The Crow Road (2 page)

‘And your father’s money; your allowance?’

‘I -’ I began, then didn’t know how to put it.

‘Prentice; how are you managing to survive?’

‘I’m managing fine,’ (I lied.) ‘On my grant.’ (Another lie.) ‘And my student loan.’ (Yet another lie.) ‘And I’m doing some bar work.’ (Four in a row!) I couldn’t get a bar job. Instead I’d sold Fraud Siesta, my car. It had been a small Ford and kind of lazy about starting. People used to imply it looked battered, but I just told them it came from a broken garage. Anyway, that money was almost gone now, too.

Grandma Margot let out a long sigh, shook her head. ‘Principles,’ she breathed.

She pulled herself forward a little, but the wheelchair was caught on part of the tarp. ‘Help me here, will you?’

I went behind her, pushed the chair over the ruffled canvas. She hauled open the offside rear door and looked into the dull interior. A smell of musty leather wafted out, reminding me of my childhood and the time when there was still magic in the world.

‘The last time I had sex was on that back seat,’ she said wistfully. She looked up at me. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Prentice.’

‘I wasn’t -’ I started to protest.

‘It’s all right; it was your grandfather.’ She patted the wing of the car with one thin hand. ‘After a dance,’ she said quietly, smiling. She looked up at me again, her lined, delicate face amused, eyes glittering. ‘Prentice,’ she laughed. ‘You’re blushing!’

‘Sorry, gran,’ I said. ‘It’s just ... well, you don’t ... well, when you’re young and somebody’s ...’

‘Past it,’ she said, and slammed the door shut; dust duly danced. ‘Well, we’re all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.’ She pushed the wheelchair back, over the toe of my new trainers. I lifted the chair clear and helped complete the manoeuvre, then pushed her to the door. I left her there while I put the tarpaulin back over the car.

‘In fact some of us get to be young twice,’ she said from the doorway. ‘When we go senile: toothless, incontinent, babbling like a baby ...’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Grandma, please.’

‘Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn’t much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind ... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.’

‘I’m sorry, Grandma.’ I closed the garage door, dusted off my hands, and took up my position at the back of the wheelchair again. There was an oily tyre print on my trainer. Crows raucoused in the surrounding trees above as I pushed my gran towards the drive.

‘Lagonda.’

‘Sorry, Gran?’

‘The car; it’s a Lagonda Rapide Saloon.’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. ‘Yes, I know.’

We left the courtyard and went crunchily down the gravel drive towards the sparkling waters of the loch. Grandma Margot was humming to herself; she sounded happy. I wondered if she was recalling her tryst in the Lagonda’s back seat. Certainly I was recalling mine; it was on the same piece of cracked and creaking, buttoned and fragrant upholstery - some years after my gran’s last full sexual experience - that I had had my first.

This sort of thing keeps happening in my family.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the family; on the one hand, as I don’t doubt you may well imagine, it gives me no great pleasure to stand here before you at this time ... yet on the other hand I am proud, and indeed honoured, to have been asked to speak at the funeral of my dear old client, the late and greatly loved Margot McHoan ...’

My grandmother had asked the family lawyer, Lawrence L. Blawke, to say the traditional few words. Pencil-thin and nearly as leaden, the tall and still dramatically black-haired Mr Blawke was dressed somewhere in the high nines, sporting a dark grey double-breasted suit over a memorable purple waistcoat that took its inspiration from what looked like Mandelbrot but might more charitably have been Paisley. A glittering gold fob watch the size of a small frying pan was anchored in the shallows of one waistcoat pocket by a bulk-carrier grade chain.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I’m not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows that time is on his side. I
thought
he had looked oddly comfortable in the presence of the undertakers.

I sat and listened to the lawyer and in short order wondered (a) why Grandma Margot had chosen a lawyer to make the address, (b) whether he’d be charging us for his time, and (c) how many others of my family were wondering the same things.

‘... long history of the McHoan family in the town of Gallanach, of which she was so proud, and to which she so ... usefully and, and industriously contributed throughout her long life. It was my privilege to know and serve both Margot and her late husband Matthew well, in Matthew’s case first as a school friend, back in the twenties. I well remember ...’

 
 
 
‘Grandma, I mean; good grief.’

‘What?’

My grandmother drew deeply on the Dunhill, flicked her wrist to close the brass Zippo, then put the lighter back in her cardigan.

‘Grandma, you’re smoking.’

Margot coughed a little and blew the smoke towards me, a grey screen for those ash-coloured eyes. ‘Well, so I am.’ She inspected the cigarette closely, then took another drag. ‘I always wanted to, you know,’ she told me, and looked away, over the loch towards the hills and trees on the far side. I’d wheeled her down to the shore path at Pointhouse near the old cairns. I sat on the grass. A soft breeze disturbed the water; seagulls flew stiff-winged, and in the distance the occasional car or truck disturbed the air, making a lazy throat-clearing noise as they emerged from or disappeared into the channel the main road drove between the trees. ‘Hilda used to smoke,’ she said quietly, not looking at me. ‘My elder sister; she used to smoke. And I always wanted to.’ I picked up a handful of pebbles from the path-side and started throwing them at the waves, lapping against the rocks a metre below us, almost at high tide. ‘But your grandfather wouldn’t let me.’ My grandmother sighed.

‘But gran,’ I protested. ‘It’s bad for you.’

‘I know.’ She smiled broadly. ‘That was another reason I didn’t ever take it up, after your grandfather died; they’d found it was unhealthy by then.’ She laughed. ‘But I’m seventy-two years old now, and I don’t give a damn.’

