The Crow Road Read online

  Stop it! I beamed at him (I was trying to develop a technique for aiming my thoughts at people to get them to do things for me; there were promising developments, but it was early days still, and I was suffering a lot of teething problems. That bastard George Lucas hadn't had the decency to reply to my letter about The Force yet, either).

  "I have not been crying, honest I haven't, Uncle Rory," I said, sniffing.

  "Of course you haven't," Uncle Rory grinned, winking at my mum.

  That's right," I said. Now put me down!

  Uncle Rory put me down with a grunt. "That's better," he said, roughing up my hair. "Ah; a wee smile!"

  Of course I'm smiling, you big fool; you are prey for my thoughts!

  "Will you be away awful long, Uncle Rory?" I asked.

  "Yes, I dare say I will, Prentice," Uncle Rory said. The PA system shouted that the Heathrow flight was boarding. The voice mentioned something about a gate, but I doubted it would be anything as interesting as a stargate. Uncle Rory picked up his shoulder bag and the three of us started to walk towards a big crowd of people. A loud roar outside the glass expanse of one wall sounded excitingly like a crash… but it was only a plane landing.

  "If you're in Hollywood and bump into George Lucas — " Uncle Rory laughed mightily, and exchanged one of those infuriatingly knowing adult looks with my mum. "I don't think that's very likely, Prentice, but if I do…»

  "Will you ask him if he got my letter?" I said. We reached the place where everybody was standing around and hugging, and we stopped. "He'll know what it's about."

  "I certainly will." Uncle Rory laughed, squatting down. He made a worse mess of my hair and gripped both shoulders of my blazer. "Now you be a good boy and I'll see you all in a few months." He stood up. Him and mum had a brief cuddle, and she kissed him on the cheek. I turned my face away. I was glad my father wasn't here to see this. How could they do that sort of thing in public? I had a look round to see if my dad was watching from behind a potted palm or through holes cut in a newspaper, but he didn't seem to be.

  "Bye, Rory; safe journey."

  "Bye, Mary. Tell Ken I'll call when I can."

  "Will do. Take care now."

  Uncle Rory grinned. "Yeah." He squeezed one of her shoulders and winked at her again! "Bye love; see you."

  "Bye." We watched him show his ticket to the man at the gate, then with one last wave he was gone.

  I turned to mum. "Mum, can I have some more money for the Star Wars machine?" I pointed at the video games. "I got through three stages last time and I almost got to the fourth; I think I know how to deal with the big towers now and I'm getting really good at —»

  "I think you've had quite enough of that machine, Prentice," mum said, as we walked away through the people. We were heading for the stairs. I tried to pull her towards the row of video games.

  "Aw, mum, please; come on; I'll let you watch if you like."

  You will let me play the machine. You will let me play the machine.

  She had the nerve to laugh. "That's very kind of you, Prentice, but I'll pass on that. We have to get back home."

  "Can I go home on the train mum, please can I?"

  You will let your son take the train home. You will let your son Prentice take the train home.

  "Something wrong with my driving, you wee rascal?"

  "No mum, but can I please?"

  "No, Prentice; we'll take the car."

  "Aww, but mum…»

  "Will I buy you a book?" Mum stopped near the bookshop. "Would you like that?"

  "There's a Judge Dredd annual out," I said helpfully.

  She tssked. "Oh, I suppose, if it'll keep you quiet…»

  While she paid for it, I went to the pile of dad's books, and when nobody was looking I tore a couple of pages in one book, then put a load of somebody else's books over the top of dad's, so that nobody could see them.

  How dare he take the stories he'd told me and Lewis and James and the others and tell them to other people, to strangers? They were ours; they were mine!

  "Come on, terror," mum said.

  A hand between my shoulder blades propelled me from the shop. But at least it wasn't the Vulcan Death Grip.

  You will change your mind about letting your son take the train.

