when that shaven-sided, crop-haired head swivelled and lowered, her calm face turning this way. I saw those eyes, shaded by her thick and shockingly black brows, blink slowly; she looked at me.
Small smile, and those diamond eyes piercing, marking me.
Then the gaze removed, refixed, directed somewhere else, once more facing the front. My neck felt un-oiled as I turned away, blasted and raddled by the urge of that directed consideration.
Verity Walker. Eating my heart out. Consuming my soul.
‘And dad’s mole?’
‘Here,’ Grandma Margot said, tapping her left shoulder. She laughed a little as we went along the path between the shore and the trees. ‘That one itches fairly often.’
‘And mine?’ I asked, plodding after the wheelchair. I’d taken my biker’s jacket off and it lay now on my gran’s lap.
She looked up at me, her expression unreadable. ‘Here.’ She patted her tummy, looked forward again. ‘Pivotal, wouldn’t you say, Prentice?’
‘Ha,’ I said, still trying to sound non-committal. ‘Could be. What about Uncle Hamish? Where’s he at?’
‘Knee,’ she said, tapping the plaster on her leg.
‘How is your leg, gran?’
‘Fine,’ she said tetchily. ‘Plaster comes off next week. Can’t happen soon enough.’
The wheels of the chair sighed through the grass on either side of the narrow path. I remembered something I’d been meaning to ask.
‘What were you doing up that tree anyway, gran?’
‘Trying to saw a branch off.’
‘What for?’
‘To stop those damn squirrels using it as a diving board to get to my bird table, that’s what for.’ She used her stick to whack a crumpled drinking-yoghurt bottle off the path and into the water.
‘You could have asked somebody else.’
‘I’m not totally incapable, Prentice. I’d have been all right if that hoodie hadn’t started dive-bombing me; ungrateful wretch.’
‘Oh, it was a bird’s fault, was it?’ I had a mental picture of some beetle-eyed carrion crow swooping on my gran, knocking her off her ladder. Maybe it had seen The Omen.
‘Yes, it was.’ Grandma Margot twisted in her wheelchair and raised both her stick and her voice. ‘And a few years ago I’d only have been bruised, as well. Brittle bones are one of the things that make getting old such a damn nuisance, too, especially if you’re a woman.’ She nodded brusquely. ‘So think yourself lucky.’
‘Okay,’ I smiled.
‘Damn birds,’ she muttered, glaring at a stand of ash trees on the edge of the plantation with such severity that I half expected to hear a parliament of crows cry out in answer. ‘Ach well,’ she shrugged. ‘Let’s head back to the house; I need to go.’
‘Right you are,’ I said, and wheeled the chair around. Grandma Margot lit another cigarette.
‘That branch is still there, by the way.’
‘I’ll deal with it.’
‘Good lad.’
A lark trilled, high overhead.
I wheeled my gran back along the path by the water, over the main road and up the gravel drive, through the sunlit cobbled courtyard towards the tall house with the crow-stepped gables.
I cut the offending branch down that afternoon, before I went back to Gallanach, to my Uncle Hamish’s house, for tea. My dad arrived while I was up the ladder, sawing away at the sappy oak and swatting at flies. He stopped and looked at me when he got out of the Audi, then he disappeared into the house. I kept on sawing.
My great-great-great grandfather, Stewart McHoan, was buried in a coffin made from black glass by the craftsmen he had commanded in his capacity as manager of the Gallanach Glass Works (a post now filled by my Uncle Hamish). Grandma Margot had gone for the more conventional wooden model; it slid away into the wall as Bach’s Mass reached one of its choral climaxes. A wood-fronted door slid back up to block the hole the coffin had disappeared into, then a little purple curtain lowered itself over the doorway.
The head honcho of the undertakers supervised us as we all formed up for what was obviously the important and formal business of Leaving The Chapel. My father and mother left first. ‘I told you we sat in the wrong place, Tone,’ I heard my Uncle Hamish whisper behind me. (Aunt Tone just went ‘Ssh!’)
Outside it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a little damp. I could smell leaves being burned somewhere. The view down the crematorium’s birch-lined drive led towards the town and the ocean. In the distance, through the haze, North Jura was dark pastel and flat-looking on the unruffled grey blanket of sea. I looked around; dark-dressed people were everywhere amongst the parked cars, talking