The Woodcutter

I spun round to face her and snapped, ‘I’m going climbing. Don’t know where you’re going. Don’t care either.’

In case you’re wondering, Elf, how come I was talking like this to the same girl I’d fallen for so utterly and irreversibly just the day before, you should recall I was a fifteen-year-old lad, uncouth as they came, with even fewer communication skills than most of the breed because there were so very few people I wanted to communicate with.

Also, let’s be honest, standing still in shorts and trainers with her golden hair hidden beneath that stupid hat, it was hard to believe this was the visionary creature I’d seen dancing on the lawn.

My mind was in a whirl so I set off again because that seemed the only alternative to standing there, looking at her.

She fell into step beside me when the terrain permitted, a yard behind me when it didn’t. I set a cracking pace, a lot faster than I would have done if I’d been by myself, but it didn’t seem to trouble her. When I got to the lake, that’s Wastwater, I deliberately headed along the path on the south-east side, the one at the foot of what they call the Screes, a thousand feet or so of steep, unstable rock that only an idiot would mess with. Even the so-called path that tracks the lake’s edge is a penance, involving a tedious mile or so of scrambling across awkwardly placed boulders. I thought that would soon shake her off, but she was still there at the far end. So now I crossed the valley and went up by the inn at Wasdale Head into Mosedale, not stopping until I reached Black Sail Pass between Kirk Fell and Pillar.

This was a good six miles over some pretty rough ground and she was still with me, no more out of breath than I was. Now I found I had a dilemma. The further I went, particularly if as usual I wandered off the main well-trodden paths, the more I’d be stuck with her. But she could easily retrace the path we’d come by back to the valley road, and on a day like this, there would be plenty of walkers tracking across Black Sail, so I felt I could dump her here without too much trouble to my conscience.

I sat down and took a drink from the bottle of water I carried in my sack. She produced a can of cola and drank from that.

I said, ‘That’s stupid.’

‘Why’s that?’ she said, not sounding offended but genuinely interested.

‘Because you can’t seal it up again like a bottle. You’ve got to drink the lot.’

‘So I’ll drink the lot.’

‘What happens when you get thirsty again?’

‘I’ll open another one,’ she said, grinning and shaking her rucksack till I could hear several cans rattling against each other. ‘Like a drink?’

She offered me the can. I shook my head. I wouldn’t have minded, but drinking out of a can that had touched her mouth seemed a bit too intimate when I was planning to dump her.

I said, ‘Won’t your mam and dad be worrying about you?’

She said, ‘No. They think I’m out walking up Greendale with Jules and Pippa.’

These it emerged were two of the other girls I’d seen the previous day. Imogen had proposed they all went out walking today, but when she revealed her plan involved getting up really early, two of them had dropped out. It said much for her powers of persuasion that she’d persuaded the other two to go along with her. It said even more that she’d got them to agree to cover up for her when she announced she was taking off on her own the moment they were out of sight of the castle.

‘I’ve arranged to meet them at five,’ she said, ‘so that gives us plenty of time.’

‘To do what?’ I was foolish enough to ask.

‘Whatever you’re going to do,’ she said expectantly. ‘Sounds like it could be fun. A lot better than anything that was likely to happen with Jules and Pippa.’

It turned out she’d made enquiries about me, of Sir Leon and also of some of the locals who worked at the castle.

From them she’d learned that I spent most of my spare time roaming the countryside, ‘getting up to God knows what kind of mischief’. She heard the story of my accident, my miraculous survival, and my subsequent exploits with some of the mountain rescue team. She’d also learned that I was usually up with the lark, so when she resolved to tag along with me, she knew she had to contrive an early start.

The trouble was, in letting her explain all this to me, I had taken a significant step towards the role of fellow conspirator. If I tried to dump her, I could now see that she was quite capable of following at a distance. I could have tried to take her back to the castle, but I had no way to compel her. And one thing I knew for certain, if ever it became known that she hadn’t spent the day with her friends, no way would my pleas of complete innocence cut any ice with Lady Kira.

So I was stuck with her. The best plan looked to be to keep her occupied a couple of hours and above all make sure that she kept her rendezvous with the other two girls.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Time to move.’

We stood up. I noticed she just left her Coke can lying on the ground. I gave it a kick. She looked down at it, looked up at me, thought for a moment, then grinned and picked it up and stuffed it into her sack.

Daft, but somehow that acknowledgement that I was the boss gave me a thrill, so rather than simply lead her up the main track on to Pillar, I decided to take her round by the High Level route that winds above Ennerdale and eventually leads to the summit by a steep scramble at the back of Pillar Rock.

It was a bad mistake. It turned out she’d heard of Pillar Rock because a friend’s brother had had a fall there in the spring and broken both his legs.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. I know a couple of the guys who brought him down. They said him and his mates were real wankers, didn’t know what they were doing.’

‘My friend said her brother had been climbing in the Alps,’ she protested.

‘Oh yeah? Can’t have been all that good if he managed to come off the Slab and Notch,’ I declared, annoyed that my mountain rescue friends’ verdict should be called in doubt. ‘It’s nowt but a scramble. Don’t even need a rope.’

This was laying it on a bit thick. OK, in terms of climbing difficulty, this most popular route up the Rock really is classed as a Grade-3 scramble. But it’s got tremendous exposure. If you come off, you fall a long way. Only real climbers, or real idiots, go up there without a rope. The guy they brought down in the spring was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a couple of smashed legs.

She said, ‘You’ve been up it then?’

‘Couple of times.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Yeah.’

It was true. The first time I’d been ten and back then I suppose I was a real idiot. I was like a spider, scuttling up rock faces that give me vertigo now just thinking about them. How the hell I never got cragfast, I don’t know.

I’d got a bit more sense since my close encounter with the mountain rescue, but I still liked climbing by myself. The second time I went up Pillar Rock had been the previous spring. After I heard my mountain rescue friends talking about the accident, some ghoulish subconscious impulse took me back there. I remember pausing in the Notch and looking down and picturing the guy tumbling through the air. I wondered what it must feel like. All I had to do to find out was let go.

Don’t worry, it wasn’t a serious thought. If I was going to fall, it would be off something that would impress my rescue mates! But dismissing the Slab and Notch as a ‘mere’ scramble now got me into more bother.

‘Let’s go up there then,’ she said.

‘With you? No way!’

‘Why not? You just said it was dead easy.’

‘Yeah, but not for someone like you.’

‘What do you mean, like me? We do climbing at my school. I’ve been on the wall at the sports centre.’

This was true, though, as I learned later, Imogen’s desire to take up rock climbing seriously had provoked a loud and unified negative from her parents, and the school had been instructed to make sure she didn’t get near the wall again.

Well, her parents might have got their way, but with me it was no contest.

In my defence, she did make it clear that she was going to have a go with or without me, and by going along with her at least I could make sure she was on the end of my rope.

And to tell the truth, this readiness of hers to go spidering up a rock face the way I’d been doing for years had an effect on me like the sight of her dancing on the lawn.

So up we went, me first, then Imogen after I’d got her belayed. There were no problems, and she clearly wasn’t in the slightest fazed by having several hundred feet of air beneath her at the most exposed points.

It was worth it just to see her face as she stood on the top of the rock.