The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  I stood there, frowning at the door Rupert Paxton-Marr had exited through. Something about the way he’d moved as he’d backed off had left me with an uncanny feeling of déjà vu.

  Ash looked surprised. So did the two guys. One of them looked me up and down. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘How’d you do that? Usually only women with toddlers screaming “Daddy!” in tow have that sort of effect on Rupe.’

  Remember, remember, I thought to myself, and smiled. I turned to the man and shrugged. ‘It’s a gift,’ I told him.

  ‘He owe you money or somefink?’ the second man said. They were both about thirty, lean and clean-cut. Both were smoking.

  I shook my head.

  Ash laughed loudly. ‘No,’ she said, holding her hands out to the two men. ‘It’s just that the last time we all met up, we all got filthy drunk - didn’t we, Presley? - and Rupert thinks Presley here — ’

  Presley? Ash was indicating me when she said the name. Presley? I thought.

  ‘... thinks that Rupert tried to proposition him. Which he didn’t, of course, but it was all a little embarrassing, wasn’t it, dear?’ Her happy, smiling face looked demandingly at me.

  I nodded dumbly as the two men looked at me as well.

  ‘Embarrassing,’ I confirmed.

  Ash was beaming smiles all over the place like a laser gone berserk. ‘I mean,’ she said, tossing her hair. ‘Rupert isn’t gay, is he? And Presley ...’ She looked suddenly sultry, voice slowing, going a little deeper. ‘Here ...’ She took an extra breath, her gaze flickering down from my face to my crotch and back, ‘... certainly isn’t.’

  Then she seemed to collect herself and directed a broad smile to the two men. They looked suitably confused.

  ‘Presley? PRESLEY?’ I yelled as we walked rapidly along Thomas More Street. ‘How could you?’ I waved my hands about. A light drizzle was falling out of the orange-black sky.

  Ashley strode on, grinning. She held a small umbrella; her heels clicked. ‘Sorry, Prentice; it was just the first thing I thought of.’

  ‘But it isn’t even very different from Prentice!’ I shouted.

  She shrugged. ‘Well then, that’s probably why it was the first thing I thought of.’ Ash laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I told her, sticking my hands into my pockets, stepping over some empty pizza containers.

  ‘It wasn’t funny,’ Ash agreed, almost prim. ‘It’s your reaction that is.’ She nodded.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘There are two guys going around now who think my name is Presley, but to you it’s just a hoot.’ I stepped on a wobbly paving stone and jetted dirty water up my chinos. ‘Jeez,’ I muttered.

  ‘Look,’ said Ash, sounding serious at last. ‘More to the point, I’m sorry I fucked that up. I don’t know why he dashed off like that. All I said was I’d a friend with me. I didn’t even say you wanted to meet him or anything. It was weird.’ She shook her head. ‘Weird.’

  We had escaped from the pub after finishing our drinks and chatting - awkwardly on my part, easily on Ashley’s - with Rupert’s two friends (Howard and Jules); a stilted conversation whose most useful result seemed to have been a general agreement that old Rupe was a lad, eh?

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I told her. I saw a taxi coming with its light on and suddenly remembered I was rich. ‘I know where I saw him, now.’

  I stepped into the road and waved.

  ‘You do?’ Ash said from the kerb.

  ‘Yep.’ The cab pulled in. Things were looking up; my usual Klingon Cloaking Device - which has tended to engage automatically on the rare occasions I have felt rich enough in the past to afford a taxi - seemed to have been de-activated. I held the door open for Ashley.

  ‘So; you going to tell me, or be all mysterious?’ she said as she got in.

  ‘I’ll tell you over dinner.’ I sat beside her and closed the door. ‘Dean Street, Soho, please,’ I told the driver. I smiled at Ashley.

  ‘Dean Street?’ she said, eyebrow arching.

  ‘Amongst many other things, I owe you a curry.’

