Iain Banks - The Crow Road

I felt weird. My feet and arms and head felt buzzy and sore, but when I felt my head I couldn't feel any blood. Feet felt slippy. I heard the phone on the desk make a noise, and picked it up, still dazed.

"Which service?" said a man's voice.

"Police!" I heard my mother shout.

"Sorry," I mumbled. I put the phone down, pushing myself away from the desk. I tripped on the pale remains of the keyboard. Its lettered keys lay scattered about the floor like teeth. I stubbed my toe on something, bent down and picked up a long steel bar. I limped to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door slam shut.

My head felt buzzy again; I went into the kitchen, found the broken door lock and two full red plastic petrol cans sitting on the kitchen table, then got back out into the hall, still holding the steel bar even though it was beginning to feel very heavy, and shouted, "Mum? Mum; it's all right! I think… " before I had to sit down at the kitchen table, because my tongue had suddenly become a clapper in the bell of my skull, and my head was ringing. I put my arms on the table and rested my head on them while I waited for the echoes in my head to go away.

"Welcome to Argyll," I told myself.

The kitchen light was painfully bright when it went on. Mum brought me my dressing gown and put a blanket over my shoulders and made me drink heavily sugared tea, and I remember thinking, Sugared tea; dad must have died again, and mumbling something about having a flag in my foot when mum washed them and put bandages on them, and wondering why she was looking so upset and James so frightened; then police came. They seemed very large and official and asked me lots of questions. Later, Doctor Fyfe appeared looking slightly dishevelled, and I recall asking him what he was doing up at this time in the morning, and how he was these days. Old ticker holding out all right, was it?

We were on the battlements; I faced into the cool north wind. I waited to feel the dizziness of déjà vu, but didn't. Maybe too much had happened, or not enough time had passed.

"Well, whatever the heathen equivalent is," Lewis said. "Will you?"

"Of course," I said. I looked down into the small pink face bundled inside the old family shawl; Kenneth McHoan had his eyes tightly closed and wore an expression of concentration on his features that implied sleep was a business of some deliberation. One of his hands — the thumb so small it could have fitted on just the nail of one of my own thumbs — was held up near his chin; the fingers made a slow waving motion, like a sea anemone in a ray current, and I jiggled up and down a little, cradling the sleeping child and going, "Shh,shh."

I glanced at Verity, sitting beside Lewis, her arm round his waist. She looked up from her son's face for a moment.

"Uncle Prentice, the Godfather." She smiled.

"An offer only a churl could refuse."

"People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice," said Diana Urvill, as she took a Corning turn-of-the-century cut glass plate out of the display case in the castle Solar and — after wiping the plate with a lint-free cloth — handed it carefully to me. We both wore white gloves. I took the plate — like an immense ice crystal with too many angles of symmetry — and placed it on the table, on the topmost sheet of foam. I folded the translucent padding over — thinking how much it looked like prawn crackers — secured it with tape, then found a suitably sized box and placed the plate in the centre, on a bed of small white expanded-polysytrene wafers that looked like flattened infinity symbols.

I lifted one of the giant sacks of the wafers and filled the box to the brim with them, covering the wrapped-up plate, then closed the box and took the little card Diana had left on the table and taped it to the side of the box where it could be read. Then I put the box on a five-high pile near the door; the stacking limit was six, so it completed that column.

"Absorption spectra?" I said sceptically, as we started to repeat the whole process with a Fritsche rock crystal ewer.

Diana, dressed in baseball boots, black tracksuit bottoms and a UCLA sweatshirt, her black hair tied in a pony tail, nodded, and breathed on the ewer before polishing it. Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in — all that sort of stuff — then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed."

"What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana," I said. "Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?" I grinned.

"Just a pet theory, Prentice." She finished polishing the ewer. "Better than believing in," she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, "crystals."

"Well, that's true, in a very un-Californian way, isn't it?" I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.

She cried out and the crystal sang in reply.

Later, we exchanged signals.

"Help me fold these sheets, will you?"

The day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.

I signed the statement.

"Thank you, sir."

"Davey, stop calling me 'sir', for God's sake," I breathed. Constable David McChrom had been in my class at school and I couldn't bring myself to call him 'officer'. His nickname had been Plooky, but that might have been carrying informality a little too far.

"Ach, second nature these days, Prent," he said, folding the papers and standing up. He looked depressingly fresh and well-scrubbed; joining the police force seemed to have done wonders for his skin condition. He lifted his cap from the table top, turning to my mother. "Right. That's all for now, Mrs McHoan. I'll be getting back, but if you think of anything else, just tell one of the other officers. We'll be in touch if we hear anything. You all right now, Mrs McHoan?"

"Fine, thanks, Davey," mum smiled. Dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, she looked a little dark around the eyes, but otherwise okay.

"Right you are, then. You look after that heid of yours, okay, Prentice?"

"As though it were my own," I breathed, adjusting my towel.

Mum saw him out.

The CID were still in the study, looking for fingerprints. They'd be lucky. I looked out of the dining-room window to where a couple of policemen were searching the bushes near the kitchen door.

My, we were being well looked after. I doubted a roughly equivalent fracas in one of the poorer council estates would have attracted quite such diligent and comprehensive investigation. But maybe that was just me being cynical.

My head hurt, my feet hurt, my fingers hurt. All the extremities. Well, save one, thankfully. Most of the damage came from the central light fixture in the study ceiling. It was part of that — a large, heavy, brass part of it — which had hit me on the head, and it was the shattered glass of its shades which had cut my feet as I'd stumbled around the study. My fingers hurt from the impact of computer keyboard and steel tyre-iron.

The desk drawers had been levered open. The back of the desk's matching chair had taken the full force of a blow with the tyre-iron, the light fixture had been hit accidentally by the same implement and the ceiling rose damaged, the Compaq's keyboard was wrecked and the kitchen door needed a new lock. I felt I could use a new head.