I sipped my Bloody Mary, looking down at huge, white, piled-up clouds so bright in the mid-day sunshine they looked yellow. The plane had just levelled out and there was a smell of food; they were serving lunch further forward in the cabin. I watched the clouds for a moment, then looked at my magazine. I was on my way to London, a couple of torn-off match-book covers m my pocket, hoping to confront Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr.
"Thanks mum… Ash?"
"Yo, Prentice. How's it hanging?"
"Oh, plum."
"Still wearing the kilt, eh? Look, I've had some word from —»
"How about you?"
"Eh?"
"How are you?"
"Oh, rude health. Verging on the obscene. Listen; my computer wizard's been in touch."
"What? About the disks?"
"Cor-rect."
"What's on them? What do they day? Is there anyth —»
"Hey… hold your horses. Had to get the stuff to him first."
"Oh. Where is he?"
"Denver."
"Denver?"
"Yup."
"Denver Colorado?"
"… Yes."
"What, in America?"
"Yeah, Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System…»
"Okay, okay, so he's… hey, is this your Texan programmer? Has he moved states?"
"Systems Analyst, for the last fucking time, Prentice, and no, it isn't him; just a guy I exchange E-mail with sometimes."
"Right. And he's got the disks?"
"No, of course he hasn't got the disks."
"What? Then —»
"He has the information that was held on them. Well, on the one that held anything. Seven were blank; not even formatted."
"Ah, right. I see… so what does it say? What is on it? Was it all Rory's —»
"It's a little more complicated than that, Prentice."
"Oh."
"I've got a message on my screen here from him. Thought you might be interested in it."
"Oh; you're at work. Hey, have you seen the time? You're working late, aren't you?"
"Yes…, Prentice. Do you want to hear the message?"
"Will I understand it?"
"You'll get the gist of it."
"Okay."
"Right. I quote: 'I thought your man up there in the misty glens might like to know —»
"'Misty glens'? That's sounds a bit patronising."
"Prentice; shut up."
"Sorry."
"… might like to know what our game plan is with respect to your word-processed file(s). As we don't yet know what geek program this mutant No-namo-brand clone was running, we have had to resort to extreme measures to access the data. Dr Claire Simmons of London University, who picked up the disks, will use a vintage Hewlett Packard TouchScreen (which has compatible eight-inch drives) in the establishment's Museum of Computing to extract the raw binaries, sector by sector, praying all the while that somebody has posted an ediger to Usenet that she can use to strip off the physical addressing; she will then attack the content one word at a time, swapping bytes as needed and inverting bits if none of it looks like ASCII, stripping the eighth bits if they're in the way or un-encoding the lot if we can't do without them, and unload the result to a Prime mini-computer (another indestructible antique) somewhere on the campus network. She moves all this to her Iris, double-encrypts it and E-mails it via Internet (off JANUS or BITNET to nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, probably) via Cornell to an account I'm not supposed to have on the Minnesota Supercomputer Center's Cray-2 (currently the biggest and quickest compute-server short of a Connection Machine at the high end, so I might as well use it to do the decryptions and perhaps take my own first whack at demangling before moving the data along). From there I download via a dedicated T3 line to an SGI 380SX–VGX at one of AT&T's Bell Labs (the one in Boulder, I think — another unofficial account) from where I can further download — and filter out certain offending control characters — to a Mac II at my office. Then I dump the results onto a floppy and bike them home to tinker with in my basement, which is where the hard work starts… Get all that, Prentice?"
"Yeah. Basically what he's saying is, it's a piece of piss."
"Absolutely. A doddle."
"Great. So when can we expect to see some results?"
"No idea. Don't forget the guy's doing it for fun, and he's a busy man. No promises, but he sounds confident. I'll call him in a week if he doesn't get in touch first."
Tell him I'll fax him a crate of champagne or something."
"Certainly. So, when…? Ah shit. Fucking decollator's jammed again. Gotta go attend the print, Prent."
