It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.
I looked at my father, sitting two rows away in the front line of seats in the cold, echoing chapel. His broad, greying-brown head was massive above his tweed jacket (a black arm-band was his concession to the solemnity of the occasion). His ears were moving in a slow, oscillatory manner, rather in the way John Wayne's shoulders moved when he walked; my father was grinding his teeth. Probably he was annoyed that my grandmother had chosen religious music for her funeral ceremony. I didn't think she had done it to upset him; doubtless she had simply liked the tune, and had not anticipated the effect its non-secular nature might have on her eldest son.
My younger brother, James, sat to my father's left. It was the first time in years I'd seen him without his Walkman, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable, fiddling with his single earring. To my father's right my mother sat, upright and trim, neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer. The UFO dipped briefly to one side as she whispered something to my father. In that movement and that moment, I felt a pang of loss that did not entirely belong to my recently departed grandmother, yet was connected with her memory. How her moles would be itching today if she was somehow suddenly reborn!
"Prentice!" My Aunt Antonia, sitting next to me, with Uncle Hamish snoring mellifluously on her other side, tapped my sleeve and pointed at my feet as she murmured my name. I looked down.
I had dressed in black that morning, in the cold high room of my aunt and uncle's house. The floorboards had creaked and my breath had smoked. There had been ice inside the small dormer window, obscuring the view over Gallanach in a crystalline mist. I'd pulled on a pair of black underpants I'd brought especially from Glasgow, a white shirt (fresh from Marks and Sparks, the pack-lines still ridging the cold crisp cotton) and my black 501s. I'd shivered, and sat on the bed, looking at two pairs of socks; one black, one white. I'd intended to wear the black pair under my nine-eye Docs with the twin ankle buckles, but suddenly I had felt that the boots were wrong. Maybe it was because they were matt finish…
The last funeral I'd been to here — also the first funeral I'd ever been to — this gear had all seemed pretty appropriate, but now I was pondering the propriety of the Docs, the 501s and the black biker's jacket. I'd hauled my white trainers out of the bag, tried one Nike on and one boot (unlaced); I'd stood in front of the tilted full-length mirror, shivering, my breath going out in clouds, while the floorboards creaked and a smell of cooking bacon and burned toast insinuated its way up from the kitchen.
The trainers, I'd decided.
So I peered down at them in the crematorium; they looked crumpled and tea-stained on the severe black granite of the chapel floor. Oh-oh; one black sock, one white. I wriggled in my seat, pulled my jeans down to cover my oddly-packaged ankles. "Hell's teeth," I whispered. "Sorry, Aunt Tone."
My Aunt Antonia — a ball of pink-rinse hair above the bulk of her black coat, like candy floss stuck upon a hearse — patted my leather jacket. "Never mind, dear," she sighed. "I doubt old Margot would have minded."
"No," I nodded. My gaze fell back to the trainers. It struck me that on the toe of the right one there was still discernible the tyre mark from Grandma Margot's wheelchair. I lifted the left trainer onto the right, and rubbed without enthusiasm at the black herring-bone pattern the oily wheel had left. I remembered the day, six months earlier, when I had pushed old Margot out of the house and through the courtyard, past the outhouses and down the drive under the trees towards the loch and the sea.
"Prentice, what is going on between you and Kenneth?"
The courtyard was cobbled; her wheelchair wobbled and jerked under my hands as I pushed her. "We've fallen out, gran," I told her.
"I'm not stupid, Prentice, I can see that." She looked up at me. Her eyes were fierce and grey, as they always had been. Her hair was grey now, too, and thinning. The summer sun cleared the surrounding oaks and I could see her pale scalp through the wisps of white.
"No, gran, I know you're not stupid."
"Well, then?" She waved her stick towards the outhouses. "Let's see if that damn car's still there." She glanced back at me again as I wheeled the chair round on its new heading, towards the green double doors of one of the courtyard garages. "Well, then?" she repeated.
