"Prentice, what is going on between you and Kenneth?" I remembered the day, six months earlier, when I had pushed old Margot out of the house and through the courtyard, past the outhouses and down the drive under the trees towards the loch and the sea. I lifted the left trainer onto the right, and rubbed without enthusiasm at the black herring-bone pattern the oily wheel had left. It struck me that on the toe of the right one there was still discernible the tyre mark from Grandma Margot's wheelchair. My Aunt Antonia - a ball of pink-rinse hair above the bulk of her black coat, like candy floss stuck upon a hearse - patted my leather jacket. I wriggled in my seat, pulled my jeans down to cover my oddly-packaged ankles. So I peered down at them in the crematorium they looked crumpled and tea-stained on the severe black granite of the chapel floor. I'd hauled my white trainers out of the bag, tried one Nike on and one boot (unlaced) I'd stood in front of the tilted full-length mirror, shivering, my breath going out in clouds, while the floorboards creaked and a smell of cooking bacon and burned toast insinuated its way up from the kitchen. The last funeral I'd been to here - also the first funeral I'd ever been to - this gear had all seemed pretty appropriate, but now I was pondering the propriety of the Docs, the 501s and the black biker's jacket. Maybe it was because they were matt finish… I'd intended to wear the black pair under my nine-eye Docs with the twin ankle buckles, but suddenly I had felt that the boots were wrong. I'd shivered, and sat on the bed, looking at two pairs of socks one black, one white. I'd pulled on a pair of black underpants I'd brought especially from Glasgow, a white shirt (fresh from Marks and Sparks, the pack-lines still ridging the cold crisp cotton) and my black 501s. There had been ice inside the small dormer window, obscuring the view over Gallanach in a crystalline mist. The floorboards had creaked and my breath had smoked. ![]() I had dressed in black that morning, in the cold high room of my aunt and uncle's house. "Prentice!" My Aunt Antonia, sitting next to me, with Uncle Hamish snoring mellifluously on her other side, tapped my sleeve and pointed at my feet as she murmured my name. How her moles would be itching today if she was somehow suddenly reborn! In that movement and that moment, I felt a pang of loss that did not entirely belong to my recently departed grandmother, yet was connected with her memory. The UFO dipped briefly to one side as she whispered something to my father. To my father's right my mother sat, upright and trim, neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer. It was the first time in years I'd seen him without his Walkman, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable, fiddling with his single earring. My younger brother, James, sat to my father's left. I didn't think she had done it to upset him doubtless she had simply liked the tune, and had not anticipated the effect its non-secular nature might have on her eldest son. Probably he was annoyed that my grandmother had chosen religious music for her funeral ceremony. His ears were moving in a slow, oscillatory manner, rather in the way John Wayne's shoulders moved when he walked my father was grinding his teeth. His broad, greying-brown head was massive above his tweed jacket (a black arm-band was his concession to the solemnity of the occasion). ![]() I looked at my father, sitting two rows away in the front line of seats in the cold, echoing chapel. ![]() I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach. Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Otherwise circulated in any form of binding orĬover other than that in which it is publishedĪnd without a similar condition including thisĬondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Written permission of the publisher, nor be Stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any No part of this publication may be reproduced, The right of Iain Banks to be identified asĪll characters in this publication are ficticiousĪnd any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, First published in Great Britain by Scribners
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