Right, now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but… I was in bed with my Aunty Janice.
Well, actually, in one sense it's exactly as bad as it sounds because when I say I was in bed with her, I don't mean I was in bed with her because we'd gone hill-walking together and been caught out in a snow storm and eventually found shelter in some exceptionally well-appointed bothy that just so happened to have only one bed and we had to get into it together to keep warm; nothing like that. We were fucking.
But (phew), she wasn't a real aunt; not a blood relation, not even an aunt by marriage. Janice Rae had been Uncle Rory's girlfriend, and I just called her Aunty. However she had been my father's brother's lover, and — perhaps more embarrassingly — it had been her daughter, Marion, who had initiated me into the whole sticky, smelly, noisy, potentially fatal, potentially natal, sordid and sublime act in the first place, on the dry, cracked green leather surface of the garaged Lagonda Rapide Saloon's back seat, one hot and musty summer's afternoon, eight years earlier. (We brought the house down.) Blame Lewis.
The voice has gone quiet, deep, almost gravelly now. A light — harsh and white — shines from one side, so that his lean, cleanshaven face looks hard and angular, even cruel.
"I have this door in my house," he breathes, then pauses. "It's a very special door." He looks to one side. The way he does it, you get the urge to look that way too, but you don't. "Do you know what I keep on the other side of that door?" He raises one eyebrow, but there is silence in the darkness. You wait. "Behind the door I keep… " (He leans forward now, towards us, somehow confiding and threatening together.) "… the rest of the Universe." A wintery smile, and if you were prone to that sort of thing, your skin might crawl.
There is a little nervous laughter. He waits patiently for it to subside. "I have a special name for that door," he says, eyes narrowing. "Do you know what I call it?" (This is the dangerous bit, where it could all end in disaster, but he holds the pause, and the silence is eloquent.) "I call it… " he pauses again, looks into the darkness to one side, then towards the light again."… my Front Door."
There is more laughter, like relief. He smiles for the first time; a thin, unimpressed expression. "Perhaps you have one like it, in your house." He steps back, the lights go up, and he makes a sort of half nod, half bow. "My name is Lewis McHoan. Good night."
He walks off to loud applause; cheers, even.
I look from the television to my flatmates.
"Aye, he's no bad," Gav says, pulling open another can of cider.
"He's okay," agrees Norris, and drinks from his. "That last bit was a bit weird but. He really your brother, aye?"
I glare at the screen as the MC appears, signing off. Lewis had been the last act. "Yes." I say, taking my empty Export can between both hands, and crushing it. "Yes, he is." The credits roll. I throw the squashed can at the litter bin, but it misses, hits the wall, rolls across the floor and dribbles flat beer onto the threadbare carpet.
I stood in the bookshop, reading the story about the magic dressing gown, tears in my eyes.
A hand tapped me on the shoulder. I put the book down quickly on the pile and hauled my hanky from my pocket, bringing it up to my face as I turned. I blew my nose.
"Come on, slow-coach," mum said, smiling down at me. Her gaze flicked to the book-pile. "Reading your dad's stories at last, eh? What's brought this on?" Not waiting for an answer, she put one arm round my shoulders and guided me out onto the Departures concourse. "Come on; let's go and wish your Uncle Rory bon voyage, shall we?"
"All right," I said, sniffing.
Mum frowned down. "Prentice, have you been crying?"
"No!" I said vehemently, shaking my head and stuffing the hanky back into my trousers. Mum just smiled. I felt the tears try to come again, prickling behind my eyes.
"Prentice!" Uncle Rory said, picking me up. "God, you're getting big. I'll soon not be able to lift you."
Good, I thought; this is embarrassing. I hugged him, as much to get my face out of sight as to express any regret at his leaving.
"Aye," I heard my mum saying. "I think we had a wee tear or two, there."
"We didn't, did we?" Uncle Rory laughed, bringing me back round in front of him, holding me there. His big face, entirely framed by curly auburn hair, looked happy and kindly. I wanted to hit him and my mum, or maybe burst into tears and hug them; either would do. "Ah, dinnae greet, laddy," he laughed, lapsing into the working-class Scots I had grown ashamed of because my beautiful cousins Diana and Helen didn't speak like that, and those coarse Watt children did.
Stop it! I beamed at him (I was trying to develop a technique for aiming my thoughts at people to get them to do things for me; there were promising developments, but it was early days still, and I was suffering a lot of teething problems. That bastard George Lucas hadn't had the decency to reply to my letter about The Force yet, either).
"I have not been crying, honest I haven't, Uncle Rory," I said, sniffing.
"Of course you haven't," Uncle Rory grinned, winking at my mum.
That's right," I said. Now put me down!
Uncle Rory put me down with a grunt. "That's better," he said, roughing up my hair. "Ah; a wee smile!"
Of course I'm smiling, you big fool; you are prey for my thoughts!
"Will you be away awful long, Uncle Rory?" I asked.
"Yes, I dare say I will, Prentice," Uncle Rory said. The PA system shouted that the Heathrow flight was boarding. The voice mentioned something about a gate, but I doubted it would be anything as interesting as a stargate. Uncle Rory picked up his shoulder bag and the three of us started to walk towards a big crowd of people. A loud roar outside the glass expanse of one wall sounded excitingly like a crash… but it was only a plane landing.
"If you're in Hollywood and bump into George Lucas — " Uncle Rory laughed mightily, and exchanged one of those infuriatingly knowing adult looks with my mum. "I don't think that's very likely, Prentice, but if I do…»
"Will you ask him if he got my letter?" I said. We reached the place where everybody was standing around and hugging, and we stopped. "He'll know what it's about."
