The Crow Road

CHAPTER 11

If the year of our folly 1990 had started inauspiciously for me, then the Fates, Lady Luck, Lord Chance, God, Life, Evolution — whoever or whatever — immediately thereafter set about the business of proving that the entangled disasters distinguishing the year's first few days were but a mild and modest prelude to the more thorough-going catastrophes planned for the weeks and months ahead… and this with a rapidity and even an apparent relish which was impressive — if also bowel-looseningly terrifying — to behold.

Gav and my Aunt Janice got on like a house on fire, a combined location and fate I occasionally wished on them as I lay awake listening to the sounds of their love-making, a pastime I sometimes suspected I shared with people in a large part of the surrounding community, not to say northern Europe.

I had made the mistake of volunteering to sleep on the couch in the living room on the nights that Janice stayed at our flat; this offer was made with what I thought was obvious sarcasm one evening while Gav and Norris were attempting to develop a technique for cooking poppadoms in the microwave. They were having an intense and appropriately heated discussion on the problems of cold-spots (as evinced by the fact that their first attempts came out looking like braille roundels), and on the unfortunate instability of three poppadoms balanced together — caused not so much by the jerk they received when the turntable started up as by their movements while they cooked and swelled — but eventually my flatmates settled on the concept of standing the things up individually on the glass turntable, and so instigated what they termed a "brain-storming session" in an attempt to find a suitable support mechanism. (I suppressed the urge to point out that the chances of two such patently zephyr-grade minds producing anything remotely resembling a storm was roughly equivalent to the likelihood of somebody called Cohen landing a pork scratching concession in Mecca during Ramadan.)

"An alligator clip with the chrome bits removed."

"Naw; still metal."

"Maybe we could shield it."

"Na; has to be plastic. Yer non thermosetting stuff, for preference."

"Well, look, Gav," I said from the kitchen doorway. "I only overhang the couch by a foot or so at each end; why don't I attempt to curl up there when you and Janice are in residence, if not flagrante, in the bedroom?"

"Eh?" Gav said, swivelling that thick neck of his to look at me, his massive brows furrowing. He scratched at one rugby-shirt shrouded armpit, then nodded. "Aw; aye." He looked pleased. "Thanks very much, Prentice; aye, that'd be grand." He turned back to the microwave.

"Maybe we could suspend them from this bit in the middle with a length of thread," Norris grunted, sticking his head almost right inside the appliance. Norris, still clad in his white lab coat, was one of those medical students whom fate has seemingly marked out to spend the bulk of their studies and initial training suffering from quite stupendous hangovers incurred through the intake of near-fatal levels of alcohol the night before, and their subsequent professional careers sternly finger-wagging at any member of the general public who dares to consume over the course of a week what they themselves had been perfectly happy to sink during the average evening.

"I mean, don't let the fact I'm the longest serving flat-dweller put you off; the last thing I want to do is embarrass you, Gav," I said (just a tad tetchily).

"Na, it's all right, Prentice; ta," Gav said, then crouched down by Norris and squinted into the lit interior of the microwave. "Nowhere to attach it," he told Norris. "Anyway; wouldnae turn, would it?"

They both looked thoughtful, heads side by side at the open oven door, while I wondered what the chances were of both heads fitting — and jamming — inside and the door safety-catch somehow short-circuiting.

"Na," Norris said. "We're looking at some form of support from below, know what ah mean? Come on, Gav, you're the engineer…»

"I mean, that old duvet's bound to cover most of the important parts of my body, and the chances of the pilot on the fire blowing out again and gassing me in my sleep can't really be that high," I said.

"Hmm," Gav said. He straightened, then bent forward and tapped at the white plastic strip on the kitchen window ledge which retained the cheaply horrid secondary double-glazing the flat's owners had fitted.

"Just a block of wood, maybe," Norris said.

"Get hot," Gav said, looking more closely at the white plastic strip. "Depending on how much water there is in the wood; could warp. Still think plastic's your best bet."

"After all, Gav, I can just stay up till your drinking pals have decided to head home, or Norris's card school chums finally drag themselves away, or crash out and snore on the Richter scale, whatever; the fun rarely extends beyond three or four o'clock in the morning… why, that would leave me a good four or five hours" sleep before an early lecture."