  Mrs Mary McHoan, you will change your mind about letting your son Prentice take the train home… and about playing the Star Wars machine…

  * * *

  "I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so noisy, do they? I mean, they can be quite specific about the actual act itself; there is no gory detail, no technical nuance that is not gone into, by teachers or parents or books about sex or the Joy of LURVE or television programmes or just the boys or girls in the year above you at school telling you behind the bike sheds, BUT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT THE NOISE!

  "They don't! The first time I ever got laid it was the summer, it was hot, we were doing it naked in the old missionary position, and there I was, trying to pretend I'd been doing this for years, and thinking am I doing this right? Was that enough foreplay, did I devote sufficient time to going down on her or did it look like I was doing it because I read you ought to in Cosmopolitan… and I did want to spend more time down there, but my neck was getting sore… and I'm thinking should I start chewing the other earlobe now, and should I sort of pull back so I can get my mouth to her nipples, because I'd like to suck them; I would, but my neck's still sore, and just as I'm thinking about all this, and still trying to think about putting this MFI kitchen unit together to stop myself from coming too soon but it isn't working any more more because I keep thinking of screws and pre-drilled holes and male and female parts and I'm stroking her and it's great and she's panting and I'm panting and then, just then, from in between our two naked, heaving bodies, THERE IS A NOISE LIKE A RHINOCEROS FARTING!

  "There is the noise of a fart the like of which you have never heard in your life before; it echoes off nearby tall buildings; it leaves your ears ringing; little old half-deaf ladies three streets away run to the broom cupboard and start hammering on the ceiling and threatening their upstairs neighbours with the Noise Abatement Society. I mean, a Loud Fart, okay?

  "And she is laughing and you don't know what to do; you try to keep going but it happens again and she's in hysterics and it is all deeply, deeply, deeply embarrassing, and you keep going but there's this constant farting noise caused by all the sweat and it just isn't the same any more and you're thinking why didn't they tell me about this? Why wasn't I told? I mean, do other people put a towel in between them, or what?

  "… And you come eventually and after a cuddle and you've whispered a few sweet somethings, you withdraw, holding the old johnny on because that's what it says on the packet after all, and you go to the loo to dispose of the horrible dangly greasy thing and you have a very full bladder by now and you think you'll have a pee… Ha ha ha ha ha; WRONG! You think you'll have a pee, but you can't!…»

  I shook my head, remembering the times Lewis had ranted away like this in the past; in pubs, amongst friends, at parties. I'd enjoyed it usually, back then; I'd felt almost privileged to witness these chaotic fulminating tirades, and even been proud that Lewis was my brother… But then I'd come to my senses and decided that my elder sibling was in fact a vainglorious egomaniac with a runaway sarcasm-gland problem. Now he was taking what had been relatively amusing examples of a private wit and exposing them to everybody, to make money and amass praise. My family are always doing this sort of thing to me.

  I looked at Gav. Gav was standing at my side, clutching his pint glass up near his shoulder and howling with laughter. He was sweating. He had tears in his eyes and his nose was running. He was having a great time. Gavin — one of my two flatmates — is a chap of the world; he has been there, he has done all this, he has had everything that Lewis was describing happen to him, too, and he didn't mind who knew it; this was the comedy of recognition; it was mature, it was happening, it was ideologically correct in terms of sexual poli
tics, but it was also extremely rude, and Gav just thought it was all totally hilarious. He was spilling what was left of his pint down his coat, but I suspected he wouldn't have cared even if he had noticed.

  I shook my head again and looked back at the low stage, where Lewis was still stalking back and forth like a caged hyena, grinning and sweating and gleaming under the lights and shouting into the microphone and flinging one arm about and smiling wickedly and striding side to side, side to side, talking to individuals at the front, to the people at the side and in the middle of the crowded audience, talking to us standing here at the back, talking to everybody.

  Lewis was dressed in black jeans and a white tuxedo over a white T-shirt which had three enormous black letters on it; FTT. In much smaller letters underneath, it read: (have carnal knowledge of the conservative and unionist party and their supporters). You could buy these T-shirts at the door. Gav had one, wrapped in polythene and stuffed in one pocket of his coat.