"I certainly will." Uncle Rory laughed, squatting down. He made a worse mess of my hair and gripped both shoulders of my blazer. "Now you be a good boy and I'll see you all in a few months." He stood up. Him and mum had a brief cuddle, and she kissed him on the cheek. I turned my face away. I was glad my father wasn't here to see this. How could they do that sort of thing in public? I had a look round to see if my dad was watching from behind a potted palm or through holes cut in a newspaper, but he didn't seem to be.
"Bye, Rory; safe journey."
"Bye, Mary. Tell Ken I'll call when I can."
"Will do. Take care now."
Uncle Rory grinned. "Yeah." He squeezed one of her shoulders and winked at her again! "Bye love; see you."
"Bye." We watched him show his ticket to the man at the gate, then with one last wave he was gone.
I turned to mum. "Mum, can I have some more money for the Star Wars machine?" I pointed at the video games. "I got through three stages last time and I almost got to the fourth; I think I know how to deal with the big towers now and I'm getting really good at —»
"I think you've had quite enough of that machine, Prentice," mum said, as we walked away through the people. We were heading for the stairs. I tried to pull her towards the row of video games.
"Aw, mum, please; come on; I'll let you watch if you like."
You will let me play the machine. You will let me play the machine.
She had the nerve to laugh. "That's very kind of you, Prentice, but I'll pass on that. We have to get back home."
"Can I go home on the train mum, please can I?"
You will let your son take the train home. You will let your son Prentice take the train home.
"Something wrong with my driving, you wee rascal?"
"No mum, but can I please?"
"No, Prentice; we'll take the car."
"Aww, but mum…»
"Will I buy you a book?" Mum stopped near the bookshop. "Would you like that?"
"There's a Judge Dredd annual out," I said helpfully.
She tssked. "Oh, I suppose, if it'll keep you quiet…»
While she paid for it, I went to the pile of dad's books, and when nobody was looking I tore a couple of pages in one book, then put a load of somebody else's books over the top of dad's, so that nobody could see them.
How dare he take the stories he'd told me and Lewis and James and the others and tell them to other people, to strangers? They were ours; they were mine!
"Come on, terror," mum said.
A hand between my shoulder blades propelled me from the shop. But at least it wasn't the Vulcan Death Grip.
You will change your mind about letting your son take the train.
Mrs Mary McHoan, you will change your mind about letting your son Prentice take the train home… and about playing the Star Wars machine…
"I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so noisy, do they? I mean, they can be quite specific about the actual act itself; there is no gory detail, no technical nuance that is not gone into, by teachers or parents or books about sex or the Joy of LURVE or television programmes or just the boys or girls in the year above you at school telling you behind the bike sheds, BUT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT THE NOISE!
"They don't! The first time I ever got laid it was the summer, it was hot, we were doing it naked in the old missionary position, and there I was, trying to pretend I'd been doing this for years, and thinking am I doing this right? Was that enough foreplay, did I devote sufficient time to going down on her or did it look like I was doing it because I read you ought to in Cosmopolitan… and I did want to spend more time down there, but my neck was getting sore… and I'm thinking should I start chewing the other earlobe now, and should I sort of pull back so I can get my mouth to her nipples, because I'd like to suck them; I would, but my neck's still sore, and just as I'm thinking about all this, and still trying to think about putting this MFI kitchen unit together to stop myself from coming too soon but it isn't working any more more because I keep thinking of screws and pre-drilled holes and male and female parts and I'm stroking her and it's great and she's panting and I'm panting and then, just then, from in between our two naked, heaving bodies, THERE IS A NOISE LIKE A RHINOCEROS FARTING!
"There is the noise of a fart the like of which you have never heard in your life before; it echoes off nearby tall buildings; it leaves your ears ringing; little old half-deaf ladies three streets away run to the broom cupboard and start hammering on the ceiling and threatening their upstairs neighbours with the Noise Abatement Society. I mean, a Loud Fart, okay?
"And she is laughing and you don't know what to do; you try to keep going but it happens again and she's in hysterics and it is all deeply, deeply, deeply embarrassing, and you keep going but there's this constant farting noise caused by all the sweat and it just isn't the same any more and you're thinking why didn't they tell me about this? Why wasn't I told? I mean, do other people put a towel in between them, or what?
"… And you come eventually and after a cuddle and you've whispered a few sweet somethings, you withdraw, holding the old johnny on because that's what it says on the packet after all, and you go to the loo to dispose of the horrible dangly greasy thing and you have a very full bladder by now and you think you'll have a pee… Ha ha ha ha ha; WRONG! You think you'll have a pee, but you can't!…»
I shook my head, remembering the times Lewis had ranted away like this in the past; in pubs, amongst friends, at parties. I'd enjoyed it usually, back then; I'd felt almost privileged to witness these chaotic fulminating tirades, and even been proud that Lewis was my brother… But then I'd come to my senses and decided that my elder sibling was in fact a vainglorious egomaniac with a runaway sarcasm-gland problem. Now he was taking what had been relatively amusing examples of a private wit and exposing them to everybody, to make money and amass praise. My family are always doing this sort of thing to me.
I looked at Gav. Gav was standing at my side, clutching his pint glass up near his shoulder and howling with laughter. He was sweating. He had tears in his eyes and his nose was running. He was having a great time. Gavin — one of my two flatmates — is a chap of the world; he has been there, he has done all this, he has had everything that Lewis was describing happen to him, too, and he didn't mind who knew it; this was the comedy of recognition; it was mature, it was happening, it was ideologically correct in terms of sexual politics, but it was also extremely rude, and Gav just thought it was all totally hilarious. He was spilling what was left of his pint down his coat, but I suspected he wouldn't have cared even if he had noticed.
