There’s an ibex out by the cliff, ahead of me. There’s a couple actually, hiding in the shadow of the rock. Husband and wife. Well a pair anyway, I’m unsure how traditional the ibex are. I heard them before I saw them, the throaty whine of the male echoed first up the rock, and then across the valley towards me. The brown-grey coats of the animals blend with the limestone cliff behind them and I have to squint to see them. The male, his horns twisting behind his head like a devil, is hopping up, effortlessly, onto a ledge three times his size. His wife follows suit then looks back, as if searching for something. 

I’ve always loved these animals. Mountain goats, or mountain deer, or whatever they are. I’m not a biologist. I grew up a climber, so I relate to them, in a way. I used to love watching the ibex, I’d try to replicate how they climbed. The effortlessness of it. Not too much climbing in Dublin but my brother and sister used to take me here, to the south of Spain, when I was a kid. They taught me the basics and soon I was top-roping, multi-pitching. I wanted to impress them, my brother especially. Climbing really became my whole personality. I was good. To be honest I was more than good, I was at one point looking to be the best trad climber in the world. Not that it’s about that at all, I didn’t give a shite about the records or the competitions or any of that. I just liked to climb. Sending a route clean, or managing to flash one after a day filled with falling. The feeling of rock under my fingers. There was nothing like it. There is nothing like it. 

I haven’t been here, to El Chorro, since I was a teenager. I’m thirty-eight now. Fuck knows how that happened. It actually looks pretty similar. Time has somehow not found this little haven in the hills. The hostel I’m in is nice but there’s a rake of people here, smelly hippies finding themselves, playing shite psytrance at all hours. Van-living flat earthers who think not washing their hair gives them a personality. Maybe I’ve just aged, there’s a new model of climber out and I’m the old brand. I’ve come up this mountain for a bit of solace, anyway. I’m not good with crowds, with people. It’s just me and the ibex up here. 

I used to come here with my siblings. I said that already. We all grew up close, but when I was about twelve my sister had a kid and moved to New Zealand, so it was just me and my brother then. People told me he had issues but I couldn’t see them. I always looked up to him, and even when he stopped climbing he was still my idol. I remember being a bit too young to understand, and him bending a spoon and slapping his forearm. Even after years away from climbing the veins still popped out of his arms, the blood throbbing through his forearms, waiting to get back on the wall. 

I kept climbing, I guess using it as a way to ignore everything else in my life, and soon I was a recognisable face on the scene. I find it baffling how much the scene has changed since then, although maybe I’m just annoyed they don’t recognise me. I really was someone, once, and these guys just look straight through me. All that pity bullshit. I don’t need anyone’s pity. But I do deserve some respect. Like oh, you’ve watched Free Solo? I used to climb with Alex. He would ask me for tips. Not that they’d believe me. Not that it matters.

I moved out to Chamonix, in the Alps, before I finished school. Lived in between there and El Chorro. Who needs their Leaving Cert when they’ve been called the next best climber in the world, right? There was a glacier there, you could work as a ski guide in the winter and a climbing instructor in the summer. Paradise. I say ‘was’ because the glacier’s melted now. You can still go there, but it’s not the same, looking at something that was once this powerful, beautiful thing, and staring at its shell.

The first ibex, the husband, is back. He’s popped his head around the corner, checking on his partner. She’s still looking into the bush, and I can see why now. A little troop of smaller ibex are trotting out of the cover of an olive tree and, one at a time, hopping up the rock after their parents. Seeing this little family of climbers makes me miss those early days with my siblings. The last one, a little baby of a thing, slows as it approaches and looks up at the rock, towering above, too high to climb. I want to pick the poor thing up and put him on the ledge, but I know I can’t do that. 

Not long before the glacier melted, I was home from France, at my brother’s gaff in Stoneybatter. He was dealing by this point, and this man, Daithí, came round to see him. He’d been the guy that had gotten my brother into drugs, and I guess the guy he worked for. I can’t really remember what happened. I remember my brother leaving with a big duffle bag, saying he’d be back in a day or two, and not to worry. Daithí clapped a hand on my shoulder, said he’d look after me, and said it would be grand. I was nineteen, but I’d really done very little with my life except climb, so I was very innocent. He kept feeding me hash  until I felt like I was melting into the sofa. I felt sick but didn’t want to be a dryshite so I kept taking it when offered. 

