The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  He tried to follow where Fergus was pointing his rifle. As he did so, still lying there with his legs up on the chair he’d fallen over, he started-to over-balance to one side, towards Fergus.

  ‘Aah!’ Rory said. He tried to put one hand out to stop himself, but the gun was still in his grip. The long, blue-black barrel arced towards Fergus. Fergus looked, as Rory fell helplessly over, the gun barrel falling like some felled tree, wide muzzle pointed straight towards him.

  Rory could tell exactly what was going to happen, and couldn’t stop it.

  Fergus’s eyes widened. He jumped; fell over the back of the couch.

  Rory fell onto his side; the shotgun roared and the rear of the couch blew open in a dusty horsehair explosion.

  Rory let the gun down to the floor. The noise still rang in his ears. The room stank of smoke and the fire had gone strangely quiet. ‘Ferg?’ he said, tentatively. Couldn’t hear himself speak. ‘Ferg!’ he shouted.

  He sat upright, leaving the gun on the floorboards. Plaster tumbled off his body in clouds of dust.

  ‘Hello?’Fergus said, appearing over the top of the couch, gunless.

  Rory looked at him. They both blinked, eyes watering. ‘Did we get it?’ Rory asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Fergus said. He staggered round the rear of the couch, feet crunching in plaster, and sat down. He looked at the still slightly smoking hole in the couch, just beside where he’d sat, then up at the holes in the ceiling.

  He stayed looking at the holes in the ceiling for a while. Then he started crying.

  Rory watched for a while, befuddled. ‘What’s the matter, man?’ he said.

  Fergus took no notice; he kept on crying, still staring up at the holes in the ceiling. He took big lungfuls of air and then let them out in great racking sobs that shook his whole body. After a while, he put his head in his hands and sat there, rocking back and forward, clutching his hair just above his ears. The tears flowed, trickling off his nose and spotting the white plaster dust on the floorboards at his feet.

  ‘Ferg,’ Rory said, going over to him. He hesitated, then put his arm on the man’s shoulders. ‘Fergus; for God’s sake man, what’s wrong?’

  Fergus looked up and suddenly Rory felt older than him. Fergus’s heavy, ruddy face was puffed and bloated, and tears had streaked through the dust on his cheeks, disappearing in the bristles on his jaw-line and chin. When he spoke it was in the voice of a small, hurt boy.

  ‘Oh God, Rory, I’ve got to tell somebody, but you must promise; you must give me your word you won’t breathe a word to anybody else. On your life.’

  ‘Hey, you haven’t killed anybody or anything, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Fergus shook his head, screwed his eyes up. ‘No! Nothing like that! It’s not something I did.’

  ‘Okay; my word. All that stuff. ‘

  Fergus looked at him and Rory shivered. ‘You swear?’ Fergus said, voice hollow.

  Rory nodded. ‘I swear.’ He felt dizzy. The smoke-filled room seemed to tip and waver. He wondered if they put something trippy in shotgun or rifle cartridges. And why did I mention killing somebody? That wasn’t too sensible, way out here on this moonless night, etc., with a couple of lethal fire-arms lying around.

  ‘All right,’ Fergus said, sitting back, breathing deeply. He looked almost soberly at Rory. ‘You sure you don’t mind me talking about your sister?’ he said slowly, with what might have been some sort of smile on his face.

  Oh god, thought Rory, and felt sick.

  But it was too late to go back now.

  The way he told it, it took maybe five minutes. Fergus Urvill was crying like a baby again at the end of it. Rory cuddled him. And after as many tender words as he could think of, to try and lighten the load, to try and make it seem less of a confession, even to try and compensate for the shared and shaming confidence, he told Fergus that he had been responsible for the fire that had burned down the barn near Port Ann, fifteen years earlier.

  They ended up laughing about that, but it was the uneasy laughter of desperation and displacement, and all they could do after that was finish the whisky and have the joint Rory had been working on, and it was almost a relief when Fergus was sick as a dog out of the window, hanging out barfing onto the slates and into the guttering while Rory tried to clean the plaster off the top bunk and stowed the guns out of harm’s way.

