The Crow Road by Iain Banks Page A

the little card-table in their quilted jackets, their night-black hair straight and shining and framing their broad-boned beautiful faces - looked like proud Mongolian princesses, calmly contemplating creation from the ribbed dome of some fume-filled yurt, midnight-pitched on the endless rolling Asian steppe.
    Verity Walker - professed sceptic though she was - read my palm, her touch like warm velvet, her voice like the spoken ocean, and in her eyes each iris like a blue-white sun stationed a billion light years off. She told me I’d be sad and I’d be happy and I’d be bad and I’d be good, and I believed all of it and why not, and she told me the last part in Clanger, the tin-whistle pretend language from one of the children’s programmes we’d all watched as youngsters, and she was trying to keep a straight face, and Lew and Dar and Di and Hel were snorting with laughter and even I was grinning, but I’d been singing happily along to the Cocteau Twins’ other-worldly words for the past hour, and I knew exactly what she said even though she might not have known herself, and fell completely in love with her iris-blue eyes and her wheat-crop hair and her peat-dark voice and the peach-skin fuzz of infinitesimally fine hairs on her creamy skin.
     
 
 
‘What was all that stuff about Pontius Pilate, anyway?’ Ash said.
    ‘Aw ...’ I waved my hand. ‘Too complicated.’
    Ash and I stood on a low little mound overlooking what had been the Slate Mine wharf, at the north-west limit of Gallanach where the Kilmartin Burn flows out of the hills, meanders without conviction, then widens to form part of Gallanach Bay before finally decanting into the deeper waters of Inner Loch Crinan. Here was where the docks had been, when the settlement had exported first coal then slate then sand and glass, before the railway arrived and a subtle Victorian form of gentrification had set in the shape of the railway pier, the Steam Packet Hotel and the clutch of sea-facing villas (only the fishing fleet had remained constant, sporadically crowded amongst its inner harbour in the stony lap of the old town, swelling, dying, burgeoning again, then falling away once more, shrinking like the holes in its nets).
    Ashley had dragged me out here, now in the wee small hours of what had become a clear night with the stars steady and sharp in the grip of this November darkness, after the Jacobite Bar and after we’d trooped (victorious at pool, by the way) back to Lizzie and Droid’s flat via McGreedy’s (actually McCreadie’s Fast Food Emporium), and after consuming our fish/pie/black pudding suppers and after a cup of tea and a J or two, and after we’d got back to the Watt family home in the Rowanfield council estate only to discover that Mrs Watt was still up, watching all-night TV (does Casey Casen never sit down in that chair?), and made us more tea, and after a last wee numbrero sombrero in Dean’s room.
    ‘I’m going for a walk, guys, okay?’ Ash had announced, coming back from the toilet, cistern flushing somewhere in the background, pulling her coat back on.
    I’d suddenly got paranoid that I had over-stayed my welcome and - in some dopey, drunken excess of stupidity - missed lots of hints. I looked at my watch, handed the remains of the J to Dean. ‘Aye, I’d better be off too.’
    ‘I wasn’t trying to get rid of you,’ Ash said, as she closed the front door after us. I’d said goodbye to Mrs Watt; Ash had said she would be back in quarter of an hour or so.
    ‘Shit. I thought maybe I was being thick-skinned,’ I said as we walked the short path to a wee garden gate in the low hedge.
    ‘That’ll be the day, Prentice,’ Ash laughed.
    ‘You really going to walk at this time of night?’ I looked up; the night was clear now, and colder. I pulled on my gloves. My breath was the only cloud.
    ‘Nostalgia,’ Ash said, stopping on the pavement. ‘Last visit to somewhere I used to go a lot when I was a wean.’
    ‘Wow,