He still hadn’t moved but there was a different tension in him now. I kept drilling that left toe in. Then I looked up at Gavin again. I stared at him so hard I’m surprised I didn’t bore holes in his face. But I had to know if he understood. And I thought he did. I said to him again, a little impatiently, ‘Come on, get on my shoulders.’
I was scared that he would be too paralysed to do anything. If anything, it was the opposite. He made a sudden movement, as though he thought that all his problems were solved and all he had to do was step down to where I was and do the piggyback thing.
Immediately half the mound of dirt that supported him fell apart and soil showered over me. A bit got in my throat but I tried not to cough. A cough, a spasm, a hiccup, or worst of all a sneeze, any of those would be enough. Action and reaction.
With the mini-avalanche Gavin suddenly had no choice about whether to join me. He was about to fall. The big danger was that he would be so unable to move that he would leave everything to gravity. If he did, then we were both gone. He would knock me from my precarious spot and we would fall to the rocks. I felt my eyes dragging downwards, to look at those rocks, and it took all the strength I had to force them in the opposite direction. I wanted to see death but I mustn’t let myself.
Gavin hovered over me but at the last moment some kind of desperate instinct cut in, and he did move voluntarily, well, a little bit at least. He swung a leg down to near my head, and then, as he started to slip, tried to get some control over the rest of his body. He scrabbled for handholds and footholds, with no real success, but the scrabbling for them meant that he stuck to the face of the cliff for a few seconds, instead of plummeting like a rock.
Those few seconds were just enough for him to reach me. I braced as I felt his swinging left foot touch my hair, then kick the side of my head on the way back.
A terrible silent wrestle followed. He continued to slide down, but now he used my body for his handholds and footholds. Although this was what I wanted, the struggle and the strain and the tension were almost impossible. I had known that he would wreck my balance, changing my centre of gravity, but I hadn’t realised how severe it would be. He was so heavy! And he did cling to me like a drowning person.
For half a minute I fought with him, with the cliff, with death itself. But the main fight was with me, to find new strength, deeper strength, the physical strength to stay upright and to fuse my fingers and toes with the dirt and rock, and the mental strength to keep energy flowing to my body.
Within a second or two I realised that I couldn’t fight Gavin, but that I couldn’t help him either. I had to think of myself as made of wood or stone, a tree or old rock. I had to leave it to him to scramble all over me, dig into me, hang on to me. If he couldn’t, that was his concern. If he failed, he fell. There was nothing I could do about that. I just had to concentrate on being solid, being strong.
We teetered outwards. There was a dreadful second when I lost three of my four points of contact with the cliff and we were about to drop. It was no use shouting at Gavin, but I shouted at him anyway, and I think he actually felt the vibration of air around him, because he did calm down a little and get a better grip on me. He was still half strangling me, but as I recovered my balance, all I could do was wait and hope that he would work out how impossible the position was.
More seconds passed before he began to slowly, agonisingly, adjust himself. He needed to get a move on, because I couldn’t hang on much longer. I simply didn’t have the strength to stay there forever. No-one would. But he got his right arm from across my throat, which gave me a bodyful of fresh pure air again, and he got both legs around me, so that he was in a reasonable piggyback position, except for his left arm, which was around my stomach, and which meant that I was slewed to one side all the time.
But I knew I couldn’t hope for anything better. And I sure as hell knew that I had to start going down, because I couldn’t hang on any longer.
The first movement was painful in one way, because I was still shocked at the weight of him, and how much strength I needed. But it was good in another way, because I think both of us were relieved to be moving at all. That little sideways shuffle, where I managed to get both my hands and both my feet to a new position, thirty centimetres to my left, was like an action that ended a paralysis. I felt that he was slightly calmer, although his grip was still so intense that if we fell we would fall locked together and hit the ground like that. Well, we were pretty locked together in our lives now, and it seemed we would go into the next world the same way.
We began the grimmest journey of our lives. We’d been on some pretty grim ones, but this was the worst. Inch by inch, crevice by hole by tiny indentation, lump of rock by pimple of dirt by protruding root. Down a few inches at this point, but sideways for the next three moves. At one time I had to go back up about a metre, to get out of a dead end route, and I think those were the worst few minutes of all. I could almost feel Gavin’s groan of disappointment and fear when I started climbing again.
He didn’t actually make a sound during the whole time, but his grip never slackened. If anything it got tighter, although I wouldn’t have thought that were possible. I began to wonder if, assuming we got to the ground, I’d ever be able to get him off me.
New muscles started to hurt. The backs of the knees, the arches of my feet, the joints of my shoulders. Sweat streaming down my face made my hair wet and dank. I couldn’t see any more for the sweat that blotted my vision and stung my eyes. I refused to think of this ever ending because I was scared the knowledge would weaken me.
My left foot landed on something unexpected. I bounced my leg a little and realised it was wood; a branch or a root. It felt soft but I needed its help so much that I relaxed onto it. For a wonderful moment it took my weight. Then it broke.
We started sliding. Dust rose around me. Little landslides of gravel came with us. I grabbed madly with open palms and with fingertips. We passed the broken stick and I saw that it was an old root, quite rotten. Grab, grab, grab, there had to be something. My hands must be getting mangled but I didn’t feel anything and didn’t care. Grabbed at a protruding rock, caught onto it for a moment but couldn’t hold it. At least it slowed me down. And a moment later I got my fingers into a split and held on.
I felt like an old snail. Do snails have a three-second memory? I had to forget the terror of the slide and just resume my journey. With the weight on my back. On and on, sobbing now, muscles locking up, slower and slower, can’t go on, can’t do it, it’s too hard, just give up, fall away into freedom.
And then we were there. Even though I had longed for the moment when we would be three or four metres from the bottom and could separate and jump, it didn’t work out that way. Gavin was still clinging so tightly that I couldn’t risk jumping with him wrapped around me, so I had to grit my teeth and force my screaming muscles to move again. Until we were not much more than a metre from something that looked more like dirt than rock. And then I let go and dropped.
We hit the ground fairly hard and rolled a couple of times. There was quite a slope, and it wasn’t until we were rolling that he started to release me. I shook him off and crawled away, then collapsed. I had no thoughts of triumph or success, no thoughts of anything really, only a complete and utter exhaustion, as though I could never move, never do anything again. Gavin crawled over to me and kind of slopped on top of me, and at some stage we both went to sleep, because when I woke up, the shadows had already reached us and it was getting cold.
My body ached like I’d been pounded with baseball bats by a gang of sumo wrestlers, but I knew no helicopter was going to pluck us out of there. If they hadn’t come while we were on the cliff they weren’t going to come now. I woke Gavin and we plodded our weary way back to the top, finding a kangaroo track that must have led to the creek we’d drunk from so often.
The day had started in one direction but gone in another and ended in a place we hadn’t known about. So sore that I could barely put one foot in front of the other, I struggled home, wondering why (since the end of the war) the mountains seemed to be betraying me.
CHAPTER 17
Two weeks later we were in the city. It’s one of life’s miracles … well actually, there are two miracles and they’re closely connected. One is that you can move so quickly from environment to environment. One minute you’re in the Sahara Desert; twelve hours later, with the help of a few helicopters or planes or something, you can be waist deep in snow in Alaska or strolling down the streets of Paris. Well, I think that’s how it works anyway. Not
