The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  I raised my hand as Ashley's gaze passed again over where I stood; she caught the movement, and that city-hard expression changed instantly, relaxing and softening as she smiled broadly and walked over.

  "Hiya, babe." She punched my shoulder, then gave me a big hug. I hugged right back. She smelled of Poison.

  "How are you?" I asked her.

  She put one fist on her hip and held her other hand up in front of my face, fingers spread. "Drinkless," she grinned.

  * * *

  "You got off?"

  "Yeah," I said, swirling the remains of my pint round in my glass.

  Ash shook her head. "I thought you were going to plead guilty."

  "I was," I confessed. I shrugged, looked down. "I got a smart lawyer. She said it was worth fighting. Ended up in a jury trial, eventually."

  Ash laughed. "Well done," she said. She lowered her head until she could look into my eyes. "Hey, what's the matter?"

  "Well," I said, trying not to smile. "I did do it after all; it seems wrong I got off because I dressed in a suit and I could afford an expensive advocate and people in the jury had heard of dad and felt sorry for me because he'd died. I mean if I'd come from Maryhill and I wasn't reasonably articulate and didn't have any money, even if I had just forgotten I hadn't paid for the book, I bet everybody would have told me to plead guilty. Instead, thanks to the money, I had an advocate who'd probably make God look just a little lacking in gravitas, and discovered a talent for lying through my teeth that promises a glittering career as a Sun journalist."

  Ash leaned conspiratorially forward over the small table we were crouched round, and quietly said, "Easy, boy, you're on their turf."

  "Yeah," I sighed. "And don't drink the tap water." I looked around the place, all crowds and smoke. The English accents still sounded oddly foreign. "No sign?" I asked.

  Ash looked round too, then shook her head. "No sign."

  "You sure he drinks here?"

  "Positive."

  "Maybe he's been sent away, back to the Gulf." Ash shook her head. "I spoke to his secretary. He's having some root canal work done; he's here till the end of next week."

  "Maybe I should have just arranged to see him." I sighed. "My new-found talent as a con-man might have come in useful. I could have said I had pictures of Saddam Hussein torturing a donkey, or something."

  "Maybe," Ash said.

  We had discussed this sort of thing. Ash's first idea was simply that she should ring him up, tell him she'd seen him on television and heard he worked in London; she was here too, now, and did he fancy a drink sometime? But I wasn't sure about this. If he'd been reluctant to give Ash his name in Berlin, and thought even there that he'd already said too much, he might be suspicious when she rang up. So I felt; so my — by now rather paranoid — feelings suggested. A chance meeting seemed more plausible, or at least it had when I'd been talking to Ash from dad's study in Lochgair. Now I wasn't so sure.

  "How's your wizard?" I asked her.

  "Eh?" Ash looked confused for a moment. "Oh; Doctor Gonzo? Still working on the files. They weren't just weird shit, they were corrupted weird shit; where did your dad keep those things; inside a TV? But anyway; he's still hopeful."

  "Doctor Gonzo?" I said, tartly.

  "Don't look like that, Prentice," Ash chided. "This guy's knocking his pan in for you for nothing. And he has got a doctorate."

  I smiled. "Sorry."

  "Oh, and supposing the good Doctor can decipher all that corrupted crap you presented him with, what format do you want these files in eventually anyway, you ungrateful wretch?"

  "How d'you mean?"

  "I mean what program do you use on the Compaq?"

  "Oh, Wordstar," I nodded knowledgeably.

  "Version? Number?"

  "Ah… I'll have to come back to you on that one. Look; just ask him to print it out and send it to me. Would that be okay?"

  She shrugged. "If you want. Or you could get a modem; E-mail's about a zillion times faster."

  "Look, I'm still not all that comfortable around computers that don't come with a joystick and a 'fire' button; just… just ordinary airmail and real paper will be fine."

  Ash grinned, shook her head. "As you wish." She stood up. "Same again?" she asked, clinking my glass.

  "No," I said. "I'll have a half."

  "Any particular sort?"

  "Na, anything."

  I was alternating pints and whiskies on principle; they keep giving you your old glass back down here.

  I watched Ash weave her way to the bar.

  I still felt nervous about meeting this guy Paxton-Marr, but all-in-all, I told myself, things weren't so bad. Those of us most affected by dad's death were — with the possible exception of Uncle Hamish — bearing up pretty well, I might yet find out what Uncle Rory had written, I didn't have to worry about money, I had no criminal record, and I was being a good young(ish) adult again, attending diligently to my studies. Mostly I stayed in Glasgow during the week, and went back to Lochgair at weekends, unless mum — sometimes accompanied by James — came to stay with me. I had got filthy drunk just once since dad had died, and then with good reason; it had been the day Thatcher resigned. Bliss was it, etc., even if the Tapeworm Party was still in power.

  The lawyer Blawke had found me a place to rent for the year I needed to be in Glasgow. It was part of the property of a Mrs Ippot, who'd died rich but intestate at a sourly ripe old age, having throughout her life promised part, or all, of her sizeable fortune to various individual relations and combinations of relations within her extensively and antagonistically divided family, in a blizzard of contradictory letters, and with what appeared to be a profound lack of consideration for the litigious chaos that was bound to ensue. Mrs Ippot, in short, had been the sort of client probate lawyers have wet dreams about.

