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By Root 556 0

me. For most purposes you climb in pairs, one supporting the other with the safety rope, but without me—and without Marcus—they had been five. Later I learned that there had been a sixth during the previous year, but he hadn’t fitted in with the group and had moved on. When I came along they must have been looking for someone to even the numbers. It was a sobering thought. Was that all that Luce had seen in me? You could tell, just by watching them, that the other pairs, Luce and Anna, Curtis and Owen, understood exactly what their partners were going to do without a word being spoken. Damien and I, however, clearly had a relationship to work out. We abseiled back down to the foot of the cliff and moved on to another route, neither commenting on the other’s performance.

Again he took the first pitch, and as I waited for him to move off I looked up and saw the dark shadow of a substantial overhang, a ‘roof’, halfway up the cliff. Damien climbed to about five metres below it and anchored himself on a shallow ledge. I followed.

There was little room to manoeuvre on the ledge, and the roof above us now projected alarmingly.

He repeated his earlier question, expressionless. ‘You all right?’

‘Sure.’

Luce and I had practised on overhangs on the cliffs at Clovelly, but I hadn’t attempted hauling myself over an obstacle like this before. I set off cautiously to the base of the shelf, then stretched out beneath it, clinging to the surface like a bat. If I lost my grip now I’d drop clean past Damien to bounce on the cliff face beneath him. As I reached one hand out to the lip of the roof I felt one foot lose its purchase, then the other slipped away, and in a moment I was swinging on my fingertips, dangling helplessly. The momentum of my fall took me out and then back, and I arched my back, straining every muscle, and brought one foot up over the ledge, and hauled myself over. It wasn’t the most elegant of moves, but it got me there.

I was shaking with effort as I reached the next belay point, and collapsed back against the rock for a moment, catching my breath. Down below I saw the glint of Marcus’s binoculars. Though he was roped, I was pleased to see that Damien wasn’t too smooth on his manoeuvre over the shelf, and his face was red, his beard bristling and gleaming with sweat, by the time he stood beside me, breathing heavily. I asked if he wanted me to lead the final pitch to the top, which looked straightforward enough, but he shook his head impatiently, annoyed with himself I think, and set off without taking a break. He should have done, though. He’d gone barely a couple of metres before he made a mistake with his footing and began to slide. He scrambled to correct his balance but couldn’t, and now he was falling. I caught him, hauling his rope tight before any damage was done, and he clambered back onto my ledge.

‘Aah …’ He stood gasping for breath, face turned up to the sky, then muttered, ‘Thanks, mate.’

After he’d recovered a little he set off again, much more cautiously, and I followed without further incident. I felt pretty good.

Later we returned to the foot of the crag for some lunch. I was the first to get out of my gear, and went down to the cars to get the esky with our sandwiches and cold drinks from the boot of the Jag. There was no sign of Marcus by his chair and bag of equipment, and I wondered where he might have got to. I went over there, peering around, and noticed his stick lying at the top of a steep bank leading down to a dark pool in a stream. Then I saw his foot, almost invisible beneath an overhanging bush.

I scrambled halfway down the slope and dropped to my knees and made out his prone body, face almost in the water. The bush tore at my arms as I grabbed hold of his leg and desperately tried to haul him back up the bank. The earth was damp and slippery, his body awkward, and I slipped and struggled to get him to the top when I became aware of his muffled cursing. I was relieved that he was conscious until I realised that he was cursing me. I fell backwards and we sat facing each other in