The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  It was a three-kilometre hike from the nearest path, and even the odd yachtsperson, passing close enough to catch sight of the block, would probably have dismissed it as some old war-time ruin. Not exactly as public as Sauchiehall Street, then, but Darren had been happy. It worked; when the tide was at the right level, it produced noises like a ghost trapped in badly tuned organ-pipes, sonorous slammings as waves opened and slammed shut heavy doors like hinged manhole covers within the set tonnes of the block's hollow insides, and — depending on the waves — impressive spouts of water, bursting into the air from its rusted throats as though from some stranded cubist whale. He'd learned a lot from it, he'd said; just you wait till the next one, and the ones after that…

  I was thinking about Aunt Fiona because death and dying were on my mind, and I was going back through all the people I'd known who'd had the nerve to pop their clogs before they should have, while I was still around to miss them. Aunt Fiona was a vague memory, even though I'd been eleven when she'd died and I'd known her for so many years. It was as though by her early death the memories had lost the chance of being renewed every now and again, and instead were somehow built over, the spaces that should have been hers recycled and used-up by those of the family who were still alive.

  She'd been okay; I'd liked her, from what I could remember. She'd let us play in the castle and its grounds, and she'd taken us on walks round the coast sometimes. She'd seemed young and old at once to me; of a different generation to Fergus and Lachlan, and even my father. She had seemed younger than them, never mind the real elders, like Grandma Margot; closer to us when we were children. It was a quality she'd shared with Uncle Rory.

  The still absent Uncle Rory. We'd thought that — as dad's death had gone reported in a few papers, partly because of his modest fame, and partly because of the bizarre nature of his demise — Rory might hear, and finally get in touch… but nothing had happened yet, and the funeral was tomorrow. The romantic in me wanted him to reappear at the ceremony, in the grounds of the house at Lochgair, but I doubted that he would. Too pat, too neat, too kind a thing for fate to throw up now.

  I looked up at the violet sky, feeling the wind move my hair across my forehead and the nape of my neck. I could see a few stars. I stared at the heavens until my neck got sore, then said, aloud and loud, "Well?" Nothing.

  The waves shushed across the sands. I lowered my head. Out to sea, a couple of birds flew wing-tip low across the sky-reflecting waters. I shook my head, wondering at it all.

  Dad died — my Uncle Hamish seemed to be maintaining — in suspicious circumstances; God killed him.

  Uncle Hamish appeared to be almost perversely upset and appalled by the implications of this supposed act; his own part in the bizarre and fatal episode troubled him less, I guessed, than the terrifying idea that there really might be, after all, a God who listens, thinks, decides and acts, just like an ordinary mortal, except more powerful. It rather indicated, I suspected, that all this time my uncle had just been playing a game, and his retributive proto-heresy was exactly as frivolous as my dad had been given to claiming. Whatever, Uncle Hamish was, in short, under sedation.

  And dad was under the care of the undertaker, and would soon be under the roses at the rear of the garden in Lochgair, un-christened at the start of his life, and joined to unconsecrated ground after its end.

  Some generation, I thought. If Uncle Rory was dead (and who was to say he wasn't) then Hamish, my uncle, The Tree, at that moment lying in a darkened room, moaning about a jealous God and being his brother's keeper and the divine and blinding light come from the skies and the smell of the devil and all his works and popping Valium every few hours and muttering about anti-creates and asking his wife to tell my mother that for all his atheism — so powerfully and dramatically disproved — he was sure Kenneth had been a mostly good man, and would not suffer unduly in the afterlife, even though the gates of heaven were irredeemably closed to him… This prattling wreck, this bed-bound, hide-bound bag of gibbering nonsense was all that remained of that generation's one-time promise.

  Rory gone from us for a decade, at least as good as dead; Fiona gone for want of a seat belt; and my father, drunk and angry, furiously determining to prove… something by a prank barely worthy of some over-privileged Oxbridge undergraduate.

  Just Hamish left, and him half-mad with an amalgamated fever of grief, guilt, and re-inoculated faith.

  Some result.

