The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  They got out; there were lights on in the house, and a couple of bikes lying against the steps curving up to the front door. "Whose are those?" he asked, taking his bags from the back of the car.

  "Couple of lassies camping over there," Fiona pointed, and he could just make out a dim orange shape, lit from inside, under the elms on the west side of the lawn.

  "Friends of yours?"

  Fiona shook her head. "No; just turned up, asked to camp; think they thought we were a farm. They're from Glasgow, I think." She took his briefcase from him and bounded up the steps to the opened double doors of the porch. He hesitated, reached into the car and took the keys out of the ignition, then glanced at the tent. "Ken?" Fiona called from the door.

  He made a tutting noise and put the keys back, then shook his head and pulled them out again. Not because there were strangers around, and certainly not just because they were from Glasgow, but just because it was irresponsible to leave keys in the car like that; Fiona had to learn. He pocketed the keys and picked up his bags. He glanced over at the tent, just as it flared with light.

  "Oh!" he heard Fiona say.

  And that was when he first saw Mary Lewis, running out of a tent in her pyjamas with her hair on fire, screaming.

  "Christ!" He dropped the bags, ran across the gravel drive towards the girl haring across the grass, hands beating at the blue and orange flames crackling round her head. He leapt down to the lawn, pulling off his jacket as he went. The girl tried to run past him; he tackled her, bringing her down with a ragged thump; he had the jacket over her head before she properly started struggling. After a few seconds, while she whimpered, and the stink of burning hair filled his nostrils, he pulled the jacket away. Fiona came running; another girl, dressed in too-big pyjamas and a fawn duffle coat, and holding a small flat kettle, followed her from the house, wailing.

  "Mary! Oh, Mary!"

  "Nice tackle, Ken," Fiona said, kneeling by the girl with the burned hair, who was sitting quivering. He put one arm round her shoulders. The second girl fell to her knees and put both arms round the girl she'd called Mary.

  "Oh, hen! Are you all right?"

  "I think so," the girl said, feeling what was left of her hair, and then burst into tears.

  He extracted his arm from between the two girls. He brushed his jacket free of grass and burned hair, and put it round the shoulders of the crying girl.

  Fiona was pulling bits of hair away and peering at her scalp in the gloom. "Think you've been lucky, lassie. But we'll call the doctor anyway."

  "Oh no!" the girl wailed, as though this was the worst thing in the world.

  "Now, now, Mary," the other girl said, her voice shaking.

  "Come on, let's get into the house," Kenneth said, rising. Take a look at you." He helped the two girls to their feet. "Maybe get you a cup of tea, eh?"

  "Oh, that's what caused all this in the first place!" Mary said, standing pale and shaking, eyes bright with tears. She gave a sort of desperate laugh. The other girl, still hugging her, laughed too. He smiled, shaking his head. He looked into the girl's face, finally seeing it properly, and thought how bizarrely beautiful she looked, even with half a head of frizzy, whitened hair, and eyes red raw with crying.

  Then he realised he was seeing her — and seeing her better all the time — in the light of a flickering glow that was blooming in the west of the garden, under the elms. Her eyes widened as she looked past him. The tent!" she howled. "Oh no!"

  * * *

  "And I missed it! Damn damn damn! I hate going to bed this early!"

  "Shush. I've told you; now go to sleep."

  "No! What happened next? Did you have to take all her clothes off and put her to bed?"

  "No! Don't be ridiculous! Of course not!"

  "Oh. That's what happened in this book I read. "Cept the girl was wet from being in the sea… she's fallen in the water!" Rory completed the latter part of this sentence in his Bluebottle voice. "She's fallen in the water!" the wee voice said again, in the darkness of the room.

  Kenneth wanted to laugh, but stopped himself. "Please shut up, Rory."

  "Go on; tell me what happened next."

  "That's it. We all came into the house; mum and dad hadn't even heard anything. I got the hose going eventually but by that time it was too late to save much of the stuff in the tent; and anyway then the primus really blew up, and —»

  "What? In an explosion?"