  My own theory was that Mrs I had actually thoroughly detested every single one of her relatives, and had hit on a nicely appropriate way of confounding all of them. By Jarndyce out of Petard, Mrs Ippot's lawyer-infested legacy had ensured that her rebarbatively consistent family would suffer years if not decades of self-inflicted hatred and frustration as the increasing legal fees gradually corroded the monies she had left; a tortuously slow method of telling your relatives from beyond the grave exactly what you thought of them that makes giving all the loot to a cats" home look positively benign in comparison.

  And so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot's enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium's experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.

  The high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot's former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d'art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house's inventory — drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was — came in three volumes.

  I christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.

  My friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.

  One of my pals — graduated, employed; moving on to better things — sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I di
dn't have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.

  Mum and I had started going through dad's diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he'd been sixteen. I'd suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren't the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we'd sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he'd met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he'd kept those in the A4 pads.

  It was at the bottom of the box containing dad's diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory's diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.

  I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory's diaries were even more sparse — and considerably more cryptic — than my father's, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week — and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory's life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I'd tried to make sense of Rory's diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:

  K r; boy 8£. Prentis?!? M ok Eve, pub.

  The entry for the next day read: 'vho' in shaky writing, and that was all. 'ho' and 'vho' (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously, ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he'd spelled it out the first time he'd used it, following a 48hr h.o. after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant 'rang'; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.

  I found a few mentions of 'CR' — I even recognised some of the notes I'd read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.

  The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:

  JUST USE IT!

  … a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate them. It read:

  show Hlvng pty wi C? (whoops): 2 close??

  The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.

  F and L. Those abbrevations didn't turn up anywhere else in Rory's notes for either Crow Road or anything else that I knew of. Rory never crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it.

  Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that 'whoops'? And what was too close to what?

  found myself cursing Uncle Rory's inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he — mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz — was LW, more usually.

  Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad's study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I'd fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I'd put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and — by my reading — been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.

  I found one thing which — after a little puzzled thought — I could comprehend, but which I hadn't been expecting, in Uncle Rory's 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.

  The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.

  * * *

  In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air… I'd just sit there or a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there ut not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people's belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again… but I'd tell him I was just browsing I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father's. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn't sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat's kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I'd stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.

  * * *

  "He's here," Ash said, coming back with the drinks. She sat down.

  I looked around. I saw him after a while. A little shorter and a little younger-looking than I'd expected, from the tape I'd seen. He was talking to a couple of other guys; they were all dressed in grey trench coats, and one had put a hat down on the bar that at least looked like it ought to be called a fedora. I wondered if the other two were also journalists.

  Rupert Paxton-Marr; a foreign correspondent, his meticulously-trained, razor-sharp mind ready in an instant to describe a place as «war-torn» and bring home to us all events and disasters in far away places, to talk of people tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, to reveal that only with dawn did the full extent of the devastation become apparent, and even — in the very best traditions of British popular journalism — to ask people who'd just seen their entire family duly butchered, burned, crushed or drowned, How do you feel?

  Ash seemed contemplative, eyeing me with a steady gaze. «Well…» I said, feeling my heart beat faster and my palms start to sweat. I took the two torn match-book covers out of my pocket. "Think I'll go see what he has to say for himself."

  "Want me to come?" Ash started to move in her seat.

  I shook my head. Then bit my lip. "Shit, I don't know. All the way down here, I was just going to go up to him and say, 'You send these to my dad? but now I don't know. It feels a bit weird." I looked over at the three men. "I mean," I laughed. "They're even wearing trench-coats!"

  Ash looked briefly over too.
"Hey," she said, smiling. "They're on wine; they're not just knocking back whiskies and heading off. They'll be here a while yet. Sit and think for a moment."

  I nodded, took a deep breath and drank some whisky.

  I thought about it some more. Then I said, "Okay. Maybe we should go together. You could sort of introduce… I could go out and pretend to just come in… Hell; I could just tell him the truth… I don't know." I closed my eyes, appalled at my own lack of gumption.

  Ash got up, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Sit here. I'll tell him I've just recognised him. You come over later; just mention the match-books. Don't show them, not at first. How does that sound?"

  I opened my eyes. I shook my head and said, "Oh, I don't know, good as anything."

  "Right." Ash went over to the men. She pulled something from the back of her head as she went, and shook her long fawn hair down. It was the length of the jacket. I smiled to myself. That's my girl, I thought.

  I saw them look her up and down. Rupert smiled, then looked mystified as she talked, animated, hands waving. Then he laughed, his tanned, handsome face smiled and he looked her up and down again. The expression changed just a little, though, after that, as though something else had occurred to him. He looked a little more wary. So it appeared to me, anyway. He held out one hand, seeming to make introductions. Ash nodded. He pointed to the bar; she shook her head, then nodded back at me.

  Rupert Paxton-Marr gazed above me, then dropped his gaze. He looked at me then back at Ashley. She was talking to him. His expression went through puzzlement, maybe concern, then went wary again, finally cold, studiously expressionless. He nodded, leaning back against a post supporting the front of the bar. Ash glanced back at me, her eyes opening wide for an instant, then she turned back to the men.