The Crow Road

by Iain M. Banks

  She saw me; I could see her laughing. She pushed the window down and waved, and pointed to my groin and made a shocked expression as the cab started away. The driver saw me too and looked amused and shook his head. The cab drove off around the curbed terrace. I opened the window and leaned out, waving, and Ashley pushed the cab’s window right down and stuck her head and arms out and blew me kisses through her wildly waving, slip-streamed hair all the way until the cab rounded the corner and disappeared.

  I sat down on the parquet, staring at the white gauziness of the huge net curtains, all my muscles complaining, my head pounding, my penis tingling, my flesh goose-pimpling against the cool wood of the floor. I shook my head. I collapsed back, banging my already internally abused head on a Persian rug. The carpet’s pile was luxuriously deep however, so it didn’t hurt as much as it might.

  I looked up at the ornately carved wooden ceiling, not entirely sure what to think. Then I started to laugh, lying there in the enormous room, naked, tummy wobbling, laughing like an idiot and hoping the resemblance ended there.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said, laughing, to the ceiling. ‘Here’s hoping.’

  ‘Good; you’re getting sensible,’ mum said. She walked carefully towards me, the big blue sheet folding and drooping between us. She took the sheet’s other two corners from me.

  ‘Getting?’ I said indignantly.

  Mum smiled, folded the sheet over twice more and put it on top of the tumble drier. I pulled another sheet down off the old clothes pulley that hung under the ceiling of the utility room. We took an end each, stood apart, pulled the sheet taut.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ she said, tugging at the sheet again. ‘I think selling the Bentley is very sensible.’ She folded the sheet over, hand to hand; I did the same. We pulled it taut again. Mum looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe we should sell that ancient thing sitting in the garage out there, as well.’

  ‘The Lagonda?’ I said. We folded the sheet over again.

  ‘Yes,’ mum said, walking towards me again. ‘It’s just a waste of space at the moment.’

  ‘You mean you weren’t thinking of going in for classic car restoration after you’ve finished the harpischord?’

  Mum smiled as she took the sheet from me. ‘Well, actually that had occurred to me, but ...’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘No; I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, we won’t get much for it in the state it’s in at the moment.’ I pulled another sheet down.

  ‘I’m not bothered about the money,’ mum said. She folded the sheet away, shot me a mischievous look. ‘And besides, whose fault is it the car’s in the state it is, anyway?’

  ‘What?’ I said. I stood looking at her.

  Mum took the sheet from me and put two of its corners in my hands as she backed off, pulling it tight. She smiled. ‘It was you who tipped the big dresser down onto it in the garage that time, wasn’t it?’

  She pulled the sheet; it flew out of my fingers, billowing over the floor of the room like some slow motion wave. I ran after it, catching it. I retrieved the corners, untwisted the sheet and studied the amused expression on my mother’s face. She tugged the sheet again and I held onto it this time.

  I’m ashamed to admit that it even occurred to me to deny it, albeit briefly. I grinned sheepishly as we folded the sheet over. ‘Yeah, guilty as charged, but it was an accident.’ I shook my head. ‘How did you work that out?’

  She walked towards me, took the sheet from me. ‘Found a bit of broken glass in your underpants when I was washing them,’ she said, and gave a tiny laugh as she turned away to place the sheet on the drier.

  I looked up at the ceiling. ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  Mum turned round, standing there in her jeans and blouse, glowing with what might well have been self-satisfaction. She reached up and pulled a last sheet down off the pulley, handing one end to me. ‘Yes. Well, we’ll draw a discreet veil over that little incident, shall we?’

  I nodded, pursed my lips. ‘Might be best,’ I agreed. I coughed, pulled the sheet taut with her, and with a textbook expression of interested interrogation, asked, ‘And how is the harpsichord-construction project going, anyway?’

  ‘Well -’

  It didn’t end there, either. Nobody had thought to tell me, but obviously it was open season on Prentice’s ignorance. If you were female, anyway.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I think my absorption spectrum must be hazy.’