I shook my head again and looked back at the low stage, where Lewis was still stalking back and forth like a caged hyena, grinning and sweating and gleaming under the lights and shouting into the microphone and flinging one arm about and smiling wickedly and striding side to side, side to side, talking to individuals at the front, to the people at the side and in the middle of the crowded audience, talking to us standing here at the back, talking to everybody.
Lewis was dressed in black jeans and a white tuxedo over a white T-shirt which had three enormous black letters on it; FTT. In much smaller letters underneath, it read: (have carnal knowledge of the conservative and unionist party and their supporters). You could buy these T-shirts at the door. Gav had one, wrapped in polythene and stuffed in one pocket of his coat.
We were upstairs in Randan's, the latest incarnation of a bar that had previously traded under the name Byre's Market, and before that had been called Paddy Jones's; premises forever apostrophised. That original appellation was before my time, and I confess to a degree of yearning for an age when bars had, in the main, sensible names, and did not pride themselves on serving their own creakingly-titled cocktails, a Choyce Selection of Our Eftim-able Home-Made Pies, Hotpottes And Other Fyne Dishes, and twenty different designer lagers, all of which taste identical, cost the earth and are advertised on the tellingly desperate Unique Selling Points of having a neat logo, a top that is difficult to open or a bottle neck whose appearance is apparently mysteriously enhanced by having a slice of citrus fruit rammed down it.
But if this is the price we have to pay for all-day opening and letting women into public bars, then I admit it may well be churlish to carp. I used to think dad was kidding about bars closing in the afternoon, and at ten in the evening (TEN, for Christ's sake; I don't go out until midnight sometimes!), and about some not having women's toilets at all… but apparently it's all true, and scarcely a decade and a half gone.
I looked at my watch, wondering how long Lewis was going to keep this up. Telling conventionally-structured jokes uses up material appallingly quickly and if that had been what Lewis was up to I might not have had the prospect of enduring too much more challenging, non-sexist, politically aware, near-the-bone (well, near the bone-head, at any rate) alternative humour, but this observational stuff — telling people things they already know and getting them to pay you for the privilege (sort of the light entertainment equivalent of psychoanalysis) — can go on virtually indefinitely. Indeed, I felt like it already had.
Lewis was moderately big all of a sudden, after a series of appearances on that late-night TV show. The programmes had been recorded at a Comedy Festival in Melbourne, Australia, which Lewis had been invited to (hence his inability to make old Margot's funeral). Tonight was the premiere date on his first solo UK tour, and it looked depressingly likely that it would be totally sold out, thanks to the advertising power of television. If he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets I doubted that Gavin and myself would have stood any chance of getting in (but then if he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets a troop of wild Clydesdales on speed wouldn't have dragged me here).
I looked at my watch again. Half an hour gone. So far he had said exactly one thing I found even slightly amusing, and that was right at the start: "At one stage I thought I was a complete asshole." (There followed the inevitable pause for effect). "But I passed through that."
Laugh? I almost.
"… about my family, ladies and gents, because I come from this very strange family, you know; very strange family indeed… " Lewis said.
Gav turned, big red face beaming; he nudged me. I didn't turn to look at him. I was staring — glaring — at the stage. My mouth felt dry. He wouldn't dare, would he?
There's my Uncle Alfred —»
I started to relax. We do not have an uncle Alfred. Still, maybe he was going to use some true or embroidered slice of family history and just disguise it with a false name.
"Uncle Alfred was a very unlucky man. He was so unlucky we actually called him Unlucky Uncle Alfred. We did. Unlucky Uncle Alfred was so unlucky, he's the only man in history ever to have been killed by an avalanche on a dry ski-slope."
I relaxed a bit more. He hadn't dared. This was just a joke.
"No, really. He was skiing down when it sort of started to come undone at the top and roll down… crushed to death by three hundred tones of nylon tufting. Haven't been able to look at a Swiss Roll the same way since."
Another nudge from a highly amused Gavin. "That true, Prentice, aye?"
I gave what I hoped was a suitably withering look, then turned back to the stage. I drank my heavy and shook my head.
"Prentice," Gav insisted from my side, missing the first part of Lewis's next mirth-infused effusion. "Zat true, aye?"
Obviously my withering look needed more work in front of the mirror. I turned to Gavin. "Every word," I told him. "Except his real name was Uncle Ethelred."
"Aw aye." Gav nodded wisely, took a sip from his beer without significantly moving the glass from near his right shoulder, and frowned as he tried to catch up with what Lewis was saying, only to succeed in catching the predictably below-the-belt punch-line. Everybody else laughed, so so did Gav, no less enthusiastically than anybody else, and, interestingly, no less enthusiastically than he had at any other part of Lewis's act, when he'd heard every word. Remarkable. I watched Gav for a while from the corner of my eye, wondering, not for the first and — barring serious accidents and justifiable homicide — almost certainly not for the last time, what I was doing sharing a flat with somebody whose cogitative powers I had last had cause to ponder only a few hours earlier, when I had discovered — while watching the news with Gav — that he had believed up until then that the Intifada was an Italian sports car.
In a way I envied Gav, just because he found life such a hoot. He also seemed to think that it was — like himself, perhaps — comparatively uncomplicated. As is the way with such things, these subjectively positive qualities tend to have precisely the opposite effect on the temperaments of those in close proximity to the person concerned.
