Iain Banks: The Crow Road

I grimaced. «Well…» I said.

"You'd be the first generation that did." She pulled on the cigarette, a look of convincing derision on her face. "Best do everything they don't. That's what tends to happen anyway, like it or lump it." She nodded to herself and ground the cigarette out on her cast, near the knee; flicked the butt into the water. I tutted under my breath.

"People react more than they act, Prentice," she said eventually. "Like you are with your dad; he raises you to be a good little atheist and then you go and get religion. Well, that's just the way of things." I could almost hear her shrug. "Things can get imbalanced in families, over the generations. Sometimes a new one has to… adjust things." She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. Her hair was very white against the rich summer green of the Argyllshire hills and the brilliant blue of the sky beyond. "D'you feel for this family, Prentice?"

"Feel for it, gran?"

"Does it mean anything to you?" She looked cross. "Anything beyond the obvious, like giving you a place to stay… well, when you aren't falling out with your father? Does it?"

"Of course, gran." I felt awkward.

She leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing. "I have this theory, Prentice."

My heart foundered. "Yes, gran?"

"In every generation, there's a pivot. Somebody everybody else revolves around, understand?"

"Up to a point," I said, non-committally, I hoped.

"It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but…»

"Dad certainly seems to think he's paterfamilias."

"Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish… " She looked troubled. "He's a bit off the beaten track, that boy." She frowned. (This «boy» was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who'd invented Newton's Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)

"I wonder where Uncle Rory is," I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.

"Who knows?" My gran sighed. "Might be dead, for all we know."

I shook my head. "No, I don't think so."

"You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don't?"

"I just feel it." I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. "He'll be back."

"Your father thinks he will," Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. "He always talks about him as though he's still around."

"He'll be back," I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.

"I don't know, though," Grandma Margot said. "I think he might be dead."

"Dead? Why?" The sky was deep, shining blue.

"You wouldn't believe me."

"What?" I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).

Grandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. "I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things."

I laughed. She looked inscrutable. "Sorry, gran?"

She tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. "Not a sausage, Prentice."

"Well," I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. "No."

"Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation." Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.

"I give in, gran; what are you talking about?"

"My moles, Prentice." She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. "I can tell what's going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something… remarkable is happening to the person." She frowned. "Well, usually." She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. "Don't tell your father about this; he'd have me committed."

"Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn't, anyway!"

"I wouldn't be too sure of that." Her eyes narrowed again.

I leant on one of the chair's wheels. "Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?"

She nodded, grim. "Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too."

"And that mole's Uncle Rory's?" I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.

That's right," she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. "Not a sausage, for eight years."

I stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. "Wow," I said at last.

"… survived, of course, by her son Kenneth, by Hamish, and by, ah, Roderick." The good lawyer Blawke had helpfully nodded at my dad and my uncle when he mentioned them. Dad kept on grinding his teeth; Uncle Hamish stopped snoring and gave a little start at the mention of his name; he opened his eyes and looked round — a little wildly, I thought — before relaxing once more. His eyelids started to droop again almost immediately. At the mention of Uncle Rory's name Mr Blawke looked about the crowded chapel as though expecting Uncle Rory to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. "And, sharing, I'm sure, in the family's grief, the husband of her late only daughter, Fiona." Here Mr Blawke looked very serious, and did indeed grasp his lapels for a moment, as he nodded, gravely, at Uncle Fergus. "Mr Urvill," Mr Blawke said, completing the nod that had developed pretensions to a bow, I thought, and then clearing his throat. This genuflection completed, the reference to past tragedy duly made, most of the people who had turned to look at Uncle Fergus turned away again.

My head stayed turned.

Uncle Fergus is an interesting enough fellow in himself, and (of course) as Mr Blawke knew to his benefit, probably Gallanach's richest and certainly its most powerful man. But i wasn't looking at him.

Beside the thick-necked bulk of the Urvill of Urvill (soberly resplendent in what I assumed was the family's mourning tartan — blackish purple, blackish green and fairly dark black) sat neither of his two daughters, Diana and Helen — those long-legged visions of money-creamed, honey-skinned, globetrotting loveliness — but instead his niece, the stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowls; the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the ibid in libidinous!

Such bliss to look. I feasted my eyes on that gracefully angular form, just this side of her uncle and sitting quietly in black. She had worn a white quilted skiing jacket outside, but now had taken it off in the unfittingly chilly crematorium, and sat in a black blouse and black skirt, black… tights? Stockings? My God, the sheer force of joy in just imagining! and black shoes. And shivering! The slick material of the blouse trembling in the light from the translucent panes overhead, black silk hanging in folds of shade from her breasts, quivering! I felt my chest expand and my eyes widen. I was just about to look away, reckoning that I had gazed to the limits of decency, when that shaven-sided, crop-haired head swivelled and lowered, her calm face turning this way. I saw those eyes, shaded by her thick and shockingly black brows, blink slowly; she looked at me.