The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Prentice.’

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, I was right. They drove to Kinglas; Glen Kinglas, with us following, and they got parked in the lay-by, and we did too, and we all got out, and we all stood there for a while, and nobody said anything. Then they got the sledgehammers and the crowbars out, and we turned the cars and left the engines running so we had plenty of light, then Bill and I sat on the bank and watched them ... Oh, wow! Mum; you should have seen them! They smashed that fucking litter bin -’

  ‘Prentice!’

  ‘Sorry. But they did; they pulverised the mother. They whacked and smashed and blasted the damn thing to smithereens then tore them to shreds too; hammered the metal bins inside flat, turned the concrete shell of the thing to dust, and I’d asked Bill if it was okay, and he’d said, In the circumstances ... so I went to his car and got his spare can of petrol, because Bill’s really organised that way, and said, Was it all right? And they were all standing there, sweating and panting and looking just so drained, and Ash just sort of nodded, and I emptied the petrol all over the remains of the bin and Dean threw a match at it and Whumph! up it went, and we just stood there.

  ‘And then this cop stopped! I couldn’t believe it! What were the chances? And like only a couple of cars had passed; hadn’t stopped, though one had slowed down, certainly, but it had gone off again. And this enormous fu - great sergeant got out and he was, like incandescent! The bin was nothing on this guy! And we all just stood there, and I thought, Oh no, this really could end badly, because there was just him by himself, and he was cursing us up and down and the Watts weren’t taking it too well and I thought I could hear Dean starting to growl, and I finally managed to get a word in edgeways when he said who’d set it on fire and I said me and stepped forward, showing him the petrol can, and told him what it was all about; about Darren hitting the thing and it being like - well I tried not to use too many long words, but like, expiation ... and he listened, and I was like in that way when you’re really nervous where once you’ve started you can’t stop, and I was probably repeating myself all over the place and rambling and not making much sense, but I just kept on going, and he just stood there with this look like thunder on his face, all lit by the fire, and I stopped and said we knew it was wrong and we’d accept having to be punished for it — even though I heard Dean growling when I said it — but even so, although we might be sorry we’d done it, we were glad too, and that was just the way it was, and if we didn’t normally have respect for public property, it wouldn’t mean so much to us to destroy it like we had.’

  Prentice swallowed. ‘And I shut up at last, and nobody said anything, and the fire was nearly out by this time, and the big sergeant just says, ‘Get on your way and pray I never haul any of you up for anything else.’ And I’m like, Yessuh, massa, and kicking dirt over the wee bits of the fire that’s left and the Watts are still surly but they’re putting all the stuff back in the boot of the Cortina and the big guy’s just standing with his arms folded watching us, and I’m thinking; Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, hell; there’s still a few good apples left, and we just got into our cars and drove away, with the big sergeant still standing there glowering like Colossus in our tail lights.’ Prentice spread his hands. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Well,’ Mary said. ‘Good grief.’ She shook her head, glanced at the snooker, then put her glasses on and took up her paper again. ‘Hmm, well, I probably won’t tell your father that. Away and wash your hands, try to get rid of that smell. There’s plenty of milk in the fridge if you want cereal.’

  ‘Right-oh, mum.’ He came over to her, kissed her hair.

  ‘Yuk; what a stink. Go and wash, you vandal.’

  ‘Thanks for listening, mum,’ he said, on his way to the door.

  ‘Oh, I had a choice, did I?’ she said, pretending primness.

  Prentice laughed.

  CHAPTER 7

  We passed the lay-by near the Cowal Road junction doing about ninety. I watched as we went by. Nothing; it was just a damp, deserted parking place with a big new concrete litter bin (replaced with unusual alacrity, in less than six months). We swept past, trailing light spray. It was a dim, grey day; light drizzle from the overcast, mountains hidden past about a thousand feet. We were on dipped-beam; the instruments glowed orange in front of the delicious, straight-armed, black-skirted, Doc-shoed, crop-blonde, purse-lipped Verity; my angelic bird of paradise, driving like a bat out of hell.

  ‘Yo; Prentice. Get you out of bed?’

  ‘Oh, you guessed.’

