The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  "But that's great news, man," Kenneth said, sitting back.

  "Talking about me, I hope, boys," Janice said, returning with their drinks on a tray.

  "…said, 'My God, Rory, I've never seen one that blg! and I said " — oh; hello dear," Rory grinned, pretending only then to notice Janice.

  She sat down, smiling. "Talking about the size of your overdraft, are we dear?"

  "Gosh-darn," Rory said, snapping his fingers, looking at Kenneth. "Caught telling tales again."

  "Runs in the family," Kenneth said, taking up his glass. "Cheers, Janice."

  "Your health."

  "Slange."

  * * *

  They left after that drink and went back to the house at Lochgair; Rory and Kenneth cleared a tangled choke of bushes and shrubs at the rear of the garden, where Mary wanted the lawn extended. They sweated through the insect-loud afternoon, while the sun shone. Janice sunbathed, and later helped Mary and Margot prepare the evening meal.

  Janice had taken that day off from the library. She and Rory left on the last train back to Glasgow that night.

  It was the last time Kenneth ever saw Rory.

  * * *

  Fiona sat in the passenger seat of the car, watching the red roadside reflectors drift out of the night towards her. She was thrown against one side of the seat as Fergus powered the Aston round the right-hander that took the road out of the forest, down, into and through the little village of Furnace. She was pressed back against the seat as Fergus accelerated again. They swung out and past some small, slower car, over-taking it as though it was stationary; headlights ahead of them glared, the on-coming car flashed its lights and she heard its horn sound as they passed, a few seconds later. The sound was quickly lost in the snarl of the Aston's engine.

  "If you're driving like this to try and prove something, don't bother on my account," she said.

  Fergus was silent for a while, then, in a very controlled and even voice said, "Don't worry. Look, I just want to get home as soon as possible. All right?"

  "Everything'll suddenly get better once we're home, will it?" Fiona said. "Kiss the kids on the head and get Mrs S to make some tea; stiff whisky for you, G and T for me. Maybe we should call up the McKeans to say we got back safely; you can ask after Julie…»

  "For Christ's sake, Fiona —»

  "'For Christ's sake, Fiona'," Fiona sneered, imitating Fergus's voice. "Is that all you can say? You've had half an hour to think up another excuse, and —»

  "I don't need," Fergus sighed, "any excuses. Look; I thought we had agreed to just leave this —»

  "Yes, that would suit you fine, wouldn't it, Ferg? That's your way of dealing with everything, isn't it? Pretend it hasn't happened, maybe it'll go away. If we're all terribly polite and decorous and discreet, maybe the whole horrid thing will just… " She made a little fluttering motion with her hands, and in a high-pitched, girlish voice, said, "Disappear'."

  She looked at him; his broad, soft-fowled face looked hard and set in the dim light shining from the car's instruments. "Well," she told him, leaning over as far as she could towards him. "They won't just go away, Ferg." She tried to make him look at her. He frowned, put his head slightly to one side and lifted it, trying to look round and over her head. "Nothing ever goes away, Fergus," she told him. "Nothing ever doesn't matter." She strained over a little more. "Fergus — " she said.

  He pushed her away with his left hand, back into her seat.

  She sat there, mouth open. He seemed to understand the silence and glanced over, a weak smile flickering on his face. "Sorry," he said. "Getting in the way a bit there. Sorry."

  "Don't you push me!" she said, slapping his shoulder. She hit him again. "Don't you ever dare push me again!"

  "Oh stop it, Fiona," he said, more exasperated than angry. "One minute I'm in the dog-house because… well, because I'm not all over you all the time; next second —»

  "'Not all over you all the time'?" Fiona said. "You mean not fucking me, Fergus, is that what you mean?"

  "Fiona, please —»

  "Oh." Fiona slapped one palm off her forehead, then crossed her arms, looked away, out of the dark side window. "Fuck; did I swear? Oh fuck. Oh what a silly fucking cow I must fucking be."

