The Crow Road (58 page)

We put some flowers on the McDobbies’ grave, where dad had died, then went in to the church, each kissing the sombrely beautiful twins.

I stood listening to the pious words, the ill-sung hymns and the plodding reminiscences of the good lawyer Blawke - who must be becoming Gallanach’s most sought-after after-death speaker - and felt a furious anger build up in me.

It was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER!

I felt dizzy. I could almost hear the echoes of my scream reflecting back off the high walls and arched ceiling of the church ... but the singing went on undisturbed. I relaxed after that, and looked around at the trappings of religion and the gathered suits and worthies of Gallanach and beyond, and - if I felt anything - felt only sorrow for us all.

I looked up towards the tower. All the gods are false, I thought to myself, and smiled without pleasure.

I talked to a red-eyed Mrs McSpadden after the service, walking down through the gravestones towards the road and sea, under a sky of scudding cloud; the wind tasted of salt. ‘Aye,’ Mrs McSpadden said, in what was for her almost a whisper. ‘You never think it’s going to happen, do you? We all have our little aches and pains, but when I think about it, if I’d just said something when he mentioned a sore chest that night to go to the doctor ...’

‘Everybody hurts, Mrs McSpadden,’ I said. ‘And he had broken those ribs, in the crash. Anybody would have assumed it was just those.’

‘Aye, maybe.’

I hesitated. ‘Mum said he’d had a phone call from abroad, the night before?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, he did. I thought I ... Well, yes.’

‘You don’t know who it was?’

‘No,’ she said slowly, though I saw her frown.

‘It’s just that a friend of mine from university who’s abroad at the moment had been going to call Fergus, to ask permission to visit the factory - he’s writing a dissertation on the history of glass making - and I haven’t heard from him for a while; I wondered if it might have been him, that’s all.’ (All lies of course, but I’d tried to ring Lachy Watt in Sydney and found that the phone had been disconnected. Ashley’s mum didn’t know where he was now, and I did still want to know what had finally driven Fergus to do what he had.)

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mrs McSpadden said, shaking her large, florid head. A big black bead of glass glittered at the end of her hatpin; a stray strand of white hair blew in the gusting wind.

‘You didn’t hear anything that was said,’ I prompted.

‘Och, just something about putting somebody up. I was on my way out the door.’

‘Putting somebody up?’

‘Aye. He said he hadn’t put anybody up, and that was all I heard. I suppose he must have been talking about people who’d stayed at the castle, or hadn’t stayed; whatever.’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘I suppose so.’ I shrugged. ‘Ah well. Perhaps it wasn’t who I was thinking of after all.’

Or maybe it was. Maybe if Mrs McS had heard one more word before she’d closed that door, it would have been the word ‘to’.

‘Come to think of it,’ Mrs McSpadden said, ‘I’d just been talking about you, Prentice, when the phone went.’

‘Had you?’

‘Aye; just mentioning to Mr Urvill what you’d said about remembering more details of when your house was burgled.’

‘Really?’ I nodded, putting my gloved hands behind my back and smiling faintly at the grey and restless sea beyond the low church wall.

‘Canada?’
I said, aghast.

‘I’ve got an uncle there. He knows somebody working in a firm installing a system I know a bit about; they swung the work permit.’

‘My God, when do you go?’

‘Next Monday.’

‘Next
Monday?’

‘I’ll be going up to Gallanach tomorrow, to say goodbye to mum.’

‘Flying?’

‘Driving. Leaving the car there. Dean can use it.’

‘Jesus. How long are you going to Canada for?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll like it.’

‘You mean you might stay?’

‘I don’t know, Prentice. I’m not making any plans beyond getting there and seeing what the job’s like and what the people are like.’

‘Shee-it. Well, can I see you? I mean; I’d like to say goodbye.’

‘Well, you going to Gallanach this weekend?’

‘Umm ... Would you believe that this weekend I was intending to drive a Bentley to Ullapool, get a ferry to the island of Lewis, drive to the most north-westerly point on the island I could find and throw a paperweight into the sea? But ...’

‘Well, don’t let me stop you. I’ve got plenty of family to see, goodness knows.’

‘But-’

‘But I’m flying out from Glasgow on the Monday morning. You can put me up in this palace you’re living in, if you like.’

‘Sunday? Yeah. Let me think; can’t get a ferry on a Sunday, but I can get to Ullapool on Friday, travel over; back Saturday. Yeah. Sunday’s fine. What time do you think you’ll get here?’

‘Six all right?’

‘Six is perfect. My turn to take you for a curry.’

‘No it isn’t, but I accept anyway. I promise not to throw brandy all over you.’

‘Okay. I promise not to act like an asshole.’

‘You have to act?’

‘Gosh, you know how to hurt a chap.’

‘Years of practice. See you Sunday, Prentice.’

‘Yeah. Then. Drive carefully.’

‘You too. Bye.’

I put the phone down, looked up at the ceiling, and didn’t know whether to whoop with joy because I was going to see her, or scream in despair because she was going to Canada. Caught between these two extremes, I experienced an odd calmness, and settled for a low moan.

 
 
 
I was starting to think that maybe the Bentley wasn’t really me. People gave me funny looks when I drove it, and I had already been stopped by some traffic cops on Great Western Road the day I drove the beast back from Lochgair to Glasgow. Is this your car, sir? they’d asked.

With hindsight, perhaps saying, Gosh, I thought you only did this to black people! wasn’t the most politic reply to have made, but they only kept me waiting for an hour while they checked up on me and scrutinised the car. I spent the time sitting in the back of the police car thinking of all the worthy causes I could give the proceeds of the Bentley’s sale to (I certainly wasn’t going to keep Fergus’s blood-money). The African National Congress and the League Against Cruel Sports were two names that suggested themselves as fit to spin Ferg’s remains up to near turbo-charger speeds in his watery grave. Thankfully the Bentley’s tyres were nearly new and the lights, like everything else, were all in perfect working order, so the boys in blue had to let me go.

