers.
He speaks. "Well, what have we here? Well I never, it's just like a bowling ball." He hooks his fingers in.
I see his fingers in the eye-sockets, his thumb around the jaw bone.
He tests the weight in his hand.
There is a pile of splintered upright stones, just like skittles.
It is all too predictable.
He hits them clean in the middle; the stones scatter, the skull fragments and it is all so indistinguishable.
He yells "Strike!" and wheels round, arm raised in triumph.
Once there was a sheep-skull, now there's a mess. Jesus will you give me strength?
"Why did you do that?"
"It was - just a joke, you know - just a joke. I was - just trying to be a bit light-hearted - relieve the tension."
We gaze together at the stone-meets-bone wreckage, united in a sort of second death.
-No, you little shit, the tension is not relieved. -The demon is not exorcised, merely demeaned.
I have to get away.
I pick up my rucksack and put it on my back. He does the same and sets off.
He doesn't look which way I'm going. Sod him. I choose the other route.
We unravel and fade from each other. Black stone looms up. Walls us apart.
"Where are you?"
-Where am I? -Would that I knew, my hard-to-come-by hard-to-keep-up-with hard-to-get-away-from little friend - would that I could stick to this mountain like you stick to me.
"Ah, there you are."
-Why, hello there! Going to speak to me?
"Where did you go?"
"Round the back. I'm pretty sure the path's there."
"OK, well, listen. I think that it's pretty important that we stick together, whether we're on the path or not. Neither of us is exactly King of the Mountains in white-out conditions. And we could get that if that blizzard-cloud comes over here. Let's get onto high ground and take another bearing. I reckon we want to head for that buttress over there."
White-out. What a chill phrase that is.
White out white rules white impales white surrounds and whitens everything fades out pales out to blank white oblivion.
"Well?"
"Yes, Boss. Anything you say."
"Pardon?"
"Oh, nothing." -Cool it. -'Cool it': that's a joke - you know he's right. -Don't argue. -Let's get this partnership on the rails again. -That way, we might even survive this great adventure. -OK. -Guide me oh, thou great MacDuff. "So, how far is it?"
"You sound like a kid in the back seat of a car going on her holidays."
"Listen..."
"I'm sorry." He brandishes a map. "We're here. That buttress is over here. And then it's descent all the way back to where we parked. OK?"
"OK, Coach. Put me in. I can do it."
"Good for you, Tiger."
-No I can't no I can't do it no I can't I'm out of my depth. -It's all right for you it's all right for you, you cocksure bastard, Mr. Oh-so-calm-voice, you've probably done this a hundred times and you're not shitting yourself wondering if you're going to get off this friggin' mountain alive.
He leaves, like a greyhound out of the slip.
I slip, get left for dead almost straight away.
I rise, try to get everything in order, hitch my rucksack up but the map case falls from my shoulder and clicks across the sheer ice and I grab for it - -Damn. -Don't go don't go! - and slip on the ice and I'm doing a slow-glide to oblivion down the back of a gulping crevice and my feet go under me and I reach blindly for hand-holds and rip the skin from the palms of my hands on the sharp stone in the passing - -God, I do believe in you, and I will be a better person! - but the gully beckons but I can't stop the slide but it's too late.
But no.
Ho Ho Ho.
No chance. Not me. Not for a map and a plastic map-case. Not when Mr. Navigator's around.
No, I watch it slip down the slope, its sharp edges scuffing up snarls of snow.
He shuffles back to me. "You OK?"
"Yeah."
"What happened?"
"My map case slipped off."
"Well, we'll be OK. Still got my map. You gave me the willies when you screamed like that!"
"Did I scream?"
"You sure as hell did!"
"Sorry. I'm OK now. Let's go."
"Well, for God's sake, take care. Let's try and get out of here alive. It's straight up here. A pretty easy path. Just stay close."
Stay close. A good one, that. I sense the tears and turn aside. Let them freeze in my eyes before I'll show him. He gestures me ahead. I move off. I glance down the gully. I've lost my map. I've lost my mapcase. Now I'm his prisoner.
We skirt a crumbling edge. No underlying snow. Just the soft-fall from the blizzard. We walked beneath it. Now we're treading it. Like walking on your own past.
I stop again to catch my breath.
Three black insects glide by in echelon, their wings not flapping.
He catches up with me, stands behind, holds my shoulders. "You OK?"
"Yeah." I take a deep breath.
"Yeah, that's right - keep breathing deeply. Let's stay calm. We're OK. Let's not panic."
-It's all right for you, mate: I can still see my panic and my panic is still white and it mists my eyes over, even when these snowflakes stop.
The pressure on my shoulders seems to intensify. I move off again.
Is this really the thing we have in common?