  "Fiona —»

  "I said something straight. I'm so sorry. I actually said what I meant, used the sort of word you'd normally only hear from your golfing chums or your rugby pals. Or does Julie use that sort of language? Does she? Do you like her to talk dirty? Does that get you going, Ferg?"

  "Fiona, I'm getting rather tired of this," Fergus said through his teeth, his fingers gripping the wheel harder, rubbing round it. "I'm sorry you think what you do about Julie. As I have tried to tell you, she was the wife of an old friend and I've kept in touch since she got divorced —»

  "Still stuck on that, Fergus?" Fiona said, impersonating concern. "Oh dear; we had that line back at Arrochar, I seem to recall. And what was the rest of it? Oh yes, one of her sons has leukaemia, poor little kid, hasn't he? And you've helped her and the little darling with BUPA out of the goodness of your heart —»

  "Yes I have, and I'm sorry you choose to sneer about it, Fiona."

  "Sneer!" laughed Fiona. "It's a joke, Fergus. Jesus, she was practically taking your zip down."

  "Oh, don't be ridiculous. It's not my fault Julie got a bit tipsy."

  "She was smashed out of her brains, Fergus, and about the only thing she remembered was that she wanted to get your trousers off. God knows why, but she seemed to associate that with pleasure." Fiona gave a sort of strangled laugh, then put one hand up suddenly to her nose, and looked away, and sobbed once.

  Fergus drove quickly on, trees flicking past like green ghosts to the right, the waters of the loch just a dark absence on the left.

  Fiona sniffed. "Trying the great silence again, eh, Ferg?" She pulled a handkerchief from her handbag on her lap, dabbed at her hose — "Still pretending it'll all go away. Still sticking your head in your precious fucking optical-quality sand."

  "Look, can't we talk about this in the morning? I mean, when you're…»

  "Sober, Fergus?" she said, looking over at him. "That what you were going to say? Blaming it on drink again? Is that all it was? Of course, silly me. I should have realised. Dear Julie gets drunk and for bizarre reason suddenly starts feeling you up under the table while we're nibbling our cheese and biscuits, and making pathetic double-entendres, and attacks you outside the bathroom; totally unprovoked, of course, and it's all just the drink talking. And I'm just being hysterical, I suppose, because I've had too many of John's terribly strong G and Ts and it'll all look different in the morning and I'll come to you and say sorry and wasn't I being a silly girl last night, and you can pat me on the head and say yes, wasn't I? And you can still go for cocktails at the Frasers" and bridge at the McAlpines and tee off with the Gordons and cruise with the Hamiltons with a united front, a respectable face, can't we, Fergus?"

  "Fiona," Fergus said, face set and teeth clenched. "I don't know," breathed, "why you're making such a big thing of this. It's just one of those things that happens at parties; people do get drunk and they do do things they wouldn't normally think of. Maybe Julie has… or has had, in the past, a crush on me or something. I don't know. Maybe —»

  "A crush on you, said Fiona. "Jesus. Well, that's a better try, Ferg. But I don't think you're quite as good a liar as you think you are. And she's not that good an actress." Fiona looked down, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. "Oh God, Ferg, it was so fucking obvious. I mean. I knew there was something going on; all those trips away, and getting drunk and not being able to come home, staying at one of your chums" delightful little pied-a-terres. Oh, sorry, no, you can't phone back, he's only just got it and it hasn't had a phone put in yet. Or coming back with bruises; how you suddenly became so very clumsy or so easily marked. But at least I could still kid myself, at least I didn't have my nose rubbed in it."

  "Fiona!" Fergus shouted, knuckl
es white on the steering wheel. "For God's sake, there's nothing to have your nose rubbed in! Julie's just a friend. I haven't touched her!"

  "You didn't have to, she was touching you," Fiona said, voice quiet, looking away from Fergus, out to the darkness of the loch. A few weak lights shone on the far side, and headlights on the Otter Ferry road, two miles away across the black expanse of waves, swung out briefly, like a lighthouse beam… and then dimmed and disappeared. The car roared through another small village before the trees hid the view again.

