The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Prentice, I’m sorry. Maybe it sounds brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Consciousness ... goodness, whatever; they haven’t got any momentum. They can stop in an instant, just snuffed out. It happens all the time; it’s happening right now, all over the world; and Darren was hardly an extreme example of life’s injustice, death’s injustice.’

  ‘I know!’ Prentice put his hands up to the jacket hood, over his ears. ‘I know all that! I know it’s happening all the time; I know the death squads are torturing children and the Israelis are behaving like Nazis and Pol Pot’s preparing his come-back tour; you keep telling us; you always told us! And people just scream and die; get tortured to death because they’re poor or they help the poor or they wrote a pamphlet or they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time; and nobody comes to rescue them, and the torturers never get punished; they retire, they even survive revolutions sometimes because they have such fucking useful skills, and no super-hero comes to save the people being tortured, no Rambo bursts in; no retribution; no justice; nothing ... and that’s just it! There has to be something more than that!’

  ‘Why?’ Kenneth said, trying not to sound angry. ‘Just because we feel that way? One wee daft species, on one wee daft planet circling one wee daft star in one wee daft galaxy; us? Barely capable of crawling into space yet; capable of feeding everybody but ... nyaa, can’t be bothered? Just because we think there must be something more and a few crazy desert cults infect the world with their cruel ideas; that’s what makes the soul a certainty and heaven a must?’ Kenneth sat back, shaking his head. ‘Prentice, I’m sorry, but I expected better of you. I thought you were smart. Shit; Darren dies and you miss Rory, so you think, “Bugger me; must be a geezer with the long flowing white beard after all.”’

  ‘I didn’t say -’

  ‘What about your Aunt Kay?’ Kenneth said. ‘Your mum’s friend; she did believe; must be a God; prayed every night, went to church, practically claimed she had a vision once, and then she gets married, her husband dies of cancer within a year and the baby just stops breathing in its cot one night. So she stops believing. Told me that herself; said she couldn’t believe in a God that would do that! What sort of faith is that? What sort of blinkered outlook on the world is it? Didn’t she believe anybody ever died “tragically” before? Didn’t she ever read her precious fucking Bible with its catalogue of atrocities? Didn’t she believe the Holocaust had happened, the death camps ever existed? Or did none of that matter because it had all happened to somebody else?’

  ‘That’s all you can do, isn’t it?’ Prentice shouted back. ‘Shout people down; skim a few useful anecdotes and bite-sized facts and always find something different to what they’ve said!’

  ‘Oh I’m sorry! I thought it was called argument.’

  ‘No, it’s called being over-bearing!’

  ‘Okay!’ Kenneth spread his arms out wide. ‘Okay.’ He sat still for a time, while Prentice remained hunched and tense-looking in the bows. When Prentice didn’t say anything, Kenneth sighed. ‘Prentice; you have to make up your own mind about these things. I ... both your mother and I have always tried to bring you up to think for yourself. I admit it pains me to think you ... you might be contemplating letting other people, or some ... some doctrine start thinking for you, even for comfort’s sake, because -’

  ‘Dad,’ Prentice said loudly, looking up at the grey clouds.‘! just don’t want to talk about it, okay?’

  ‘I’m just trying -’

  ‘Well, stop!’ Prentice whirled round, and Kenneth could have wept to see the expression on the face of his son: pained and desperate and close to tears if he wasn’t crying already; the rain made it hard to tell. ‘Just leave me alone!’

  Kenneth looked down, massaged the sides of his nose with his fingers, then took a deep breath. Prentice turned away from him again.

  Kenneth stowed the fishing rod, looked round the flat, rain-battered waters of the small loch, and remembered that hot, calm day, thirty years earlier, on another fishing trip that had ended quite differently.

  He took up the oars. ‘Let’s head back in, all right?’

  Prentice didn’t say anything.

  ‘Fergus, darling! You’re soaked! Oh; you’ve brought some little friends with you, have you?’

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Urvill.’

  ‘Oh, it’s young Kenneth McHoan. Didn’t see you under that hood. Well, jolly good; come in. Take off your coats. Fergus, darling; close that door.’

  Fergus closed the door. ‘This is Lachlan Watt. His dad works in our factory.’

  ‘Oh, really? Yes. Well ... You’ve all been out playing, have you?’

  Mrs Urvill took their coats, handling Lachy’s tattered and greasy-looking jacket with some distaste. She hung the dripping garments up on hooks. The rear porch of the Urvill’s rambling house, at the foot of Barsloisnoch hill, beyond the north-west limits of Gallanach, smelled somehow cosy and damp at the same time.