I chucked a few more pebbles. ‘Well, it isn’t a very good example to us youngsters, is it?’

‘What’s that got to do with the price of sliced bread?’

‘Eh?’ I looked at her. ‘Pardon?’

‘You’re not really trying to tell me that young people today look to their elders for an example, are you, Prentice?’

I grimaced. ‘Well ...’ I said.

‘You’d be the first generation that did.’ She pulled on the cigarette, a look of convincing derision on her face. ‘Best do everything they don’t. That’s what tends to happen anyway, like it or lump it.’ She nodded to herself and ground the cigarette out on her cast, near the knee; flicked the butt into the water. I tutted under my breath.

‘People react more than they act, Prentice,’ she said eventually. ‘Like you are with your dad; he raises you to be a good little atheist and then you go and get religion. Well, that’s just the way of things.’ I could almost hear her shrug. ‘Things can get imbalanced in families, over the generations. Sometimes a new one has to ... adjust things.’ She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. Her hair was very white against the rich summer green of the Argyllshire hills and the brilliant blue of the sky beyond. ‘D’you feel for this family, Prentice?’

‘Feel for it, gran?’

‘Does it mean anything to you?’ She looked cross. ‘Anything beyond the obvious, like giving you a place to stay ... well, when you aren’t falling out with your father? Does it?’

‘Of course, gran.’ I felt awkward.

She leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing. ‘I have this theory, Prentice.’

My heart foundered. ‘Yes, gran?’

‘In every generation, there’s a pivot. Somebody everybody else revolves around, understand?’

‘Up to a point,’ I said, non-committally, I hoped.

‘It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but...’

‘Dad certainly seems to think he’s paterfamilias.’

‘Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish ...’ She looked troubled. ‘He’s a bit off the beaten track, that boy.’ She frowned. (This ‘boy’ was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who’d invented Newton’s Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)

‘I wonder where Uncle Rory is,’ I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.

‘Who knows?’ My gran sighed. ‘Might be dead, for all we know.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don’t?’

‘I just feel it.’ I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. ‘He’ll be back.’

‘Your father thinks he will,’ Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. ‘He always talks about him as though he’s still around.’

‘He’ll be back,’ I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.

‘I don’t know, though,’ Grandma Margot said. ‘I think he might be dead.’

‘Dead? Why?’ The sky was deep, shining blue.

‘You wouldn’t believe me.’

‘What?’ I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).

Grandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. ‘I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things.’

I laughed. She looked inscrutable. ‘Sorry, gran?’

She tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. ‘Not a sausage, Prentice.’

‘Well,’ I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. ‘No.’

‘Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation.’ Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.

‘I give in, gran; what are you talking about?’

‘My moles, Prentice.’ She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. ‘I can tell what’s going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something ... remarkable is happening to the person.’ She frowned. ‘Well, usually.’ She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. ‘Don’t tell your father about this; he’d have me committed.’

‘Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn’t, anyway!’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’ Her eyes narrowed again.

I leant on one of the chair’s wheels. ‘Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?’

She nodded, grim. ‘Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too.’

‘And that mole’s Uncle Rory’s?’ I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.

‘That’s right,’ she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. ‘Not a sausage, for eight years.’

I stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. ‘Wow,’ I said at last.

 
 
‘... survived by her daughter lisa, and sons Kenneth, Hamish and Roderick.’ The good lawyer Blawke had helpfully nodded at my dad and my uncle when he mentioned them. Dad kept on grinding his teeth; Uncle Hamish stopped snoring and gave a little start at the mention of his name; he opened his eyes and looked round - a little wildly, I thought - before relaxing once more. His eyelids started to droop again almost immediately. At the mention of Uncle Rory’s name Mr Blawke looked about the crowded chapel as though expecting Uncle Rory to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. ‘And, sharing, I’m sure, in the family’s grief, the husband of her dear late daughter, Fiona.’ Here Mr Blawke looked very serious, and did indeed grasp his lapels for a moment, as he nodded, gravely, at Uncle Fergus. ‘Mr Urvill,’ Mr Blawke said, completing the nod that had developed pretensions to a bow, I thought, and then clearing his throat. This genuflection completed, the reference to past tragedy duly made, most of the people who had turned to look at Uncle Fergus turned away again.

My head stayed turned.

Uncle Fergus is an interesting enough fellow in himself, and (of course) as Mr Blawke knew to his benefit, probably Gallanach’s richest and certainly its most powerful man. But I wasn’t looking at him.

Beside the thick-necked bulk of the Urvill of Urvill (soberly resplendent in what I assumed was the family’s mourning tartan - blackish purple, blackish green and fairly dark black) sat neither of his two daughters, Diana and Helen - those long-legged visions of money-creamed, honey-skinried, globetrotting loveliness - but instead his niece, the stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowls; the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the ibid in libidinous!

Such bliss to look. I feasted my eyes on that gracefully angular form, just this side of her uncle and sitting quietly in black. She had worn a white quilted skiing jacket outside, but now had taken it off in the unfittingly chilly crematorium, and sat in a black blouse and black skirt, black ... tights? Stockings? My God, the sheer force of joy in just imagining! and black shoes. And shivering! The slick material of the blouse trembling in the light from the translucent panes overhead, black silk hanging in folds of shade from her breasts, quivering! I felt my chest expand and my eyes widen. I was just about to look away, reckoning that I had gazed to the limits of decency, when that shaven-sided, crop-haired head swivelled and lowered, her calm face turning this way. I saw those eyes, shaded by her thick and shockingly black brows, blink slowly; she looked at me.