The Crow Road Page 5

  Rory pulled back, and Kenneth could just make out the boy’s eyes, shining in the gloom.

  He hugged him again. ‘I swear; on my life. I’ll never tell anybody. Ever.’

  ‘The farmer won’t have to sell his car to buy a new barn, will he?’

  ‘No,’ he laughed quietly. ‘It’s old Urvill’s farm anyway, really, and being a good capitalist, I’m sure he had it well insured.’

  ‘Oh... okay. It was an accident, honest it was, Ken. You won’t tell Mr Urvill, will you?’

  ‘Don’t worry; I won’t. It was only a barn; nobody hurt.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Sssh.’ He held the boy, rocked him.

  ‘I was that frightened afterwards, Ken; I was going to run away, so I was.’

  ‘There now; sssh.’

  After a while, Rory said, groggily, ‘Going to tell me about shagging, Ken, eh?’

  ‘Tomorrow, all right?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t want you getting all excited again.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise. Lie back; go to sleep.’

  ‘Mmmm. Okay.’

  He tucked the boy in, then looked up at the dull crosses of the planes, poised overhead. Young rascal, he thought.

  He lay back himself, toyed briefly with his own erection, then felt guilty and stopped. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn’t stop thinking of the girl whose hair had gone on fire. He’d seen quite far down her pyjama top when he’d put his arm round her shoulders.

  He forced himself to stop thinking about her. He reviewed the day, the way he often had since childhood, trying to fill the time between the light going out and his brain finally relaxing, letting him go to sleep.

  Well, so much for his plan to tell his parents as soon as he got home that he too wanted to travel, that he didn’t want to stay here, or get a job at the factory, managerial or not, or become a teacher like Hamish. Maybe something settled and bourgeois like that could come later, but he wanted to taste the world first; there was more to it than this wee corner of Scotland, more to it than Glasgow and even Britain. The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage of both (apart from anything else, there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream of the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world).

  He had intended to tell his parents all this as soon as he got in, but the incident with the girls and their tent and that poor, shocked, bonny lassie with her hair on fire had made it impossible. It would have to wait until tomorrow. There would be time. There was always time.

  He wondered what her skin would feel like. It had been the colour of pale honey. He wondered what it would feel like to hold her. He had touched her - he had been sprawled on top of her, dammit - but that wasn’t the same thing, not the same thing at all. She had been slim, but her breasts, soft globes within the shadows of those silly pyjamas, had looked full and firm. There had been something fit and limber about the way she’d moved, even when she’d been shivering after her ordeal. He would have believed she was an athlete, not a student of - what had she said? - geography. He smiled in the darkness, touching himself again. He’d like to study her geography, all right; the contours of her body, the swelling hills and deep dales, her dark forest and mysterious, moist caves ...

  The girls stayed at Lochgair for another six days. The McHoans were used to keeping open house, and wouldn’t hear of the girls just packing up what was left of their possessions and cycling or taking a train back to Glasgow.

  ‘Och, no; you must stay,’ Margot McHoan said, at breakfast the next morning. They were all sat round the big table; Mary with a towel round her head, looking prettily embarrassed, her friend Sheena, big-boned, blonde and apple-cheeked, happily wolfing down sausage and eggs, Fiona and Kenneth finishing their porridge, Rory searching for the plastic toy concealed somewhere in the Sugar Smacks packet. Dad had left for the glass factory earlier.

  ‘Oh, Mrs McHoan, we couldn’t,’ Mary said, looking down at the table. She had only nibbled at her toast.

  ‘Nonsense, child,’ Margot said, pouring Rory another glass of milk and smoothing the Herald on the table in front of her. ‘You’re both very welcome to stay, aren’t they?’ She looked round her three children.

  ‘Certainly,’ Fiona said. She had already found Sheena to be a kindred spirit when it came to Rock ‘n Roll, which might provide her with a valuable ally when it came to displacing dad’s folk songs and Kenneth’s jazz on the turntable of the family radiogram.