  "That's the way things normally blow up, yes."

  "Holy smoke! Oh damn, hell and shite! I missed it."

  "Rory; mind your language!"

  "Weeeellll." Rory turned over in the bed, his feet prodding Kenneth in the back.

  "And mind your feet, too."

  "Sorry. So did the doctor come or not?"

  "No; she didn't want us to call him, and she wasn't badly hurt; just her hair, really."

  "Waa!" Rory gave a squeal of excitement. "She's not bald, is she?"

  "No, she isn't bald. But she'll probably have to wear a scarf or something for a while, I expect."

  "So they're staying in the house, are they? These two lassies from Glasgow? They're in the house?"

  "Yes, Mary and Sheena are staying in my room, which is why I've got to sleep with you."

  "Ffworr!"

  "Rory, shut up. Go to sleep, for Pete's sake."

  "Okay." Rory made a great bouncing movement, turning over in bed. Kenneth could feel his brother lying still and tense beside him. He sighed.

  He remembered when this had been his room. Before his dad had unblocked the fireplace and put a grate in it, the only heating during the winter had been that ancient paraffin heater they hadn't used since the old house, back in Gallanach. How nostalgic he had felt then, and how distant and separated from Gallanach at first, even though it was only eight miles away over the hills, and just a couple of stops on the train. That heater had been the same height as him, at first, and he'd been told very seriously never ever to touch it, and been slightly frightened of it at the start, but after a while he had grown to love the old enamelled heater.

  When it was cold his parents would put it in his room to heat it up before he went to bed, and they would leave it on for a while after they'd said good-night to him, and he'd lie awake, listening to the quiet, puttering, hissing noise it made, and watching the swirling pattern of flame-yellow and shadow-dark it cast on the high ceiling, while the room filled with a delicious warm smell he could never experience after that without a sense of remembered drowsiness.

  It had been a precious light, back then; must have been during the war at first, when his dad was using the probably illegal stockpile of paraffin he'd built up before rationing began.

  Rory nudged him with one foot. He ignored this.

  He ignored another, slightly stronger nudge, and started snoring quietly.

  Another nudge.

  "What?"

  "Ken," Rory whispered. "Does your tassel get big sometimes?"

  "Eh?"

  "You know; your tassel; your willy. Does it get big?"

  "Oh, good grief," he groaned.

  "Mine does. It's gone big now. Do you want to feel it?"

  "No!" he sat up in the bed, looking down at the vague shape of his brother's head on the pillow at the other end of the bed. "No, I do not!"

  "Only asking. Does it, though?"

  "What?"

  "Your willy; get big?"

  "Rory, I'm tired; it's been a long day, and this isn't the time or the place —»

  Rory sat up suddenly. "Bob Watt can make stuff come out of his; and so can Jamie McVean. I've seen them do it. You have to rub it a lot; I've tried but I can't get any stuff to come out, but twice now I've got this funny feeling where it's like heat; like heat coming up as if you're getting into a bath, sort of. Do you get that?"

  Kenneth sighed, rubbed his eyes, rested his back against the low brass rail at the foot of the bed. He drew his legs up. "I don't think it's really up to me to have to go into all this, Rory. You s
hould talk to dad about it."

  "Rab Watt says it makes you go blind." Rory hesitated. "And he wears glasses."

  Kenneth stifled a laugh. He looked up at the dim roof, where dozens of model aircraft hung on threads and whole squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes and ME 109s attacked Wellingtons, Lancasters, Flying Fortresses and Heinkels. "No, it doesn't make you go blind."

  Rory sat back, legs drawn up too. Kenneth couldn't make out his brother's expression; there was a soft glow from the small nightlight candle on Rory's desk, near the door, but it was too weak to let him see the boy's face clearly.

  "Ha; I told him he was wrong."

  Kenneth lay back down. Rory said nothing for a while. Then Rory said, "I think I'm going to fart."

  "Well, you'd better make damn sure it goes out the way."

  "Can't; got to keep it under the covers or it might ignite on the nightlight and blow the whole house up."