  Fiona kept her face away from him, looking out into the night, watching the vertical bright line of light the car threw onto the serried mass of dark conifers. Even there she could not escape him; she could see his distorted image in the slanted glass of the car's windows, dim in the background, still lit by his instruments.

  She wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved him, and why she had stayed with him for so long after she'd realised that if she ever had, she did not love him now.

  Of course she could say it was for the children, as people always did… It was true, up to a point. How terrible it was to have those easy phrases, trotted out so often in the course of gossip, or heart-to-hearts, or in magazine articles, or even court cases, become so real.

  It was never the sort of thing you thought about when you were young, when you were — or thought you were — in love, and all the future shone with promise.

  Problems belonged to other people. You might imagine supporting them, talking with them when they needed to talk, trying to help, but you didn't imagine that you would be the one desperate to talk (or the one too embarrassed to talk, too ashamed or too proud to talk); you didn't imagine you would be the one who needed help, not even when you told friends that of course there might be problems, or agreed with your beloved that you would always talk about things…

  Staying together for the children.

  And for the adults, she thought. For the sake of appearances. God, she had thought she was above that sort of thing, once. She had been bright and free and determined and she had decided she was going to make her own way in the world, just as well as any of her brothers might. She'd been a sort of feminist before it became fashionable; never had much time for all that sisterly stuff, but she was positive she was as good as any man and she'd prove it… And marrying Ferg had seemed like an extra boost to her life-plan. London had been exciting, but she had not shone out there, she felt, the way she had here. She had never felt any affection for the place and had made no friends there she would miss; and anyway, she would find fields to conquer up here, coming home triumphant to wed the lord of the manor.

  But it had not been as she had imagined. She had expected to be the centre of things in Gallanach, but the McHoans as a family had so many other things happening to them; she had felt peripheral. The Urvills" own history, too, made her feel like something unimportant on the family tree, for all that Fergus talked of responsibility and duty and one's debt to the next generation.

  She was a leaf, expendable. A twig — maybe — at best.

  Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the goal of having goals one day, once she had made up her mind what it was she wanted.

  But that had never happened. First Fergus, then the twins, then her own small part in the society of the town and the people there, and in the wider, still circumferential concerns of this wee country's middle-to-ruling classes, and in the more dissipated commonwealth of mildly powerful people who were their peers beyond that — in England, on the continent, from the States and elsewhere — took up her time, sapped her will and replaced her own concerns with theirs.

  So now, she thought, I am married to a man whose touch disgusts me, and who anyway does not seem to want to touch me. She looked at Fergus's dim reflection, distorted in the glass, then tried to re-focus on her own image. Can he find me as repellent as I find him? I can't look that bad, can I? A few grey hairs, but you don't notice them; still a size twelve, and I've looked after myself. I look good in this, your standard little black number, and I still get into a tight pair of jeans… What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why does he have to spend half his time with that drunken, brassy bitch?

  God, the best time I've had in the past five years was one night with Lachy Watt, angry at Ferg, and more surprised than anything else. The way he just took my hair in one hand, while we were standing looking up at that God-awful window in the great hall, and turned my head to him, and pulled me close; tongue down my throat before I knew what was happening, and there was something adolescent and desperate beneath all that working-class directness, but Jesus, I felt wanted…

  She shook her head. That was best left out of it. Once was once; dismissible. Ever again would set a pattern. Lachy had been back one time afterwards that she knew of, a year later, and he had called, but she'd told him she wouldn't be able to see him, and put the phone down on him. No, that didn't matter.

  She looked at the reflection of Fergus again, as he pulled the wheel; the car tunnelled into the forest, the wall of trees on either side a blur, their greenness more remembered than seen.

  I could leave him, she thought. I could always have left him. But mother's too close for comfort; there'd be too many nearby friends, too many chances of bumping into people I'd rather not bump into; too much mitigating against the clean break; new start. God, I'm pathetic, though, that's so petty. Why haven't I the sheer drive to just get up and go, take the twins and emigrate to Oz or Canada? Or live in wild eccentricity in London or Paris?

