Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Oh," I'd said. "A Hollywood movie about two cops who don't get along at first but are thrown together on a case involving drugs, foreigners, lots of fights and guns and which ends up with them respecting each other and winning. Sheech." I shook my head. "Makes you wonder where these script-writer guys get their weird and zany ideas from, doesn't it?"

Gav had nodded in agreement, without taking his eyes off the screen. Janice Rae had smiled over at me, her hair fetchingly disarrayed, her cheeks flushed. "Oh yes, Prentice," she'd said. "What did you think of Rory's work, in that folder?"

Hence the exchange above.

Janice looked back at the telly and stretched one leg out over Gavin's lap. I glanced over, thinking that she had much better legs than a woman of her age deserved. Come to that, she had much better legs than a man of Gav's mental age deserved.

"So you haven't found any hints about what it was Rory had hidden in there?" she said.

"I've no idea what he wanted to hide," I said, wishing that Janice would hide a little more of her legs.

I was uncomfortable talking about the poems and Rory's papers; the bag lost on the train coming back from Lochgair at the start of the year had stayed lost, and — stuck with just the memory of the half-finished stuff that Janice had given me originally — I'd given up on any idea I'd ever had of trying to rescue Uncle Rory's name from artistic oblivion, or discovering some great revelation in the texts. Still, it haunted me. Even now, months later, I had dreams about reading a book that ended half-way through, or watching a film which ended abruptly, screen whiting-out… Usually I woke breathless, imagining there was a scarf — shining white silk looped in a half-twist — tightening round my neck.

"It was something he'd seen, I think." Janice watched the distant screen. «Something…» she said slowly, pulling her dressing gown closed. "Something… over-seen, if you know what I mean."

"Vaguely," I said. I watched Gavin's hand move — apparently unconsciously, though of course with Gav that could still mean it was fully willed — to Janice's polyester-and-cotton covered thigh. "Something," (I suggested, watching this,) "seen voyeuristically, perhaps?"

"Mmm," Janice nodded. Her right hand went up to Gav's short, brownish hair, and started to play with it, twirling it round her fingers. "He put it in… whatever he was working on." She nodded. "Something he'd seen, or somebody had seen; whatever. Some big secret."

"Really?" I said, Gavin's hand rubbed up and down on Janice's lap. Gav's face gave no sign he was aware of doing this. I pondered the possibility that the lad possessed some dinosaur-like secondary brain which was controlling the movements of his hand. Palaeo-biological precedent dictated such an organ be housed in Gavin's ample rear, and have responsibility for his lower limbs — not to say urges — rather than his arms, but then one never knew, and I reckoned Gavin's modest forebrain — doubtless fully occupied with the post-modernist sub-texts and tertiary structuralist imagery of Red Heat — could probably do with all the help it could get. "Really?" I repeated.

"Mmm,'Janice nodded. "So he said."

She bit her lip. Gavin had a look of concentration on his face now, as though two parts of his brain were attempting the tricky and little-practised operation of communicating with each other.

"Something about — " Janice moved her hips, and seemed to catch her breath." — the castle." She clutched at Gav's hair.

I looked at her. "The castle?" I said. But too late.

Perhaps lent the final impetus necessary for successful reception by the proximity of the area of stimulus to that of cognition, this hair-pulling signal finally seemed to awaken Gavin to the perception that there might be something else going on in his immediate area other than the video, undeniably captivating though it was. He looked round, first at his hand, then at Janice, who was smiling radiantly at him, and finally at me. He grinned guiltily.

He yawned, glanced at Janice again. "Bit tired," he said to her, yawning unconvincingly once more. "Fancy goin" to —?"

"What" Janice said brightly, slapping her hand down on Gavin's bulky shoulder," — a good idea!"

"Tell us how it ends, eh Prentice?" Gav said, nodding back at the television as he was half hauled out of the room by Aunt Janice, en route to the land of nod after a lengthy detour through the territories of bonk.

"With you going 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh! " I muttered to the closed door. I glared at the screen. "'How it ends, " I muttered to myself. "It's a video, you cretin!"

I returned to the changes in British society required to bring about the Empire on which the light of reason rarely shone. It was going to be a long night, as I also had to finish an already over-due essay on Swedish expansion in tne seventeentn century (it would have to be a goodish one, too; an earlier remark — made in an unguarded moment during a methodically boring tutorial — ascribing Swedish territorial gains in the Baltic to the invention of the Smorgasbord with its take-what-you-want ethic, had not endeared me to the professor concerned; nor had my subsequent discourse on the innate frivolity of the Swedes, despite what I thought was the irrefutable argument that no nation capable of giving a Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger could possibly be accused of lacking a sense of humour. Pity it was actually the Norwegians.

I remembered a joke about Kissinger ('no; fucking her.) and found myself listening to Gav and Janice. They were still at that stage of their coital symphony where only the brass section was engaged, as the old metal bed creaked to and fro. The wind section — essentially vox humana — would join in later. I shook my head and bent back to my work, but every now and again, as I was writing or just thinking, a niggling little side-track thought would distract me, and I'd find myself remembering Janice's words, and wondering what exactly Uncle Rory might have hidden within his later work (if he really had hidden anything). Not, of course, that there was much point in me wondering about it.

For about the hundredth time, I cursed whatever kleptomaniac curmudgeon had walked off the train with my bag. May the scarf unravel and do an Isadora Duncan on the wretch.

"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!" came faintly from what had been my bedroom. I ground my teeth.

"Married?" I gasped, aghast.

"Well, they're talking about it," my mother said, dipping her head towards the table and holding her Paisley-pattern scarf to her throat as she nibbled tentatively at a large cream cake.

We were in Mrs Mackintosh's Tea Roomes, just off West Nile Street, surrounded by straightly pendulous light fitments, graph-paper pierced wooden screens, and ladder-back seats which turned my usual procedure of hanging my coat or jacket on the rear of the seat into an operation that resembled hoisting a flag up a tall mast. "But they can't!" I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. They couldn't do this to me!

My mother, neat and slim as ever, ploughed crunchingly into the loaf-sized meringue cream cake like a polar bear breaking into a seal's den. She gave a tiny giggle as a little dollop of cream adhered to the tip of her nose; she removed it with one finger, licked the pinky, then wiped her nose with her napkin, glancing round the restaurant through the confusing topography of slats and uprights of the seats and screens, apparently worried that this minor lapse in hand-mouth coordination was being critically observed by any of the surrounding middle-class matrons, perhaps with a view to passing on the scandalous morsel to their opposite numbers in Gallanach and having mother black-balled from the local bridge club. She needn't have worried; from what I had seen, getting a little bit of cream on your nose was practically compulsory, like getting nicked on the cheek in a ritualised duel before being allowed to enter a Prussian drinking sodality. The atmosphere of middle-aged ladies enjoying something wicked and nostalgic was quite palpable.