The Crow Road (40 page)

Lewis - who had asked for and got a television for his room, and a new Walkman - had the good grace to express gratitude. I was still celebrating having finally worn down dad’s resistance to having a computer in the house, and was therefore far too busy kicking pixel and re-staging the attack of the Imperial AT-ATs on the rebel snow trenches to be bothered sparing more than the most cursory glance at what was, when all was said and done, a lump of amateurishly painted cardboard, a handful of non-motorised and very basic Lego bits, a few adulterated cards and what looked suspiciously like an exam paper. ‘Yeah; great, dad. Got any more PP9 batteries for this wee car? The one out your calculator didn’t last long,’ was about as enthusiastic as I got about the game for most of the festive period.

Later, I deigned to play.

The River Game was based on trade; dad had wanted something that would distract us from all the war games Lewis and I played: soldiers, with our friends in the woods, battles with our toys, wars on friends’ computers. He really wanted something non-capitalistic as well as non-military, but the River Game was going to be just his first effort; he would - he told us - be working on something much more right-on, once he had the time to spare. He’d see if we liked the River Game first.

You had two or three ships; you sailed them from a port on one side of the board to a port on the other side through what was either a big loch or lake choked with islands, or a piece of territory with an awful lot of waterways snaking through it, depending how you chose to look at it. You picked up cargo at the second port and sailed back. The cargo was worth a certain amount when you got back to your home port, and with the money you could buy more ships, configured for speed or capacity. There were at least half a dozen major routes from one port to the other, and basically, the shorter the route you took, the more hazardous it was; there were whirlpools, channels prone to rock falls, stretches of river where the sand-banks changed all the time, and so on. The weather had a chance to change every few moves, and how much the different types of cargo were worth depended on ... Oh, what your opponents had chosen to carry, what the weather was, whether the month had an ‘r’ in it; I can’t remember it all.

It was quite a fun game, mildly addictive, with a reasonable balance of skill and luck, and Lewis and I eventually got quite a few of our friends playing it, but the truth is it improved dramatically when Lewis - with my help - drew up an extra set of rules which let you build
warships!

We played that game for weeks before dad caught us at it in the conservatory, one rainy May day, and asked how come there were all these ships with funny-coloured cargoes clustered so close together and surrounded by wrecks where there were no hazards.

Oops.

We called it the Black River Game (Dad even objected to the title). He had been working on a new improved version of the original game that involved using some of the money to build railways across the board; you laid track, you built bridges, dug tunnels, coped with rock falls and marshes and recalcitrant land owners, and the first one to finish his or her railway was, in effect, the winner. But he stopped work on this sophistication when he found us acting out furiously destructive naval engagements on his painstakingly crafted board. He didn’t take it away, though. I think for a while he was trying to develop another non-combative game that he’d defy us to turn martial, but it stayed at the development stage and never did see the light of day.

I stopped digging for a moment, wiped some sweat from my brow with the hem of my T-shirt, which was lying on the ground at the head of the grave. I leant on my shovel, looking at Jimmy Turrock’s up-ended face while he snored. Lewis stopped digging for a moment too, breathing hard.

I said, ‘We disappointed him, though, didn’t we?’

Lewis shrugged. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. ‘Oh, Prentice, come on; boys will be boys. Dad knew that.’

‘Yeah, but he expected better of us.’

‘Dads always do, it’s traditional. We turned out not too bad.’

‘Neither of us did as well as he expected at Uni,’ I said. I’d told Lewis - though not my mother - that I was fairly certain I’d failed my finals.

‘Well, for a start, he didn’t know about you,’ Lewis said, scraping some earth off the blade of his spade. ‘And he was smart enough to know degrees aren’t everything. Come on, we’re not in prison, we’re not junkies and we’re not Young Tories.’ He waggled his eyebrows. ‘It’s no small achievement.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, and started digging again. (Pity he’d mentioned prison; another thing I hadn’t told Lewis about was that I’d been nicked for shop-lifting. Not that I’d be going to prison, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Lewis kept on digging. ‘We could have done worse,’ he insisted.

‘We could have done better,’ I said, shovelling another load of earth out of the pit.

Lewis was silent for a while, then said, quietly, ‘Better than ... yesterday?’

I laughed in spite of myself (and in spite of the grave, and my aching head and still bruised heart). ‘Shut up,’ I said, ‘please.’