  They woke with raging hangovers to a wrecked room and the smell of black powder and vomit. There was a dead rat, blown almost in two, resting on the hearth of the fire.

  They left the place as it was, picked up their gear and walked away. Neither of them mentioned anything that had been said during the night; they just agreed to head back to civilisation and not to mix whisky and cannabis like that again.

  There were no more huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ trips. Rory went back to live in London that winter, and ended up — funnily enough — living in a squat.

  He wrote poems.

  CHAPTER 9

  The train sat, wrapped in rain and rocked by gusts, waiting to join the main line. Sidelined again, I watched the cold wind flatten the grubby-looking grass of a weedy field outside Springburn. A man walked across the field, some mongrel dog padding ahead of him. Two paths crossed the rectangular field, forming a neat St Andrew’s Cross of down-trodden grass. The dog stopped to sniff at something in the grass, then squatted, urinating. The man following behind was dressed in cheap looking jeans and a donkey jacket, there was a bonnet perched on his head, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. He walked up behind the dog and kicked its arse. The animal loped away, putting more distance between them, then resumed its casual, padding walk along the path. It was getting dark. Street lights were starting to come on in the distance, crimson slivers slowly brightening to orange.

  I looked at my watch. We’d been stuck here, waiting to join the main line into Queen Street, for about ten minutes. You often had to wait here while the Edinburgh trains came and went, but the delay didn’t usually last this long. The station was only five minutes away; more importantly, food was only five minutes away. I’d forgone breakfast because I hadn’t got to bed till four in the morning, lunch because I had a hangover and anyway I was late for the train, and due to the fact that it was - according to British Rail at any rate - still part of the extended Festive Period, there had been no buffet trolley on the train. I was starving. I was so hungry I’d have eaten pork scratchings. Queen Street station, a scant mile and a half away, had burgers, sandwiches, shell pies, french fries and french sticks, bridies and pasties and patties. My God, if all they had were Haggisburgers, I’d eat those.

  ‘Ladies and gentulmun ...’ crackled a gruff Glaswegian voice from the carriage loudspeakers. My heart sank. The perfect end to a perfect holiday. ‘Due to a signalling failure ...’

  I looked out of the wind-shaken carriage, where people were moaning and cursing and making vows to start going by bus, or take the car next time, or buy a car, or learn to drive ... looked out through the rain-spattered sheets of glass, watching the cold January day leach out of the grey skies above the drenched city, and witnessed the rain fall upon the tramped-on, pissed-on, shat-on grass of the narrow path in the scrubby field with a feeling of wry but nevertheless wretched empathy.

  God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn’t have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.

  And intelligence? Control? There were things that we had no more control over yet than th
e grass did over the developer who chose to plough it all under and build a factory on top. Perhaps some asteroid, nudged out of its place in the great gravitational gavotte, would fall to Earth; a bullet into a face, obliterating. Unwitnessed, for what would be visible, from even a nearby star? A blink of flame, like a match struck beside a search-light ... And then nothing.

  But didn’t there have to be something out there, just to witness, just to know? Hell, it didn’t even have to do anything; it didn’t have to act on prayers or have us singled out as a special species, or play any part in our history and development; it didn’t even necessarily have to have created us, or created anything, all it had to do was exist and have existed and go on existing, to record, to encompass.

  I watched as the rain battered the grass and the wind pummelled it, quick gusts flattening patches of the field like sudden bruises beneath the dull sky. I could just imagine my father jumping up and down on this argument, this need for meaning, for faith.

  The train jerked. I started, too, shaken from my reverie. Then the train went into reverse, motors growling, occupants groaning, and trundled slowly back through the squalls of rain, passing Maryhill and looping down through Anniesland and over Great Western Road.

  We paralleled Crow Road for a bit, and stopped, waiting for signals, outside Jordanhill station; I looked up at the rear of the flats which fronted Crow Road, trying to work out which was Janice Rae’s.

