Instead I blew on her.
Well, she was sweaty, and I could see moisture on the top of her chest, above the little white bra she was wearing, trickling between the white swells of her breasts. She seemed to appreciate the gesture, and lay back and closed her eyes.
I remember her asking if I wasn’t hot, and feeling my leg, and her hand running up to my thigh, then there was some silly line like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ as she felt inside my shorts, expressing what even then I thought was probably fake surprise at what she discovered there. My own words were no less inane, but something - either the heat of the moment or just retrospective embarrassment - seems to have wiped them and most of the subsequent relevant details from my memory. Still, I recall being pleased that everything seemed to fit, and work as well, and if our (now I think about it, ridiculously fast) mutual thrusts hadn’t unsettled the car on its blocks, that sense of having successfully risen to the occasion and worked out what to do with relatively little guidance would have been my abiding impression of the proceedings.
Instead, just as I was both coming and going (going; ‘Wow!’), and Marion was making some extremely interesting noises, the car collapsed under us.
It shuddered and fell onto the concrete floor of the garage with an apocalyptic crash. We’d shaken it off its blocks. Some bizarre sense of symmetry had made me insist that we should not lie across the back seat, but that I should instead squat on the transmission tunnel, with Marion half on the rear seat, and half on me. As a result, the Rapide fell backwards off its wooden supports and its boot rammed into a load of drums and cans stored behind it, crushing them in turn against an old Welsh dresser that had been consigned to the garage years earlier; this - loaded up with tins and tools and spare parts and junk until it was top heavy - proceeded to over-balance. It leant, creaking, towards the car, and - although it did not actually fall over - distributed most of its load of paint, spanners, plugs, bolts, spare bulbs, bits of trim, hammers, wrenches and assorted boxes and tins all over the tarpaulin-covered boot, rear window and roof of the Lagonda.
The noise was appalling, and seemed to go on forever; I was dead still, my orgasm - more quality than quantity - completed, and my mouth hanging open as the cacophony reverberated through the garage, the car and my body. Dust filled the car’s interior; Marion sneezed mightily and almost squeezed me out of her. Something heavy hit the rear window, and it went white all over, crazed into a micro-jigsaw of tiny glass fragments.
Eventually the noise stopped, and I was about to suggest that we ran away very soon and to some considerable distance before anybody discovered what had happened, when Marion grabbed both my buttocks with a grip like steel, stuck her panting, sweat-streaked face against mine, and snarled those words with which I- in common with most men, I suspect - would eventually become relatively familiar, in similar, if rather less dramatic situations: ‘Don’t Stop.’
It seemed only right to comply, but my mind wasn’t really on what I was doing. Another precedent, perhaps.
Marion seemed to have some sort of fit; it coincided with - or perhaps was the cause of - the rear window falling in. It showered us both with little jagged lumps of glass, green under the tarpaulin-light, like dull emeralds. We both stayed like that for a bit, breathing heavily and brushing crystalline fragments out of each other’s hair and laughing nervously, then started the delicate business of disengaging and trying to dress in the back of a tarpaulin-covered car full of gravelly glass.
We completed dressing outside the car, in the garage, shaking bits of glass out of our clothes as we did so. I had the presence of mind to put these fragments back into the car, and spread the glass more evenly over the seat, removing the shard-shadow of Marion from the cracked green leather (there was, I noticed with a little pride and considerable horror, a small stain there - probably more Marion than me, to be honest - but there was nothing I could do about that beyond wiping it with my hanky). We closed the garage, grabbed our bikes and headed for the hills.
It was a week before dad discovered the disaster scene in the garage. He never did work it out.
Lewis threatened to tell him, but that was only because I’d been stupid enough to blab to my brother, and then been incensed to discover he’d screwed Marion too, twice; on the two previous weekends she’d been down. I immediately threatened to tell the police because Lewis was older than she was and that made it Statue-Tory Rape (I’d heard of this on TV); he said if I did that he’d tell dad about the car ... and so there we were, me barely a teenager and already arguing over a woman with my brother.
