Sunday 14 January 2007

Climbing.

“Come down here right now!” She ignored her father’s calls. Every time they asked her father to ‘deal with her’, he would come to the school and shout at her; and every time, she would ignore him and keep climbing. She didn’t want to come down. She was safe up there, leaving everyone and everything at ground level as she ran across the roof… at least, that was how she thought it should be. The reality was very different. Every time she thought she had succeeded in freeing herself from the worries of the world, somebody - usually her father - would come and shout at her. It wasn’t as if she was doing anything that terrible; she knew she wouldn’t fall. She had been climbing things for as long as she could remember.

I remember a seven year old girl, running from a boy with a dog. He chased her through the park until she climbed up a large tree with spreading branches. He waited at the foot of the tree for an hour, taunting the girl and shouting at her, until he realised that she was long gone. She had climbed across to one of the other trees intertwined with it. She kept climbing through the treetops, long after she could have come down safely, knowing that nobody could get her while she kept away from the ground.

“I’m not kidding, young lady, you get down here right now!” Sighing, she jumped from the art block, to the bench, to the ground. “That’s better. You know I don’t like you climbing things, it’s dangerous! You could hurt yourself so badly. Now come on, we’re going home.” He took her hand and led her to the car, which she entered silently. He shook his head. He worried about her so much, and she kept risking her neck. She only had to be unlucky once…

I remember a nine year old girl, helping her father put the Christmas lights on the roof of their house. He threw her a string of fairy lights, which she caught and wound around the chimney with a smile on her face. “Good girl!” He laughed, clutching the end of the lights as she threw them back. The girl smiled again as she dropped from the edge of the slates into her father’s arms.

“What was it this time? Homework you haven’t done? Kids picking on you? Mean teachers?” The girl frowned at her father.
“No.”
“Well whatever it was, you have to learn to deal with it! You can’t keep avoiding your problems, darling, you’ve got to face it head-on.”
“I know.”
He slumped back in his chair; it was no use. She was going to keep climbing whatever he said. She’d been doing it her whole life, and it hadn’t bothered him at first.

I remember talking to a man. I said, “I wish you wouldn’t encourage her. One of these days she’s going to break her neck up there, and you know she’s starting to climb at school as well. It’s not safe!”
He replied, “You worry too much about her. I trust her completely; she knows what she’s doing and it won’t help for us to stop her. Besides, you have to get used to the idea if you’re going to come rock-climbing with us!”
I remember looking doubtful. “You’ll have a wonderful time”, he assured me. “We’ll both be looking out for you, and I would love for us all to have a shared interest. We never seem to do anything as a family any more.”

After she had gone to her room, he took out the last photo album of them all together, at the beginning of the holiday. She looked so much happier then, he thought. So did he. He took out the photo of his wife, taken hours before she fell.

I remember being strapped in to the harness. I remember him reassuring me. I remember the girl looking excited. We climbed for three hours up a vertical cliff with plenty of handholds. I remember pulling myself up by one, and I remember it crumbling. That’s all I remember.

She entered the house through her window. Her father had never realised that she could get anywhere she wanted from her room without going downstairs, and she did so every night. This night, she had gone back to the park. She had climbed the huge, sprawling tree in the middle of the park and sat in its branches thinking of her mother. Now that she was back, she went to check on her father. He wasn’t in bed, even though it was past 2am. He was downstairs, asleep in his chair, holding the last picture of her mother in his hands. The girl went slowly up to her room.

She didn’t climb again.

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