  ‘Now, I dare say you young men could do with some tea, am I right?’

  Mrs Urvill was a tall, aristocratic-looking lady Kenneth always remembered as wearing a head-scarf. She wasn’t that day; she wore a tweed skirt, sweater, and a pearl necklace which she kept fingering.

  She made them tea, accompanied by some slices of bread and bramble jelly. This was served at a small table in Fergus’s room, on the first floor.

  Fergus had one slice of bread, and Kenneth managed two before Lachy wolfed all the rest. The war was only over a few months, and rationing was still in force. Lachy sat back, belched. ‘That was rerr,’ he said. He wiped his mouth on the frayed sleeve of his jumper. ‘See the breed in our hoose; it’s green, so it is.’

  ‘What?’ said Kenneth.

  ‘What rot,’ Fergus said, sipping his tea.

  ‘Aye it is,’ Lachy said, pointing one grubby finger at Fergus.

  ‘Green bread?’ Kenneth said, grinning.

  ‘Aye, an’ ah’ll tell ye why, tae, but ye’ve goat tae promise no tae tell anybudy.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kenneth said, sitting forwards, head in hands.

  ‘Hmm, I suppose so,’ Fergus agreed unenthusiastically.

  Lachy glanced from side to side. ‘It’s the petrol,’ he said, voice low.

  ‘The petrol?’ Kenneth didn’t understand.

  ‘Load of absolute rot, if you ask me,’ Fergus sneered.

  ‘Na; it’s true,’ Lachlan said. ‘See the Navy boys, oot oan the flyin boat base?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Kenneth, frowning.

  ‘They pit this green dye in thur petrol, an if yer foun wi that in the tank uv yer motor car, ye get the jile. But if ye pit the petrol through breed, the dye comes oot, an ye can use the petrol an naebudy kens a thing. It’s true.’ He sat back. ‘An that’s why we huv green breed in oor hoose, sometimes.’

  ‘Woof,’ Kenneth said, fascinated. ‘Bet it tastes horrible!’

  ‘That’s illegal,’ Fergus said. ‘My mother knows the C.O. at the base; if I told her she’d tell him and you’d probably all be arrested and you would get the jail.’

  ‘Aye,’ Lachy said. ‘But you promised no tae tell, didn’t ye?’ He smiled thinly over at Fergus, sitting on the other side of the small table. ‘Your maw always call ye “Darlin”, aye?’ .

  ‘No,’ Fergus said, sitting straight and drawing a hand across his forehead, moving some hair away from his eyes. ‘Only sometimes.’

  Kenneth got up and went to stare at a big model ship in a glass case on the far side of the room. It was an ordinary steamer, not a warship, unfortunately, but it looked magnificent, like one of the ones he’d seen in the big museum in Glasgow when his dad had taken him there. The ship was wonderfully detailed; every stanchion and rail was there; every tiny port-hole, even the oars in the tiny shore-boats behind the tall funnel, their seats and internal ribs thinner than match-sticks.

  ‘You her darlin, ur ye?’ Lachy said, wiping some crumbs from the plate. ‘You her wee darlin, th
at right, Fergus?’

  ‘Well, what if I am?’ Fergus said sniffily.

  ‘Weyl, whort if a eym?’ Lachy mimicked. Kenneth looked round from the gleaming, perfect model.

  Fergus’s face looked pinched. ‘At least my mum and dad don’t hit me, Master Watt.’

  Lachy sneered, stirred in his seat. ‘Aye, great fur some,’ he said, standing up. He walked round the room, looking at some wooden aircraft models on a desk, tapping them. ‘Very fancy carpet, Fergus darling,’ he said, going up and down on his heels on the thick pile of the intricately-patterned rug. Fergus said nothing. Lachy picked up some lead soldiers from a couple of trays ranked full of them, then stood inspecting some maps on the wall, of Scotland, the British Isles, Europe and The World. ‘They red bits aw ours, are they?’

  ‘No, they’re the King’s actually,’ Fergus said. ‘That’s the Empire. They’re not red because they’re commie or anything.’

  ‘Ach,’ Lachy said, ‘Ah ken that; but ah mean they’re British; they’re ours.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about “ours”, but they belong to Britain.’

  ‘Well,’ Lachy said indignantly. ‘Ah’m British, am ah no?’