I sighed. "It's a matter of principle, gran." Stopping at the garage doors, she used her stick to knock the hasp off its staple, pushed at one door till its planks bowed slightly, then, wedging her stick into the resulting gap, levered the other door open, a bolt at one corner scraping and tinkling through a groove worn in the cobbles. I pulled the chair back to let the garage door swing. Inside it was dark. Motes swirled in the sunlight falling across the black entrance. I could just make out the corner of a thin green tarpaulin, draped angularly about level with my waist. Grandma Margot lifted the edge of the tarp with her stick, and flicked it away with surprising strength. The cover fell away from the front of the car and I pushed her further into the garage.
"Principle?" she said, leaning forward in the chair to inspect the long dark bonnet of the car, and pushing the tarp back still further until she had revealed the auto up to its windscreen. The wheels had no tyres; the car rested on blocks of wood. "What principle? The principle of not entering your father's house? Your own family home?" Another flick of the cane and the covering moved up the screen, then fell back again.
"Let me do that, gran." I stepped to the side of the car and pulled the tarpaulin back until it lay crumpled on the boot, revealing that the car had a missing rear window. More dust revolved in the light from outside, turning Grandma Margot into a seated silhouette, her almost transparent hair shining like a halo.
She sighed. I looked at the car. It was long and quite beautiful, in a recently-old-fashioned way. Beneath the patina of dust it was a very dark green. The roof above the missing rear window was battered and dented, as was the exposed part of the boot lid.
"Poor old thing," I whispered, shaking my head.
Grandma Margot sat upright. "It or me?" she said sharply.
«Gran…» I said, tutting. I was aware that she could see me very well, sunlit from behind her, while all I could see of her was a dark shape, a subtraction of the light.
"Anyway," she said, relaxing and poking at one of the car's wire wheels with her walking stick. "What's all this nonsense about a matter of principle?"
I turned away, rubbing my fingers along the chrome guttering over a rear door. "Well… dad's angry at me because I told him I believed in… God, or in something, anyway." I shrugged, not daring to look at her. "He won't… well, I won't… We're not talking to each other, so I won't come into the house."
Grandma Margot made a clucking noise with her mouth. That's it?"
I nodded, glancing at her. "That's it, gran."
"And your father's money; your allowance?"
"I — " I began, then didn't know how to put it.
"Prentice; how are you managing to survive?"
"I'm managing fine," (I lied.) "On my grant." (Another lie.) "And my student loan." (Yet another lie.) "And I'm doing some bar work." (Four in a row!) I couldn't get a bar job. Instead I'd sold Fraud Siesta, my car. It had been a small Ford and kind of lazy about starting. People used to imply it looked battered, but I just told them it came from a broken garage. Anyway, that money was almost gone now, too.
Grandma Margot let out a long sigh, shook her head. "Principles," she breathed.
She pulled herself forward a little, but the wheelchair was caught on part of the tarp. "Help me here, will you?"
I went behind her, pushed the chair over the ruffled canvas. She hauled open the offside rear door and looked into the dull interior. A smell of musty leather wafted out, reminding me of my childhood and the time when there was still magic in the world.
The last time I had sex was on that back seat," she said wistfully. She looked up at me. "Don't look so shocked, Prentice."
"I wasn't — " I started to protest.
"It's all right; it was your grandfather." She patted the wing of the car with one thin hand. "After a dance," she said quietly, smiling. She looked up at me again, her lined, delicate face amused, eyes glittering. "Prentice," she laughed. "You're blushing!"
"Sorry, gran," I said. "It's just… well, you don't… well, when you're young and somebody's…»
"Past it," she said, and slammed the door shut; dust duly danced. "Well, we're all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old." She pushed the wheelchair back, over the toe of my new trainers. I lifted the chair clear and helped complete the manoeuvre, then pushed her to the door. I left her there while I put the tarpaulin back over the car.
"In fact some of us get to be young twice," she said from the doorway. "When we go senile: toothless, incontinent, babbling like a baby… " Her voice trailed off.
"Grandma, please."
"Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind… Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you."
"I'm sorry, Grandma." I closed the garage door, dusted off my hands, and took up my position at the back of the wheelchair again. There was an oily tyre print on my trainer. Crows raucoused in the surrounding trees above as I pushed my gran towards the drive.
"Lagonda."
"Sorry, Gran?"
The car; it's a Lagonda Rapide Saloon."
