The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I tried to imagine how the world had been created, and I imagined Sooty - you know; the glove puppet -’

  ‘I know; they still have him. Sooty and Sweep.’ Prentice giggled.

  ‘Well, I imagined him standing on a wee planet about the size of a football -’

  ‘But he hasn’t got any legs!’

  ‘Ah, but he did in the annuals I got for Christmas. Anyway, I imagined him waving a wand, and the world came into existence. Like, I’d been to church, been to Sunday School, so I knew all the stuff in the Bible, but I guess I needed to envisage it ... see it, in my own terms.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But then I thought; wait a minute; where does the planet Sooty’s standing on come from? I thought Sooty could have waved his wand and made that appear too, but where would he stand while he was doing it? I mean, I didn’t think, Well, he could float in space, and it never occurred to me to ask where Sooty himself had come from, or the wand, but I was already heading towards not believing, I suppose. It was like the dragons.’

  ‘Dragons?’ Prentice said, sounding excited and wary at once. Rory felt the boy tremble.

  ‘Yeah,’ Rory said. ‘I used to hide under the covers of my bed at night, imagining there were dragons out there; in the room when the light was out, when there was nobody else there. I’d hunch down under the covers with just an air-hole to breath through, and shelter there. The dragons couldn’t get you through the air-hole; they could only get you if you put out a foot or a hand, or worst of all your head; that was when they struck; bit it off, or pulled you right out and ate all of you.’

  ‘Waa! Alien!’ Prentice said. His arms squeezed Rory’s neck.

  ‘Yeah,’ Rory said. ‘Well, I guess a lot of horror films come from that sort of background. Anyway; I used to be petrified of these dragons, even though I knew they probably didn’t exist; I mean I knew there was no Santa Claus, and no fairies and elves, but still thought ghosts and dragons were a possibility, and it only took one to kill you ... I mean how did I really know I could trust adults? Even mum and dad? There were so many things I didn’t really understand about people, about life. Most of the time you could just ignore a lot of the stuff you didn’t know; it’d come in time, you’d be told when you needed to know... But how did you know that there wasn’t some big secret, some big, evil deal going down that involves you but had been kept secret from you?

  ‘Like, maybe your parents were just fattening you up until you would make a decent meal for these dragons, or it was an intelligence test; the kids smart enough to have sussed out the fact there were dragons around were the ones that would survive, and the ones that just lay there, trusting, each night, deserved to die, and their parents couldn’t tell them or the dragons would eat them, and stories about dragons were the only clues you were ever given; that was all the adults could do to warn you ... I was pretty paranoid about it. I used to be frightened to fall asleep at night sometimes, afraid I’d stick my head out from under the clothes while I was asleep and wake up to find my head in a dragon’s mouth, before I died.’

  ‘Wow!’

  Rory grunted, shifting Prentice’s weight again. Kid wasn’t so feather-light after all. ‘But then one night, under the covers - I was just getting older, I guess, but anyway - I was sort of reviewing the day, and I was thinking about school, and what we’d learned, and we’d been doing the Second World War, and I hadn’t liked the sound of this Hitler guy at all; and I’d asked dad, just to double-check, and -’

  ‘So he was still alive? When you were ten?’

  ‘Oh yeah; didn’t die until I was twelve. Anyway; he brought down this book; history of the War in pictures, and it had like all these photos of the death camps, where the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, and communists, and homosexuals, and gypsies and anybody else they didn’t like ... but mostly Jews, and there were like just piles of bodies; incredibly thin bodies, like bones; skeletons wrapped with tissue paper, and piled higher than a house ... and pits; long pits full of bodies, and the metal stretchers they were put onto to be shoved into the ovens, and the piles of wedding rings and spectacles; glasses, and even artificial legs and weird stuff like that ...

  ‘Anyway, that night they put a night-light in my room, in case I had nightmares, but the shadows were even worse than the darkness, and so I just lay there, under the covers, quivering with fear thanks to these damn dragons, and I wished Ken was back from University because sometimes I was allowed to sleep in his room, and I wished I was allowed a torch in my room, but I wasn’t, and I was wondering about crying really loudly, because that would bring mum and dad in to see me, but then what did I say was wrong? And then I suddenly thought ...