  Or I can stay, as I know I probably will. Muddle through. Look after the twins and try to make sure they negotiate the reefs of puberty and adolescence, set them up to make their way in the world, and do so without becoming just like me…

  She looked out, into the grey sweep of road ever rushing towards them. Fergus powered the car down out of the forest, through some more houses and a few lights. The car lurched. Fergus looked over, smiled at her. She didn't know whether to smile back or not, and she wondered what that expression had meant, and what had been going through his head for the last few miles.

  The car jiggled on its springs, lurched again and settled. She clutched at her seat, looking forward. The engine roared.

  She looked back at Ferg, saw tears in his eyes. "Ferg?" she said.

  The car skidded a little, came straight; she glanced forward at the road, saw the corner and the trees. She clutched at the dashboard with both hands. "Ferg!" she screamed. "Look —!"

  CHAPTER 13

  I was eleven when Aunt Fiona died; I remember feeling both peeved and cheated that I was thought too young to go to the funeral. It would have been my chance to show how mature I had become, and anyway from what I'd seen on television and films, funerals looked like rather dramatic and romantic events; people dressed in black and looked sombre. They had thin, tight lips, and they sometimes wept, and there was a lot of grim clutching of other people's shoulders, and low mutterings about how so-and-so had been a good person, and that sort of thing. But under it all was the simple, joyous fact: they were dead and you weren't yet!

  I hadn't got to see Aunt Fiona being buried, but I did see Uncle Fergus in hospital. I was in, too, getting my appendix out, and I went along from my ward to his room just to say how sorry I was. He had a broken arm, some cracked ribs, and his whole face was bruised; kids with face-paints couldn't have matched all those colours. I'd never seen anything like it.

  There wasn't much to say; I can't remember what I did say. He kept talking about not being able to remember anything after passing Lochgair, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn't understand why she hadn't been wearing her seatbelt. He'd thought she had been, but they said she hadn't. She hadn't. He started to cry.

  * * *

  I sat on the giant, corroded lump of concrete and steel, legs crossed, arms folded, watching the waves break on the sands below and listening to the strange, whooping, hooting s
ounds and hollow clanging noises produced by the fluted pipes and iron doors embedded in the fractionally tilted concrete mass.

  It was a little after sunset, three days after my father's death. The sun had dipped behind North Jura, and abandoned the sky to a skeined mass of glowing clouds, sinking through the spectrum from gold towards blood-red, all against a wash of deepening blue. The wind was still warm, coming in from the south west, sharp with salt as the remnants of the rolling Atlantic swell hit the rocks nearby and sent up spray, but maybe also — well, you could imagine it, at least — containing a hint of grasses, too; something directed over the distant greenery of Ireland, or swept round from the Welsh hills along the circling wind.

  The concrete block was more or less a cube, about four metres to a side, though it looked more squat than that, its lower metre buried in the sand of the small beach a few miles west of Gallanach, about level with the southern tip of Island Macaskin. The concrete and pipe-work block — four years old now, and streaked with rust and seagull droppings — was the only full-size work Darren Watt ever completed.

  Darren had got his sponsorship from a cement company, which agreed to provide materials and a grant, but finding a place to put the finished piece had been tricky, and it had been Uncle Fergus, no less, who had finally come to the rescue with a site for the work; the town council hadn't liked the idea of a gigantic concrete object the size of four garages being stationed anywhere near the town itself, and for a while it had looked like Darren was going to have real problems finding anywhere to put his concrete edifice (especially after a couple of the more pygmy-brained newspapers had taken up the story and started fuming about a ridiculous waste of public money and the outrageous despoiling of our fragile landscape with queer, arty-farty, loony-left monstrosities).

  Darren had thought about playing up to this drivel by giving the thing some wonderfully pretentious title, and I recall him at a party discussing the merits of calling it The Lusitanian Coast Dialectical Kinetic/Static Object Alpha. In the end, though, he just called it Block One.