Kahn

Scott learned to climb in a fifteenth century church in Bristol. Even after everything – the smashed body, the intrusive dreams, Morgan’s tearful departure – even after he’d thrown his climbing shoes away and given up on it altogether, it still gave him a kind of aching pleasure to stand in the doorway of the church and watch people climb. The building itself had been converted to house four, huge climbing walls. The climbers bouldered between the sandstone arches and scaled the overhangs to arrive in the rafters, face-to-face with a stained-glass window. The colours from the glass splashed across the floor and caught the clouds of chalk dust and the faces of people ascending upwards, laced with ropes. Morgan once joked that it was the closest an atheist could ever get to God.

Even from the beginning he had loved the transcendent, slightly ridiculous spectacle of it: the animal grace of the experienced climbers juxtaposed against the clumsy attempts of new arrivals to outwit gravity, the constant flow of bodies upwards and downwards. He loved the language too: carabiner, belay, draw, daisy chain, hexes.

Outside was better though. He and Morgan spent most of their first summer together climbing the gorge, high on adrenaline and the excitement of a new relationship. They were thrilled by the slippery steepness of the limestone and the threatening mudflats that waited below, daring them to miss a footing and fall. Throughout August their arms and shoulders changed shape, and muscle grew as they learnt to pull their weight in and press their bodies up against the rock to keep their centre of gravity as close to it as possible. All summer they climbed up towards the sky.

In late September Morgan found a hole in the fence up by the Camera Obscura. The path was overgrown and shadowed by trees, drawing a muddy trail downwards towards the mouth of a cave. During the inquest and the police interviews it was referred to as Burwall’s Cave; back then they had just known it as Kahn’s. The mossy entrance was painted with symbols and decorated with prayer flags and candle stubs. Inside were sleeping bags and billycans watched over by statues of Krishna and Siddhartha, old berries and discarded beer bottles.

Following the path around the cave led to a tunnel of low branches and bracken and, finally, out into the light. An exposed ledge looked out across the river Avon, offering the first foothold up towards the sheerest part of the gorge. Scott had been ecstatic to find a place apparently so unknown by other climbers that they spent several days there, sharing chunks of bread and tins of tuna and watching the buzzards circle the updrafts above them.

They knew of Kahn before they saw him. They had heard stories about him from climbers who had seen him from a distance, further down the gorge. They had passed the cave several times to discover a fire smouldering in the opening. Once, Morgan had suggested they hang around so they could see what he was like for themselves, but it had been hot and Scott had wanted to get home.

It was the last evening in September when they discovered a series of handholds leading diagonally out from their ledge, and they stayed later than usual to tentatively explore their new route. The rock was damp and slippery from the morning’s rain. Morgan noticed him first; a tall, long-haired figure scaling a stretch of rock far above them, silhouetted by the sinking sun as it edged behind the gorge. She had seemed flustered, Scott would recall later; tapping him repeatedly and pointing in the figure’s direction. He had shielded his eyes from the light and looked up, just in time to catch a glimpse of a spider-like figure moving across the rocks before disappearing behind the lip of an overhang.

Everything that followed the next moment was terrible: the echo of a body breaking against the rocks, Morgan’s screams, the realisation of what had happened. Their memories of the moment itself were later hashed over so many times that they seemed to Scott to have merged completely to produce a singular, sublime image: a man’s figure, illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, falling head-first past their ledge and down into the gorge. His hair glowed as it caught the warmth of the last light and his eyes fixed momentarily on theirs as his flailing hands grasped at the air in front of them. Then he was gone.