by Iain Banks
I closed my eyes and looked down, ashamed not just for Lewis but for my whole family. So this was the cutting edge of British alternative humour. Finishing with a song. Good grief.
shall draw a veil over this performance, but let history record that this pretended paean of praise for Mrs Thatcher — comparing her to various foods, with only a hint of sarcasm most of the way through ('as English as Blueberry pie') — ended with the couplet "Maggie, you're a Spanish omelette, like an egg you just can't be beaten, Maggie, you're all the food that I eat… twenty-four hours after it's eaten."
The puzzled patrons of Randan's, who had been worriedly thinking that perhaps Lewis wasn't quite so right-on after all, and had had his head turned by a sniff of fame and a glimpse of the flexible stuff, suddenly realised their man was still okay (phew), and it had all been an elaborate joke (ha!) as well as a knowing dig at more conventional comedians (nudge), and so duly erupted with applause (hurrah!).
I breathed a sigh of relief that at last it was all over — barring encores, of course — clapped lightly, looking at my watch as I did so. A glance revealed that the besieged bar was under further pressure now that the attacking forces had been reinforced following the end of Lewis's act. I suspected that for all my scorn I might yet be grateful for Gav's rugbying skills that evening, not to mention his Neanderthal build (perhaps that was why he found rugby so attractive; he was a throw-back!)
I looked at my watch again, wondering if Lewis would be unduly insulted, and Gav overly disappointed, if we didn't go back-stage to see the great performer afterwards. Things had gone so appallingly well that Lewis would undoubtedly be on a high and hence unbearable.
Perhaps I could plead a headache, if that wasn't too un-butch for Gav to accept. ('Ach, have another few beers and a whisky or two and it'll soon go away, ya big poof," would be the sort of reply my flat-mate would favour, as I knew to my cost.)
"Excuse me, are you Prentice? Prentice McHoan?"
I'd noticed the woman sidling through the crowd in my direction a few seconds earlier, but paid no real attention, assuming I just happened to be on her route.
"Yes?" I said, frowning. I thought I recognised her. She was short, maybe early forties; curly brown hair and a round, attractive face that looked run-in without being worn out. I coveted her leather jacket immediately, but it wouldn't have fitted me. A glint in her eyes could have been animal lust but was more likely to be contact lenses. I tried to remember where I'd seen her before.
"Janice Rae," she said, offering her hand. "Remember?"
"Aunty Janice!" I said, shaking her hand. I suspected I was blushing. "Of course; you used to go out with Uncle Rory. I'm sorry I knew I recognised you. Of course. Aunt Janice."
She smiled, "Yeah, Aunt Janice. How are you? What are you doing?"
"Fine," I told her. "At Uni; last year. History. And yourself?"
"Oh, keeping all right," she said. "How are your parents, are they well?"
"Fine. Just great," I nodded. I looked round to see if Gav was on his way back; he wasn't. "They're fine. Umm… Grandma Margot died last month, but apart from that —»
"Oh no!" she said. "Margot? Oh, I'm sorry."
"Yes," I said. "Yes, well, we all were."
"I feel terrible; if only I'd kept in touch… Do you think it would be all right if I, if I wrote… to your mum and dad?"
"Oh, sure; yeah; fine. They'd be delighted."
"Even if I'd just made the funeral… " she said, downcast.
"Yes… Big turn-out. Went… not with a whimper." I nodded at the empty stage. "Lewis couldn't make it, but everybody else was there."
Her eyes widened; it was like a light went on beneath her skin, then started to go out even as she said, "Rory, was he —?"
"Oh," I said, shaking my hand quickly in front of her, as though rubbing something embarrassing out on an invisible blackboard. "No; not Uncle Rory."
"Oh," she said, looking down at her glass. "No."
"'Fraid we haven't heard anything for, well, years." I hesitated "Don't suppose he ever got in touch with you, did he?"
She was still looking at her glass. She shook her head. "No; there's been nothing. No word."