"Aye, that's great, Prentice," Gav said, still closely inspecting the window sill. Then he stood up suddenly and snapped his fingers.

"Got it!'he said.

What, I thought? Had my tone of reason in the face of monstrosity finally registered? But no.

"Blu-tack!"

"What?"

"Blu-tack!"

"Blu-tack?"

"Aye; Blu-tack. You know: Blu-tack!"

Norris thought about this. Then said excitedly. "Aye; Blu-tack!" "Blu-tack!" Gav said again, looking wide-eyed and pleased with himself.

"The very thing!" Norris nodded vigorously.

I shook my head, quitting the kitchen doorway for the comparative sanity of the dark and empty hallway. "You crack the Bollinger," I muttered. "I'll just phone the Nobel Prize Committee and tell them their search is over for another year."

"Blu-tack, ya beauty!" I heard from the white-glowing crucible of cutting-edge technological advancement that our humble kitchen had become.

"You mean you haven't read them all?"

"I went off the idea," I said. I was sitting in what had effectively become my boudoir; our living room. Aunt Janice seemed to prefer staying here with Gavin to travelling out to Crow Road most nights.

Gav and Janice sat on the couch, loosely attired in dressing gowns and watching a video.

I had been sitting at the table housed in the living room bay window, trying to write a paper for a tutorial the next day, but Gavin and Janice had chosen to punctuate their highly audible coupling sessions (in what the more tenacious core-areas of my long-term memory still sporadically insisted had once been my bedroom) with an almost equally noisy episode of tortilla chip eating. The corny raucousness which ensued of course meant that the television volume had to be turned up to window-shaking levels so that the happy couple could savour the exquisitely enunciated phrasing of Arnold Schwarzenneger's lines over the noise of their munching.

I had admitted defeat on the subject of the links between agricultural and industrial revolution and British Imperialism, and sat down to watch the video. Perhaps appropriately, given the inflammatory nature of the effect Gav and Janice seemed to have on each other's glands, it was called Red Heat.

"Oh," I'd said. "A Hollywood movie about two cops who don't get along at first but are thrown together on a case involving drugs, foreigners, lots of fights and guns and which ends up with them respecting each other and winning. Sheech." I shook my head. "Makes you wonder where these script-writer guys get their weird and zany ideas from, doesn't it?"

Gav had nodded in agreement, without taking his eyes off the screen. Janice Rae had smiled over at me, her hair fetchingly disarrayed, her cheeks flushed. "Oh yes, Prentice," she'd said. "What did you think of Rory's work, in that folder?"

Hence the exchange above.

Janice looked back at the telly and stretched one leg out over Gavin's lap. I glanced over, thinking that she had much better legs than a woman of her age deserved. Come to that, she had much better legs than a man of Gav's mental age deserved.

"So you haven't found any hints about what it was Rory had hidden in there?" she said.

"I've no idea what he wanted to hide," I said, wishing that Janice would hide a little more of her legs.

I was uncomfortable talking about the poems and Rory's papers; the bag lost on the train coming back from Lochgair at the start of the year had stayed lost, and — stuck with just the memory of the half-finished stuff that Janice had given me originally — I'd given up on any idea I'd ever had of trying to rescue Uncle Rory's name from artistic oblivion, or discovering some great revelation in the texts. Still, it haunted me. Even now, months later, I had dreams about reading a book that ended half-way through, or watching a film which ended abruptly, screen whiting-out… Usually I woke breathless, imagining there was a scarf — shining white silk looped in a half-twist — tightening round my neck.

"It was something he'd seen, I think." Janice watched the distant screen. «Something…» she said slowly, pulling her dressing gown closed. "Something… over-seen, if you know what I mean."

"Vaguely," I said. I watched Gavin's hand move — apparently unconsciously, though of course with Gav that could still mean it was fully willed — to Janice's polyester-and-cotton covered thigh. "Something," (I suggested, watching this,) "seen voyeuristically, perhaps?"

"Mmm," Janice nodded. Her right hand went up to Gav's short, brownish hair, and started to play with it, twirling it round her fingers. "He put it in… whatever he was working on." She nodded. "Something he'd seen, or somebody had seen; whatever. Some big secret."