‘It was good to meet you again, Janice,’ Lewis said, shaking Aunt Janice’s hand, then taking her elbow in the other hand, kissing her on the cheek. ‘You should get in touch with Mary and Ken again; I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.’
‘I will,’ she said, smiling, then fastened the collar of her glove-leather jacket.
Lewis turned to me. ‘Bro; sure we can’t tempt you?’
‘Positive,’ I said. ‘Got a lot of work to do. Enjoy yourselves.’
‘Aw, come on, ya big poof,’ Gav said, breathing beer. He put one arm round my shoulders and hugged. From the amount of pressure involved, I gathered he was trying to fold me in half. ‘’Sno even wan yet!’
‘Yes, Gavin, the night is yet senile; but I have to go. You have fun, all right?’
‘Aye, okay.’
‘Taxi!’ shouted Lewis.
We were standing on Byres Road, outside Randan’s, which would be closing soon. Lewis, some guy he’d been friendly with at Uni, a girl who may or may not have been Lewis’s girlfriend, and Gav had all decided to head for some bar in the centre of town. I had demurred, as had Janice.
‘Prentice; see you at the weekend.’ Lewis hesitated as he pulled the taxi door open for the maybe-girlfriend, then came up to me, hugged me. ‘Good to see you, little brother.’
‘Yeah; you take care,’ I said, patting his back. ‘All the best.’
‘Thanks.’
They left in the taxi; Janice and I walked up Byres Road to where she’d left her car. It started to rain. ‘Maybe I will take that lift,’ I told her.
‘Good,’ she said. She pulled a small umbrella from her shoulder bag, opened it as the rain came on heavier. She handed it to me. ‘Here; you’d better hold this; you’re taller.’ She took my arm and we had to lean towards each other to keep even our heads dry under the little flimsy umbrella.
She smelled of Obsession and smoke. She, Gav and I had gone to meet Lewis, holding court in the small dressing room. Later we had all gone to the downstairs bar, then Lewis had announced he wanted to keep on drinking after they called time. Janice had had a couple of fizzy waters, and seemed totally sober, so I reckoned it was safe to accept a lift.
‘You don’t really like your brother that much, do you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ I told her. The traffic hissed by, heading up Byres Road. ‘He just ... annoys me sometimes.’
‘I thought you seemed a bit reluctant when he suggested going back home this weekend.’
I shrugged. ‘Oh, that’s not Lewis; that’s dad. We aren’t speaking.’
‘Not speaking?’ She sounded surprised; maybe amused. ‘Why not?’
‘Religious differences,’ I said. It had become my stock reply.
‘Oh dear.’ We turned onto Ruthven Street, away from the bright shop fronts and traffic. ‘Still a bit further to go,’ she said.
‘Where are you parked?’
‘Athole Gardens.’
‘Really? Not a good place to live if you had a lisp.’
She laughed, squeezed my arm.
Hello, I thought. I switched the umbrella from one hand to the other and put my arm lightly round her waist. ‘I hope I’m not taking you out of your way. I mean, I could walk. It isn’t far.’
‘No problem, Prentice,’ she said, and put her arm round my waist. Hmm. I thought. She gave a small laugh. ‘You were always thoughtful.’ But somehow, the way she said it,
I thought, No, she’s just being friendly.
We got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back. She put both hands on the wheel, then turned to me. ‘Listen, I’ve got some ... some papers Rory left with me. I did mean to send them to your father, but to be honest I lost track of them, and then didn’t find them again until mum died and I was clearing stuff out ... I don’t suppose it’s anything ... you know, that the family needs, is it?’
I scratched my head. ‘Dad has all Rory’s papers, I think.’
‘It’s just old poems and notes; that sort of thing.’ She started the car; we put our belts on. She took a pair of glasses from her shoulder bag. ‘All a bit confusing, really.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I suppose dad might want a look at them. Wouldn’t mind looking at them myself, come to think of it.’