This was a man, after all, who had not yet mastered something as fundamental and as linear in its properties (for the most part) as running a bath at the correct temperature. How many times had I gone into the bathroom in our flat to find that the bath was full almost to the brim of hot, steaming water? This was an indication that Gav was planning to bathe in an hour or so. Gavin was of the opinion that the way to draw a bath was to fill it entirely from the tap that had the little «H» on it (thereby reducing the flat's supplies of immediately available hot water to zero), then leaving the resulting body of liquid to cool to something approaching a state in which a human body could enter it without turning instantly the colour of a just-boiled lobster. This normally took about thirty minutes in the depths of winter, and sometimes well over an hour in high summer, during which time Gav was inclined to amuse himself watching television — soap operas and the less intellectually taxing game shows, preferably — or eating, say, banana and Marmite sandwiches (just one example from Gavin's extensive repertoire of unique snackettes that entirely substituted culinary originality for anything as boring as tasting pleasant).
My attempts to explain the subtle dialectics of utilising both hot and cold taps — consecutively or concurrently — to produce a bath that could be used immediately without recourse to the Western General's burns unit (with the resulting benefits of freeing the bath for the use of others earlier and in the process using a great deal less electric power, which both we and the planet could ill afford), fell not so much on deaf ears as on open-plan ones. In automotive terms, if Lewis was a motor-mouth, then Gavin was a cross-flow head.
I drained my glass, studied the flattening dregs of foam at the bottom.
"Nuther beer, big yin?"
"No thanks, Gav; I'll buy my own."
Gavin, I had long ago concluded, believed that life revolved around rugby and beer, and that — especially under the influence of too much of the latter — sometimes it just revolved. Perhaps it might be a mistake to match him pint for pint.
"Ah; go on. Heavy, aye?" He grabbed my empty glass, and with that he was gone, shouldering his way through the pack of bodies for the distant dream that was the bar. He was still grinning inanely. Probably a good point for him to mount an expedition to the bar. Lewis was in the middle of a long, right-on, faux-naïve spiel about post-isms which Gav probably found a little bewildering. ('I mean, what is post-feminism? Eh? Answer me that? What do they mean? Or have I missed something? I mean, was there a general election last week and nobody told me about it and half the MPs are now women? Are fifty per cent of the directors of all major industries female? Is it no longer the case that the only way to hold on to your genitals if you're brought up in Sudan is to be born a boy? Don't Saudi Arabian driving licences still have a section that says Title: Mr, Mr or Sheik, please delete?)
I really had been going to buy my own drink; anybody who has ever been hard-up will tell you it's the easiest way to regulate one's finances while still remaining nominally sociable, but Gav, profligate though he may have been with the heat plumes from his baths (and kettles; Gavin's determination to wreck the ecosphere through the generation of copious volumes of unnecessary hot water extended to never boiling a kettle that was less than brim-full, even if only a single cup was required), was equally generous when it came to buying drink. At such moments it was almost possible to forget he was also the inventor of custard and thousand-island dressing pudding.
My brother seemed to be thinking along the same epicurean lines. However, to my horror (emulsified with a small amount of schadenfreudian delight), he appeared to be proposing to sing.
I closed my eyes and looked down, ashamed not just for Lewis but for my whole family. So this was the cutting edge of British alternative humour. Finishing with a song. Good grief.
shall draw a veil over this performance, but let history record that this pretended paean of praise for Mrs Thatcher — comparing her to various foods, with only a hint of sarcasm most of the way through ('as English as Blueberry pie') — ended with the couplet "Maggie, you're a Spanish omelette, like an egg you just can't be beaten, Maggie, you're all the food that I eat… twenty-four hours after it's eaten."
The puzzled patrons of Randan's, who had been worriedly thinking that perhaps Lewis wasn't quite so right-on after all, and had had his head turned by a sniff of fame and a glimpse of the flexible stuff, suddenly realised their man was still okay (phew), and it had all been an elaborate joke (ha!) as well as a knowing dig at more conventional comedians (nudge), and so duly erupted with applause (hurrah!).
I breathed a sigh of relief that at last it was all over — barring encores, of course — clapped lightly, looking at my watch as I did so. A glance revealed that the besieged bar was under further pressure now that the attacking forces had been reinforced following the end of Lewis's act. I suspected that for all my scorn I might yet be grateful for Gav's rugbying skills that evening, not to mention his Neanderthal build (perhaps that was why he found rugby so attractive; he was a throw-back!)
I looked at my watch again, wondering if Lewis would be unduly insulted, and Gav overly disappointed, if we didn't go back-stage to see the great performer afterwards. Things had gone so appallingly well that Lewis would undoubtedly be on a high and hence unbearable.
Perhaps I could plead a headache, if that wasn't too un-butch for Gav to accept. ('Ach, have another few beers and a whisky or two and it'll soon go away, ya big poof," would be the sort of reply my flat-mate would favour, as I knew to my cost.)
"Excuse me, are you Prentice? Prentice McHoan?"
I'd noticed the woman sidling through the crowd in my direction a few seconds earlier, but paid no real attention, assuming I just happened to be on her route.
"Yes?" I said, frowning. I thought I recognised her. She was short, maybe early forties; curly brown hair and a round, attractive face that looked run-in without being worn out. I coveted her leather jacket immediately, but it wouldn't have fitted me. A glint in her eyes could have been animal lust but was more likely to be contact lenses. I tried to remember where I'd seen her before.
"Janice Rae," she said, offering her hand. "Remember?"
