The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  "Aw Christ!" he heard Lachlan Watt say, body arching. Fiona shuddered, her voice almost a squeal as she took a series of sudden, deep in-rushing breaths, and buried her head in the hollow between Lachlan Watt's shoulder and neck.

  * * *

  Fergus let the little door down without making a noise.

  He felt very cold, and he had pissed himself. The urine was warm around his balls and tepid down his leg, but it was cold at his knees. He knelt there in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the subsiding passion in the room below, then swivelled silently and with even greater care than before, and feeling far more sober, moved back towards the thin, escaping light at the far end of the chill, cramped roof space.

  CHAPTER 11

  If the year of our folly 1990 had started inauspiciously for me, then the Fates, Lady Luck, Lord Chance, God, Life, Evolution — whoever or whatever — immediately thereafter set about the business of proving that the entangled disasters distinguishing the year's first few days were but a mild and modest prelude to the more thorough-going catastrophes planned for the weeks and months ahead… and this with a rapidity and even an apparent relish which was impressive — if also bowel-looseningly terrifying — to behold.

  Gav and my Aunt Janice got on like a house on fire, a combined location and fate I occasionally wished on them as I lay awake listening to the sounds of their love-making, a pastime I sometimes suspected I shared with people in a large part of the surrounding community, not to say northern Europe.

  I had made the mistake of volunteering to sleep on the couch in the living room on the nights that Janice stayed at our flat; this offer was made with what I thought was obvious sarcasm one evening while Gav and Norris were attempting to develop a technique for cooking poppadoms in the microwave. They were having an intense and appropriately heated discussion on the problems of cold-spots (as evinced by the fact that their first attempts came out looking like braille roundels), and on the unfortunate instability of three poppadoms balanced together — caused not so much by the jerk they received when the turntable started up as by their movements while they cooked and swelled — but eventually my flatmates settled on the concept of standing the things up individually on the glass turntable, and so instigated what they termed a "brain-storming session" in an attempt to find a suitable support mechanism. (I suppressed the urge to point out that the chances of two such patently zephyr-grade minds producing anything remotely resembling a storm was roughly equivalent to the likelihood of somebody called Cohen landing a pork scratching concession in Mecca during Ramadan.)

  "An alligator clip with the chrome bits removed."

  "Naw; still metal."

  "Maybe we could shield it."

  "Na; has to be plastic. Yer non thermosetting stuff, for preference."

  "Well, look, Gav," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I only overhang the couch by a foot or so at each end; why don't I attempt to curl up there when you and Janice are in residence, if not flagrante, in the bedroom?"

  "Eh?" Gav said, swivelling that thick neck of his to look at me, his massive brows furrowing. He scratched at one rugby-shirt shrouded armpit, then nodded. "Aw; aye." He looked pleased. "Thanks very much, Prentice; aye, that'd be grand." He turned back to the microwave.

  "Maybe we could suspend them from this bit in the middle with a length of thread," Norris grunted, sticking his head almost right inside the appliance. Norris, still clad in his white lab coat, was one of those medical students whom fate has seemingly marked out to spend the bulk of their studies and initial training suffering from quite stupendous hangovers incurred through the intake of near-fatal levels of alcohol the night before, and their subsequent professional careers sternly finger-wagging at any member of the general public who dares to consume over the course of a week what they themselves had been perfectly happy to sink during the average evening.

  "I mean, don't let the fact I'm the longest serving flat-dweller put you off; the last thing I want to do is embarrass you, Gav," I said (just a tad tetchily).

  "Na, it's all right, Prentice; ta," Gav said, then crouched down by Norris and squinted into the lit interior of the microwave. "Nowhere to attach it," he told Norris. "Anyway; wouldnae turn, would it?"

  They both looked thoughtful, heads side by side at the open oven door, while I wondered what the chances were of both heads fitting — and jamming — inside and the door safety-catch somehow short-circuiting.

  "Na," Norris said. "We're looking at some form of support from below, know what ah mean? Come on, Gav, you're the engineer…»

  "I mean, that old duvet's bound to cover most of the important parts of my body, and the chances of the pilot on the fire blowing out again and gassing me in my sleep can't really be that high," I said.

  "Hmm," Gav said. He straightened, then bent forward and tapped at the white plastic strip on the kitchen window ledge which retained the cheaply horrid secondary double-glazing the flat's owners had fitted.

  "Just a block of wood, maybe," Norris said.

  "Get hot," Gav said, looking more closely at the white plastic strip. "Depending on how much water there is in the wood; could warp. Still think plastic's your best bet."

  "After all, Gav, I can just stay up till your drinking pals have decided to head home, or Norris's card school chums finally drag themselves away, or crash out and snore on the Richter scale, whatever; the fun rarely extends beyond three or four o'clock in the morning… why, that would leave me a good four or five hours" sleep before an early lecture."

  "Aye, that's great, Prentice," Gav said, still closely inspecting the window sill. Then he stood up suddenly and snapped his fingers.

  "Got it!'he said.

  What, I thought? Had my tone of reason in the face of monstrosity finally registered? But no.

  "Blu-tack!"

  "What?"

