The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  "Aye," he said, looking thoughtful. "Looks like I've found a sponsor for the real thing, too."

  "What? Really?"

  Darren grinned. "Big cement company's interested; talking about a serious money grant."

  "Wow! Congratulations."

  For the last eighteen months or so, Darren had been making these tenth-scale wood and plastic models of sculptures he wanted to build full size in concrete and steel one day. The idea was to construct these things on a beach; he'd need planning permission, ots of money, and waves. The sculptures were wave-powered mobiles and fountains. When a wave struck them a giant wheel would revolve, or air would be forced through pipes, producing weird, chest-shaking, cathedral-demolishing bass notes and uncanny howls and moans, or the water in the waves themselves would be channelled, funnelled, and emerge in a whale-like spout of spray, bursting from the top or sides of the sculpture. They sounded great, perfectly feasible, and I wanted to see one work, so this was good news.

  I went downstairs for a pee, and came back to a good-natured but confused argument. "What do you mean, no it doesn't?" Verity said from her sleeping-bagged cubby-hole.

  "I mean, what is sound?" Lewis said. "The definition is; what we hear. So if there's nobody there to hear it…»

  "Sounds a bit anthro-thingy to me," Helen Urvill said, from the card table.

  "But how can it fall without making a sound?" Verity protested. "That's crazy."

  I leaned over to Darren, who was sitting looking amused. "We talking trees falling in forests?" I asked. He nodded.

  "You're not listening — " Lewis told Verity.

  "Maybe you're not making a sound."

  "Shut up, Prentice," Lewis said, without bothering to look at me. "What I'm saying is, What is a sound? If you define it as —»

  "Yeah," interrupted Verity. "But if the tree hits the ground that must make the air move. I've stood near a tree when it's felled; you feel the ground shake. Doesn't the ground shake either, when there's nobody there? The air has to move; there must be… movement, in the air; its molecules, I mean…»

  "Compression waves," I provided, nodding to Verity, and thinking about Darren's wave-powered organ-pipe coast sculptures.

  "Yeah; producing compression waves," Verity said, with an acknowledging wave at me (oh, my heart leapt!). "Which birds and animals and insects can hear —»

  "Ah!" Lewis said. "Supposing there aren't —»

  Well, it got silly after that, dissolving into the polemical equivalent of white noise, but I liked the robustly common-sensical line Verity was taking. And when she was talking, of course, I got to stare at her without anybody thinking it odd. It was wonderful. I was falling in love with her. Beauty and brains. Wow!

  More sounds, more spliffs, more star-gazing. Lewis did his impression of a radio being tuned through various wavelengths; fingers at his lips to produce the impressively authentic between-stations noises, then suddenly putting on silly voices to impersonate a news reader, compere, quiz contestant, singer…»

  rrrrsssshhhh… reports that the London chapter of the Zoroastrians have fire-bombed the offices of the Sun newspaper for blasphemy… zzzoooowwwaaanngggg… athangyou, athangyou, laze an ge'men, andenow, please put your hands together for the Siamese Twins… rrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa… uh, can you eat it, Bob? Ah, no, you can't. I'm afraid the answer is; a Pot Nooddle… bllbllbllbl… Hey hey, we're the junkies!… zpt!"

  And so on. We laughed, we drank more coffee, and we smoked.

  The gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the "scope's single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or — hand-cranked — swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too. The music machine played away — far away — and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked. The stars shone on in mysterious galactic harmonies, constellations like symphonies of ancient, trembling light; Lewis told weird and creepy stories and bizarrely apposite jokes, and the twins — hunkered over the little card-table in their quilted jackets, their night-black hair straight and shining and framing their broad-boned beautiful faces — looked like proud Mongolian princesses, calmly contemplating creation from the nbbed dome of some fume-filled yurt, midnight-pitched on the endless rolling Asian steppe.

  Verity Walker — professed sceptic though she was — read my palm, her touch like warm velvet, her voice like the spoken ocean and in her eyes each iris like a blue-white sun stationed a billion light years off. She told me I'd be sad and I'd be happy and I'd be bad and I'd be good, and I believed all of it and why not, and she told me the last part in Clanger, the tin-whistle pretend language from one of the children's programmes we'd all watched as youngsters, and she was trying to keep a straight face, and Lew and Dar and Di and Hel were snorting with laughter and even I was grinning, but I'd been singing happily along to the Cocteau Twins" other-worldly words for the past hour, and I knew exactly what she said even though she might not have known herself, and fell completely in love with her iris-blue eyes and her wheat-crop hair and her peat-dark voice and the peach-skin fuzz of infinitesimally fine hairs on her creamy skin.

