Just Another Mountain Read online

  When it came to the opposite sex, it seemed I was genetically hardwired to disastrous affairs of the heart – Mum’s record had been no better. But of her failed romantic entanglements there was one she had told me to try to learn from.

  I was in my teens and I’d just returned home from an adventure holiday in the South of France. I hadn’t phoned ahead, as I’d wanted my arrival to be a surprise. Mum wasn’t at the flat so I set off on foot to my grandparents’ house, anticipating the welcome and the quiz on how I’d got on. Instead I was greeted with the image of my mother lying curled up and shaking on their sofa.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I questioned Gran when Mum didn’t even look at me.

  ‘She’s been like that all weekend,’ Gran said. My grandad took me through to the kitchen.

  ‘Your mum was beaten up on Friday.’

  ‘What! Why?’

  ‘All I can tell you is that she arrived here at the back door, her face so covered in blood I didn’t recognise her at first. The doctor came out at two in the morning. Stones ingrained into the palms of her hands had to be scrubbed out and then she was taken to Raigmore for X-rays. Her head had been knocked so hard off a wall she was temporarily deafened in one ear. If two men hadn’t come out of the pub and stopped it God knows what would have happened.’

  The attacker had been Mum’s boyfriend, but she didn’t press charges. Instead, two months later she succumbed to his apologies and flowers and announced they were seeing each other again. ‘It wasn’t him, it was the drink,’ she said. ‘It won’t happen again. He’s said he’ll change.’

  Of course, he did not. And he went on to cheat. Mum told me she’d seen them together, walking by the riverside hand in hand. ‘Hi, Jen,’ he’d said, all casual, like she was nothing special to him. At home, in a fit of rage, she shredded everything he’d ever given her. She took the tattered, broken items and scattered them over his garden. It was the one and only time I’d ever known her to act so wildly. When he tried to win her round again, this time, for her, it was over.

  We all have our own threshold of how far we are prepared to go before the game is finally up. People don’t change unless they really want to, and, like my mum, I’d had to learn this lesson the hard way too. I’d kept trying with Sam, because he’d kept telling me he loved me, and I wanted to believe that. I found myself stuck in the same sort of relationship as my mother, repeating her mistakes. When it came down to the choice of me or a bottle, I’d never stood much chance, I was almost used to that. But when I discovered a mass of online messages to a string of other women, I should have realised I was never going to be enough.

  As I climbed over the stile I lingered briefly to catch a glimpse of the loch, most of it hidden by the intervening slopes. Once we gained the ridge we stayed on its left, the way clearly marked as we followed footprints trodden deep into the snow. Leon wanted to make his own tracks but quickly gave up. ‘It’s too hard work,’ he said as he flumped down, picked up some snow and ate it.

  After we passed a knobble of rock there was a slight dip before we began a more direct ascent of the hill, and the last 100 metres were steeper still, but posed no difficulty as old, sunken footprints carved out a snowy staircase. Marcus sprang ahead. I was lost in admiration when, somewhere from behind, a familiar, high-pitched screech like a gull interrupted my thought.

  ‘Muum!’ Leon squawked, ‘my legs are going to fall off. I have to stop.’

  ‘We’ve really not got far to go, we’re almost at the top. Come on, you’ve done brilliantly well. Keep going!’ I said, remembering that I’d moaned over less on walks with my own mum. Tugging at her trouser leg I’d repeatedly asked, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ or ‘How far now?’ or ‘When will we be home?’ and she’d had to answer with small untruths like ‘Not far now,’ or ‘Just around the next corner’ or ‘It won’t be long.’ By my standards, Leon was doing great. Mum would have been proud of him.

  I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that my children had had the chance to know her. That she’d had the chance to know them. I’d always talked to them about her. And when they were small they’d at least known the sound of her voice because I’d played them bedtime stories she’d recorded on tapes. That had meant so much to me. But these much-loved treasures were lost to us for ever, all chewed up by the cassette recorder. If she had been here she would have read to them all the time. She would have played games, sung to them while playing her guitar, taken them for walks or to the park – and I would never have had to worry about arranging childcare, she’d have been stealing them off me! She would have looked after them the same way my grandparents had done for her with me. Remembering how much I had benefited from that close and important relationship I’d had with my own grandparents made me regret even more how my boys were missing out.