"Really?" I said, Gavin's hand rubbed up and down on Janice's lap. Gav's face gave no sign he was aware of doing this. I pondered the possibility that the lad possessed some dinosaur-like secondary brain which was controlling the movements of his hand. Palaeo-biological precedent dictated such an organ be housed in Gavin's ample rear, and have responsibility for his lower limbs — not to say urges — rather than his arms, but then one never knew, and I reckoned Gavin's modest forebrain — doubtless fully occupied with the post-modernist sub-texts and tertiary structuralist imagery of Red Heat — could probably do with all the help it could get. "Really?" I repeated.

"Mmm,'Janice nodded. "So he said."

She bit her lip. Gavin had a look of concentration on his face now, as though two parts of his brain were attempting the tricky and little-practised operation of communicating with each other.

"Something about — " Janice moved her hips, and seemed to catch her breath." — the castle." She clutched at Gav's hair.

I looked at her. "The castle?" I said. But too late.

Perhaps lent the final impetus necessary for successful reception by the proximity of the area of stimulus to that of cognition, this hair-pulling signal finally seemed to awaken Gavin to the perception that there might be something else going on in his immediate area other than the video, undeniably captivating though it was. He looked round, first at his hand, then at Janice, who was smiling radiantly at him, and finally at me. He grinned guiltily.

He yawned, glanced at Janice again. "Bit tired," he said to her, yawning unconvincingly once more. "Fancy goin" to —?"

"What" Janice said brightly, slapping her hand down on Gavin's bulky shoulder," — a good idea!"

"Tell us how it ends, eh Prentice?" Gav said, nodding back at the television as he was half hauled out of the room by Aunt Janice, en route to the land of nod after a lengthy detour through the territories of bonk.

"With you going 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh! " I muttered to the closed door. I glared at the screen. "'How it ends, " I muttered to myself. "It's a video, you cretin!"

I returned to the changes in British society required to bring about the Empire on which the light of reason rarely shone. It was going to be a long night, as I also had to finish an already over-due essay on Swedish expansion in tne seventeentn century (it would have to be a goodish one, too; an earlier remark — made in an unguarded moment during a methodically boring tutorial — ascribing Swedish territorial gains in the Baltic to the invention of the Smorgasbord with its take-what-you-want ethic, had not endeared me to the professor concerned; nor had my subsequent discourse on the innate frivolity of the Swedes, despite what I thought was the irrefutable argument that no nation capable of giving a Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger could possibly be accused of lacking a sense of humour. Pity it was actually the Norwegians.

I remembered a joke about Kissinger ('no; fucking her.) and found myself listening to Gav and Janice. They were still at that stage of their coital symphony where only the brass section was engaged, as the old metal bed creaked to and fro. The wind section — essentially vox humana — would join in later. I shook my head and bent back to my work, but every now and again, as I was writing or just thinking, a niggling little side-track thought would distract me, and I'd find myself remembering Janice's words, and wondering what exactly Uncle Rory might have hidden within his later work (if he really had hidden anything). Not, of course, that there was much point in me wondering about it.

For about the hundredth time, I cursed whatever kleptomaniac curmudgeon had walked off the train with my bag. May the scarf unravel and do an Isadora Duncan on the wretch.

"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!" came faintly from what had been my bedroom. I ground my teeth.

"Married?" I gasped, aghast.

"Well, they're talking about it," my mother said, dipping her head towards the table and holding her Paisley-pattern scarf to her throat as she nibbled tentatively at a large cream cake.

We were in Mrs Mackintosh's Tea Roomes, just off West Nile Street, surrounded by straightly pendulous light fitments, graph-paper pierced wooden screens, and ladder-back seats which turned my usual procedure of hanging my coat or jacket on the rear of the seat into an operation that resembled hoisting a flag up a tall mast. "But they can't!" I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. They couldn't do this to me!

My mother, neat and slim as ever, ploughed crunchingly into the loaf-sized meringue cream cake like a polar bear breaking into a seal's den. She gave a tiny giggle as a little dollop of cream adhered to the tip of her nose; she removed it with one finger, licked the pinky, then wiped her nose with her napkin, glancing round the restaurant through the confusing topography of slats and uprights of the seats and screens, apparently worried that this minor lapse in hand-mouth coordination was being critically observed by any of the surrounding middle-class matrons, perhaps with a view to passing on the scandalous morsel to their opposite numbers in Gallanach and having mother black-balled from the local bridge club. She needn't have worried; from what I had seen, getting a little bit of cream on your nose was practically compulsory, like getting nicked on the cheek in a ritualised duel before being allowed to enter a Prussian drinking sodality. The atmosphere of middle-aged ladies enjoying something wicked and nostalgic was quite palpable.

