I sat fretting, wanting to be away.
By some miracle, the 2CV hadn’t been towed away when I’d finally dragged Ash out; we’d made it to the M1, picked up a hitcher and - rather beyond the call of duty, I’d have said - dropped him where he was going, in Coventry. We got lost in Nuneaton trying to get back on the M6, and were now heading through Lancashire at dusk, still an hour or more from the border.
‘Prentice, there are a lot of better reasons for not talkin to your dad, believe me.’
‘I believe you,’ I said.
‘What about your mother?’
‘No, she’s still talking to him.’
She tutted. ‘You know what I mean. You’re still seeing her, I hope.’
‘Yeah; she came to Uncle Hamish’s a couple of times, and she drove me back to Glasgow once.’
‘I mean, what’s the big argument? Can’t you just agree to disagree?’
‘No; we disagree about that.’ I shook my head. ‘Seriously; it doesn’t work that way; neither of us can leave it alone. There’s almost nothing either of us can say that can’t be taken the wrong way, with a bit of imagination. It’s like being married.’
Ash laughed. ‘What would you know? I thought your mum and dad were pretty happy.’
‘Yeah, I suppose. But you know what I mean; when a marriage or relationship is going wrong and it’s like everything that one person says or doesn’t say, or does or doesn’t do, seems to rub the other one up the wrong way. Like that.’
‘Hmm,’ Ash said.
I watched the red tail lights. I felt very tired. ‘I think he’s angry that having given me the freedom to think for myself, I’ve not followed him all down the line.’
‘But, Prentice, it’s not as though you even believe in Christianity or anything like that. Shit, I can’t work out what it is you do believe in ... God?’
I shifted uncomfortably in the thin seat. ‘I don’t know; not God, not as such, not as a man, something in human form, or even in an actual thing, just ... just a field ... a force -’
‘ “Follow the Force, Luke,” eh?’ Ash grinned. ‘I remember you and your Star Wars. Didn’t you write to Steven Spielberg?’ She laughed.
‘George Lucas.’ I nodded miserably. ‘But I don’t even mean anything like that; that was just background for the film. I mean a sort of interconnectedness; a field effect. I keep getting this feeling it’s already there, like in quantum physics, where matter is mostly space, and space, even the vacuum, seethes with creation and annihilation all the time, and nothing is absolute, and two particles at opposite ends of the universe react together as soon as one’s interfered with; all that stuff. It’s like it’s there and it’s staring us in the face but I just can’t ... can’t access it.’
‘Maybe it isn’t accessible,’ Ash said, fag in mouth, holding the steering wheel with her knees and making a stretching, circling motion with her shoulders (we were on a quiet stretch of motorway, thankfully). She took her cigarette from her mouth again, put her hands back on the wheel. I hoped she wasn’t getting sleepy; the drone of the wee Citroën’s engine was cataleptically monotonous.
‘How not?’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t it be accessible?’
‘Maybe it’s like your particle; inevitably uncertain. Soon as you understand one part of what it means, you lose any chance of understanding the rest.’ She looked over at me, brows furrowed. ‘What was that routine Lewis used to do? About Heisenberg?’
‘Oh,’ I said, annoyed now. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Something about being at school and bursting into this office and saying, look, are you Principal here or not, Heisenberg? And him going, weellll ...’ She gave a small laugh. ‘Mind, it was funnier the way Lewis told it.’
‘A little,’ I conceded. ‘But -’
‘Lewis seems to be making it in the old alternative comedy scene, doesn’t he?’ Ash said.
‘So we’re told,’ I said, looking away. ‘I don’t imagine Ben Elton or Robin Williams have considered early retiral quite yet, though.’
‘Aye, but good for him, though, eh?’
I looked at Ash. She was watching the road as we roared down a slight incline at all of seventy. Her face was expressionless; that long, Modigliani nose like a knife against the darkness. ‘Yeah,’ I said, and felt small and mean-spirited. ‘Aye, good for him.’
‘It true you’ve not seen much of him in London?’
