Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

I had thought I’d never feel again. It was as if I were back at the school I had hated. An old self-loathing returned, but I pushed my brain to form some answers out of the murk.

      None came.

      Drifting out of the storm, we trench through deep snow until we come to the edge of the loch, its surface frozen beneath a winter blanket. My partner takes a bearing and shouts into my ear that it isn’t far. The buttress above comes into view for a moment as the cloud spins away from its summit.

      We have left the car in the dark, woken early by the wind buffeting it on that empty high mountain road. Groggy with the long journey north from England, we had dressed while still in our seats, fighting like Houdini to pull on boots and salopettes in our confined quarters—neither of us really wanting to venture outside until the last possible moment. The early start has proved useful in the long approach through the deep snowdrifts. With luck it will allow enough time to climb the route.

      We recheck our bearings, wanting to avoid the avalanche-prone slab to the left of the loch, and gain another quick glimpse of the wall when the cloud thins. It is steep and covered in rime ice, which clings to the rock just like ice clings to the inside walls of a freezer. It offers an equivalent security.

      The conditions are far from perfect, but this is Scottish-winter climbing. Here you just climb routes as you find them, not as you’d like to find them. It has been pointed out by a visiting Slovene climber that here in Scotland we ‘ski on the grass and ice-climb on rock’, but at least today the rock looks wintry enough. Stuffing the map away and pulling on goggles, we take the easy option and set off across the loch’s creaking edge.

      I turned the paper over and looked up at the snow, lying thick as a bed on the sill. I had a few minutes left until the examiner was due to return, but I knew from experience that it would take more than time to get these answers right.

      Teachers always said I was lazy, that I lacked concentration or was a slow learner, then went on to label me as having some kind of learning disability. The schools I went to were filled with ‘problem children’ and I was just one more. I remember learning in Biology that the brain has two sides. It came as a bit of a revelation at the time. It seemed to explain why sometimes I felt slow and stupid, one of the school’s stigmatised, remedial kids, while at other times I felt bright and intelligent, capable of producing drawings or solving puzzles that were beyond the others. Most of the time I kept the dark side in the background, concentrating on what I was good at, but at school that wasn’t easy when the narrowly focused world of school subjects gave you almost no way of shining.

      The route looks hard. A tenuous mixed line up a steep wall and arête, it is a classic rock climb in the summer, but now, with a coating of ice, it is one of the hardest climbs on the crag. I visualise the moves, how I’ll link up those rounded horizontal cracks and vertical seams, digging through the wall’s thick winter coat of rime for secret places in which to twist and hook the picks of my axes.

      I’ve wanted this route for a long time, storing in my head every scrap of information I can find. Although I can’t spell the name of the routes, or the corrie we are in, I can list everyone who’s tried them, what else they’ve done and why they failed.

      As I step up to the base, I remember the discouraging words of a climber who has failed on this route twice: ‘You’ll never climb it, there’s a really long reachy move on it—you’re too short.’

      Flicking my picks into the hard cold turf that sprouts in patches on the climb I close my eyes and visualise the route as a puzzle, the pieces jumbled in the snow. I see the first piece and start to climb.

      The examiner opened the door and asked me to stop.

      I looked out of the window feeling sick and empty.

      At school my worst nightmare had been the times tables. The teacher would start in one corner of the classroom and go around, making each child stand up at their desk and say the next figure. As the moment snaked nearer, the blood would drain from my face as my heart beat faster and faster. I would feel hollowed-out and sick. The dark half would scramble any thought as I struggled to calculate an answer. Finally, on shaky legs, I would stand and speak. I always got it wrong. The other kids would laugh as I sat back down, thankful the ordeal was over.

      Totally immersed in the climbing, my brain is powered up and energised, working to its full potential, its limited memory freed from all those confusing hoops it has had to jump through in the real world. Up here everything is real. No numbers. No words. The only calculations are physical, the only questions how to progress and how not to fall off.

      Winter climbing is 10 per cent physical, 90 per cent mental. If you’re good at jigsaws you’ll probably be good at this sort of climbing. It’s simply a frozen puzzle, your tools and crampons torquing and camming the pieces into place—and like a jigsaw, the moves are easy. It’s just finding them that’s hard.

      The examiner picked up the sheets and asked me to come to his office while he marked the papers. Seeing I was pensive he chatted about the storm as we walked through the old Victorian building.

      It wasn’t leaving school with few qualifications that mattered to me or to anyone else; it was leaving with the belief, created by society, that these things really mattered. At sixteen I thought I had been graded for life. The only skill that I knew I possessed was my ability to be creative. This initially manifested itself in painting and drawing, but, like anything that comes easy, I had no way of knowing that this was any kind of skill at all. I found it hard to get people to take me seriously when they found I couldn’t remember my date of birth or the months of the year. I was always fearful that I would be found out, that people would dismiss me as thick or stupid. Yet slowly, as I grew older, I found ways around this by trying to avoid any contact with words or numbers.

      I left home and moved into a squat near the city’s university, and slowly I began to mix with people who could get things right, people I had never met in my remedial world. It was like meeting people from another culture, and yet I found we weren’t that different—and that in some ways I had skills they lacked, or maybe even envied. I slowly learnt that I had to tag abstract words or numbers with images for reference words, and that way could bypass the sludgy part of my brain. My party piece back then was trying to remember all twelve months of the year, and get them in order, something for the life of me I just couldn’t do. It was only at that point that my new acquaintances made me see that this and all the other things that once did matter meant nothing at all. One night at a party someone said my linear brain function was perhaps a sign of dyslexia and maybe I should be tested, just to find out what exactly was wrong with my brain—and that’s how I found myself doing this one final test, wondering if, at nineteen, it no longer mattered.

      I get to the place where the other climbers have failed. Two spaced, flared, horizontal cracks, the gap too wide to span with my axe. I hunker down on my tools and try to solve the problem.

      Hammering my axe into the crack at chest level, I mantle up on it, palming down on its head, straightening my arm, one crampon point scratching near its spike, the other crampon latched around a corner. It feels as if I’m about to do a handstand. I blindly scrape away the thick stubborn hoar with my other axe, searching for a secure home for its pick. There is nothing.

      I think about backing off, about failing, but I’m not sure I can. I imagine the good nuts set in poor icy cracks below and feel committed to the move, as I blindly scrape for something to hang. With my arms cramping, I’m forced to commit to laying away off the rounded arête, the teeth of my pick skittering and skating around until I pull down hard and trust it, wiggling my other axe out as I slowly stand up straight, my body hanging on tenterhooks.

      I try not to shake too much.

      I take a deep breath and look for the next piece.

      The first test paper had comprised a hundred complicated cubes, with four options of how they would look opened out. The other paper had been covered in words and numbers. The boxes were easy and I had wondered if I’d been given this by mistake. Then I had come to the other sheet and the lights had gone out. Feeling like an idiot, well aware I hadn’t done well on the second sheet, I sat and watched