The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Aye, it’s yourself, Prentice,’ boomed Mrs McSpadden, informatively. ‘And how are you?’ Mrs McSpadden was the Urvill’s housekeeper; a rotundly buxom lady of perpetual middle-age with a big baw-face that gave the impression of being freshly scrubbed. She had a very loud voice and dad always told people that she hailed from Fife. A ringing noise in one’s ears after a close encounter with the lady tended to enforce the impression this was literally true. ‘The rest are up there. Will you take this tray up? There’s coffee in these pots; you just turn the wee spot to the front here, ken, and -’ She lifted the corner of a heavy napkin smothering a very large plate. ‘- there’s hot sausage rolls under here.’

  ‘Right, thanks,’ I said, lifting the tray. I’d come in through the castle kitchen; entering through the main door after it had been shut for the night could be a performance. I made for the stairs.

  ‘Here, Prentice; take this scarf up to Miss Helen,’ Mrs McSpadden said, flourishing the article. ‘That lassie’ll catch her death of cold up there one night, so she will.’

  I bowed my head so that Mrs S could put the scarf over my neck.

  ‘And mind them there’s plenty of bread, and some chicken in the fridge, and cheese, and plenty of soup forbye, if you get hungry again.’

  ‘Right, thanks,’ I repeated, and jogged carefully upstairs.

  ‘Anybody got any roach paper?’

  I squeezed into the brightly-lit dome of the observatory; it was about three metres in diameter, made from aluminium, the telescope took up a lot of it, and it was cold, despite a wee two-bar electric heater. A modestly proportioned ghetto-blaster was playing something by the Cocteau Twins. Diana and Helen, bundled in enormous Mongolian quilted jackets, were crouched round a small table with Darren Watt, playing cards. My elder brother, Lewis, was at the telescope. We all said our hellos. ‘This is cousin Verity. Remember her?’ Helen said, as she draped the scarf I’d brought her over Darren’s head. Helen pointed at a cloud of smoke, and as it blew towards me and cleared I saw her.

  There was a sort of cubby-hole in the non-rotating part of the observatory, built into the attic of the castle’s main block. It was just a long cupboard really, but you could coorie down into it to make more space in the dome proper. Verity Walker was lying in a sleeping bag there, only her upper half protruding into the dome; she was smoking one joint and rolling another, on the cover of a pictorial atlas of the universe. ‘Evening,’ she said. ‘Got any roach paper?’

  ‘Yeah; hi,’ I said. I put the tray down, searched my pockets, pulled out some stuff. The last time I’d seen Verity Walker, maybe five or six years earlier, she’d been a scrawny tyke with a mouth full of orthodontic brace-work and a serious Shakin’ Stevens habit. Now - once seen through the smoke - she had short, pure blonde hair, and a delicate, almost elfin face which tapered to an exquisite chin that looked like it had been made to be grasped lightly in three fingers and pulled closer to your lips ... well, to my lips, anyway. Her eyes were the blue of old sea-ice, and when I saw her complexion all I could think was: Wow; Lloyd Cole city! Because she had perfect skin.

  ‘That’ll do.’ She took something from my hand. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Hey! That’s a library ticket!’ I grabbed it back. ‘Here.’ I handed her half a book token my mother had given me.

  ‘Thanks.’ She started cutting it with a little pair of scissors.

  ‘It’s just a tokin’ token,’ I told her, squatting down beside her.

  She grunted with laughter, and my heart performed manoeuvres that the connecting plumbing makes topologically impossible.

  ‘All set for the big move, bro?’ Lewis grinned down from the wee seat under the eye-piece of the telescope. He reached over to the table where I’d set the tray down and started pouring coffee into the mugs. My big brother has always seemed more than two years older than me; a little taller than my 1.85, and a little more thick-set, he looked bigger still at the time thanks to a beard of the burst-sofa persuasion. Back then, it was his turn to be in disgrace with my father, because he’d just dropped out of University.

  ‘Yeah, all set,’ I told him. ‘Found a place to stay.’ I nodded at the telescope. ‘Anything interesting tonight?’

  ‘Got it on the Pleiades just now. Take a look.’

  We took turns star-gazing, playing cards, crouching round the little electric heater, and constructing joints. I’d brought a half bottle of whisky, and the twins had some brandy, which we used to beef up the coffee. The munchies struck again an hour or so after we’d polished off the last of the sausage rolls; the twins mounted an expedition into the depths of the castle in search of the mythical Soup Dragon (we spoke in Clanger while they were gone) and returned with a steaming tureen and a half-dozen bowls.

  ‘Where’re you staying in Glasgow, Prentice?’ Darren Watt asked.

  ‘Hyndland,’ I said, slurping my soup. ‘Lauderdale Gardens.’

  ‘Ah, that’s no far from us. Going to be around on the thirtieth? We’re having a party.’

  ‘Oh, ah, yeah; probably.’ (Actually, I’d been going to come home that weekend, but I could juggle things.)

  ‘Ah well, come along; should be fun.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Darren Watt was in his last year at Art School and - for me, at least - had been the epitome of cool since New Year two years earlier. After the bells, mum had driven Lewis and me into Gallanach; we went to a party Droid and his chums were giving. Darren had been there; blond, lean, drop-dead bone structure, and exuding style. I’d admired the looped silk scarf he’d worn over a red velvet jacket that would have looked silly on most people but in which he looked totally poised. He’d given me the scarf, and - when I’d tried to demur - explained he was growing bored with it; better it went to somebody who would appreciate it, though he hoped I’d hand it on too, if I ever tired of it.

  So I took it. It was just an ordinary silk scarf, given a half twist and the ends carefully sewn together, but that, of course, made it a Möbius scarf, the very idea of which I just thought was wonderful. I thought Darren was pretty wonderful, too, and for a while wondered if maybe I was gay, too, but decided against it. In fact, a large part of the attraction of an invite to a party at Darren’s place was due to the fact his flat-mates were three salivatingly attractive and reputedly enthusiastically heterosexual female arts students (I’d met them when he’d brought them to Gallanach on a day trip the previous year).

  ‘You still making models of these wave-powered hoodjie-ma-flips?’ I asked him, finishing my soup. Darren was wiping his plate with a bit of bread, and I found myself copying him.

  ‘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, lots 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 ... ‘ttttrrrrsssshhhh ... 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 ... kkkkrrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa ... 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 ribbed 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 laughed 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 fla
pping 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.