We started watching Top Gear. This guy then, Daithí, began smoking something else from a little glass pipe, I don’t know what. He got angry when I said I didn’t want any. I was awkward then, antisocial. I didn’t mean to be, I just was. I still am, to be honest. I’d probably be diagnosed with something if I took the tests. He stood up, kept asking what my problem was, why I wasn’t normal. Did I think I was a big man, because I had that article about me in the Irish Times and that article in Men’s Health? My brother had them pinned up on the wall. I’d smoked so much hash by this point I felt like my head was in a cloud, like Daithí was yelling at me in slow motion. 

Like I said, I don’t remember much. Just fragments. The vein in his neck bulging under his swallow tattoo. His little, piggy eyes. His big, swollen knuckles. I heard what happened through the papers, and through a friend of a friend who knew Daithí. Apparently he just flipped. Saw red, he said in court, whatever the fuck that means. Even after I was unconscious he didn’t stop hitting me. He hit me until he couldn’t lift his fists anymore, then began stomping on my head, his big spotless Timberlands darkening with my blood. My brother found me, about forty hours later. The way I was lying, sort of on top of one arm, cut the blood flow off, which is why, so I was told, I lost that arm.

Daithí panicked once he realised the state I was in; he fled to Spain but it was during the whole Hutch-Kinahan war so they extradited him assuming it was related. Apparently they found him walking down the motorway, barefoot and mumbling to himself. He tried to pull the insanity card, fair enough to be honest the fucking psycho, but it didn’t take. He got seven years of which he served four and a half. He’s out now. I hear he’s found God. 

I was in a coma for three weeks, I lost a limb, and I get more or less constant migraines. Oh, and I’m blind in one eye now. The doctors say the migraines and the pain in my stump where my forearm and hand used to be is psychosomatic, which is an enormously unhelpful thing to say. Surely all pain is psychosomatic? 

I tried for a while to keep climbing, and even with just one hand I could manage okay, I could still send a six or even seven A at the Wall or Gravity without too much bother, once I got the hang of it. Real climbing, outdoor climbing, is harder. I can’t belay anyone, even with a GriGri, and the unpredictability of a cliff causes too many problems.

And anyway, with the migraines I can’t climb for long, I often have to lie down, and the pain if I exert myself is unbearable. More than that, it just isn’t the same. I know how good I had been. Could have been. Climbing now with losers like the gang at this hostel, having to ask one of them to help me into my harness, to tie my knots for me, I never thought of myself as arrogant, but it’s not something I can do easily. Watching Alex and the rest of them just blow up, become superstars and I’m what, living in a new build in Carlow town, living off the dole and getting stoned all day? It’s okay. I don’t mean to moan. I don’t need to climb even, it’s nice just to be here, in the mountains, away from it all. Nature. Silence. The ibex.

The little ibex is trying a different route, but it’s not working either. The male stares at his partner, the angry father annoyed they are behind schedule. The patient mother ignores him, staring down at her youngest and willing him up to her. One of the other smaller goats is peeking round the rock now too.

My brother died of an overdose while I was still in hospital. He didn’t leave a note or anything, so we never found out if it was an accident or not. People assumed suicide, out of guilt for me. I don’t know, to be honest. Daithí was at the funeral. My sister didn’t want him there, but my brother told me once that he thought anyone had a right to mourn the dead regardless, so I said he could come. He kept his sunglasses on the whole time and didn’t come to speak to me in the wheelchair. 

It’s actually very green here, at the moment. Mid-April. The locals are saying they keep getting lost, the terrain is unrecognisable. It could almost be the Wicklow mountains it’s so full of life. That’s something. Just when you think we’ve killed anything that can  grow, you see Earth pushing back, finding life out of nothing. It was snowing in Grenada two weeks ago. I don’t know much about the climate really, aside from knowing we’ve destroyed most of it, but I know for every glacier melted in Chamonix, for every destroyed, polluted piece of land in Ireland, for every one-armed climber reaching for nothing but his forties, there is always something out there, worth looking at. A family of endangered ibex, pushing through challenges, overcoming obstacles. Living.

The young goat has turned around, given himself a bigger run up. Springing along in a little up-and-down gallop, he leaps like a child dressed as Batman and manages to clear the rock, just about. Scampers up the rest of it and along to his mother, who turns and leads him to the others, all making their way up the cliff, to endless more impossible climbs that he will have to face. But he’s with his family and he’s where he was born to be, and his size and his fears don’t matter anymore.