always 2004.’ Sam smiled, thinking within himself: It should be the other way round. You should be saying that to me.
‘You’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, aren’t you?’
You know how old I am. ‘Long-distance running isn’t a kids’ game, luckily. You can stay in the front rank over long-distance well into your thirties.’
‘I was looking forward to you bringing home that gold.’ Mike nodded to the mantel, as if there were a space there, among the pictures of mountains and bearded men, that was bereaved of his son’s Olympic medal.
‘I’d have been happy enough just to go to Sydney and represent my country. It never was just about winning, Dad,’ Sam said patiently.
‘No.’
The monosyllable was a taunt, expertly flicked, that dug into Sam like the barb of a fish-hook.
It’s the way he is, Sam reminded himself. It’s because he’s bitter about his own life. And he’s entitled to a grouse this time. He would have been proud of me if I’d made it, so it’s understandable that he should feel the opposite way now.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it this time. It was tough for me as well. But I won’t stop running. It means a lot to me.’
‘Keep at it while you still can,’ Mike agreed. ‘You’re lucky.’
Do you want me to say I’m sorry for that, as well? Sam wondered.
Mike had already turned his gaze over his son’s shoulder, back towards the jeering audience on the television. The volume went up again.
Sitting in this house, with its fading wallpaper and the same old sofa and chairs, and the blandishing blue-sky covers of his father’s magazines – he still subscribed to Climber and Outside and the rest – it was hard for Sam to head off the memories. They lined up in the kitchen space and in the closets, and behind the curtains, waiting to ambush him. Where he lived now, up in Seattle with work to do, and Frannie and friends for company and distraction, he could keep out of their way. But not here, not even most of the time. He supposed it was the same for everyone going home. Whether or not you enjoyed your visit depended on the quality of the memories.
They had moved to this house when Sam was six. Before that, Mike and Mary McGrath had lived on the Oregon coast near Newport, but then Mike had started up a rental cabin and backwoods vacation tour business, with a partner, and had brought his family to the little town of Wilding. The business had only survived a year or two, and the partner had made off with most of the liquid assets and none of the burden of debt, but the McGraths had stayed on. They had put money into this house, a couple of miles out of town, and Mary had dug a garden out front and started to make some friends. Sam was in school and seemed happy enough, and in any case Mike was as willing to stay where he was as to move on. He took a job as a transport manager with a logging company. Mike didn’t reckon much on where he lived or what he did for a living, just so long as he could feed and house his wife and child, and get to Yosemite and the Tetons whenever possible, and to plenty of big boulders for climbing when his budget didn’t stretch to proper expeditions.
Other kids had plenty worse things to deal with, Sam knew, but he found the climbing hard.
He went on the camping trips, and while his father solo-climbed he played softball with the other boys and swam in icy streams, and hiked and rode his bike, always in fear of the moment when his father would call him.
‘Come on, Sammy. It’s your turn.’
‘No.’ Trying to climb with his father watching, with the hammering of blood in his ears and the shivering of his joints, and the sipping for breath with the top inch of his lungs because to breathe more deeply might be to dislodge himself from his precarious hold – all of these were too familiar to Sam.
‘Watch me, then.’ Mike sighed.
His movements were so smooth as he climbed, his body seemed like water flowing over the rock. But Sam’s arms wound tight around his knees as he sat watching and his breath came unevenly.
Don’t fall, he prayed. Don’t fall, Dad.
A moment or two later the man reached the crest of the boulder and disappeared, then his broad grinning face looked down over the edge. ‘See? Easy as pie.’
Sam felt his cheeks turning hotter, not from the sun’s brightness. His father was already down-climbing, smooth and steady. And then midway he suddenly stopped.
‘Now what can I do?’ he demanded, flinging the words back over his shoulder into the still air. ‘I’m stuck. Tell me what to do.’
The boy raked the reddish cliff with his eyes, searching the sandstone for a crack or a bulge. There were no ropes, nothing held his father safe except his own fingers or toes and now he was stuck and he would surely fall … he would fall and fall, and he would die.
‘See anything?’ Mike McGrath called more loudly. ‘Any foothold?’
Sam gazed until his eyes burned.
The red rock was flat and hard, and there wasn’t a dimple in it, even to save his father’s life. Terror froze the sunny afternoon and silenced the birdsong, and stretched the moment into an hour.
‘Wait. Maybe if you go that way …’ He rocked up on to his knees, so that he knelt at the rock face, and took tufts of long grass in his clenched fists to hold himself tethered to the earth. There was a little nubbin below where his father’s feet rested.
Too late.
‘I’m falling,’ the man cried suddenly. And as he did so he peeled away from the rock and his body turned once in the air, black, and as helpless as a dropped puppet.
Out of Sam’s mouth a scream forced itself.
Even after Mike had executed a gymnast’s neat backflip and landed upright, knees together and arms at his sides in the exact centre of the old bath towel that he left at the foot of the boulder to keep the soles of his rock shoes from contact with the ground, Sam went on screaming. The sound brought his mother running. He buried himself in her arms.
‘Michael,’ she remonstrated, ‘what are you doing?’
She was holding the boy pressed against her as she spoke and Sam could feel her voice vibrate in the cage of her chest.
‘I didn’t mean to frighten him. I was just showing him it’s safe, for Chrissakes. Sammy, I’m okay. I came off deliberately.’
‘He’s eight years old, Mike.’
‘I want him to know what climbing means.’
Sam McGrath already knew. He knew it was what his father loved. Without knowing how to form the words he understood that Michael cared about him and his mother in his own way, but climbing was what gave everything else a meaning. Every dollar that he had to spare, every possible weekend and any vacation, were devoted to it. That was all. It was so overwhelming that in a way it was perfectly simple. And for himself, Sam also knew that it scared him speechless.
‘Let him alone. He’ll learn when he’s ready.’
There
