The Crow Road (10 page)

I looked down. ‘It’s a wee lump of ground,’ I said. Ash looked at me. ‘All right,’ I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I’d have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). ‘I don’t know. What is it?’

Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.

‘This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice,’ she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. ‘When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?’

She looked at me. I nodded. ‘Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a
Herald of Free Enterprise.’

‘Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from,’ Ash said, looking to the west again. ‘But when it got here they didn’t need it, so they dumped it -’

‘Here?’ I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. ‘Always here?’

‘That’s what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn,’ Ash said. ‘He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later.’ (Ashley pronounced the word ‘cran’, in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn’t supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.

‘ “Hen,” he’d say, “There’s aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.”’

I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. ‘I never forgot that; I’d come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia or America ...’

Ash squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, ‘... Or India,’ to myself just then, and for one long, swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us. I thought,
God, how we are connected to the world!,
and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet. I stared up at the broken face of moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.

 
 
 
When he was younger than I am now, my Uncle Rory went on what was supposed to be a World Trip. He got as far as India. Fell in love with the place; went walk-about, circulating; to Kashmir from Delhi, then along the hem of the Himalayas, crossing the Ganga at Patna - asleep on the train - then zig-zagging from country to coast and back again, but always heading or trying to head south, collecting names and steam trains and friends and horrors and adventures, then at the very hanging tip of the subcontinent, from the last stone at low tide on Cape Comorin one slack dog-day; reversing; heading north and west, still swinging from interior to coast, writing it all down in a series of school exercise books, rejoicing in the wild civility of that ocean of people, the vast ruins and fierce geography of the place, its accrescent layers of antiquity and bureaucracy, the bizarre images and boggling scale of it; recording his passage through the cities and the towns and villages, over the mountains and across the plains and the rivers, through places I had heard of, like Srinagar and Lucknow, through places whose names had become almost banal through their association with curries, like Madras and Bombay, but also through places he cheerfully confessed he’d visited for their names as much as anything else: Alleppey and Deolali, Cuttack and Calicut, Vadodara and Trivandrum, Surendranagar and Tonk ... but all the while looking and listening and questioning and arguing and reeling with it all, making crazed comparisons with Britain and Scotland; hitching and riding and swimming and walking and when he was beyond the reach of money, doing tricks with cards and rupees for his supper, and then reaching Delhi again, then Agra, and a trek from an ashram to the great Ganga, head fuddled by sun and strangeness to see the great river at last, and then the long drift on a barge down to the Farakka Barrage a train to Calcutta and a plane to Heathrow, half dead with hepatitis and incipient malnutrition.

In London, after a month in hospital, he typed it all out, got his friends in the squat where he lived to read it, called it
The Deccan Traps And Other Unlikely Destinations,
and sent it to a publisher.

It very nearly sank without trace, but then it was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, and suddenly, with no more warning or apparent cause than that,
Traps
just was the rage, and he was there.

I read the book when I was thirteen, and again four years later, when I understood it better. It was hard to be objective - still is - but I think it is a good book; gauche and naive in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal - ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard - and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual
presence
of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.

Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.

And so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.

 
 
 
Ash squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the mound, ran it through her fingers. ‘And I’d come here when my daddy-paddy was beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too.’ She looked up at me. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Prentice.’

I hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. ‘Well, not exactly, but I knew it wasn’t all sweetness and light,
chez
Watt.’

‘Fuckin right it wasn’t,’ Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade of grass ran through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up, shrugged. ‘Anyway, sometimes I came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of shoes.’

‘Aye, well,’ I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a family of mostly amiable over-achievers.

‘Anyway,’ she said again. ‘They’re levelling the lot tomorrow.’ Ash looked back over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. ‘That’s what all that plant’s for.’

I remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little way off down the piece of waste ground.

‘Aw, shit,’ I said, eloquently.

‘An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one- and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free membership of the private health club,’ Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.

‘Fffuck,’ I shook my head.

‘What the hell,’ Ashley said, rising. ‘I suppose the Glasgow middle classes have to go somewhere after they’ve braved the treacherous waters of the Crinan canal.’ She gave her hands one final dust. ‘Hope they’re happy there.’

We turned to leave the mound, me and the Ash, then I grabbed her arm. ‘Hi.’ She turned to me. ‘Berlin,’ I said. ‘The jacuzzi; I just remembered.’

‘Oh yeah.’ She started walking down the slope, back to the weeds, the junk and the ankle-high remains of old brick walls. I followed her. ‘I was in Frankfurt,’ she said. ‘Seeing this friend from college? We heard things were happening in Berlin so we hitched and trained it; met up with ... Well, it’s a long story, but I ended up in this fancy hotel, in the swimming pool; and had a big whirl-pool bath in a wee sort of island at one end, and this drunken English guy was trying hard to chat me up, and making fun of my accent and -’

‘Cheeky basturt,’ I said as we got to the main road.