  "Rory; shut up. I'm serious."

  "… "sall right." Rory turned over, settled down. "It went away." There was silence for some time. Ken fitted his legs round Rory's back, closed his eyes, and wished that his father had concentrated on restoring more rooms in the old house rather than building courtyard walls.

  After a while, Rory stirred again and said sleepily, "Ken?"

  "Rory; please go to sleep. Or I'll kick you unconscious."

  "No, but Ken?"

  "Whaaat?" he breathed. I should have beaten him up when we were younger; he isn't scared of me at all.

  "Have you ever shagged a woman?"

  "That's none of your business."

  "Go on; tell us."

  "I'm not going to."

  "Please. I won't tell anybody else. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die I won't."

  "No; go to sleep."

  "If you tell me, I'll tell you something."

  "Oh, I'm sure."

  "No, really; something dead important that nobody else knows."

  "I'm not buying it, Rory. Sleep or die."

  "Honest; I've never told anybody, and if I do tell you you mustn't tell anybody else, or I might get put in the jail."

  Kenneth opened his eyes. What's the kid talking about? He turned over, looked to the head of the bed. Rory was still lying down. "Don't be melodramatic, Rory. I'm not impressed."

  "It's true; they'd put me in jail."

  "Rubbish."

  "I'll tell you what I did if you tell me about shagging."

  He lay there, thought about this. Apart from anything else, the horrible and ghastly truth was that at the ripe old age of practically twenty-two, he had never made love to a woman. But of course he knew what to do.

  He wondered what Rory's secret was, what he thought he had done, or what story he had made up. They were both good at making up stories.

  "You tell me first," Kenneth said, and felt like a child again.

  To his surprise, Rory said, "All right." He sat up in bed, and so did Kenneth. They waggled closer until their heads were almost touching, and Rory whispered, "You remember last summer, when the big barn burned down on the estate?"

  Kenneth remembered; it had been the last week of his vacation, and he had seen the smoke rising from the farm, a mile away along the road towards Lochgilphead. He and his dad had heard the bell sound in the ruined estate chapel, and had jumped into the car, to go and help old Mr Ralston and his sons. They'd tried to fight the fire with buckets and a couple of hoses, but by the time the fire engines arrived from Lochgilphead and Gallanach the old hay barn was burning from end to end. It stood not far from the railway line, and they'd all assumed it had been a spark from an engine.

  "You're not going to tell me —»

  "That was me."

  "You're joking."

  "Promise you won't tell, please? Please please please? I've never told anybody and I don't want to go to jail, Ken."

  Rory sounded too frightened to be lying. Kenneth hugged his young brother. The boy shivered. He smelled of Palmolive.

  "I didn't mean to do it, Ken, honest I didn't; I was experimenting with a magnifying glass; there was this wee hole in the roof, and this beam of sunlight, and it was like a sort of searchlight falling on the straw, and I was playing with my Beaufighter; not the Airfix one, the other one, and I was melting holes in the wings and fuselage "cos they look dead like bullet holes and you can melt a big long line of them and they look like twenty millimetre cannon holes, and I pretended the sunshine really was a sort of searchlight, and the plane crashed, and I'd thought I'd see if I could make the straw go on fire, just a little bit, round where the plane had crashed, but I didn't think it would all burn down, really I didn't; it just all went up dead sudden. You won't tell, will you, Ken?"

  Rory pulled back, and Kenneth could just make out the boy's eyes, shining in the gloom.

  He hugged him again. "I swear; on my life. I'll never tell anybody. Ever."

  "The farmer won't have to sell his car to buy a new barn, will he?"

  "No," he laughed quietly. "It's old Urvill's farm anyway, really, and being a good capitalist, I'm sure he had it well insured."

  "Oh… okay. It was an accident, honest it was, Ken. You won't tell Mr Urvill, will you?"

  "Don't worry; I won't. It was only a barn; nobody hurt."

  "It was an accident."

  "Sssh." He held the boy, rocked him.

  "I was that frightened afterwards, Ken; I was going to run away, so I was."