Lewis shut up. I encountered another rhodie root and attacked it with the hacksaw, then took up the spade again, blinking sweat out of my eyes and waving a couple of flies away.

Lewis muttered almost inaudibly as he dug; ‘It’s only
waffer
thin ...’

We snorted and guffawed for a while, then took a break for yet more Irn-Bru, sitting at the edge of the grave, legs dangling into it, with Jimmy Turrock still blissfully - and vocally - in the land of nod across the grave in front of us.

I drank deeply from the bottle, passed it to Lewis. He finished it, grimaced, looked at the bottle. ‘You know, I’ve finally realised what this stuff reminds me of,’ he said, and belched heavily. I followed suit, trumping his sonorous burp with one that disturbed a few drowsy crows from nearby trees and even had Jimmy Turrock stir in his sleep.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Chewing gum,’ Lewis said, screwing the cap back on the bottle and chucking it into the grass near the council earth-digger.

I nodded wisely. ‘Yeah, right enough.’

We sat there, silent for a while. I looked at Jimmy Turrock’s spotty, open-mouthed face and his wispy red hair. His snores sounded like somebody forever trying to start a badly-tuned buzz-saw. I listened to it for a while, and watched a couple of flies buzzing around in a tight but complicated holding pattern in front of his mouth, as though daring each other to be the first to investigate inside. After a while they broke off, though, and settled for exploring the rough landscape of Jimmy’s checked shirt. My head hurt. Come to that, almost everything hurt. Ah well, self-inflicted wounds.

Jimmy Turrock snored on, oblivious.

 
 
 
Lewis and Verity had arrived the night before, an hour after I’d got back from my sunset visit to Darren’s sea-side sculpture. Their plane had been late and they’d had problems hiring the car, so they arrived nearly two hours later than we’d expected. Rather than phone from the airport, Lewis had hired a mobile along with the car but then when they’d tried to use it, it hadn’t worked. The upshot was that mum and I had been getting into a fine panic, and I’d been dreading watching the news: ‘... and we’re just getting reports of an incident at Glasgow airport ... details still coming in ...’

I mean, statistics tell you family tragedies oughtn’t to come in quite such close succession, but Jeez; it gets to you, when somebody dies as unexpectedly as dad. Suddenly everybody you know seems vulnerable, and you fear for them all. Every phone-call sends your heart racing, every car journey anyone takes you want to say, Oh God be careful don’t go above second gear have you thought of fitting air-bags is your journey really necessary be careful be careful be careful ... So there we were; mum and I sitting watching the television, on the couch together, side by side, holding hands tightly without even realising it and watching the television but not taking in what we were watching, and dreading the sound of the phone and waiting waiting waiting for the sound of a car coming up the drive.

Until I heard it, and leapt over the couch and hauled open the curtains and the car drew up and Lewis waved at me as he got out and I whooped, ‘It’s them!’ to my mum, who smiled and relaxed and looked suddenly beautiful again.

There was a big three-cornered hug in the hall; then mum saw Verity standing by the door, taking a very long deliberate time to take her jacket off and hang it up; and so she was brought into the scrum too, and that was the first time, I realised, that I’d ever actually embraced her, even if it was just one arm round her slim shoulders. It was all right.

Then the phone rang. Mum and I jumped.

I got it. Mum took Lewis and Verity into the lounge.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello!’ shouted a voice of immodestly robust proportions. ‘To whom am I talking?’ the booming voice demanded. It was Aunt lisa. We’d left a message at the only contact address we had for her, two days earlier. She was in Ladakh, a place so out of the way it would take several international airports, a major rail terminus and substantial investment in a network of eight-lane highways to promote it to the status of being in the middle of nowhere.

‘It’s Prentice, Aunt Ilsa.’ There was a satellite delay. I was talking to what I suspected was the only satellite ground station between Islamabad and Ulaan Baatar. There was a lot of noise in the background; it sounded like people shouting, and a mule or something.

‘Hello there, Prentice,’ Aunt lisa bellowed. ‘How are you? Why did you want me to call?’ Perhaps, I thought, she’d been taking steroids and they’d all gone to her vocal chords.

‘I’m ... there’s -’

‘- ello?’

‘- some bad news, I’m afraid.’

‘What? You’ll have to speak up, my dear; the hotelier is proving refractory.’

