The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  I pulled my seat over alongside hers.

  The good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.

  ‘Yes,’ the lawyer Blawke said, reading the will as he sat in the front lounge. ‘Well, I can’t see anything wrong with it.’ He looked unhappy. ‘Unarguably his writing ...’

  He studied it again.

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded, finally. ‘I actually warned him against doing this, some time ago, but he seems to have got away with it.’ The heron-like lawyer seemed sad that the will was litigation-proof. He smiled weakly, and mum offered to re-fill his whisky glass.

  The will - expressed with a brevity and a lack of ambiguity the best lawyers would have been proud of, and the rest alarmed at - left the house, grounds and so on to mum, along with a two-fifths share in both the residue of dad’s savings and any money made after his death. Lewis, James and I had one-fifth shares each. There were specified amounts to an almost archetypal spread of right-on causes: CND, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Ten grand each. Ten grand! I was initially stunned, fleetingly annoyed, then ashamed, and later vaguely impressed. Mum just sighed, like she’d been expecting something like that.

  I confess to having experienced a sensation of relief on discovering I had not been written out of dad’s will; I wouldn’t have blamed him. I think and hope that that feeling was engendered more by a desire to feel I’d still been loved - despite everything - than by avarice. I didn’t think there would be all that much to go round after those donations, anyway.

  Dad’s agent, his accountant and the lawyer Blawke worked it out between them (though I checked their figures later). The good lawyer summoned us all to his office a fortnight after dad’s death. Only James wouldn’t come. Lewis flew up specially.

  It had all, indeed, been just about as simple as it had looked. Blawke told us the sums involved and I was pleasantly surprised. The donations to right-onnery seemed much more in proportion now; I can only claim that I had spent (what at least seemed like) so long living on bread and cottage cheese and fish suppers in Glasgow - measuring my money in pennies and reluctantly-parted-with pounds - that I had an excuse for not being able to imagine that the thirty K dad had salved his conscience with when he’d written the will had actually been quite a small part of the modest fortune he’d built up over the years.

  Dad had left over a quarter of a million pounds, after the government had taken its cut.

  My share came to well over forty thousand smackeroos. The likelihood was that for the next few years at least, I’d bank about fifteen grand per annum, which might or might not tail off, abruptly or gradually, depending on how well dad’s stories held up against the tests of time ... not to mention the likes of Thomas the Tank Engine, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and whatever other delights the future of the children’s fiction market held.

  Anyway, suddenly I was, if not quite within range of the mountains of Rich, certainly well into the foothills of Comfortable. It entirely made up for the discovery, a few days earlier, that the estimate I had made of my chances of passing my final exams had been considerably more accurate than any of the conclusions I had drawn in the course of them. I had distinguished myself by failing, a result the department prided itself on happening only rarely.

  My initial reaction had been to cut my losses on the honours front and see if I could take an MA instead; a re-sit would mean a whole extra year at university. But that sentiment had only lasted for a day. In the turmoil of feelings and fortunes dad’s death had produced, the prospect of another year’s study, with the framework and time scale that would provide - especially if I applied myself, as I thought I would now be able to - seemed suddenly a relief rather than a chore.

  At any rate I still had a little time to decide what to do, and the money would make the choice easier. A return to Glasgow need not now also mean a return to the joys of sharing a flat with Gav, Aunt Janice, and their sonically extrovert passions.

  We stood, the three of us, mum, Lewis and I, on the pavement outside the Main Street offices of the lawyer Blawke, in Gallanach. I was still thinking, Forty grand? and trying not to look too stunned. Mum was slowly putting on her black leather gloves.

  Lewis and I looked at each other.

  Lewis wasn’t doing too badly himself, down in London, but he too had looked pretty surprised when Blawke told us the sums that were heading our way. Mum hadn’t really shown any reaction; she’d just thanked the good lawyer politely and asked after his wife and family.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’ Lewis said to me. I nodded. I felt slightly faint. ‘Mum?’ Lewis said.

