A Climber of Things

Even from before he could remember, he was a known climber of things. It didn’t matter what it was- a tree, a wall, a house-, if there was a position elevated above the plane of the ordinary he had to get there. And if he had a couple of drinks in him, then all the better. His mother recalls the story of how he had disappeared from the house one afternoon when he was four. She had left him on the swirling carpet of the lounge room with a ten liter bucket of Lego’s while she tended to the dishes and getting a start on dinner, but when she stuck her head around the corner, the floor was strewn with coloured blocks and a half-finished house, but there was no Tommy to be seen. The empty bucket stood on its mouth in front of the open back door. She rushed outside hoping to see him playing in the garden stood, and nearly fainted when a tiny voice called to her from above. A toddler’s face smiled down on her from over the rim of the guttering, and laughed at the meeting of her eyes with his. She blinked at the shock, as if this action would resolve her vision into something more comprehensible.

“What are you doing up there?” She didn’t yell, or even infantilize her voice, but stated it as if she would to any other adult. The laugh resounded; she snapped back to her senses. She gasped, covered her mouth and took a couple of quick steps backwards. “Oh my god. Stay right there! Move away from the edge, honey.”

She couldn’t figure out how exactly he had gotten up there, only that he had succeeded in his goal. And from that moment forward the doors of the house were locked whenever she was too busy to keep her eyes fixed upon him. Even so, she would come into the room to find him on top of the piano, amongst the silver on top of the cabinet, on top of the wardrobe, halfway up the inside of the chimney covered in soot, and a couple of times even up in the roof, the manhole cover tossed aside pointedly as if it were responsible for his transgressions. It seemed that his compunction to climb was driven more than just a simple desire to be above everyone else, but by the illicitness of the act itself.

Of course he did from time to time fall. One cannot climb for so long without the odd failure, or learning experience. However not once in all his years of climbing did he break a bone (teeth don’t count); he always seemed to bounce. His body had an almost supernatural talent in healing itself, or disguising its injuries to the outside world. By the time he was 12 he had already been winded that many times that he would calmly and patiently wait for the moment to come, which it inevitably did, when he could breath once more. No panic, no fight, no force. He simply waited it out.

As a teen his parents paid for rock-climbing and abseiling classes at the local gym, and as an adult he worked in construction for a while, then tree-lopping, then as a high-rise window washer, but he tired of each task quickly, as though the harnesses and safety equipment nullified the thrill of the climb. Gymnasiums and climbing centers wouldn’t let him climb without the safety of ropes and helmets, so he turned to free-climbing. He joined a club, and together with three or four other guys they would head out every other weekend to the mountains or one of the old abandoned quarries that littered the bush near town. There they would put their skills and cunning and daring to the test.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Whenever he went out on the town, or to a friend’s barbeque he would invariably find himself up some tree or scaffold or flagpole. He would be called upon to climb up and in through a storey window whenever one of his friends managed to lock themselves out of their apartment. Neighborhood kids would call on him to help retrieve lost balls from their roofs, or else injure themselves trying to emulate his feats.

Some people cook, others write, and still others smoke. Climbing was his vice, his drug of choice. It was his thing, his compulsion. It was setting himself a goal that seemed impossible to others, and going ahead and actually doing it.

He’d seen men dressed in Lycra climbing the matrices of windows and steel on the news- the tallest and most famous buildings in the world being climbed without ropes or wires or helmets. He would sit agape at the sight of these dazzling men on the television screen, with their slender limbs spread out and clinging to the walls like a daddy-long-legs, chalk bag swinging like dog’s bollocks, and imagine him in their stead. Sure there was the fleeting fame and adulation, but the thing that drove them was the sheer thrill of it, the racing heart, the muscles contracted to snapping, the burning fear threatening to overcome and the overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment upon getting to the top alive.

He knew that one day he would join them. It was his reason. He started training- shedding weight, conditioning his muscles, increasing his flexibility. He started out on friend’s apartment blocks. He avoided the easy structures like drainpipes and antenna leads and concentrated on the sheer surfaces like brickwork, windows and the frames in which they sat.