I nodded my head, looked around for Gav again. Janice Rae was still inspecting her glass. Broke or not I'd have offered to buy her another drink, but her glass was full. I was aware that I was sucking in my lips, trapping them between my teeth. This is something I do when I'm feeling awkward. I wished she would say something more or just go away.
"I always felt," she said, looking up at last, "that your dad knew more than he was letting on."
I looked into her bright eyes. "Did you?"
"Yes. I wondered if Rory was still in touch with him, somehow."
"Well, I don't know," I said. I shrugged. "He does still talk about him as though… " I had been going to say as though he were still alive, but that might have hurt her. "As though he knows where Uncle Rory is."
She looked thoughtful. "That was the way I felt, when I was down there, after Rory… left. There was one time when… " She shook her head again. "I thought he was going to tell me how he knew; let me in on his secret, but… well, at any rate, he never did." She smiled at me. "And how is Lochgair? Your parents still in that big house?"
"Still there," I confirmed, catching sight of Gav making his way through the scrum of bodies, concentrating on the two full beer glasses in front of him.
Janice Rae looked warm and happy for a moment, and her eyes narrowed a little, her gaze shifting away to one side. "It was a good place," she said softly. "I have a lot of happy memories of that house."
"I guess we all do."
* * *
Uncle Rory had met Janice Rae at some literary do in Glasgow. She was ten years older than him, a librarian, divorced, and had a ten-year-old daughter called Marion. She lived with her mother, who looked after Marion while Aunt Janice was at work. I could remember the two of them coming to the house for the first time. Uncle Rory had brought various women to the house before; I'd ended up calling them all aunty, and I was calling Janice that by the end of the first weekend they spent at Lochgair.
Despite the fact that Marion was a girl and a couple of years older than me, I got on well enough with her. Lewis — also two years older than me — was going through an awkward stage during which he wasn't sure whether to treat girls with scorn and contempt, or sweeties. James, born the year after me, liked what and who I liked, so he liked Marion. She became one of The Rabble, the generic and roughly affectionate term my father applied to the various kids he would tell stories to on a Family Sunday.
A Family Sunday was one when either the McHoans or the Urvills played host to the other family, plus that of Bob and Louise Watt. Aunt Louise had been born a McHoan; her father was the brother of Matthew, my paternal grandfather and husband of Grandma Margot, she of the heart that broke only after she was safely dead. Bob Watt was brother of Lachlan, whose taunting of Uncle Fergus concerning the matter of hiding inside a medieval lavatory led to the unfortunate incident with the display case and resulted in Lachlan becoming the man with four eyes, but who did not wear glasses.
Bob Watt never turned up for Family Sundays, though Aunt Louise did, often wearing thick make-up and sometimes dark glasses. Sometimes the bruises showed through, all the same. Now and again there'd be something she didn't even try to hide, and I can recall at least two occasions when she turned up with her arm in a sling. I didn't think very much about this at the time, just assuming that my Aunt Louise was somehow more fragile than the average person, or perhaps excessively clumsy.
It was Lewis who eventually told me that Bob Watt beat up his wife. I didn't believe him at first, but Lewis was adamant. I puzzled over this for a while, but at length just accepted it as one of those inexplicable things that other people did — like going to the opera or watching gardening programmes — which seemed crazy to oneself but made perfect sense to the individuals concerned. Maybe, I thought, it was a Watt family
tradition, just as Family Sundays and at least one person in each generation of our family managing the Gallanach Glass Works seemed to be two of our traditions.
Mum and Aunt Janice became friends; she and dad were much closer in age to Janice than Rory, and they were parents, too, so perhaps it was no surprise they got on. Whatever; after Uncle Rory disappeared, Aunt Janice and Marion still came down to the house every now and again. It was the year after Rory vanished that Marion, then about fifteen, got me into the garage where the car was. We'd been out on our bikes, riding round some of the forestry tracks one hot and dusty September day; everybody else was in Gallanach, shopping, or — in Lewis's case — playing football.