  She looked round at him, small and neat in her dark blue coat. It was a bright, warm day and I could see the silver in her dark brown hair. She looked so delicate. I felt like I was in my early teens again, mum seemingly getting shorter and shorter with each season that passed.

  ‘What?’ she said. I found myself sniffing the air; I was downwind, but all I could smell was Pear’s soap and Lewis’s Aramis. Mum seemed to have stopped wearing perfume.

  ‘I think a drink, to steady our nerves,’ Lewis said to her.

  ‘Aye,’ mum said, looking thoughtful. She gave a thin wee smile and nodded at us. ‘Aye, he’d have liked that.’

  And so we went to the Lounge of the Steam Packet Hotel, looking out over the tourist-crowded pier and the packed car park. The water was bright amongst the hulls of the moored yachts, and the Mull ferry was a black shape in the distance, heading away.

  We drank vintage champagne and fifteen-year-old malt. I suspected dad would have approved.

  Lewis had to head back to London that night. Mum and I had been busy for a week, tidying up all the loose ends an unexpected death leaves, especially when the deceased is somebody as socially and professionally entangled as dad.

  Then mum had gardened while I’d sorted through less urgent papers; printing out everything on the disks, searching out all the rest of the stuff on stories, and sending it - or copies - to dad’s literary executor, his editor in London. I had become modestly PC-COMPUTERATE (Ashley had given me a grounding in the basics, though PCs were not really her field). I’d even learned how to change the toner cartridge in the photocopier without making a mess.

  On one of the earliest computer disks dad had used, dated shortly after he’d finally joined the computer age and bought the Compaq, in 1986, I found copies of some of Rory’s poems; dad must have been putting them onto the system from the drafts Rory had left. I printed those out. It didn’t look like dad had been very impressed with the poems, or he’d presumably have transcribed them all onto the computer (they weren’t on the hard disk or backed up onto another floppy either - another indication my father had regarded them as relatively unimportant), but at least I again had something Rory had written. I was still hoping more of Rory’s papers would surface somewhere.

  Dad’s old diaries turned up in a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard. Mum glanced at them, handed them to me. They looked pretty boring, frankly: ‘M&I to Gal; shops, prom walk, back; did VAT.’ and ‘me Glasg car 1040 LHR 1315 F’furt; late, missed others. tel. L’gair Din in room, TV’ were two of the more exciting and informative entries for last year. Dad’s ideas books - A4 pads, usually - were where the interesting stuff was. We’d look at the diaries later.

  Then, one day, at the back of dad’s oldest and most decrepit filing cabinet, I’d discovered treasure. It was in the form of three tatty, falling-apart Woolworth folders stuffed with old exercise books and shorthand-pads, bulging manila envelopes stuffed with old tickets, timetables and assorted scraps of paper, as well as assorted sheets of paper of various sizes, some stapled together, most loose, some typed and some hand-written, and all the work of Uncle Rory. There was one sealed envelope, too.

  Here were all the poems I’d seen before and more, typescript
s of all the travel pieces, and the progenitor of Traps; Rory’s India journal; tattered, battered, stained and torn and littered with doodles and little hand-drawn maps and sketches. A fold-out map of India was stapled to the inside back cover of the first exercise book, and on it Rory’s spastically erratic route round the country was picked out in blue Biro. The back cover of the second book was covered with little faded train and bus tickets, attached to the cheap, fibrous blue paper with rusting staples. The last exercise book had only one ticket stapled to the rear cover: Rory’s Air India ticket home. Some of the pages were stained with what looked like saffron, and I swear one book still smelled of curry.

  I’d sat down there and then and begun to read, flicking through the thin, brittle pages of the journal, smiling at the spelling mistakes and the awkward, amateurish drawings, looking for passages I remembered.

  I’d looked at the other stuff too, and found one play - another martial yarn about death and betrayal, and apparently nameless - which contained not only the passage about the fate of soldiers which I’d read in the delayed train back in January, in the rain on the line at the back of Crow Road, but which also ended with the lines I’d heard first a few weeks before that, in Janice Rae’s flat. In Janice Rae’s bed, in fact.