  When I was fifteen I had my first really bad hangover. On Friday nights I and some of my school pals used to meet at the Droid family house in Gallanach; we’d sit in Droid’s bedroom, watching TV and playing computer games. And we’d drink cider, which Droid’s big brother purchased for us - for a small commission - from the local off-licence. And smoke dope, which my cousin Josh McHoan, Uncle Hamish’s son, purchased for us - at an exorbitant commission - in the Jacobite Bar. And sometimes do speed, which came from the latter source as well. Then one night Dave McGaw turned up with a litre of Bacardi and he and I finished it between the two of us, and the next morning I was woken up by my dad to a strange and horrible new feeling.

  vho, as Rory would have written. nsg at all.

  There had been a phone-call for me; Hugh Robb, from the farm near the castle, reminding me I’d agreed to come and help with making the bonfire for Guy Fawkes’ night. He was coming out to pick me up.

  This, of course, was not really what I needed (any more than I needed dad lecturing me on how unsound a custom it was to build bonfires on November the fifth and so celebrate religious bigotry; didn’t I know it had been an anti-catholic ceremony, and the effigy burned on the fire used to be the Pope?), but I couldn’t admit to mum and dad I’d been drinking and had a hangover, so I had to get dressed with my head pounding and my insides feeling distinctly unwell. I waited outside on the porch steps, taking deep breaths in the cool clear air and wishing the hangover would just go away. Then I suddenly thought maybe it wasn’t a hangover; maybe this pounding in my head was the first symptom of a brain tumour ... and so I ended up praying that I did have a hangover.

  Hugh Robb was a big, amiable Scotch Broth of a lad; he was a full year older than I was but we were in the same class at school because he’d been kept back a year. He arrived in a tractor hauling a trailer full of branches and old wood and I rode with him in the cab, wishing that the tractor had better suspension and that Hugh could have thought of something else to talk about other than the prolapsed uterus of one of the farm’s cows.

  Round the hill from the castle there was a big east-facing field; it was surrounded by trees on all sides but the slope gave it a view towards Bridgend. I still thought of it as the ponies’ field because it was where Helen and Diana’s ponies had been stabled originally before they’d been moved to a more level paddock west of the castle.

  Hugh and I unloaded the broken planks and the great bare grey branches from the trailer. We worked together for a bit, then I continued to stack the wood while Hugh went to collect some more. He made a couple of trips, dumping what looked like about a tonne of wood each time before announcing he was off to another farm where they had even more wood.

  I let the tractor disappear, bumping along the track towards the castle, then collapsed back in the huge pile of branches awaiting my attention. I lay, spread-eagled and half-submerged on the springy mass of grey, leaf-nude wood and stared up at the wide blue November sky, hoping the bass drum inside my head would hit a few thousand rest-bars reasonably soon.

  The sky seemed to beat in time to the throbbing inside my head, the whole blue vault pulsing like some living membrane. I thought about Uncle Rory and his discovery that it was not possible to influence TV screens from afar by humming. I wondered - as ever — where he was; he’d been gone a couple of years by that time.

  A bird swung into view over the trees behind my head, and I lay there and I watched it; broad, flat-winged, flight feathers at the square wing-tip ruffling like soft fingers, the small, quick head flicking this way and that, the brown-grey body between the soft density of wings tilting and turning as it glided the cool air, tail feathers like a rich brown fan.

  ‘Beauty,’ I whispered to myself, smiling despite the pain in my head.

  Then suddenly the buzzard burst and sprayed across the sky; it fell plummeting, limp and trailing feathers, to the ground. A double crack of sound snapped across the
field.

  The bird fell out of sight behind me. I blinked, not believing what had happened, then rolled over, looking through the mask of branches at the trees edging the field where the sound of the shots had come from. I saw a man holding a shotgun, just inside the trees, looking to one side then the other, then running out into the field. He wore green strapped wellies, thick brown cords, a waxed jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth bunnet. One more prick in a Barbour jacket, but this one had just shot a buzzard.

  He gazed down at something in the grass, then smiled. He was tall and blond and he looked like a male model; enviable jaw line. He stamped down on the thing in the grass, looked around again then backed off, finally turning and walking smartly back into the woods.