  * * *

  "What was all that stuff about Pontius Pilate, anyway?" Ash said.

  «Aw…» I waved my hand. "Too complicated."

  Ash and I stood on a low little mound overlooking what had been the Slate Mine wharf, at the north-west limit of Gallanach where the Kilmartin Burn flows out of the hills, meanders without conviction, then widens to form part of Gallanach Bay before finally decanting into the deeper waters of Inner Loch Crinan. Here was where the docks had been, when the settlement had exported first coal then slate then sand and glass, before the railway arrived and a subtle Victorian form of gentrification had set in the shape of the railway pier, the Steam Packet Hotel and the clutch of sea-facing villas (only the fishing fleet had remained constant, sporadically crowded amongst its inner harbour in the stony lap of the old town, swelling, dying, burgeoning again, then falling away once more, shrinking like the holes in its nets).

  Ashley had dragged me out here, now in the wee small hours of what had become a clear night with the stars steady and sharp in the grip of this November darkness, after the Jacobite Bar and after we'd trooped (victorious at pool, by the way) back to Lizzie and Droid's flat via McGreedy's (actually McCreadie's Fast Food Emporium), and after consuming our fish/pie/black pudding suppers and after a cup of tea and a J or two, and after we'd got back to the Watt family home in the Rowanfield council estate only to discover that Mrs Watt was still up, watching all-night TV (does Casey Casen never sit down in that chair?), and made us more tea, and after a last wee numbrero sombrero in Dean's room.

  "I'm going for a walk, guys, okay?" Ash had announced, coming back from the toilet, cistern flushing somewhere in the background, pulling her coat back on.

  I'd suddenly got paranoid that I had over-stayed my welcome and — in some dopey, drunken excess of stupidity — missed lots of hints. I looked at my watch, handed the remains of the J to Dean. "Aye, I'd better be off too."

  "I wasn't trying to get rid of you," Ash said, as she closed the front door after us. I'd said goodbye to Mrs Watt; Ash had said she would be back in quarter of an hour or so.

  "Shit. I thought maybe I was being thick-skinned," I said as we walked the short path to a wee garden gate in the low hedge.

  "That'll be the day, Prentice," Ash laughed.

  "You really going to walk at this time of night?" I looked up; the night was clear now, and colder. I pulled on my gloves. My breath was the only cloud.

  "Nostalgia," Ash said, stopping on the pavement. "Last visit to somewhere I used to go a lot when I was a wean."

  "Wow, really? How far is it? Can I come?" I have a fascination with places people think powerful or important. If I hadn't been still fairly drunk I'd have been a lot more subtle about asking to accompany Ash, but, well, there you are.

  Happily, she just la
ughed quietly, turned on her heel and said, "Aye; come on; isn't far."

  So here we stood, on the wee mound only five minutes from the Watt house, down Bruce Street, through a snicket, across the Oban road and over the weedy waste ground where the dock buildings stood, long ago.

  The dock-side was maybe ten metres away; the skeletal remains of a crane stood lop-sided a little way along the cancered tarmac, its foundations betrayed by rotten wooden piling splaying out from the side of the wharf like broken black bones. Mud glistened in the moonlight. The sea was a taste, and a distant glittering that all but disappeared if you looked at it straight. Ash seemed lost in thought, staring away to the west. I shivered, un-studded the wide lapels of the fake biker's jacket and pulled the zip up to my right shoulder so that my chin was encased.

  "Mind if I ask what we're doing here?" I asked. Behind and to our left, the lights of Gallanach were steady orange, like all British towns, forever warning the inhabitants to proceed with caution.

  Ash sighed, her head dropped a little. She nodded down, at the ground we stood upon. "Thought you might know what this is, Prentice."

  I looked down. "It's a wee lump of ground," I said. Ash looked at me. "All right," I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I'd have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). "I don't know. What is it?"

  Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.

  This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice," she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. "When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?"

  She looked at me. I nodded. "Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise."

  "Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from," Ash said, looking to the west again. "But when it got here they didn't need it, so they dumped it —»

  "Here?" I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. "Always here?"

  "That's what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn," Ash said. "He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later." (Ashley pronounced the word "cran', in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn't supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.

  "'Hen, he'd say, 'There's aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.»

  I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. "I never forgot that; I'd come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia or America…»

  Ash squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, "… Or India," to myself just then, and for one long, swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us. I thought, God, how we are connected to the world! and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet. I stared up at the broken face of moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.