  ‘Hmm. I suppose so,’ Fergus conceded. ‘But I don’t see how you can call it yours; you don’t even own your own house.’

  ‘So whit?’ Lachy said angrily.

  ‘Yes, but, Fergus,’ Kenneth said. ‘It is the British Empire and we’re all British, and when we’re older we can vote for MPs to go to parliament, and they’re in power, not the King; that’s what the Magna Carta says; and we elect them, don’t we? So it is our Empire, really, isn’t it? I mean you when think about it.’

  Kenneth walked into the middle of the room, smiling at the other two boys. Fergus looked unconvinced. Lachlan rolled his eyes, looked at the small single bed, then at a couch in one corner. ‘You got this room all tae yerself?’ Lachy said, voice high.

  ‘Yes, so?’ Fergus replied.

  ‘Bi Christ, it’s all right for some, eh, Ken?’ Lachy said, winking at Kenneth and walking over to the model ship in the glass case. ‘Aye,’ he said, tapping the glass, then twisting a little key in a lock at one end of the case; the side panel of the case opened. ‘Ah bet ye can get up tae all sorts aw things in here by yourself at nights.’ He started trying to haul the model out of the case.

  ‘Stop that!’ Fergus shouted, standing up.

  Lachy shifted the whole glass on its stand, reached in and lifted the model out of its two wood and brass cradles. Kenneth saw the rear mast bend against the top of the case. The black threads of the radio wires sagged.

  ‘How can ye play with it in here?’ Lachlan protested, straining to pull the model out.

  ‘Lachy -’ Kenneth said, starting over to him.

  ‘It’s not a toy!’ Fergus said, running over. He swatted Lachy’s arm. ‘Stop it! You’ll break it!’

  ‘Ach, all right,’ Lachy said. He slid the model ship back in. Kenneth noticed with some relief that the mast flexed back into shape, hauling the radio antennae taut again. ‘Keep yer hair on, darling.’

  Fergus locked the door of the case and pocketed the key. ‘And don’t call me that!’

  ‘Sorry, darling.’

  ‘I said stop it!’ Fergus shrieked.

  ‘Ach, dinnae wet yer knickers, ya big lassie.’

  ‘You disgusting little -’

  ‘Oh, come on, you two; act grown-up,’ Kenneth said. ‘Fergus,’ he pointed over to the window, and a slope-topped display case standing under it. ‘What’s all this stuff?’

  ‘That’s my museum,’ Fergus said, glaring at Lachy and walking to the window.

  ‘Oo, a museum,’ Lachy said in a pretend posh voice, but came over too.

  ‘Things I’ve found, locally,’ Fergus explained. He stood over the case, pointing. ‘That’s a Roman coin, I think. And that’s an arrowhead.’

  ‘Whit’s that green thing?’ Lachy said, pointing to one corner.

  ‘That,’ Fergus told him, ‘is a fossilized pear.’

  Lachy guffawed. ‘It’s a bit aw bone, ya daft bugger. Where’d ye get yon? Back a the butcher’s shop? Find it in the dug’s bowl, aye?’

  ‘No I did not,’ Fergus said indignantly. ‘It’s a fossilized pear; I found it on the beach.’ He turned to Kenneth. ‘You’ve got some education, Kenneth; you tell him. It’s a fossilized pear, isn’t it?’

  Kenneth looked closer. ‘Hmm. Umm, I don’t know, actually.’

  ‘Fuckin bit a bone,’ Lachy muttered.

  ‘You filthy-mouthed little wretch!’ Fergus shouted. ‘Get out of my house!’

  Lachy ignored this, bent down, face over the cabinet.

  ‘Go on; get out!’ Fergus screamed, pointing to the door.

  Lachy looked sourly at the pitted, vaguely green exhibit labelled ‘Fossilized Pear, Duntrunne Beach, 14th of May 1945.’

  ‘I’m not kidding! Out!’

  ‘Fergus -’ began Kenneth. He put a hand on the other boy’s arm. Fergus hit it away, face white with fury.

  Lachy wrinkled his nose, which was almost touching the glass of the cabinet. ‘Still, whit dae ye expect frae a laddy that hides in a lavvy?’

  ‘You pig!’ Fergus screamed, and brought both fists thudding down on the back of Lachy’s head. Lachy’s face crashed through the glass, into the display case.

  ‘Fergus!’ Kenneth yelled, pulling him away as Fergus kicked at Lachy’s legs. Lachy screamed, jerked back, spilling glass, arms flailing, face covered in blood.