Marion Rae had the same curly brown hair her mother did. She had a round, healthy-looking face which even I could see was quite pretty, and was about the same height as I was, though a little heavier (I was of that age and body-type concerning which adults help to ease the difficult journey through the age of puberty by making remarks about disappearing if you turned sideways, and running around in the shower to get wet). We'd seen some old burnt-out wreck of a car abandoned in a ditch, up in the hills; I'd said something about the sports car under the covers in the courtyard garage back at the house; Marion wanted to see it.
I still maintain I was seduced, but I suppose I was inquisitive as well. Girls were still less interesting to me than models of the Millennium Falcon and my Scalextric set, but I had conducted a couple of masturbatory experiments which had set me thinking, and when Marion, exploring the warm, dim, tarpaulin-green gloom of the old car with me, said, Phew she was hot, wasn't I? and started unbuttoning her blouse, I didn't say No, or run away, or suggest we get out of the stuffy garage.
Instead I blew on her.
Well, she was sweaty, and I could see moisture on the top of her chest, above the little white bra she was wearing, trickling between the white swells of her breasts. She seemed to appreciate the gesture, and lay back and closed her eyes.
I remember her asking if I wasn't hot, and feeling my leg, and her hand running up to my thigh, then there was some silly line like, "Oh, what's this?" as she felt inside my shorts, expressing what even then I thought was probably fake surprise at what she discovered there. My own words were no less inane, but something — either the heat of the moment or just retrospective embarrassment — seems to have wiped them and most of the subsequent relevant details from my memory. Still, I recall being pleased that everything seemed to fit, and work as well, and if our (now I think about it, ridiculously fast) mutual thrusts hadn't unsettled the car on its blocks, that sense of having successfully risen to the occasion and worked out what to do with relatively little guidance would have been my abiding impression of the proceedings.
Instead, just as I was both coming and going (going; "Wow!), and Marion was making some extremely interesting noises, the car collapsed under us.
It shuddered and fell onto the concrete floor of the garage with an apocalyptic crash. We'd shaken it off its blocks. Some bizarre sense of symmetry had made me insist that we should not lie across the back seat, but that I should instead squat on the transmission tunnel, with Marion half on the rear seat, and half on me. As a result, the Rapide fell backwards off its wooden supports and its boot rammed into a load of drums and cans stored behind it, crushing them in turn against an old Welsh dresser that had been consigned to the garage years earlier; this — loaded up with tins and tools and spare parts and junk until it was top heavy — proceeded to over-balance. It leant, creaking, towards the car, and — although it did not actually fall over — distributed most of its load of paint, spanners, plugs, bolts, spare bulbs, bits of trim, hammers, wrenches and assorted boxes and tins all over the tarpaulin-covered boot, rear window and roof of the Lagonda.
The noise was appalling, and seemed to go on forever; I was dead still, my orgasm — more quality than quantity — completed, and my mouth hanging open as the cacophony reverberated through the garage, the car and my body. Dust filled the car's interior; Marion sneezed mightily and almost squeezed me out of her. Something heavy hit the rear window, and it went white all over, crazed into a micro-jigsaw of tiny glass fragments.
Eventually the noise stopped, and I was about to suggest that we ran away very soon and to some considerable distance before anybody discovered what had happened, when Marion grabbed both my buttocks with a grip like steel, stuck her panting, sweat-streaked face against mine, and snarled those words with which I — in common with most men, I suspect — would eventually become relatively familiar, in similar, if rather less dramatic situations: "Don't Stop."
It seemed only right to comply, but my mind wasn't really on what I was doing. Another precedent, perhaps.
Marion seemed to have some sort of fit; it coincided with — or perhaps was the cause of — the rear window falling in. It showered us both with little jagged lumps of glass, green under the tarpaulin-light, like dull emeralds. We both stayed like that for a bit, breathing heavily and brushing crystalline fragments out of each other's hair and laughing nervously, then started the delicate business of disengaging and trying to dress in the back of a tarpaulin-covered car full of gravelly glass.
We completed dressing outside the car, in the garage, shaking bits of glass out of our clothes as we did so. I had the presence of mind to put these fragments back into the car, and spread the glass more evenly over the seat, removing the shard-shadow of Marion from the cracked green leather (there was, I noticed with a little pride and considerable horror, a small stain there — probably more Marion than me, to be honest — but there was nothing I could do about that beyond wiping it with my hanky). We closed the garage, grabbed our bikes and headed for the hills.
