"Yet," I said.
"Yet," she agreed equably. "Want more coffee? Or will you do me a favor?"
I put my empty cup on the floor.
"Do you a favor," I said.
"Cut my hair."
I got up and went to her end of the sofa. She turned away from me so I could release her hair from the scrunchy. "Shake it," I said. She shook it. She ran her hands through it. Perfume came up; something I didn’t recognize. "It doesn’t need much," I said. I switched the overhead light back on and fetched a kitchen chair. "Sit here. No, right in the light. You’ll have to take your jumper off."
"The good scissors are in the bathroom," she said.
Cut my hair. She had asked me that before, two or three days after she decided we should split up. I remembered the calm that came over me at the gentle, careful sound of the scissors, the way her hair felt as I lifted it away from the nape of her neck, the tenderness and fear because everything was changing around the two of us forever and somehow this quiet action signalized and blessed that. The shock of these memories made me ask:
"How are you two getting on?"
She lowered her head to help me cut. I felt her smile.
"You and Ed always liked the same kind of girls," she said.
"Yes," I said.
I finished the cut, then lightly kissed the nape of her neck. "There," I said. Beneath the perfume she smelled faintly of hypoallergenic soap and unscented deodorants. "No, Mick," she said softly. "Please." I adjusted the collar of her shirt, let her hair fall back round it. My hand was still on her shoulder. She had to turn her head at an awkward angle to look up at me. Her eyes were wide and full of pain. "Mick." I kissed her mouth and brushed the side of her face with my fingertips. Her arms went round my neck, I felt her settle in the chair. I touched her breasts. They were warm, the cotton shirt was clean and cool. She made a small noise and pulled me closer. Just then, in the back room among the dusty air tanks and disused parachutes, Ed Johnson fell out of his chair and began to thrash about, the back of his head thudding rhythmically on the floor.
Caitlin pushed me away.
"Ed?" she called, from the passage door.
"Help!" cried Ed.
"I’ll go," I said.
Caitlin put her arm across the doorway and stared up at me calmly.
"No," she said.
"How can you lift him on your own?"
"This is me and Ed," she said.
"For God’s sake!"
"It’s late, Mick. I’ll let you out, then I’ll go and help him."
At the front door I said:
"I think you’re mad. Is this happening a lot? You’re a fool to let him do this."
"It’s his life."
I looked at her. She shrugged.
"Will you be all right?" I said.
When I offered to kiss her goodbye, she turned her face away.
"Fuck off then, both of you," I said.
I knew which game Ed was playing, because I had seen the software wrapper discarded on the desk near his Mac. Its visuals were cheap and schematic, its values self-consciously retro. It was nothing like the stuff we sold off the MAX site, which was quite literally the experience itself, stripped of its consequences. You had to plug in for that: you had to be cored. This was just a game; less a game, even, than a trip. You flew a silvery V-shaped graphic down an endless V-shaped corridor, a notional perspective sometimes bounded by lines of objects, sometimes just by lines, sometimes bounded only by your memory of boundaries. Sometimes the graphic floated and mushed like a moth. Sometimes it traveled in flat vicious arcs at an apparent Mach 5. There were no guns, no opponent. There was no competition. You flew. Sometimes the horizon tilted one way, sometimes the other. You could choose your own music. It was a bleakly minimal experience. But after a minute or two, five at the most, you felt as if you could fly your icon down the perspective forever, to the soundtrack of your own life.
It was quite popular.
It was called Out There.
"Rock climbing is theater," I once wrote.
It had all the qualities of theater, I went on, but a theater-in-reverse:
"In obedience to some devious vanished script, the actors abandon the stage and begin to scale the seating arrangements, the balconies and hanging boxes now occupied only by cleaning women."
"Oh, very deep," said Ed Johnson when he read this. "Shall I tell you what’s wrong here? Eh? Shall I tell you?"
"Piss off, Ed."
"If you fall on your face from a hundred feet up, it comes off the front of your head and you don’t get a second go. Next to that, theater is wank. Theater is flat. Theater is Suicide Coast."
Ed hated anywhere flat. "Welcome to the Suicide Coast," he used to say when I first knew him. To start with, that had been because he lived in Canterbury. But it had quickly become his way of describing most places, most experiences. You didn’t actually have to be near the sea. Suicide Coast syndrome had caused Ed to do some stupid things in his time. One day, when he and Moscow still worked in roped-access engineering together, they were going up in the lift to the top of some shitty council high rise in Birmingham or Bristol, when suddenly Ed said:
"Do you bet me I can keep the doors open with my head?"
"What?"
"Next floor! When the doors start to close, do you bet me I can stop them with my head?"
It was Monday morning. The lift smelled of piss. They had been hand-ripping mastic out of expansion joints for two weeks, using Stanley knives. Moscow was tired, hung over, weighed down by a collection of CPTs, mastic guns and hundred-foot coils of rope. Her right arm was numb from repeating the same action hour after hour, day after day.
"Fuck off, Ed," she said.
But she knew Ed would do it whether she took the bet or not.
Two or three days after she first introduced me to Ed, Moscow telephoned me. She had got herself a couple of weeks cutting out on Thamesmead Estate. "They don’t half work hard, these fuckers," she said. We talked about that for a minute or two then she asked:
"Well?"
"Well what, Moscow?"
"Ed. Was he what you were looking for, then? Or what?"
I said that though I was impressed I didn’t think I would be able to write anything about Ed.
"He’s a mad fucker, though, isn’t he?"
"Oh he is," I said. "He certainly is."
The way Moscow said "isn’t he" made it sound like "innie."
Another thing I once wrote:
"Climbing takes place in a special kind of space, the rules of which are simple. You must be able to see immediately what you have to lose; and you must choose the risk you take."
What do I know?
I know that a life without consequences isn’t a life at all. Also, if you want to do something difficult, something real, you can’t shirk the pain. What I learned in the old days, from Ed and Moscow, from Gabe King, Justine Townsend and all the others who taught me to climb rock or jump off buildings or stay the right way up in a tube of pitch-dark water two degrees off freezing and two hundred feet under the ground, was that you can’t just plug in and be a star: you have to practice. You have to keep loading your fingers until the tendons swell.
So it’s back to the Mile End wall, with its few thousand square feet of board and bolt-on holds, its few thousand cubic meters of emphysemic air through which one very bright ray of sun sometimes falls in the middle of the afternoon, illuminating nothing much at all. Back to the sound of the fan heater, the dust-filled Akai radio playing some mournful aggressive thing, and every so often a boy’s voice saying softly, "Oh shit," as some sequence or other fails to work out. You go back there, and if you have to fall off the same ceiling move thirty times in an afternoon, that’s what you do. The mats give their gusty wheeze, chalk dust flies up, the fan heater above the Monkey House door rattles and chokes and flatlines briefly before puttering on.