The sky darkens, the air cools and the snow comes bleaching in again, from left and right, folds in on itself and buffets away. A sort of Red Sea Corridor opens before us.
We follow it. I am unsure of the wisdom of so doing. Let me say that again. I am utterly convinced of the sheer rancid stupidity of the path we are taking. As so often before, inevitability has taken over.
Every flake seems to melt in my ears and fizz and burn and fizzle out.
I am all-white and witless.
I am suffused within all this landscape.
I want to go down, but every step takes me up.
But somehow, this seems only right.
We level out.
He taps me on the shoulder, gestures to the right. Upwards.
Up still. Still up.
We climb out of the cloud.
A triangulation pillar squats there, welcoming and menacing.
He rushes towards it.
I catch him up; stand there panting beside him.
He takes another deep breath. "It smells so clean up here. It's so far away from the grime of the city."
I smell nothing. I try to breathe, but it is all cleared-out by panic, a colded-out white clinical void.
The cloud starts to clear and he points down the hill.
I can see the carpark!
He speaks. "That's one hell of a view. The way it ebbs and flows. Increases and diminishes. Like someone painting it and repainting it before your very eyes."
-You're a complete bastard. -I start to hate you and then you say something gentle like that and I want to smother lipstick kisses all over your shiny pink balding forehead.
He turns away to face me. "What are you thinking?"
"Oh, nothing. Just musing on the view and the blizzard and the journey. And, of course how we're gonna get off the bleedin' mountain alive."
"I wish you wouldn't swear."
"Sorry."
"It just spoils the atmosphere. Especially up here."
"OK."
"It's like when I catch you smoking. Something just gets spoiled, somehow."
"OK, I'm sorry. Let's go." -Yeah, let's go, let's go.
Down down, the snow melting and muddying with every step, my feet shifting from frozen to saturated, down to the gravel-line, to the reassuring crunch of erosion beneath the boots.
We reach the stile.
He collapses against it.
He is shaking. I punch him on the shoulder. "You OK?" I ask.
"Yeah. Now. God, I was wetting myself up there. But I felt I just had to appear calm."
I look at him. I tear off his bobble-hat; stick it in my pocket.
I clasp him to me.
And we hug.
And we hug and we turn and we hug and we turn and we lift and touch ground and lift and touch ground all the way down the slope to the car and then we collapse on the bonnet in giggles.
-Well, thank God for you, Bully Wee. -Saved my bacon again. -My protector. -No wonder I'm crazy about you.
-No wonder I can't stand you.
I remember a day.
I remember a day when all was white.
White as this page.
I see it now all white when my eyes clear through.
Cold blindness.
A deserted mountain top.
A man in a silly hat.
He stretches ahead. Silent.
I follow, a dutiful ten yards behind, trying to keep my footing on the frozen meltwater.
-Still angry, my Angel?
The clouds dragged down from the sky meet the snow heaved up from the ground and I am fused in all this white.
I am here and I can't get off. We are walking through a dome of invisibility.
He seems so calm.
So am I. Outside.
But the white panic flurries inside my brain, kicks up the confusion, yet numbs me as the frost takes grip as all grip goes from my mind and I relinquish control and my veins clog to a stop and my head cloys to zero and my frozen feet freeze to self-destruction.
Where are we?
What am I doing here?
An ice-curtain of cloud wraps us together then separates us then wafts away to reveal dark peaks zig-zagging up ahead like teeth gone bad for good.
He stops. Check of the compass. Nod of the hat. The bobble bobbles in the still air. We inhale deeply together. Three fingers of cold in the lungs. A good measure - helps me to keep the night out. I feel the night twisting ever closer - the short shrift of these winter days.
"You OK? I think that we'd better be moving."
-OK, Mr. Calm-voice.
"We'll keep going diagonally upwards to the left of that knoll. I've taken a bearing, and we'll take another one when we get to the top. At least we know where we are."
"I'll take your word for it."
We start the trudge, and the blizzard begins.
A track, twisting sideways round the mountain.
I suspend my stupid survival faculties and stick to the path.
We are a two-person mule-train, snow-trudging in eternal boredom.
I trudge behind him, my eye-lashes crusted by fragments of blizzard, trying to dodge between the flakes - they are inexorable; they are floating malevolent cells, white and voracious.
-What is the point of all this? -Turn around. -Turn around! -Look at me, you bastard! -I could be hundreds of yards back here and you wouldn't care!
His boots clomp ahead - tiny showers of powder snow and pounded rock - I watch it fray and spray.
And then the sun hacks through and the blizzard gives way for a while and reveals this cursed big stone in all its banal glory.
A wet rock.
A bloody big wet rock.