  We were upstairs in Randan's, the latest incarnation of a bar that had previously traded under the name Byre's Market, and before that had been called Paddy Jones's; premises forever apostrophised. That original appellation was before my time, and I confess to a degree of yearning for an age when bars had, in the main, sensible names, and did not pride themselves on serving their own creakingly-titled cocktails, a Choyce Selection of Our Eftim-able Home-Made Pies, Hotpottes And Other Fyne Dishes, and twenty different designer lagers, all of which taste identical, cost the earth and are advertised on the tellingly desperate Unique Selling Points of having a neat logo, a top that is difficult to open or a bottle neck whose appearance is apparently mysteriously enhanced by having a slice of citrus fruit rammed down it.

  But if this is the price we have to pay for all-day opening and letting women into public bars, then I admit it may well be churlish to carp. I used to think dad was kidding about bars closing in the afternoon, and at ten in the evening (TEN, for Christ's sake; I don't go out until midnight sometimes!), and about some not having women's toilets at all… but apparently it's all true, and scarcely a decade and a half gone.

  I looked at my watch, wondering how long Lewis was going to keep this up. Telling conventionally-structured jokes uses up material appallingly quickly and if that had been what Lewis was up to I might not have had the prospect of enduring too much more challenging, non-sexist, politically aware, near-the-bone (well, near the bone-head, at any rate) alternative humour, but this observational stuff — telling people things they already know and getting them to pay you for the privilege (sort of the light entertainment equivalent of psychoanalysis) — can go on virtually indefinitely. Indeed, I felt like it already had.

  Lewis was moderately big all of a sudden, after a series of appearances on that late-night TV show. The programmes had been recorded at a Comedy Festival in Melbourne, Australia, which Lewis had been invited to (hence his inability to make old Margot's funeral). Tonight was the premiere date on his first solo UK tour, and it looked depressingly likely that it would be totally sold out, thanks to the advertising power of television. If he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets I doubted that Gavin and myself would have stood any chance of getting in (but then if he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets a troop of wild Clydesdales on speed wouldn't have dragged me here).

  I looked at my watch again. Half an hour gone. So far he had said exactly one thing I found even slightly amusing, and that was right at the start: "At one stage I thought I was a complete asshole." (There followed the inevitable pause for effect). "But I passed through that."

  Laugh? I almost.

  "… about my family, ladies and gents, because I come from this very strange family, you know; very strange family indeed… " Lewis said.

  Gav turned, big red face beaming; he nudged me. I didn't turn to look at him. I was staring — glaring — at the stage. My mouth felt dry. He wouldn't dare, would he?

  There's my Uncle Alfred —»

  I started to relax. We do not have an uncle Alfred. Still, maybe he was going to use some true or embroidered slice of family history and just disguise it with a false name.

  "Uncle Alfred was a very unlucky man. He was so unlucky we actually called him Unlucky Uncle Alfred. We did. Unlucky Uncle Alfred was so unlucky, he's the only man in history ever to have been killed by an avalanche on a dry ski-slope."

  I relaxed a bit more. He hadn't dared. This was just a joke.

  "No, really. He was skiing down when it sort of started to come undone at the top and roll down… crushed to death by three hundred tones of nylon tufting. Haven't been able to look at a Swiss Roll the same way since."

  Another nudge from a highly amused Gavin. "That true, Prentice, aye?"

  I gave what I hoped was a suitably withering look, then turned back to the stage. I drank my heavy and shook my head.

  "Prentice," Gav insisted from my side, missing the first part of Lewis's next mirth-infused effusion. "Zat true, aye?"

  Obviously my withering look needed more work in front of the mirror. I turned to Gavin. "Every word," I told him. "Except his real name was Uncle Ethelred."

