The Crow Road

"Och, no; you must stay," Margot McHoan said, at breakfast the next morning. They were all sat round the big table; Mary with a towel round her head, looking prettily embarrassed, her friend Sheena, big-boned, blonde and apple-cheeked, happily wolfing down sausage and eggs, Fiona and Ke

"Oh, Mrs McHoan, we couldn't," Mary said, looking down at the table. She had only nibbled at her toast.

"Nonsense, child," Margot said, pouring Rory another glass of milk and smoothing the Herald on the table in front of her. "You're both very welcome to stay, aren't they?" She looked round her three children.

"Certainly," Fiona said. She had already found Sheena to be a kindred spirit when it came to Rock "n Roll, which might provide her with a valuable ally when it came to displacing dad's folk songs and Ke

"Of course." Ke

"Muuuum, they've forgotten to put the wee boat in this box," Rory complained, arm deep in the Sugar Smacks packet, face dark with frustration and ire.

"Just keep looking, dear," Margot said patently, then looked back at the two girls. "Aye; stay by all means, the two of you. This big house needs filling up, and if you feel guilty you can always help with a bit of decorating, if there's any wet days, and if my husband gets round to it. Fair enough?"

Ke

"That's awful kind, Mrs McHoan," Sheena said, wiping her plate with a bit of fried bread. "Are you sure?"

Totally," Margot said. "Your parents on the phone?"

"Mine are, Mrs McHoan," Mary said, glancing up.

"Good," Margot said. "We'll call them, tell them you'll be here, all right?"

"Oh, that's awfully nice of you, Mrs McHoan," Mary said, and flickered a wee nervous smile at the older woman. Ke

He drove the two girls round the area in the Humber when his dad wasn't using it; sometimes Fiona came too. The summer days were long and warm; they walked in the forests south of Gallanach, and in the hills above Lochgair. A puffer captain let them travel through the Crinan canal on his boat, and they took the family dory puttering over to Otter Ferry for lunch one day, over the smooth waters of Lower Loch Fyne, one windless day when the smoke rose straight, and cormorants stood on exposed rocks, wings held open like cloaks to the warm air, and seals popped up, black cones of blubber with surprised-looking faces, as the old open boat droned slowly past.

There was a dance on in Gallanach Town Hall that Saturday, the day before the two girls were due to return to Glasgow; Ke

There is a loch in the hills above Lochgair; Loch Glashan, reservoir for the small hydro power station in the village. Matthew McHoan's friend, Hector Cardie, a Forestry Commission manager, kept a rowing boat on the loch, and the McHoans had permission to use the boat, to fish the waters.

Rory was bored. He was so bored he was actually looking forward to school starting again next week. Back in the spring, he had hoped that Ken being back home would make the summer holidays fun, but it hadn't worked out that way; Ken was either up in Glasgow seeing that Mary girl, or she was here, and they were together all the time and didn't want him around.

He had been in the garden, throwing dry clods of earth at some old model tanks; the clouds of dust the clods made when they hit the hard, baked earth looked just like proper explosions. But then his mum had chased him out because the dust was getting the washing dirty. He hadn't found anybody else around to play with in the village, so he'd watched a couple of trains pass on the railway line. One was a diesel, which was quite exciting, but he'd soon got bored there, too; he walked up the track by the river, up to the dam. It was very warm and still. The waters of the loch were like a mirror.

He walked along the path between the plantation and the shore of the loch, looking for interesting stuff. But you usually only found that sort of thing down at the big loch. There was a rowing boat out in the middle of the little loch, but he couldn't see anybody in it. He was ba

He sat down in the grass, took out a little die-cast model of a Gloster Javelin, and played with it for a while, pretending he was a camera, tracking the plane through the grass and over the pebbles and rocks by the loch side. He lay back in the grass, looked at the blue sky, and closed his eyes for a long time, soaking up the pinkness behind his eyelids and pretending he was a lion lying tawny and sated under the African sun, or a sleepy-eyed tiger basking on some rock high over a wide Indian plain. Then he opened his eyes again and looked around, at a world gone grey, until that effect wore off. He looked down at the shore; little waves were lapping rhythmically at the stones.

He watched the wavelets for a while. They were very regular. He looked along the nearby stretch of shore. The waves — hardly noticeable, but there if you looked — were coming ashore all along the lochside. He followed the line they seemed to indicate, out to the little rowing boat near the middle of the loch. Now he thought about it, it was very odd that there was nobody in the boat. It was moored; he could see the wee white buoy it was tied to. But there was nobody visible in the boat.

The more carefully he looked, the more certain he became that it was the rowing boat that all these little, rhythmic waves were coming from. Hadn't Ken and Mary been going fishing today? He had thought they'd meant sea-fishing, in Loch Fyne, but maybe he hadn't been paying attention. What if they had been fishing from the rowing boat and fallen overboard and both been drowned? Maybe that was why the boat was empty! He sca

Anyway, what was making the boat make those waves?

He wasn't sure, but he thought he could see the boat moving, very slightly; rocking to and fro. Maybe it was a fish, flopping about in the bottom.

Then he thought he heard a cry, like a bird, or maybe a woman. It made him shiver, despite the heat. The boat seemed to stop rocking, then moved quite a lot, and then went totally still. The little waves went on, then a few slightly bigger, less regular ones lapped ashore, then the water went still, and was as flat as a pane of glass.

A gull, a white scrap across the calm sky, flapped lazily just above the blue loch; it made to land on the prow of the little rowing boat, then at the last second, even as its feet were about to touch, it suddenly burst up into the sky again, all panic and white feathers, and its calls sounded over the flat water as it flapped away.