  ‘No,’ Diana said. ‘I think it’s much like anybody else’s.’ She took a Waldglas beaker out of the display cabinet and glanced at me. She may have seen a hurt expression because she shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Okay, maybe yours has a few more black lines. You were always interested in all sorts of stuff, weren’t you?’

  I shrugged. ‘It runs in the family.’

  ‘Fact is,’ Diana said, breathing on the knobby green glass, ‘it’s probably thanks to you I spend so much of my life fourteen thousand feet above Hawaii looking for I-R stars.’

  ‘It is?’ I said. /

  ‘Yeah,’ Diana said, smiling at the glass as she polished it. ‘You remember the night there was Helen, me, you, Lewis and Verity and ... Darren? We were up in the observatory?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘You got really stoned and started gibbering about how fantastic the universe was?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I confessed.

  ‘Well, you were pretty ripped,’ Diana said. She handed me the beaker. ‘But you were coherent, mostly, and you were really enthusiastic. I mean you even shut Lewis up; you just raved about how amazing astronomy was. You meant cosmology, but what the heck. You were just bubbling with it.’ She brought a second Waldglas beaker out of the cabinet.

  ‘Huh.’ I filled the beaker with polystyrene beads, found a box big enough to hold the two beakers and put the first one carefully into its bed of little white infinity symbols. ‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Oh, you were just so fascinated with it all. Especially with stellar evolution. That had obviously really blown your mind. “We are made of bits of stars!” you shouted.’ Diana laughed a little. ‘You’d been reading about all that stuff and it just tickled you pink. You told us about how the sun and the solar system were made out of the remnants of older stars that had blown up; how the elements that made up the world had been made in those ancient stars, and that meant our bodies, too, every atom. Jeez, I thought you were going to explode.’ She handed me the second beaker.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Well, I sort of remember that, I think.’

  Actually, I wasn’t sure I really did at all. My recollection of that evening got very hazy after the bit where Verity had pretended to tell me my fortune.

  ‘ “We are made from bits of stars! We are made from bits of stars!” you kept yelling, and went through it all: super novae scattering heavy atoms; the debris swirling through space, other novae and supers sending shock-waves through the debris, compressing it; stars forming, planets; geology, chemistry; life.’ Diana shook her head. She extracted a thin, delicate, old-looking flute of a wine glass from the display case. ‘And Jeez, you made me feel ashamed. I mean, dad had built the observatory for us; it was a present, in a way. And we hardly used it. We went up there to smoke dope. And here you were, knew all about this stuff, and actually made it sound interesting. You were really gone on the idea that we were stuck down here on this one little planet and still just savages really, but we’d glimpsed the workings of the universe, worked out from light and radiation what had happened over the last fifteen billion years and could talk sensibly about the first few seconds after the big bang - even if the jury has gone back out on that idea nowadays - and could predict what would happen to the universe over the next few billion, and understand it ...’ Diana held the wine glass up to the light, and cleaned it with the cloth. ‘You were pretty scathing about religion, too; tawdry and pathetic in comparison, you said.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t necessarily buy that, but you made me ashamed not to hav
e used the telescope more. And so I did, and then I got some books on astronomy, and found out a lot of it was about maths, which I was good at anyway, though somehow the fact astronomy was about numbers and equations as well as stars and telescopes hadn’t occurred to me. But anyway, that was the start of it, I was hooked. Been a star-junkie ever since, Prent, and it’s all your fault.’

  She flashed a shocked expression at me and handed me the glass.

  I shook my head. ‘You as well, eh?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Diana said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I breathed, running a hand through my hair. ‘Shit, I never knew.’ I looked mockly serious. ‘This is something of a responsibility, Diana. I trust you haven’t had cause to regret your decision.’