  ‘Of course.’ Kenneth smiled at Mary, and at Sheena. ‘I’ll show you around, if you like; much better to have a local guide, and my rates are very reasonable.’

  ‘Muuuum, they’ve forgotten to put the wee boat in this box,’ Rory complained, arm deep in the Sugar Smacks packet, face dark with frustration and ire.

  ‘Just keep looking, dear,’ Margot said patiently, then looked back at the two girls. ‘Aye; stay by all means, the two of you. This big house needs filling up, and if you feel guilty you can always help with a bit of decorating, if there’s any wet days, and if my husband gets round to it. Fair enough?’

  Kenneth glanced at his mum. Margot McHoan was still a striking-looking woman, though her thick brown hair was starting to go grey over her forehead (she had dyed it at first, but found it not worth the bother). He admired her, he realised, and felt proud that she should be so matter-of-factly generous, even if it might mean that he had to keep sleeping in the same bed as his young brother.

  ‘That’s awful kind, Mrs McHoan,’ Sheena said, wiping her plate with a bit of fried bread. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Totally,’ Margot said. ‘Your parents on the phone?’

  ‘Mine are, Mrs McHoan,’ Mary said, glancing up.

  ‘Good,’ Margot said. ‘We’ll call them, tell them you’ll be here, all right?’

  ‘Oh, that’s awfully nice of you, Mrs McHoan,’ Mary said, and flickered a wee nervous smile at the older woman. Kenneth watched her and the smile ended up, albeit briefly, directed at him, before Mary looked down, and crunched into her toast and marmalade.

  He drove the two girls round the area in the Humber when his dad wasn’t using it; sometimes Fiona came too. The summer days were long and warm; they walked in the forests south of Gallanach, and in the hills above Lochgair. A puffer captain let them travel through the Crinan canal on his boat, and they took the family dory puttering over to Otter Ferry for lunch one day, over the smooth waters of Lower Loch Fyne, one windless day when the smoke rose straight, and cormorants stood on exposed rocks, wings held open like cloaks to the warm air, and seals popped up, black cones of blubber with surprised-looking faces, as the old open boat droned slowly past.

  There was a dance on in Gallanach Town Hall that Saturday, the day before the two girls were due to return to Glasgow; Kenneth asked Mary to go with him. She borrowed one of Fiona’s dresses, and a pair of his mother’s shoes. They danced, they kissed, they walked by the quiet harbour where the boats lay still on water like black oil, and they sauntered hand-in-hand along the esplanade beneath a moon-devoid sky full of bright stars. They each talked about their dreams, and about travelling to far-away places. He asked if she had given any thought of maybe coming back here some time? Like next weekend, for example?

  There is a loch in the hills above Lochgair; Loch Glashan, reservoir for the small hydro power station in the village. Matthew McHoan’s friend, Hector Cardle, a Forestry Commission manager, kept a rowing boat on the loch, and the McHoans had permission to use the boat, to fish the waters.

  Rory was bored. He was so bored he was actually looking forward to school starting again next week. Back in the spring, he had hoped that Ken being back home would make the summer holidays fun, but it hadn’t worked out that way; Ken was either up in Glasgow seeing that Mary girl, or she
was here, and they were together all the time and didn’t want him around.

  He had been in the garden, throwing dry clods of earth at some old model tanks; the clouds of dust the clods made when they hit the hard, baked earth looked just like proper explosions. But then his mum had chased him out because the dust was getting the washing dirty. He hadn’t found anybody else around to play with in the village, so he’d watched a couple of trains pass on the railway line. One was a diesel, which was quite exciting, but he’d soon got bored there, too; he walked up the track by the river, up to the dam. It was very warm and still. The waters of the loch were like a mirror.

  He walked along the path between the plantation and the shore of the loch, looking for interesting stuff. But you usually only found that sort of thing down at the big loch. There was a rowing boat out in the middle of the little loch, but he couldn’t see anybody in it. He was banned from making rafts or taking boats out. Just because he’d got a bit wet a few times. It was unfair.