  ‘It’s a gift. Pick you up at one?’

  ‘Umm ... Yeah. Where are you, Lewis?’

  ‘At the Walkers’, in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Oh ... Is Verity there?’

  ‘Yeah; she’s coming.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘She’s coming; to Lochgair. Charlotte and Steve are off to the States this morning, skiing, and Verity -’

  ‘Skiing, to the States? Sheesh, that pack-ice gets -’

  ‘Shut up, Prentice. The upshot is Verity’s going to be Festival Perioding with the Urvills. She’s going to drive us there.’

  And me insane, I thought.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘No Rodney?’

  Lewis laughed. ‘No Rodney. Verity is finally a Rod-free zone.’

  ‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer chap.’

  ‘Agree grade and comments. See you thirteen hundred hours.’

  ‘Yeah; see you then.’ I put the phone down.

  There was a dartboard above the phone with a picture of Thatcher taped over it. I kissed it. ‘Yeeeeee-HA!’ I shouted, leaping back into the bedroom.

  ‘Shut up, Prentice,’ Gav moaned, muffled, from his bed. He was invisible under a heap of duvet. My bed was on the other side of the room, away from the window, and so not quite as cold as Gav’s in the winter. I fell into it, bounced. (Technically I should have Norris’s solo room because I’ve been in the flat longest, but that room’s small and noisy; also, Gav doesn’t snore and he’s quite happy to retreat to the living room couch if I have female company ... That’s another thing; there’s only room for a single bed in Norris’s room). ‘Put the heater on, ya bastard,’ Gav mumbled.

  I leapt up, ninja’d over to Gav’s bed and wheeched the duvet off.

  ‘Aw ya -!’ He grabbed the duvet back, cocooned himself again. ‘- bastard!’

  ‘Gavin,’ I told him. ‘You are a skid-mark on the lavatory bowl of life. But I respect you for it.’ I turned, grabbed my dressing gown and made for the door; with one mighty ninja kick, the side of my right foot connected with all three switches of the fan heater at the same time and it hummed into life. ‘I shall make some tea.’

  ‘Dunno about tea; fuckin good at makin a noise.’

  ‘Thank you for sharing that with us, Gav. I shall return.’

  ‘What’s the weather like?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, staring at the ceiling, one finger to my lips. ‘Good question,’ I said. ‘The weather’s like, a manifestation of the energy-transfer effected between volumes of the planet’s gaseous envelope due to differential warming of the atmosphere at various latitudes by solar radiation. Surprised you didn’t know that, actually, Gavin.’

  Gavin stuck his head out from under the duvet, giving me cause once more to marvel at the impressive way the lad’s shoulders merged into his head with no apparent narrowing in between (this appeared to be the principal physical benefit bestowed by the game of rugby; the acquisition of an extremely thick neck, just as the most important thing one could take to the sport was a thick skull, and from it an intact one still in satisfactory two-way communication with one’s spinal cord).

  Gav - who probably epitomised thick-skulledness, though admittedly would not be amongst one’s first fifteen when it came to offering proof of heavy traffic within the central nervous system - opened one bleary eye and focused on me with the same accuracy one has grown to expect from security forces aiming baton rounds at protesters’ legs. ‘What the fuck’s made you so un
bearable this morning?’

  I clasped my hands, smiled broadly. ‘Gavin, I am in a transport of delight, or at least shall be shortly after one o’clock this afternoon.’

  There was a pause while Gavin’s duty-neuron struggled to assimilate this information.

  The intense processing involved obviously exhausted too much of Gav’s thinly stretched grey matter to allow speech in the near future, so he contented himself with a grunt and submerged again.

  I boogied to the kitchen, singing, ‘Walking On Sunshine’.

  I watched the orange-white needles swing across their calibrated arcs. Ninety. Jeez. I was sitting behind Lewis, who was in the front passenger seat. I kind of wished I’d sat behind Verity; I wouldn’t have seen so much of her - not even a hint of that slim, smooth face, frowning in concentration as she barrelled the big black Beemer towards the next corner - but I wouldn’t have been able to see the speedometer, either. Lewis seemed unperturbed.