  Reaching a cairn on what appeared to be the summit, we noticed that the true top lay further west. ‘I’m staying here. Collect me on the way back,’ stated Leon. Marcus and I exchanged a look and agreed to carry on without him, knowing full well he’d soon follow. We dropped down a short distance before we were traipsing up once again to reach a flat plateau. It didn’t take much more than five to ten minutes to arrive at the real peak, and as we neared the piled-up stones a fast crunching over snow behind us announced the imminent arrival of the one and only Leon. Spinning round, we cheered, and a gigantic smile spread across his face as I welcomed him into my arms.

  It had been warm work reaching the top, though now we’d stopped we cooled rapidly, so we stayed at the summit only long enough to eat rolls, slug freezing water and take in the panoramic scene in silence. In every direction we were surrounded by a glut of gleaming white peaks, row after row rippling off into the distance, pristine, angled outlines against a deep-blue sky. The clean, dry air brought down from Arctic regions made views down the Great Glen to Ben Nevis appear stunningly clear. Snow had transformed the landscape, hiding heathers and grasses, and it was so cold there was not a flying insect to be seen; and yet I felt flooded by the presence of life. We were removed from the chaos and noise that carried on way down beneath us – people buzzing past in cars to-ing and fro-ing from appointments, folk bustling around shops, and workers in offices or on building sites – all oblivious to us up here by ourselves.

  ‘Look,’ I said to the boys, pointing, ‘you can see Fort George from here.’ We’d been to the Fort, and the village where I’d grown up, on our bikes many times. And as much as I had done with my mum, they too loved clambering to the top of Cromal Mount, where we’d look across the smudge of Inverness to the inverted bowl we now stood upon.

  As we retraced our steps across the plateau, the race was on between the boys. ‘Last one to that lump stinks of tuna!’ Marcus yelled. I watched contentedly as they ran. I’d tentatively broached the subject of Sam earlier in the day and they had said they didn’t mind that he didn’t live with us any more. Listening to their laughter and shrieks escaping into the still air, I was reassured they were indeed all right. And so was I.

  The end of my relationship with Sam had marked the beginning of a new and, I hoped, better phase for me. With every mountain I was climbing, I was becoming fitter physically and growing stronger mentally. I’d come to realise since separating that the main reason I’d married Sam was because I’d been afraid to be alone, but it hadn’t solved anything. Now I finally understood that being alone could be the more attractive option. My marriage hadn’t failed; it had been a mistake from the start. And I hadn’t let my children down; they were doing just fine.

  And now I was on course for a new, exciting challenge: Kilimanjaro. I felt more resolute than ever that the effort of the journey to its top would help me to put all of my troubles firmly behind me – after all, the name of the mountain’s peak itself, Uhuru, meant freedom.

  PHASE TWO

  TROUBLED TRACKS

  But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays

  Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;

  Hither
and thither moves, and checks, and slays,

  And one by one back in the Closet lays.’

  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LXIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Keep Them Close

  Nakara, Tanzania, June 2010

  It was the eve of my flight to Tanzania. Four days earlier I’d been on Braeriach with my children, but now Marcus had been packed off on a school trip to an outdoor-activity centre for a week, and Sam had agreeably upheld his offer to look after Leon. I was on my own at last, sitting on a bed in a hotel room near Edinburgh airport. It was almost liberating in itself to have no responsibilities for the next ten days. After all the changes and upheavals that had been going on, and all the preparation involved for this trip, I finally had the chance to put my foot on the brake for a while.

