The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  "How's school?" Fiona asked her brother.

  "Och, getting on," he said. "Getting on." He had been promoted to Principal Teacher in English the previous autumn. His sister always wanted to know how things were going at the high school, but he usually felt reluctant to talk about work around her and Fergus. He wasn't sure why, and he suspected he probably wouldn't like acknowledging the reason, if he ever did work it out. He was even more chary about revealing he was writing down some of the stories he'd told the kids over the years, hoping to publish them some day. He was worried people might think he was trying to out-do Rory, or — worse still — think he hoped to use him as a contact, an easy way in.

  "No, I tell a lie," Fergus admitted. "Here's the English bit. Well, American, anyway." He sighed, then looked round. "Talking about English-speaking furriners, McHoan; you still all right for the International next Saturday?"

  "Oh aye," Kenneth nodded. They were meant to be going to the Scotland-England rugby game in a week's time. "Who's driving.

  "Umm, thought we'd take the Morgan, actually."

  "Oh God, Fergus, must we? I'm not sure I can find my bobblehat."

  "Oh, come on man," Fergus chuckled. Thought we'd try a new route: down to Kintyre; across to Arran, Lochranza to Brodick; Land Ardrossan and then the A71 to the A of the N. Strikes and power cuts permitting, of course."

  "Fergus," Kenneth said, putting one hand to his brow. "It sounds enormously complicated." He refused to rise to the bait about strikes and power cuts. He guessed that "A of the N" meant Athens of the North. "Are you sure the Lochranza ferry runs outside the high season, anyway?"

  Fergus looked troubled, stood up. "Oh, it must, mustn't it? Well, I think it does."

  "Might be best to check."

  "Righty-oh, will do."

  "Anyway, couldn't we take the Rover?" Kenneth wasn't keen on the Morgan; its stiff ride hurt his back and gave him a headache, and Fergus drove too fast in the ancient open-top. Maybe it was the sight of all that British Racing Green paint and the leather strap across the bonnet. The Rover, 3.5 though it was, seemed to calm Fergus a little.

  "Oh, come on man, where's your sense of occasion?" Fergus chided. The hotel won't let us into the car park if we show up in the Rover,"

  "Oh God," Kenneth sighed, and squeezed his sister's waist. "The Morgan it is then." he looked at Fiona. Those green eyes sparkling. "I'm getting old, sis. Do you think I'm getting old?"

  "Positively ancient, Ken."

  "Thanks. How're the twins?"

  "Oh, glowing."

  "Still taking them to Windscale for their hols then, are you?"

  "Ha! Oh, Ken, you're still so comparatively witty."

  "Have you tried switching it on?" Fergus suggested, squatting on the floor in front of the dishwasher again. His voice echoed inside the machine as he tried to stick his head inside amongst the racks.

  "Don't be catty, Ferg," Fiona told him. She smiled at her brother. "Haven't seen young Rory out here for a while, and he never calls us; he okay?"

  "Still in that squat in Camden, last we heard, living off his ill-gotten sub-continental gains."

  "A squat?" Fergus said, words muffled. "Thought he made a packet on that… travel book thingy."

  "He did," Ken nodded.

  "About India, wasn't it?"

  "Yep."

  "Ferg," Fiona said, exasperated. "You bought the book, remember?"

  "Of course I remember," Fergus said, reaching into the dishwasher to fiddle with something. "Just haven't read it, that's all. Who needs to read a book to find out about India? Just go to bloody Bradford… What's he doing living in a squat?

  Ken ground his teeth for a second, looking appraisingly at Fergus's ample rear. He shrugged. "He just likes living with the people there. He's a social animal, Ferg."

  "Have to be a bloody animal to live in a squat," Fergus muttered, echoing.

  "Hoi, don't be horrible about my brother," Fiona said, and tapped Fergus's backside with her foot.

  Fergus glanced quickly round and glared at her, his plump, slightly reddened face suddenly grim. Kenneth felt his sister stiffen next to him. Then Fergus gave a little wavering smile, and with a quiet grunt turned back to the opened machine and its instruction booklet. Fiona relaxed again.