"Don't be silly, Prentice; of course they can. They're both adults." Mother licked cream from the ice-cave interior of the meringue, then broke off part of the superstructure with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.

I shook my head, appalled. Lewis and Verity! Married? No! But isn't this… " My voice had risen a good half-octave and my hands were waggling around on the end of my arms as though I was trying to shake off bits of Sellotape."…rather soon?" I finished, lamely.

"Well, yes," mum said, sipping her cappuccino. "It is." She smiled brightly. "I mean, not that she's pregnant or anything, but —»

"Pregnant!" I screeched. The very idea! The thought of the two of them fucking was bad enough; Lewis impregnating that gorgeous creature was infinitely worse.

"Prentice!" Mother whispered urgently, leaning closer and glancing round again. This time we were getting a few funny looks from other customers. My mother smiled insincerely at a couple of Burberried biddies smirking from the table across the aisle; they turned sniffily away.

My mother giggled again, hand to mouth, then delved into the meringue. She sat back, munching, face red but eyes twinkling, and with those eyes indicated the two women who'd been looking at us; then she raised one finger and pointed first at me, then at her. Her giggle turned into a snort. I rolled my eyes. She dabbed at hers with a clean corner of napkin, laughing.

"Mother, this is not funny." I drank my tea, and attacked another chocolate eclair. It was my fourth and my belly was still growling. "Not at all funny." I knew I was sounding prissy and ridiculous but I couldn't help it. This was a very trying time for me, and the people who ought to be offering support were offering only insults.

"Well," mother said, sipping at her coffee again. "Like I say, there's no question of that. I mean, not that it makes much difference these days anyway, but yes, you're right; it is a bit soon. Your father and I have talked to Lewis and he's said they aren't going to actually rush into anything, but they just feel so… right together that it's… just come up, you know? Arisen naturally between them."

I couldn't help it. My obsessed, starveling brain was conjuring up all sorts of ghastly images to accompany this sort of talk; things arising, coming up… Oh God…

"They've talked about it," mother said, in tones of utmost reason, with a small shrug. "And I just thought you ought to know.

"Oh, thanks," I said, sarcastically. I felt like I'd been kicked by a camel but I still needed food, so I polished off the eclair, belched with all the decorum I could, and started eyeing up a Danish pastry.

"They're in the States right now," mother said, licking her fingers. "For all we know they might come back married. At least if that happens it won't come as quite such a shock now, will it?"

"No," I said miserably, and took the pastry. It tasted like sweetened cardboard.

It was April. I hadn't been back to Gallanach yet this year, hadn't spoken to dad. My studies weren't going so well; a 2.2 was probably the best I could hope for. Money was a problem because I'd spent all the dosh I'd got for the car, and I needed my grant to pay off the overdraft I'd built up. There was about a grand in the old account — my dad's money came by standing order — but I wouldn't use it, and what I regarded as my own finances were — judging from the tone of the bank's increasingly frequent letters — somewhere in the deep infrared and in serious danger of vanishing from the electromagnetic spectrum altogether.

I had paid my rent early on with the last inelastic cheque I'd written, hadn't paid my Poll Tax, had tried to find bar work but been unsuccessful, and was borrowing off Norris, Gav and a few other pals to buy food, which comprised mostly bread and beans and the odd black pudding supper, plus a cider or two when I could be persuaded to squander my meagre resources on contributing to the funds required for a raid on the local off-licence.

I spent a lot of time lying on the couch in the living room, watching day-time television with a sneer on my face and my books on my lap, making snide remarks at the soaps and quizzes, chat snows and audience participation fora, skimming the scummy surface of our effervescent present in preference to plumbing the adumbrate depths of the underlying past. I had taken to finishing off the flat beer left in cans by the members of Norris's itinerant card school after its frequent visits chez nous, and was seriously considering starting to steal from bookshops in an attempt to raise some cash.

For a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week, still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory's poems and Darren Watt's Mobius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again. But even they weren't having anything to do with me any more, after I'd definitely detected an edge of sarcasm in the person's voice and lost my temper and started shouting and swearing.