  He sat down in the grass, took out a little die-cast model of a Gloster Javelin, and played with it for a while, pretending he was a camera, tracking the plane through the grass and over the pebbles and rocks by the loch side. He lay back in the grass, looked at the blue sky, and closed his eyes for a long time, soaking up the pink-ness behind his eyelids and pretending he was a lion lying tawny and sated under the African sun, or a sleepy-eyed tiger basking on some rock high over a wide Indian plain. Then he opened his eyes again and looked around, at a world gone grey, until that effect wore off. He looked down at the shore; little waves were lapping rhythmically at the stones.

  He watched the wavelets for a while. They were very regular. He looked along the nearby stretch of shore. The waves - hardly noticeable, but there if you looked - were coming ashore all along the lochside. He followed the line they seemed to indicate, out to the little rowing boat near the middle of the loch. Now he thought about it, it was very odd that there was nobody in the boat. It was moored; he could see the wee white buoy it was tied to. But there was nobody visible in the boat.

  The more carefully he looked, the more certain he became that it was the rowing boat that all these little, rhythmic waves were coming from. Hadn’t Ken and Mary been going fishing today? He had thought they’d meant sea-fishing, in Loch Fyne, but maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. What if they had been fishing from the rowing boat and fallen overboard and both been drowned? Maybe that was why the boat was empty! He scanned the surface of the loch. No sign of bobbing bodies or any clothing. Perhaps they’d sunk.

  Anyway, what was making the boat make those waves?

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see the boat moving, very slightly; rocking to and fro. Maybe it was a fish, flopping about in the bottom.

  Then he thought he heard a cry, like a bird, or maybe a woman. It made him shiver, despite the heat. The boat seemed to stop rocking, then moved quite a lot, and then went totally still. The little waves went on, then a few slightly bigger, less regular ones lapped ashore, then the water went still, and was as flat as a pane of glass.

  A gull, a white scrap across the calm sky, flapped lazily just above the blue loch; it made to land on the prow of the little rowing boat, then at the last second, even as its feet were about to touch, it suddenly burst up into the sky again, all panic and white feathers, and its calls sounded over the flat water as it flapped away.

  What sounded very like laughter came from the little rowing boat.

  Rory shrugged, put the model plane in the pocket of his shorts and decided to go back down to the village and see if there was anybody around to play with yet.

  Kenneth and Mary held hands at tea that evening, and said they wanted to get married. Mum and dad seemed quite happy. Fiona didn’t seem in the least surprised. Rory was nonplussed.

  It was years before he made the connection between those tiny, rhythmically lapping waves, and that blushing, excited announcement.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gaineamh Castle, home of the Urvills once again, stands amongst the alders, rowans and oaks that cover the northern flanks of the Cnoc na Moine, due south of the carbuncular outcrop that supports the First Millennium fort of Dunadd, and a little north-west of the farm rejoicing in the name of Dunamuck. The castle, a moderately large example of the Scottish Z-plan type, with cannon-shaped stone waterspouts, has a fine view through the trees and across the parkland and fields to the town of Gallanach, which spreads round the deep waters of Inner Loch Crinan like some slow but determined beach-head of architecture somehow landed from the sea.

  The sound of gravel crunching beneath a car tyre has always meant something special to me; at once comforting and exciting. Of course the one time I tried to explain this to my father he suggested that what it really signified was the easy rolling pressure the middle and upper classes thought it was their right to exert upon the multitudinous base of the workers. I have to confess that the entire counter-revolution in world affairs has come as something of a personal relief to me, making my dad seem no longer quite so remorselessly well-clued-up, but rather - if anything, any more - just quaint. It would have been sweet to tackle him on that subject at the time, especially given that Gorby’s unleashed restructuring had just resulted in the spectacular and literal deconstruction of one of the age’s most resonantly symbolic icons, but at the time we weren’t talking.

