The Crow Road (20 page)

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.

I sat fretting, wanting to be away.

 
 
 
By some miracle, the 2CV hadn’t been towed away when I’d finally dragged Ash out; we’d made it to the M1, picked up a hitcher and - rather beyond the call of duty, I’d have said - dropped him where he was going, in Coventry. We got lost in Nuneaton trying to get back on the M6, and were now heading through Lancashire at dusk, still an hour or more from the border.

‘Prentice, there are a lot of better reasons for not talkin to your dad, believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ I said.

‘What about your mother?’

‘No, she’s still talking to him.’

She tutted. ‘You know what I mean. You’re still seeing her, I hope.’

‘Yeah; she came to Uncle Hamish’s a couple of times, and she drove me back to Glasgow once.’

‘I mean, what’s the big argument? Can’t you just agree to disagree?’

‘No; we disagree about that.’ I shook my head. ‘Seriously; it doesn’t work that way; neither of us can leave it alone. There’s almost nothing either of us can say that can’t be taken the wrong way, with a bit of imagination. It’s like being married.’

Ash laughed. ‘What would you know? I thought your mum and dad were pretty happy.’

‘Yeah, I suppose. But you know what I mean; when a marriage or relationship is going wrong and it’s like everything that one person says or doesn’t say, or does or doesn’t do, seems to rub the other one up the wrong way. Like that.’

‘Hmm,’ Ash said.

I watched the red tail lights. I felt very tired. ‘I think he’s angry that having given me the freedom to think for myself, I’ve not followed him all down the line.’

‘But, Prentice, it’s not as though you even believe in Christianity or anything like that. Shit, I can’t work out what it is you do believe in ... God?’

I shifted uncomfortably in the thin seat. ‘I don’t know; not God, not as such, not as a man, something in human form, or even in an actual thing, just ... just a field ... a force -’

‘ “Follow the Force, Luke,” eh?’ Ash grinned. ‘I remember you and your Star Wars. Didn’t you write to Steven Spielberg?’ She laughed.

‘George Lucas.’ I nodded miserably. ‘But I don’t even mean anything like that; that was just background for the film. I mean a sort of interconnectedness; a field effect. I keep getting this feeling it’s already there, like in quantum physics, where matter is mostly space, and space, even the vacuum, seethes with creation and annihilation all the time, and nothing is absolute, and two particles at opposite ends of the universe react together as soon as one’s interfered with; all that stuff. It’s like it’s there and it’s staring us in the face but I just can’t ... can’t access it.’

‘Maybe it isn’t accessible,’ Ash said, fag in mouth, holding the steering wheel with her knees and making a stretching, circling motion with her shoulders (we were on a quiet stretch of motorway, thankfully). She took her cigarette from her mouth again, put her hands back on the wheel. I hoped she wasn’t getting sleepy; the drone of the wee Citroën’s engine was cataleptically monotonous.

‘How not?’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t it be accessible?’

‘Maybe it’s like your particle; inevitably uncertain. Soon as you understand one part of what it means, you lose any chance of understanding the rest.’ She looked over at me, brows furrowed. ‘What was that routine Lewis used to do? About Heisenberg?’

‘Oh,’ I said, annoyed now. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Something about being at school and bursting into this office and saying, look, are you Principal here or not, Heisenberg? And him going, weellll ...’ She gave a small laugh. ‘Mind, it was funnier the way Lewis told it.’

‘A little,’ I conceded. ‘But -’

‘Lewis seems to be making it in the old alternative comedy scene, doesn’t he?’ Ash said.

‘So we’re told,’ I said, looking away. ‘I don’t imagine Ben Elton or Robin Williams have considered early retiral quite yet, though.’

‘Aye, but good for him, though, eh?’

I looked at Ash. She was watching the road as we roared down a slight incline at all of seventy. Her face was expressionless; that long, Modigliani nose like a knife against the darkness. ‘Yeah,’ I said, and felt small and mean-spirited. ‘Aye, good for him.’