  There now; sssh."

  After a while, Rory said, groggily, "Going to tell me about shagging, Ken, eh?"

  "Tomorrow, all right?" he whispered. "Don't want you getting all excited again."

  "You promise?"

  "I promise. Lie back; go to sleep."

  "Mmmm. Okay."

  He tucked the boy in, then looked up at the dull crosses of the planes, poised overhead. Young rascal, he thought.

  He lay back himself, toyed briefly with his own erection, then felt guilty and stopped. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking of the girl whose hair had gone on fire. He'd seen quite far down her pyjama top when he'd put his arm round her shoulders.

  He forced himself to stop thinking about her. He reviewed the day, the way he often had since childhood, trying to fill the time between the light going out and his brain finally relaxing, letting him go to sleep.

  Well, so much for his plan to tell his parents as soon as he got home that he too wanted to travel, that he didn't want to stay here, or get a job at the factory, managerial or not, or become a teacher like Hamish. Maybe something settled and bourgeois like that could come later, but he wanted to taste the world first; there was more to it than this wee corner of Scotland, more to it than Glasgow and even Britain. The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage of both (apart from anything else, there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream of the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world).

  He had intended to tell his parents all this as soon as he got in, but the incident with the girls and their tent and that poor, shocked, bonny lassie with her hair on fire had made it impossible. It would have to wait until tomorrow. There would be time. There was always time.

  He wondered what her skin would feel like. It had been the colour of pale honey. He wondered what it would feel like to hold her. He had touched her — he had been sprawled on top of her, dammit — but that wasn't the same thing, not the same thing at all. She had been slim, but her breasts, soft globes within the shadows of those silly pyjamas, had looked full and firm. There had been something fit and limber about the way she'd moved, even when she'd been shivering after her ordeal. He would have believed she was an athlete, not a student of — what had she said? — geography. He smiled in the darkness, touching himself again. He'd like to study her geography, all right; the conto
urs of her body, the swelling hills and deep dales, her dark forest and mysterious, moist caves…

  * * *

  The girls stayed at Lochgair for another six days. The McHoans were used to keeping open house, and wouldn't hear of the girls just packing up what was left of their possessions and cycling or taking a train back to Glasgow.

  "Och, no; you must stay," Margot McHoan said, at breakfast the next morning. They were all sat round the big table; Mary with a towel round her head, looking prettily embarrassed, her friend Sheena, big-boned, blonde and apple-cheeked, happily wolfing down sausage and eggs, Fiona and Kenneth finishing their porridge, Rory searching for the plastic toy concealed somewhere in the Sugar Smacks packet. Dad had left for the glass factory earlier.

  "Oh, Mrs McHoan, we couldn't," Mary said, looking down at the table. She had only nibbled at her toast.

  "Nonsense, child," Margot said, pouring Rory another glass of milk and smoothing the Herald on the table in front of her. "You're both very welcome to stay, aren't they?" She looked round her three children.

  "Certainly," Fiona said. She had already found Sheena to be a kindred spirit when it came to Rock "n Roll, which might provide her with a valuable ally when it came to displacing dad's folk songs and Kenneth's jazz on the turntable of the family radiogram.

  "Of course." Kenneth smiled at Mary, and at Sheena. "I'll show you around, if you like; much better to have a local guide, and my rates are very reasonable."

  "Muuuum, they've forgotten to put the wee boat in this box," Rory complained, arm deep in the Sugar Smacks packet, face dark with frustration and ire.

  "Just keep looking, dear," Margot said patently, then looked back at the two girls. "Aye; stay by all means, the two of you. This big house needs filling up, and if you feel guilty you can always help with a bit of decorating, if there's any wet days, and if my husband gets round to it. Fair enough?"

  Kenneth glanced at his mum. Margot McHoan was still a striking-looking woman, though her thick brown hair was starting to go grey over her forehead (she had dyed it at first, but found it not worth the bother). He admired her, he realised, and felt proud that she should be so matter-of-factly generous, even if it might mean that he had to keep sleeping in the same bed as his young brother.