  Kenneth wondered if things were really all right with the couple. He thought he sensed a tension between them sometimes, and a couple of years earlier, not long after the twins had been born, he'd thought Fergus and Fiona had seemed distinctly cold towards each other. He had worried for them, and he and Mary had discussed it, wondering what might have caused this unhappiness, and if there was anything they could do (they had decided there wasn't, not unless they were asked). Still, he had tried broaching the subject with Fergus once, after a dinner party, while they nursed whiskies in the conservatory of the old Urvill house and watched the lights of the navigation buoys and lighthouses scattered around and through the Sound of Jura as they winked on and off.

  Fergus hadn't wanted to talk. Mary had had no more success with Fiona. And anyway it had all seemed to come gradually right again.

  Maybe I'm just jealous, he thought to himself, as Fiona pulled away from him and went to the big new Aga, sitting squat, cream and gleaming against one wall of whitewashed stone. She put a hand over part of the cooker's surface, gauging the heat. The silence in the kitchen went on.

  Kenneth had never given Freud much credence; mainly because he had looked as honestly into himself as he could, found much that was not to his taste, found a little that was even just plain bad, but nothing much that fitted with what Freud's teachings said he ought to find. Still, he wondered if he did resent Fergus, at least partly because he had taken his sister away, made her his.

  Well, you never knew, he supposed. Maybe everybody's theories were right, maybe the whole world and every person, and all their relationships within it were utterly bound up with one another in an intricate, entangled web of cause and effect and underlying motive and hidden principle. Maybe all the philosophers and all the psychologists and all the theoreticians were right… but he wasn't entirely sure that any of it made much difference.

  "Mary and the kids with you?" Fiona said, turning from the Aga to look at him.

  "Taking in the view from the battlements," Kenneth told her.

  "Good," she nodded. She glanced at her husband. "We're getting an observatory, did Ferg tell you?"

  "No." He looked, surprised, at the other man, who didn't turn round. "No, I didn't know. You mean a… a telescope; an astronomical observatory?"

  "Bloody astronomically expensive," Fergus said, voice echoing in the dishwasher.

  "Yes," Fiona said. "So Ferg can spend his nights star-gazing." Mrs Urvill looked at her husband, still squatting in front of the opened machine, with an expression Kenneth thought might have been scorn.

  "What's that, my dear?" Fergus asked, looking over at his wife, an open, innocent expression on his face.

  "Nothing," his wife said brightly, voice oddly high.

  "Hmm," Fergus adjusted something inside the dishwasher, scratched above his ear with his pipe again. "Jolly good."

  Kenneth looked away then, to the windows, where the rain spattered and ran.

  * * *

  Conceived in a howling gale, Verity was born — howling — in one, too. She came into the world a month before she was due, one windy evening in August 1970, by the shores of Loch Awe — a birth-place whose title, Prentice at least had always thought, could hardly have been more apt.

  Her mother and father had been staying at Fergus and Fiona Urvill's house in Gallanach for the previous two weeks, on holiday from their Edinburgh home. For the last night of their holiday the young couple decided to visit a hotel at Kilchrenan, an hour's drive away to the north east up the side of the loch. They borrowed Fergus's Rover to make the journey. The bulging Charlotte had that week developed a craving for salmon, and duly dined on salmon steaks, preceded by strips of smoked salmon and followed by smoked salmon mou
sse, which she chose in preference to a sweet. She complained of indigestion.

  Well — if in Charlotte's case rather monotonously — fed, they began the return journey. The evening was dull, and although there was no rain a strong warm wind was blowing, waving the tops of the trees and stroking lines of white breakers up the length of the narrow loch. The gale increased to storm force as they drove south west into it, down the single-track road on the western shore.

  The narrow road was littered with fallen branches; it was probably one of those that produced the puncture.

  And so, while her husband struggled with over-enthusiastically-tightened wheel-nuts, Charlotte went into labour.

  Barely half an hour later a stunning blue flash — the colour of the moon and brighter than the sun — burst over the scene from the hill above.

  The noise was thunderous.

  Charlotte screamed.

