Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Aw Christ!" he heard Lachlan Watt say, body arching. Fiona shuddered, her voice almost a squeal as she took a series of sudden, deep in-rushing breaths, and buried her head in the hollow between Lachlan Watt's shoulder and neck.

Fergus let the little door down without making a noise.

He felt very cold, and he had pissed himself. The urine was warm around his balls and tepid down his leg, but it was cold at his knees. He knelt there in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the subsiding passion in the room below, then swivelled silently and with even greater care than before, and feeling far more sober, moved back towards the thin, escaping light at the far end of the chill, cramped roof space.

If the year of our folly 1990 had started inauspiciously for me, then the Fates, Lady Luck, Lord Chance, God, Life, Evolution — whoever or whatever — immediately thereafter set about the business of proving that the entangled disasters distinguishing the year's first few days were but a mild and modest prelude to the more thorough-going catastrophes planned for the weeks and months ahead… and this with a rapidity and even an apparent relish which was impressive — if also bowel-looseningly terrifying — to behold.

Gav and my Aunt Janice got on like a house on fire, a combined location and fate I occasionally wished on them as I lay awake listening to the sounds of their love-making, a pastime I sometimes suspected I shared with people in a large part of the surrounding community, not to say northern Europe.

I had made the mistake of volunteering to sleep on the couch in the living room on the nights that Janice stayed at our flat; this offer was made with what I thought was obvious sarcasm one evening while Gav and Norris were attempting to develop a technique for cooking poppadoms in the microwave. They were having an intense and appropriately heated discussion on the problems of cold-spots (as evinced by the fact that their first attempts came out looking like braille roundels), and on the unfortunate instability of three poppadoms balanced together — caused not so much by the jerk they received when the turntable started up as by their movements while they cooked and swelled — but eventually my flatmates settled on the concept of standing the things up individually on the glass turntable, and so instigated what they termed a "brain-storming session" in an attempt to find a suitable support mechanism. (I suppressed the urge to point out that the chances of two such patently zephyr-grade minds producing anything remotely resembling a storm was roughly equivalent to the likelihood of somebody called Cohen landing a pork scratching concession in Mecca during Ramadan.)

"An alligator clip with the chrome bits removed."

"Naw; still metal."

"Maybe we could shield it."

"Na; has to be plastic. Yer non thermosetting stuff, for preference."

"Well, look, Gav," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I only overhang the couch by a foot or so at each end; why don't I attempt to curl up there when you and Janice are in residence, if not flagrante, in the bedroom?"

"Eh?" Gav said, swivelling that thick neck of his to look at me, his massive brows furrowing. He scratched at one rugby-shirt shrouded armpit, then nodded. "Aw; aye." He looked pleased. "Thanks very much, Prentice; aye, that'd be grand." He turned back to the microwave.

"Maybe we could suspend them from this bit in the middle with a length of thread," Norris grunted, sticking his head almost right inside the appliance. Norris, still clad in his white lab coat, was one of those medical students whom fate has seemingly marked out to spend the bulk of their studies and initial training suffering from quite stupendous hangovers incurred through the intake of near-fatal levels of alcohol the night before, and their subsequent professional careers sternly finger-wagging at any member of the general public who dares to consume over the course of a week what they themselves had been perfectly happy to sink during the average evening.

"I mean, don't let the fact I'm the longest serving flat-dweller put you off; the last thing I want to do is embarrass you, Gav," I said (just a tad tetchily).

"Na, it's all right, Prentice; ta," Gav said, then crouched down by Norris and squinted into the lit interior of the microwave. "Nowhere to attach it," he told Norris. "Anyway; wouldnae turn, would it?"

They both looked thoughtful, heads side by side at the open oven door, while I wondered what the chances were of both heads fitting — and jamming — inside and the door safety-catch somehow short-circuiting.

"Na," Norris said. "We're looking at some form of support from below, know what ah mean? Come on, Gav, you're the engineer…»

"I mean, that old duvet's bound to cover most of the important parts of my body, and the chances of the pilot on the fire blowing out again and gassing me in my sleep can't really be that high," I said.

"Hmm," Gav said. He straightened, then bent forward and tapped at the white plastic strip on the kitchen window ledge which retained the cheaply horrid secondary double-glazing the flat's owners had fitted.

"Just a block of wood, maybe," Norris said.

"Get hot," Gav said, looking more closely at the white plastic strip. "Depending on how much water there is in the wood; could warp. Still think plastic's your best bet."

"After all, Gav, I can just stay up till your drinking pals have decided to head home, or Norris's card school chums finally drag themselves away, or crash out and snore on the Richter scale, whatever; the fun rarely extends beyond three or four o'clock in the morning… why, that would leave me a good four or five hours" sleep before an early lecture."

"Aye, that's great, Prentice," Gav said, still closely inspecting the window sill. Then he stood up suddenly and snapped his fingers.

"Got it!'he said.

What, I thought? Had my tone of reason in the face of monstrosity finally registered? But no.

"Blu-tack!"

"What?"

"Blu-tack!"

"Blu-tack?"

"Aye; Blu-tack. You know: Blu-tack!"

Norris thought about this. Then said excitedly. "Aye; Blu-tack!" "Blu-tack!" Gav said again, looking wide-eyed and pleased with himself.

"The very thing!" Norris nodded vigorously.

I shook my head, quitting the kitchen doorway for the comparative sanity of the dark and empty hallway. "You crack the Bollinger," I muttered. "I'll just phone the Nobel Prize Committee and tell them their search is over for another year."

"Blu-tack, ya beauty!" I heard from the white-glowing crucible of cutting-edge technological advancement that our humble kitchen had become.

"You mean you haven't read them all?"

"I went off the idea," I said. I was sitting in what had effectively become my boudoir; our living room. Aunt Janice seemed to prefer staying here with Gavin to travelling out to Crow Road most nights.

Gav and Janice sat on the couch, loosely attired in dressing gowns and watching a video.

I had been sitting at the table housed in the living room bay window, trying to write a paper for a tutorial the next day, but Gavin and Janice had chosen to punctuate their highly audible coupling sessions (in what the more tenacious core-areas of my long-term memory still sporadically insisted had once been my bedroom) with an almost equally noisy episode of tortilla chip eating. The corny raucousness which ensued of course meant that the television volume had to be turned up to window-shaking levels so that the happy couple could savour the exquisitely enunciated phrasing of Arnold Schwarzenneger's lines over the noise of their munching.

I had admitted defeat on the subject of the links between agricultural and industrial revolution and British Imperialism, and sat down to watch the video. Perhaps appropriately, given the inflammatory nature of the effect Gav and Janice seemed to have on each other's glands, it was called Red Heat.