  * * *

  When he was younger than I am now, my Uncle Rory went on what was supposed to be a World Trip. He got as far as India. Fell in love with the place; went walk-about, circulating; to Kashmir from Delhi, then along the hem of the Himalayas, crossing the Ganga at Patna — asleep on the train — then zig-zagging from country to coast and back again, but always heading or trying to head south, collecting names and steam trains and friends and horrors and adventures, then at the very hanging tip of the subcontinent, from the last stone at low tide on Cape Comorin one slack dog-day; reversing; heading north and west, still swinging from interior to coast, writing it all down in a series of school exercise books, rejoicing in the wild civility of that ocean of people, the vast ruins and fierce geography of the place, its accrescent layers of antiquity and bureaucracy, the bizarre images and boggling scale of it; recording his passage through the cities and the towns and villages, over the mountains and across the plains and the rivers, through places I had heard of, like Srinagar and Lucknow, through places whose names had become almost banal through their association with curries, like Madras and Bombay, but also through places he cheerfully confessed he'd visited for their names as much as anything else: Alleppey and Deolali, Cuttack and Calicut, Vadodara and Trivandrum, Surendranagar and Tonk… but all the while looking and listening and questioning and arguing and reeling with it all, making crazed comparisons with Britain and Scotland; hitching and riding and swimming and walking and when he was beyond the reach of money, doing tricks with cards and rupees for his supper, and then reaching Delhi again, then Agra, and a trek from an ashram to the great Ganga, head fuddled by sun and strangeness to see the great river at last, and then the long drift on a barge down to the Farakka Barrage a train to Calcutta and a plane to Heathrow, half dead with hepatitis and incipient malnutrition.

  In London, after a month in hospital, he typed it all out, got his friends in the squat where he lived to read it, called it The Deccan Traps And Other Unlikely Destinations, and sent it to a publisher.

  It very nearly sank without trace, but then it was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, and suddenly, with no more warning or apparent cause than that, Traps just was the rage, and he was there.

  I read the book when 1 was thirteen, and again tour years later, when I understood it better. It was hard to be objective — still is — but I think it is a good book; gauche and naïve in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal — ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard — and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.

  Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.

  And so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.

  * * *

  Ash squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the mound, ran it through her fingers. "And I'd come here when my daddy-paddy was beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too." She looked up at me. "Stop me if you've heard this one before, Prentice."

  I hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. "Well, not exactly, but I knew it wasn't all sweetness and light, chez Watt."

  "Fuckin right it wasn't," Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade or grass ran through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up, shrugged. "Anyway, sometimes I came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of shoes."

  "Aye, well," I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a family of mostly amiable over-achievers.

  "Anyway," she said again. They're levelling the lot tomorrow." Ash looked back over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. "That's what all that plant's for."

  I remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little
way off down the piece of waste ground.

  "Aw, shit," I said, eloquently.

  "An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one- and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free membership of the private health club," Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.

  "Fffuck," I shook my head.

  "What the hell," Ashley said, rising. "I suppose the Glasgow middle classes have to go somewhere after they've braved the treacherous waters of the Crinan canal." She gave her hands one final dust. "Hope they're happy there."

  We turned to leave the mound, me and the Ash, then I grabbed her arm. "Hi." She turned to me. "Berlin," I said. The jacuzzi; I just remembered."

  "Oh yeah." She started walking down the slope, back to the weeds, the junk and the ankle-high remains of old brick walls. I followed her. "I was in Frankfurt," she said. "Seeing this friend from college? We heard things were happening in Berlin so we hitched and trained it; met up with… Well, it's a long story, but I ended up in this fancy hotel, in the swimming pool; and had a big whirlpool bath in a wee sort of island at one end, and this drunken English guy was trying hard to chat me up, and making fun of my accent and —»

  "Cheeky basturt," I said as we got to the main road.

  We waited while a couple of cars sped north out of town.

  That's what I thought," Ashley nodded, as we crossed the road. "Anyway, when I told him where I came from he started saying he knew the place well and he'd been shooting here, and fishing, and knew the laird and —»

  "Do we have a laird?" I didn't know. Perhaps he meant Uncle Fergus."

  "Maybe, though when I asked him that he got cagey and said no… but the point is he was acting all mysterious about something, and he'd already said there was somebody here who was having the wool pulled over their eyes, and had been for a long time, and he thought their name was… " Ash stopped at the snicket that led up to Bruce Street. My route back to Uncle Hamish's house went straight along the main road.

  I looked up the wee path, lit by a single yellow street lamp, half way up. Then I looked back into Ashley Watt's eyes.