The Crow Road (28 page)

Instead I put my head to one side so that it rested against the cold glass of the window, closed my eyes and let my mouth hang open a little. I stayed like that for the minute or so we waited at the Lochgair station platform, and didn’t stir again - yawning convincingly for any other passengers who might be watching - until we were crossing the viaduct at Succothmore.

 
 
 
Still stuck on the track within sight of Janice Rae’s flat, I got up out of my seat, took down my bag and fished out the file mum had brought from the house. I found some much-Tippexed poems typed on foolscap, plus about twenty or so printed A4 pages which looked like they were part of a play or film script. I selected a page at random and started reading.

 
But I couldn’t take any more. I put the papers in the folder and the folder in my bag, then stuffed that under my seat.

I looked out at the rain instead; it was cheerier.

I’d avoided stopping off to see mum and dad. It made my eyes close, every time I thought about it. What was wrong with me?

Well, I thought; they made me. They produced me; their genes. And they brought me up. School and university still hadn’t changed me as much as they had; maybe even the rest of my life could never compensate for their formative effect. If I was too embarrassed, too full of shame to go and see them, it wasn’t just my fault; it was theirs too, because of the way they’d brought me up (God, I thought I’d stopped using that excuse when I left Lochgair Primary School). But there
was
a grain of truth in there.

Wasn’t there?

And hell, I thought; I
had
been tired; I
was
tired still, and I would phone that evening - definitely - and say I’d fallen asleep, and nobody would be too bothered, and after all a chap could only cope with so much sorrow-saying in one day ... of course I’d phone. A bit of soft soap, a bit of flannel, like dad would say.

No sweat; I could charm them. I’d make everything all right.

 
 
 
Still, it was the hangover of that piece of moral cowardice at Lochgair station, along with everything else, that led to me feeling so profoundly awful with myself that evening (after the train finally did get into Queen Street and I walked back, soaked and somehow no longer hungry, in the rain to the empty flat in Grant Street), that mum had to call me there, because I hadn’t been able to bring myself to phone her and dad ... and I still managed to feign sleep and a little shame and a smattering of sorrow and reassure her as best I could that really I was all right, yes of course, not to worry, I was fine, thanks for calling ... and so of course after that felt even worse.

I made a cup of coffee. I was feeling so bad that I treated it as a kind of moral victory that I was able to empty most of the water out of the obviously Gav-filled kettle and leave the level at the minimum mark. I stood in the kitchen waiting for the water to heat up with a distinct feeling of eco-smugness.

It was just as I was sitting down in the living room with my cup of coffee that I realised I’d left my bag on the train.

I couldn’t believe it. I remembered getting out of my seat, putting on my jacket, wondering about trying to get something to eat, deciding I didn’t feel hungry, glancing at the empty luggage rack, and then heading through the station and up the road. With no bag.

How could I? I put the coffee down, leapt out of my chair and over the couch, ran to the phone, and got through, ten minutes later, to the station. Lost Property was closed; call tomorrow.

I lay in bed that night, trying to remember what had been in the bag. Clothes, toiletries, one or two books, a couple of presents ... and the folder with Uncle Rory’s papers in it; both folders, including the one I hadn’t read yet.

No, I told myself, as panic tried to set in. It was inconceivable that I’d lost the bag forever. It would turn up. I had always been lucky that way. People were generally good. Even if somebody had picked it up, maybe they had done so by mistake. But probably a guard had spotted it and it was right now sitting in some staff-room in Queen Street station, or Gallanach. Or maybe - in a siding only a mile or two from where I lay - a cleaner’s brush was at this moment encountering the bag, wedged back under the seat ... But I’d get it back. It couldn’t just disappear; it had to find its way back to me. It had to.

I got to sleep eventually.

I dreamt of Uncle Rory coming home, driving the old Rover Verity had been born in, the window open, his arm sticking out, him smiling and holding the missing folder in his hand; waving it. In the dream, he had a funny looking white towel wrapped round his neck, and that was when I woke up and remembered.

My white silk scarf; the irreplaceable Möbius scarf, the gift of Darren Watt, had been in the missing bag as well.

‘Noooo!’ I wailed into the pillow.

Waking up was a process of gradually remembering all the things I had to feel bad about. I rang Lost Property first thing. No bag. I got them to give me the number for the cleaners’ mess-room and asked there. No bag. I tried Gallanach, in case the train had got back there before the bag had been discovered under the seat by some honest person. No bag.

I tried both stations again in the afternoon; guess what?

I did the only thing I could think of, and retired to bed; if 1 was to be a blade of grass doomed to be trampled flat, then I might as well accept it and lie down. I stayed in bed for the next twenty-four hours, sleeping, drinking a little water, not eating at all, and only rousing myself when Gav arrived back (from his parents’, I wrongly assumed), loudly declaring himself to be of unsound liver but totally in love.

Oh, lucky ewe, I said, does she come from a respectable flock?