It was a week before dad discovered the disaster scene in the garage. He never did work it out.
Lewis threatened to tell him, but that was only because I'd been stupid enough to blab to my brother, and then been incensed to discover he'd screwed Marion too, twice; on the two previous weekends she'd been down. I immediately threatened to tell the police because Lewis was older than she was and that made it Statue-Tory Rape (I'd heard of this on TV); he said if I did that he'd tell dad about the car… and so there we were, me barely a teenager and already arguing over a woman with my brother.
* * *
"It was good to meet you again, Janice," Lewis said, shaking Aunt Janice's hand, then taking her elbow in the other hand, kissing her on the cheek. "You should get in touch with Mary and Ken again; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you."
"I will," she said, smiling, then fastened the collar of her glove-leather jacket.
Lewis turned to me. "Bro; sure we can't tempt you?"
"Positive," I said. "Got a lot of work to do. Enjoy yourselves."
"Aw, come on, ya big poof," Gav said, breathing beer. He put one arm round my shoulders and hugged. From the amount of pressure involved, I gathered he was trying to fold me in half. 'Sno even wan yet!"
"Yes, Gavin, the night is yet senile; but I have to go. You have fun, all right?"
"Aye, okay."
"Taxi!" shouted Lewis.
We were standing on Byres Road, outside Randan's, which would be closing soon. Lewis, some guy he'd been friendly with at Uni, a girl who may or may not have been Lewis's girlfriend, and Gav had all decided to head for some bar in the centre of town. I had demurred, as had Janice.
"Prentice; see you at the weekend." Lewis hesitated as he pulled the taxi door open for the maybe-girlfriend, then came up to me, hugged me. "Good to see you, little brother."
"Yeah; you take care," I said, patting his back. "All the best."
"Thanks."
They left in the taxi; Janice and I walked up Byres Road to where she'd left her car. It started to rain. "Maybe I will take that lift," I told her.
"Good," she said. She pulled a small umbrella from her shoulder bag, opened it as the rain came on heavier. She handed it to me. "Here; you'd better hold this; you're taller." She took my arm and we had to lean towards
each other to keep even our heads dry under the little flimsy umbrella.
She smelled of Obsession and smoke. She, Gav and I had gone to meet Lewis, holding court in the small dressing room. Later we had all gone to the downstairs bar, then Lewis had announced he wanted to keep on drinking after they called time. Janice had had a couple of fizzy waters, and seemed totally sober, so I reckoned it was safe to accept a lift.
"You don't really like your brother that much, do you?" she asked.
"Yes, I do," I told her. The traffic hissed by, heading up Byres Road. "He just… annoys me sometimes."
"I thought you seemed a bit reluctant when he suggested going back home this weekend."
I shrugged. "Oh, that's not Lewis; that's dad. We aren't speaking."
"Not speaking?" She sounded surprised; maybe amused. "Why not?"
"Religious differences," I said. It had become my stock reply.
"Oh dear." We turned onto Ruthven Street, away from the bright shop fronts and traffic. "Still a bit further to go," she said.
"Where are you parked?"
"Athole Gardens."
"Really? Not a good place to live if you had a lisp."
She laughed, squeezed my arm.
Hello, I thought. I switched the umbrella from one hand to the other and put my arm lightly round her waist. "I hope I'm not taking you out of your way. I mean, I could walk. It isn't far."
"No problem, Prentice," she said, and put her arm round my waist. Hmm. I thought. She gave a small laugh. "You were always thoughtful." But somehow, the way she said it, I thought, No, she's just being friendly.
We got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back. She put both hands on the wheel, then turned to me. "Listen, I've got some… some papers Rory left with me. I did mean to send them to your father, but to be honest I lost track of them, and then didn't find them again until mum died and I was clearing stuff out… I don't suppose it's anything… you know, that the family needs, is it?"
I scratched my head. "Dad has all Rory's papers, I think."