We waited while a couple of cars sped north out of town.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Ashley nodded, as we crossed the road. ‘Anyway, when I told him where I came from he started saying he knew the place well and he’d been shooting here, and fishing, and knew the laird and -’

‘Do we have a laird? I didn’t know. Perhaps he meant Uncle Fergus.’

‘Maybe, though when I asked him that he got cagey and said no ... but the point is he was acting all mysterious about something, and he’d already said there was somebody here who was having the wool pulled over their eyes, and had been for a long time, and he thought their name was ...’ Ash stopped at the snicket that led up to Bruce Street. My route back to Uncle Hamish’s house went straight along the main road.

I looked up the wee path, lit by a single yellow street lamp, half way up. Then I looked back into Ashley Watt’s eyes.

‘Not McHoan, by any chance?’ I asked.

‘Yep,’ Ash nodded.

‘Hmm,’ I said. Because McHoans are fairly thin on the ground around here. Or anywhere, for that matter.

‘Who was this guy?’

‘Journalist. There to cover the big knock-down.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Rudolph something, I think somebody called him. He wouldn’t say.’

‘You might have used your feminine wiles.’

‘Well, at the time they were more or less fully employed on a systems analyst from Texas with shoulders wide as the prairie sky and a gold company Amex card, to be perfectly honest, Prentice.’ Ash smiled sweetly.

I shook my head. ‘Saucy bitch.’

Ash grabbed my balls through my 501s and squeezed gently. My breath baled out.

‘Language, Prentice,’ she said, then released, covered my mouth with hers, wiped my teeth with her tongue, then swivelled, walked away.

‘Wow,’ I said. The old testes were complaining, but only slightly. I cleared my throat. ‘Night, Ashley,’ I said, cool as I could.

Ash turned, grinning, then reached into her big, naval-looking jacket with the brass buttons and fished something out; threw it.

I caught the projectile; a little lump of grey concrete, smooth and dark on one side.

‘Die Mauer,’ she said, walking backwards. ‘Actually from the section near the Brandenburg Gate where it said, “Viele viele bunte Smarties!”. The red paint on one surface used to be in the middle of the dot in the last “i”. Bit of the world that used to be between Germanies.’ She waved. ‘Night, Prentice.’

I looked at the grainy chunk of concrete in my hand. ‘Wow,’ I breathed. Ash’s fair hair flared briefly under the street light, then dimmed as she walked away. ‘Wow!’

CHAPTER 4

He looked round the Solar of the castle. The big new window at the gable end of the hall was still covered with a translucent plastic sheet which rustled in the wind and crackled as the rain blew onto it. A shifting grid of dark lines was the shadow of the scaffolding outside. The high-ceilinged hall smelled of paint, varnish, new wood and drying plaster. He walked over to one of the mullioned windows, and stood there, looking out at the low clouds as they drifted over Gallanach, soaking the dull town with the curving veils of rain they dragged beneath them, like the train of some vast grey gown.

‘Daddy, daddy! Uncle Fergus says we can go up on the roof with mum if we’re careful! Can we? Please can we? Promise we won’t jump off!’ Lewis skipped into the hall, dragging little Prentice behind him. Lewis had his anorak back on, and Prentice was dragging his behind him over the shining parquet floor.

‘Aye son, I suppose so,’ Kenneth said, sitting on his ankles to pull the younger boy’s jacket on and zipping it up. Lewis went leaping and whooping round the hall while this was going on. ‘Not so loud, Lewis,’ Kenneth said, without much conviction.

Prentice smiled at his dad. ‘Daddy,’ he said in his slow, croaky voice. ‘Need the toilet.’

Kenneth sighed, pulled the child’s hood up, then pushed it back down again. ‘Aye well; your mum will take you. Lewis!’ he shouted. Lewis darted guiltily away from the paint pots he’d been examining at the other end of the hall, and came running over.

‘This is great, daddy! Can we get a castle too, aye?’

‘No. We can’t afford it. Take your brother back to his mum; he needs the toilet.’

‘Aww,’ whined Lewis, staring accusingly at his young brother, who just grinned at him and wiped his nose on one cuff of his anorak. Lewis prodded Prentice in the back. ‘You’re always spoiling things!’

‘Do as you’re told, Lewis,’ McHoan said, straightening. His knees complained as he did so. ‘On you go. And be careful on that roof.’ He waved them both towards the double doors they’d entered through.