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That was all. Sam read and reread the brief details, as if the extra attention might extract some more subtle and satisfying information. He even touched the tip of his finger to the screen, to the strands of dark hair, but encountered only the glass, faintly gritty with dust. The dates of the trip blinked at him, with the invitation to follow the progress of the climb over the following weeks via daily reports and regular updates from Base Camp. She must already be on her way to Nepal, Sam calculated.
There had been a total of perhaps five hours from the moment she had blown with the storm into one airport, then disappeared into the press of another. He had been thinking about her for another fifty. Sam swivelled in his chair, eyeing the over-familiar clutter on his desk and trying to reason why. Not just because of the way she looked, or her cool manner, or the glimpse of her vulnerability in her fear of flying, although all of these had played their part. It was more that there had been a sense of purpose about her. He saw it and envied it. She looked through him to a bigger view and the vista put light in her face and tightened the strings that held her body together. The effect wasn’t just to do with sex, although it was also the sexiest encounter he had ever had with a total stranger.
Sam sighed. Everything about Finch Buchanan was the opposite of the way he felt about himself. His life seemed to have narrowed and lost its force, and finally dried out like a stream in a drought. Work yawned around him with its diminishing satisfactions. His father was disappointed in him and vice versa. The energy and effort he had put into competitive running now seemed futile. And the woman he shared his life with was asleep in another room, separate from him, and he couldn’t even make himself care properly about that.
I wish I were going to Everest too, he thought.
The wildness of the idea even made him smile.
And then it was so unthinkable that he let himself think about it.
The climbing he had done as a child with Michael had frightened him. He knew his father had pushed him too hard; the terror still sometimes surfaced in his dreams. And yet this woman did it and it – or something related to it – gave her a force field that sucked him towards her. He was drawn closer and now the fear had transferred from himself to Finch. Even before she vanished at Vancouver airport, even as he sat down beside her on the plane, he had known he would find her again. He had imagined that he would wait until she came back, then track her down in Vancouver. But the aridity of his life made a sudden desert flower of an idea swell and burst into iridescent colour in his mind. He didn’t have to wait for her to come back. He had been prescient enough to ask where she was staying.
He could go out there.
Maybe just by being close enough inside her orbit he could make sure that she was safe.
Ever the optimist, McGrath, he thought. The woman’s a serious mountaineer and you flunked out of it at the age of fourteen. And you still imagine you can look after her? She’ll just think you’re some weird stalker.
He’d have to deal with that. Optimism was good; it was too long since he had felt it about anything. Seize the moment.
Sam sat for a few more minutes in front of his screen, reading the rest of the Mountain People’s seductive sell.
When he slipped into their bedroom he found to his surprise that Frannie was still awake, propped up on her side of the bed reading a gardening book. The angle of a fire escape outside a city apartment wasn’t enough growing space for her. She wanted a house and a garden for her plants, and Sam couldn’t blame her for that. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and she lowered the book to look at him.
‘Working?’
‘Yeah.’ He undid the laces of his sneakers and eased them off his feet, then unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Frannie lay back, watching him, waiting for him to climb in beside her. They had lived together for three years, and the sediment of their joint existence was spread around them on the shelves and in the drawers. A blanket from Mexico, their last holiday together, covered the bed. There were invitations in their joint names on the dresser. Even in the fluff of pocket linings and trouser turn-ups there would be the forensic evidence of their inter-related lives: sand from walks on the beach; dust from cinemas; carpet fibres from the homes of their shared friends. The extent of their separation within this unit was too apparent to Sam.
‘Switch the light off,’ Frannie murmured as he lay down. She turned on her side to face him and her breath warmed his face as she slid closer. ‘Mm?’
Sam lay still, contemplating the redoubt of betrayal.
‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered.
He lifted his weighty hand and rested it on the naked curve of her hip where the T-shirt she wore in bed had ridden up.
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. Could you say, I feel trapped by this life, I don’t want to stay here, you deserve a man who will treat you better than I do? How did you do that, instead of making love like he proceeded to do now, with a flare of guilty optimism battened down inside you?
Afterwards Frannie fell asleep with her back curved against his belly and Sam lay awake, thinking out how he would make the next moves and trying to plan the gentlest words he could use to tell her.
