The Crow Road by Iain Banks Page B

really? How far is it? Can I come?’ I have a fascination with places people think powerful or important. If I hadn’t been still fairly drunk I’d have been a lot more subtle about asking to accompany Ash, but, well, there you are.
    Happily, she just laughed quietly, turned on her heel and said, ‘Aye; come on; isn’t far.’
    So here we stood, on the wee mound only five minutes from the Watt house, down Bruce Street, through a snicket, across the Oban road and over the weedy waste ground where the dock buildings stood, long ago.
    The dock-side was maybe ten metres away; the skeletal remains of a crane stood lop-sided a little way along the cancered tarmac, its foundations betrayed by rotten wooden piling splaying out from the side of the wharf like broken black bones. Mud glistened in the moonlight. The sea was a taste, and a distant glittering that all but disappeared if you looked at it straight. Ash seemed lost in thought, staring away to the west. I shivered, un-studded the wide lapels of the fake biker’s jacket and pulled the zip up to my right shoulder so that my chin was encased.
    ‘Mind if I ask what we’re doing here?’ I asked. Behind and to our left, the lights of Gallanach were steady orange, like all British towns, forever warning the inhabitants to proceed with caution.
    Ash sighed, her head dropped a little. She nodded down, at the ground we stood upon. ‘Thought you might know what this is, Prentice.’
    I looked down. ‘It’s a wee lump of ground,’ I said. Ash looked at me. ‘All right,’ I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I’d have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). ‘I don’t know. What is it?’
    Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.
    ‘This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice,’ she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. ‘When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?’
    She looked at me. I nodded. ‘Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise.’
    ‘Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from,’ Ash said, looking to the west again. ‘But when it got here they didn’t need it, so they dumped it -’
    ‘Here?’ I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. ‘Always here?’
    ‘That’s what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn,’ Ash said. ‘He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later.’ (Ashley pronounced the word ‘cran’, in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn’t supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.
    ‘ “Hen,” he’d say, “There’s aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.”’
    I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. ‘I never forgot that; I’d come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia or America ...’
    Ash squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, ‘... Or India,’ to myself just then, and for one long, swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us. I thought, God, how we are connected to the world!, and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet. I stared up at the broken face of moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.
     
 
 
When he was