The Crow Road (14 page)

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 Eftimable 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 tons 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-f, 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.

I 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.’