  ‘The dragons might be there; they might be real and they might be every bit as vicious as I’d imagined, but I’m a human being; so was Adolf Hitler and he killed millions of people!

  ‘And I threw back the bedclothes before I had any more time to think about it and burst out of the bed; threw myself into the middle of the bedroom, screaming and roaring and thrashing about.’

  ‘Ha!’ Prentice said, squirming.

  ‘That brought mum and dad through; thought I was having a fit or something. But I just looked up from the carpet with this great big reassuring smile and said there was nothing to worry about.’ Rory smiled at the memory, bringing his head up to look around. A break in the dunes let the sound of surf grow louder. There was a car in the distance coming towards them.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Prentice said.

  Rory grunted, shifting Prentice’s weight once more. ‘Never had any trouble with dragons after that.’

  ‘I’ll bet you didn’t!’

  The car hummed nearer as the view to one side slowly opened up through the dunes to reveal the shining beach and blue-green ocean.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get a lift off this car, eh?’ Rory said. ‘You okay to get down?

  ‘Yeah!’ Prentice slid off onto the grass and stood there, favouring his good leg, while Rory stretched and rubbed at his lower back. He stuck one thumb out when the car was still a few hundred yards away. Prentice reached up and put something on the thin collar of Rory’s shirt. It was the little paper Lifeboat flag. Rory held his collar out so that he could look at it. He looked down at the boy’s grinning face. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘That’s your medal, Uncle Rory,’ Prentice told him. ‘For being a brilliant uncle.’

  Rory ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘Thanks, Prentice.’ He looked back at the car. Was it slowing?

  ‘I used to worry about Darth Vader,’ Prentice confessed, putting his arm round Rory’s waist and lifting his foot to massage it with one hand. ‘I’d lie under the covers and make the noise he makes when he’s breathing, and then I’d stop, but sometimes it would go on after I’d stopped!’ Prentice shook his head, and slapped one hand off his forehead. ‘Crazy, eh?’

  Rory laughed, as the approaching car started to slow down. ‘Yeah, well, that’s what stories do to you, sometimes. Your dad’s always tried never to tell you lies, or stories that would scare you or make you superstitious, but -’

  ‘Ha!’ Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them. ‘I remember he tried to tell us clouds came from the Steam Packet Hotel, in the town. That’s what they were: packets of steam from the Steam Packet Hotel. Ha!’

  Rory smiled as they walked towards the car, him supporting the limping boy. Rory looked away for a second, towards the beach, where the long Atlantic rollers crashed against the broad expanse of gold.

  He sniffed the glass; the whisky was amber, and there wasn’t much of it. The smell stung. He put it to his lips, hesitated, then knocked it back in one go. The drink made his lips and tongue tingle; his throat felt sore and the fumes went up his nose and down into his lungs. He tried very hard not to cough like he’d seen people cough in westerns when they tried whisky for the first time, and got away with just clearing his throat rather loudly (he looked round at the curtains, afr
aid somebody might have heard). His eyes and nose were watering, so he pulled his hanky from his trousers, blew his nose.

  The whisky tasted horrible. And people drank this stuff for pleasure? He had hoped that by trying some whisky he’d understand adults a bit better; instead they made even less sense.

  He was standing between the curtains and the windows of the ballroom of the Steam Packet Hotel, on the railway pier at Gallanach. Outside, the afternoon was wet and miserable-looking, and what little light there had been - watery and grey - was going now. Sheets of rain hauled in off the bay, blew around the steamers and ferries moored round the windswept quay, then collapsed upon the dark grey buildings of the town. The street lamps were already lit, and a few cars crawled through the rough-mirror streets with their lights on and their wipers flapping to and fro.

  Music played behind Rory. He balanced the empty whisky glass on the window-sill and gave his nose a last wipe, pocketing his hanky. He supposed he’d better go back into the ballroom. Ballroom; he hated the word. He hated the music they were playing - Highland stuff, mostly - he hated being here in this dull, wet town, with these dull people listening to their dull music at their dull wedding. They should be playing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and they shouldn’t be getting married in the first place - modern people didn’t.

