Iain Banks: The Crow Road

Her nose had been reset, of course, and we'd got on better since we'd each left school. Ash frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey eyes searching mine.

"I was sorry to hear about the old lady. All of us were." She swivelled briefly to Dean, standing lighting up a Regal behind her. He nodded; black jeans and a dark blue crombie that looked like it had seen better decades.

I wasn't sure what to say. "I'll miss her," I said eventually. I'd been trying not to think about it, ever since I'd heard the news.

"Was it a heart attack, aye, Prentice?" Dean inquired through his cloud of smoke,

"No," I said. "She fell off a ladder."

"I thought she did that last year," Ash said.

"She did; off a tree. This time she was clearing the gutters. The ladder slipped and she went through the conservatory roof. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Shock from blood-loss, apparently."

"Oh, Prentice, I'm sorry," Ash said, and put her hand on my arm.

Dean shook his head and looked mystified. "Ah thought she had a heart attack."

"She did have one," I nodded. "About five years ago; got a pacemaker fitted."

"Maybe she had a heart attack while she was up the ladder," Dean suggested. Ash kicked his shin. "Oo-ya!" he said.

"Excuse Mr Sensitivity here," Ash said. "But like I said: we were all really sorry to hear, Prentice." She looked around. "Haven't seen Lewis here; could he not make it?"

"He's in Australia," I sighed. "Being funny."

"Ah." Ash nodded, smiling faintly. "Well, that's a shame."

"For the Australians, perhaps," I said.

Ash looked sad, even pitying. "Aw, Prentice —»

Dean prodded his sister in the back with the hand he wasn't rubbing his shin with. "Hoi; what was that about yon guy ye bumped into in that Jacuzzi in Berlin? Said ye were goantae tell —»

"Oh yeah… " Ash turned from frowning at her brother to frowning at me, took a breath, then let it out. "Hey; you fancy a pint later, Prentice?"

"Well, maybe," I said. "I think we're ordered up to the castle for drinks and a bite to eat." I shrugged. "This evening?"

"Okie-dokie," Ash nodded.

"A jacuzzi? I asked, looking at Dean and Ash in turn. "Berlin?"

Dean grinned broadly and nodded.

Ash said, "Aye, Prentice; watchin the wa" come doon. And a shocking and decadent tale it is, too, let me tell you. See you in the Jacobite about eight?"

"Right you are," I said. I leaned close and nudged her. "What Jacuzzi?"

I saw the expression on Dean's face, then heard the noise, then watched Ashley's gaze rise from my face to fasten somewhere over my left shoulder. I turned slowly.

The car came screaming up the crematorium drive, leaves swirling into the air behind. It was a green Rover, and it had to be doing sixty. Probably exceeding the previous speed record within the crematorium grounds by a factor of at least three. It was heading more or less straight for us, and braking distance was running out fast.

"That no Doctor Fyfe's car?" Dean said, as Ash grabbed my sleeve and started to pull me back, at the same time as the Rover's engine note fell from its wail, its nose dipped and the rear end wavered as the tyres tried to bite the moist tarmac.

"I thought he had an Orion," I said, as Ashley pulled Dean and me past the rear of Uncle Hamish's car and onto the grass. Everybody in the crowd outside the crematorium was watching the green 216 as it skidded to a stop, avoiding a head-on collision with the Urvill's Bentley Eight by only a few centimetres. The tyres rasped on the tarmac. Doctor Fyfe — for indeed, that was who it was — jumped out of the driver's seat. He was as small, rotund and be-whiskered as ever, but today his face was red and his eyes were staring.

"Stop!" he yelled, slamming the door and running for the chapel entrance as fast as his little legs would carry him. "Stop!" he shouted again; a little unnecessarily, I thought, as everybody had quite entirely stopped whatever they'd been doing some time before his car had even begun braking. "Stop!"

I still insist that I heard a muffled crump at this point, but nobody believes me. That was when it happened, though.

The sensitive morticians who run the Gallanach Corporation Crematorium usually wait until night before they burn the bodies, to avoid the possibility of resulting smoke-plumes sending overwrought relations into unsightly paroxysms of grief, but Grandma Margot had specified that she wanted to be incinerated immediately; her cremation was therefore genuinely under way as we stood there.

"Ah!" said Doctor Fyfe, stumbling just before he was intercepted before the door of the chapel by a concerned undertaker. "Ah!" he said again, and crumpled, first into the undertaker's arms and then to the ground. He was on his knees briefly, then turned and sat down, clutched at his chest, stared at the granite flagstones outside the chapel, and to the assembled, still stunned and quieted crowd of us announced, "I'm sorry, folks, but I believe I'm having a coronary… " and keeled over on his back.

There was an instant when nothing much seemed to happen. Then Dean Watt nudged me with the hand holding his Regal and said quietly, "There's a funny thing, eh?"

"Dean!" hissed Ashley, as people crowded round the doctor.

"Oo-ya!"

"Call an ambulance!" somebody shouted.

"Use the hearse!" yelled my dad.

"Och, it's only a bruise," Dean muttered, rubbing vigorously at his shin. "Oo-ya! Will ye quit that!"

They used the hearse, and got Doctor Fyfe to the local hospital in ample time to save his life if not his professional reputation.

The muffled crump — which I still maintain that I heard — was my grandmother exploding; Doctor Fyfe had neglected to ask the hospital to remove her pacemaker before she was cremated.

Like I say, this sort of thing keeps happening in my family.

These were the days of fond promise, when the world was very small and there was still magic in it. He told them stories of the Secret Mountain and the Sound that could be Seen, of the Forest drowned by Sand and the trees that were time-stilled waters; he told them about the Slow Children and the Magic Duvet and the Well-Travelled Country, and they believed all of it. They learned of distant times and long-ago places, of who they were and what they weren't, and of what had and what had never been.

Then, every day was a week, each month a year. A season was a decade, and every year a life.

"But dad, Mrs McBeath says there is so a God, and you'll go to a bad place."

"Mrs McBeath is an idiot."

"No she's no, dad! She's a teacher!"

"No she's not, or better still, no she isn't. Don't use the word 'no' when you mean 'not'."

"But she's no a niddyott, dad! She is a teacher. Honest."

He stopped on the path, turned to look at the boy. The other children stopped too, grinning and giggling. They were almost at the top of the hill, just above the Forestry Commission's arbitrary tree line. The cairn was visible, a lump on the sky-line. "Prentice," he said. "People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots… in fact I think they have to be… a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement."

Several of the children giggled.

"Uncle Kenneth," Helen Urvill sang out. "Our daddy said you were a commie." Her sister, alongside her on the path and holding her hand, gave a little squeal and put her free hand up to her mouth.

"Your father is absolutely correct, Helen," he smiled. "But only in the pejorative sense, and not the practical one, unfortunately."