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Mum and I had started going through dad's diaries. Some were pocket size, some
were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They
went back to when he'd been sixteen. I'd suggested Mum read them first in case
there was anything embarrassing in them, though
I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren't the stuff of scandal,
anyway; the entries we'd sampled when we first discovered them in the box at
the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just
appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who
he'd met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it.
The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he'd kept those
in the A4 pads.
It was at the bottom of the box containing dad's diaries, in an old
presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I
found Rory's diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad
must have filed them separately from the other papers.
I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory's diaries were even
more sparse -
and considerably more cryptic - than my father's, with too many initials and
acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week - and even month-long
gaps to form a reliable impression of
Rory's life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I'd tried to make
sense of Rory's diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my
birth (when Rory had been in London)
read:
K r; boy 8£. Prentis ?! ? M ok Eve, pub.
The entry for the next day read: "vho" in shaky writing, and that was all.
"ho" and "vho" (or
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt (140 of
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file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt
sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties
the night before, and
I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant
Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously, ok was itself (its opposite was nsg,
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
which stood for Not So Good; he'd spelled it out the first time he'd used it,
following a "48hr h.o." after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant
"rang"; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.
I found a few mentions of "CR" - I even recognised some of the notes I'd read
the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before
transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any
new answers.
The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything,
but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary,
the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:
JUST USE IT!
. . . a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in
very thin felt-
tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had
where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or
letters, but to obliterate them. It read:
show Hlvng pty wi C?" (whoops): 2 close??
The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black
felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and
by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that
the first letter had been an F and the second an L.
F and L. Those abbrevations didn't turn up anywhere else in Rory's notes for
either Crow Road or anything else that I knew of. Rory never crossed stuff
right out; he only ever put a line through it.
Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that
"whoops"? And what was too close to what?
found myself cursing Uncle Rory's inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes
meant Fergus (aka
Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known
in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the
diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he - mentioned on the rare occasions
when he came back to visit from Oz - was LW, more usually.
Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little,
thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad's study, trying to make sense of
it all, and failing, I'd fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms,
the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all
swirling round in front of me even after I'd put the light out and closed my
eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and - by my
reading - been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex
of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not
comprehend.
I found one thing which - after a little puzzled thought - I could comprehend,
but which I
hadn't been expecting, in Uncle Rory's 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back
cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper
Lifeboat flag, without its pin.
The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.
*
In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the
atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples,
more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always
stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of
incense in the air. . . I'd just sit there or a while, listening but not
listening, seeing but not seeing, there ut not there, and finding solace in
the hushed commerce of other people's belief, absorbed in the comings and
goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of
faith. A father would approach me, now and again . . . but I'd tell him
I was just browsing I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long
tweed coat that had been my father's. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full
of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes
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