"Yes," I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. "Yes, I know."
We left the courtyard and went crunchily down the gravel drive towards the sparkling waters of the loch. Grandma Margot was humming to herself; she sounded happy. I wondered if she was recalling her tryst in the Lagonda's back seat. Certainly I was recalling mine; it was on the same piece of cracked and creaking, buttoned and fragrant upholstery — some years after my gran's last full sexual experience — that I had had my first.
This sort of thing keeps happening in my family.
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the family; on the one hand, as I don't doubt you may well imagine, it gives me no great pleasure to stand here before you at this time… yet on the other hand I am proud, and indeed honoured, to have been asked to speak at the funeral of my dear old client, the late and greatly loved Margot McHoan…»
My grandmother had asked the family lawyer, Lawrence L. Blawke, to say the traditional few words. Pencil-thin and nearly as leaden, the tall and still dramatically black-haired Mr Blawke was dressed somewhere in the high nines, sporting a dark grey double-breasted suit over a memorable purple waistcoat that took its inspiration from what looked like Mandelbrot but might more charitably have been Paisley. A glittering gold fob watch the size of a small frying pan was anchored in the shallows of one waistcoat pocket by a bulk-carrier grade chain.
Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows that time is on his side. I thought he had looked oddly comfortable in the presence of the undertakers.
I sat and listened to the lawyer and in short order wondered (a) why Grandma Margot had chosen a lawyer to make the address, (b) whether he'd be charging us for his time, and (c) how many others of my family were wondering the same things.
"… long history of the McHoan family in the town of Gallanach, of which she was so proud, and to which she so… usefully and, and industriously contributed throughout her long life. It was my privilege to know and serve both Margot and her late husband Matthew well, in Matthew's case first as a school friend, back in the twenties. I well remember…»
"Grandma, I mean; good grief."
"What?"
My grandmother drew deeply on the Dunhill, flicked her wrist to close the brass Zippo, then put the lighter back in her cardigan.
"Grandma, you're smoking."
Margot coughed a little and blew the smoke towards me, a grey screen for those ash-coloured eyes. "Well, so I am." She inspected the cigarette closely, then took another drag. "I always wanted to, you know," she told me, and looked away, over the loch towards the hills and trees on the far side. I'd wheeled her down to the shore path at Pointhouse near the old cairns. I sat on the grass. A soft breeze disturbed the water; seagulls flew stiff-winged, and in the distance the occasional car or truck disturbed the air, making a lazy throat-clearing noise as they emerged from or disappeared into the channel the main road drove between the trees. "Hilda used to smoke," she said quietly, not looking at me. "My elder sister; she used to smoke. And I always wanted to." I picked up a handful of pebbles from the path-side and started throwing them at the waves, lapping against the rocks a metre below us, almost at high tide. "But your grandfather wouldn't let me." My grandmother sighed.
"But gran," I protested. "It's bad for you."
"I know." She smiled broadly. That was another reason I didn't ever take it up, after your grandfather died; they'd found it was unhealthy by then." She laughed. "But I'm seventy-two years old now, and I don't give a damn."
I chucked a few more pebbles. "Well, it isn't a very good example to us youngsters, is it?"
"What's that got to do with the price of sliced bread?"
"Eh?" I looked at her. "Pardon?"
"You're not really trying to tell me that young people today look to their elders for an example, are you, Prentice?"
I grimaced. «Well…» I said.
"You'd be the first generation that did." She pulled on the cigarette, a look of convincing derision on her face. "Best do everything they don't. That's what tends to happen anyway, like it or lump it." She nodded to herself and ground the cigarette out on her cast, near the knee; flicked the butt into the water. I tutted under my breath.
"People react more than they act, Prentice," she said eventually. "Like you are with your dad; he raises you to be a good little atheist and then you go and get religion. Well, that's just the way of things." I could almost hear her shrug. "Things can get imbalanced in families, over the generations. Sometimes a new one has to… adjust things." She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. Her hair was very white against the rich summer green of the Argyllshire hills and the brilliant blue of the sky beyond. "D'you feel for this family, Prentice?"
"Feel for it, gran?"