‘Well, he has his own friends, and I was usually too tired after work.’ (A lie; I wandered art galleries and went to films, mostly.) ‘And I couldn’t have paid my way, either.’
‘Ach, Prentice,’ Ashley said, chiding. She shook her head (the long mane of fair hair was tied up, so it did not swish and fall over her shoulders). ‘He’d have liked to have seen you more often. He’s missed you.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said.
I watched the lights again for a while. Ashley drove and smoked. I felt myself nodding off, and shook myself awake. ‘Ah, dear ...’ I rubbed my face with both hands, asked, ‘How do you keep awake?’
‘I play games,’ she told me.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, licking her lips. ‘Like Name That Tail-Light.’
‘What?’ I laughed.
‘True,’ she said. ‘See that car up ahead?’
I looked at the two red lights. ‘Yeah.’
‘See how high up the lights are, not too far apart?’
‘Yo.’
‘Renault 5.’
‘No kidding!’
‘Mm-hmm. One it’s over-taking?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Horizontally divided lights; that’s an old Cortina; mark 3.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Here’s a Beemer. New five series, I think ... about to pass us; should have lights that slant in slightly at the bottom.’
The BMW passed us; its rear lights were slanted in slightly, at the bottom. We overtook the old Ford and the 5 a little later.
‘Course,’ Ash said. ‘It’s more fun in a fast car when you’re doing all the overtaking, but even just sitting at seventy you’d be surprised how much you pass, sometimes. Now.’ She held up one finger. ‘Listen and feel as we pull back into the slow lane.’
Ash swung the ancient 2CV to the left, then straightened.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Nothing.’ She grinned. ‘Missed all the cats’ eyes. Bump-free lane-changing. A great skill, you know.’ She glanced at me, mock-serious. ‘Not so easy in a Ferrari, or whatever; the tyres are too wide. But skinny wee tyres like this thing’s got are just about ideal.’
‘Allow me to sit back in amazement, young Ashley,’ I said, crossing my arms and twisting in my seat to face her. ‘I had no idea it was possible to extract such multifarious enjoyment from a simple night-time car journey.’
Ashley laughed. ‘Cobbled streets are even more fun, if you’re a girly.’
‘Huh. Trust you to lower the tone of the whole conversation and introduce a note of clitoris envy at the same time.’
Ash laughed louder, ground the cigarette butt out in the ashtray, flipped it closed. ‘Och, it’s a gift; I’d be ashamed of myself if I wasn’t just so fucking nice with it.’ She put her head back and roared with laughter at this, before shaking her head and restoring her attention to the road. I laughed a little too, then stared out of the side window, wondering suddenly if Ash had slept with Lewis last night.
She clicked the indicator on. ‘Ye Olde Motorway Services. Come on; yer Aunty Ashley’ll buy you a coffee and a sticky bun.’
‘Gee, you sure know how to show a boy a good time.’
Ash just smirked.
When I woke, about mid-day in the flat on Crow Road, Janice Rae had gone. To work, I assume. There was a note, on a small blue sheet of writing paper: ‘You’re the better stand-up. Call me, sometime, if you want. J.’
I looked at that qualified second sentence with an odd feeling of sadness and relief.
Drying off after a shower
, I stood looking at two framed movie posters on the bathroom wall. Paris, Texas and Dangerous Liaisons.
I had a coffee and some toast, washed up and let myself out. I’d put the Crow Road folder in a Tesco bag, and walked back to our flat under grey skies and through a mild and swirling wind, swinging the carrier to and fro, and whistling.
Our flat was in Grant Street, near St George’s Cross (and just off Ashley Street, funnily enough). My flat-mates were out when I got back, which was fine by me; I did not relish the prospect of facing the single-entendres that were Gav’s best approximation of wit, and which inevitably followed any sexual adventure of mine or Norris’s - real or imagined — Gav ever found out about. If I was lucky, Gav would be so shocked at the very idea I had had carnal knowledge of an aunt - even one of the not-really-an-aunt variety - that he would just pretend it hadn’t happened. Hell, if I was really lucky he might stop talking to me altogether, I thought ... but that didn’t seem likely. Or preferable, to be honest; part of me rather looked forward to such taunting. I’d caught a glimpse of my face in the hall mirror once, when Gav was berating me for such rakish tendencies, and I’d been smiling.