  * * *

  I'd surprised myself, when Gav broke down like that, and I knew that dad was dead. I believe I actually came close to fainting. I stood, watching Gav greet, hearing Janice Rae sob into Ashley Watt's shoulder behind me, and gradually I started to feel I was no more attached to or in control of my own body than I was Gavin's. I don't mean that I stood or floated outside myself, just that I was somewhere inside me that wasn't connected with the usual channels of communication, let alone action.

  I heard a noise like continual surf, and the view went sort of grey, and tunnel-like for a bit. I was suddenly aware of how delicately balanced we are on our two skinny legs, and my skin seemed to be contracting, pressing in all about me, and going cold, leaving sweat.

  I wobbled, apparently; Ash took me by the shoulders and sat me down on the little chair by the table. She got Janice to make some sweet tea. I said thank you, drank the tea, shivered a bit, and then Ash dialled Lochgair for me.

  The phone was engaged, but Ashley kept trying. It was a friend of mum's from the village who answered initially.

  I didn't think I was crying, while I was on the phone; I felt calm and in control and I spoke quietly to my mum, who sounded trembly and yet flat-toned, and told me what had happened, but after I'd put the phone down I found that my eyes were full of tears and my cheeks wet with them. They'd dribbled round my chin and onto my chest, inside the open shirt.

  "Oh dear," I said, feeling that I ought to feel embarrassed. Ash handed me a clean tissue, and I dabbed myself dry.

  "I'll drive you back," Ashley said, squatting in front of me in the hall, my hands gathered in hers, her long face serious, eyes shining.

  "You've drunk too much. We've both drunk too much," I said.

  "Anyway, you've got to get to London, start your new job." I took a deep breath. "Thanks, though." I bent forward, kissed her nose.

  She put her head down. I sat back in the seat again and gazed over her head at the white-painted wallpaper on the far side of the hallway.

  She looked up into my eyes. "What happened, Prentice?"

  I shrugged. "Crazy," I said, my gaze sliding away from those sternly concerned eyes, to look at the worn hall carpet and an old red wine stain from a party two years ago. "Just crazy."

  Ash patted my hands. "I'll take you down in the morning, then. I can get them to hold the job. There was no rush. Only if you want."

  "I don't know," I said, and really didn't. I bent forward, put my head between my knees and stared at the black-taped edge of the carpet under the seat and the rough floorboards beyond. I felt Ash stroke my head, her hands soft and gentle through my hair.

  I didn't want to go to bed and anyway could not have slept. She stayed up with me, and we finished the real coffee and then the instant. I talked about the family, about Rory and Fiona and mum and dad. Thunder rolled over the city, just before sunrise, and I found myself laughing, sitting there on the couch, in the living room with Ashley; laughing at the thunder. She held me, shushed me. The dawn came up dull at first, then the clouds cleared from the west and a bright blue day was there. Ashley left a note for Gav and Janice, helped me pack a bag — I couldn't decide on anything — then we left. The old 2CV, freshly pillar-box red after its latest re-spray, puttered through the near-empty streets of the bright and silent city, and rocked and rolled its way back down towards Gallanach.

  The weather was perfect, the new day glorious. I talked incessantly and Ash listened, sometimes smiled and seemed always to have a kind word.

  We arrived at Lochgair about br
eakfast-time, with the sun shining through the trees and the birds loud in the garden. Ashley stopped the car at the opened gates at the end of the drive where it entered the courtyard. "I'll drop you here, okay?" she said. "Oh, come in," I told her.

  She shook her head, yawned. Her long fawn hair shone in a beam of sunlight coming through the car's open side window. "I don't think so, Prentice. I'll get home, get some sleep. Give me a call if there's anything I can do, okay?"

  I nodded. "Okay."

  "Promise?" She smiled.

  "Promise," I said.

  She leaned over, put one hand behind my head and kissed my forehead. I heard her take a breath, like she was about to speak, but then she exhaled, just patted my head. I put one arm round her, held her for a moment, then pulled away, reached into the back and got my bag, opened the door and got out. "Thanks," I said.