"Okay. Bye. Oh, and thanks."
"…»
I now had a better idea of what Rory had been doing in the days before his disappearance. It looked like he had been working on Crow Road between the time he'd come back from London after seeing his friends and the evening he disappeared, on the motor bike he'd borrowed from his flat-mate. That was what he'd been doing, stuck in his room in the flat in Glasgow; finally actually writing something on his bizarre contraption of a computer.
He'd done it, he'd stopped writing notes and started on the work itself.
I'd talked to a retired policeman who at the time had looked — briefly — into what had happened to Rory. The police hadn't come up with anything; they'd interviewed Janice Rae, and Rory's flatmate Andy Nichol, and looked at the papers Rory had left with Janice. There was no suicide note, so they'd decided the papers weren't relevant. Apart from checking the hospitals and eventually listing Rory as a Missing Person, that had been that.
The only useful information I'd got from the police was that Rory's flat-mate had left local government and joined the civil service a few months after Rory had disappeared. I'd tracked Andy Nichol down at a tax office in Plymouth and called him there, but apart from saying he'd heard a lot of keyboard-clattering noises coming from Rory's room during the days before Rory had borrowed his bike and disappeared, he'd only been able to confirm what I already knew. He did say he'd tried working Rory's Neanderthal computer after dad had said he could have it, but he couldn't make the beast work; he'd sold the machine and the two blank disks that had come with it to a friend in Strathclyde University. It had been chucked out years ago.
… Whatever; after those few days work, Rory had suddenly upped and offed, and never came back. Maybe the stuff on the disks would give me a clue why he'd suddenly done that. If there was anything useful there; that clattering noise didn't prove anything… I'd seen The Shining.
The cloud cover started to break up over the midlands; I chomped through my lunch. The starter was smoked salmon. I thought of Verity and Lewis, on honeymoon in the Bahamas, and — with just a tinge of sadness — silently wished them well.
I saw Ashley come into the pub. She stood near the door, looking round, that strong-boned head swivelling, those grey eyes scanning. She didn't see me on the first sweep; I was mostly hidden by other people. I watched her take a couple of steps forward, look round again. She was dressed in a dark, skirted suit, under the old but still good-looking jacket I remembered her wearing at Grandma Margot's funeral. Her hair was gathered up and tied; she wasn't wearing her glasses. Her face looked tense and forbidding. She seemed harder, more capable and more self-contained than I recalled her being in Scotland.
In those few moments, in the noise and smoke of a pub by the river, a quarter mile from the Tower, in the great, cruel, headless monster that was London after a decade of Hyaena rule, I wondered again at my own feelings for Ashley Watt. I knew I didn't love her; she didn't make me feel anything like the way I had about Verity, and yet I'd been — I realised — looking forward to seeing her, and now that I had seen her, just felt, well… happier, I guess. It was all puzzlingly simple. Maybe — to lapse into the humdrum continuum for a moment — she was the sister I'd never had. I remembered the mascara mum had discovered in my hair after the wedding, and wondered if the position of honorary sibling was one Ashley would entirely welcome.
I tried to remember Ashley's tone when I'd rung her, a couple of days ago, to say that I was coming down (this about a week after I'd had my own personal info-dump on the workings of the world computer network). I had already called Aunt Ilsa and arranged to stay with her and Kentledge Man, and I'd wondered at the time if I'd detected the merest hint of reproach in Ashley's voice when I'd told her I would be staying in deepest Kensington. At any rate, she'd told me there was a sofa-bed and a spare duvet of indeterminate tog value at the flat she shared in Clapham, in case Aunt Ilsa went on some sudden expedition to Antarctica and forgot to tell her Filipino maid, or whatever. She'd added that the two girls she shared with really wanted to meet me (I felt pretty sure the person they really wanted to meet was Lewis).
I raised my hand as Ashley's gaze passed again over where I stood; she caught the movement, and that city-hard expression changed instantly, relaxing and softening as she smiled broadly and walked over.