I made myself another coffee, extended myself on the sofa - my legs quivery with fatigue - opened the folder, pulled out the sheets of paper and started to read.
Crow Road seemed to be the title of Uncle Rory’s Big Idea. From the notes, he seemed unsure whether its final form would be a novel, a film, or an epic poem. There were even some pages discussing the possibility of it being a concept album. I lay there on the couch and shuddered at the very thought. So seventies.
The material in the folder seemed to fall into three basic categories : notes, bits of descriptive prose, and poems. A few of the notes were dated, all between the early and late seventies. The notes were on a mixture of papers, mostly loose-leaf; ruled, plain, squared, graph. Some were on cartridge paper, some on pages torn from what looked like school exercise books, and some on folded, green-lined computer print-out. Napkins and old cigarette packets did not, sadly, put in an appearance. The notes were scribbled in a no-less motley variety of different-coloured pens (ball, felt and micro-liner) and used a lot of abbreviations and compressions: H crshd twn carige & tr? Erlier proph. by Sr: ‘kld by t. livng & t. ded((?)) H Chrst-lk figr (chng nm to start with T!!???); fml Chrst fr new times? Scot mrtyr? Or Birnam wd idea - disgsd army??? (2 silly?) ... and that was one of the more comprehensible bits.
2 silly, indeed.
The prose was mostly about places Rory had been; they read like out-takes from his travel pieces. San José, Ca: Suddenly, the Winchester House itself seemed like a emblem for the restless American soul.... about some weird house Rory wanted to use in his story, judging by some cryptic notes at the end of the passage.
Then there was the poetry:
... We know this life
is merely a succession
of endless brutal images,
punctuated,
for effect,
by relative troughs
whose gutsy heaves
at first disguised
but power us to the next disgrace.
‘Not applying for a job with Hallmark cards, then,’ I muttered to myself, sipping at my coffee.
But I kept on reading.
My head wasn’t really in the right state for assimilating all this stuff, but as far as I could gather, Uncle Rory had been trying for years to come up with something Creative (his capital, his italics). Something that would establish him as a Writer: script-writer, poet, lyricist for a rock band, novelist, playwright ... it didn’t matter. Being recognised for having kept a glorified diary while wandering through India when he was young and naive wasn’t enough for him. It wasn’t serious. This work, Crow Road, would be Serious. It would be about Life and Death and Treachery and Betrayal and Love and Death and Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism. It would be about Scotland, (or India, or an ‘Erewhon???’) and the Working Class and Exploitation and Action, and there would be characters in the work who would represent all of these things, and the working out of the story would itself prove the Subjectivity of Truth.
... There were pages of that sort of stuff.
There were also pages of poems forced into some sort of rhyming structure so that they might conceivably have worked as songs, several paragraphs of references to critical works (Barthes, especially; Death of the Author! shouted what looked like a headline over one entire page of notes devoted to ideas about a loose-leaf novel/poem?? There were location notes for a film and sheets about the physical appearance of the characters and the sort of actors who might play them, these surrounded by doodles, mazes and uninspired drawings of faces. There was a list of bands that might be interested in doing an album (a musical tone-scale running all the way from Yes to Genesis), and a sheaf of sketches for the sets in a stage presentation. What there wasn’t was any indication whatsoever that Rory had actually written any part of this great work. The only things that might have been classed as narrative were the poems, and they didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other, apart from the fact a lot of them seemed to be vaguely about Death, or Love. Tenuous, was the word that came to mind.
I looked in the folder again to see if I’d missed anything.
I had. There was another small sheet of blue writing paper, in Janice Rae’s hand. ‘Prentice - had a look at this -’ (then the word ‘while’, crossed out heavily, followed by the word ‘before’, also nearly obliterated) ‘- Can’t find any more; R had another folder. (?) If you find it and work out what it’s all about, let me know; he said there was something secret buried in it. (Gallanach)?’
