The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  I looked at my watch, wondering how long Lewis was going to keep this up. Telling conventionally-structured jokes uses up material appallingly quickly and if that had been what Lewis was up to I might not have had the prospect of enduring too much more challenging, non-sexist, politically aware, near-the-bone (well, near the bone-head, at any rate) alternative humour, but this observational stuff - telling people things they already know and getting them to pay you for the privilege (sort of the light entertainment equivalent of psychoanalysis) - can go on virtually indefinitely. Indeed, I felt like it already had.

  Lewis was moderately big all of a sudden, after a series of appearances on that late-night TV show. The programmes had been recorded at a Comedy Festival in Melbourne, Australia, which Lewis had been invited to (hence his inability to make old Margot’s funeral). Tonight was the premiere date on his first solo UK tour, and it looked depressingly likely that it would be totally sold out, thanks to the advertising power of television. If he hadn’t given me the complimentary tickets I doubted that Gavin and myself would have stood any chance of getting in (but then if he hadn’t given me the complimentary tickets a troop of wild Clydesdales on speed wouldn’t have dragged me here).

  I looked at my watch again. Half an hour gone. So far he had said exactly one thing I found even slightly amusing, and that was right at the start: ‘At one stage I thought I was a complete asshole.’ (There followed the inevitable pause for effect). ‘But I passed through that.’

  Laugh? I almost.

  ‘... about my family, ladies and gents, because I come from this very strange family, you know; very strange family indeed ...’ Lewis said.

  Gav turned, big red face beaming; he nudged me. I didn’t turn to look at him. I was staring - glaring - at the stage. My mouth felt dry. He wouldn’t dare, would he?

  ‘There’s my Uncle Alfred -’

  I started to relax. We do not have an uncle Alfred. Still, maybe he was going to use some true or embroidered slice of family history and just disguise it with a false name.

  ‘Uncle Alfred was a very unlucky man. He was so unlucky we actually called him Unlucky Uncle Alfred. We did. Unlucky Uncle Alfred was so unlucky, he’s the only man in history ever to have been killed by an avalanche on a dry ski-slope.’

  I relaxed a bit more. He hadn’t dared. This was just a joke.

  ‘No, really. He was skiing down when it sort of started to come undone at the top and roll down ... crushed to death by three hundred tons of nylon tufting. Haven’t been able to look at a Swiss Roll the same way since.’

  Another nudge from a highly amused Gavin. ‘That true, Prentice, aye?’

  I gave what I hoped was a suitably withering look, then turned back to the stage. I drank my heavy and shook my head.

  ‘Prentice,’ Gav insisted from my side, missing the first part of Lewis’s next mirth-infused effusion. ‘Zat true, aye?’

  Obviously my withering look needed more work in front of the mirror. I turned to Gavin. ‘Every word,’ I told him. ‘Except his real name was Uncle Ethelred.’

  ‘Aw aye.’ Gav nodded wisely, took a sip from his beer without significantly moving the glass from near his right shoulder, and frowned as he tried to catch up with what Lewis was saying, only to succeed in catching the predictably below-the-belt punch-line. Everybody else laughed, so so did Gav, no less enthusiastically than anybody else, and, interestingly, no less enthusiastically than he had at any other part of Lewis’s act, when he’d heard every word. Remarkable. I watched Gav for a while from the corner of my eye, wondering, not for the first and - barring serious accidents and justifiable homicide - almost certainly not for the last time, what I was doing sharing a flat with somebody whose cogitative powers I had last had cause to ponder only a few hours earlier, when I had discovered - while watching the news with Gav - that he had believed up until then that the Intifada was an Italian sports car.

  In a way I envied Gav, just because he found life such a hoot. He also seemed to think that it was - like himself, perhaps - comparatively uncomplicated. As is the way with such things, these subjectively positive qualities tend to have precisely the opposite effect on the temperaments of those in close proximity to the person concerned.

  This was a man, after all, who had not yet mastered something as fundamental and as linear in its properties (for the most part) as running a bath at the correct temperature. How many times had I gone into the bathroom in our flat to find that the bath was full almost to the brim of hot, steaming water? This was an indication that Gav was planning to bathe in an hour or so. Gavin was of the opinion that the way to draw a bath was to fill it entirely from the tap that had the little ‘H’ on it (thereby reducing the flat’s supplies of immediately available hot water to zero), then leaving the resulting body of liquid to cool to something approaching a state in which a human body could enter it without turning instantly the colour of a just-boiled lobster. This normally took about thirty minutes in the depths of winter, and sometimes well over an hour in high summer, during which time Gav was inclined to amuse himself watching television - soap operas and the less intellectually taxing game shows, preferably - or eating, say, banana and Marmite sandwiches (just one example from Gavin’s extensive repertoire of unique snackettes that entirely substituted culinary originality for anything as boring as tasting pleasant).

  My attempts to explain the subtle dialectics of utilising both hot and cold taps - consecutively or concurrently - to produce a bath that could be used immediately without recourse to the Western General’s burns unit (with the resulting benefits of freeing the bath for the use of others earlier and in the process using a great deal less electric power, which both we and the planet could ill afford), fell not so much on deaf ears as on open-plan ones. In automotive terms, if Lewis was a motor-mouth, then Gavin was a cross-flow head.

  I drained my glass, studied the flattening dregs of foam at the bottom.

  ‘Nuther beer, big yin?’

  ‘No thanks, Gav; I’ll buy my own.’

  Gavin, I had long ago concluded, believed that life revolved around rugby and beer, and that - especially under the influence of too much of the latter - sometimes it just revolved. Perhaps it might be a mistake to match him pint for pint.

  ‘Ah; go on. Heavy, aye?’ He grabbed my empty glass, and with that he was gone, shouldering his way through the pack of bodies for the distant dream that was the bar. He was still grinning inanely. Probably a good point for him to mount an expedition to the bar. Lewis was in the middle of a long, right-on, faux-naïve spiel about post-isms which Gav probably found a little bewildering. (‘I mean, what is post-feminism? Eh? Answer me that? What do they mean? Or have I missed something? I mean, was there a general election last week and nobody told me about it and half the MPs are now women? Are fifty per cent of the directors of all major industries female? Is it no longer the case that the only way to hold on to your genitals if you’re brought up in Sudan is to be born a boy? Don’t Saudi Arabian driving licences still have a section that says Title: Mr, Mr or Sheik, please delete?’)

  I really had been going to buy my own drink; anybody who has ever been hard-up will tell you it’s the easiest way to regulate one’s finances while still remaining nominally sociable, but Gav, profligate though he may have been with the heat plumes from his baths (and kettles; Gavin’s determination to wreck the ecosphere through the generation of copious volumes of unnecessary hot water extended to never boiling a kettle that was less than brim-full, even if only a single cup was required), was equally generous when it came to buying drink. At such moments it was almost possible to forget he was also the inventor of custard and thousand-island dressing pudding.

  My brother seemed to be thinking along the same epicurean lines. However, to my horror (emulsified with a small amount of schadenfreudian delight), he appeared to be proposing to sing.

  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 alterna
tive humour. Finishing with a song. Good grief.

  I 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 sen
se 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.