  "Aw aye." Gav nodded wisely, took a sip from his beer without significantly moving the glass from near his right shoulder, and frowned as he tried to catch up with what Lewis was saying, only to succeed in catching the predictably below-the-belt punch-line. Everybody else laughed, so so did Gav, no less enthusiastically than anybody else, and, interestingly, no less enthusiastically than he had at any other part of Lewis's act, when he'd heard every word. Remarkable. I watched Gav for a while from the corner of my eye, wondering, not for the first and — barring serious accidents and justifiable homicide — almost certainly not for the last time, what I was doing sharing a flat with somebody whose cogitative powers I had last had cause to ponder only a few hours earlier, when I had discovered — while watching the news with Gav — that he had believed up until then that the Intifada was an Italian sports car.

  In a way I envied Gav, just because he found life such a hoot. He also seemed to think that it was — like himself, perhaps — comparatively uncomplicated. As is the way with such things, these subjectively positive qualities tend to have precisely the opposite effect on the temperaments of those in close proximity to the person concerned.

  This was a man, after all, who had not yet mastered something as fundamental and as linear in its properties (for the most part) as running a bath at the correct temperature. How many times had I gone into the bathroom in our flat to find that the bath was full almost to the brim of hot, steaming water? This was an indication that Gav was planning to bathe in an hour or so. Gavin was of the opinion that the way to draw a bath was to fill it entirely from the tap that had the little «H» on it (thereby reducing the flat's supplies of immediately available hot water to zero), then leaving the resulting body of liquid to cool to something approaching a state in which a human body could enter it without turning instantly the colour of a just-boiled lobster. This normally took about thirty minutes in the depths of winter, and sometimes well over an hour in high summer, during which time Gav was inclined to amuse himself watching television — soap operas and the less intellectually taxing game shows, preferably — or eating, say, banana and Marmite sandwiches (just one example from Gavin's extensive repertoire of unique snackettes that entirely substituted culinary originality for anything as boring as tasting pleasant).

  My attempts to explain the subtle dialectics of utilising both hot and cold taps — consecutively or concurrently — to produce a bath that could be used immediately without recourse to the Western General's burns unit (with the resulting benefits of freeing the bath for the use of others earlier and in the process using a great deal less electric power, which both we and the planet could ill afford), fell not so much on deaf ears as on open-plan ones. In automotive terms, if Lewis was a motor-mouth, then Gavin was a cross-flow head.

  I drained my glass, studied the flattening dregs of foam at the bottom.

  "N
uther beer, big yin?"

  "No thanks, Gav; I'll buy my own."

  Gavin, I had long ago concluded, believed that life revolved around rugby and beer, and that — especially under the influence of too much of the latter — sometimes it just revolved. Perhaps it might be a mistake to match him pint for pint.

  "Ah; go on. Heavy, aye?" He grabbed my empty glass, and with that he was gone, shouldering his way through the pack of bodies for the distant dream that was the bar. He was still grinning inanely. Probably a good point for him to mount an expedition to the bar. Lewis was in the middle of a long, right-on, faux-naïve spiel about post-isms which Gav probably found a little bewildering. ('I mean, what is post-feminism? Eh? Answer me that? What do they mean? Or have I missed something? I mean, was there a general election last week and nobody told me about it and half the MPs are now women? Are fifty per cent of the directors of all major industries female? Is it no longer the case that the only way to hold on to your genitals if you're brought up in Sudan is to be born a boy? Don't Saudi Arabian driving licences still have a section that says Title: Mr, Mr or Sheik, please delete?)

  I really had been going to buy my own drink; anybody who has ever been hard-up will tell you it's the easiest way to regulate one's finances while still remaining nominally sociable, but Gav, profligate though he may have been with the heat plumes from his baths (and kettles; Gavin's determination to wreck the ecosphere through the generation of copious volumes of unnecessary hot water extended to never boiling a kettle that was less than brim-full, even if only a single cup was required), was equally generous when it came to buying drink. At such moments it was almost possible to forget he was also the inventor of custard and thousand-island dressing pudding.

  My brother seemed to be thinking along the same epicurean lines. However, to my horror (emulsified with a small amount of schadenfreudian delight), he appeared to be proposing to sing.