  I thought of Uncle Rory, then remembered that I had some more of his papers with me, and a load of his poems. Mum had found them for me in the house at Lochgair. I got my bag down from the rack. Uncle Rory could not be more depressing than reality was, just now.

  Any hope I might have entertained that Lewis and Verity’s little Hogmanay hug had been an aberration, something they would fail to follow through, or feel for some reason embarrassed about, was comprehensively quashed the next evening when they turned up together at Uncle Hamish and Aunt Tone’s, bearing all the signs of new lovers (literally so in the case of Lewis’s neck, which displayed a line of passion purpurae worthy of an industrial vacuum cleaner, and which were ill-concealed by Lewis’s longish dark curls and a white shirt fastened with a bootlace tie).

  Lewis and Verity kept exchanging looks, laughing at anything even remotely amusing each other said, sitting close together, finding a hundred small excuses to touch each other ... I wanted to throw up. We had all gathered for Hamish and Tone’s traditional Ne’erday partyette; a necessarily quietish affair during which people exchanged tales of drunkenness, broken resolutions and recipes for hangover cures, as well as taking advantage of the opportunity to compare notes regarding blank spots in the memories of any of the assembled penitents.

  I was helping Aunt Tone prepare stuff in the kitchen but had to give up when Lewis and Verity volunteered to assist as well, and then spent most of the time feeding one another little bits of food, goosing each other and going into sardinely-intimate huddles punctuated by low whispers, bursts of baboon-like giggles and convincingly porcine snorts. I went through to the dining-room and helped myself to a pint of the neuron-friendly punch Uncle Hamish always made for the event.

  Mum and dad turned up later. There were about twenty of us, all told; mostly McHoans but with a smattering of civilians. We sipped - or in my case gulped - the weak but tasty punch, nibbled on Aunt Tone’s buffet-bits, and played Alternative Charades; an invention of my father’s in which one first has to guess the category of the thing one is being asked to decipher. When it was my turn to mime, I tended to concentrate on Popular Communicable Diseases, Well-Known Poisons, Famous Mass Murderers and Great Natural Disasters.

  My last memory is of trying to mime Rare Gynaecological Disorders, preparatory to attempting Toxic Shock Syndrome. But apparently people insisted that one stand up to do one’s piece, and I - successfully acclimatised to the horizontal by this time - refused to pander to this sort of nit-picking, and so passed my turn on to Cousin Josh with as much good grace as I could muster.

  ‘The congenitally odd-jeaned person to my left will take my place,’ I mumbled, waving one hand in his direction before letting my head resume its communion with Hamish and Tone’s lounge carpet.

  The bit about odd jeans was totally accurate, by the way; Cousin Josh made his fortune firstly by dealing in cars, then by risking all on a jeans company which at the time was tottering on the very hem of bankruptcy; under Josh’s regime, their jeans weren’t any better or any cheaper than anybody else’s, but he had the garments made in odd sizes; waists of 29, 31, 33 inches, and so on, as opposed to the products from all other companies, domestic and foreign, which tended to favour the even numbers.

  It was one of those brilliantly simple ideas people always wish they had had themselves, and believe that somehow they could have had; no need to incur any extra expense or make any more sizes than anybody else, or necessarily to distinguish one’s product in other way, yet just by the idea one has a potential market of half the jeans-buying public, or at least that proportion of it which has always felt that they are somehow perpetually between the usual sizes.

  I vaguely remember dreaming about Verity’s jeans that night; how graphically, geographically tight they were and how wonderful it must be to take them off her. Then I imagined Lewis, boots tied round his neck, for some reason suddenly resembling Shane MacGowan, skinning her jeans off, not me, and he turned into Rodney Ritchie, at home with his parents, unpicking the individual stitches of her jeans with a tiny knife, and the Ritchies all wore badly-fitting jeans and had denim curtains and denim carpets and denim light shades and denim wallpaper with the little rivets left on like poppers so you could just press paintings and photos onto the wall ... except that Mr Ritchie looked like Claude Levi-Strauss, which is when I think I started to get confused.

