Trouble With Me

Hunched conspiratorially around the old oak table, Tim Neill, Phil Dowthwaite, and I whispered over the Gogarth guidebook. Phil pulled the cork from a third bottle of wine. Squeezed into the dark corner of the kitchen, I felt small. Tim and Phil towered above me, and a spiral staircase covered with hanging ivy towered over us all. Shelves full of climbing guidebooks and climbing magazines lined the room. The stove roared. John Redhead, the previous owner of this place, the Old Schoolhouse, would have rejoiced in our bacchanal.

Tim and I laughed as the description of the climb was read aloud. Phil looked on bemused, knowing he was working in the morning and wouldn’t be joining us.

“The top pitch is yours,” Tim said with his soft Irish lilt.

“No problem,” I replied with curt Staffordshire syllables. I had drunk more wine than Tim.

The swallowing blue of the sea dazzles. My eyes sting as if full of tiny steel splinters, a result, no doubt, of too much ultraviolet at altitude. Tears run down my unshaven face. I’ve just done the easy first pitch, which means the last and hardest pitch is mine, and the second and the third are the Big Guy’s. I settle on the small belay ledge with my shoes off, wiggling toes and sunbathing, letting the rope snake through my hands. I revel in the heat of the early summer sun, knowing that an afternoon storm is forecast.

A chance meeting with Twid Turner and Stu McAleese in the South Stack café this morning brought about a ripple of concern.

“What are you boys up to?” asked Twid.

“Thought we’d try Me, on Yellow Wall,” I ventured. “What’s it like?” I regretted asking the question as soon as it fell from my mouth.

“It’s so good, I’ve done it twice,” Twid said, throwing down the gauntlet with an evil glint in his eye.

Tim moves into the overhanging second pitch, hanging from the steep yellow wall. Seagulls swoop with ease as he makes blind, sideways shuffl es around arêtes and into corners, his long legs wafting. Cams, wires, and slings litter his path. Disappearing from view, he drops into the strenuous but more popular line of The Cow. At least the rock here has been pulled more often.

“Safe!”

I follow the pitch, urged forward by the knowledge that every step sideways is one meter less to swing should I fall.