"Aunty Janice!" I said, shaking her hand. I suspected I was blushing. "Of course; you used to go out with Uncle Rory. I'm sorry I knew I recognised you. Of course. Aunt Janice."
She smiled, "Yeah, Aunt Janice. How are you? What are you doing?"
"Fine," I told her. "At Uni; last year. History. And yourself?"
"Oh, keeping all right," she said. "How are your parents, are they well?"
"Fine. Just great," I nodded. I looked round to see if Gav was on his way back; he wasn't. "They're fine. Umm… Grandma Margot died last month, but apart from that —»
"Oh no!" she said. "Margot? Oh, I'm sorry."
"Yes," I said. "Yes, well, we all were."
"I feel terrible; if only I'd kept in touch… Do you think it would be all right if I, if I wrote… to your mum and dad?"
"Oh, sure; yeah; fine. They'd be delighted."
"Even if I'd just made the funeral… " she said, downcast.
"Yes… Big turn-out. Went… not with a whimper." I nodded at the empty stage. "Lewis couldn't make it, but everybody else was there."
Her eyes widened; it was like a light went on beneath her skin, then started to go out even as she said, "Rory, was he —?"
"Oh," I said, shaking my hand quickly in front of her, as though rubbing something embarrassing out on an invisible blackboard. "No; not Uncle Rory."
"Oh," she said, looking down at her glass. "No."
"'Fraid we haven't heard anything for, well, years." I hesitated "Don't suppose he ever got in touch with you, did he?"
She was still looking at her glass. She shook her head. "No; there's been nothing. No word."
I nodded my head, looked around for Gav again. Janice Rae was still inspecting her glass. Broke or not I'd have offered to buy her another drink, but her glass was full. I was aware that I was sucking in my lips, trapping them between my teeth. This is something I do when I'm feeling awkward. I wished she would say something more or just go away.
"I always felt," she said, looking up at last, "that your dad knew more than he was letting on."
I looked into her bright eyes. "Did you?"
"Yes. I wondered if Rory was still in touch with him, somehow."
"Well, I don't know," I said. I shrugged. "He does still talk about him as though… " I had been going to say as though he were still alive, but that might have hurt her. "As though he knows where Uncle Rory is."
She looked thoughtful. "That was the way I felt, when I was down there, after Rory… left. There was one time when… " She shook her head again. "I thought he was going to tell me how he knew; let me in on his secret, but… well, at any rate, he never did." She smiled at me. "And how is Lochgair? Your parents still in that big house?"
"Still there," I confirmed, catching sight of Gav making his way through the scrum of bodies, concentrating on the two full beer glasses in front of him.
Janice Rae looked warm and happy for a moment, and her eyes narrowed a little, her gaze shifting away to one side. "It was a good place," she said softly. "I have a lot of happy memories of that house."
"I guess we all do."
Uncle Rory had met Janice Rae at some literary do in Glasgow. She was ten years older than him, a librarian, divorced, and had a ten-year-old daughter called Marion. She lived with her mother, who looked after Marion while Aunt Janice was at work. I could remember the two of them coming to the house for the first time. Uncle Rory had brought various women to the house before; I'd ended up calling them all aunty, and I was calling Janice that by the end of the first weekend they spent at Lochgair.
Despite the fact that Marion was a girl and a couple of years older than me, I got on well enough with her. Lewis — also two years older than me — was going through an awkward stage during which he wasn't sure whether to treat girls with scorn and contempt, or sweeties. James, born the year after me, liked what and who I liked, so he liked Marion. She became one of The Rabble, the generic and roughly affectionate term my father applied to the various kids he would tell stories to on a Family Sunday.
A Family Sunday was one when either the McHoans or the Urvills played host to the other family, plus that of Bob and Louise Watt. Aunt Louise had been born a McHoan; her father was the brother of Matthew, my paternal grandfather and husband of Grandma Margot, she of the heart that broke only after she was safely dead. Bob Watt was brother of Lachlan, whose taunting of Uncle Fergus concerning the matter of hiding inside a medieval lavatory led to the unfortunate incident with the display case and resulted in Lachlan becoming the man with four eyes, but who did not wear glasses.
Bob Watt never turned up for Family Sundays, though Aunt Louise did, often wearing thick make-up and sometimes dark glasses. Sometimes the bruises showed through, all the same. Now and again there'd be something she didn't even try to hide, and I can recall at least two occasions when she turned up with her arm in a sling. I didn't think very much about this at the time, just assuming that my Aunt Louise was somehow more fragile than the average person, or perhaps excessively clumsy.
It was Lewis who eventually told me that Bob Watt beat up his wife. I didn't believe him at first, but Lewis was adamant. I puzzled over this for a while, but at length just accepted it as one of those inexplicable things that other people did — like going to the opera or watching gardening programmes — which seemed crazy to oneself but made perfect sense to the individuals concerned. Maybe, I thought, it was a Watt family tradition, just as Family Sundays and at least one person in each generation of our family managing the Gallanach Glass Works seemed to be two of our traditions.
Mum and Aunt Janice became friends; she and dad were much closer in age to Janice than Rory, and they were parents, too, so perhaps it was no surprise they got on. Whatever; after Uncle Rory disappeared, Aunt Janice and Marion still came down to the house every now and again. It was the year after Rory vanished that Marion, then about fifteen, got me into the garage where the car was. We'd been out on our bikes, riding round some of the forestry tracks one hot and dusty September day; everybody else was in Gallanach, shopping, or — in Lewis's case — playing football.