"Does it mean anything to you?" She looked cross. "Anything beyond the obvious, like giving you a place to stay… well, when you aren't falling out with your father? Does it?"
"Of course, gran." I felt awkward.
She leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing. "I have this theory, Prentice."
My heart foundered. "Yes, gran?"
"In every generation, there's a pivot. Somebody everybody else revolves around, understand?"
"Up to a point," I said, non-committally, I hoped.
"It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but…»
"Dad certainly seems to think he's paterfamilias."
"Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish… " She looked troubled. "He's a bit off the beaten track, that boy." She frowned. (This «boy» was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who'd invented Newton's Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)
"I wonder where Uncle Rory is," I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.
"Who knows?" My gran sighed. "Might be dead, for all we know."
I shook my head. "No, I don't think so."
"You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don't?"
"I just feel it." I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. "He'll be back."
"Your father thinks he will," Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. "He always talks about him as though he's still around."
"He'll be back," I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.
"I don't know, though," Grandma Margot said. "I think he might be dead."
"Dead? Why?" The sky was deep, shining blue.
"You wouldn't believe me."
"What?" I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).
Grandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. "I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things."
I laughed. She looked inscrutable. "Sorry, gran?"
She tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. "Not a sausage, Prentice."
"Well," I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. "No."
"Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation." Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.
"I give in, gran; what are you talking about?"
"My moles, Prentice." She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. "I can tell what's going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something… remarkable is happening to the person." She frowned. "Well, usually." She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. "Don't tell your father about this; he'd have me committed."
"Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn't, anyway!"
"I wouldn't be too sure of that." Her eyes narrowed again.
I leant on one of the chair's wheels. "Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?"
She nodded, grim. "Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too."
"And that mole's Uncle Rory's?" I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.
That's right," she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. "Not a sausage, for eight years."
I stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. "Wow," I said at last.
"… survived, of course, by her son Kenneth, by Hamish, and by, ah, Roderick." The good lawyer Blawke had helpfully nodded at my dad and my uncle when he mentioned them. Dad kept on grinding his teeth; Uncle Hamish stopped snoring and gave a little start at the mention of his name; he opened his eyes and looked round — a little wildly, I thought — before relaxing once more. His eyelids started to droop again almost immediately. At the mention of Uncle Rory's name Mr Blawke looked about the crowded chapel as though expecting Uncle Rory to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. "And, sharing, I'm sure, in the family's grief, the husband of her late only daughter, Fiona." Here Mr Blawke looked very serious, and did indeed grasp his lapels for a moment, as he nodded, gravely, at Uncle Fergus. "Mr Urvill," Mr Blawke said, completing the nod that had developed pretensions to a bow, I thought, and then clearing his throat. This genuflection completed, the reference to past tragedy duly made, most of the people who had turned to look at Uncle Fergus turned away again.
My head stayed turned.
Uncle Fergus is an interesting enough fellow in himself, and (of course) as Mr Blawke knew to his benefit, probably Gallanach's richest and certainly its most powerful man. But i wasn't looking at him.
Beside the thick-necked bulk of the Urvill of Urvill (soberly resplendent in what I assumed was the family's mourning tartan — blackish purple, blackish green and fairly dark black) sat neither of his two daughters, Diana and Helen — those long-legged visions of money-creamed, honey-skinned, globetrotting loveliness — but instead his niece, the stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowls; the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the ibid in libidinous!
Such bliss to look. I feasted my eyes on that gracefully angular form, just this side of her uncle and sitting quietly in black. She had worn a white quilted skiing jacket outside, but now had taken it off in the unfittingly chilly crematorium, and sat in a black blouse and black skirt, black… tights? Stockings? My God, the sheer force of joy in just imagining! and black shoes. And shivering! The slick material of the blouse trembling in the light from the translucent panes overhead, black silk hanging in folds of shade from her breasts, quivering! I felt my chest expand and my eyes widen. I was just about to look away, reckoning that I had gazed to the limits of decency, when that shaven-sided, crop-haired head swivelled and lowered, her calm face turning this way. I saw those eyes, shaded by her thick and shockingly black brows, blink slowly; she looked at me.
Small smile, and those diamond eyes piercing, marking me.