  And all your nonsenses and truths, I’d read.

  ‘Your finery and squalid options,’ I’d said quietly, to myself.

  Rory’s climax-delaying mantra was all there, right down to the last, three-word line. But, given the situation the narrator was in at that point, the lines took on an extra resonance, and an irony I had not been able to appreciate before. The section was circled with red ink and under that last line was written a note in large letters:

  USE FOR END CR.

  Gradually though, as I’d looked at it all, my feeling of quiet elation faded as I realised there seemed to be nothing else in any of the folders that seemed to relate to Crow Road. All I found was one cryptic note scribbled in pencil on the inside flap of what looked like the most recent of the three tatty files. It said:

  “CR: !B killsH!!? (save)

  (jlsy? stil drwnd)”

  B and H. I vaguely remembered these abbreviations from the notes I’d lost. I shook my head, cursing my own idiot negligence, and Uncle Rory’s frustrating delight in abstract abbreviation.

  ... Jlsy. Well, that was a recurring theme in Rory’s work.

  ... Stil drwnd. But Hell, I thought H got crshd btwen crge & tr!

  ‘Fuck it,’ I’d said, and closed the file. I’d turned the bulky, heavy, sealed manila A4 envelope over in my hands for a while, then opened it. Computer disks. (That was a surprise. As far as I knew Uncle Rory had never possessed a computer.) Eight big floppy computer disks each in their own brown paper envelopes. Hewlett-Packard Double-sided Flexible Disks, Recorder # 92195A (Package of 10 disks). Well, yes; of course there would have to be two missing. They were numbered 1 to 8 in black felt-tip, and that was the only indication they weren’t brand new and unused. The write-protect holes were still taped over.

  I’d looked over at the Compaq, sitting on dad’s desk, but the big, somehow already old-fashioned looking disks wouldn’t even have fitted into the Compaq’s drive if you’d folded them in half.

  Making a mental note to call Ashley in London about the disks some time, I put them back in their manila envelope and the envelope back in its faded folder, and spent a fair while after that just leafing through Uncle Rory’s India journal, smiling sadly at it all and becoming almost as willingly lost in it as it seemed Rory had in the pungent, teeming wastes of India itself ... until mum called me from the foot of the stairs, and it was time for tea.

  A few days later, I’d travelled back up to Glasgow by train; we’d got all the immediate matters regarding my father’s death sorted out. It had been a perfect day; summer-warm and spring-fresh, the air winter-clear, the colours more vivid than in autumn.

  I’d felt a sort of shocked calm settle over me as I’d travelled, and been able to forget about death and its consequences for a while.

  The familiar route had looked new and startling that day. The train had travelled from Lochgair north along the lower loch, crossed the narrows at Minard, and stopped at Garbhallt, Strachur, Lochgoilhead and Portincaple Junction, where it joined the West Highland line and took the north shore of the Clyde towards Glasgow. The waters and the skies blazed blue, the fields and forests waved luxuriously in a soft, flower-scented breeze and the high hill summits shimmered purple and brown in the distance.

  My spirits had been raised just watching the summer countryside go past — even the sight of the burgeoning obscenity of the new Trident submarine base at Faslane hadn’t depressed me — and when the train had approached Queen Street (and I’d been making very sure I had all my luggage with me) I’d seen something sublime, even magical.

  It had been no more than that same scrubby, irregularly rectangular field of coarse grass I’d sat looking at so glumly from the delayed train in the rain that January. Then, the field’s sodden, down-trodden paths had provided an image of desolation I had fastened onto, in my self-pity, like a blood-starved leech onto bruised flesh.