Rejected by Lost Property; it seemed like the ultimate insult.

And Aunt Janice never did remember any more about whatever Rory had hidden in his later work.

Mum sipped her coffee. I tore the Danish to bits, imagining it was Lewis's flesh. Or Verity's underclothes — I was a little confused at the time.

Well, let them get married. The earlier the better; it would end in tears. Let them rush into it, let them repent at leisure. They weren't right for each other and maybe a marriage would last a shorter time than a more informal, less intense liaison; brief and bitter, both of them on proximity fuses with things coming rapidly to a crunch, rather than something more drawn out, where they might spend long periods apart and so forget how much they hated being together, and enjoy the fleeting, passionate moments of reunion…

I fumed and bittered away while my mother finished her coffee and made concerned remarks about how thin and pale I was looking. I ate another Danish; mother told me everybody else was fine, back home.

"Come back, Prentice," she said, putting one hand out across the table to me. Her brown eyes looked hurt. "This weekend, come back and stay with us. Your father misses you terribly. He's too proud to —»

"I can't," I said, pulling my hand away from hers, shaking my head. "I need to work this weekend. Got a lot to do. Finals coming up."

"Prentice," my mother whispered. I was looking down at my plate, licking my finger and picking off the last few crumbs, transferring them to my mouth. I could tell mum was leaning forward, trying to get me to meet her eyes, but I just frowned, and with my moistened finger-tip cleared my plate. "Prentice; please. For me, if not for your dad."

I looked up at her for a moment. I blinked quickly. "Maybe," I said. "I don't know. Let me think about it."

"Prentice," my mother said quietly, "say you will."

"All right," I said, not looking at her. I knew I was lying but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I couldn't send her away thinking I could be so heartless and horrible, but I also knew that I wasn't going to go home that weekend; I'd find an excuse. It wasn't that this dispute between my dad and me about whether there was a God or not really meant anything any more, but rather the fact of the history of the dispute — the reality of its course, not the substance of the original disagreement — was what prevented me from ending it. It was less that I was too proud, more that I was too embarrassed.

"You promise?" mother said, a slight stitching of her brows as she sat back in the ladder-backed seat the only indication that she might not entirely believe me.

"I promise," I nodded. I felt, wretchedly, that I was such a moral coward, such a sickening liar, that making a promise I knew I had no intention whatever of keeping was hardly any worse than what I had already done. "I promise," I repeated, blinking again, and set my mouth in a firm, determined way. Let there be no way out of it; let me really make this promise. I was so disgusted with myself that wanted to make myself suffer even more when I did — as I knew I would — break my word. I nodded fiercely and smiled bravely, utterly insincerely, at my mother. "I really do promise. Really."

We said goodbye outside, in the street. I told her the flat was in too disgusting a state for her to come and visit. She hoisted her umbrella to ward off the light drizzle that had started to fall, gave me a couple of twenty-pound notes, said she'd look forward to seeing me on Friday, kissed my cheek, then went off to do her shopping.

I had dressed as well as I could that morning, in more or less the same stuff I'd worn for Grandma Margot's funeral. Minus the lost Mobius scarf, of course. I turned up the collar of my fake biker's jacket and walked off.

I gave the money to a thankfully dumb-struck fiddle-player on Sauchiehall Street and walked away feeling like some sort of martyred saint. As I walked, this mood was gradually but smoothly replaced by one of utmost depression, while my body — as though jealous of all the obsessive regard my emotions were receiving — came up with its own demands for attention, evidenced by an unsteady, fluid shifting in my guts, and a cold sweat on my brow.

I felt fainter and fainter and worse and worse and more and more nauseous, unsure whether it was the bitterness of sibling-thwarted love, or just too much starch and refined sugar. It felt like my stomach had decided to take a sabbatical; all that food was just sitting there, unprocessed, locked in, slopping around and making me feel horrible.

After a while I stopped telling myself I wasn't going to be sick, and — resigned to the fact that I was going to have to throw up at some point — kept telling myself instead that I'd manage to hold it in until I was back in the flat, and so do it in private, rather than into the gutter in front of people.

Eventually I threw up into a litter bin attached to a crowded bus shelter on St George's Road.