‘Do you want to pick them up now?’ She looked at me, her round face soft-looking in the orange blush of the sodium vapour. Her hair was like a curly halo. ‘It isn’t far.’
‘Yeah, okay. I guess so.’
I watched her face. She smiled as we pulled away. ‘You sound just like Rory sometimes.’
Janice Rae was the last person known to have seen Uncle Rory, one evening in Glasgow. Rory had been staying with friends in London for the previous fortnight. He had talked to his agent and seen some television people about doing some travel series, but whatever deal he’d been trying to set up with the BBC, it had fallen through.
At the time Rory was still - just - living off Traps, which was attracting a trickle of money even then, when he’d spent everything he’d got for later travel books and occasional articles. He was sharing a flat with an old pal called Andy Nichol who worked in local government; according to Andy, Rory had moped around their flat for a couple of days, shut in his room mostly, supposedly writing, then when Andy had come back from work one day, Rory had asked if he could borrow Andy’s motorbike for the night. Andy had given him the keys, and Rory had set off; he’d stopped briefly at Janice Rae’s mum’s place, and said something about having an idea; some way of saving the project he’d been working on; adding some new ingredient.
He’d given Janice the folder that she now wanted to give me, eight years later, and then rode off into the sunset, never to be seen again.
Her flat was on Crow Road, not all that far away, down near Jordanhill. As she showed me into the place, down a hall lined with old movie posters, I asked her if she’d ever heard Grandma Margot use the saying: away the Crow Road (or the Craw Rod, if she was being especially broad-accented that day). It meant dying; being dead. ‘Aye, he’s away the crow road,’ meant ‘He’s dead.’
Janice looked away from me when I said those words, mumbled about the papers and went to get them.
Idiot, I told myself. I stood in the living room; it was full of heavy old furniture that looked as though it belonged somewhere else, and some limited edition modern prints. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of Janice Rae’s dead mother, and another of her daughter Marion and her husband. Marion was a police-woman in Aberdeen. I shook my head, grinning and feeling very old and very young at once.
‘Here,’ Aunt Janice said. She handed me a cardboard folder stuffed with loose papers. On the spine it said CR in black felt-tip. The folder was burgundy but the spine was faded to grey.
‘CR?’ I said.
‘Crow Road,’ Janice said quietly, looking down at the folder in my hands.
I wasn’t sure what to say. While I was still thinking, she looked up, bright-eyed, glanced around at the walls of the flat and shrugged. ‘Yeah; I know. Sentimental of me, eh?’ She smiled.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s ... it’s -’ The words sweet and nice suggested themselves, but didn’t seem right. ‘- fitting. I guess.’ I stuck the folder under my arm, cleared my throat. ‘Well ...’ I said.
She had taken off her jacket; she wore a blouse and cords. She shrugged. ‘Would you like some coffee? Something stronger?’
‘Umm ...’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘Well ... aren’t you tired?’
‘No,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I usually read way past this time of night. Stay; have some whisky.’
She took my jacket, poured me a whisky.
I sat down on a huge, surprisingly firm old couch. It looked like brown leather, but any smell it had had was gone. I held the whisky glass up. ‘Won’t you?’ I said. This is like playing chess, I thought.
‘Well, not if I have to drive you home, Prentice.’
‘Oh ... I could ... walk,’ I smiled bravely. ‘Can’t be more than three or four miles. Less than an hour. You’d lend me a brolly, wouldn’t you? Or there might be a night bus. Please; have a whisky; sit down, make yourself at home.’
She laughed. ‘Okay, okay.’ She went to the table where the bottles were, poured herself a whisky. Somewhere in the distance, that sound of the city: a siren warbling.
‘Stay here, if you like,’ she said, slowly putting the top back on the bottle. She turned, leaning back against the table, drinking from her glass, looking down at me. ‘That’s if you want to ... I don’t want you to think I’m seducing you or anything.’
