Iain Banks - The Crow Road

The congenitally odd-jeaned person to my left will take my place," I mumbled, waving one hand in his direction before letting my head resume its communion with Hamish and Tone's lounge carpet.

The bit about odd jeans was totally accurate, by the way; Cousin Josh made his fortune firstly by dealing in cars, then by risking all on a jeans company which at the time was tottering on the very hem of bankruptcy; under Josh's regime, their jeans weren't any better or any cheaper than anybody else's, but he had the garments made in odd sizes; waists of 29, 31, 33 inches, and so on, as opposed to the products from all other companies, domestic and foreign, which tended to favour the even numbers.

It was one of those brilliantly simple ideas people always wish they had had themselves, and believe that somehow they could have had; no need to incur any extra expense or make any more sizes than anybody else, or necessarily to distinguish one's product in other way, yet just by the idea one has a potential market of half the jeans-buying public, or at least that proportion of it which has always felt that they are somehow perpetually between the usual sizes.

I vaguely remember dreaming about Verity's jeans that night; how graphically, geographically tight they were and how wonderful it must be to take them off her. Then I imagined Lewis, boots tied round his neck, for some reason suddenly resembling Shane MacGowan, skinning her jeans off, not me, and he turned into Rodney Ritchie, at home with his parents, unpicking the individual stitches of her jeans with a tiny knife, and the Ritchies all wore badly-fitting jeans and had denim curtains and denim carpets and denim light shades and denim wallpaper with the little rivets left on like poppers so you could just press paintings and photos onto the wall… except that Mr Ritchie looked like Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is when I think I started to get confused.

Either I had been put to bed, I thought, as I woke up next morning, in the wee cold room at the top of the house, or my standard drunk-person's on-board auto-pilot facility was improving with experience. I bathed, dressed, and broke my fast with some left-overs from the fridge, a pint of water and a couple of brace of Paracetamol, all without encountering anybody else in the house. It was only eight o'clock; obviously I'd conked out some time before everybody else, and they were still asleep (I had heard appropriate log-sawing-like noises coming from Hamish and Tone's room on my way back from the bathroom). The day looked bright but cold; I laced up the Docs and went for a walk in the hills behind Gallanach.

I felt like shit and I was trying so hard not to think of Lewis and Verity that I couldn't think about anything else, but the day was fabulous; clear and cold, the sky crystal blue and reflecting in the waters of hill-cupped lochans and the glinting length of Loch Add. On such days the hills hold a mixture of azure and gold never seen at any other time of year; the cobalt sky is more intense than it ever is in summer, and the straw-coloured hills shine strong in the light from the low winter sun. Against the shifting mirror that is the surface of a loch, the colours shimmer and dance; they take your breath away, and — for a brief, relieving while — they can even take your thoughts away.

Up in the hills, at the place of marching water, I found Ashley Watt and one of her more exotic cousins.

The concrete spillway below the Loch Add reservoir comes down to a stepped slope above the confluence of several small burns draining nearby slopes. A short bridge carries the track over the spillway, and that was where Ashley and Aline were sitting, legs dangling over the stream in the concrete gully, arms resting on the lower bar of the bridge rails.

They were sitting side by side, watching the marching water. What happened was that the water first backed up behind the lipped edge of the top step, then over-flowed, and spilled with increasing force, in a sort of hydro-chain-reaction, down each subsequent step to the bottom of the channel. There followed a period of comparative quiet, while the water built up again behind the top step and those beneath. You might guess it was my dad who first pointed out this odd (and classically Chaotic) phenomenon and brought it to the attention of us kids. None of us had ever been able to discover whether it was a deliberate effect, or the result of pure chance. Whatever, it was wonderfully restful, unpredictable and therapeutic.

"Hey, Prentice," Ash said. She looked a little worn and bleary-eyed, though her long, lion-coloured hair shone like health itself in the brassy sunlight of mid-day.

"Hi." I nodded to her and to Aline, who was Franco-Vietnamese and engaged to Hugh Watt, one of Ashley's multitudinous cousins from the branch of the family that seemed to favour consorts of an exotic provenance (Hugh's brother Craig was going out with a stunning, lanky Nigerian called Noor). Aline looked even smaller and blacker-haired than usual, beside Ashley. "Aline; ça va?"

"Magic, Prentice," Aline replied in fluent Glaswegian.

"Have some skoosh," Ash said as I sat down next to her. She reached between her and Aline and handed me a half-finished bottle of Irn-Bru. I had, over the course of the morning, already gulped down about a gallon of teeth-achingly cold stream-water at various points up in the hills, but the traditional Scottish hangover treatment was probably just what I needed. I took a couple of mouthfuls, handed the bottle back, wiping my lips.

"You look terrible," Ash said.

"Feel worse," I said glumly, watching the water cascade down the concrete stair-case of the spillway.

"Lost track of you at the Urvills" party, Prentice," Ashley said. "You just slope off, or did you get a lumber?"

"Oh God," I moaned, and lowered my head to the cool steel pipe of the bridge rail.

«Hey…» Ash said gently, putting her hand on my head and patting me. "There there, Prentice ma man. What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing much," I sighed, slowly raising my head again and gazing at the water. "I saw the woman I love wrap herself round my older, smarter and wittier brother like clingfilm round a sandwich, and it looks like they're enjoying each other the way… Oh, God, I'm so pissed off I can't even think of a decent comparison. Or even an indecent one, which would probably — certainly — be more to the point."

"Part from that; everything okay, aye?" Ash said, putting her arm round my shoulders.

"Help me, Ashley," I said, closing my eyes and putting my head on her shoulder. "What am I to do?"

"You must think of her on the toilet," Aline said, and giggled.

"Off-white woman speak truth," Ash said, lowering her head to rest it on mine. "The hots rarely survive an intense course of imagining the beloved on the cludgie."

"No," I sighed, opening my eyes as a series of splashes announced another chaotic event on the spillway. "I'd probably only develop a fetish for coprophagy."

"Pardon?"

"That as unpleasant as it sounds?"

"Unpleasanter."

"Merde!"

"Yup."

"You're a hopeless case, Prentice, so you are. Have you contemplated suicide?"

"Yeah; soon as it's finished, I'm going to throw myself off the Channel Tunnel."

Ashley's shoulders moved once under my head. "Plenty of time to set your affairs in order, then."

"It's not my affairs I'm concerned with."

"Ach, she wasn't your sort, anyway, Prentice."

"What; you mean not good enough for me?"

"No, Prentice; I mean too much taste. You never stood a chance with a woman that choosy."

I pulled away and looked dubiously at Ashley, who smiled sweetly. "What is this?" I said. "You auditioning for the Exit chapter of the Samaritans, or what?"

Ashley took my hands in hers. "Ah, Prentice. Dinnae worry; maybe it's just an infatuation; hers, or Lewis's… or yours. Whatever. Maybe she'll come to her senses. Maybe she wants to work her way through all the McHoan brothers in order of age —»