Ha ha, it’s your au - fr ... parents’ friend, Janice, Gav beamed, radiating unrepentant guilt; came round here the other day looking for you we got talking went for a curry had a few drinks ended up back here one thing led to another know how it is always liked older women they’re more experienced know what I mean arf arf anyway spent an extremely enjoyable New Year at her place apart from the usual visit to my folks’ of course oh by the way she’s coming round here tonight I’m cooking lasagne can you swap rooms seeing Norris won’t be back until tomorrow it’s just I didn’t expect you back until then either, that okay?

I stared at Gav from my bed, blinking and trying to take in this torrent of exponentially catastrophic information. I attempted desperately to convince myself that what I was experiencing was just a particularly cruel and hateful dream concocted by some part of my mind determined to exact due penalty from my conscience for my having behaved with such despicable lack of grace during the holidays ... but failed utterly; my sub-conscious’ stock of nightmare-paradigms includes nothing so banally twisted as Gav.

Finally, scraping together the last microscopic filaments of my tattered pride to produce a quorum fit for emergency ego-resuscitation if not actual wit, I managed: ‘Gav, I’m shocked.’ (Gav looked defensive for all of a micro-second, a concession my lacerated self-respect fell upon with all the pathetic desperation of a humiliatingly defeated politician pointing out that well, things can only get better.) ‘You never told me you could cook lasagne.’

CHAPTER 10

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a rich merchant who thought that the city where he lived was full of bad people, and especially bad children.’

‘Were they Slow Children?’

‘Some of them were, as a matter of fact, but at the time they didn’t have the signs to tell them so.’

‘Are the Slow Children only in Lochgair, dad?’

‘No; there are Slow Children in various places; watch out for the road-signs. Now; back to the story. The rich merchant thought the children should always salute him and call him “sir” when they passed him in the street. He hated beggars and old people who couldn’t work any more. He hated untidiness and waste; he thought that babies who threw things from their cradles should be punished, and children who wouldn’t eat their food should be starved until they ate what they had been given in the first place.’

‘Dad, what if it had gone rotten?’

‘Even if it had gone rotten.’

‘Aw, dad! Even if it had maggots and things in it and it was all horrible?’

‘Yes; that would teach them, he thought.’

‘Awwrr! Yuk!’

‘Well, the rich merchant was very powerful, and he came to control things in the city, and he made everybody do as he thought they ought to do; snowball-throwing was made illegal, and children had to eat up all their food. Leaves were forbidden to fall from the trees because they made a mess, and when the trees took no notice of this they had their leaves glued onto their branches ... but that didn’t work, so they were fined; every time they dropped leaves, they had twigs and then branches sawn off. And so eventually, of course, they had no twigs left, then no branches left, and in the end the trees were cut right down. The same happened with flowers and bushes too.

‘Some people kept little trees in secret courtyards, and flowers in their houses, but they weren’t supposed to, and if their neighbours reported them to the police the people would have their trees chopped down and the flowers taken away and they would be fined or put in prison, where they had to work very hard, rubbing out writing on bits of paper so they could be used again.’

‘Is this story pretend, dad?’

‘Yes. It’s not real; I made it up.’

‘Who makes up real things, dad?’

‘Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don’t always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they’re too ... messy.’

‘So the rich merchant wouldn’t like them?’

‘That’s right. In the city, nobody was allowed to tell stories. Nobody was allowed to hum, or whistle or listen to music, either, because the merchant thought that people should save their breath the way they saved their money.

‘But people didn’t like living the way the merchant wanted them to; most mums and dads wouldn’t serve their children rotten food, and hated having to pretend that they did. People missed the trees and flowers ... and having to walk around with one eye covered by an eye-patch.’

‘Why was that, dad? Why did they have -’

‘Because the merchant thought it was a waste of light to have both eyes open; why not save the light the way you save money?’

‘Were they like Mr Lachy, dad?’

‘Well, not exactly, no; Lachlan Watt only has one eye; the other one looks like a real one but it’s glass. The people in the city could change from one eye to the other on different days, but Lachlan -’

‘Aye, dad, but they’re like him sort of, aren’t they?’

‘Well, sort of.’

‘Why has Mr Lachy only got one eye, dad?’

‘Uncle Fergus punched him! Eh, dad?’

‘No, Prentice. Uncle Fergus didn’t punch him. It was an accident. Fergus and Lachy were fighting and Fergus meant to hit Lachy but he didn’t mean to put his eye out. Now; do you two want to hear this story or not?’

‘Aye, dad.’

‘Aye, dad.’

‘Right. Well, the city wasn’t a nice place to live because of all the silly laws the merchant had passed, and people started to leave it and go to other towns and other countries, and the merchant was spending so much time passing new laws and trying to make people obey the ones he’d already passed that his own business started to fail, and eventually the city was almost deserted, and the merchant found that he owed people much more money than he had in the bank, and even though he sold his house and everything he owned he was still broke; he was thrown out of his house and out of the city too, because he had become a beggar, and beggars weren’t allowed in the city.

‘So he wandered the countryside for a long time, starving and having to beg for food, and sleeping in barns and under trees, and eventually he found a little town where all the beggars and old people he’d had thrown out of the city had gone; they were very poor, of course, but by all helping each other they had more than the merchant had. He asked if he could stay with them, and eventually they agreed that he could, but only if he worked. So they gave him a special job.’

‘What, dad?’

‘What was the job, dad?’