  And now the field had burned. Recently, too, because there was no new growth on the brown-black earth. And yet the field was not fully dark. All the grass had been consumed save for a giant green X that lay printed, vivid and alive, on the black flag of the scorched ground. It was the two criss-crossing paths through the wedged-in scrap of field that still shone emerald in the sunlight. The flames had passed over those foot-flattened blades and consumed their healthier neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

  I’d stood there, in the act of taking my bags down from the luggage rack. And smiling to myself, I’d said, ‘See?’

  Dad hadn’t specified any memorial; all his will had said was that he wanted to be buried somewhere in the grounds of the house. There was some discussion, and eventually mum decided on a plain black marble obelisk with his name and the relevant dates on it.

  1 Stood there, dressed in my slightly preposterous Highland finery, half-way through this wedding in the rain and remembering the funeral in the sunlight a season earlier, and I thought again how damn ugly that dark monument had turned out, then I shook my head and turned, and walked back to the lawn and the marquee. The ground was squelchy and I had to tread carefully to avoid getting mud on my thick white socks. The kilt swung against my knees.

  I wondered if Ash was back yet.

  ‘What what what? Come on, Prentice! My first chance to snog tongues with your brother as a married man and you’re dragging me away waving ... ha! ha! Where did you get these?’

  The hall- of the Lochgair house was swarming with people, crowding in, laughing, brandishing presents, shaking hands, demanding drinks, slapping Lewis on the back, hugging Verity, talking quietly to my mother, wandering through the press of people greeting each other and bumping and smiling and talking away and generally making me feel I might have arranged the reception line a little better; it had been a relief to spot Ashley struggling through the crowd at the front door, remember the computer disks, dash upstairs to get them and then down to intercept her and haul her into the lounge.

  Found them in dad’s study,’ I told Ashley, holding the disks out to her. She put a gaily wrapped package down on a chair, took one of the big disks from me and slid it out of its paper wrapper, grinning.

  Then she looked up, frowned and stepped back, arms wide. ‘Prentice,’ she said, voice deep with censure. ‘You haven’t said how stunning I look yet. I mean, come now.’

  Ash wore loose black pants and a shimmery silver top; hair back-swept and piled up. The glasses had been replaced by contacts. ‘You look great,’ I told her. I nodded at the disk in her hand. ‘Think you can do anything with that?’

  Ash sighed and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Haven’t you got the machine they ran on?’
/>
  I shook my head. ‘I asked my mum about it; she thinks they might have been Rory’s.’

  ‘That long ago, eh?’ Ash tapped the disk sleeve dubiously, as though expecting it to crumble to dust at any second.

  ‘I didn’t know until today he even had one; I mentioned to mum I’d ask you about these, and she said Rory did have a computer, or a word processor or whatever. Got it out in Hong Kong about a year before he disappeared.’

  ‘Hong Kong?’ Ash looked even more dubious.

  ‘Some sort of ... copy; clone? Of an ... well, mum said an Orange, but I guess she means Apple. She remembers him complaining that it - or the program or whatever - didn’t come with proper instructions, but he got it to work eventually.’

  ‘...Uh-huh.’

  ‘Dad left it in the flat Rory shared in Glasgow when he took Rory’s papers away. Wouldn’t have a computer in the house, at the time.’

  ‘Wise man.’

  ‘I’m going to try and track down the guy Rory shared the flat with, but I reckon the machine’s been chucked out or whatever long ago, and I just thought, could you ... you know ... you might know somebody who perhaps could be able to ... to decode what’s on there?’ I shrugged, suddenly feeling awkward. Ash was now looking at the disk as though fully anticipating that creepy crawlies were about to start emerging from it. ‘I mean,’ I said, clearing my throat, suddenly feeling hot and sweaty. ‘There might not be anything on them at all, but ... I just thought ...’

  ‘So,’ Ash said slowly. ‘Let me get this straight: you don’t know the machine, but it’s probably some ancient nameless Apple clone from the dark grey end of the market, almost certainly using reject chips; it probably had a production run that lasted until the first month’s rent fell due on the shed the child-labourers were assembling them in, it used an eight-inch drive and ran. what sounds like dodgy proprietorial software with more bugs than the Natural History Museum?’