  ‘Prentice,’ rumbled the slightly bloated Urvill of Urvill, taking my hand and briefly shaking it, as if weighing my mitt. I felt for a moment the way a young bull ought to feel when the man from McDonalds slaps its haunch ... but then probably doesn’t. ‘So very sorry.’ Fergus Urvill said. I wondered whether he was referring to Grandma Margot’s death itself, her detonation, or Doctor Fyfe’s apparent attempt to up-stage the old girl. Uncle Fergus let my hand go. ‘And how are your studies going?’

  ‘Oh, just fine,’ I said.

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘And the twins; are they both well?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Fergus nodded, presumably allocating his two daughters a word each in his reply. Ferg’s gaze went smoothly to my Aunt Antonia; I took the hint, and (like Margot) passed on. ‘Antonia,’ I heard behind me. ‘So very sorry ...’

  Helen and Diana, Uncle Ferg’s two lusciously lissom daughters, sadly couldn’t be here; Diana spent most of her time either in Cambridge or the least touristy part of Hawaii, which is the bit thirty kilometres away from the beaches - four of them vertically - at the Mauna Kea observatory, studying the infra-red. Helen, on the other hand, worked for a bank in Switzerland, dealing with the ultra-rich.

  ‘Prentice, are you all right?’ My mother took me in her arms, held me to her black coat. Still splashing on the No. 5, by the smell of it. Her green eyes looked bright. My father had been at the head of the reception line; I had ignored him and the compliment had been returned.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told her.

  ‘No, but are you really?’ She squeezed my hands.

  ‘Yes; I’m really really fine.’

  ‘Come and see us, please.’ She hugged me again, said quietly, ‘Prentice, this is silly. Make it up with your father. For me.’

  ‘Mum, please,’ I said, feeling like everybody was looking at us. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’ I said, and pulled away.

  I walked into the hall, taking off my jacket, blinking hard and sniffing. Coming from cold into warmth always does this to me.

  The entrance hall of Gaineamh Castle sports the business end of a dozen or so beheaded male red deers, perched so high up on the oak-panelled walls that attempting to utilise them for their only conceivable practical purpose in such a location - hanging coats, scarves, jackets, etc. on their impressively branched antlers - only exposes them as the venue for a kind of non-returnable sport rather than a sensible amenity. Rather more prosaic brass hooks, like smooth unsuitable claws beneath the glass-eyed stares of the stags, accepted our garments in their stead. My much be-zippered black leather pretend-biker’s jacket seemed a l
ittle out of place amongst the sober wools and furs; Verity’s snow-white skiing jacket looked ... well, just sublime. I stood and stared at it for a second or two longer than was probably fit; but it really did seem to glow in the dark company. I sighed, and decided to keep my white silk Möbius scarf on.

  I entered the hammer-beamed Solar of the castle; the great hall was filled with a quietly chattering crowd of McHoans, Urvills and others, all nibbling canapes and vol-au-vants, and sipping whisky and sherries. I suspect my grandmother would have preferred pan-loaf sarnies and maybe a few slices of ham-and-egg pie, but it had, I suppose, been a kind gesture of the Urvill to ask us back here, and one should not carp. Somehow the McHoan home, still bearing the scars of grandma’s sudden, unorthodox and vertical re-entry into the conservatory following her abortive attempt to de-moss the gutters, seemed unfitting as our post-cremation retreat.

  There! I caught sight of Verity, standing looking out of one of the Solar’s tall mullioned windows, the wide grey light of this chill November day soft upon her skin. I stopped and looked at her, a hollowness in my chest as though my heart had become a vacuum pump.

  Verity: conceived beneath a tree two millennia old and born to the flare and snap of human lightning. Emerging to emergency, making her entrance, and duly entrancing.

  Whistling or humming the first phrase of Deacon Blue’s Born In A Storm whenever I saw her had become a sort of ritual with me, a little personal theme in the life lived as movie, existence as opera. See Verity; play them tunes. It was in itself a way of possessing her.

  I hesitated, thought about going over to her, then decided I’d best get a drink first, and started towards the sideboard with the glasses and bottles, before I realised that offering to refresh Verity’s glass would be as good a way as any of getting talking to her. I turned again. And almost collided with my Uncle Hamish.