  I shifted in my seat, a little uncomfortable. I pulled the seat belt tight again. I checked Verity wasn’t watching and adjusted my jeans a little. The folder containing Rory’s work lay on the seat by my side; I lifted the file onto my lap, concealing a bulge. There was a reason for this.

  We’d been on the bit of fast dual carriageway between Dumbarton and Alexandria, not long after Verity and Lewis had picked me up. Verity made a sort of wriggling motion a couple of times, straining back against her seat. This force was applied by those long, black-nyloned legs, and though most of the pressure was provided by her left limb, some residual effort pushed her right foot down as well, and on each occasion we speeded up, just momentarily, as her amply-soled Doc Marten pressed against the accelerator.

  ‘You okay?’ Lewis had asked, sounding amused.

  She’d made a funny face. ‘Yup,’ she’d said, shifting down to fourth as a car she’d been waiting to pass pulled back into the slow lane. We were all pressed back into our seats. ‘Problem of wearing sussies, sometimes; they sort of pull a bit, you know?’ She flashed a smile at Lewis, then me, then looked forward again.

  Lewis laughed, ‘Well, no, can’t claim I do know, but I’ll take your word for it.’

  Verity nodded. ‘Just getting things sorted out here.’ She strained against the back-rest again, her bum lifting right off the seat. The car, already doing eight-five, roared up to over a hundred. The rear of a truck was approaching rapidly. Verity wiggled her bottom, plonked it back down, calmly braked and shifted up to fifth, dawdling along behind the green Parceline truck while she waited for it to overtake an Esso tanker. ‘Parceline, parceline ...’ she breathed, tapping her fingers on the thick steering wheel. She made it sound French, pronouncing the word so that it rhymed with ‘Vaseline’.

  ‘That better?’ Lewis inquired.

  ‘Mm-hum,’ Verity nodded.

  Meanwhile I was fainting in the back seat, just thinking of what that tight black mid-thigh skirt concealed.

  It had taken until the long, open left-hander that leads down into Glen Kinglas before my erection had finally subsided, and that had been mostly naked fear; Verity had lost it just for a second, the rear of the car nudging out towards the wrong side of the road as we whanged round the bend. Sitting in the rear, maybe it had felt worse, but I’d been petrified. Thankfully, there’d been no traffic coming; the concept of striking up an intimate - indeed potentially penetrative - relationship with the rocks on the far side of the road had been bad enough; but even the prospect of a head-on with another lump of metal travelling at anything remotely like the sort of speed we were sustaining might have resulted in me making my mark in the most embarrassing fashion on the leather upholstery of the Bavarian macht-wagen.

  Verity just went ‘Whoa-yeah!’ like she’d accomplished something, jiggled the steering wheel once and accelerated cleanly away.

  Anyway, it’s one of the minor unfortunate facts of life that a detumescing willy is prone to trap stray pube hairs under the foreskin as it scrolls forward again, and that was why I was adjusting my clothing as we braked for the bend above Cairndow.

  I opened the Crow Road folder lying on my lap and leafed through some of the papers. I’d read the various bits and pieces a couple of times now, looking for something deep and mysterious in it all but not finding anything; I’d even done a little research of my own, and discovered through mum that dad had some more of Rory’s papers in his study; she’d promised she’d try and look them out for me. I took a sheet of paper out of the folder and held the page of scribbled, multi-coloured notes up, resting it on one raised knee, gazing at it with a critical look, wondering if Verity could see what I was doing. I cleared my throat. I’d rather been hoping Lewis or Verity might have asked me what the file contained by now, and what I was doing, but - annoyingly - neither of them had.

  ‘Sounds?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘Sounds.’ Verity nodded.

  I sighed. I put the sheet back in the folder and the folder back on the other rear seat.

  We rounded the top of Upper Loch Fyne listening to an old Madonna tape, the Material Girl singing ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ which raised a smile from me, at least.

  ... Back to Gallanach, for Christmas and Hogmanay. I felt a strange mixture of hope and melancholy. The lights of on-coming cars glared in the dull day. I watched the lights and the drizzle and the grey, pervasive clouds, remembering another car journey, the year before.

  ‘Sounds daft to me, Prentice,’ Ashley said, lighting another cigarette.

