White

‘Wait. Do you want to do something genuinely helpful?’ she added.

‘Yes.’

‘Then sit down for a while with Adam Vries. I have to check over my supplies because they’ve just come in from the airport.’

‘I’ll make sure he’s okay.’

‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head and walked away down the stairs. Sam followed her with his eyes, remembering her long legs under the ski parka.

Adam had shifted his position. ‘Huh. I shoved the thing up my butthole. How does she know I’m not going to shit before I puke?’

‘Brilliant medical judgement.’

‘Mh. I wasn’t going to have her sticking her index finger up there.’

‘No. Although, I don’t know …’

Adam managed the ghost of a smile. ‘You too? Forget it. Used to know a brutal med student like that at college. The Fridge, we used to call her.’

‘Is that so?’

Sam settled himself in a chair and rested his feet on another. He could see through a chink between the shutters to the top of a tree and the side walls of some houses. On a balcony level with his sightline an old woman was peeling vegetables over a plastic bowl. A plump baby played at her feet until a young woman, hardly more than a girl, came out and swept him up in her arms. The baby’s thumb plugged into his mouth at once and his head settled on her shoulder. The mother cupped the back of it with her hand, stroking his hair. Sam watched until she had carried the infant inside, then sat for a while with unfocused eyes, wondering what Finch would look like with a baby.

Whatever Adam might think she wasn’t a fridge. Something in her eyes, the turn of her head and hips, made him certain of that. When he looked again he saw that Adam had drifted into a doze. He would have liked to slip away and maybe go out for a beer with Rix and the others, but he was afraid that if he moved he would wake him up. He leaned his head against the chair back and let his own eyes fall shut.

Last night had made him think of his father.

Michael would talk about mountains in the same way, using the very same words. He remembered conversations overheard.

Michael and Mary outside the tent on summer nights when he was supposed to be asleep, and the timbre of his father’s voice in response to Mary’s questions why, and what for – and the always unspoken but equally ever-present words within his own head, danger and falling and dead –

‘I need that reality. If I don’t climb, my grip on reality fades and I feel like nothing exists.’

‘Not me? Or your boy?’

‘Of course. But not in the same way, Mary. Nothing’s the same as the way you feel up there with the rock and space. I’m no good with words, you know that. I can’t explain the need for it, the being more alive than alive. But it’s always there, once you’ve tasted it.’

‘So am I always here, so is Sammy. We don’t want anything to happen to you.’

Sam remembered that he would squirm in his sleeping bag, trying to bury his head, to bring his shoulders up around his ears so that he couldn’t hear any more. But the voices came anyway, as much from within his head as outside it.

Michael would give his warm, reassuring laugh. ‘Nothing will happen. It’s concentration. If you keep your mind on it you don’t make mistakes.’

Sam thought of Michael as he was now, moving painfully around the old house, all alone, with only the television freak shows for company. When I get back, he promised the dim room, I’ll see more of him. Maybe it’s time to move the business a bit closer to home. If there still is a business when I’m through with this caper.

An hour later Adam woke up again. ‘I’ve got a thirst like the desert,’ he whispered.

Sam passed him the water, but held it so that he could only take a sip or two at a time. ‘Otherwise you’ll spew it straight up again.’

‘Thanks, nurse.’ He rubbed his cracked mouth with the back of his hand.

Sam went into the bathroom and found his face-cloth, rinsed it in cool water and handed it to him.

‘Nice. But I’d still rather have the doc to hold my hand.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Is that what all this is about? You should see me when I’m really looking my best.’

‘She told me to keep an eye on you.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Adam lay back again. ‘I appreciate it. I think I may go back to sleep. Don’t need you to watch me any more. Honestly.’

Sam stood up. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

‘Ahuh.’

There was no one to be seen downstairs. Sam hung around for a minute or two, hoping that Finch might appear again, but in the end he gave up. He found a bar a hundred yards from the hotel gates and sat at a rickety iron table under a bamboo awning, keeping watch.

He didn’t have much of an idea about what he was going to do next.

Al was in a taxi on his way in from the airport. He had been to Kathmandu a dozen times before, so did not have much attention to spare for the congested road and the scrubby concrete housing that lined it. He sat motionless in the back of the worn-out Mercedes, his eyes apparently fixed on the grime-marked collar of the driver’s blue shirt.

