The Alpine Bar

I cut the rope.
It was her or me, on that edge. She was light,
but I couldn’t hold on all night, not with frostnip
and a storm coming in. I called for her and called
for her. No answer on the satellite phone, no idea
if she’d already fallen. So I sawed till it frayed
and gave, with her gift to me, the Swiss army knife.

After they’d medivacked her out in the chopper
and she didn’t recognise me in the hospital in Lukla,
I said ‘Claire, Claire, it’s me, it’s Jamie.’
When she came to, she called me
connard, gros con, ball-less cowardly cunt –
‘I never want to see you again!’ ‘We’re married.’
‘Not any more!’ chucking her ring across the ward.
‘Look what you’ve done – ’ gesturing to the bandages.

I just wanted us to patch things up, you understand –
the sponsors needn’t even know about the breakup.
I said there were only two things keeping us together, sex
and climbing. One of them
was wearing thin, but we still had the other.
She told me to chuck myself down Sale Athée
and see what a fractured skull and six pins
in the fibula and tibia feel like.

I cut her rope. When I walked into the Alpine Bar
and ordered a double Benriach on the rocks
all of the Club Alpin wheeled round to stare at me,
muttering something that sounded like connard.

I rang and rang and said we’d just
do the Greenland expedition
as planned, and she told me to hang myself
with that fucking rope, she’d thought her career
was over. Papers and solicitor’s fees.
The business with the house took months –
she kept telling me cash was running out, she was broke
and her leg still gave her agony, that she wanted
to attempt the new line up Blanc when it healed,
her lawyer was bleeding her dry. I said
she’d take that cut of the house and like it.

Next time I saw her, I ordered a Glenraven,
went up to her, ‘Claire –’ and she gave me a face
like K2, grabbed that bastard Pierre’s arm,
and dragged him out of the door.

Each summer, I’d go back to it – that line
she set. Névrose. Hair-breadth and gearless,
the holds a fingertip or two at best. I’d seen her lead it, fall,
and fall again at the crux on the seventh pitch, dangling
over the void on a tiny cam – until the time she clawed
granite to tussle her way to the top-out.
Her whoop of joy split the wind.

I could knock back beers in a Refuge with lads shouting à sec!
sleep like a boulder, and still be up in the small hours,
climb all day on only a few energy gels
and the contents of my hip flask, and be ready for the summit

or, again and again, Névrose. The toehold,
a nail-edge on a crimp, my balance pitch-perfect, then I’d jump
for the sloper at the crux and plummet. ‘Spider’
Mackintosh and I would pack up our gear, wind downhill,
then slump into the bottoms of our glasses.

I cut that rope. Whenever I hear the wind in a couloir, I hear her cry
as she went over the edge. Christ, I’ve never known a woman
who could lead an ice pitch like that. I was taller than her
by a foot, and she’d look down at me from the brink
laughing: ‘Allez, Jamie, what are we waiting for?’

Breithorn

Lightstruck, I climbed lightheaded.
Bright mountain, broad mountain,

your brow at four thousand above.
My love and I hiked with a lifeline between us,
each braced to halt the other’s fall.

He knelt in the snow of the mountain’s crest
and asked for us to be linked for life.

I was a wild bird, bruised and wary,
and he climbed with me to the highest ridge
over the glacier that shatters and shifts.

Looking east, the torqued blackness
of the Matterhorn and Dent d’Hérens;

turning south and west, the Eagle’s Beak,
Monte Rosa in a bloom of sunlight.
We stood, held in the hands of mountains,

the summit gowned in ice, frost-flowers at our feet,
and we were wedded by sunrise, scarce air, and sky.