  ‘It sounds daft to me,’ I agreed. I watched the red tip of her cigarette glow; white headlights streamed by on the other side of the motorway, as we headed north in the darkness.

  Darren had been dead a couple of months; I had fallen out with my father and I’d been in London for most of the summer, staying with Aunt Ilsa and her long-term companion, whose only name appeared to be Mr Gibbon, which I thought made him sound like a cat for some reason ... Anyway, I’d been staying with them in darkest Kensington, at Mr Gibbon’s very grand, three-storeyed town-house in Ascot Square, just off Addison Road, and working at a branch of Mondo-Food on Victoria Street (they were trying a new line in Haggisburgers at the time and the manager thought my accent would help shift them. Only trouble was, when people said, ‘Gee, what’s in these?’ I kept telling them. I don’t believe they’re on the menu any more). I’d saved some money, grown heartily sick of London, fast food and maybe people, too, and I was getting out.

  Ash had been in London for a programming interview with some big insurance company and had offered me a lift back home, or to Gallanach anyway, as I’d exiled myself from Lochgair. Her battered, motley-panelled 2CV had looked out of place in Ascot Square, where I think that anything less than a two-year old Golf GTi, Peugeot 209 or Renault 5 was considered to be only just above banger status, even as a third car, let alone a second.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Prentice,’ she’d said, and kissed my cheek. She and Lewis had been out for a meal the night before. Big brother was staying in Islington, making a living from TV comedy shows by being one of the twenty or so names that zip up the screen under where it says Additional Material By:, and trying to be a stand-up comic. I’d been invited to dinner too, but declined.

  I’d hoped she’d just pick me up and we’d be on our way, but Ash hadn’t seen Aunt Ilsa for a long time and insisted on exchanging more than just pleasantries with her and Mr G.

  Aunt Ilsa was a large, loud woman of forbiddingly intense bonhomie; I always thought of her as being the most remote outpost of the McHoan clan (unless you counted the still purportedly peripatetic Uncle Rory); a stout bulwark of a woman who - for me at least - had always personified the dishevelled ramifications of our family. A couple of years older than dad, she had lived in London for three decades, on and off. Mostly, she was off; travelling the world with Mr Gibbon, her constant companion for twenty-nine of those thirty years. Mr Gibbon had been an industrialist whose firm had employed the ad agency which Aunt Ilsa had worked for when she’d first moved to
London.

  They met; he found her company agreeable, she found his a new slogan. Within a year they were living together and he had sold his factory to devote more time to the rather more demanding business of keeping Aunt Ilsa company on her peregrinations; they had been on the move more or less ever since.

  Mr Gibbon was a grey-haired pixie of a man, ten years older than Aunt Ilsa, and as tiny and delicate as she was tall and big-boned. Apparently he was quite charming, but as the basis of his charm seemed to rest upon the un-startling stratagem of addressing every female he encountered by the fullest possible version of her name (so that every Julie became a Juliana, every Dot extended to a Dorothea, all Marys became Mariana, Sues Susanna, etc. Sorry; etcetera) as well as the slightly perverse habit of calling all young girls ‘madam’ and all old women ‘girls,’ it was a charm to which I at least was quite prophylactically immune.

  ‘And you are ...?’ he asked Ashley as he welcomed her in the hallway.

  ‘Ash,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  I grinned, thinking Mr Gibbon would have a hard job finding a convincing embellishment for Ash’s uncommon monicker.

  ‘Ashkenazia! Come in! Come in!’ He led the way to the library.

  Ash turned back to me as we followed, and muttered, ‘He’s a pianist, isn’t he?’

  Totally misunderstanding what she meant, I sneered slightly at Mr Gibbon’s back, and nodded. ‘Yeah; isn’t he just.’

  Aunt Ilsa was in the library; she had a heavy cold at the time and I am tempted to say we discovered her poring over a map, but the inelegant truth is that she was searching the shelves for a misplaced book when we entered.

  She spent most of the next half hour or so talking about the extended holiday to Patagonia she was planning, in an extremely loud voice and with an enthusiasm that would probably have embarrassed the Argentinian Tourist Board.