  ‘Heeee-yooch!’ a voice shouted, startlingly nearby, making Rory jump. The curtains bowed in a few yards away, almost touching the window-sill, the movement like a wave. Rory could hear the stamping, slapping feet move in time to the fiddles and accordions as they played a jig. People were clapping, shouting out. God, it was all so provincial.

  Rory straightened his tie, and with his whisky still burning in his throat, and now his stomach too, he moved along to the gap in the curtains and slid through, back into the ballroom, where people sat drinking at long wooden tables and groups of dancers went whirling round in complicated, ever-changing patterns, all flowing dresses and clasping hands and big red sweaty faces and white shirts and ties and narrow trousers or - even worse - kilts.

  Rory moved near the stage, behind the tables where Kenneth and Mary sat, talking to mum. Boring Hamish and the horse-resembling Antonia were on the floor, him in a kilt, her still in her white bridal gown, both dancing badly and out of time, but seemingly thoroughly enjoying themselves.

  ‘Well,’ he heard his mum saying, ‘you two had better get a move on, or Hamish and Antonia will beat you to it.’ She laughed and drank from her glass. She wore a hat. Rory hated his mother in a hat. He thought she sounded drunk. Kenneth and Mary smiled uncertainly at each other.

  ‘Well, mum,’ Kenneth said, sitting back, filling his pipe. ‘We have been practising.’

  ‘Kenneth!’ his wife said quietly.

  Mum shook her head. ‘Ah, don’t mind me; plenty of time yet, I dare say.’ She looked into her empty glass. ‘I wouldn’t be missing grandchildren so much, but ...’ She shrugged. There was an awkward silence between the three people then, while the music played and the dancers whooped and shouted and clapped and stamped. Rory saw his mother’s shoulders move once, and she put her head down for a second, sniffed. She reached down for her handbag on the floor. Kenneth handed her his hanky. He put his arm round his mum’s shoulders. Mary moved her seat closer, reached out and took one of the older woman’s hands in hers.

  ‘God, I miss that old devil,’ mum said, and blew her nose. Eyes bright with tears, she looked at Mary, and then saw Rory standing behind and to one side of them. ‘Rory,’ she said, trying to sound all right. ‘We wondered where you were. Are you enjoying yourself, darling?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied. He hated her calling him ‘darling’. He stayed where he was because he didn’t want to get close enough for them to smell his breath. His mother smiled.

  ‘Good lad. See if you can find your cousin Sheila; you said you’d ask her to dance, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ he said, turning away.

  He didn’t like boring cousin Sheila, either. She was about the only girl here who was his own age. It was horrible being this age when nobody else was; they were all either adults or children. He blamed his parents. Mostly he blamed his dad. If he’d looked after himself, not had a heart attack, he’d still be around. That was how thoughtless he’d been. Rory supposed it was the same thoughtlessness that had made dad and mum have him so much later than the rest of their children. People just didn’t think, that was the trouble.

  He didn’t go looking for Sheila. He decided to go wandering. He would slip away. He had always liked slipping away from things. At parties he would just quietly leave when nobody was watching him, so that only much later would anybody wonder where he was. When he was out with a group of other kids, playing kick-the-can or soldiers, he would often sneak away, so that they would never find him, or think he had fallen down a hole or into a burn or a loch. It was a wonderful feeling, to disappear like that; it made him feel different and special. He gloried in the cunningness of it, the feeling of having outwitted the others, of knowing what they did not; that he was out and away and they were back there where he’d left them, ignorantly worrying where he was, searching; wondering.

  He slunk out through the doors while they were clapping the band after finishing one of their noisy, interminable Highland dances.

  It was cooler in the lobby. He drew himself upright and walked confidently through the bit of the lobby that gave onto the Cocktail Lounge, where ruddy-faced men stood panting and laughing, sleeves rolled up, ties loose, queuing for drinks or holding trays of them, laughing loudly in deep voices.