The rock-edged lines creep back through the gloom to threaten but he is hunched into the journey, blinded by adherence to direction, forgetful of this poor sap lingering behind; his rucksack shoulders weave into and out of the sun, blocking and revealing in two, and his skittering footprints continue to mark the alien white.
-Still in a sulk, then, Mr. Bobble-hat.
(Slivers of ice slow-drip from the back of his woolly hat.)
And still no respite from the route-march.
Do the trudge trudge trudge.
The latest dance trudge trudge.
Easy to learn trudge trudge
If you get the chance trudge trudge.
One foot in front trudge trudge.
The other behind trudge trudge.
Don't need no rhythm trudge trudge.
You can do it blind.
"Ow! You clumsy bitch! - you might just as well be blind!" -Ow, that really hurt! -Sod! -Probably lose a toenail now. -Why didn't I get proper walking boots? -Not even that makes you turn around, mister? -You sealed in your ice-coated hat, too deaf to hear? -Hello, anybody in there? -Earth calling! -Earth calling!
Earth gets no response but the heavens open again.
White white flakes down on me every damn last thing is white.
And I am floundering up this slope, ducking and weaving, cold stinging my fingers. -Why has he got proper gloves and why haven't I and why doesn't he give me his, the selfish bastard? -No, but let's be reasonable, now: you know his need's greater than yours - when it all comes down to it with him - isn't that typical? - there's always a reason.
And the corner of the bloody plastic mapcase jagging my nipple.
And blisters pushing through on both heels.
And the see-saw noise of this nylon cagoule grating deep down in my ears.
-Oh, you've finally stopped, have you?
He stands.
Pulls off his mittens.
Rubs his beard with the back of his hand, shards of ice sent flying.
Three fingers push his woolly hat back.
He fumbles for something.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?"
"I gotta stop. Take some glucose. Hang on."
I see him wait and fumble with his lousy fumbling fingers at the goddam wrapper making me wait in my frostbitten fucking misery as he crams the white tablets in. I see them crumble like uncold snow, smearing his natty red thermal inner-gloves.
He makes an offer. "Want one?"
Its chalky-whiteness repels me. "No thanks."
I turn aside. I see something. I touch it with my boot, appalled.
A skull.
Hollowed-out sockets stare whitely.
He picks it up with his bright-red hands, the white crumbs still on the fingers.
He speaks. "Well, what have we here? Well I never, it's just like a bowling ball." He hooks his fingers in.
I see his fingers in the eye-sockets, his thumb around the jaw bone.
He tests the weight in his hand.
There is a pile of splintered upright stones, just like skittles.
It is all too predictable.
He hits them clean in the middle; the stones scatter, the skull fragments and it is all so indistinguishable.
He yells "Strike!" and wheels round, arm raised in triumph.
Once there was a sheep-skull, now there's a mess. Jesus will you give me strength?
"Why did you do that?"
"It was - just a joke, you know - just a joke. I was - just trying to be a bit light-hearted - relieve the tension."
We gaze together at the stone-meets-bone wreckage, united in a sort of second death.
-No, you little shit, the tension is not relieved. -The demon is not exorcised, merely demeaned.
I have to get away.
I pick up my rucksack and put it on my back. He does the same and sets off.
He doesn't look which way I'm going. Sod him. I choose the other route.
We unravel and fade from each other. Black stone looms up. Walls us apart.
"Where are you?"
-Where am I? -Would that I knew, my hard-to-come-by hard-to-keep-up-with hard-to-get-away-from little friend - would that I could stick to this mountain like you stick to me.
"Ah, there you are."
-Why, hello there! Going to speak to me?
"Where did you go?"
"Round the back. I'm pretty sure the path's there."
"OK, well, listen. I think that it's pretty important that we stick together, whether we're on the path or not. Neither of us is exactly King of the Mountains in white-out conditions. And we could get that if that blizzard-cloud comes over here. Let's get onto high ground and take another bearing. I reckon we want to head for that buttress over there."
White-out. What a chill phrase that is.
White out white rules white impales white surrounds and whitens everything fades out pales out to blank white oblivion.
"Well?"
"Yes, Boss. Anything you say."
"Pardon?"
"Oh, nothing." -Cool it. -'Cool it': that's a joke - you know he's right. -Don't argue. -Let's get this partnership on the rails again. -That way, we might even survive this great adventure. -OK. -Guide me oh, thou great MacDuff. "So, how far is it?"
"You sound like a kid in the back seat of a car going on her holidays."
"Listen..."
"I'm sorry." He brandishes a map. "We're here. That buttress is over here. And then it's descent all the way back to where we parked. OK?"
"OK, Coach. Put me in. I can do it."
"Good for you, Tiger."
