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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 younger than I am now, my Uncle Rory went on what was supposed to
be a World Trip. He got as far as India. Fell in love with the place; went
walk-about, circulating; to Kashmir from
Delhi, then along the hem of the Himalayas, crossing the Ganga at Patna -
asleep on the train -
then zig-zagging from country to coast and back again, but always heading or
trying to head south, collecting names and steam trains and friends and
horrors and adventures, then at the very hanging tip of the subcontinent, from
the last stone at low tide on Cape Comorin one slack dog-day;
reversing; heading north and west, still swinging from interior to coast,
writing it all down in a series of school exercise books, rejoicing in the
wild civility of that ocean of people, the vast ruins and fierce geography of
the place, its accrescent layers of antiquity and bureaucracy, the bizarre
images and boggling scale of it; recording his passage through the cities and
the towns and villages, over the mountains and across the plains and the
rivers, through places I had heard of, like Srinagar and Lucknow, through
places whose names had become almost banal through their association with
curries, like Madras and Bombay, but also through places he cheerfully
confessed he'd visited for their names as much as anything else: Alleppey and
Deolali, Cuttack and Calicut, Vadodara and Trivandrum, Surendranagar and Tonk
. . . but all the while looking and listening and questioning and arguing and
reeling with it all, making crazed comparisons with Britain and
Scotland; hitching and riding and swimming and walking and when he was beyond
the reach of money, doing tricks with cards and rupees for his supper, and
then reaching Delhi again, then Agra, and a trek from an ashram to the great
Ganga, head fuddled by sun and strangeness to see the great river at last, and
then the long drift on a barge down to the Farakka Barrage a train to Calcutta
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and a plane to Heathrow, half dead with hepatitis and incipient malnutrition.
In London, after a month in hospital, he typed it all out, got his friends in
the squat where he lived to read it, called it The Deccan Traps And Other
Unlikely Destinations, and sent it to a publisher.
It very nearly sank without trace, but then it was serialised in a Sunday
newspaper, and suddenly, with no more warning or apparent cause than that,
Traps just was the rage, and he was there.
I read the book when 1 was thirteen, and again tour years later, when I
understood it better.
It was hard to be objective - still is - but I think it is a good book; gauche
and naïve in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes
open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the
pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as
though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had
until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could
describe walking towards the Taj Mahal - ho-hum, thinks the reader,
immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard -
and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual
presence of that white
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt (29 of
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file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt tomb;
delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.
Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what
he meant.
And so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the
escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.
*
Ash squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the
mound, ran it through her fingers. 'And I'd come here when my daddy-paddy was
beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too.' She looked up at
me. 'Stop me if you've heard this one before, Prentice.'
I hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. 'Well,
not exactly, but I
knew it wasn't all sweetness and light, chez Watt.'
'Fuckin right it wasn't,' Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade or grass ran
through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up,
shrugged. 'Anyway, sometimes I
came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too
loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street
and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of
shoes.'
'Aye, well,' I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get
uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a
family of mostly amiable over-achievers.
'Anyway,' she said again. They're levelling the lot tomorrow.' Ash looked back
over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. 'That's what all that plant's for.'
I remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and
only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little
way off down the piece of waste ground.
'Aw, shit,' I said, eloquently.
'An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one-
and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free
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