I was still gagging up the last few dregs when somebody punched me on the cheek, sending the other side of my head banging against the metal wall of the shelter. I spun round and sat down on the pavement, a ringing noise in my head.

A tramp dressed in tattered, shiny trousers and a couple of greasy-looking, buttonless coats bent down, looking at me. He smelled of last year's sweat. He gestured angrily up at the litter bin. "Ye wee basturt; there might a been somethin good in there!" He shook his head in obvious disgust and stalked off, muttering.

I got to my feet, supporting myself on the side of the shelter. A wee grey woman wearing a headscarf peered out at me from the end of the bus queue. "You all right, sonny?" she said.

"Aye," I said, grimacing. "Missus," I added, because it seemed appropriate. I nodded at the bin. "Sorry about that; my stomach's on strike and my food's coming out in sympathy."

She smiled uncomprehendingly at me, looking round. "Here's ma bus son; you look after yoursel, okay?"

I felt the side of my head where it had hit the bus shelter; a bruise was forming and my eye felt sore. The wee woman got on her bus and went away.

"Oh, Prentice!" Ash said, more in despair than with disgust. "You're kidding." She looked at me in the candle-light. I was past caring about feeling guilt and shame and everything was collapsing anyway, so I just looked straight back at her, resigned, and after a while I shook my head. Then I picked up a bit of naan bread and mopped up my curry sauce.

The naan bread was big; we'd both stuffed ourselves with it during the meal but it was still big. When it had arrived it had needed a separate table just to accommodate it; luckily the restaurant wasn't busy. "Not so much a naan bread, more a toasted duvet, I'd said. Ash had laughed.

During the course of the meal we'd reduced the blighter to the porportions of a couple of pillows, not to mention disposing of portions of chicken kalija and fish pakora to start, followed by garlic chilli chicken, lamb passanda, a single portion of pulao rice, and side dishes of Bombay potato and sag panir to accompany.

Two dry sherries and a couple of bottles of Nuit St Georges had washed it all down and now we were onto the coffee and brandy. It was Ashley Watt's treat, of course; I still couldn't afford to eat out unless it was in the street and out of a paper poke. Ash was passing through Glasgow and staying with us on her way to a new job down in London.

It was mid-summer, and unseasonably warm for Glasgow; Ash wore a long, rough silk shirt, and leggings. A light cotton jacket hung over the back of her chair. I was still wearing out the regulation Docs and the thick black jeans. I had borrowed one of Norris's big paramilitary-style fawn shirts to wear as a jacket over my anti Poll Tax T-shirt. I'd left it to the end of the meal before I said anything about being arrested.

"Aw, man," Ash said, sitting back slackly in her seat. The candlelight reflected in her glasses. "Why, Prentice?" The Anarkali was dark and quiet and a lot of the light was coming from the candle between us. She looked sad; concerned for me, I thought.

I rather liked it. I liked the idea of other people feeling sorry for me, even though I also despised them for it, because I wasn't worth their sympathy and that made them fools.

Of course, I despised myself for despising them for showing such genuine and unselfish emotions, but that's just one of the things you have to get used to when you're in a serious self-destruction spiral. Mine was feeling rather like a power-dive right now. I shrugged. "Why not? I needed the money."

"But your family's rich!"

"No, they're… Well, they might be fairly well… " I smiled, sat closer, took up my brandy and cradled it in front of the candle flame. "Actually, there's quite a good exchange on those lines in Catch-22, the movie — much underrated film — which isn't in the book, so Buck Henry must have written it, where Nately's been killed and Yossarian's been to Milo's whorehouse to see Nately s whore and Milo's picked him up in the half-track and he's saying Nately died a rich man; he had such-and-such a number of shares in M&M enterprises, and Yossarian says —»

Ashley was glaring at me over the candle flame the way a hawk must glare at a field mouse the instant before it parts mouse from field forever. I saw this predatory, outraged expression building on Ash's face like a line of dark clouds on the horizon, and stopped talking, though entirely out of inquisitiveness, not trepidation.

"Shut the fuck up about Catch-22, ya cretin;" Ash said, storming forward and planting both fore-arms on the table cloth. "What the fucking hell are you doin stealing books for money when you've no need to, eh? Just what sort of dick-head are you, Prentice? I mean, what the fuck are your parents going to think if they hear? How are they goin to feel? Or is that it? Are they supposed to feel bad? Are you tryin to get back at your dad because of this stupit religious thing? Well, come on; are you?"