  He went through another set of doors, down some steps, round a corner, and found the hotel’s single small lift. He pulled both sets of gates open with an effort, entered, then closed them again. The lift was a little bigger than a phone box. He pressed the brass button for the top floor. The lift jerked into motion and set off, humming. The white-washed walls of the lift shaft moved smoothly downwards as the lift ascended. Stencilled letters painted inside the shaft said 1st Floor ... 2nd Floor ... God, he thought, Americans must think they’re in the Stone Age when they come to stay in a place like this.

  He felt ashamed.

  The top floor was boring. He went from one end to the other of the U-shaped hotel, up and down steps that marked the boundaries of the three separate buildings that made up the Steam Packet Hotel. There were no windows; only skylights, each spattered with rain drops and lined with little rivulets of running water. He’d been hoping for windows, and a view over the bay or the town.

  He trod the corridors again, looking for an unlocked door. Maybe the maids would have left some of the rooms open, if there was nobody staying in them just now. He tried a few handles. The only open door led to a broom cupboard.

  Then at the next door he heard giggling. He looked at the number. It was room 48. 48 was a good number; not as good as 32 or 64, but better than, say, 49, and much better than 47 (though that was interesting too because it was a prime). The very best numbers were numbers like 20, 23, 30, 40, 57, 75, 105 and 155. Calibre numbers; gun numbers. Those were luckiest. But 48 was all right.

  More giggling. He looked back down the corridor, then crouched and looked through the key-hole. It was a bit clichéd, but what did people expect in a boring hotel like this in a boring town like this in a boring country like this? It was all you could do.

  There was no key in the lock, so he could see in through the big old-fashioned key-hole. He saw a large dressing table sitting in a broad bay window. The dressing-table held a big, tippable mirror, and most of the rest of the room was visible in it. In the mirror Rory saw his sister Fiona, and then Fergus Urvill. They were making the big double bed.

  Fiona still wore her peach-coloured bridesmaid’s dress, very long and smooth-looking. There were flowers in her hair, which made her look quite good. Rory suspected she looked so good because she didn’t live here any more; she lived in London, and Aunt Ilsa had got her a job working for a television company. Fiona sold time to
people. That was how she put it. She sold advertising space. She sold time. Rory thought that sounded pretty interesting.

  Fergus Urvill was on the other side of the bed, dressed in a kilt, shirt and waistcoat. Rory knew Fergus was ages with Kenneth, but somehow he always seemed older. Maybe it was because he had gone to a private high school. Rory didn’t really know Fergus Urvill very well; although he did sometimes visit Lochgair, he spoke differently - posher - and seemed to spend a lot of his time shooting at birds and animals with other rich people.

  Rory had always found Fergus Urvill to be a little frightening. Kenneth had told him the story, years ago, about when Fergus put Lachy Watt’s eye out; he’d stuck a fossil bone in it, or something. Rory thought now that his brother must have exaggerated the story, made it more horrific than it really had been, and he certainly didn’t believe that Lachy had run away to sea just so that he could wear an eye-patch and pretend he was a pirate. He had joined the merchant navy - Rory had asked dad about that - but he had an artificial eye, not a patch. Rory knew because he’d been with mum once when they’d met Lachy and a woman in the street in Lochgilphead. Rory had looked very hard but hadn’t been able to decide which was the false eye.

  His own eye smarted, exposed to the draft coming through the key-hole. He blinked, then used his other eye.

  Fiona and Fergus were making the bed, but doing it in a funny sort of way; the bottom sheet had been doubled up half-way down the bed. They were both chuckling to themselves, and talking in quiet, urgent whispers. Fiona glanced off to one side a couple of times. Rory worked out she was looking at the door he was crouched behind.

  They made the bed up, so that it looked ordinary. Rory got ready to run away down the corridor. But they didn’t leave the room; instead, Fiona and Fergus, still breathless with giggles, still chattering excitedly away, started to turn the furniture in the room upside down. They left the bed, of course, but they turned a table, a chest of drawers, two bedside cabinets, two chairs and an easy chair upside down. They carefully replaced lights and vases and other bits and pieces as they went along. They stood before the dressing table for a while, looking at it and discussing it, apparently, but eventually just turned it round so that it faced the wrong way, rather than turn it upside down.