  Clutched in the palm of one hand was a tiny pot containing some of Mum’s ashes. I knew she would have loved to return to East Africa, so a piece of her was coming with me. In my other hand was a photograph of the two of us, taken at the top of Cromal Mount, the Fort in the background. As I looked at the image of our smiling faces, feeling the familiar sadness swelling, I thought about the imminent ascent of Kilimanjaro: I knew it was going to be tough, but I had to succeed. It was as though the two things were tied – the grief that I hadn’t been able to shake had driven me to take on this challenge, and if anything was going to get me to the top it would be holding tightly to thoughts of Mum, a determination to keep going in her memory. A part of me was also excited to think that I’d be, in a way, following in Gerry’s footprints, becoming a big mountain climber.

  Lying in the hotel bed too excited to sleep, I fantasised that I’d made it to the mountain’s peak and was overlooking Kenyan plains, towards the places of my mother’s childhood. In 1960 my grandad had been posted to a place called Lanet, six miles from the town of Nakuru, about 100 miles from Nairobi. The family lived on a military base, and home was a large, red-roofed bungalow with a huge garden. Mum was about eight years old then. I imagined her as a little girl, all prim and proper in her purple and white gingham dress, ready for the journey to school in Nakuru. There was no bus for the dozen or so kids from the army base who attended Lugard, so instead they were transported to school on the back of a one-ton army truck. Five minutes before it was due to leave, a hand-cranked air-raid siren would sound and Mum, along with all the other kids, would belt down the road.

  I’d heard the stories so many times when I was younger and had always found them fascinating. It sounded so exciting – so different from my own childhood experiences. Still, growing up in a military background, Mum had had a fairly rigid upbringing, I knew. I wondered if that’s what had made her so wild and free-spirited during her teenage years. Still not asleep in the darkening airport hotel room, I thought back to my own childhood and the experiences that had played their part in defining the person I became.

  I was five, living with my grandparents, and had just started school. My mother was in Aberdeen and had begun a second year of teacher training. I would only see her on holidays, and her commitment to the four-year course was already taking its toll on my long-term, and already fragile, security. I was quite reserved. Going to school was the first time I’d mixed with local children, and this only made me more timid – I may as well have walked into that playground with a big placard emblazoned with the words ‘easy target’.

  Set back from the road and surrounded by farmland, the old stone school building was situated two miles outside the village, and it was there that a girl, a couple of years my senior, made it her business to terrorise me. Bullying didn’t happen every day, but its impact over the course of two years stayed with me. Playtime and home time had always been the worst. Deliberately seeking me out, the robust, red-cheeked girl would order me to the end of the playing field, where she’d humiliate me by pulling up my skirt, teasing that she was going to pull down my pants and tickle me or ‘get me’ after school; but what hurt a million times more than her threats was when she would tell me that my mother didn’t love or care about me. On and on she would taunt.

  My grandad and her mother would take turns to do the school run home. I dreaded the ride home with her – sitting next to me on the back seat, she would deliberately squash me against the door, pinch my legs hard and sneakily tug my hair. And then one day I was invited to her home. I’d thought she wanted to be my friend now. We played in some woods out of sight from her house, where I picked up a colourful plastic ball. ‘That had poison on it. You’ll be dead by tomorrow,’ she jeered. She made me follow her to a wooden fence where we sat on top of its stile.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she ordered.

  ‘Where?’ I asked, feeling hugely afraid of her answer.

  ‘On my mouth,’ she said, with unflinching coldness. I obeyed.

  After that the prospect of having to go to school made me feel sick. I’d complain to my grandparents that I didn’t want to go, that I didn’t like it, but I was too frightened to reveal the truth.

  When my mum came home on holiday I was her shadow. She’d take me on walks along the beach where broom crackled in the summer heat and sweet coconut-scented gorse grew so wildly, its smell mingling with the salty seaside air. She taught me the difference between these similar species, pointed out dog rose and other wild flowers and plants, or birds like the yellowhammers that flew between the thickets and seabirds like the oystercatchers and curlews. We’d have picnics on white sands round the back of the Fort and play at running away from the waves. We’d search for razor clams, perfectly intact whelks and stamp on the seaweed to hear it pop. And at home she’d play songs to me on her guitar. All of these things were reassurance that the bully was wrong and that I was loved, but time always passed too quickly and Mum would leave once more for Aberdeen.