Anyway, it felt right that it was the monstrous burgundy-coloured Eight I took to the Hebrides rather than the Golf.

I started out on the Friday morning and took the A82 to Inverness, then crossed to the west coast and Ullapool. The drive confirmed that the Bentley would have to go. It hadn’t been as unwieldy as I’d imagined it might be, but I just felt embarrassed in the thing. There hadn’t been anything in Fergus’s will to say I couldn’t do what I wanted with the car, so what the hell, I’d sell it.

I caught the afternoon ferry to Stornoway. I stayed in the Royal Hotel that night, read history books about ancient wars and long-gone empires, and dipped into our currently interesting times via the television. I stationed the paperweight on the bedside table, as though to guard me through the night.

 
 
 
At ten o’clock the next morning I stood in a strong wind and light drizzle, wrapped in my dad’s old coat, near the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis - trying to think of a good joke about that to tell my brother - and wishing I’d brought a brolly. I hadn’t been able to decide whether this really was the most north-westerly point of the island - there was a place with the appropriate name of Gallan Head that might have done as well - but in the end I thought maybe it didn’t really matter that much, and anyway this headland was easier to get to.

There were some cliffs, not especially high. I had the paperweight in my pocket, and I took it out, feeling suddenly self-conscious and foolish even though there was nobody else around. The wind tugged at the coat and threw light, soaking spray into my eyes. The sea was tarnished rolling silver and seemed to go on forever into the light grey watery expanse of spray and air and cloud.

I hefted the glass ball, then threw it with all my might out to sea. I don’t think it would have mattered especially to me if it had hit the rocks and shattered, but it didn’t; it just disappeared into the greyness, heading towards the piling, restless waves. I think I saw it splash, but I’m not sure.

I had been thinking about saying something, when I threw the paperweight into the sea; ‘You forgot something,’ had been the line I’d been toying with on the drive up, through the peat-smoke smell. But it seemed trite; in the end I didn’t say anything.

Instead I stood there for a while, getting wet and cold, and looking out at the waves and thinking of that wreckage, lying out there on the floor of the Atlantic, a few hundred kilometres to the northwest, far beneath the surface of that grey receiving sea.

Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere?

I found that I couldn’t believe that it was. Neither was dad’s, neither was Rory’s, nor Aunt Fiona’s, nor Darren Watt’s. There was no such continuation; it just didn’t work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn’t. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.

The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.

The waves surged against the cliffs, thudding into the rock and being reflected. The shapes of their energy charged back into that wild, disturbed water, obliterated and conserved at once.

It seemed to me then that it was this simple; individual life has no momentum, and - just as dad had said - the world is neither fair nor unfair. Those words are our inventions, and apply only to the results of thought. To die as Darren had, and as my father had, and perhaps as Rory had, with what might have been great things still to do, and much to give and to receive, was to make our human grief the greater, but could not form part of any argument. They were here, and then they weren’t, and that was all there was.

My father had had the right of it, when I’d been so upset at Darren Watt’s death; it had been a sort of petulance I had felt towards the world, an anger as well as a sadness that Darren had died so soon (and so uglily, so sordidly; a litter bin, for fuck’s sake). How dare the world not behave as I expected it to? How dare it just rub out one of my friends? It wasn’t fair! And, of course, indeed it was not fair. But that was beside the point.

Well, the old man had been right and I had been wrong, and I just hoped that he’d known somehow that I would come to my senses eventually.

But if he had gone to his grave - via the McDobbies’ - thinking that his middle son was a credulous fool, and likely to stay that way, well, that hurt me; hurt me more than I could say, but there was no fixing that now. It was over.

 
 
 
I turned and left and caught the ferry back to Ullapool from Stornoway that afternoon, drinking cups of styrofoam coffee and eating greasy pies while I stood out on deck watching the beating waves.

We’d seen dolphins following the ship once, coming back this way past the Summer Isles after a holiday, one day many years ago; mum and dad and Lewis and James and me.

But that was then.

I was back in Glasgow six hours later. I slept well.

 
 
 
And so we went back to the Anarkali restaurant on that Sunday night, Ashley Watt and I, and we had a meal that was almost identical to the one we’d had before, on the summer night when dad had died, except we got along just fine this time, and Ashley didn’t throw any brandy over me, and I didn’t act like a complete asshole, and as I sat there, talking about all the old times and about the future, again I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because it was so good to see her, but she was going away tomorrow, flying off across that wide grey ocean I’d stood looking at just the day before, flying away to Canada and maybe going to stay there, and I didn’t know whether to ask about any men in her life or not - even though I knew from Dean that the guy she’d gone off with at Hogmanay had only been a one-night thing - and I still didn’t feel I could tell her how I felt about her because she was going to go away now, and how could I suddenly say I love you when I’d never said it to anybody in my life before? How could I say it now especially, the night before she was due to leave? It would look like I was trying to make her stay, or just get her into bed. It would probably wreck this one precious evening that we did have, and upset her, confuse her, even hurt her, and I didn’t want to do any of that. And through it all I knew there must have been a moment when I could have told her, some time in the past, some time over the last few months, when it would have been the right time and the right place, and it would have felt like the most natural thing in the world to say and do, but somehow, in the heat of things, just during the complexity of events - and thanks to my own stupidity, my hesitation, my indecision; my negligence - I’d missed it, and that, too, was gone from me; over.