"Hiya, babe." She punched my shoulder, then gave me a big hug. I hugged right back. She smelled of Poison.
"How are you?" I asked her.
She put one fist on her hip and held her other hand up in front of my face, fingers spread. "Drinkless," she grinned.
"You got off?"
"Yeah," I said, swirling the remains of my pint round in my glass.
Ash shook her head. "I thought you were going to plead guilty."
"I was," I confessed. I shrugged, looked down. "I got a smart lawyer. She said it was worth fighting. Ended up in a jury trial, eventually."
Ash laughed. "Well done," she said. She lowered her head until she could look into my eyes. "Hey, what's the matter?"
"Well," I said, trying not to smile. "I did do it after all; it seems wrong I got off because I dressed in a suit and I could afford an expensive advocate and people in the jury had heard of dad and felt sorry for me because he'd died. I mean if I'd come from Maryhill and I wasn't reasonably articulate and didn't have any money, even if I had just forgotten I hadn't paid for the book, I bet everybody would have told me to plead guilty. Instead, thanks to the money, I had an advocate who'd probably make God look just a little lacking in gravitas, and discovered a talent for lying through my teeth that promises a glittering career as a Sun journalist."
Ash leaned conspiratorially forward over the small table we were crouched round, and quietly said, "Easy, boy, you're on their turf."
"Yeah," I sighed. "And don't drink the tap water." I looked around the place, all crowds and smoke. The English accents still sounded oddly foreign. "No sign?" I asked.
Ash looked round too, then shook her head. "No sign."
"You sure he drinks here?"
"Positive."
"Maybe he's been sent away, back to the Gulf." Ash shook her head. "I spoke to his secretary. He's having some root canal work done; he's here till the end of next week."
"Maybe I should have just arranged to see him." I sighed. "My new-found talent as a con-man might have come in useful. I could have said I had pictures of Saddam Hussein torturing a donkey, or something."
"Maybe," Ash said.
We had discussed this sort of thing. Ash's first idea was simply that she should ring him up, tell him she'd seen him on television and heard he worked in London; she was here too, now, and did he fancy a drink sometime? But I wasn't sure about this. If he'd been reluctant to give Ash his name in Berlin, and thought even there that he'd already said too much, he might be suspicious when she rang up. So I felt; so my — by now rather paranoid — feelings suggested. A chance meeting seemed more plausible, or at least it had when I'd been talking to Ash from dad's study in Lochgair. Now I wasn't so sure.
"How's your wizard?" I asked her.
"Eh?" Ash looked confused for a moment. "Oh; Doctor Gonzo? Still working on the files. They weren't just weird shit, they were corrupted weird shit; where did your dad keep those things; inside a TV? But anyway; he's still hopeful."
"Doctor Gonzo?" I said, tartly.
"Don't look like that, Prentice," Ash chided. "This guy's knocking his pan in for you for nothing. And he has got a doctorate."
I smiled. "Sorry."
"Oh, and supposing the good Doctor can decipher all that corrupted crap you presented him with, what format do you want these files in eventually anyway, you ungrateful wretch?"
"How d'you mean?"
"I mean what program do you use on the Compaq?"
"Oh, Wordstar," I nodded knowledgeably.
"Version? Number?"
"Ah… I'll have to come back to you on that one. Look; just ask him to print it out and send it to me. Would that be okay?"
She shrugged. "If you want. Or you could get a modem; E-mail's about a zillion times faster."
"Look, I'm still not all that comfortable around computers that don't come with a joystick and a 'fire' button; just… just ordinary airmail and real paper will be fine."
Ash grinned, shook her head. "As you wish." She stood up. "Same again?" she asked, clinking my glass.
"No," I said. "I'll have a half."
"Any particular sort?"
"Na, anything."
I was alternating pints and whiskies on principle; they keep giving you your old glass back down here.
I watched Ash weave her way to the bar.