  I should have shouted, or taken the bird to the police as evidence - buzzards are a protected species, after all - but I didn’t. I just watched the Barbour disappear into the trees, then rolled over and breathed, ‘Fuckwit.’

  He was at the firework party the following night, laughing and talking and sharing a dram from Fergus’s hip flask. I watched him, and he saw me, and we looked at each other for a few moments before he looked away, all in the furious, writhing light of the pyre that I had put together, and which contained - pushed in near its now blazing centre - the corpse of the bird he had killed.

  CHAPTER 16

  We stood beside the observatory dome, on the battlements of Castle Gaineamh, facing into a cool westerly breeze. Lewis, in cords and a grease-brown stockman’s coat, looked through the binoculars, his black hair moving slightly in the wind. Verity stood at his side, face raised shining to the winter blue sky, bulky in her thermal jacket, her ski-gloved hands clasped thickly under the bulge of her belly. The plain beyond the woods below, holding Gallanach and cupping the inner bay, was bathed in the deep-shadowed sunlight of late afternoon. Wisps of cirrus moved high above, tails trailing up, promising clear weather. A two-coach sprinter moved in the distance, on the viaduct at Bridgend, windows glinting in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and could smell the sea.

  The unopened air-mail packet from Colorado, lodged next to my chest between shirt and jacket, make a crinkling, flexing noise, giving me a funny feeling in my belly.

  ‘No sign?’ Verity asked.

  Lewis shook his head. ‘Mm-mm.’

  Verity shivered. She hunched her shoulders, bringing them up and in towards her neck. ‘Brr,’ she went. She linked arms with Lewis.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, protesting, still looking through the field glasses, though now at a slight angle.

  Verity tutted, and with a gorgeously pretended scowl moved away from her husband and stepped over to me. She slid an arm round my waist, snuggling. I put an arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against my arm; I looked down at her. She was growing her hair a little. The sides of her head weren’t actually shaved any more. She smelled of baby oil; Lewis had what sounded like the enviable job of smoothing it over The Bulge, in an attempt to fend off stretch marks later. I smiled, unseen, and looked back to the north.

  ‘Is that what-do-you-call-it?’ Verity said, nodding.

  ‘No, that’s thingy-ma-bob,’ Lewis said, just as I said,

  ‘Hey; well remembered.’

  ‘Dunadd,’ Verity said patiently, ignoring both of us. She was looking at the small, rocky hill a kilometre to the north. ‘Where the footprint is.’

  ‘Correct,’ I said.

  Lewis glanced at us, grinned. He lowered the binoculars a little. ‘Can’t see it from here, but that’s where it is.’

  Dunadd Rock had been the capital of Dalriada, one of the early and formative kingdoms in Scotland. The footprint - looks more like a bootprint, actually, just a smooth hollow in the stone - was where the new king had to place his foot when he made his vows, symbolically — I suppose — to join him to the land.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ Verity said. Lewis handed her the glasses, and she leant against the stone battlements, supporting her belly. Lewis stood behind her, chin lowered onto her shoulder.

  ‘Right at the summit, isn’t it?’ Verity asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Lewis said.

  She looked at Dunadd for a bit. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you had one of your feet planted there, when you gave birth ...’

  I laughed. Lewis went wide-eyed, drawing up and back from his wife. She turned round, grinning wickedly at Lewis and then me. She patted Lewis’s elbow. ‘Joke,’ she said. ‘I want to be in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital.’ She turned back to the view. Lewis looked at me.

  ‘Had me fooled,’ I shrugged. ‘Runs in the family, after all.’

  ‘Can you see that stone circle, too?’ Verity said, lifting the binoculars to gaze further north.

