The lights of the Bamburgh golf club winked through a fringe of grass and thistles silhouetted against the afterglow like an advert for wallpaper. The sea went grey, the islands black: from its square white tower at the top of the bay the light began its sweep. Another light answered it promptly from the south. Every time I drifted off to sleep Sankey groaned and shifted restlessly, rocking the van on its suspension and waking me up again. We had the doors open a crack. This admitted a chilly air, and the sound of the stones grinding together in the tide. Cars lit up the interior with their headlights; the lighthouse sent in its beams.
In between sleep and waking I dreamed road numbers, M62, M6, A65 and signs: WELCOME TO OLDHAM, HOME OF THE TUBULAR BANDAGE. I was seventeen before I jumped in the sea for the first time. I had that peculiar ugly surprise you get when the experience fails to fit your expectations. My arms and legs were all over the place. I was upside down. I would be battered, smoothed off into the limbless potato shape of a thalidomide baby. I dreamed without warning and completely the gentle rise and fall, the sudden sunny dips and lifts, the white bridges and broad embankments of the roads of summer –
DANGER, OIL ON BEACH.
By eight o’clock the next morning the sun was already quite strong, baking alike the eastern walls of Bamburgh Castle and the roofs of the peeling beach huts below the coast road. I walked down to the sea through yarrow-like white cloisonné brooches scattered in the grass. There I found Sankey squatting moodily by a tidal pool. ‘Saving energy, kid,’ he said. He was washing his lock-knife and frying pan. The blade of the knife flashed under the cloudy water like a fish. Later, when I remembered that summer, it was always through glimpses like this, as a kind of sleepless daze presided over by the smell of waves or flowers, fried food or perfume. I was embalmed in it like a photo in clear plastic, along with Sankey. I wish I had gone out with him more often. But he was killed bouldering on the rocks behind his cottage two or three weeks after we came back from Northumberland.
Excerpt From: M. John Harrison. “Climbers: A Novel”