  "It's okay, Prentice," she said.

  I closed the flimsy door. The car revved up and turned round, one skinny front wheel poking out alarmingly from its wheel arch. The little Citroen clattered off down the drive. Ashley stuck one hand out of the window and waved; I raised my arm, and held it there as I watched the car head away under the trees through the dappling light. It paused at the main road, then turned away, its noise soon lost in the background of bird-song and wind-ruffled leaves.

  The cool morning air smelled clean and fresh; I took a deep breath and rubbed my smarting eyes, feeling spaced-out from lack of sleep.

  Then I picked up my bag and turned to the house.

  * * *

  It was a well-travelled country, dad told us. Within the oceanic depths of time that lay beneath the surface of the present, there had been an age when, appropriately, an entire ocean had separated the rocks that would one day be called Scotland from the rocks that would one day be called England and Wales. That first union came half a billion years ago. Some of those rocks were ancient even then; two billion years and counting, and shifting and moving across the face of the planet while that primaeval ocean shrank and closed and all that would become the British Isles still lay south of the equator. Compressed and folded, the rocks that would be Scotland — by then part of the continent of Euramerica — held within their crumpled, tortuously layered cores the future shape of the land.

  By a third of a billion years ago, that part of Euramerica lay on the equator, covered by great fern forests that would be buried and folded and pressed and heated and so turn to oil and coal, in the future that was yet to come. Meanwhile the mass of rocks, afloat on the molten stone beneath, were heading slowly northwards, and sundering; the climate became hot and the rains sparse; the great dinosaurs, tree-tall and house-heavy, tramped slowly through a semi-desert while a new ocean opened to the west. After the dinosaurs had gone, and while the Atlantic still grew, the volcanoes erupted, smothering the old rock on the surface under their own vast, deep oceans of lava.

  The land then held mountains higher than Everest, but they were worn down eventually by nothing harder than wind and water, until, much later still — now that Scotland was level with Canada and Siberia and the earth cooler — the glaciers came, covering the rocks with their own chill, inverted image of the old and weathered lava plains. The sheer mess of that frozen water etched the mountain rock like steel engraving glass, and pressed the roots of those fire-floating hills deeper into the dense sea of magma beneath.

  Then the climate changed again; the glaciers retreated and the water they had held filled the oceans, so that the waters rose and cut what would eventually be called the British Isles off from mainland Europe, while the scoured, abraded hills to the north, set free at last from that compressing weight of ice, rose slowly back out of the earth, to be colonised again by plants and animals, and people.

  On walks, on day trips and holidays, he found and pointed out the signs that told of the past, deciphering the symbols written into the fabric of the land. In Gallanach, we saw the bright seam of white cretaceous sandstone that had provided the Gallanach Glass Works with raw material for a century and a half. On Arran, he showed us rocks folded like toffee, ribboned and split; on Staffa, the even, keyboard-regular columns of cooled lava; in Edinburgh, the rubble-tailed stumps of ancient volcanoes; in Glasgow, the black, petrified remains of trees three hundred million years old; in Lochaber, the parallel roads that marked the shores of lochs dammed and un-dammed by glaciers, millennia earlier; throughout Scotland we saw hanging valleys, drumlins and corries; and in the Hebrides we walked the raised beaches where the ocean swells had crashed until the land rose, and touched rocks two and a half billion years old; half as old as Earth itself; a sixth of the age of the entire universe.

  Here was magic, I remember thinking, as we drove north towards Benbecula one day, looking out at the machair, gaudy with flowers. I was just old enough to grasp what dad had been telling us, but still young enough to have to think about it in childish terms. Magic. Time was Magic; and geology. Physics, chemistry; all the big, important words dad used. They were all Magic.

  I sat listening to the car's engine, as we drove; mum at the wheel, dad in the passenger seat, shirt-sleeved arm out of the Volvo's window, Lewis, James and I in the back.