Marion Rae had the same curly brown hair her mother did. She had a round, healthy-looking face which even I could see was quite pretty, and was about the same height as I was, though a little heavier (I was of that age and body-type concerning which adults help to ease the difficult journey through the age of puberty by making remarks about disappearing if you turned sideways, and running around in the shower to get wet). We'd seen some old burnt-out wreck of a car abandoned in a ditch, up in the hills; I'd said something about the sports car under the covers in the courtyard garage back at the house; Marion wanted to see it.
I still maintain I was seduced, but I suppose I was inquisitive as well. Girls were still less interesting to me than models of the Millennium Falcon and my Scalextric set, but I had conducted a couple of masturbatory experiments which had set me thinking, and when Marion, exploring the warm, dim, tarpaulin-green gloom of the old car with me, said, Phew she was hot, wasn't I? and started unbuttoning her blouse, I didn't say No, or run away, or suggest we get out of the stuffy garage.
Instead I blew on her.
Well, she was sweaty, and I could see moisture on the top of her chest, above the little white bra she was wearing, trickling between the white swells of her breasts. She seemed to appreciate the gesture, and lay back and closed her eyes.
I remember her asking if I wasn't hot, and feeling my leg, and her hand running up to my thigh, then there was some silly line like, "Oh, what's this?" as she felt inside my shorts, expressing what even then I thought was probably fake surprise at what she discovered there. My own words were no less inane, but something — either the heat of the moment or just retrospective embarrassment — seems to have wiped them and most of the subsequent relevant details from my memory. Still, I recall being pleased that everything seemed to fit, and work as well, and if our (now I think about it, ridiculously fast) mutual thrusts hadn't unsettled the car on its blocks, that sense of having successfully risen to the occasion and worked out what to do with relatively little guidance would have been my abiding impression of the proceedings.
Instead, just as I was both coming and going (going; "Wow!), and Marion was making some extremely interesting noises, the car collapsed under us.
It shuddered and fell onto the concrete floor of the garage with an apocalyptic crash. We'd shaken it off its blocks. Some bizarre sense of symmetry had made me insist that we should not lie across the back seat, but that I should instead squat on the transmission tunnel, with Marion half on the rear seat, and half on me. As a result, the Rapide fell backwards off its wooden supports and its boot rammed into a load of drums and cans stored behind it, crushing them in turn against an old Welsh dresser that had been consigned to the garage years earlier; this — loaded up with tins and tools and spare parts and junk until it was top heavy — proceeded to over-balance. It leant, creaking, towards the car, and — although it did not actually fall over — distributed most of its load of paint, spanners, plugs, bolts, spare bulbs, bits of trim, hammers, wrenches and assorted boxes and tins all over the tarpaulin-covered boot, rear window and roof of the Lagonda.
The noise was appalling, and seemed to go on forever; I was dead still, my orgasm — more quality than quantity — completed, and my mouth hanging open as the cacophony reverberated through the garage, the car and my body. Dust filled the car's interior; Marion sneezed mightily and almost squeezed me out of her. Something heavy hit the rear window, and it went white all over, crazed into a micro-jigsaw of tiny glass fragments.
Eventually the noise stopped, and I was about to suggest that we ran away very soon and to some considerable distance before anybody discovered what had happened, when Marion grabbed both my buttocks with a grip like steel, stuck her panting, sweat-streaked face against mine, and snarled those words with which I — in common with most men, I suspect — would eventually become relatively familiar, in similar, if rather less dramatic situations: "Don't Stop."
It seemed only right to comply, but my mind wasn't really on what I was doing. Another precedent, perhaps.
Marion seemed to have some sort of fit; it coincided with — or perhaps was the cause of — the rear window falling in. It showered us both with little jagged lumps of glass, green under the tarpaulin-light, like dull emeralds. We both stayed like that for a bit, breathing heavily and brushing crystalline fragments out of each other's hair and laughing nervously, then started the delicate business of disengaging and trying to dress in the back of a tarpaulin-covered car full of gravelly glass.
We completed dressing outside the car, in the garage, shaking bits of glass out of our clothes as we did so. I had the presence of mind to put these fragments back into the car, and spread the glass more evenly over the seat, removing the shard-shadow of Marion from the cracked green leather (there was, I noticed with a little pride and considerable horror, a small stain there — probably more Marion than me, to be honest — but there was nothing I could do about that beyond wiping it with my hanky). We closed the garage, grabbed our bikes and headed for the hills.
It was a week before dad discovered the disaster scene in the garage. He never did work it out.
Lewis threatened to tell him, but that was only because I'd been stupid enough to blab to my brother, and then been incensed to discover he'd screwed Marion too, twice; on the two previous weekends she'd been down. I immediately threatened to tell the police because Lewis was older than she was and that made it Statue-Tory Rape (I'd heard of this on TV); he said if I did that he'd tell dad about the car… and so there we were, me barely a teenager and already arguing over a woman with my brother.
"It was good to meet you again, Janice," Lewis said, shaking Aunt Janice's hand, then taking her elbow in the other hand, kissing her on the cheek. "You should get in touch with Mary and Ken again; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you."
"I will," she said, smiling, then fastened the collar of her glove-leather jacket.
Lewis turned to me. "Bro; sure we can't tempt you?"
"Positive," I said. "Got a lot of work to do. Enjoy yourselves."
"Aw, come on, ya big poof," Gav said, breathing beer. He put one arm round my shoulders and hugged. From the amount of pressure involved, I gathered he was trying to fold me in half. 'Sno even wan yet!"
"Yes, Gavin, the night is yet senile; but I have to go. You have fun, all right?"
"Aye, okay."
"Taxi!" shouted Lewis.
