Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ want to talk about it.

      ‘I mean it, man.’ He paused. ‘Be careful.’

      I finished selecting gear and began placing each rack of hardware in haul bags ready for tomorrow, when I’d carry them up to the base of the climb and then begin fixing my ropes over the next two days.

      When the gear was packed, I sat on a nearby picnic table and sketched out the food I would need, how much water to take, and anything I had to buy before I left—wet wipes, batteries for my Walkman, sun-cream.

      I pulled out the book I’d brought for my trip—The Periodic Table by Primo Levi—and opened it to reveal two photos. They were poor-quality shots of Ella and Mandy, poor quality because I knew they would get trashed on the climb and probably lost. One was of Ella sitting in her high chair, red tights poking out beneath the table, a cowboy hat on her head. It was her second birthday. The second was the reflection of Mandy, Ella and me in a shop window, taken in Scarborough a few months before. Ella is on my shoulders, her hands resting on my head, Mandy is standing beside me, her arm through mine. We’re all smiling. The smiles seemed so long ago.

       Why weren’t they enough?

      They were then.

      They are now.

      I sat for a while and tried to feel the calmness of the place around me, the call of birds, the gentle creak of the trees, the low hum of the occasional car passing by. It would be nice to stay a while and be normal, to sit with other climbers and talk shop, maybe even get my ego stroked some more.

      There would be no peace. The drums were beating inside me.

      If you want to be happy again, you have to go.

      FOUR

      Pebbledashed

      The perfect life I had known changed when I was seven, my tiny seaside house swapped for a damp top-floor maisonette in a tower block in the city of Hull. I retreated inside myself and fed on memories. I wanted my old bedroom. My old house. My school. My friends. My toys. To turn back the clock and sit on our garden fence and see my dad coming home across the field. I wanted things to be as they had been. I wanted my dad. My old life became nothing more than a film in my head that I would watch for the rest of my life.

      From my bedroom you could see the Humber estuary to the south, its waters brown like cheap chocolate and slow with silt, pollution, and history. The hills and ocean of my past, with its freedom and space and happiness, had changed overnight to mountains of concrete, tower blocks with families packed in tight; a world of spiralling stairs and piss-stinking lifts, a dark and dirty world beside a dirty river, a body of water that matched my surroundings perfectly, just as the sea had matched my previous life.

      We had stepped down from the train into a dark city. We might as well have landed on an alien world.

      We had had very little before, and had been poor, but now we had even less and were poorer still. My mum, however, was forever strong and positive. She never let her guard slip, even when I knew she was crumbling to nothing inside. She had lost more than we had. We were all she had left. Now she had to find a new map of our future. From her I learnt that often the only way to get through life is to hide how you feel when others depend on you appearing strong.

      The only time my mum ever articulated how she felt was when she told me she could physically feel that her heart was broken. I imagined her heart, red and solid, unbeating, like a piece of broken pottery, and knew I could do nothing to help except be as strong as she was.

      Council housing had been in short supply, but she found us a new home on an estate of pebbledashed tower blocks nicknamed ‘the misery maisonettes’ by the local paper. They were set out like a prison, and it had been some city planner’s sick joke to name them after villages in the Lake District. We moved into Buttermere House. It was only on the day she got the key and we moved in that she found out from the next door neighbours why the flat hadn’t been snapped up. The previous tenant had hanged himself in the maisonette’s stairwell. He’d tied the rope to the banister that would soon stand a foot from the head of my bed, and the mark was still there to see. At night when the building cooled, the banister would begin to creak. The flat had two small balconies, and sometimes I would dream I saw the dead man, who looked like the Yorkshire Ripper, standing there looking through the curtains.

      It would be easy to look back and feel hard done by in such difficult times, but, like most poor children, on the surface at least, we slowly adapted, started new schools and made do with a new world. Inside, I was bewildered and lost, but we had the gravity of our mum’s love to pull us all in, and we knew that this would never change. The years passed and I adapted who I was to where I was. The space of my childhood in Tywyn expanded with my imagination, becoming just as boundless as any landscape. The Hull estate, in my mind fed by films like Star Wars and comics such as 2000 AD, changed from a collection of pebbledashed flats into some post-apocalyptic city. My new friends and I began to play ever more complex games, and build up worlds of imagination. The dim and dark corners of our world turned into something exciting and startling. Sacred amongst all these places were the green open areas: the playing fields, the small park, the squares of dog-shit-covered green grass, and the trees. We gobbled these places up, our skin tingling for nature even though we didn’t know it then. I imagined myself an alien who had come from a different world from the other kids, a world that made me different from them and to which I would have given anything to return.

      School was amazing. The teachers were experienced and positive, able to deal with a lot of problem kids with a firm but supportive hand. Somehow they made every child feel unique, special and wanted. Nevertheless I struggled in many subjects, finding it hard to do what many of the other kids took for granted, both academically and, more embarrassingly, socially, unable to master reading the time or tying my shoe laces. I began special lessons, the teachers helping me to catch up, and learn new ways of learning. There was never a name given to my slowness of understanding, or stigma, only acceptance that I required help.

      Luckily my saviour was the fact that I could draw, a fantastic outlet for my out-of-control imagination. Unable to read, I looked at comics, a braille of pictures becoming my language, the stories I wanted to tell produced in images. I was a real daydreamer, finding it hard to concentrate in class, and I was forever in trouble for scribbling in book margins and on desks, rather than getting down to work. I always seemed to be somewhere else. I spent all my spare time drawing, lying on my stomach in front of the TV. My mother’s brother, who owned a printing company, kept me supplied with off-cuts of paper and card.

      My dad’s visits were erratic. Often he went months without seeing us, something that’s hard to understand when you’re a child—or a father. I wonder if perhaps it would have been better to have never seen him again, because of the amount of upset it caused when he had to leave—two days or a week not being enough to fill the hole inside us. Even so I loved him unconditionally, and held on to his image, both because he was my dad, and because he was the only link back to my old life. We, however, were changing fast. Joanne was out of her plaster and a cheerful little girl, and both Robin and I were growing up. In the early days I would pray that Mum and Dad would get back together, but as the years moved on I knew they never would.

      When I knew my dad was going to visit us, I’d count down the days as if to Christmas. Then I would stand on a chair and look out at the road, the height of the flats allowing me to see for a long way, waiting for his car to turn off the main road and drive into the flats’ car park. I would pine for him. Nothing else mattered. I could feel the pain of longing, and wondered if my heart was broken like my mum’s and if hers felt like this. But I always forgave him.

      When СКАЧАТЬ