‘It’s dad,’ I said, thinking I might as well get this over with as quickly as possible. ‘Kenneth; your brother. I’m afraid he’s dead. He died three days ago.’

‘Good God! What on earth happened?’ Aunt lisa rumbled. I could hear shouting. The thing that sounded like a mule went into what appeared to be a fit of coughing. ‘Mr Gibbon!’ roared Aunt Ilsa. ‘Will you control that fellow!’

‘He was struck by lightning,’ I said.

‘Lightning?’ Aunt lisa thundered.

‘Yes.’

‘Good God. Where was he? Was he on a boat? Or -’

‘He was -’

‘ -golf course? Mr ... hello? Mr Gibbon had a friend once who was struck by lightning on a golf course, in Marbella. Right at the top of his back-swing. Bu -’

‘No; he was -’

‘ -course it was an iron.’

‘ -climbing,’ I said.

‘ -number seven, I think. What?’

‘He was climbing,’ I shouted. I could hear what sounded like a fight going on at the other end of the phone. ‘Climbing a church.’

‘A
church?’
Aunt lisa demanded.

‘I’m afraid so. Listen, Aunt lisa -’

‘But he wouldn’t be seen dead near a church!’

I bared my teeth at the phone and growled. My aunt, the unconscious humorist.

‘I’m afraid that’s what happened,’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘The funeral is tomorrow. I don’t suppose you can make it, can you?’

There was a noise of some Ladakhian confusion for a while, then, fortissimo; ‘I’ll have to leave you now, Lewis -’

‘Prentice,’ I breathed through gritted teeth.

‘ -Our yak has escaped. Tell your mother our thoughts are with her at -’

And it was goodbye downlink.

I looked at the phone. ‘I’m not sure you have any to spare, aunt,’ I said, and put the phone down with a feeling of relief.

‘I need a drink,’ I said to myself. I strode purposefully towards the lounge.

 
 
 
Lewis had been marginally more sensible than me, later on, that night before the funeral; he’d gone to bed one whisky before I had, leaving me in the lounge alone, at about three in the morning.

I should have gone then too, but I didn’t, so I was left to get morose and self-pitying, re-living another evening in this room, another whisky-connected two-some over a year earlier.

‘But it’s not
fair!’

‘Prentice, -’

‘And don’t tell me life isn’t fair!’

‘Aw,
think,
son,’ dad said, sitting forward in his seat, clutching his glass with both hands. His eyes fixed on mine; I looked down, glaring at his reflection on the glass-topped coffee table between us. ‘Fairness is something we made up,’ he said. ‘It’s an idea. The universe isn’t fair or unfair; it works by mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry ... Things happen; it takes a mind to come along and call them fair or not.’

‘And that’s it, is it?’ I said bitterly. ‘He just dies and there’s nothing else?’ I could feel myself quivering with emotion. I was trying hard not to cry.

‘There’s whatever he left behind; art, in Darren’s case. That’s more than most get. And there’s how people remember him. And there might have been children -’

‘Not very likely in Darren’s case, was it?’ I sneered, grabbing at any opportunity to score even the smallest rhetorical point over my father.

Dad shrugged, staring into his whisky. ‘Even so.’ He drank, looked at me over the top of the tumbler. ‘But the rest,’ he said, ‘is just cells, molecules, atoms. Once the electricity, the chemistry, stops working in your brain, that’s it; no more. You’re history.’

‘That’s defeatist! That’s small-minded!’

He shook his head. ‘No. What you’re proposing is,’ he said, slurring his words a little. He pointed one finger at me. ‘You’re too frightened to admit how big everything else is, what the scales of the universe are, compared to ours; distance and time. You can’t accept that individually, we’re microscopic; here for an eye-blink. Might be heading for better things, but no guarantees. Trouble is, people can’t believe they’re not the centre of things, so they come up with all these pathetic stories about God and life after death and life before birth, but that’s cowardice. Sheer cowardice. And because it’s the product of cowardice, it promotes it; “The Lord is my shepherd”. Thanks a fucking lot. So we’ve to live like sheep. Cowardice and cruelty. But everything’s okay, because we’re doing the Lord’s work. Fuck the silicosis, get down that mine and work, nigger; Aw shucks; sure we skinned her alive and threw her in the salt pans, but we were only doing it to save her soul. Lordy lordy, gimme that old time religion and original sin. Another baby for perdition ... Shit; original sin? What sick fuckwit thought that one up?’