  "Blu-tack!"

  "Blu-tack?"

  "Aye; Blu-tack. You know: Blu-tack!"

  Norris thought about this. Then said excitedly. "Aye; Blu-tack!" "Blu-tack!" Gav said again, looking wide-eyed and pleased with himself.

  "The very thing!" Norris nodded vigorously.

  I shook my head, quitting the kitchen doorway for the comparative sanity of the dark and empty hallway. "You crack the Bollinger," I muttered. "I'll just phone the Nobel Prize Committee and tell them their search is over for another year."

  "Blu-tack, ya beauty!" I heard from the white-glowing crucible of cutting-edge technological advancement that our humble kitchen had become.

  * * *

  "You mean you haven't read them all?"

  "I went off the idea," I said. I was sitting in what had effectively become my boudoir; our living room. Aunt Janice seemed to prefer staying here with Gavin to travelling out to Crow Road most nights.

  Gav and Janice sat on the couch, loosely attired in dressing gowns and watching a video.

  I had been sitting at the table housed in the living room bay window, trying to write a paper for a tutorial the next day, but Gavin and Janice had chosen to punctuate their highly audible coupling sessions (in what the more tenacious core-areas of my long-term memory still sporadically insisted had once been my bedroom) with an almost equally noisy episode of tortilla chip eating. The corny raucousness which ensued of course meant that the television volume had to be turned up to window-shaking levels so that the happy couple could savour the exquisitely enunciated phrasing of Arnold Schwarzenneger's lines over the noise of their munching.

  I had admitted defeat on the subject of the links between agricultural and industrial revolution and British Imperialism, and sat down to watch the video. Perhaps appropriately, given the inflammatory nature of the effect Gav and Janice seemed to have on each other's glands, it was called Red Heat.

  "Oh," I'd said. "A Hollywood movie about two cops who don't get along at first but are thrown together on a case involving drugs, foreigners, lots of fights and guns and which ends up with them respecting each other and winning. Sheech." I shook my head. "Makes
you wonder where these script-writer guys get their weird and zany ideas from, doesn't it?"

  Gav had nodded in agreement, without taking his eyes off the screen. Janice Rae had smiled over at me, her hair fetchingly disarrayed, her cheeks flushed. "Oh yes, Prentice," she'd said. "What did you think of Rory's work, in that folder?"

  Hence the exchange above.

  Janice looked back at the telly and stretched one leg out over Gavin's lap. I glanced over, thinking that she had much better legs than a woman of her age deserved. Come to that, she had much better legs than a man of Gav's mental age deserved.

  "So you haven't found any hints about what it was Rory had hidden in there?" she said.

  "I've no idea what he wanted to hide," I said, wishing that Janice would hide a little more of her legs.

  I was uncomfortable talking about the poems and Rory's papers; the bag lost on the train coming back from Lochgair at the start of the year had stayed lost, and — stuck with just the memory of the half-finished stuff that Janice had given me originally — I'd given up on any idea I'd ever had of trying to rescue Uncle Rory's name from artistic oblivion, or discovering some great revelation in the texts. Still, it haunted me. Even now, months later, I had dreams about reading a book that ended half-way through, or watching a film which ended abruptly, screen whiting-out… Usually I woke breathless, imagining there was a scarf — shining white silk looped in a half-twist — tightening round my neck.

  "It was something he'd seen, I think." Janice watched the distant screen. «Something…» she said slowly, pulling her dressing gown closed. "Something… over-seen, if you know what I mean."

  "Vaguely," I said. I watched Gavin's hand move — apparently unconsciously, though of course with Gav that could still mean it was fully willed — to Janice's polyester-and-cotton covered thigh. "Something," (I suggested, watching this,) "seen voyeuristically, perhaps?"

  "Mmm," Janice nodded. Her right hand went up to Gav's short, brownish hair, and started to play with it, twirling it round her fingers. "He put it in… whatever he was working on." She nodded. "Something he'd seen, or somebody had seen; whatever. Some big secret."

  "Really?" I said, Gavin's hand rubbed up and down on Janice's lap. Gav's face gave no sign he was aware of doing this. I pondered the possibility that the lad possessed some dinosaur-like secondary brain which was controlling the movements of his hand. Palaeo-biological precedent dictated such an organ be housed in Gavin's ample rear, and have responsibility for his lower limbs — not to say urges — rather than his arms, but then one never knew, and I reckoned Gavin's modest forebrain — doubtless fully occupied with the post-modernist sub-texts and tertiary structuralist imagery of Red Heat — could probably do with all the help it could get. "Really?" I repeated.

  "Mmm,'Janice nodded. "So he said."

  She bit her lip. Gavin had a look of concentration on his face now, as though two parts of his brain were attempting the tricky and little-practised operation of communicating with each other.

  "Something about — " Janice moved her hips, and seemed to catch her breath." — the castle." She clutched at Gav's hair.

  I looked at her. "The castle?" I said. But too late.

  Perhaps lent the final impetus necessary for successful reception by the proximity of the area of stimulus to that of cognition, this hair-pulling signal finally seemed to awaken Gavin to the perception that there might be something else going on in his immediate area other than the video, undeniably captivating though it was. He looked round, first at his hand, then at Janice, who was smiling radiantly at him, and finally at me. He grinned guiltily.