  Above, on the hillside, stood the lattice forms of two electricity pylons, straddling the heather like grey gigantic skeletons wreathed in darkness. The black wind howled and there was another blinding flash and a titanic concussion; a line of violet incandescence split the night mid-way between the two huge pylons as energy short-circuited through the air between the wind-whipped power-lines.

  Charlotte screamed again, and the child was born.

  * * *

  The tail end of Hurricane Verity passed over the British Isles that night; it had been born in the doldrums, cut its teeth flooding bits of the Bahamas, flirted with the coast of North Carolina, and then swept off across the North Atlantic, gradually losing energy; a brief encounter with the angle between a cold front and a warm front just off Ireland refreshed it unexpectedly, and it trashed numerous pleasure boats, rattled a few acres of windows, played frisbee with a multitude of slates and broke many a bough as it passed over Scotland.

  The stretch of the national electricity grid down the western shore of Loch Awe towards Gallanach was one of the storm's more spectacular victims, and Charlotte always claimed that it was right on the stroke of the final massive arc between the thrashing cables — which tripped circuit breakers in the grid to the north and plunged all of Gallanach into darkness — that her child (wrinkled, blood-flecked and salmon pink) finally slid out into her father's hands.

  They named her Verity, after the hurricane.

  * * *

  When she was eighteen, Fergus Urvill gave his niece Verity a very special present made from one of the exhibits in the museum attached to his glass factory. For the child born to the blaze and crack of human lightning, her entry into this world marked by the same brilliant arcs of short-circuited energy that plunged Gallanach into powerless gloom, he had a necklace fashioned which was made from fulgurite.

  Fulgurite is a natural glass, like another of the museum's minor treasures, obsidian. But while obsidian is born purely of the earth, formed in the baking heat and furious pressure of volcanic eruptions, fulgurite is of the earth and of the air, too; it is made when lightning strikes unconsolidated sand, and fuses it, vitrifies it in long, zig-zag tubes. God's glass, Hamish McHoan called it.

  The Gallanach Glass Works Museum contained a collection of tubular fulgurites, plucked from the sands of Syria by Walter Urvill — Fergus's grandfather — on a visit there in 1890, and transported back to Scotland with great care and not a little luck so that they arrived intact. One of the crinkled, gnarled little tubes was over a metre long; another just a fraction shorter. Fergus had the smaller of the two sent to a jeweller in Edinburgh, to be broken, the pieces graded and ground and polished and threaded together like dark little pearls, to create a unique necklace for his niece.

  He presented the result to the lightning-child during ner birthday party, at her parents" house in Merchiston, in Edinburgh, in August 1988 (it was, perhaps unfittingly, a perfectly fine, warm, clear and calm night, on that anniversary). Fergus — always a rather dour, prematurely elderly figure, characterised by those collar-contacting jowls — improved immensely in the eyes of both Kenneth and Prentice McHoan with that single, elegant, and rather unexpectedly poetic act.

  Verity had the grace to accept the necklace with a particular gratitude that acknowledged the thought behind the gift, and the taste to make it a regular, even habitual, part of her wardrobe.

  The upholstery of Fergus's Rover was cleansed of the debris and stains associated with Verity's birth and the car continued to serve the Urvill family for another five years or so until 1975, when it was traded in (for what Prentice would thereafter maintain was a scandalously small sum, considering that the thing ought to have been preserved as some sort of internationally-recognised shrine to Beauty) for an Aston Martin DB6.

  It was once Prentice's dream, shortly after he'd passed his driving test, to find that old Rover — lying in a field somewhere, perhaps — and to buy it; to own the car his beloved had been born in; to drive it and to cherish it. He realised, of course, that it had almost certainly been scrapped long before, but that had not prevented him harbouring the perhaps irrational notion that somehow a little of its recycled metal must have found its way into at least one of the three old bangers he'd owned.

  The defiantly thunderous and lightning-fast Aston Martin DB6 was the car that Fergus and Fiona Urvill were travelling in on the night they were involved in a crash at Achnaba, just south of Lochgair, in 1980.

  CHAPTER 5

  Right, now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but… I was in bed with my Aunty Janice.