  ‘Aah, ya basturt!’ he wailed, staggering. ‘Ah canny see!’

  ‘Lachy!’ Kenneth shouted, hauling his hanky out of his pocket. He went to Lachy, grabbed his shoulders. ‘Lachy; stand still! Stand still!’ He tried to wipe the blood from the other boy’s eyes; it was all over his jumper, dripping onto the carpet.

  ‘But ah canny see! Ah canny see!’

  ‘What on earth is going on in he - Oh my God!’ Mrs Urvill said, from the doorway. ‘Fergus! What have you been letting him do? And get him off that carpet; it’s Persian!’

  Lachlan lost an eye. The Gallanach Glass Works, Ornaments Division, made him an artificial one. Fergus was soundly beaten by his father, and not allowed out for a fortnight. The Urvills granted the Watt family the sum of one thousand guineas in full and final settlement of the matter, the papers drawn up by the firm of Blawke, Blawke and Blawke.

  Lachlan was still growing, and perhaps because of that during his mid-teens the eye kept falling out, so another, slightly larger, was made; Lachlan was allowed to keep the old one. He had a third glass eye, which he’d got from the hospital when the first one had been lost for a week (it was eventually discovered, months later, under a chest of drawers in Lachy and Rab’s bedroom, where presumably it had rolled during the night), but it was of inferior quality; duller and less lifelike, and he kept it as a spare.

  He was the boy with four eyes, and he didn’t even need glasses. Or rather a monocle.

  ‘Keep an eye out for us, Lachy!’ and variations thereof became a popular phrase amongst his school-mates, though not to his face after the first boy to say it within Lachy’s earshot, if not sight, was held down by a half-dozen powerful young Watts and forced to swallow the brown-irised orb, and then to bring it back up.

  Mary McHoan sniffed the air. ‘Prentice, you smell of petrol.’

  Prentice collapsed into a seat in the living room. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  His mother looked over the top of the Guardian at him. On the television, a game of snooker was proceeding silently. Prentice sat and looked at it. Mary put the paper down, took off her reading glasses.

  ‘Where’s Ken?’ Prentice asked. He still had his black leather jacket on.

  ‘In bed, reading,’ Mary told him. She folded the paper, went over to her son, and sniffed the air above him. ‘And smoke! You smell of ... of non-pub smoke,’ she said, going back to her seat. ‘What have you been up to?’

  Prentice leaned towards her. ‘Promise you won’t tell dad?�
��

  ‘No, Prentice,’ she said, smoothing her skirt. She took a coffee mug from the small table at her side and sipped from it. ‘You know I’m terrible with secrets; not like your father.’

  ‘Hell’s teeth. Oh, well,’ Prentice said. ‘Whatever; we got let off, so -’

  ‘Let off what?’ Mary said, alarmed.

  ‘We were in the Jac and Bill Gray said he’d heard the Watts saying - well, it was Ashley, he said, which was why I didn’t believe him at first - but he’d heard them ... they were all sitting, all the young ones; the Watts, anyway, sitting there being antisocial and morose, cause of Darren getting killed, and anyway, Bill heard Ash saying there was only one way to deal with it, or they’d never get over it properly, and they should all get sledgehammers and stuff -’

  ‘Sledgehammers!’ Mary said, clutching at her elbows.

  ‘That’s what I said!’ Prentice said, sitting forward, unzipping his jacket. ‘Sledgehammers? And Bill said yeah, he was sure; and crowbars, that sort of stuff; they were going to get it out of their system, and I believed Bill because he’s so straight; no side at all, and I looked over and they were all standing up and putting their coats on and drinking up, and I tried to talk to Ashley, but they were out the door, and Ash said something about coming along too, and it was Bill had the car, and he’d dashed for a pee, and by the time we got out to the car park they were tearing off in Dean’s Cortina, and then Bill couldn’t get his car started and we headed for the Watts’ house, but by then they’d been there and they passed us; we turned round, followed their lights, caught up with them at those new houses out by Dalvore, but they were just throwing stuff in the boot. I shouted to them, but they got back in and screamed off again, so we followed.

  ‘Jeez, I thought they knew where that guy lived that hit Darren, but Bill said he was from East Kilbride, and I said but we’re heading that way! And they just kept going; past here and up to Inveraray, and then I thought, God, I hope I know what they’re really going to do, and I told Bill, and he said Shit, let’s hope so.’