Frannie was a teacher and always woke up early to prepare properly for the day at school. When her alarm went off at 6.50 a.m. she got out of bed at once, and padded around between bed and bathroom while Sam lay with the covers hiding his head. He heard her taking a shower, rummaging for clothes, peering in the mirror while she applied a slick of mascara. When she went into the kitchen to make coffee he sat up abruptly and followed her.
‘Toast?’ she asked, with a knife slicing the air. They didn’t usually have breakfast together. Evenings were their time, when they drank wine and talked and collaborated over the cooking. Or used to.
‘Just coffee.’
He sat at the table, looking into the cup. ‘Fran. I want to go away for a bit.’
As soon as the words were out he knew she had been anticipating, probably fearing them. The tension of it had been in the air between them. Her face creased now and her mouth drew in sharply. ‘Where to?’
‘I want to go … to Nepal. Maybe to see Everest.’
She gazed at him. ‘Oh, of course. When?’
‘Now. I suppose.’
Fran shook her head. There were red marks like thumbprints on each cheekbone. ‘Why?’
Because I need to get away from here? Because my work isn’t satisfying and because I can’t run as fast as I want to, and because you and I don’t make each other happy? Because I’ve just been to see my father and we can’t talk to each other, and I know I have disappointed him? Or just because I saw a woman at an airport and thought, I want her?
Sam mumbled, ‘I can’t tell you why. I want to go because I had the idea.’ This was cowardly. But would the truth be kinder?
There were tears in Frannie’s eyes but she stood up and turned away. She rinsed her breakfast plate, an angry plume of water splashing up from the sink. ‘You always do what you want.’
He was surprised at that. Sam generally felt that he spent his life approximately conforming to what other people wanted – clients, friends, Frannie. Maybe as an ineffectual compensation for not doing it for Michael. He had been feeling ineffectual for too long. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’ She began to shout at him. ‘You keep it quiet, but you do. And you evade everything you don’t want to do. You’re never full on. It’s like you’re always looking out of the window at some view the rest of us can’t see. I hate it.’
‘I’m sorry, Fran.’ His inability to please her was just part of the scratchy disorder that his life had become. He was profoundly tired of it, he knew that much. His resolve hardened.
She flung some cutlery into the sink. ‘What happens if I’m not here when you come back?’
Their eyes met.
‘I will have to deal with that when it happens.’
There was a silence. Through the wall hummed their neighbour’s choice of morning radio programme.
Fran jerked away from the sink. ‘I’ve got to get to school. We’ll have to talk later.’
‘It isn’t a whim,’ he said quietly.
‘I don’t care what it is,’ Frannie shouted.
After she had gone Sam walked to his desk. His jacket was creased on the back of his chair, where he had shrugged it off last night. He picked it up and absently smoothed the lapels.
He had to get to work too, to a meeting with a travel agent who wanted a website to sell last-minute budget ski packages.
Go, Sam advised himself. Maybe the reasons for it were shaky, but he couldn’t come up with a single one against going.
Four (#ub6dcaaf9-063d-5232-8208-a396ee615d1e)
‘You coming?’ Adam Vries asked Finch.
A group of seven men were standing outside the dining-room of the Buddha’s Garden Hotel. In their plaid shirts, combat pants and cheery slogan T-shirts they might have been any group of tourists, although a closer inspection would have revealed that they seemed noticeably fitter than the average. They had just eaten an excellent dinner and they had the rosy, expansive look of people intent on enjoying themselves for much of the rest of the night.
‘Yeah, come on. We’re going to Rumdoodle.’
‘What the hell’s that?’ Finch grinned.
‘She’s a newcomer, isn’t she?’ a big, grizzled man teased in a broad Yorkshire accent. His name was Hugh Rix; the front of his T-shirt proclaimed ‘Rix Trucking. Here Today, There Tomorrow’.
‘Bar,’ Ken Kennedy said briefly. He was in his early forties, short but broad-built. His colourless hair was shaved close to his scalp and his rolled shirtsleeve showed a scorpion tattoo on his left bicep.
‘Uh, I don’t think so,’ Finch demurred. ‘I’m going to sleep. In a bed. While I still have the chance.’
‘Coward.’
‘Leave her be, Rix. She’ll be seeing more than enough of you before the trip ends,’ Ken said.
