Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Well, he has his own friends, and I was usually too tired after work." (A lie; I wandered art galleries and went to films, mostly.) "And I couldn't have paid my way, either."

"Ach, Prentice," Ashley said, chiding. She shook her head (the long mane of fair hair was tied up, so it did not swish and fall over her shoulders). "He'd have liked to have seen you more often. He's missed you."

"Oh, well," I said.

I watched the lights again for a while. Ashley drove and smoked. I felt myself nodding off, and shook myself awake. "Ah, dear… " I rubbed my face with both hands, asked, "How do you keep awake?"

"I play games," she told me.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," she nodded, licking her lips. "Like Name That Tail-Light."

"What?" I laughed.

"True," she said. "See that car up ahead?"

I looked at the two red lights. "Yeah."

"See how high up the lights are, not too far apart?"

"Renault 5."

"No kidding!"

"Mm-hmm. One it's over-taking?"

"Yeah?"

"Horizontally divided lights; that's an old Cortina; mark 3."

"Good grief."

"Here's a Beemer. New five series, I think… about to pass us; should have lights that slant in slightly at the bottom."

The BMW passed us; its rear lights were slanted in slightly, at the bottom. We overtook the old Ford and the 5 a little later.

"Course," Ash said. "It's more fun in a fast car when you're doing all the overtaking, but even just sitting at seventy you'd be surprised how much you pass, sometimes. Now." She held up one finger. "Listen and feel as we pull back into the slow lane."

Ash swung the ancient 2CV to the left, then straightened.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." She grinned. "Missed all the cats" eyes. Bump-free lane-changing. A great skill, you know." She glanced at me, mock-serious. "Not so easy in a Ferrari, or whatever; the tyres are too wide. But skinny wee tyres like this thing's got are just about ideal."

"Allow me to sit back in amazement, young Ashley," I said, crossing my arms and twisting in my seat to face her. "I had no idea it was possible to extract such multifarious enjoyment from a simple night-time car journey."

Ashley laughed. "Cobbled streets are even more fun, if you're a girly."

"Huh. Trust you to lower the tone of the whole conversation and introduce a note of clitoris envy at the same time."

Ash laughed louder, ground the cigarette butt out in the ashtray, flipped it closed. "Och, it's a gift; I'd be ashamed of myself if I wasn't just so fucking nice with it." She put her head back an roared with laughter at this, before shaking her head and restoring her attention to the road. I laughed a little too, then stared out of the side window, wondering suddenly if Ash had slept with Lewis last night.

She clicked the indicator on. "Ye Olde Motorway Services. Come on; yer Aunty Ashley'll buy you a coffee and a sticky bun."

"Gee, you sure know how to show a boy a good time."

Ash just smirked.

When I woke, about mid-day in the flat on Crow Road, Janice Rae had gone. To work, I assume. There was a note, on a small blue sheet of writing paper: "You're the better stand-up. Call me, sometime, if you want. J."

I looked at that qualified second sentence with an odd feeling of sadness and relief.

Drying off after a shower, I stood looking at two framed movie posters on the bathroom wall. Paris, Texas and Dangerous Liaisons.

I had a coffee and some toast, washed up and let myself out. I'd put the Crow Road folder in a Tesco bag, and walked back to our flat under grey skies and through a mild and swirling wind, swinging the carrier to and fro, and whistling.

Our flat was in Grant Street, near St George's Cross (and just off Ashley Street, funnily enough). My flat-mates were out when I got back, which was fine by me; I did not relish the prospect of facing the single-entendres that were Gav's best approximation of wit, and which inevitably followed any sexual adventure of mine or Norris's — real or imagined — Gav ever found out about. If I was lucky, Gav would be so shocked at the very idea I had had carnal knowledge of an aunt — even one of the not-really-an-aunt variety that he would just pretend it hadn't happened. Hell, if I was really lucky he might stop talking to me altogether, I thought… but that didn't seem likely. Or preferable, to be honest; part of me rather looked forward to such taunting. I'd caught a glimpse of my face in the hall mirror once, when Gav was berating me for such rakish tendencies, and I'd been smiling.

I made myself another coffee, extended myself on the sofa — my legs quivery with fatigue — opened the folder, pulled out the sheets of paper and started to read.

Crow Road seemed to be the title of Uncle Rory's Big Idea. From the notes, he seemed unsure whether its final form would be a novel, a film, or an epic poem. There were even some pages discussing the possibility of it being a concept album. I lay there on the couch and shuddered at the very thought. So seventies.

The material in the folder seemed to fall into three basic categories: notes, bits of descriptive prose, and poems. A few of the notes were dated, all between the early and late seventies. The notes were on a mixture of papers, mostly loose-leaf; ruled, plain, squared, graph. Some were on cartridge paper, some on pages torn from what looked like school exercise books, and some on folded, green-lined computer print-out. Napkins and old cigarette packets did not, sadly, put in an appearance. The notes were scribbled in a no-less motley variety of different-coloured pens (ball, felt and micro-liner) and used a lot of abbreviations and compressions: H crshd twn carige & tr? Erlier proph. by Sr: "kid by t. livng & t. ded((?)) H Chrst-lk figr (chng nm to start with T!!???); fml Chrst fr new times? Scot mrtyrf Or Birnam wd idea — disgsd army??? (2 silly?)… and that was one of the more comprehensible bits.

2 silly, indeed.

The prose was mostly about places Rory had been; they read like out-takes from his travel pieces. San José, Ca: Suddenly, the Winchester House itself seemed like a emblem for the restless American soul… about some weird house Rory wanted to use in his story, judging by some cryptic notes at the end of the passage.

Then there was the poetry:

… We know this life

is merely a succession

of endless brutal images,

punctuated,

for effect,

by relative troughs

whose gutsy heaves

at first disguised

but power us to the next disgrace.

"Not applying for a job with Hallmark cards, then," I muttered to myself, sipping at my coffee.

But I kept on reading.

My head wasn't really in the right state for assimilating all this stuff, but as far as I could gather, Uncle Rory had been trying for years to come up with something Creative (his capital, his italics). Something that would establish him as a Writer: script-writer, poet, lyricist for a rock band, novelist, playwright… it didn't matter. Being recognised for having kept a glorified diary while wandering through India when he was young and naïve wasn't enough for him. It wasn't serious. This work, Crow Road, would be Serious. It would be about Life and Death and Treachery and Betrayal and Love and Death and Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism. It would be about Scotland, (or India, or an "Erewhon???) and the Working Class and Exploitation and Action, and there would be characters in the work who would represent all of these things, and the working out of the story would itself prove the Subjectivity of Truth.

… There were pages of that sort of stuff.

There were also pages of poems forced into some sort of rhyming structure so that they might conceivably have worked as songs, several paragraphs of references to critical works (Barthes, especially; Death of the Author! shouted what looked like a head-over one entire page of notes devoted to ideas about a loose-leaf novel/poem?? There were location notes for a film and sheets physical appearance of the characters and the sort of actors who might play them, these surrounded by doodles, mazes and uninspired drawings of faces. There was a list of bands that might be interested in doing an album (a musical tone-scale running all the way from Yes to Genesis), and a sheaf of sketches for the sets in a stage presentation. What there wasn't was any indication whatsoever that Rory had actually written any part of this great work. The only things that might have been classed as narrative were the poems, and they didn't seem to have anything to do with each other, apart from the fact a lot of them seemed to be vaguely about Death, or Love. Tenuous, was the word that came to mind.