We were standing on Byres Road, outside Randan's, which would be closing soon. Lewis, some guy he'd been friendly with at Uni, a girl who may or may not have been Lewis's girlfriend, and Gav had all decided to head for some bar in the centre of town. I had demurred, as had Janice.
"Prentice; see you at the weekend." Lewis hesitated as he pulled the taxi door open for the maybe-girlfriend, then came up to me, hugged me. "Good to see you, little brother."
"Yeah; you take care," I said, patting his back. "All the best."
"Thanks."
They left in the taxi; Janice and I walked up Byres Road to where she'd left her car. It started to rain. "Maybe I will take that lift," I told her.
"Good," she said. She pulled a small umbrella from her shoulder bag, opened it as the rain came on heavier. She handed it to me. "Here; you'd better hold this; you're taller." She took my arm and we had to lean towards each other to keep even our heads dry under the little flimsy umbrella.
She smelled of Obsession and smoke. She, Gav and I had gone to meet Lewis, holding court in the small dressing room. Later we had all gone to the downstairs bar, then Lewis had announced he wanted to keep on drinking after they called time. Janice had had a couple of fizzy waters, and seemed totally sober, so I reckoned it was safe to accept a lift.
"You don't really like your brother that much, do you?" she asked.
"Yes, I do," I told her. The traffic hissed by, heading up Byres Road. "He just… annoys me sometimes."
"I thought you seemed a bit reluctant when he suggested going back home this weekend."
I shrugged. "Oh, that's not Lewis; that's dad. We aren't speaking."
"Not speaking?" She sounded surprised; maybe amused. "Why not?"
"Religious differences," I said. It had become my stock reply.
"Oh dear." We turned onto Ruthven Street, away from the bright shop fronts and traffic. "Still a bit further to go," she said.
"Where are you parked?"
"Athole Gardens."
"Really? Not a good place to live if you had a lisp."
She laughed, squeezed my arm.
Hello, I thought. I switched the umbrella from one hand to the other and put my arm lightly round her waist. "I hope I'm not taking you out of your way. I mean, I could walk. It isn't far."
"No problem, Prentice," she said, and put her arm round my waist. Hmm. I thought. She gave a small laugh. "You were always thoughtful." But somehow, the way she said it, I thought, No, she's just being friendly.
We got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back. She put both hands on the wheel, then turned to me. "Listen, I've got some… some papers Rory left with me. I did mean to send them to your father, but to be honest I lost track of them, and then didn't find them again until mum died and I was clearing stuff out… I don't suppose it's anything… you know, that the family needs, is it?"
I scratched my head. "Dad has all Rory's papers, I think."
"It's just old poems and notes; that sort of thing." She started the car; we put our belts on. She took a pair of glasses from her shoulder bag. "All a bit confusing, really."
"Hmm," I said. "I suppose dad might want a look at them. Wouldn't mind looking at them myself, come to think of it."
"Do you want to pick them up now?" She looked at me, her round face soft-looking in the orange blush of the sodium vapour. Her hair was like a curly halo. "It isn't far."
"Yeah, okay. I guess so."
I watched her face. She smiled as we pulled away. "You sound just like Rory sometimes."
Janice Rae was the last person known to have seen Uncle Rory, one evening in Glasgow. Rory had been staying with friends in London for the previous fortnight. He had talked to his agent and seen some television people about doing some travel series, but whatever deal he'd been trying to set up with the BBC, it had fallen through.
At the time Rory was still — just — living off Traps, which was attracting a trickle of money even then, when he'd spent everything he'd got for later travel books and occasional articles. He was sharing a flat with an old pal called Andy Nichol who worked in local government; according to Andy, Rory had moped around their flat for a couple of days, shut in his room mostly, supposedly writing, then when Andy had come back from work one day, Rory had asked if he could borrow Andy's motorbike for the night. Andy had given him the keys, and Rory had set off; he'd stopped briefly at Janice Rae's mum's place, and said something about having an idea; some way of saving the project he'd been working on; adding some new ingredient.
He'd given Janice the folder that she now wanted to give me, eight years later, and then rode off into the sunset, never to be seen again.
Her flat was on Crow Road, not all that far away, down near Jordanhill. As she showed me into the place, down a hall lined with old movie posters, I asked her if she'd ever heard Grandma Margot use the saying: away the Crow Road (or the Craw Rod, if she was being especially broad-accented that day). It meant dying; being dead. "Aye, he's away the crow road," meant "He's dead."
Janice looked away from me when I said those words, mumbled about the papers and went to get them.
Idiot, I told myself. I stood in the living room; it was full of heavy old furniture that looked as though it belonged somewhere else, and some limited edition modern prints. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of Janice Rae's dead mother, and another of her daughter Marion and her husband. Marion was a policewoman in Aberdeen. I shook my head, grinning and feeling very old and very young at once.
"Here," Aunt Janice said. She handed me a cardboard folder stuffed with loose papers. On the spine it said CR in black felt-tip. The folder was burgundy but the spine was faded to grey.
"CR?" I said.
"Crow Road," Janice said quietly, looking down at the folder in my hands.
I wasn't sure what to say. While I was still thinking, she looked up, bright-eyed, glanced around at the walls of the flat and shrugged. "Yeah; I know. Sentimental of me, eh?" She smiled.
"No," I said. "It's… it's — " The words sweet and nice suggested themselves, but didn't seem right. " — fitting. I guess." I stuck the folder under my arm, cleared my throat. «Well…» I said.
She had taken off her jacket; she wore a blouse and cords. She shrugged. "Would you like some coffee? Something stronger?"
