Rosie Thomas - White

‘Actually, I was hoping …’ Sam tried.

She snapped her bag shut. ‘See you later, Adam. Goodbye … um …’

‘Come on, you know my name.’

Finch was already halfway out of the door.

‘Wait a minute. Look, I’ll be back,’ he called over his shoulder to the wan figure in the bed.

Adam had covered his eyes again with one arm. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he muttered.

Sam ran down the corridor after Finch. Realising that she wasn’t going to shake him off so easily she turned with a flicker of anger and confronted him. ‘Right. So here you are in Kathmandu. What do you want, exactly? I’m busy, I’ve got a job to do.’

‘I want to take you out to dinner. Is that too much to ask?’

‘Did you follow me all the way out here?’

‘Yes. I got here twenty-four hours ago.’

‘Why?’

‘That was how the plane times worked out.’

‘Don’t try to be more of an asshole than you are already. Why did you follow me?’

Sam hesitated. ‘Look, I know it seems flaky. I met you, we talked, I wanted to see you again. But it isn’t as weird as that makes it sound. You talked about Everest and I loved the way it lit you up. My life is at a kind of static point right now, so taking off out of it for a while seemed a good idea and I thought, why not here? I’ve never seen Kathmandu before.’

‘That’s not what you told me.’ She did look faintly mollified now.

‘Why would you have told me where you were staying, if I hadn’t claimed some familiarity with the place?’ Candour, he thought, was probably the best defence.

They were standing in an angle of the main stairway. Rix, Mark Mason and Sandy Jackson came up the stairs from the lobby, and each of them gave Sam a friendly greeting as they passed.

‘Hey doc, how’s the patient?’ Sandy enquired over his shoulder.

‘He’ll live.’ She returned her full attention to Sam. ‘You know everyone.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, sort of. How about tonight?’

Finch sighed. Her hair was tied with what looked like a bootlace and he wanted to slide his finger underneath and hook it off.

‘Listen …’

‘Sam.’

‘Yes. I do remember. Listen carefully, Sam, and save yourself from any more impulses to do with me. One, I am responsible for the health care of a total of twenty people on this expedition. Two, I am here to climb as high as I can go on Everest. I don’t expect to make the summit, necessarily, but I want to do myself justice. I can’t afford it, but I have saved up the money to pay for this. I’ve made a lot of physical and mental preparations. I don’t have room for anything else in my life right now. Nothing .’

She’s saying the same things as those guys last night, Sam thought. Climbers. Peak pervs. Monofocal mountain morons. But even so his longing to untie Finch’s bootlace, to put his fingertip to the corner of her mouth, to hear her voice in his ear, never even wavered. Her steeliness only impressed him and made him want to be with her even more than before. He held up his hands and smiled. ‘It’s only dinner. Two glasses of wine and a curry, dessert optional. It’s not an addition to your workload or an emotional commitment.’

She studied him briefly, working out whether he was threatening or harmless, then put her hand briefly on his arm. ‘No. No thanks, Sam.’

She smiled in a finite way and removed her hand again. Sam was not especially pleased with his way with women, but it did strike him that even in circumstances as unusual as these he had never been turned down with quite such cool certainty. There was more here, he thought, than immediately met the eye.

‘Wait. Do you want to do something genuinely helpful?’ she added.

‘Yes.’

‘Then sit down for a while with Adam Vries. I have to check over my supplies because they’ve just come in from the airport.’

‘I’ll make sure he’s okay.’

‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head and walked away down the stairs. Sam followed her with his eyes, remembering her long legs under the ski parka.

Adam had shifted his position. ‘Huh. I shoved the thing up my butthole. How does she know I’m not going to shit before I puke?’

‘Brilliant medical judgement.’

‘Mh. I wasn’t going to have her sticking her index finger up there.’

‘No. Although, I don’t know …’

Adam managed the ghost of a smile. ‘You too? Forget it. Used to know a brutal med student like that at college. The Fridge, we used to call her.’

‘Is that so?’

Sam settled himself in a chair and rested his feet on another. He could see through a chink between the shutters to the top of a tree and the side walls of some houses. On a balcony level with his sightline an old woman was peeling vegetables over a plastic bowl. A plump baby played at her feet until a young woman, hardly more than a girl, came out and swept him up in her arms. The baby’s thumb plugged into his mouth at once and his head settled on her shoulder. The mother cupped the back of it with her hand, stroking his hair. Sam watched until she had carried the infant inside, then sat for a while with unfocused eyes, wondering what Finch would look like with a baby.

Whatever Adam might think she wasn’t a fridge. Something in her eyes, the turn of her head and hips, made him certain of that. When he looked again he saw that Adam had drifted into a doze. He would have liked to slip away and maybe go out for a beer with Rix and the others, but he was afraid that if he moved he would wake him up. He leaned his head against the chair back and let his own eyes fall shut.

Last night had made him think of his father.

Michael would talk about mountains in the same way, using the very same words. He remembered conversations overheard.

Michael and Mary outside the tent on summer nights when he was supposed to be asleep, and the timbre of his father’s voice in response to Mary’s questions why , and what for – and the always unspoken but equally ever-present words within his own head, danger and falling and dead –

‘I need that reality. If I don’t climb, my grip on reality fades and I feel like nothing exists.’

‘Not me? Or your boy?’

‘Of course. But not in the same way, Mary. Nothing’s the same as the way you feel up there with the rock and space. I’m no good with words, you know that. I can’t explain the need for it, the being more alive than alive. But it’s always there, once you’ve tasted it.’

‘So am I always here, so is Sammy. We don’t want anything to happen to you.’

Sam remembered that he would squirm in his sleeping bag, trying to bury his head, to bring his shoulders up around his ears so that he couldn’t hear any more. But the voices came anyway, as much from within his head as outside it.

Michael would give his warm, reassuring laugh. ‘Nothing will happen. It’s concentration. If you keep your mind on it you don’t make mistakes.’

Sam thought of Michael as he was now, moving painfully around the old house, all alone, with only the television freak shows for company. When I get back, he promised the dim room, I’ll see more of him. Maybe it’s time to move the business a bit closer to home. If there still is a business when I’m through with this caper.

An hour later Adam woke up again. ‘I’ve got a thirst like the desert,’ he whispered.

Sam passed him the water, but held it so that he could only take a sip or two at a time. ‘Otherwise you’ll spew it straight up again.’

‘Thanks, nurse.’ He rubbed his cracked mouth with the back of his hand.

Sam went into the bathroom and found his face-cloth, rinsed it in cool water and handed it to him.