  Separation was upsetting; I didn’t want her to go because her departure also spelt back to school and into the clutches of my tormentor. Eventually I was moved to the village school, but the damage was already done and I was shy and awkward around the other kids for the rest of my school years, distrusting people’s motives while also being convinced I was unlikeable. I spent a fairly solitary and lonely childhood, deriving happiness from the company of the adults at home and by losing myself in drawing and painting – mainly on the walls, which did not go down a storm with Gran.

  Later, during my teen years, my grandad would sometimes ask why I was either up or down and never a happy medium. I used to tell him it was because of my inherent artistic temperament, and while I decided there probably was some truth in that, I also believed I’d been conditioned by those early experiences: swinging between the extremes of feeling great joy when Mum was home from college, to deep term-time doom. Where my mother had spent her teens rebelling against her parents in pursuit of independence, I had wanted to stay as close to her as possible.

  It was an early start the next day, but it felt full of promise. And after an eight-hour flight the aircraft began its descent to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As we reached a height of 5,000 metres, I realised that in a few days my feet – like those belonging to the other 35,000 people who also come to climb this mountain each year – would be trekking higher than this. It seemed both fantastic and implausible.

  After immigration and baggage reclaim I exited the airport and found my way to other waiting members of the Marie Curie fundraising team. I’d been to Africa before, visiting Malawi and Egypt, but the wall of heat and the monstrously proportioned bugs still came as a surprise. The driver launched our rucksacks and holdalls onto the roof of our transport, a minibus that looked like the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo, and funnily enough our short and stocky, bespectacled trek doctor, Emma, with her auburn fringed bob, bore more than a passing resemblance to Velma. There weren’t enough seats in the bus for everyone, so I travelled to the hotel by Jeep with Marty – who would also be my roomie during the trip. Marty and I came from the same town and we knew each other a little, so it was nice to have a familiar face to share a hotel room and t
ent with.

  We set off and almost immediately petrol fumes and the stench of rotting animal flesh rushed in through the open windows, filling my nostrils and making me feel very ill. But as the countryside opened up, these odours were replaced by the smells of burning bush from local farms. For two hours the bumpy ride continued until finally we arrived at Nakara Hotel, which, at an elevation of around 1,500 metres, was higher than Ben Nevis. The queasiness passed and the intoxicating and heady scent of jasmine permeated the night air. Above us a sumptuous, deep-velvet sky was punctuated by a scattering of stars. I already felt better.

  Last down for breakfast, I was dismayed to find that everything was pretty much gone, so I had a juice then took a short walk before our briefing. I’d read up on high-altitude trekking and was aware of the risks involved; these were made more stark by our medic, Emma. ‘The higher you go the more important it is to drink plenty of fluids. Dehydration is dangerous on its own, but it can also mask or worsen altitude sickness. If your pee is dark, you aren’t drinking enough. Your headache could lead to cerebral oedema and coughs may be the precursor to pulmonary oedema. Both are life-threatening and in either event we need to get you down off the mountain quickly.’

  Later, all twenty-five of us set out for an acclimatisation walk around the local area along the soft, reddish-brown soil road which, because of the rain, seemed to have turned into a kind of wet clay. Streets were simply openings in thick plantations of maize or banana trees. Winding paths the width of a foot supported the occasional kiosk, whose goods were random and sparse – three of this, four of that. Soaps and washing powder sold alongside half a dozen tomatoes and an avocado, all ensconced behind a wire mesh to stop thieves. I bought a piece of sugar cane from a young boy for a dollar. Its stick-like shape and fibrous texture reminded me of the rhubarb Grandad once grew in his garden, but my taste buds felt robbed because it wasn’t the sugary treat I’d expected. We walked on through luscious green foliage above a rock-strewn river, and beyond its bank was a field being worked by women, breaking the soil with antiquated scythes. It looked an arduous task under the blaze of the afternoon sun, but on seeing us they raised their hands to wave and flashed a smile.