«Umm…» I said, taking a deep breath. "Well… aren't you tired?"
"No," she said, folding her arms. "I usually read way past this time of night. Stay; have some whisky."
She took my jacket, poured me a whisky.
I sat down on a huge, surprisingly firm old couch. It looked like brown leather, but any smell it had had was gone. I held the whisky glass up. "Won't you?" I said. This is like playing chess, I thought.
"Well, not if I have to drive you home, Prentice."
"Oh… I could… walk," I smiled bravely. "Can't be more than three or four miles. Less than an hour. You'd lend me a brolly, wouldn't you? Or there might be a night bus. Please; have a whisky; sit down, make yourself at home."
She laughed. "Okay, okay." She went to the table where the bottles were, poured herself a whisky. Somewhere in the distance, that sound of the city: a siren warbling.
Stay here, if you like," she said, slowly putting the top back on the bottle. She turned, leaning back against the table, drinking from her glass, looking down at me. "That's if you want to… I don't want you to think I'm seducing you or anything."
"Shit," I said, putting my glass down on a rather over-designed coffee table. I put my hands on my hips (which is rather an unnatural thing to do when you're sitting down, but what the hell). "I was kinda hoping you were, actually."
She looked at me, then gave a single convulsive laugh, and right until then I think it might still have gone either way, but she stood there, her back to the table, set her glass down upon its polished surface, put her hands behind her back, and looked down, her head forward and a little to the left. Her weight was on her left leg; her right leg was relaxed, knee bent in slightly towards the left. I could see she was smiling.
I knew I'd seen that stance before, and even as I was getting up from the couch to go over to her I realised she was standing just the way Garbo does in Queen Christina, during the Inn sequence, when she's sharing the best room with John Gilbert, playing the Spanish ambassador who doesn't realise until that point the disguised Garbo is a woman, not a man. She starts to take her clothes off eventually, and gets down to her shirt; then Gilbert looks round, does a double take and looks back; and she's standing just like that, and he knows.
It had — I recalled, even as I went over to her — been one of Uncle Rory's favourite old films.
It was one of those wonderful first nights when you never really do more than drowse between bouts of love-making, and even when you do think no more; that's it, finito… you still have to say goodnight, which itself means a kiss, and a hug; and each touch begets another touch more sweet, and the kiss on the cheek or neck moves to the lips, the lips open, the tongues meet… so every touch becomes a caress, each caress an embrace, and every embrace another coupling.
She turned to me, during that night, and said, "Prentice?"
"Mm-hmm?"
"Do you think Rory's… away the crow road? Do you think he's dead?"
I turned on my side, stroked her flank, smoothing my hand from thigh to shoulder, then back. "I really don't know," I admitted.
She took my hand, kissed it. "I used to think, sometimes, that he must be dead, because otherwise he'd have been in touch. But I don't know." There was just enough light seeping in past the curtains to let me see her head shaking. "I don't know, because people sometimes do things you'd never have thought they would ever do." Her voice broke, and her head turned suddenly; she pushed her face into the bedclothes; I moved over to hold her, just to comfort her; but she kissed, hard, and climbed on top of me.
I had, up until that point, been performing an agonising reappraisal of the indignant signals of total, quivering, painful exhaustion flooding in from every major muscle I possessed. My body's equivalent of the Chief Engineer was screaming down the intercom that the system just wouldn't take any more punishment, Jim, and there was no doubt that I really should have been pulling out and powering down just then…
But, on the other hand, what the heck.
"… all your your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squal-adoptions, combine and coalesce, to one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux; there we are. If it has any final signal, the universe says simply, but with every possible complication, "Existence," and it neither pressures us, nor draws us out, except as we allow. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos… and I am.»
Her voice was sleepy; the hand that had been quietly ruffling my hair had now gone limp. The litany subsided, the quiet words not echoing in the dark room.
Uncle Rory's words, apparently. At first just thought; a mantra to delay ejaculation — a slightly more civilised, if narcissistic, alternative to brother Lewis's thoughts about constructing MFI kitchen units. Then, once, she had asked him what he thought of when they made love (and smoothed over his protestations of eternal in-head fidelity) to discover that — purely to prolong her pleasure — he sometimes recited a piece of his own poetry to himself. He was persuaded to repeat it, for her, and it became a shared ritual.
"Always… always liked that," she said quietly, shifting a little to fit her body to mine. "Always…»
"Hmm," I said, and felt her breathing alter. "Good-night, Janice," I whispered.
"Night, Rore," she murmured.
I wasn't sure what to feel. Eventually I yawned, pulled the duvet over the two of us, and smiled into the darkness.
I went to sleep wondering what on earth had possessed Uncle Rory to write a miserable, incomprehensible line "your finery and squal-adoptions'.
What in the name of hell was a squal-adoption, for goodness" sake?
There was something else nagging me; my conscience. The embarrassing truth was that despite having taken a sort of policy decision years ago, the gist of which was: no condom, no sex, Janice and I had not been using one. She'd emplaced a cap, but that, as the leaflets will tell you, don't provide no AIDS protection. So here I was indulging in casual — if intensive — sex with a woman I hadn't even heard anything about for eight years; hell, she could have been up to anything! But she had claimed the opposite, and I'd believed her. It was probably the truth, but it was exactly such instances of casually misplaced trust that were undoubtedly going to kill better men and women than me over the next decade or so.
Still, it was done. I drifted away.
I swear I was asleep when my eyes flicked on their own and in a burst of dark certainty I thought: squalid options! that's what he wrote: Squalid options, before going instantly back to sleep again.