  Earlier that day, Helen Urvill, Verity and Lewis and I had been behaving like tourists. The land around Gallanach is thick with ancient monuments; burial sites, standing stones, henges and strangely carved rocks; you can hardly put a foot down without stepping on something that had religious significance to somebody sometime. Verity had heard of all this ancient stoneware but she’d never really seen it properly; her visits to Gallanach in the past had been busy with other things, and about the only place she had been to before was Dunadd, because it was an easy walk from the castle. And of course, because we had lived here most of our lives, none of the rest of us had bothered to visit half the places either.

  So we borrowed Fergus’s Range Rover and went site-seeing; tramping through muddy fields to the hummocks that were funeral barrows, looking up at moss-covered standing stones, plodding round stone circles and chambered cairns, and leaning on fences staring at the great flat faces of cup-and-ring marked rocks, their grainy surfaces covered in the concentric circular symbols that looked like ripples from something fallen in a pond, frozen in stone.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I used to be able to make televisions go wonky, from far away?’

  It was a bright and warm day, back in that same summer Rory had come out to the Hebrides with us. Rory and I were walking near Gallanach, going from the marked rocks in one field to the stone circle in another. I remember I had a pain in my side that day and I was worrying that it was appendicitis (one of the boys in my class that year had almost died when his appendix had ruptured). It was just a stitch, though. Uncle Rory was a fast walker and I’d been intent on keeping up with him; my appendix waited another year before it needed taking out.

  We had been visiting some of the ancient monuments in the area, and had started talking about what the people who’d built the cairns and stone circles had believed in, and that had led us on to astrology. Then suddenly he mentioned this thing about televisions.

  ‘Making them go wonky?’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ Rory said, then turned and looked behind us. We stood up on the verge as a couple of cars passed us. It was hot; I took off my jacket. ‘Well,’ Rory repeated, ‘I was ... a few years older than you are now, I guess. I was over at a friend’s house, and there was a bunch of us watching Top of the Pops or something, and I was humming along with a record. I hit a certain deep note, and the TV screen went wavy. Nobody else said anything, and I wondered if it was just coincidence, so I tried to do it again, and after a bit of adjusting I hit the right note and sure enough, the screen went wavy again. Still nobody said anything.’ Rory laughed at the memory. He was wearing jeans and T-shirt and carried a light jacket over his shoulder.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I didn’t say anything. I thought maybe it just worked on that one particular television set, so I tried it at home; and it still happened. The effect seemed to work from quite a distance, too. When I stood out in the hall and looked into the lounge, it was still there, stronger than ever.

  ‘Then we were going up to Glasgow, mum and I, and we were passing a shop window full of TVs, and so I tried this new gift for messing up TV screens on them, and hummed away to myself, and all the screens went wild! And I was thinking Great, I really can do magic! The
effect is getting stronger! I could appear on TV and do this! Maybe it would make everybody’s screens go weird!’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, wanting to get home and try this myself.

  ‘So,’ Rory said. ‘I stopped in my tracks and I asked mum. I said, “Mum; watch this. Watch those screens.” And I hummed for all I was worth, and the pictures on the screens went wavy. And mum just looked at me and said, “What?” And I did it again, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get her to see the effect. Eventually she got fed up with me and told me to stop being silly. I had screens going mental in every TV shop we passed in Glasgow that day, but nobody else seemed to be able to see it.’

  Rory grimaced, looking across the edge of the plain beyond Gallanach to the little rocky hill that stuck up from the flat fields.

  ‘Now, I wish I could remember just what it was that made the penny drop, but I can’t. I mean, usually a beautiful assistant says something stupid and the clever scientist says, “Say that again!” and then comes up with the brilliant plan that’s going to save the world as we know it ... but as far as I remember it just came to me.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Rory grinned down at me. ‘Vibrations,’ he said.

  ‘Vibrations?’

  ‘Yeah. The vibrations I was setting up in my own skull - actually in the eyeball, I suppose - were making my eyes vibrate at about the same frequency as the TV screen flickers. So the screen looked funny, but only to me, that was the point. And it made sense that the further away you were from the screen - as long as you could still make it out, of course - the more pronounced the effect would appear.’ He looked down at me. ‘You see?’