The Fall by Simon Mawer

Author:Simon Mawer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780316073790
Publisher: Back Bay
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

That Sunday, Jamie and I made the first winter ascent of a route on the Orion Face of Ben Nevis. It was a complex mixed route that wound its way up icefalls and over verglassed rock for more than a thousand feet, a piece of route-finding that owed everything to Jamie’s genius for moving in a vertical world. Sometimes it was easy, chopping our way up compact snow-ice; sometimes we teetered up heaped crystals that had the texture of potato chips; sometimes we were climbing iced-up rock pitches with crampons and ice axes. The sunlight glittered from diamonds all around us. There was space below our heels and the sensation of flight in our hearts. We could never fall. Almost, for those breathless hours, we felt that we might fly.

When we finally emerged into an arctic whiteness on the summit plateau, the sun was setting in a welter of red and black over the Isle of Mull and the distant Atlantic. Jamie’s yell of triumph was puny against the roaring wind, no more than a sparrow’s cry. We stumped across the plateau to find the path down. Orion the Hunter hung in the gathering blackness overhead as we descended. Below us, in the shadows of Glen Nevis, were the lights of the van where Ruth and Davie were waiting.

“Bloody Sassenachs,” Davie protested when he heard what we had done, “coming here and stealing our routes.” He had to get back home because he had an appointment first thing in the morning. We waved him off, then clambered into the warm fug of the van and threw off our gear. Ruth had a kettle on the boil for tea and had opened a bottle of whisky.

“How was your old man?” Jamie asked. It was the first time the visit to my father had been mentioned. I really didn’t want to speak about it.

“He’s just that: an old man,” I replied.

“But he’s your father, for God’s sake,” Ruth said.

“I don’t really know what that means,” I told her. “Don’t you see? Never having had one, I don’t understand.”

The next morning we woke early. We said little while we packed the things away and prepared to leave. We took turns driving during the long journey south.

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