"Mind if I ask what we're doing here?" I asked. Behind and to our left, the lights of Gallanach were steady orange, like all British towns, forever warning the inhabitants to proceed with caution.
Ash sighed, her head dropped a little. She nodded down, at the ground we stood upon. "Thought you might know what this is, Prentice."
I looked down. "It's a wee lump of ground," I said. Ash looked at me. "All right," I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I'd have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). "I don't know. What is it?"
Ash bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.
This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice," she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. "When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?"
She looked at me. I nodded. "Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a Herald of Free Enterprise."
"Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from," Ash said, looking to the west again. "But when it got here they didn't need it, so they dumped it —»
"Here?" I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. "Always here?"
"That's what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn," Ash said. "He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later." (Ashley pronounced the word "cran', in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn't supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.
"'Hen, he'd say, 'There's aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.»
I watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. "I never forgot that; I'd come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was 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 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 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 membership of the private health club," Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.