‘Shit,’ I said, putting my glass down on a rather over-designed coffee table. I put my hands on my hips (which is rather an unnatural thing to do when you’re sitting down, but what the hell). ‘I was kinda hoping you were, actually.’
She looked at me, then gave a single convulsive laugh, and right until then I think it might still have gone either way, but she stood there, her back to the table, set her glass down upon its polished surface, put her hands behind her back, and looked down, her head forward and a little to the left. Her weight was on her left leg; her right leg was relaxed, knee bent in slightly towards the left. I could see she was smiling.
I knew I’d seen that stance before, and even as I was getting up from the couch to go over to her I realised she was standing just the way Garbo does in Queen Christina, during the Inn sequence, when she’s sharing the best room with John Gilbert, playing the Spanish ambassador who doesn’t realise until that point the disguised Garbo is a woman, not a man. She starts to take her clothes off eventually, and gets down to her shirt; then Gilbert looks round, does a double take and looks back; and she’s standing just like that, and he knows.
It had - I recalled, even as I went over to her - been one of Uncle Rory’s favourite old films.
It was one of those wonderful first nights when you never really do more than drowse between bouts of love-making, and even when you do think no more; that’s it, finito ... you still have to say good-night, which itself means a kiss, and a hug; and each touch begets another touch more sweet, and the kiss on the cheek or neck moves to the lips, the lips open, the tongues meet ... so every touch becomes a caress, each caress an embrace, and every embrace another coupling.
She turned to me, during that night, and said, ‘Prentice?’
‘Mm-hmm?’
‘Do you think Rory’s ... away the crow road? Do you think he’s dead?’
I turned on my side, stroked her flank, smoothing my hand from thigh to shoulder, then back. ‘I really don’t know,’ I admitted.
She took my hand, kissed it. ‘I used to think, sometimes, that he must be dead, because otherwise he’d have been in touch. But I don’t know.’ There was just enough light seeping in past the curtains to let me see her head shaking. ‘I don’t know, because people sometimes do things you’d never have thought they would ever do.’ Her voice broke, and her head turned suddenly; she pushed her face into the bedclothes; I moved over to hold her, just to comfort her; but she kissed, hard, and climbed on top of me.
I had, up until that point, been performing an agonising re-appraisal of the indignant signals of total, quivering, painful exhaustion flooding in from every major muscle I possessed. My body’s equivalent of the Chief Engineer was screaming down the intercom that the system just wouldn’t take any more punishment, Jim, and there was no doubt that I really should have been pulling out and power
ing down just then ...
But, on the other hand, what the heck.
‘ “... all your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squal-adoptions, combine and coalesce, to one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux; there we are. If it has any final signal, the universe says simply, but with every possible complication, ‘Existence,’ and it neither pressures us, nor draws us out, except as we allow. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos ... and I am.” ’
Her voice was sleepy; the hand that had been quietly ruffling my hair had now gone limp. The litany subsided, the quiet words not echoing in the dark room.
Uncle Rory’s words, apparently. At first just thought; a mantra to delay ejaculation - a slightly more civilised, if narcissistic, alternative to brother Lewis’s thoughts about constructing MFI kitchen units. Then, once, she had asked him what he thought of when they made love (and smoothed over his protestations of eternal in-head fidelity) to discover that - purely to prolong her pleasure - he sometimes recited a piece of his own poetry to himself. He was persuaded to repeat it, for her, and it became a shared ritual.
‘Always ... always liked that,’ she said quietly, shifting a little to fit her body to mine. ‘Always...’
‘Hmm,’ I said, and felt her breathing alter. ‘Good-night, Janice,’ I whispered.
‘Night, Rore,’ she murmured.
I wasn’t sure what to feel. Eventually I yawned, pulled the duvet over the two of us, and smiled into the darkness.
I went to sleep wondering what on earth had possessed Uncle Rory to write a miserable, incomprehensible line ‘your finery and squal-adoptions’.