I bobbled my head from side to side. ‘Gallanach?’ I said, in a silly high-pitched voice, as though quoting. I stretched, grunting with pain as my leg muscles extracted their revenge for having been ignored twelve hours earlier.
I reached for my coffee, but it was cold.
‘Dear God, we beseech ye, visit the reactive wrath of their own foulness upon those nasty wee buggers in the Khmer Rouge in general, and upon their torturers, and their leader Pol Pot, in particular; may each iota of pain they have inflicted on the people of their country - heathen or not - rebound upon their central nervous system with all the agony they originally inflicted upon their victims. Also, Lord God, we ask that you remember the dark deeds of any communistic so-called-interrogators, in this time of great upheaval in eastern Europe; we know that you will not forget their crimes when their day of reckoning comes, and their guttural, Slavic voices cry out to ye for mercy, and ye reward them with all the compassion they ever showed to those unfortunate souls delivered unto them. Prentice?’
I jumped. I’d almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on. I opened my eyes. The Tree was looking expectantly at me.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Umm ... I’d just like to put in a word for Salman Rushdie. Or at least take one out for old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ...’ I looked at Uncle Hamish, who was making quiet signals that I should clasp my hands and close my eyes. We were in the front lounge of Uncle Hamish and Aunt Tone’s Victorian villa in the attractive Gallanach suburbette of Ballymeanoch, facing each other over a card table. I closed my eyes.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Dear God, we pray that as well as suffering whatever part of the general physical unpleasantness involved in the Iran-Iraq war you may judge to be rightly his, you can find a spare area in his suffering, er, anti-create, for Mr R. Khomeini, late of Tehran and Qom, to experience at least some of the, umm, despair and continual worry currently being undergone by the novelist Mr S Rushdie, of Bombay and London, heathen and smart-alec though he may well be. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ echoed Uncle H. I opened my eyes. Uncle Hamish was already rising from his seat, looking positively twinkly with health and good cheer. He rubbed his hands. ‘Very good,’ he said, moving in that oddly stiff and creaky way of his for the door. ‘Let us repair for some repast,’ he chuckled as he held the door open for me. ‘I believe Antonia has
prepared something called Cod Creole.’ He sniffed the fishy air in the hall; we crossed to the dining room.
‘Not Lobster Creole? Or Kid?’ I inquired.
But I don’t think Uncle Hamish heard me. He was humming something sombre and looking pleased with himself.
Uncle H has developed a fascinating heresy based on the idea that exactly what you did to other people while you were alive gets done right back to you once you’re dead. Torturers die - in agony - hundreds, maybe thousands of times, before their ravaged souls are finally dropped from the jaws of a fearsome and vengeful God. Those who authorise the dreadful deeds carried out by the torturers (or whoever) also share whatever proportion of this retrospective agony the deity - or his angelic cost-benefit-calculating representatives - deem they deserve. Having quizzed The Tree on the details of this scheme, it would appear that said burden of transferred pain is debited from the account of the guy at - or rather wielding - the sharp end of the original action, which seems only fair, I suppose.
Apparently Uncle Hamish is awaiting divine inspiration on the knotty problem of whether the good things one has accomplished in one’s life are also re-lived from the other side (as it were), or simply subtracted from the nasty stuff. At the moment he seems to be veering towards the idea that if you did more good than bad during your life you go straight to Heaven, an arrangement which at least processes the merit of simplicity; the rest sounds like something dreamt up by a vindictive bureaucrat on acid while closely inspecting something Hieronymus Bosch painted on one of his bleak but imaginative-days.
Still, it has its attractions.
Aunt Tone and the family’s two children, Josh and Becky, and Becky’s infant daughter, Iona, were already in the dining room, filling it with bustle and chat.
‘Said your prayers?’ Aunt Tone said brightly, depositing a steaming dish of potatoes on the table.