Iain Banks: The Crow Road

Small smile, and those diamond eyes piercing, marking me.

Then the gaze removed, refixed, directed somewhere else, once more facing the front. My neck felt un-oiled as I turned away, blasted and raddled by the urge of that directed consideration.

Verity Walker. Eating my heart out. Consuming my soul.

"And dad's mole?"

"Here," Grandma Margot said, tapping her left shoulder. She laughed a little as we went along the path between the shore and the trees. "That one itches fairly often."

"And mine?" I asked, plodding after the wheelchair. I'd taken my biker's jacket off and it lay now on my gran's lap.

She looked up at me, her expression unreadable. "Here." She patted her tummy, looked forward again. "Pivotal, wouldn't you say, Prentice?"

"Ha," I said, still trying to sound non-committal. "Could be. What about Uncle Hamish? Where's he at?"

"Knee," she said, tapping the plaster on her leg.

"How is your leg, gran?"

"Fine," she said tetchily. "Plaster comes off next week. Can't happen soon enough."

The wheels of the chair sighed through the grass on either side of the narrow path. I remembered something I'd been meaning to ask.

"What were you doing up that tree anyway, gran?"

"Trying to saw a branch off."

"What for?"

"To stop those damn squirrels using it as a diving board to get to my bird table, that's what for." She used her stick to whack a crumpled drinking-yoghurt bottle off the path and into the water.

"You could have asked somebody else."

"I'm not totally incapable, Prentice. I'd have been all right if that hoodie hadn't started dive-bombing me; ungrateful wretch."

"Oh, it was a bird's fault, was it?" I had a mental picture of some beetle-eyed carrion crow swooping on my gran, knocking her off her ladder. Maybe it had seen The Omen.

"Yes, it was." Grandma Margot twisted in her wheelchair and raised both her stick and her voice, "And a few years ago I'd only have been bruised, as well. Brittle bones are one of the things that make getting old such a damn nuisance, too, especially if you're a woman." She nodded brusquely. "So think yourself lucky."

"Okay," I smiled.

"Damn birds," she muttered, glaring at a stand of ash trees on the edge of the plantation with such severity that I half expected to hear a parliament of crows cry out in answer. "Ach well," she shrugged. "Let's head back to the house; I need to go."

"Right you are," I said, and wheeled the chair around. Grandma Margot lit another cigarette.

"That branch is still there, by the way."

"I'll deal with it."

"Good lad."

A lark trilled, high overhead.

I wheeled my gran back along the path by the water, over the main road and up the gravel drive, through the sunlit cobbled courtyard towards the tall house with the crow-stepped gables.

I cut the offending branch down that afternoon, before I went back to Gallanach, to my Uncle Hamish's house, for tea. My dad arrived while I was up the ladder, sawing away at the sappy oak and swatting at flies. He stopped and looked at me when he got out of the Audi, then he disappeared into the house. I kept on sawing.

My great-great-great grandfather, Stewart McHoan, was buried in a coffin made from black glass by the craftsmen he had commanded in his capacity as manager of the Gallanach Glass Works (a post now filled by my Uncle Hamish). Grandma Margot had gone for the more conventional wooden model; it slid away into the wall as Bach's Mass reached one of its choral climaxes. A wood-fronted door slid back up to block the hole the coffin had disappeared into, then a little purple curtain lowered itself over the doorway.

The head honcho of the undertakers supervised us as we all formed up for what was obviously the important and formal business of Leaving The Chapel. My father and mother left first. "I told you we sat in the wrong place, Tone," I heard my Uncle Hamish whisper behind me. (Aunt Tone just went "Ssh!)

Outside it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a little damp. I could smell leaves being burned somewhere. The view down the crematorium's birch-lined drive led towards the town and the ocean. In the distance, through the haze, North Jura was dark pastel and flat-looking on the unruffled grey blanket of sea. I looked around; dark-dressed people were everywhere amongst the parked cars, talking quietly. Their breath rose in clouds through the still air. Uncle Hamish was talking to the lawyer Blawke; Aunt Antonia to my mother. Dad was with the Urvills. The wonderful Verity was mostly hidden by my father, her snow-white ski jacket in eclipse behind the old man's tweed coat. I considered shifting my position so I could see her properly, but decided against it; somebody might notice.

At least, I thought brightly, she was here alone. For the last two years that I'd been worshipping Verity from afar she'd been going out with a gorm-free creature called Rodney Ritchie; his parents owned Ritchie's Reliable Removals in Edinburgh and were keen on alliteration. My father had met them once and coined a new collective noun: an embarrassment of Ritchies.

Anyway, Urvill family gossip had it that Verity might be coming to her senses regarding Rodney's removal, and it was a positive and encouraging sign that she had turned up here without the geek in tow. I thought about approaching her. Maybe when we got back to the castle.

I also thought about talking to James, but little brother was leaning against the crematorium wall looking bored but cool in his borrowed great-coat, earplugs in, getting his Walkman fix at last. Still mainlining The Doors, probably. For a moment I almost missed my elder brother, Lewis, who hadn't been able to make it back for the funeral. Lewis is better-looking, smarter and wittier than I am, so I don't miss him often.

I was standing beside Uncle Hamish's Jaguar. Maybe I should just get into the car. Or find somebody else to talk to. I could feel that an attack of awkwardness — the kind of episode I am unhappily prone to — was imminent.

"Hi, Prentice. You okay?"

The voice was deep and throaty but female. Ashley Watt strolled up, put her hand on the side of my shoulder, patting. Her brother Dean was just behind. I nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah; fine. How's yourself? Hi, Dean."

"Hi, man."

"You just back for this?" Ash asked, nodding her head at the low grey granite of the crematorium buildings. Her long fawn hair was gathered up; her strong, angular face, dominated by a blade of a nose and a pair of large round-lensed glasses, was concerned and sad. Ash was my age, but she always made me feel younger.

"Yeah; back to Glasgow on Monday." I looked down. "Wow, Ash; I don't think I've ever seen you in a skirt before." Ash always wore jeans. We'd known each other since we'd used to crawl around on the same carpets together, but I couldn't remember seeing her in anything else but jeans. Yet there were her legs all right; pretty good-looking ones too, under a knee-length black skirt. She wore a big naval-looking jacket with the cuffs turned over, and black gloves; medium-high heels made her the same height as me.

She grinned. "Short memory, Prentice. Recall school?"

"Oh, yeah," I nodded, still looking at the legs. "Apart from then, though." I shrugged, smiled warily at her. I'd gone through a protracted Unbearable stage while I'd been at high school — it had lasted from my first day through to about fourth year — and the most vivid memory I had of Ash from that time was when I and her two brothers had carried out a highly successful snowball ambush on her, her sister and their pals as they'd walked back from school one dark evening. Somebody's snowball had broken that long sharp nose of Ashley's, and I suspected it had been one of mine if for no other reason than because as far as I knew nobody else had been deploying snowballs whose ballistic properties had been enhanced by the judicious reinforcement of their cores with moderately sizeable chuckie stones.