Karachi had been a last-minute diversion, a visit to an old climbing friend. They had sat for a long time over too many glasses of whisky, not talking very much, merely pursuing their memories in one another’s company. When it was time for Al to leave again Stuart had come to see him off.

‘Drop in and see me on the way back, when you’ve got the big hill in your pocket.’

‘I might just do that.’

Stuart stood watching Al’s back as he moved in the line of veiled women and men in loose shalwar kameez towards the barrier. He stood a full head taller than anyone else, and he looked fit and relaxed. Just before he disappeared Al glanced round and nodded a last goodbye. Stuart lifted his hand and held it up long after Al had gone. They had known each other for many years and had said casual goodbyes before a score of expeditions. That was what happened and this was no different. History made no difference. It was the present and the future tenses that counted for climbers.

As his taxi approached the Buddha’s Garden Al was acknowledging to himself that the stopoff to see Stuart Frost had been a delaying tactic. He hadn’t wanted to get to Kathmandu, to join this group, until the last moment. But now that he was here he focused his mind on what was to be done. It was a job, like any other, as well as a climb.

As he was checking in, with his weather-beaten packs piled beside him, George Heywood came out of the bar. He shook Al’s hand, enclosing it warmly in both of his. George was bald, with a seamed face and sharp grey eyes.

‘Good to see you, Al. Thought you might be going AWOL at the last minute.’

‘Why?’

George laughed. ‘Now I see you I realise I was worrying about nothing. You look good.’

‘Everyone here?’

‘Yup. You’re the last.’

‘Good.’

‘Ken’s in the bar, with Pemba and Mingma. You want to go and change or something, or will you come and join us?’

‘I’ll come,’ Al said.

The three men stood up when they saw Al’s tall frame following George to the table. Pemba Chhotta and Mingma Nawang were the climbing sirdars – experienced Sherpa mountaineers who would be sharing the guiding duties with Al and Ken. They had worked with Al in the past and they showed their liking for him in broad smiles of greeting.

‘Namaste, Alyn,’ Pemba said formally.

Ken was more laconic. He clasped Al’s hand very briefly. ‘Yeah, mate. Here we are.’

‘Ken. I saw Stu in Karachi. Sends you his best.’

Their eyes met briefly. Everyone sat down and George ordered more drinks. There was the business of supplies and logistics and porters and yaks to be discussed, then George briefly described their six clients, mostly for the benefit of the two Sherpas who would act as second guides to Ken and Al. The two Britons had been on Everest the year before, but with a different company who they believed had let them down. Now they had come to George and his US-based Mountain People to make one more attempt. The two Americans were experienced mountaineers too; the Australian was a less well-known quantity but he had been recommended by previous clients.

The Canadian doctor, George explained, had climbed McKinley in a group led by Ed Vansittart. Everyone at the table nodded. Ed had written to him to say that Dr Buchanan was an excellent medic, who really understood the demands of high-altitude climbing. She was in a unique position in the group because she had a staff role, but she was also a client who hoped to reach the summit with the rest of them. Although not highly experienced herself, she was physically strong and as tough-minded as any mountaineer he had ever met. She was also good company, he had added.

‘I think we’re lucky to have her with us,’ George concluded. ‘Al agreed with me.’

‘Seems A-okay to me,’ Ken said.

Al listened impassively to all of this, with the edge of his thumbnail minutely chafing the corner of his mouth.

George was folding up his lists. ‘And Adam Vries is sick.’

Ken clicked his tongue.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Al.

‘Just a gut thing. A day or two, the doc says. We leave the day after tomorrow, as planned.’

Once the last pieces of equipment and batches of food supplies had been assembled, there was nothing more for the expedition members to do in Kathmandu but enjoy what would almost certainly be their last hot baths and clean sheets for two months.

‘Another beer?’ George asked them all, by way of a conclusion.

Ken had glanced up. ‘Speak of the devil,’ he said in a warmer voice than he had used before. The rest of them looked in the same direction.

Finch was hesitating in the doorway. Filling most of the wall behind the little group of climbers was a huge colour photograph. Against a hyper-real blue sky stood the huge bracket ridge and summit of Nuptse. Everest stood to the left, farther back and seeming smaller than its neighbour, and in the foreground was the monstrous spillage of the icefall and the dirty grey rubble of the Khumbu glacier.

