High Marks - a short story

I sat alone in the small white room, watching the snow build on the window sill outside, looking down at the two test papers. I fidgeted with my pencil, aware that time was running out, as the wind rattle across the corrugated roof.

Although this was an exam I sought out, it felt no better than all the others, making me feel small, awkward and stupid. The first one had been easy, but the second had turned my brain into a thick slow glue, the numbers falling from their places, lost upon the page.

Even though the room was cold, I felt feverish with a familiar panic, something I though I’d never feel again. An old self loathing returned as I pushed my brain to form some answers out of the murk. None came.

Drifting out of the storm, we trenched through the deep snow until we came to the edge of the loch, it’s surface frozen deep beneath a winter blanket.

Knowing how useless I am at navigating, Dick took a bearing and shouted into me ear that it wasn’t far.

We’d left the car in the dark, woken early by the wind buffeting it on the empty high mountain road. Groggy with the long journey, we dressed in our seats, fighting like Hudini, to pull boots and saloptettes on in our confined quarters – neither of us really wanted to venture outside until the last possible moment. The early start had proved useful in the long approach through the early season drifts.

As we stood there, we had a quick glimpse of the wall, steep and thickly hoard, as the spindrift and cloud thinned. The conditions were far from perfect, but this was Scotland. Here any condition is a blessing. Dick stuffed the map away and pulling on his goggles, took the easy option, and set off across the lake.

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

It had always been like this. My mother thought I was just lazy, my teachers said I was slow learner, then labelled me as having some kind of ‘learning disability’. The schools I went to were filled with ‘problem children’ and I was just one more problem.

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 schools stigmatised remedial kids, while other times bright and intelligent, capable of producing drawings or solving puzzles that were beyond the other kids.

Most of the time I kept this dark half in the background, concentrating on what I was good at and but at school it’s not easy.

The route looked hard. A tenuous mixed line up the wall and arete of a summer 5.9. I visualised the moves, how I’d link up those rounded breaks and seams, digging through the walls thick winter coat of rime for secret places in which to torque and hook.

I’d wanted this route for a long time. Storing every scrap of information I could find in my head. And although I couldn’t spell the routes name, or the corrie we were in, I could list everyone who’d tried it, what else they’d done and why they failed.

As I stepped up to the base, I remembered the discouraging words of a climber who’d failed on the route twice. ‘You’ll never climb it, it’s huge span – you’re too short’.

Flicking my picks into the hard cold turf I closed my eyes and visualised the route as a puzzle, the pieces jumbled in the snow, I saw the first piece and started climbing.

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 was the times table. 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 it 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 always laugh and I was sit back down thankful the ordeal was over.

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

Don't believe the hype. Winter climbing is 10 percent physical, 90 percent mental. If your good a jigsaws you'd probably be good a mixed climbing. It's simply a frozen puzzle, your tools and crampons tourquing and caming the pieces to fit. 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.

I left school with nothing. My only talent being my imagination, a poor skill in Thatcher’s Britain.

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.

As I grew older this became my party piece. Trying to guess the months of the year. Then once at a party someone said I didn’t appear to be a stupid as I thought, and suggested I find out exactly what was wrong with my brain.

And that’s how I found myself doing one final test. Wondering that at nineteen maybe it no longer mattered.

I get to the place were the other climbers have failed. Two spaced flared, horizontal breaks, the gap too wide to span with my axe. I hunker down on my tools and try to solve the problem. I think back to those times tables and imagine that teacher here.

Hammering my axe into the break at chest level, I mantle up on it, palming down on it’s adze, straightening my arm, one mono point scratching near it’s spike, the other crampon latched around a corner. It feels like I’m about to do a handstand as I blindly scrape away the thick stubborn hoar with my hammer, searching for a secure home for my pick. There is nothing. I can hear the kids laughing at my failure as I think about backing off, but I’m not sure I can. I imagine the good cams 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 arete, wiggling my axe out as I slowly stand up straight, my body hanging on tender hooks.

I try not to shake too much as I taking a deep breath and look for the next piece.

The first test paper comprised of a hundred complicated cubes, with four options of how they would look opened out. The other was covered in words and numbers. The boxes were easy and I wondered if I’d been given this by mistake. Then I came to the other sheet and the lights went out.

Feeling like an idiot, well aware I hadn’t done well on the second sheet, I sat and watched him mark the answers, ticking them of as he went.

Reaching easy ground, easy in comparison to what it took to reach it, I race up a hanging corner forgoing the opportunity of protection in return for some speed. I pop up onto a narrow foot ledge, a turfy escape route into a easier line to my left. I hesitated. Above the wall looks compact and steep. It would be so easy to avoid what waits above. Plenty of possible excuses. The dark. The storm. I look down at Dick and think of the hollowness of giving up now. knowing he doesn’t care as long as I get a move on.

With a Camalot 4 at my feet I boulder out the moves above the ledge until I’m committed. I can see were I’m headed. Across the wall to a ledge on the arete. Sweeping away the white muck as I go, I try not to think about getting pumped as I scratch until I find one good tool placement on round edges, mono points poised on sloppy chicken heads. Matching tools I look down at Dick far below as he tries to stay in balance in the wind, his flapping red jacket barely visible through the wind blown snow. The two ropes arch, plucking questionable cams out, but the big one stays put yet.

The doctor looked up from his marking and removed his glasses.

‘Remarkable, you’ve scored 99 percent in the spatial test. I’ve only ever had one other person score so high. He was a headmaster. As for the other test… I’m afraid you only scored 16 percent’

The overwhelming joy was quickly crushed by the realisation of how much more important the second test was to real life. After all what use is being about to recognised what boxes look like opened out, unless I could find a job in a cardboard box factory.

‘You’re a classic dyslexic’ He said. ‘One side of your brain doesn’t work how it should, so the other half compensates.’

He told me the symptoms of a dyslexia and it the pieces finally fitted.

Lateral thinking gets me below a small ledge, holding my breath on nothing foot holds I tickle it’s shallow frozen turf. The pick bites with a dull, shallow thwack.

With time running out I blindly swap feet, then hang of the one tool as I bring the other across to join it, feeling the dice roll.

I wonder weather they’ll rip when I pull. My brain does some quick calculations and says no. I do. They don't. I'm there.

I mantle up onto the arete. I’m so aware of everything around me. The wind, the darkness, the cold. My body is hot, my brain burning as I suck in the speeding snow. The next thirty feet is unprotected. If I fall I’ll die, but there is no time for melodrama, this is were I have always wanted to be.
I think how strange it is that brain power can get me here, yet it still fails to repeat a telephone number, or spell a word it correctly I has spelt a million times. But I know such details no longer matter. There is no need of words here. With the pieces together I can see the picture, who needs to know it's name.

Hooking my axe into a crack I tap it home, then stacking hammer over axe, pull of the ledge and head into the darkness.

The doctor shows me to the door and hands me a brown envelope containing my results. "Andrew, with a score of 99 percent you should find something you enjoy that involves three dimensional problem solving”. I shake his hand and I say thank you, then walk home through the snow, wondering were such a strange gift will lead me.

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