“Um …” She clears her throat. “Just to trek up to the summit.”
Leanne has told us what to say. She seems to think the Maoists will charge us extra if they think we’re going to be staying in a Western establishment rather than one of the Nepalese-owned hostels.
“You sure about that?” He continues to stare at her.
“Of course. I’m dying to see the view from the top. It’s supposed to be amazing.”
He pushes Daisy’s possessions across the desk towards her then dismisses her with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t speak to Al, Leanne or me, and our documents are processed wordlessly. When we’ve been checked, the two armed men standing either side of the gate take a step back to let us enter the trail.
Daisy grabs my arm the second we’re all through. “Wow.” She pushes her sunglasses onto the top of her head. She has bags under her eyes, and dozens of red blood vessels streak the white around her eyeballs. “That was mental.”
She releases me and links her arm through Shankar’s before striding off up the path. If she notices him flinching at the unwanted physical contact, she doesn’t let on.
The muscles in my thighs burn from weaving my way from left to right and back again as I climb the three thousand steps up the Annapurna mountain. I was expecting actual steps – I think we all were – but these aren’t evenly sized concrete blocks; they’re slabs of rock, dug into the side of the mountain, so uneven and wonky you have to look where you’re placing your feet. They’re the rustic, higgledy-piggledy winding steps of a fairytale. Or a nightmare. With the exception of Al, we all go to a gym back home in London, but running 5K in thirty-three minutes on a treadmill prepares you for this in the same way that jumping in puddles prepares you to swim the English Channel.
It’s 2 p.m. and Shankar is leading the way, leaping from stone to stone, as enthusiastic and energised as he was when we started our trek five hours ago. Daisy and Leanne follow in his steps, both breathing heavily, both swearing whenever they look up and see how many more steps there are to go until we reach the end of the trail. Green mountains striped with brown paddy fields and capped with snowy peaks wrap around us, hiding us from the rest of the world. I have never been anywhere so breathtakingly beautiful or so back-breakingly harsh. We passed donkeys earlier, roped together, stumbling up the steps with huge saddle bags strapped to their backs, their knees buckling, their hooves slipping under the weight of their heavy loads. One of the donkeys was carrying a fridge, strapped on top of its saddle bag like it was the most normal thing in the world. Watching the poor animals climb and stumble, heads down, eyes sad, was more than I could bear. I wanted to set them free and tell their handler that he was cruel for forcing them to live such a miserable life, but I bit my tongue.
Al trails behind me, her face puce, her enormous backpack waving from side to side with each step she takes, the belt undone around her waist, her hands on her hips. Every dozen or so steps she stops, takes a puff of her asthma inhaler and continues on again. If I were Al, I’d ask to slow down or take more breaks, but she’s ox-like in her determination to get to the retreat before nightfall and hasn’t complained once. I hear the puff-puff of her inhaler and stop walking. That’s twice in the last five minutes.
“You okay?”
She shrugs off her backpack then bends forward and grips her knees with her hands. She sucks at the mountain air like a fish on a hook.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Stand upright if you can. Leaning over like that squashes your lungs.” My brother Henry had asthma as a child, so her attack doesn’t faze me. Though the fact that we’re 3,500 metres above sea level and at least five and a half hours away from the nearest hospital does.
Al straightens up, puts her hands on her hips and cranes her chin towards the sky as she continues to gulp in air. Her cheeks are still a violent shade of red, but it’s not them I’m looking at. It’s her lips. They’re pink, not blue. That’s a good sign.
“Nice deep breaths,” I say. “Slowly. Don’t panic. In … and out … in … and out … Relax your shoulders. You’re tensing them because you’re scared. Relax your shoulders and exhale for as long as you can, then a nice deep breath in again.”
I can hear Daisy’s voice in my head as I speak, saying the exact same words to me a couple of months ago when I was in the grip of a panic attack. We were in a crowded cinema, people filling every seat, and it was hot, really hot. We were watching a thriller Daisy wanted to see and each time the main character jumped, I jumped. Each time she saw shadows where there weren’t any I saw them too. As her world grew smaller and more claustrophobic, so did mine, and I became convinced that there wasn’t enough air in the cinema for everyone to breathe, and I had to get out.
“Everything okay, miss?”
Our guide nimbly picks his way back down the mountain towards us, his tiny rucksack strapped to his back. Shankar’s weather-beaten face is as lined as befits a man in his late forties, but he moves like a man twenty years younger.
“She breathe okay?” he asks as he reaches us.
“No. She’s not. I think the altitude might be affecting her asthma. Maybe we should go back down.”
“No!” Leanne says so loudly I jump. I hadn’t realised she and Daisy had joined us too.
“I’m sorry?”
“We … we should carry on,” she says, the base of her neck colouring. “It can’t be much further to the retreat, and they might have a doctor or a nurse there.”
“But if the altitude is making her asthma worse, the best thing for her to do is go down again,” Daisy says.
I nod in agreement. Thousands of people do this trek every year, but occasionally people die. None of us wants to be part of that statistic.
“I still think we should continue to the retreat,” Leanne says. She glances from Al to the steps, as though she’s desperately hoping Ekanta Yatra will magically appear before us. “We’ve come this far. It would be such a shame to give up now. You can make it a little bit further, can’t you, Al? We can take it slowly, take lots of breaks. And like I said, I’m sure there will be someone there who can help.”
Daisy and I exchange a look. Normally, Leanne would be the first to put her best friend’s health before everything and charge down the mountain to get help. And then there’s the fact that she’s disagreeing with Daisy. That never happens.
“Yeah, yeah, we heard you,” I say, “but conjecture isn’t going to magically conjure up a nebuliser, is it? Are there doctors and nurses up there or not?”
Leanne shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably. There are a lot of people there from different professions, and—”
“We’re going back down.” Daisy holds up her hands. “We’re not gambling with Al’s health. Come on.” She gives Leanne a small shove. “Let’s go.”
“No!” Leanne twists sharply to one side and, for one heart-stopping second, I think she’s going to hit Daisy. “You can go back down if you want, but I’m—”
“Could everyone please stop talking about me as if I’m dead, or something!” Al steps out from beside me and holds up her hands. “I am here, you know. Seriously, I appreciate the concern, guys, but no one is going to miss out on the holiday of a lifetime just because I’m a twenty-a-day lard arse with crap lungs and a heavy load.” She pats the roll of flesh that overhangs the waistband of her black combat shorts.
Daisy shakes her head firmly. “Nice speech, but no one loves a dead hero.”
“Fuck off, Dais!” Al laughs then looks at Shankar. “How much further have we got to go? Like, how many more hours?”
He shrugs. “Thirty minutes, maybe forty?”
“All right, then.” Al reaches down for her backpack but Shankar grabs it first. There’s a stand-off