  Well, actually, in one sense it's exactly as bad as it sounds because when I say I was in bed with her, I don't mean I was in bed with her because we'd gone hill-walking together and been caught out in a snow storm and eventually found shelter in some exceptionally well-appointed bothy that just so happened to have only one bed and we had to get into it together to keep warm; nothing like that. We were fucking.

  But (phew), she wasn't a real aunt; not a blood relation, not even an aunt by marriage. Janice Rae had been Uncle Rory's girlfriend, and I just called her Aunty. However she had been my father's brother's lover, and — perhaps more embarrassingly — it had been her daughter, Marion, who had initiated me into the whole sticky, smelly, noisy, potentially fatal, potentially natal, sordid and sublime act in the first place, on the dry, cracked green leather surface of the garaged Lagonda Rapide Saloon's back seat, one hot and musty summer's afternoon, eight years earlier. (We brought the house down.) Blame Lewis.

  * * *

  The voice has gone quiet, deep, almost gravelly now. A light — harsh and white — shines from one side, so that his lean, cleanshaven face looks hard and angular, even cruel.

  "I have this door in my house," he breathes, then pauses. "It's a very special door." He looks to one side. The way he does it, you get the urge to look that way too, but you don't. "Do you know what I keep on the other side of that door?" He raises one eyebrow, but there is silence in the darkness. You wait. "Behind the door I keep… " (He leans forward now, towards us, somehow confiding and threatening together.) "… the rest of the Universe." A wintery smile, and if you were prone to that sort of thing, your skin might crawl.

  There is a little nervous laughter. He waits patiently for it to subside. "I have a special name for that door," he says, eyes narrowing. "Do you know what I call it?" (This is the dangerous bit, where it could all end in disaster, but he holds the pause, and the silence is eloquent.) "I call it… " he pauses again, looks into the darkness to one side, then towards the light again."… my Front Door."

  There is more laughter, like relief. He smiles for the first time; a thin, unimpressed expression. "Perhaps you have one like it, in your house." He steps back, the lights go up, and he makes a sort of half nod, half bow. "My name is Lewis McHoan. Good night."

  He walks off to loud applause; cheers, even.

  I look from the television to my flatmates.

  "Aye, he's no bad," Gav says, pulling open another can of cider.

  "He's okay," agrees Norris, and drinks from his. "That last bit
was a bit weird but. He really your brother, aye?"

  I glare at the screen as the MC appears, signing off. Lewis had been the last act. "Yes." I say, taking my empty Export can between both hands, and crushing it. "Yes, he is." The credits roll. I throw the squashed can at the litter bin, but it misses, hits the wall, rolls across the floor and dribbles flat beer onto the threadbare carpet.

  * * *

  I stood in the bookshop, reading the story about the magic dressing gown, tears in my eyes.

  A hand tapped me on the shoulder. I put the book down quickly on the pile and hauled my hanky from my pocket, bringing it up to my face as I turned. I blew my nose.

  "Come on, slow-coach," mum said, smiling down at me. Her gaze flicked to the book-pile. "Reading your dad's stories at last, eh? What's brought this on?" Not waiting for an answer, she put one arm round my shoulders and guided me out onto the Departures concourse. "Come on; let's go and wish your Uncle Rory bon voyage, shall we?"

  "All right," I said, sniffing.

  Mum frowned down. "Prentice, have you been crying?"

  "No!" I said vehemently, shaking my head and stuffing the hanky back into my trousers. Mum just smiled. I felt the tears try to come again, prickling behind my eyes.

  "Prentice!" Uncle Rory said, picking me up. "God, you're getting big. I'll soon not be able to lift you."

  Good, I thought; this is embarrassing. I hugged him, as much to get my face out of sight as to express any regret at his leaving.

  "Aye," I heard my mum saying. "I think we had a wee tear or two, there."

  "We didn't, did we?" Uncle Rory laughed, bringing me back round in front of him, holding me there. His big face, entirely framed by curly auburn hair, looked happy and kindly. I wanted to hit him and my mum, or maybe burst into tears and hug them; either would do. "Ah, dinnae greet, laddy," he laughed, lapsing into the working-class Scots I had grown ashamed of because my beautiful cousins Diana and Helen didn't speak like that, and those coarse Watt children did.