‘Night,’ they all said to her and in a solid phalanx moved towards the door. Of the ten-strong Western contingent that made up the Mountain People expedition, George Heywood had eaten a quick dinner and gone off to a meeting with the climbing Sherpas and Alyn Hood had not yet arrived. The word was that he had taken a two-day stopover in Karachi.
Finch went upstairs to her small single room and switched on her PowerBook to send an e-mail to Suzy.
Hey, married woman.
Good honeymoon?
Here I am. Flights not too bad, hotel plain but reasonably clean (as my mother would say). Dinner tonight with the rest of the group except lead guide who isn’t here yet. They’re okay!!! George Heywood I already met, Adam Vries is communications manager, pretty face (but your type, not mine), poses a bit. Ken Kennedy’s the second guide, acts tough, sports a tattoo, probably has a heart of gold. Clients are Hugh Rix and Mark Mason, both Brits, know each other from back home. Rix (as he calls himself) is the self-made-man type, probably won’t stand any nonsense unless he’s generating it. Mark is quieter and more sensitive, although not by a long way. There’s a longhair Aussie rock jock named Sandy Jackson and two determined Americans, Vern Ecker and Ted Koplicki, who were here last year and turned back from Camp Four. Now they’ve all gone out for a beer.
For me, bed. If I can sleep, with excitement.
I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world, or be doing anything different. You know that. Give Big J a kiss from me xxx
Before she climbed into bed, Finch stood at her window. She opened the shutter and looked out over the trees of the garden and a carved statue of the Buddha to a corner of the busy street just visible beyond the gate. The traffic rolled and hooted through the haze of pollution. Kathmandu lay in a hollow ringed by high hills, and the smoke and exhaust fumes hung in the air like a grey veil. As she stood absently watching, a man walked in the darkness across the grass and through the gate into the roadway. He lifted his hand to a bicycle rickshaw man hopefully lingering near the hotel entrance and hopped into the hooded seat. The old man stood up on the pedals, his lean legs tensing with the effort, and the rickshaw trundled away. Finch stood for a moment longer, resting her shoulder against the window frame and breathing in the scent of woodsmoke and joss and curry that drifted up to her. Then she pulled the shutter to and finished her preparations for bed.
It was surprisingly snug in the rickshaw seat, with the hood framing the view of haphazard streets and ancient wooden houses leaning out over the cobbles. Piles of rotting debris carelessly swept into the angles of walls gave out a pungent vegetable smell. Sam leaned forward to the driver. ‘Very far?’
A triangle of brown face briefly presented itself over the hunched shoulder. ‘No, sir. Near enough.’
Sam had landed at Kathmandu six hours earlier. He had found himself an acceptable hotel close to the Buddha’s Garden, changed his clothes, eaten a meal that he didn’t taste and couldn’t remember, and shaved and showered with close attention. The unfamiliar feeling in his gut was nothing to do with the soupy dal bhaat he had eaten – it was anticipation. It was a very long time since anything in his life had given him the same sensation. Even running didn’t do it for him any more. He had tried to summon it up before he competed at Pittsburgh and had failed. There was a part of himself that warned the rest that it had been a long way to travel from Seattle to catch up with a woman he had spent barely five hours with. But Sam told himself that in any case it wasn’t just to do with Finch. He was in Kathmandu, he was doing something other than withering away at home.
When he finally reached Finch’s hotel the obliging receptionist told him that yes, Miss Buchanan was resident there. But he believed that all the climbers had gone out – just gone, sir, five minutes only – to a bar in the Thamel district.
Armed with the name and directions, Sam set out again. The quickest way through the steaming traffic looked as though it might be this bicycle-propelled pram. He sat even further forward on the sagging seat, as if he could urge the driver to pedal faster. His eyes were gritty with travel and he blinked at the waves of people and cars with a yawn trapped in the back of his throat. Maybe he should have gone to bed and waited until tomorrow to find her. But the thought of being so close, and the fear that she would somehow disappear into the mountains before he could reach her, was too much for him.
At last the old man sank back on his saddle and the rickshaw wavered to a halt. They had come to a doorway wedged in a row of open-fronted shops, where multicoloured T-shirts and cotton trousers hung like flags overhead, and a press of wandering shoppers threaded through narrow alleyways. There was a thick smell of spicy food, and patchouli and marijuana. Two dogs lay asleep on a littered doorstep.