I sat back, amused.

I played with the dumpy stem of the brandy glass, smirking at Ashley through the candle flame. Ashley's long hair was tied back and she looked rather attractive, now I thought about it. I wondered what the chances were of bedding the girl. A little recreational fornication would go down quite well just now. I wondered if Ash was into rough sex. I had no idea whether I was into it myself, but for some reason just then the idea seemed rather intriguing. I smiled at her, gave a small laugh. "Really, Ashley, I didn't think you'd take it all so melodramatically. It's only shoplifting, after all. Just one silly book, too; worse things happen at C&A s." I sat back, still smiling; legs crossed, arms crossed.

Ash's face was close to the flame, its yellow oval glowing like some magical caste-mark on her forehead. Much closer and she'll melt her glasses, I thought. She appeared to be trying to out-stare me but actually I'm rather good at that sort of thing when I want to be, and I didn't let my eyes flicker.

A waiter was approaching from behind her, I noticed, without taking my eyes off hers; I felt the grin broaden on my lips. The waiter would distract her, especially as she had ordered the meal and was obviously paying, and anyway she almost certainly hadn't heard the waiter approaching.

Ash reached one hand out across the table and spilled my brandy into my lap.

Just as I was reacting, going "Wha —!" and jerking forward, Ash turned smoothly to the waiter and with a broad smile said,

"The bill, please."

"It does look like I've pissed myself!" I protested as we walked back to the flat. "Those people were definitely laughing at me."

"Oh, shut up, Prentice."

"You're telling me to shut up!" I laughed. The July night was warm and muggy and the traffic rumbled like thunder down Great Western Road. "You throw drink all over me, expect to sleep in my flat tonight and you tell me to shut up!"

Ash paced purposefully on, long flinging strides I was having difficulty in keeping up with. She was still glaring, though straight ahead now. I noticed people coming towards us weren't getting in her way.

"I didn't throw the drink, I tipped it," she told me. "And I'm only coming back to the flat to get my bag, if that's the way you feel. I'll sleep in the car. Or find a hotel."

"I didn't!" I protested, waving my arms and running after her as I saw the possibility of getting into Ashley's increasingly attractive body slipping away from me. "I didn't say that! I just don't like being told to shut up! I'm sorry! I mean, I'm really sorry I'm annoyed that you spilled — or tipped — drink all over me!"

Ash stopped so suddenly I wondered where she'd gone for a moment. I turned, looked, and went back to her, standing looking furious in the light of a Spud-U-Like,

"Prentice," she said calmly. "You've practically exiled yourself from your family and your home and your friends, you think you've failed your finals but you say you've no intention of sitting your re-sits even if you have; you've no money and you haven't even been looking for a job; you're getting done for shop-lifting and you're acting like such a fucking dick-head you seem determined to get shot of the last few pals you do have left… and all you can do is make smart-ass remarks."

I looked through her bright red glasses into her light grey eyes and said, "Well, so far so good, certainly, but let's not count our —»

She stamped on my right big toe, forcing me to produce an involuntary and appallingly undignified yelp. She stormed off; I half limped, half hopped after her.

"Let's not count our vultures before they're hatched, eh?" I laughed. She powered on, ignoring me. I hopped after her. "Spare a shekel for a healthy beggar?" I cackled. "Able was I ere I saw Michael; where can you land a Palin? And in what?"

Ash kicked my other shin. Wonderful girl; didn't even seem to break stride.

She disappeared into an off-licence. I waited outside, rubbing my shin and inspecting the damage to my Docs; luckily the scuff on the right toe didn't show up the way it would have with polished boots.

Ash reappeared with a bag; she swept past me, briefly showing me the bottle of Grouse it contained. I skipped after her down the street. "After trying the fluid on a small unnoticeable area, you now wish to wash all of my trousers the spirited way, am I right, madam? Now; will you swap these two bottles of warm urine for that one bottle of our product?"

She shook her head, not looking at me. "You and I are going to get filthily drunk, Prentice, and if by the time we get to the bottom or this bottle I haven't got some sort of sense out of you I'm going to break it over your thick fucking skull." She turned, beamed a toothy non-smile at me for about a micro-second, then strode determinedly on.