I still felt nervous about meeting this guy Paxton-Marr, but all-in-all, I told myself, things weren't so bad. Those of us most affected by dad's death were — with the possible exception of Uncle Hamish — bearing up pretty well, I might yet find out what Uncle Rory had written, I didn't have to worry about money, I had no criminal record, and I was being a good young(ish) adult again, attending diligently to my studies. Mostly I stayed in Glasgow during the week, and went back to Lochgair at weekends, unless mum — sometimes accompanied by James — came to stay with me. I had got filthy drunk just once since dad had died, and then with good reason; it had been the day Thatcher resigned. Bliss was it, etc., even if the Tapeworm Party was still in power.
The lawyer Blawke had found me a place to rent for the year I needed to be in Glasgow. It was part of the property of a Mrs Ippot, who'd died rich but intestate at a sourly ripe old age, having throughout her life promised part, or all, of her sizeable fortune to various individual relations and combinations of relations within her extensively and antagonistically divided family, in a blizzard of contradictory letters, and with what appeared to be a profound lack of consideration for the litigious chaos that was bound to ensue. Mrs Ippot, in short, had been the sort of client probate lawyers have wet dreams about.
My own theory was that Mrs I had actually thoroughly detested every single one of her relatives, and had hit on a nicely appropriate way of confounding all of them. By Jarndyce out of Petard, Mrs Ippot's lawyer-infested legacy had ensured that her rebarbatively consistent family would suffer years if not decades of self-inflicted hatred and frustration as the increasing legal fees gradually corroded the monies she had left; a tortuously slow method of telling your relatives from beyond the grave exactly what you thought of them that makes giving all the loot to a cats" home look positively benign in comparison.
And so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot's enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium's experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.
The high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot's former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d'art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house's inventory — drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was — came in three volumes.
I christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.
My friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.
One of my pals — graduated, employed; moving on to better things — sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn't have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.
Mum and I had started going through dad's diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he'd been sixteen. I'd suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren't the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we'd sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he'd met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he'd kept those in the A4 pads.
It was at the bottom of the box containing dad's diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory's diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.
I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory's diaries were even more sparse — and considerably more cryptic — than my father's, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week — and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory's life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I'd tried to make sense of Rory's diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:
K r; boy 8£. Prentis?!? M ok Eve, pub.
The entry for the next day read: 'vho' in shaky writing, and that was all. 'ho' and 'vho' (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously, ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he'd spelled it out the first time he'd used it, following a 48hr h.o. after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant 'rang'; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.
I found a few mentions of 'CR' — I even recognised some of the notes I'd read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.
The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:
JUST USE IT!
… a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate them. It read:
show Hlvng pty wi C? (whoops): 2 close??
The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.
F and L. Those abbrevations didn't turn up anywhere else in Rory's notes for either Crow Road or anything else that I knew of. Rory never crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it.
Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that 'whoops'? And what was too close to what?
found myself cursing Uncle Rory's inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he — mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz — was LW, more usually.
Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad's study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I'd fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I'd put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and — by my reading — been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.
I found one thing which — after a little puzzled thought — I could comprehend, but which I hadn't been expecting, in Uncle Rory's 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.
The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.
In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air… I'd just sit there or a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there ut not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people's belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again… but I'd tell him I was just browsing I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father's. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn't sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat's kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I'd stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.
"He's here," Ash said, coming back with the drinks. She sat down.
I looked around. I saw him after a while. A little shorter and a little younger-looking than I'd expected, from the tape I'd seen. He was talking to a couple of other guys; they were all dressed in grey trench coats, and one had put a hat down on the bar that at least looked like it ought to be called a fedora. I wondered if the other two were also journalists.
Rupert Paxton-Marr; a foreign correspondent, his meticulously-trained, razor-sharp mind ready in an instant to describe a place as «war-torn» and bring home to us all events and disasters in far away places, to talk of people tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, to reveal that only with dawn did the full extent of the devastation become apparent, and even — in the very best traditions of British popular journalism — to ask people who'd just seen their entire family duly butchered, burned, crushed or drowned, How do you feel?