The bar was up a flight of wooden stairs. Sam found a big room, noisy with muzzily amplified music and loud talk. Most of the customers were very young Westerners with the suntans, bleached hair and ripped shorts of backpackers, although there were a few Thais and Japanese among them. He edged his way through the babble of American, British and indeterminate accents to the bar, and positioned himself in front of it. He searched the crowd with his eyes, looking for her.
Finch wasn’t there. Within a minute he knew it for certain but he still examined each of the groups more carefully and drank some weak beer while he waited in case she had gone outside for five minutes. It took him much less than five minutes to identify the group of Everest mountaineers. They were older than most of the other drinkers and were gathered in a tight group around two rickety little tables. One of them had a goatee and wore his long hair tied back in a lank ponytail, another had an effete blond fringe, the rest had brutally short crops. They all had worked-out, hard-looking rather than muscular physiques. The look was familiar enough to Sam: for years he had seen men with similar bodies high on the pillars in Yosemite, or drinking beers with his father and exchanging the arcane details of routes and lines and remote peaks.
There was an empty chair at the far side of their group, next to the blond man. Sam strolled casually across the room and hesitated beside it. ‘Mind if I take this?’
‘Sure. Help yourself.’
He sat down, carefully placing his drink on the table. He relaxed for a minute, gazing into the room with unfocused eyes and letting their conversation drift around him.
‘The man’s an asshole. Forget the hills. I wouldn’t go as far as the Bronx with him leading …’
‘… into a heap of shit. So I say to the guy, this place is a latrine …’
‘A brand new camera, a Nikon AX.’
‘I’m ready for it. But if I don’t make it this year I’ll be back. And I’ll keep on coming back until I do make it.’
‘You’ll do it, man. George Heywood’s put thirty-five clients up there already. Why not you? And Al Hood’s a fine leader.’
‘He’s never climbed it.’
‘He’s climbed every other fucker in the known world.’
Meditatively, Sam drained his glass. These men were going to be Finch’s companions for two months. ‘You heading up for some climbing?’ he asked the blond in a friendly voice.
‘Yeah, man.’
‘What’re you planning?’
‘The big one. Everest.’
Sam gave a soundless, admiring whistle. ‘Is that right? I envy you. You all going?’
‘It’s a commercial expedition. Six clients, or five if you don’t count the chick medic. Two guides, Ken here and another guy. The boss is out here this trip as Base Camp manager. He’s climbed the hill twice himself. I work for the company, supplies and communications manager, but I’m kind of hoping to get a shot at the summit. Have to see how things pan out, though.’
‘Ahuh. Sounds good.’
‘You climbing? My name’s Adam Vries, by the way.’
‘Sam McGrath. Not this time,’ Sam said cautiously. He didn’t want to exclude himself from the company that included Finch.
‘Pity. Want some of this?’ He held up a jug of beer and Sam nudged his glass across. Adam filled it up for him.
‘Thanks. So, where’re you from?’
Adam named a little town in Connecticut but said that he spent most of his teenage years in Geneva. Under the careful pressure of Sam’s questions he hitched his boot on the rung of a chair, locked his hands behind his head and talked about climbing in the Alps. His fine, slightly girlish features lit up with passion as he reminisced about the big faces of the Eiger and Mont Blanc, and Sam found his initial antipathy melting away. Even though he had dismissed Finch as the chick medic, this was a nice guy. For a climber, he was an exceptionally nice guy.
In turn, Adam extracted from Sam the details of his own mountain history. He shook his head disparagingly. ‘Man, that’s tough. But you can still climb, can’t you? Without your old man, I mean.’
‘I suppose I could.’
He had merged into the group now. The two British expedition members had introduced themselves as Mark Mason and Hugh Rix – ‘Just call me Rix,’ the blunt-faced man insisted – and Ken Kennedy stretched out a hand and shook Sam’s. His grip was like a juice presser.
The jug of beer was filled and refilled, and the level of noise and laughter rose.
‘What are you doing in Kathmandu?’ Rix demanded in his loud voice.
‘Just travelling. Taking a break from the world.’