  ‘Not at all, Prentice.’ She closed the now empty cabinet, and took off her white gloves. ‘I mean, maybe I’d have settled on astronomy anyway, without your one-man show. Whatever; it’s been fun. Cold at nights and a long way from the beach, and the air’s a bit thin ... but it’s the skies that really take your breath away.’ She nodded. ‘You should visit, come see it all some time.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ I said. ‘People allowed to come and look round?’

  Diana folded her arms and rested her back against the display cabinet. ‘It can be arranged.’

  ‘There’s somebody I’d like to take there.’

  Diana smirked. ‘Yeah? Somebody special? Who’s that?’

  ‘Oh ... friend of mine. In Canada at the moment.’

  ‘Ashley, huh?’

  I felt myself blush. ‘Well, yeah,’ I said, trying not to grin too much.

  Diana nodded, still smiling. ‘It’d be great to see you both out there. You two sort of an item these days?’

  I shrugged, felt myself blush again. ‘Sort of. I hope so. I think so.’

  Diana laughed, which was good to hear; I didn’t think she had laughed since Fergus died. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  Verity and Lewis brought young Kenneth to the castle that day, so that Mrs McSpadden could go all gooey over him. She did. Diana seemed equally charmed. Kenneth just slept.

  Diana broke open a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallen, which was older than any of us (well, except Mrs McS, but she’d gone back to the kitchen by then), and an awful lot older than Kenneth.

  ‘Let’s wet his head,’ Diana said.

  ‘Can we go up on the roof?’ I said. It just seemed like a good idea.

  So we climbed up there, into a bright March afternoon with a keen blue sky and a smell of wood-smoke on the westerly breeze. We sat on the slates and drank our whiskies and took turns holding the baby, who was still fast asleep.

  ‘You having him christened?’ Diana asked Verity softly, peering down at the infant’s tiny scrunched-up face. She rocked him to and fro.

  ‘Well, I think mum and dad would rather he was, but I’m not bothered one way or the other. Lewis isn’t too keen, are you, my love?’

  Lewis showed his teeth. ‘Over my dead body, actually.’ he said.

  ‘See?’ Verity said to Diana, who was smiling broadly and holding the boy close, sniffing him. She just nodded.

  Verity glanced at Lewis, then said, ‘Prentice?’

  ‘Yo?’

  ‘We’d like you to be his godfather. Would you be?’ She actually looked as though she thought I might refuse. Lewis was grinning at me.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Well ... in terms of the actual title, I’m sort of taking a long hard look at my previous statements about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being at this moment in time, re-appraisal-wise,’ I said, a suitably pained expression on my face as Diana handed the baby to me.

  Lewis laughed.

  Anyway, it was agreed, and then we thought the little blighter ought to have at least a semblance of a christening, so Lewis dabbed his finger in his whisky and reached over and put a tiny drop of the spirit on his son’s head, and said, ‘There; that’s all he’s going to get.’

  ‘Kenneth Walker McHoan,’ I said, cradling him with one arm and raising my glass in the other hand.

  We drank the lad’s health. Then Diana threw her glass away over the battlements towards the woods. Lewis, Verity and I all looked at each other, then followed suit, and heard a couple of the tumblers smash somewhere in the trees beneath. Young Kenneth opened his eyes at that point, looked woozily up at me and let out a small, plaintive cry. I laughed and kissed his tiny nose, then handed him back to his mother so she could feed him.

  I stood up then and went to the battlements, and held the ancient rough stones beneath my hands. I looked out over the woods and the plain and the fields; to Gallanach, with its quays and spires and serried streets, and out to the crumpled hills beyond, the brindle of forests to the east and the glitter of waves to the west, where the ocean was. I thought of Ashley, on the other side of that ocean, and wondered what she was doing right now, and hoped that she was well, and happy, and maybe thinking of me, and then I just stood there, grinning like a fool, and took a deep, deep breath of that sharp, smoke-scented air and raised my arms to the open sky, and said, ‘Ha!’