-No I can't no I can't do it no I can't I'm out of my depth. -It's all right for you it's all right for you, you cocksure bastard, Mr. Oh-so-calm-voice, you've probably done this a hundred times and you're not shitting yourself wondering if you're going to get off this friggin' mountain alive.
He leaves, like a greyhound out of the slip.
I slip, get left for dead almost straight away.
I rise, try to get everything in order, hitch my rucksack up but the map case falls from my shoulder and clicks across the sheer ice and I grab for it - -Damn. -Don't go don't go! - and slip on the ice and I'm doing a slow-glide to oblivion down the back of a gulping crevice and my feet go under me and I reach blindly for hand-holds and rip the skin from the palms of my hands on the sharp stone in the passing - -God, I do believe in you, and I will be a better person! - but the gully beckons but I can't stop the slide but it's too late.
But no.
Ho Ho Ho.
No chance. Not me. Not for a map and a plastic map-case. Not when Mr. Navigator's around.
No, I watch it slip down the slope, its sharp edges scuffing up snarls of snow.
He shuffles back to me. "You OK?"
"Yeah."
"What happened?"
"My map case slipped off."
"Well, we'll be OK. Still got my map. You gave me the willies when you screamed like that!"
"Did I scream?"
"You sure as hell did!"
"Sorry. I'm OK now. Let's go."
"Well, for God's sake, take care. Let's try and get out of here alive. It's straight up here. A pretty easy path. Just stay close."
Stay close. A good one, that. I sense the tears and turn aside. Let them freeze in my eyes before I'll show him. He gestures me ahead. I move off. I glance down the gully. I've lost my map. I've lost my mapcase. Now I'm his prisoner.
We skirt a crumbling edge. No underlying snow. Just the soft-fall from the blizzard. We walked beneath it. Now we're treading it. Like walking on your own past.
I stop again to catch my breath.
Three black insects glide by in echelon, their wings not flapping.
He catches up with me, stands behind, holds my shoulders. "You OK?"
"Yeah." I take a deep breath.
"Yeah, that's right - keep breathing deeply. Let's stay calm. We're OK. Let's not panic."
-It's all right for you, mate: I can still see my panic and my panic is still white and it mists my eyes over, even when these snowflakes stop.
The pressure on my shoulders seems to intensify. I move off again.
Is this really the thing we have in common?
The sky darkens, the air cools and the snow comes bleaching in again, from left and right, folds in on itself and buffets away. A sort of Red Sea Corridor opens before us.
We follow it. I am unsure of the wisdom of so doing. Let me say that again. I am utterly convinced of the sheer rancid stupidity of the path we are taking. As so often before, inevitability has taken over.
Every flake seems to melt in my ears and fizz and burn and fizzle out.
I am all-white and witless.
I am suffused within all this landscape.
I want to go down, but every step takes me up.
But somehow, this seems only right.
We level out.
He taps me on the shoulder, gestures to the right. Upwards.
Up still. Still up.
We climb out of the cloud.
A triangulation pillar squats there, welcoming and menacing.
He rushes towards it.
I catch him up; stand there panting beside him.
He takes another deep breath. "It smells so clean up here. It's so far away from the grime of the city."
I smell nothing. I try to breathe, but it is all cleared-out by panic, a colded-out white clinical void.
The cloud starts to clear and he points down the hill.
I can see the carpark!
He speaks. "That's one hell of a view. The way it ebbs and flows. Increases and diminishes. Like someone painting it and repainting it before your very eyes."
-You're a complete bastard. -I start to hate you and then you say something gentle like that and I want to smother lipstick kisses all over your shiny pink balding forehead.
He turns away to face me. "What are you thinking?"
"Oh, nothing. Just musing on the view and the blizzard and the journey. And, of course how we're gonna get off the bleedin' mountain alive."
"I wish you wouldn't swear."
"Sorry."
"It just spoils the atmosphere. Especially up here."
"OK."
"It's like when I catch you smoking. Something just gets spoiled, somehow."
"OK, I'm sorry. Let's go." -Yeah, let's go, let's go.
Down down, the snow melting and muddying with every step, my feet shifting from frozen to saturated, down to the gravel-line, to the reassuring crunch of erosion beneath the boots.
We reach the stile.
He collapses against it.
He is shaking. I punch him on the shoulder. "You OK?" I ask.
"Yeah. Now. God, I was wetting myself up there. But I felt I just had to appear calm."
I look at him. I tear off his bobble-hat; stick it in my pocket.
I clasp him to me.
And we hug.
And we hug and we turn and we hug and we turn and we lift and touch ground and lift and touch ground all the way down the slope to the car and then we collapse on the bonnet in giggles.
-Well, thank God for you, Bully Wee. -Saved my bacon again. -My protector. -No wonder I'm crazy about you.
-No wonder I can't stand you.
© 2006 by Adrian Benson
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