1. Green

The technique works like this: if your arms are tiring, stretch them out so your hands have to take the full weight of your body. This can be useful at height – transferring pressure from your biceps to the tips of your fingers, quick shift, delicious loosening of temporary pain.

Kate does this for a moment, lets herself hang and considers the distance between one hand and another. The climbing wall was reset last Tuesday, and the red holds on this section have been spaced in such a way that her reach has already been stymied several times. She is three quarters of the way up the wall, and the Centre is busy enough that she knows several people are hanging about just below hoping she’ll pack it in and come down again. She stays where she is, even so, considers the holds at eye level and slightly above to one side. Left hand over right, she thinks, maps it out with a vain sort of logic, and then slide to the left, and then up. Only that hold has no grip and the other’s too sheer to be trusted, and I can’t see my way up from here. She thinks this, imagines the swing of a body in motion. Climbing, she often feels, is one thing when you’ve already done it and quite another when you still have some distance to go. How she managed to get up this far has already dissolved into something like fantasy – she used her arms, she imagines, and her legs, and she moved up the wall the way anyone would, but beyond that the sequence of holds and of movement collapses into a sort of witless geometry and she cannot imagine how she will move further up.

This quite apart, she knows she is tiring. The gentle tremor that started first in the backs of her arms is travelling down along the outskirts of her body, progressing in stages to the upper reaches of her legs. The technique may be respite enough, but it is not foolproof, and her grasp is becoming less certain with her arms taking none of the weight. She considers all this for a second – her arms, the sweat in the dips of her collarbones - and then shakes her head. Beat a retreat, she thinks, bends her arms in and pulls herself tight to the wall for a moment before shimmying back down the way she has come.

The wall, from the floor, is nothing to speak of. Kate looks up and feels, as she so often does, quite bewildered that such a brief stretch of space could have stymied her reach so entirely. She has already been overtaken on the red route by one of a number of overkeen German hobbyists – a man in a tank top and bike shorts who now shivers up the wall like a thing prickled over with feelers and easily untangles the spot where she had to turn back. She sighs, brushes her hands together and stretches her fingers apart. Leans down to catch up the chalk bag she left on the floor when she set off up the red route. The smell of chalk is something akin to the smell of sweat – loamy alkaline smell like a hand thrust in earth. She lets it absorb her, just briefly, looks around at the bustle of climbers on the crash mat-covered platforms, at the figures pinned and struggling at various points up the walls.

Wednesday evening crowd, she thinks, nothing special. The Germans and the cyclists and the outdoor pursuits dykes bundled up around the hardest routes and overhangs, leaving the green and orange holds to the newcomers – girls with ponytails and rented climbing shoes and men in t-shirts rendered see-through and sticking to their backs. Green for the rookies, then purple, then orange, and finally red. She shakes her head, glances to the left and tries to decide if she’s done, or merely pausing. There is, she thinks, a certain shivered timbre to the evening’s atmosphere – nervy chatter of the introductory group at the training wall bleeding out into the spaces around them – and she pictures, then dismisses, someone falling. Something minor – loosened hold, mistaken judgement. A climb can be so easily pulled in the direction of catastrophe.

She shakes her head again, slides down off the platform and moves into the café space beyond. She is, a little jittery tonight, looks about her in the fruitless way one does when hoping for a thing to hold one’s focus. Hard breath, then another. She touches her hand to her upper lip. She could buy a Coke, have a sit down. Or not, as the case may be.

The girl behind her is not in her immediate line of vision – she reaches out from the nearest table to touch her shoulder in apparent enquiry. Kate spins, blinks, does her best to reorientate. It can, she has found, be quite tricky to feel oneself solid when back on the floor. 

That was impressive, the girl says, on the red wall, I mean. I really thought you were going to get all the way up.

The girl is smallish, light-haired and uncomfortable looking in climbing shoes she has done up too loosely to fit. She follows Kate’s gaze to her feet for a second and grins, kicks her ankles together where she sits on the tall café chair.

Oh, they keep saying I need to get shoes that feel small on me, but that seems so illogical.

You do though, Kate says. Wonders briefly if the tone she has taken is rude. Or you’ll fall.

I’ll fall? the girl asks, and Kate looks at her, pulls a face and then reconsiders, because of my shoes?

You need to do them up tight, Kate says, if your toes are curled up at the tip of the shoe, then you’ve done it correctly.

It is easy enough, in this light, in this atmosphere. Nervous evening sensation, back sore, arms exhausted and sweaty towards the elbow crease. She looks at this girl and thinks well, that’s a concept. The girl’s face is an uncertain thing – gentle dint of a smile, one tooth oversharp and snaggling. She is, Kate thinks, looking up in an anticipating way. She is, Kate thinks, continuing to look.

It is easy enough, in this light.

End of Excerpt