The Grain Store had been a silo until 2009, and the climbing centre kept the name and the concrete. Kit liked the cold in the stairwell, the smell of rubber and chalk dust, and Thursdays, when the wall was quiet and the fans were turned down.
On the last Thursday in August she stood under route fourteen with her hands already chalked.
“Again?” Ade called from the desk. He had his feet up on the crate of hire shoes, a mug balanced on one knee.
“Again.”
He checked the clock on the wall. “You’ve got forty minutes. They’re stripping the west bay at nine tomorrow.”
She knew. Everyone knew. The whole bay was coming down for the autumn reset, and route fourteen would go with it, and the poster by the front door, with 7a printed under the photo, would be out of date by Monday.
She climbed.
The first four metres were easy, wide ledges, almost a joke. Then the wall leaned back and the holds shrank to the width of two fingers and she had to think about her feet. She had done this part a hundred times. Her left hand went to the crimp. Her right foot came up, toes precise. She pressed her hip into the wall and reached.
Her fingers found the sloper and slid off it.
She came down in three jumps, landed badly, and sat on the mat with her forearms burning.
“That’s four,” Ade said.
“I can count.”
He came over with the mug. He was nineteen, he set the routes on Tuesdays, and he had a way of standing with his weight on one leg that made him look as though he had all the time in the world. He looked up at the sloper, then at her, and said nothing.
That was the thing. He always said nothing at that exact moment.
“Say it,” she said.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’re not saying.”
He drank his tea. “You’ll get it. You’re close.”
She was not close. She had been not close since April.
She went to the water fountain and came back along the desk, and Ade was on the phone, half turned away, talking to Ruth in the office about the reset. She heard her own name and stopped behind the pillar, because she was sixteen and because that is what you do.
“…no, the sloper on fourteen. The top one. I set it for Jamie’s span, that was the whole point of the move, and then I never moved it down.” A pause. “I know. Three months. I kept meaning to. It’s on the poster, and Kit’s been on it since April, and I thought, if I change the hold the grade drops to 6b and the poster’s wrong, and—” He laughed at himself, badly. “Yeah. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”
Kit stood behind the pillar with her chalk bag in her hand.
The fans turned. Somewhere above, a bolt clicked as the metal cooled.
She walked out and stood in front of him. He put the phone down slowly.
“How far down?” she said.
“What?”
“The hold. How far down should it be?”
He looked at his shoes. “Fifteen centimetres. Maybe twenty.”
“And you left it there so the poster would be right.”
“Kit—”
“Get the ladder.”
He got the ladder. Ruth came out of the office and watched from the doorway with her arms folded, and said nothing, which was Ruth’s way of saying a great deal. Ade climbed, unclipped the sloper, cleaned the old chalk off the threads with his thumb, and bolted it back fifteen centimetres lower. The torque wrench made a small, flat sound.
“Ready,” he said.
She climbed.
The easy part went by. The crimp, the hip, the reach. Her fingers closed on the sloper and it was simply there, a good hold, generous, and her right hand came up to the top edge before she had time to be afraid. Four seconds, perhaps five. She pulled over the lip and sat on the ledge with her legs hanging.
Below her the gym was very quiet. Ade stood at the bottom of the ladder. Ruth was still in the doorway.
Kit looked at her hands. Five months of Thursdays, and the move had taken her five seconds. She had wanted it so badly that she had built something out of not being able to do it: the girl who tried, the girl who was almost there. Now the wall had handed her the hold, and there was nothing underneath the wanting.
She came down.
At the desk she took the marker from the tin and turned the routesetter’s board around. It was a whiteboard with the week’s jobs on it and a corner that said SPANS in Ade’s handwriting. She wrote: KIT, 16, APEX 196. Then she put the cap back on the pen and dropped it in the tin.
Ade read it. “196?”
“From the floor to the top of my reach. That’s the number. Set the next ones to that.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s fair.”
“Sunday,” she said. “The west bay. I’ll help strip it.”
“Sunday.”
Outside, the chip stall stood under the streetlight with its hatch up, and the rain had started, the fine kind that gets into your collar and stays. They ate chips out of paper with too much salt on them and did not talk about the wall.
The poster stayed up until Monday. Then the new routes went in, and nobody printed them on anything.