I tried to keep up. I looked at the bottle in the bag. "Couldn't you just leave the whisky, I'll drink it all, wake up in the morning — no, make that the afternoon — with a head that feels like you hit me over the skull with the bottle, and you sleep in the car ready for that long and demanding journey down the notoriously dangerous A74 tomorrow?"

Ash shook her head.

We got back to Grant Street. I looked up, saw some lights on in the flat. Maybe, I thought, Ash would be so turned on by the sounds of frantic coupling emanating from Gav and Aunt Janice in the bedroom that she'd tear my clothes off. Or maybe Norris and his pals would distract her from this crazed idea of getting air-locked drunk by suggesting a friendly game of cards.

Ash followed my gaze. She held the bottle up in front of my eyes. "Ready for this, Prentice?"

"Drink doesn't solve anything, you know," I told her. "Just dissolves brain cells."

"I know," she said. "I'm working on the principle that most people are okay unless they get muroculous with drink, when they become arse-holes; you're behaving like an arse-hole now, so maybe drink'll make you okay."

I tried to look as sceptical as I could. "I bet you believe in crop circles, too."

"Prentice, I believe you seem determined to fuck your life up, and I just want to know why."

"Oh," I said brightly. "That's easy; my affections have been rejected by the one I love and her carnality is being most thoroughly investigated by my elder and smarter brother on a more or less hourly basis, so I am spurned and she is spermed; my father believes his children should be free to make up their own minds, but preferably only out of the spare-parts that he provides… And apart from that… I mean the exams and getting nicked and stuff… Well," I sighed, looking up to the night sky, where the clouds were starting to blot out the few stars that the city lights did not obscure. I spread my arms wide."… I'm just a waster."

Ash looked at me. I could see her chest move in and out inside the light cotton jacket. "Naw, Prentice," she said quietly, after a while. "You're just a bairn."

I shrugged. "Maybe. Come on." I indicated the close. "Let's get as drunk as you think we have to, and you can tell me all the reasons I'm so childish." I glanced at my watch as we headed for the stairs. "Better get started, though; we've only got all night."

We climbed the stairs, reached the flat.

"You know," Ash was saying, breathing hard and looking down the stair-well as I opened the door. "I don't know anybody who lives in a flat who doesn't live on the top floor."

"Friends in high places," I said, opening the door to Janice Rae.

Aunt Janice was clothed (shirt and jeans), which made rather a refreshing change, and standing in the hallway. She looked distraught. Her eyes were red and her mascara had left what appeared to be a diagram of the Los Angeles freeway system down her cheeks. Beyond her Gav stood looking awkward and sheepish. I glanced from Janice to Gav and back again, while Janice looked at me, lip trembling.

Let me guess, I thought; they've finally done it; they've broken the bed.

"Oh, Prentice!" Janice said suddenly, throwing herself at me and enveloping my upper torso in a hug that would have done credit to a grizzly. I wondered what had brought this on, and how to peel Aunt Janice off. What must Ashley be making of all this? (She'd be getting jealous, with any luck.)

Janice pulled away; I could breathe again, and promptly did so.

"Oh, Prentice," she said again, holding my head in both hands and shaking her own. Her eyes closed, she turned her face away, released her hold on my cheekbones and let me go on into the hall. Gav stood by the hall table, shifting his weight from side to side and glancing nervously down at the phone now and again.

He avoided my eyes.

I took a couple of steps forward, then heard something whispered from behind me, and looked back to see Janice hugging Ash, almost violently.

They'd never met before. How shocking, I thought. Where was that traditional British reserve only abandoned for cloying camaraderie under the influence of injuriously vast quantities of alcohol? I wondered, if nervously.

Ash was looking over Janice Rae's shoulder at me, those grey eyes behind the bright red glasses filling with tears.

"Um; you've to phone home," Gav mumbled, apparently addressing his trainers.

"ET or BT?" I heard myself say to him, though the different sections of my brain seemed to have slipped out of synch somehow, and I was aware of all sorts of different things at once, and time seemed to have slowed down and at the same time some part of my brain was racing, trying to come up with some logical explanation for what was going on that didn't involve calamity… and failing.

"It's — " Gav said, this time seemingly directing his remarks to his rugby-shirted chest. "It's your dad," he whispered, and suddenly started to cry.