George beckoned cheerfully, his head bobbing up to obliterate the South Col. ‘Here’s our doc. Come and join us, Finch.’ She stood at the edge of the group. Ken levered himself out of his wicker chair and offered it, but she only smiled at him. ‘I’ve just been to see Adam again.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a bad bout. But he should be okay to leave as planned.’

‘Finch, this is Pemba, and Mingma.’ She shook hands with each of them. ‘And Alyn Hood.’

Al had risen to his feet. He was much taller than Finch but when their eyes met they seemed on a level.

‘Hello,’ Finch said quietly.

Al said nothing at all. He held on to her hand for one second, then carefully released it. In the confusion of introductions no one else noticed the way that their eyes briefly locked and the flash of acknowledgement that passed between them. No one could have guessed that they knew each other already, or deduced a single episode of their history from the way they moved quietly apart again.

Five

The helicopter ride was nothing like flying the trim A-Star with Ralf across the serene silvery expanses of the Canadian mountains. The Asian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Lukla was a pensioned-off ex-Russian machine that lifted off the runway abruptly, without pre-take-off formalities, and juddered over the grey haze of the valley towards the mountains.

Finch sat in her metal seat and tightened the webbing strap across her lap, trying not to think about crashing into the fields beneath them. Her knees were wedged against a mountain of expedition baggage secured under netting that filled the centre of the cabin. She had checked them on board already, but she searched out the barrels in which her medical supplies were packed and kept her eye on them as if they might jump up and roll away. Anything was better than looking out of the porthole behind her head, either at the view down to steep ridges striped with different coloured crops or upwards to the blanket of mist that blotted out the peaks. Bundled up beside her with his chin on his chest was Adam Vries. The noise of the engines made conversation difficult, but she nudged him and raised her eyebrows, you okay?

He nodded wearily. Two days of sickness had left him grey and listless.

The helicopter tilted sharply and changed direction, climbing steadily. Finch closed her eyes and swallowed hard to equalise the pressure in her ears. When she looked up she saw that Sam McGrath was grinning at her from his seat on the other side of the netting. She gave him what she intended as a glare in return. He had seen her abject fear on the bad flight up to Vancouver and she wasn’t pleased to have him watching this fresh ordeal.

She wasn’t quite sure yet how he had insinuated himself, but he was here for the ride and maybe a couple of days’ trekking with the expedition on the walk-in towards Base Camp at the foot of the Everest icefall. She hadn’t seen him for the whole of the last day in Kathmandu and had concluded that after all he had been easy enough to shake off. Her relief at this had, she was certain, been entirely untinged by regret. And then, in this morning’s bleary dawn at the airport, there he was again. Standing joking with Rix and Mark Mason at the check-in for Lukla, towering over the packs of Japanese tourists who were waiting to see if the weather would lift and allow them to embark on sightseeing flights around the Everest massif.

‘What’s he doing here?’ she had murmured to George.

‘They went out on the beer again and Rix and Sandy just asked me if he could come along for part of the walk. All the guys seem to have really taken to him.’ George shrugged. ‘Makes no difference to me, so long as he pays his way. Might even be helpful. He looks in good shape. You know him anyway, don’t you?’

‘No. I just met him once, on a flight into Vancouver.’

‘Coincidence.’

Finch noticed that Sam fitted easily into the group. He wore well-trodden hiking boots and similar clothes to the other men, and he looked just as fit and testosteronically confident. But of course, she remembered, he was an almost-Olympic marathon runner. He was probably stronger than any of them.

‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully to her. And then, ‘You’re not happy about this, are you?’

‘Is my happiness or otherwise particularly relevant?’

‘Of course it is.’ He had mobile eyebrows and they flattened now in a straight, sincere line. There was a puppyishness about him that irritated her.

She made an effort to sound neutral. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me if you walk in with the expedition. It’s just a few days’ hiking.’

He smiled at her. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Magnificent scenery, I believe.’

Thin veils of mist blurred the blue view through the portholes and the helicopter rocked through the bumpy air. The mist thinned into streaks, and above and beyond puffed great towers of cumulonimbus. Warm, moist air was sucked up from the valleys to funnel upwards. The weather up here was usually changeable, often threatening, always unpredictable.

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