Then the gaze removed, refixed, directed somewhere else, once more facing the front. My neck felt un-oiled as I turned away, blasted and raddled by the urge of that directed consideration.
Verity Walker. Eating my heart out. Consuming my soul.
"And dad's mole?"
"Here," Grandma Margot said, tapping her left shoulder. She laughed a little as we went along the path between the shore and the trees. "That one itches fairly often."
"And mine?" I asked, plodding after the wheelchair. I'd taken my biker's jacket off and it lay now on my gran's lap.
She looked up at me, her expression unreadable. "Here." She patted her tummy, looked forward again. "Pivotal, wouldn't you say, Prentice?"
"Ha," I said, still trying to sound non-committal. "Could be. What about Uncle Hamish? Where's he at?"
"Knee," she said, tapping the plaster on her leg.
"How is your leg, gran?"
"Fine," she said tetchily. "Plaster comes off next week. Can't happen soon enough."
The wheels of the chair sighed through the grass on either side of the narrow path. I remembered something I'd been meaning to ask.
"What were you doing up that tree anyway, gran?"
"Trying to saw a branch off."
"What for?"
"To stop those damn squirrels using it as a diving board to get to my bird table, that's what for." She used her stick to whack a crumpled drinking-yoghurt bottle off the path and into the water.
"You could have asked somebody else."
"I'm not totally incapable, Prentice. I'd have been all right if that hoodie hadn't started dive-bombing me; ungrateful wretch."
"Oh, it was a bird's fault, was it?" I had a mental picture of some beetle-eyed carrion crow swooping on my gran, knocking her off her ladder. Maybe it had seen The Omen.
"Yes, it was." Grandma Margot twisted in her wheelchair and raised both her stick and her voice, "And a few years ago I'd only have been bruised, as well. Brittle bones are one of the things that make getting old such a damn nuisance, too, especially if you're a woman." She nodded brusquely. "So think yourself lucky."
"Okay," I smiled.
"Damn birds," she muttered, glaring at a stand of ash trees on the edge of the plantation with such severity that I half expected to hear a parliament of crows cry out in answer. "Ach well," she shrugged. "Let's head back to the house; I need to go."
"Right you are," I said, and wheeled the chair around. Grandma Margot lit another cigarette.
"That branch is still there, by the way."
"I'll deal with it."
"Good lad."
A lark trilled, high overhead.
I wheeled my gran back along the path by the water, over the main road and up the gravel drive, through the sunlit cobbled courtyard towards the tall house with the crow-stepped gables.
I cut the offending branch down that afternoon, before I went back to Gallanach, to my Uncle Hamish's house, for tea. My dad arrived while I was up the ladder, sawing away at the sappy oak and swatting at flies. He stopped and looked at me when he got out of the Audi, then he disappeared into the house. I kept on sawing.
My great-great-great grandfather, Stewart McHoan, was buried in a coffin made from black glass by the craftsmen he had commanded in his capacity as manager of the Gallanach Glass Works (a post now filled by my Uncle Hamish). Grandma Margot had gone for the more conventional wooden model; it slid away into the wall as Bach's Mass reached one of its choral climaxes. A wood-fronted door slid back up to block the hole the coffin had disappeared into, then a little purple curtain lowered itself over the doorway.
The head honcho of the undertakers supervised us as we all formed up for what was obviously the important and formal business of Leaving The Chapel. My father and mother left first. "I told you we sat in the wrong place, Tone," I heard my Uncle Hamish whisper behind me. (Aunt Tone just went "Ssh!)
Outside it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a little damp. I could smell leaves being burned somewhere. The view down the crematorium's birch-lined drive led towards the town and the ocean. In the distance, through the haze, North Jura was dark pastel and flat-looking on the unruffled grey blanket of sea. I looked around; dark-dressed people were everywhere amongst the parked cars, talking quietly. Their breath rose in clouds through the still air. Uncle Hamish was talking to the lawyer Blawke; Aunt Antonia to my mother. Dad was with the Urvills. The wonderful Verity was mostly hidden by my father, her snow-white ski jacket in eclipse behind the old man's tweed coat. I considered shifting my position so I could see her properly, but decided against it; somebody might notice.
