Iain Banks - The Crow Road

Ash had been in London for a programming interview with some big insurance company and had offered me a lift back home, or to Gallanach anyway, as I'd exiled myself from Lochgair. Her battered, motley-panelled 2CV had looked out of place in Ascot Square, where I think that anything less than a two-year old Golf GTi, Peugeot 209 or Renault 5 was considered to be only just above banger status, even as a third car, let alone a second.

"Sorry I'm late, Prentice," she'd said, and kissed my cheek. She and Lewis had been out for a meal the night before. Big brother was staying in Islington, making a living from TV comedy shows by being one of the twenty or so names that zip up the screen under where it says Additional Material By:, and trying to be a stand-up comic. I'd been invited to dinner too, but declined.

I'd hoped she'd just pick me up and we'd be on our way, but Ash hadn't seen Aunt Ilsa for a long time and insisted on exchanging more than just pleasantries with her and Mr G.

Aunt Ilsa was a large, loud woman of forbiddingly intense bonhomie; I always thought of her as being the most remote outpost of the McHoan clan (unless you counted the still purportedly peripatetic Uncle Rory); a stout bulwark of a woman who — for me at least — had always personified the dishevelled ramifications of our family. A couple of years older than dad, she had lived in London for three decades, on and off. Mostly, she was off; travelling the world with Mr Gibbon, her constant companion for twenty-nine of those thirty years. Mr Gibbon had been an industrialist whose firm had employed the ad agency which Aunt Ilsa had worked for when she'd first moved to London.

They met; he found her company agreeable, she found him a new slogan. Within a year they were living together and he had sold his factory to devote more time to the rather more demanding business of keeping Aunt Ilsa company on her peregrinations; they had been on the move more or less ever since.

Mr Gibbon was a grey-haired pixie of a man, ten years older than Aunt Ilsa, and as tiny and delicate as she was tall and big-boned. Apparently he was quite charming, but as the basis of his charm seemed to rest upon the un-startling stratagem of addressing every female he encountered by the fullest possible version of her name (so that every Julie became a Juliana, every Dot extended to a Dorothea, all Marys became Mariana, Sues Susanna, etc. Sorry; etcetera) as well as the slightly perverse habit of calling all young girls «madam» and all old women "girls," it was a charm to which I at least was quite prophylactically immune.

"And you are…?" he asked Ashley as he welcomed her in the hallway.

"Ash," she said. "Pleased to meet you."

I grinned, thinking Mr Gibbon would have a hard job finding a convincing embellishment for Ash's uncommon monicker.

"Ashkenazia! Come in! Come in!" He led the way to the library.

Ash turned back to me as we followed, and muttered, "He's a pianist, isn't he?"

Totally misunderstanding what she meant, I sneered slightly at Mr Gibbon's back, and nodded. "Yeah; isn't he just."

Aunt Ilsa was in the library; she had a heavy cold at the time and I am tempted to say we discovered her poring over a map, but the inelegant truth is that she was searching the shelves for a misplaced book when we entered.

She spent most of the next half hour or so talking about the extended holiday to Patagonia she was planning, in an extremely loud voice and with an enthusiasm that would probably have embarrassed the Argentinian Tourist Board. I sat fretting, wanting to be away.

By some miracle, the 2CV hadn't been towed away when I'd finally dragged Ash out; we'd made it to the M1, picked up a hitcher and — rather beyond the call of duty, I'd have said — dropped him where he was going, in Coventry. We got lost in Nuneaton trying to get back on the M6, and were now heading through Lancashire at dusk, still an hour or more from the border.

"Prentice, there are a lot of better reasons for not talkin to your dad, believe me."

"I believe you," I said.

"What about your mother?"

"No, she's still talking to him."

She tutted. "You know what I mean. You're still seeing her, I hope."

"Yeah; she came to Uncle Hamish's a couple of times, and she drove me back to Glasgow once."

"I mean, what's the big argument? Can't you just agree to disagree?"

"No; we disagree about that." I shook my head. "Seriously; it doesn't work that way; neither of us can leave it alone. There's almost nothing either of us can say that can't be taken the wrong way, with a bit of imagination. It's like being married."

Ash laughed. "What would you know? I thought your mum and dad were pretty happy."

"Yeah, I suppose. But you know what I mean; when a marriage or relationship is going wrong and it's like everything that one person says or doesn't say, or does or doesn't do, seems to rub the other one up the wrong way. Like that."

"Hmm," Ash said.

I watched the red tail lights. I felt very tired. "I think he's angry that having given me the freedom to think for myself, I've not followed him all down the line."

"But, Prentice, it's not as though you even believe in Christianity or anything like that. Shit, I can't work out what it is you do believe in… God?"

I shifted uncomfortably in the thin seat. "I don't know; not God, not as such, not as a man, something in human form, or even in an actual thing, just… just a field… a force —»

"'Follow the Force, Luke, eh?" Ash grinned. "I remember you and your Star Wars. Didn't you write to Steven Spielberg?" She laughed.

"George Lucas." I nodded miserably. "But I don't even mean anything like that; that was just background for the film. I mean a sort of interconnectedness; a field effect. I keep getting this feeling it's already there, like in quantum physics, where matter is mostly space, and space, even the vacuum, seethes with creation and annihilation all the time, and nothing is absolute, and two particles at opposite ends of the universe react together as soon as one's interfered with; all that stuff. It's like it's there and it's staring us in the face but I just can't… can't access it."

"Maybe it isn't accessible," Ash said, fag in mouth, holding the steering wheel with her knees and making a stretching, circling motion with her shoulders (we were on a quiet stretch of motorway, thankfully). She took her cigarette from her mouth again, put her hands back on the wheel. I hoped she wasn't getting sleepy; the drone of the wee Citroen's engine was cataleptically monotonous.

"How not?" I said. "Why shouldn't it be accessible?"

"Maybe it's like your particle; inevitably uncertain. Soon as you understand one part of what it means, you lose any chance of understanding the rest." She looked over at me, brows furrowed. "What was that routine Lewis used to do? About Heisenberg?"

"Oh," I said, annoyed now. "I can't remember."

"Something about being at school and bursting into this office and saying, look, are you Principal here or not, Heisenberg? And him going, weellll… " She gave a small laugh. "Mind, it was funnier the way Lewis told it."

"A little," I conceded. "But —»

"Lewis seems to be making it in the old alternative comedy scene, doesn't he?" Ash said.

"So we're told," I said, looking away. "I don't imagine Ben Elton or Robin Williams have considered early retiral quite yet, though."

"Aye, but good for him, though, eh?"

I looked at Ash. She was watching the road as we roared down a slight incline at all of seventy. Her face was expressionless; that long, Modigliani nose like a knife against the darkness. "Yeah," I said, and felt small and mean-spirited. "Aye, good for him."

"It true you've not seen much of him in London?"