  Either I had been put to bed, I thought, as I woke up next morning, in the wee cold room at the top of the house, or my standard drunk-person’s on-board auto-pilot facility was improving with experience.

  I bathed, dressed, and broke my fast with some left-overs from the fridge, a pint of water and a couple of brace of Paracetamol, all without encountering anybody else in the house. It was only eight o’clock; obviously I’d conked out some time before everybody else, and they were still asleep (I had heard appropriate log-sawing-like noises coming from Hamish and Tone’s room on my way back from the bathroom). The day looked bright but cold; I laced up the Docs and went for a walk in the hills behind Gallanach.

  I felt like shit and I was trying so hard not to think of Lewis and Verity that I couldn’t think about anything else, but the day was fabulous; clear and cold, the sky crystal blue and reflecting in the waters of hill-cupped lochans and the glinting length of Loch Add. On such days the hills hold a mixture of azure and gold never seen at any other time of year; the cobalt sky is more intense than it ever is in summer, and the straw-coloured hills shine strong in the light from the low winter sun. Against the shifting mirror that is the surface of a loch, the colours shimmer and dance; they take your breath away, and - for a brief, relieving while - they can even take your thoughts away.

  Up in the hills, at the place of marching water, I found Ashley Watt and one of her more exotic cousins.

  The concrete spillway below the Loch Add reservoir comes down to a stepped slope above the confluence of several small burns draining nearby slopes. A short bridge carries the track over the spillway, and that was where Ashley and Aline were sitting, legs dangling over the stream in the concrete gully, arms resting on the lower bar of the bridge rails.

  They were sitting side by side, watching the marching water.

  What happened was that the water first backed up behind the lipped edge of the top step, then over-flowed, and spilled with increasing force, in a sort of hydro-chain-reaction, down each subsequent step to the bottom of the channel. There followed a period of comparative quiet, while the water built up again behind the top step and those beneath. You might guess it was my dad who first pointed out this o
dd (and classically Chaotic) phenomenon and brought it to the attention of us kids. None of us had ever been able to discover whether it was a deliberate effect, or the result of pure chance. Whatever, it was wonderfully restful, unpredictable and therapeutic.

  ‘Hey, Prentice,’ Ash said. She looked a little worn and bleary-eyed, though her long, lion-coloured hair shone like health itself in the brassy sunlight of mid-day.

  ‘Hi.’ I nodded to her and to Aline, who was Franco-Vietnamese and engaged to Hugh Watt, one of Ashley’s multitudinous cousins from the branch of the family that seemed to favour consorts of an exotic provenance (Hugh’s brother Craig was going out with a stunning, lanky Nigerian called Noor). Aline looked even smaller and blacker-haired than usual, beside Ashley. ‘Aline; ça va?’

  ‘Magic, Prentice,’ Aline replied in fluent Glaswegian.

  ‘Have some skoosh,’ Ash said as I sat down next to her. She reached between her and Aline and handed me a half-finished bottle of Irn-Bru. I had, over the course of the morning, already gulped down about a gallon of teeth-achingly cold stream-water at various points up in the hills, but the traditional Scottish hangover treatment was probably just what I needed. I took a couple of mouthfuls, handed the bottle back, wiping my lips.

  ‘You look terrible,’ Ash said.

  ‘Feel worse,’ I said glumly, watching the water cascade down the concrete stair-case of the spillway.

  ‘Lost track of you at the Urvills’ party, Prentice,’ Ashley said. ‘You just slope off, or did you get a lumber?’

  ‘Oh God,’ I moaned, and lowered my head to the cool steel pipe of the bridge rail.

  ‘Hey ...’ Ash said gently, putting her hand on my head and patting me. ‘There there, Prentice ma man. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ I sighed, slowly raising my head again and gazing at the water. ‘I saw the woman I love wrap herself round my older, smarter and wittier brother like clingfilm round a sandwich, and it looks like they’re enjoying each other the way ... Oh, God, I’m so pissed off I can’t even think of a decent comparison. Or even an indecent one, which would probably - certainly - be more to the point.’