At least, I thought brightly, she was here alone. For the last two years that I'd been worshipping Verity from afar she'd been going out with a gorm-free creature called Rodney Ritchie; his parents owned Ritchie's Reliable Removals in Edinburgh and were keen on alliteration. My father had met them once and coined a new collective noun: an embarrassment of Ritchies.
Anyway, Urvill family gossip had it that Verity might be coming to her senses regarding Rodney's removal, and it was a positive and encouraging sign that she had turned up here without the geek in tow. I thought about approaching her. Maybe when we got back to the castle.
I also thought about talking to James, but little brother was leaning against the crematorium wall looking bored but cool in his borrowed great-coat, earplugs in, getting his Walkman fix at last. Still mainlining The Doors, probably. For a moment I almost missed my elder brother, Lewis, who hadn't been able to make it back for the funeral. Lewis is better-looking, smarter and wittier than I am, so I don't miss him often.
I was standing beside Uncle Hamish's Jaguar. Maybe I should just get into the car. Or find somebody else to talk to. I could feel that an attack of awkwardness — the kind of episode I am unhappily prone to — was imminent.
"Hi, Prentice. You okay?"
The voice was deep and throaty but female. Ashley Watt strolled up, put her hand on the side of my shoulder, patting. Her brother Dean was just behind. I nodded.
"Yeah. Yeah; fine. How's yourself? Hi, Dean."
"Hi, man."
"You just back for this?" Ash asked, nodding her head at the low grey granite of the crematorium buildings. Her long fawn hair was gathered up; her strong, angular face, dominated by a blade of a nose and a pair of large round-lensed glasses, was concerned and sad. Ash was my age, but she always made me feel younger.
"Yeah; back to Glasgow on Monday." I looked down. "Wow, Ash; I don't think I've ever seen you in a skirt before." Ash always wore jeans. We'd known each other since we'd used to crawl around on the same carpets together, but I couldn't remember seeing her in anything else but jeans. Yet there were her legs all right; pretty good-looking ones too, under a knee-length black skirt. She wore a big naval-looking jacket with the cuffs turned over, and black gloves; medium-high heels made her the same height as me.
She grinned. "Short memory, Prentice. Recall school?"
"Oh, yeah," I nodded, still looking at the legs. "Apart from then, though." I shrugged, smiled warily at her. I'd gone through a protracted Unbearable stage while I'd been at high school — it had lasted from my first day through to about fourth year — and the most vivid memory I had of Ash from that time was when I and her two brothers had carried out a highly successful snowball ambush on her, her sister and their pals as they'd walked back from school one dark evening. Somebody's snowball had broken that long sharp nose of Ashley's, and I suspected it had been one of mine if for no other reason than because as far as I knew nobody else had been deploying snowballs whose ballistic properties had been enhanced by the judicious reinforcement of their cores with moderately sizeable chuckie stones.
Her nose had been reset, of course, and we'd got on better since we'd each left school. Ash frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey eyes searching mine.
"I was sorry to hear about the old lady. All of us were." She swivelled briefly to Dean, standing lighting up a Regal behind her. He nodded; black jeans and a dark blue crombie that looked like it had seen better decades.
I wasn't sure what to say. "I'll miss her," I said eventually. I'd been trying not to think about it, ever since I'd heard the news.
"Was it a heart attack, aye, Prentice?" Dean inquired through his cloud of smoke,
"No," I said. "She fell off a ladder."
"I thought she did that last year," Ash said.
"She did; off a tree. This time she was clearing the gutters. The ladder slipped and she went through the conservatory roof. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Shock from blood-loss, apparently."
"Oh, Prentice, I'm sorry," Ash said, and put her hand on my arm.
Dean shook his head and looked mystified. "Ah thought she had a heart attack."
"She did have one," I nodded. "About five years ago; got a pacemaker fitted."
"Maybe she had a heart attack while she was up the ladder," Dean suggested. Ash kicked his shin. "Oo-ya!" he said.
"Excuse Mr Sensitivity here," Ash said. "But like I said: we were all really sorry to hear, Prentice." She looked around. "Haven't seen Lewis here; could he not make it?"
