Then there was the poetry:

… We know this life

is merely a succession

of endless brutal images,

punctuated,

for effect,

by relative troughs

whose gutsy heaves

at first disguised

but power us to the next disgrace.

"Not applying for a job with Hallmark cards, then," I muttered to myself, sipping at my coffee.

But I kept on reading.

My head wasn't really in the right state for assimilating all this stuff, but as far as I could gather, Uncle Rory had been trying for years to come up with something Creative (his capital, his italics). Something that would establish him as a Writer: script-writer, poet, lyricist for a rock band, novelist, playwright… it didn't matter. Being recognised for having kept a glorified diary while wandering through India when he was young and naïve wasn't enough for him. It wasn't serious. This work, Crow Road, would be Serious. It would be about Life and Death and Treachery and Betrayal and Love and Death and Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism. It would be about Scotland, (or India, or an "Erewhon???) and the Working Class and Exploitation and Action, and there would be characters in the work who would represent all of these things, and the working out of the story would itself prove the Subjectivity of Truth.

… There were pages of that sort of stuff.

There were also pages of poems forced into some sort of rhyming structure so that they might conceivably have worked as songs, several paragraphs of references to critical works (Barthes, especially; Death of the Author! shouted what looked like a head-over one entire page of notes devoted to ideas about a loose-leaf novel/poem?? There were location notes for a film and sheets physical appearance of the characters and the sort of actors who might play them, these surrounded by doodles, mazes and uninspired drawings of faces. There was a list of bands that might be interested in doing an album (a musical tone-scale running all the way from Yes to Genesis), and a sheaf of sketches for the sets in a stage presentation. What there wasn't was any indication whatsoever that Rory had actually written any part of this great work. The only things that might have been classed as narrative were the poems, and they didn't seem to have anything to do with each other, apart from the fact a lot of them seemed to be vaguely about Death, or Love. Tenuous, was the word that came to mind.

I looked in the folder again to see if I'd missed anything.

I had. There was another small sheet of blue writing paper, in Janice Rae's hand. "Prentice — had a look at this — " (then the word "while', crossed out heavily, followed by the word "before', also nearly obliterated) " — Can't find any more; R had another folder. (?) If you find it and work out what it's all about, let me know; he said there was something secret buried in it. (Gallanach)?"

I bobbled my head from side to side. "Gallanach?" I said, in a silly high-pitched voice, as though quoting. I stretched, grunting with pain as my leg muscles extracted their revenge for having been ignored twelve hours earlier.

I reached for my coffee, but it was cold.

"Dear God, we beseech ye, visit the reactive wrath of their own foulness upon those nasty wee buggers in the Khmer Rouge in general, and upon their torturers, and their leader Pol Pot, in particular; may each iota of pain they have inflicted on the people of their country — heathen or not — rebound upon their central nervous system with all the agony they originally inflicted upon their victims. Also, Lord God, we ask that you remember the dark deeds of any communistic so-called-interrogators, in this time of great upheaval in eastern Europe; we know that you will not forget their crimes when their day of reckoning comes, and their guttural, Slavic voices cry out to ye for mercy, and ye reward them with all the compassion they ever showed to those unfortunate souls delivered unto them. Prentice?"

I jumped. I'd almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on. I opened my eyes. The Tree was looking expectantly at me.

"Oh," I said. "Umm… I'd just like to put in a word for Salman Rushdie. Or at least take one out for old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini… " I looked at Uncle Hamish, who was making quiet signals that I should clasp my hands and close my eyes. We were in the front lounge of Uncle Hamish and Aunt Tone's Victorian villa in the attractive Gallanach suburbette of Ballymeanoch, facing each other over a card table. I closed my eyes.

"Ah," I said. "Dear God, we pray that as well as suffering whatever part of the general physical unpleasantness involved in the Iran-Iraq war you may judge to be rightly his, you can find a spare area in his suffering, er, anti-create, for Mr R. Khomeini, late of Tehran and Qom, to experience at least some of the, umm, despair and continual worry currently being undergone by the novelist Mr S Rushdie, of Bombay and London, heathen and smart-alec though he may well be. Amen."

"Amen," echoed Uncle H. I opened my eyes. Uncle Hamish was already rising from his sear, looking positively twinkly with health and good cheer. He rubbed his hands. "Very good," he said, moving in that oddly stiff and creaky way of his for the door. "Let us repair for some repast," he chuckled as he held the door open for me. "I believe Antonia has prepared something called Cod Creole." He sniffed the fishy air in the hall; we crossed to the dining room.

"Not Lobster Creole? Or Kid?" I inquired.

But I don't think Uncle Hamish heard me. He was humming something sombre and looking pleased with himself.

Uncle H has developed a fascinating heresy based on the idea that exactly what you did to other people while you were alive gets done right back to you once you're dead. Torturers die — in agony — hundreds, maybe thousands of times, before their ravaged souls are finally dropped from the jaws of a fearsome and vengeful God. Those who authorise the dreadful deeds carried out by the torturers (or whoever) also share whatever proportion of this retrospective agony the deity — or his angelic cost-benefit-calculating representatives — deem they deserve. Having quizzed The Tree on the details of this scheme, it would appear that said burden of transferred pain is debited from the account of the guy at — or rather wielding — the sharp end of the original action, which seems only fair, I suppose.

Apparently Uncle Hamish is awaiting divine inspiration on the knotty problem of whether the good things one has accomplished in one's life are also re-lived from the other side (as it were), or simply subtracted from the nasty stuff. At the moment he seems to be veering towards the idea that if you did more good than bad during your life you go straight to Heaven, an arrangement which at least processes the merit of simplicity; the rest sounds like something dreamt up by a vindictive bureaucrat on acid while closely inspecting something Hieronymus Bosch painted on one of his bleak but imaginative days.

Still, it has its attractions.

Aunt Tone and the family's two children, Josh and Becky, and Becky's infant daughter, Iona, were already in the dining room, filling it with bustle and chat.

"Said your prayers?" Aunt Tone said brightly, depositing a steaming dish of potatoes on the table.

"Thank you, yes," Hamish replied. My uncle worships alone these days, and has done ever since his son left home to become a devout Capitalist (neither his wife nor his daughter had ever bothered with my Uncle's unique brand of condemnationist Christianity; as a rule, the McHoan women, whether so by blood or marriage, have displayed a marked reluctance to take their men-folk's passions seriously, at least outside the bedroom). I think that was why Uncle Hamish had been so delighted when I'd come to stay with the family, and also — perhaps — why he was in no hurry to help effect a reconciliation between me and my father.