  The car engine made a steady growling noise, and I remember thinking it was funny that those long-dead plants had been turned into the oil that had been turned into the petrol that made the car growl. I chose to forget the absence of reptiles in those carboniferous forests, and imagined that they had been populated by great dinosaurs, and that they too had fallen into the ooze, and made up part of the oil, and that the noise the car made was like the angry, bellowing growls they would have made while they were alive, as though their last dying breath, their last sound on this planet, had been saved all these millions and millions of years, to be exhaled along a little road on a little island, pushing the McHoan family north, one summer, on our holidays.

  I looked out of the open window; the machair lay dazzling under the midsummer sunshine to our left.

  "Prentice! Prentice! Oh, Prentice; pray for your father!"

  "Hello, Uncle Hamish," I said, as Aunt Tone ushered mother and me into the bedroom where my uncle lay, propped up, splendid but demented in a pair of blue cotton pyjamas and a red silk dressing-gown decorated with blue dragons. The room was behind dim closed curtains, and smelled of apples.

  "Mary! Oh, Mary," Uncle Hamish said, seeing my mother. He clasped his hands together, holding a black handkerchief. His hair was a bit mussed and he had a stubble shadow; I'd never seen him look so disarrayed. In front of him there was a huge tray with short legs, partly covered by a quarter-completed jigsaw puzzle. I walked up to the bed and put my hand out. I clutched Uncle Hatnish's still clasped hands, held them briefly, squeezed and let go.

  Closer inspection revealed that Hamish was putting the jigsaw puzzle together upside-down; every cardboard flake was grey, turned the wrong way up.

  Mum gave Hamish a brief hug and we sat down on a couple of chairs on either side of the bed. "I'll make some tea," Aunt Tone said, and quietly closed the door.

  "And biscuits!" shouted Uncle Hamish at the closed door, and smiled broadly at first mum and then me. After a moment, though, his face seemed to collapse and he looked like he was about to weep.

  The door opened again. "What's that, my dear?" Aunt Tone asked.

  "Nothing," Uncle Hamish said, the mouth-only smile suddenly there again, then fading just as quickly. The door closed. Hamish peered down at the jigsaw puzzle, toyed with a couple of the pieces, looking for a place to fit them into what he had already completed. The squint bottom edge of the puzzle, some small spaces between joined pieces, a few tiny flecks of cardboard — half grey, half coloured — gathered like dust along the raised edges of the tray, and a small pair of collapsible scissors lying on the bedspread near the pillows, indicated that Uncle Hamish had — not to put too fine a point on it — been cheating.

  Thank you, both, for coming," he said, absently, still fiddling with the grey pieces. He sounded bored, like h
e was talking to a couple of factory workers summoned to his office for some formality of business. "I appreciate it." I exchanged looks with my mother, who appeared close to tears again.

  Mum had done pretty well till now; we'd both cried a bit when Ashley had deposited me at the gates of the house at Lochgair, but since then she had coped pretty well. We'd visited the good lawyer Blawke that first day, and the next day he'd actually made a house-call, a concession which, extrapolating from the attitude of his secretary when she rang us up to tell us the sacred presence was on his way, we ought to have treated with the sort of awe and respect the average person reserves for royalty and major religious figures. I was a little surprised he didn't kneel and kiss the door-step when he unfolded himself from his Merc.

  The undertaker had been dealt with, a few reporters fended off, Lewis — in London — reassured that there was nothing he could do up here for now, and told not to cancel his gig dates, and James, on a school trip in Austria, finally contacted. He would arrive the day of the funeral; one of his teachers would come back with him.

  Dad's study proved to be a wilderness of papers, disorganised files, chaotic filing cabinets, and an impressive-looking computer that neither mum nor I knew how to operate. The afternoon I got back mum and I had stood looking at the machine, knowing there might be stuff in it we'd need to look at, but unable to work out what to do with the damn thing after switching it on; the relevant manual had disappeared, mum had never touched a keyboard in her life and my computer expertise was confined to having a sound tactical sense of which alien to zap first and a leechlike grip on continuous-fire buttons.

  "I know just the person," I said, and rang the Watts" house.

  Twenty-four hours before the funeral, Aunt Tone had rung and said could we possibly come and see Uncle Hamish? He'd asked to see us.