  He yawned, glanced at Janice again. "Bit tired," he said to her, yawning unconvincingly once more. "Fancy goin" to —?"

  "What" Janice said brightly, slapping her hand down on Gavin's bulky shoulder," — a good idea!"

  "Tell us how it ends, eh Prentice?" Gav said, nodding back at the television as he was half hauled out of the room by Aunt Janice, en route to the land of nod after a lengthy detour through the territories of bonk.

  "With you going 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh! " I muttered to the closed door. I glared at the screen. "'How it ends, " I muttered to myself. "It's a video, you cretin!"

  * * *

  I returned to the changes in British society required to bring about the Empire on which the light of reason rarely shone. It was going to be a long night, as I also had to finish an already over-due essay on Swedish expansion in tne seventeentn century (it would have to be a goodish one, too; an earlier remark — made in an unguarded moment during a methodically boring tutorial — ascribing Swedish territorial gains in the Baltic to the invention of the Smorgasbord with its take-what-you-want ethic, had not endeared me to the professor concerned; nor had my subsequent discourse on the innate frivolity of the Swedes, despite what I thought was the irrefutable argument that no nation capable of giving a Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger could possibly be accused of lacking a sense of humour. Pity it was actually the Norwegians.

  I remembered a joke about Kissinger ('no; fucking her.) and found myself listening to Gav and Janice. They were still at that stage of their coital symphony where only the brass section was engaged, as the old metal bed creaked to and fro. The wind section — essentially vox humana — would join in later. I shook my head and bent back to my work, but every now and again, as I was writing or just thinking, a niggling little side-track thought would distract me, and I'd find myself remembering Janice's words, and wondering what exactly Uncle Rory might have hidden within his later work (if he really had hidden anything). Not, of course, that there was much point in me wondering about it.

  For about the hundredth time, I cursed whatever kleptomaniac curmudgeon had walked off the train with my bag. May the scarf unravel and do an Isadora Duncan on the wretch.

  "Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!" came faintly from what had been my bedroom. I ground my teeth.

  * * *

  "Married?" I gasped, aghast.

  "Well, they're talking about it," my mother said, dipping her head towards the table and holding her Paisley-pattern scarf to her throat as she nibbled tentatively at a large cream cake.

  We were in Mrs Mackintosh's Tea Roomes, just off West Nile Street, surrounded by straightly pendulous light fitments, graph-paper pierced wooden screens, and ladder-back seats which turned my usual procedure of hanging my coat or jacket on the rear of the seat into an operation that resembled hoisting a flag up a tall mast. "But they can't!" I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. They couldn't do this to me!

  My mother, neat and slim as ever, ploughed crunchingly into the loaf-sized meringue cream cake like a polar bear breaking into a seal's den. She gave a tiny giggle as a little dollop of cream adhered to the tip of her nose; she removed it with one finger, licked the pinky, then wiped her nose with her napkin, glancing round the restaurant through the confusing topography of slats and uprights of the seats and screens, apparently worried that this minor lapse in hand-mouth coordination was being critically observed by any of the surrounding middle-class matrons, perhaps with a view to passing on the scandalous morsel to their opposite numbers in Gallanach and having mother black-balled from the local bridge club. She needn't have worried; from what I had seen, getting a little bit of cream on your nose was practically compulsory, like getting nicked on the cheek in a ritualised duel before being allowed to enter a Prussian drinking sodality. The atmosphere of middle-aged ladies enjoying something wicked and nostalgic was quite palpable.

  "Don't be silly, Prentice; of course they can. They're both adults." Mother licked cream from the ice-cave interior of the meringue, then broke off part of the superstructure with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.

  I shook my head, appalled. Lewis and Verity! Married? No! But isn't this… " My voice had risen a good half-octave and my hands were waggling around on the end of my arms as though I was trying to shake off bits of Sellotape."…rather soon?" I finished, lamely.

  "Well, yes," mum said, sipping her cappuc
cino. "It is." She smiled brightly. "I mean, not that she's pregnant or anything, but —»

  "Pregnant!" I screeched. The very idea! The thought of the two of them fucking was bad enough; Lewis impregnating that gorgeous creature was infinitely worse.

  "Prentice!" Mother whispered urgently, leaning closer and glancing round again. This time we were getting a few funny looks from other customers. My mother smiled insincerely at a couple of Burberried biddies smirking from the table across the aisle; they turned sniffily away.

  My mother giggled again, hand to mouth, then delved into the meringue. She sat back, munching, face red but eyes twinkling, and with those eyes indicated the two women who'd been looking at us; then she raised one finger and pointed first at me, then at her. Her giggle turned into a snort. I rolled my eyes. She dabbed at hers with a clean corner of napkin, laughing.

  "Mother, this is not funny." I drank my tea, and attacked another chocolate eclair. It was my fourth and my belly was still growling. "Not at all funny." I knew I was sounding prissy and ridiculous but I couldn't help it. This was a very trying time for me, and the people who ought to be offering support were offering only insults.