Iain Banks - The Crow Road

I stood there, frowning at the door Rupert Paxton-Marr had exited through. Something about the way he'd moved as he'd backed off had left me with an uncanny feeling of déjà vu.

Ash looked surprised. So did the two guys. One of them looked me up and down. "Jesus Christ," he said. "How'd you do that? Usually only women with toddlers screaming 'Daddy! in tow have that sort of effect on Rupe."

Remember, remember, I thought to myself, and smiled. I turned to the man and shrugged. "It's a gift," I told him.

"He owe you money or somefink?" the second man said. They were both about thirty, lean and clean-cut. Both were smoking.

I shook my head.

Ash laughed loudly. "No," she said, holding her hands out to the two men. "It's just that the last time we all met up, we all got filthy drunk — didn't we, Presley? — and Rupert thinks Presley here —»

Presley? Ash was indicating me when she said the name. Presley? I thought.

"… thinks that Rupert tried to proposition him. Which he didn't, of course, but it was all a little embarrassing, wasn't it, dear?" Her happy, smiling face looked demandingly at me.

I nodded dumbly as the two men looked at me as well.

"Embarrassing," I confirmed.

Ash was beaming smiles all over the place like a laser gone berserk. "I mean," she said, tossing her hair. "Rupert isn't gay, is he? And Presley… " She looked suddenly sultry, voice slowing, going a little deeper. «Here…» She took an extra breath, her gaze flickering down from my face to my crotch and back,"… certainly isn't."

Then she seemed to collect herself and directed a broad smile to the two men. They looked suitably confused.

"Presley? PRESLEy?" I yelled as we walked rapidly along Thomas More Street. "How could you?" I waved my hands about. A light drizzle was falling out of the orange-black sky.

Ashley strode on, grinning. She held a small umbrella; her heels clicked. "Sorry, Prentice; it was just the first thing I thought of."

"But it isn't even very different from Prentice!" I shouted.

She shrugged. "Well then, that's probably why it was the first thing I thought of." Ash laughed.

"It's not funny," I told her, sticking my hands into my pockets, stepping over some empty pizza containers.

"It wasn't funny," Ash agreed, almost prim. "It's your reaction that is." She nodded.

Great," I said. "There are two guys going around now who think my name is Presley, but to you it's just a hoot." I stepped on a wobbly paving stone and jetted dirty water up my chinos. "Jeez," I muttered.

Look," said Ash, sounding serious at last. "More to the point, I'm sorry I fucked that up. I don't know why he dashed off like that. All I said was I'd a friend with me. I didn't even say you wanted to meet him or anything. It was weird." She shook her head. "Weird."

We had escaped from the pub after finishing our drinks and chatting — awkwardly on my part, easily on Ashley's — with Rupert's two friends (Howard and Jules); a stilted conversation whose most useful result seemed to have been a general agreement that old Rupe was a lad, eh?

"Doesn't matter," I told her. I saw a taxi coming with its light on and suddenly remembered I was rich. "I know where I saw him, now."

I stepped into the road and waved.

"You do?" Ash said from the kerb.

"Yep." The cab pulled in. Things were looking up; my usual Klingon Cloaking Device — which has tended to engage automatically on the rare occasions I have felt rich enough in the past to afford a taxi — seemed to have been de-activated. I held the door open for Ashley.

"So; you going to tell me, or be all mysterious?" she said as she got in.

"I'll tell you over dinner." I sat beside her and closed the door. "Dean Street, Soho, please," I told the driver. I smiled at Ashley.

"Dean Street?" she said, eyebrow arching.

"Amongst many other things, I owe you a curry."

When I was fifteen I had my first really bad hangover. On Friday nights I and some of my school pals used to meet at the Droid family house in Gallanach; we'd sit in Droid's bedroom, watching TV and playing computer games. And we'd drink cider, which Droid's big brother purchased for us — for a small commission — from the local off-licence. And smoke dope, which my cousin Josh McHoan, Uncle Hamish's son, purchased for us — at an exorbitant commission — in the Jacobite Bar. And sometimes do speed, which came from the latter source as well. Then one night Dave McGaw turned up with a litre of Bacardi and he and I finished it between the two of us, and the next morning I was woken up by my dad to a strange and horrible new feeling.

vho, as Rory would have written, nsg at all.

There had been a phone-call for me; Hugh Robb, from the farm near the castle, reminding me I'd agreed to come and help with making the bonfire for Guy Fawkes" night. He was coming out to pick me up.

This, of course, was not really what I needed (any more than I needed dad lecturing me on how unsound a custom it was to build bonfires on November the fifth and so celebrate religious bigotry; didn't I know it had been an anti-catholic ceremony, and the effigy burned on the fire used to be the Pope?), but I couldn't admit to mum and dad I'd been drinking and had a hangover, so I had to get dressed with my head pounding and my insides feeling distinctly unwell. I waited outside on the porch steps, taking deep breaths in the cool clear air and wishing the hangover would just go away. Then I suddenly thought maybe it wasn't a hangover; maybe this pounding in my head was the first symptom of a brain tumour… and so I ended up praying that I did have a hangover.

Hugh Robb was a big, amiable Scotch Broth of a lad; he was a full year older than I was but we were in the same class at school because he'd been kept back a year. He arrived in a tractor hauling a trailer full of branches and old wood and I rode with him in the cab, wishing that the tractor had better suspension and that Hugh could have thought of something else to talk about other than the prolapsed uterus of one of the farm's cows.

Round the hill from the castle there was a big east-facing field; it was surrounded by trees on all sides but the slope gave it a view towards Bridgend. I still thought of it as the ponies" field because it was where Helen and Diana's ponies had been stabled originally before they'd been moved to a more level paddock west of the castle.

Hugh and I unloaded the broken planks and the great bare grey branches from the trailer. We worked together for a bit, then I continued to stack the wood while Hugh went to collect some more. He made a couple of trips, dumping what looked like about a tonne ot wood each time before announcing he was off to another farm where they had even more wood.

I let the tractor disappear, bumping along the track towards the castle, then collapsed back in the huge pile of branches awaiting my attention. I lay, spread-eagled and half-submerged on the springy mass of grey, leaf-nude wood and stared up at the wide blue November sky, hoping the bass drum inside my head would hit a few thousand rest-bars reasonably soon.

The sky seemed to beat in time to the throbbing inside my head, the whole blue vault pulsing like some living membrane. I thought about Uncle Rory and his discovery that it was not possible to influence TV screens from afar by humming. I wondered — as ever — where he was; he'd been gone a couple of years by that time.

A bird swung into view over the trees behind my head, and I lay there and I watched it; broad, flat-winged, flight feathers at the square wing-tip ruffling like soft fingers, the small, quick head flicking this way and that, the brown-grey body between the soft density of wings tilting and turning as it glided the cool air, tail feathers like a rich brown fan.