The Crow Road Read Free

understand?’
    ‘Up to a point,’ I said, non-committally, I hoped.
    ‘It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but...’
    ‘Dad certainly seems to think he’s paterfamilias.’
    ‘Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish ...’ She looked troubled. ‘He’s a bit off the beaten track, that boy.’ She frowned. (This ‘boy’ was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who’d invented Newton’s Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)
    ‘I wonder where Uncle Rory is,’ I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.
    ‘Who knows?’ My gran sighed. ‘Might be dead, for all we know.’
    I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    ‘You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don’t?’
    ‘I just feel it.’ I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. ‘He’ll be back.’
    ‘Your father thinks he will,’ Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. ‘He always talks about him as though he’s still around.’
    ‘He’ll be back,’ I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.
    ‘I don’t know, though,’ Grandma Margot said. ‘I think he might be dead.’
    ‘Dead? Why?’ The sky was deep, shining blue.
    ‘You wouldn’t believe me.’
    ‘What?’ I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).
    Grandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. ‘I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things.’
    I laughed. She looked inscrutable. ‘Sorry, gran?’
    She tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. ‘Not a sausage, Prentice.’
    ‘Well,’ I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. ‘No.’
    ‘Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation.’ Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.
    ‘I give in, gran; what are you talking about?’
    ‘My moles, Prentice.’ She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. ‘I can tell what’s going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something ... remarkable is happening to the person.’ She frowned. ‘Well, usually.’ She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. ‘Don’t tell your father about this; he’d have me committed.’
    ‘Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn’t, anyway!’
    ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’ Her eyes narrowed again.
    I leant on one of the chair’s wheels. ‘Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?’
    She nodded, grim. ‘Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too.’
    ‘And that mole’s Uncle Rory’s?’ I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.
    ‘That’s right,’ she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. ‘Not a sausage, for eight years.’
    I stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. ‘Wow,’ I said at last.
     
 
‘... survived by her daughter lisa, and sons Kenneth, Hamish and