Ash seemed contemplative, eyeing me with a steady gaze. «Well…» I said, feeling my heart beat faster and my palms start to sweat. I took the two torn match-book covers out of my pocket. "Think I'll go see what he has to say for himself."
"Want me to come?" Ash started to move in her seat.
I shook my head. Then bit my lip. "Shit, I don't know. All the way down here, I was just going to go up to him and say, 'You send these to my dad? but now I don't know. It feels a bit weird." I looked over at the three men. "I mean," I laughed. "They're even wearing trench-coats!"
Ash looked briefly over too. "Hey," she said, smiling. "They're on wine; they're not just knocking back whiskies and heading off. They'll be here a while yet. Sit and think for a moment."
I nodded, took a deep breath and drank some whisky.
I thought about it some more. Then I said, "Okay. Maybe we should go together. You could sort of introduce… I could go out and pretend to just come in… Hell; I could just tell him the truth… I don't know." I closed my eyes, appalled at my own lack of gumption.
Ash got up, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Sit here. I'll tell him I've just recognised him. You come over later; just mention the match-books. Don't show them, not at first. How does that sound?"
I opened my eyes. I shook my head and said, "Oh, I don't know, good as anything."
"Right." Ash went over to the men. She pulled something from the back of her head as she went, and shook her long fawn hair down. It was the length of the jacket. I smiled to myself. That's my girl, I thought.
I saw them look her up and down. Rupert smiled, then looked mystified as she talked, animated, hands waving. Then he laughed, his tanned, handsome face smiled and he looked her up and down again. The expression changed just a little, though, after that, as though something else had occurred to him. He looked a little more wary. So it appeared to me, anyway. He held out one hand, seeming to make introductions. Ash nodded. He pointed to the bar; she shook her head, then nodded back at me.
Rupert Paxton-Marr gazed above me, then dropped his gaze. He looked at me then back at Ashley. She was talking to him. His expression went through puzzlement, maybe concern, then went wary again, finally cold, studiously expressionless. He nodded, leaning back against a post supporting the front of the bar. Ash glanced back at me, her eyes opening wide for an instant, then she turned back to the men.
I started to get to my feet.
Rupert's expression didn't change as I walked over. Two couples passed in front of me, weaving their way between the tables. When they'd passed, Rupert was already on his way to the door, mouth smiling broadly, one hand alternately waving and pointing at his watch as he backed off. By the time I got to where Ash and the two guys in the trench coats were standing, he'd made it out to the street.
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.
"Beauty," I whispered to myself, smiling despite the pain in my head.
Then suddenly the buzzard burst and sprayed across the sky; it fell plummeting, limp and trailing feathers, to the ground. A double crack of sound snapped across the field.
The bird fell out of sight behind me. I blinked, not believing what had happened, then rolled over, looking through the mask of branches at the trees edging the field where the sound of the shots had come from. I saw a man holding a shotgun, just inside the trees, looking to one side then the other, then running out into the field. He wore green strapped wellies, thick brown cords, a waxed jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth bunnet. One more prick in a Barbour jacket, but this one had just shot a buzzard.
He gazed down at something in the grass, then smiled. He was tall and blond and he looked like a male model; enviable jaw line. He stamped down on the thing in the grass, looked around again then backed off, finally turning and walking smartly back into the woods.
I should have shouted, or taken the bird to the police as evidence — buzzards are a protected species, after all — but I didn't. I just watched the Barbour disappear into the trees, then rolled over and breathed, "Fuckwit."
He was at the firework party the following night, laughing and talking and sharing a dram from Fergus's hip flask. I watched him, and he saw me, and we looked at each other for a few moments before he looked away, all in the furious, writhing light of the pyre that I had put together, and which contained — pushed in near its now blazing centre — the corpse of the bird he had killed.