"He's in Australia," I sighed. "Being funny."
"Ah." Ash nodded, smiling faintly. "Well, that's a shame."
"For the Australians, perhaps," I said.
Ash looked sad, even pitying. "Aw, Prentice —»
Dean prodded his sister in the back with the hand he wasn't rubbing his shin with. "Hoi; what was that about yon guy ye bumped into in that Jacuzzi in Berlin? Said ye were goantae tell —»
"Oh yeah… " Ash turned from frowning at her brother to frowning at me, took a breath, then let it out. "Hey; you fancy a pint later, Prentice?"
"Well, maybe," I said. "I think we're ordered up to the castle for drinks and a bite to eat." I shrugged. "This evening?"
"Okie-dokie," Ash nodded.
"A jacuzzi? I asked, looking at Dean and Ash in turn. "Berlin?"
Dean grinned broadly and nodded.
Ash said, "Aye, Prentice; watchin the wa" come doon. And a shocking and decadent tale it is, too, let me tell you. See you in the Jacobite about eight?"
"Right you are," I said. I leaned close and nudged her. "What Jacuzzi?"
I saw the expression on Dean's face, then heard the noise, then watched Ashley's gaze rise from my face to fasten somewhere over my left shoulder. I turned slowly.
The car came screaming up the crematorium drive, leaves swirling into the air behind. It was a green Rover, and it had to be doing sixty. Probably exceeding the previous speed record within the crematorium grounds by a factor of at least three. It was heading more or less straight for us, and braking distance was running out fast.
"That no Doctor Fyfe's car?" Dean said, as Ash grabbed my sleeve and started to pull me back, at the same time as the Rover's engine note fell from its wail, its nose dipped and the rear end wavered as the tyres tried to bite the moist tarmac.
"I thought he had an Orion," I said, as Ashley pulled Dean and me past the rear of Uncle Hamish's car and onto the grass. Everybody in the crowd outside the crematorium was watching the green 216 as it skidded to a stop, avoiding a head-on collision with the Urvill's Bentley Eight by only a few centimetres. The tyres rasped on the tarmac. Doctor Fyfe — for indeed, that was who it was — jumped out of the driver's seat. He was as small, rotund and be-whiskered as ever, but today his face was red and his eyes were staring.
"Stop!" he yelled, slamming the door and running for the chapel entrance as fast as his little legs would carry him. "Stop!" he shouted again; a little unnecessarily, I thought, as everybody had quite entirely stopped whatever they'd been doing some time before his car had even begun braking. "Stop!"
I still insist that I heard a muffled crump at this point, but nobody believes me. That was when it happened, though.
The sensitive morticians who run the Gallanach Corporation Crematorium usually wait until night before they burn the bodies, to avoid the possibility of resulting smoke-plumes sending overwrought relations into unsightly paroxysms of grief, but Grandma Margot had specified that she wanted to be incinerated immediately; her cremation was therefore genuinely under way as we stood there.
"Ah!" said Doctor Fyfe, stumbling just before he was intercepted before the door of the chapel by a concerned undertaker. "Ah!" he said again, and crumpled, first into the undertaker's arms and then to the ground. He was on his knees briefly, then turned and sat down, clutched at his chest, stared at the granite flagstones outside the chapel, and to the assembled, still stunned and quieted crowd of us announced, "I'm sorry, folks, but I believe I'm having a coronary… " and keeled over on his back.
There was an instant when nothing much seemed to happen. Then Dean Watt nudged me with the hand holding his Regal and said quietly, "There's a funny thing, eh?"
"Dean!" hissed Ashley, as people crowded round the doctor.
"Oo-ya!"
"Call an ambulance!" somebody shouted.
"Use the hearse!" yelled my dad.
"Och, it's only a bruise," Dean muttered, rubbing vigorously at his shin. "Oo-ya! Will ye quit that!"
They used the hearse, and got Doctor Fyfe to the local hospital in ample time to save his life if not his professional reputation.
The muffled crump — which I still maintain that I heard — was my grandmother exploding; Doctor Fyfe had neglected to ask the hospital to remove her pacemaker before she was cremated.
Like I say, this sort of thing keeps happening in my family.