Whit

by Iain Banks

  CHAPTER SIX

  The day after the great storm, Aasni and Zhobelia scraped my Grandfather clean of tea and lard and took him to the farm of Mr Eoin McIlone, the free-thinker who had offered shelter to the sisters before. On this occasion he also offered succour to their storm-tossed foundling, for whom he made up the bed in what he called his spare room, though in truth it was more like a study or even a library; the walls were lined with mismatched bookcases and rickety shelving nailed to the wooden walls, all supporting Mr McIlone's considerable collection of books on philosophy, politics, theology and radical thought.

  My Grandfather continued to drift in and out of something between a fever and a coma for most of the next few days, rambling incoherently and moaning. The local doctor had been summoned and had judged Grandfather too ill to move. He had taken the zhlonjiz poultice off my Grandfather's head and had applied a proper dressing, which Aasni had removed and replaced with a fresh poultice the instant she heard the doctor's car start up again. It took Grandfather some days to come fully round. The name of Mr McIlone's farm was Luskentyre.

  When my Grandfather did eventually become entirely conscious and lucid and sat up in the bed in his book-lined room and was asked what his name was, he told his two dusky rescuers that he had been reborn, and so had no name. Hearing that he had muttered the name 'Salvador' during the first night, he suggested this was a sign from God to take that name, and asked his rescuers to address him so.

  He then told the sisters of a canvas grip he had possessed which was all he wished to salvage from his past life. This canvas bag was most important to him, as was proved by the fact that while he could remember nothing else from the day of the storm, he knew that he had been carrying the canvas bag and that everything he valued had been inside it. He implored Aasni and Zhobelia to search the beaches and rocks around the place he had been found for the grip, and to bring it to him unopened if they did.

  They duly searched, while my Grandfather recovered - often talking at some length about his revelations with Mr McIlone. Mr McIlone was an atheist, but he was still fascinated by my Grandfather's revelatory experience, even if he ascribed it to the effects of being near death, losing a lot of blood and possibly being affected by whatever strange herbs, liniments and potions were contained in the zhlonjiz poultice. Mr McIlone suggested that my Grandfather make use of the books on the shelves around him if he wanted to think further about his apparently religious experience, and this Salvador duly did, diffidently at first.

  The sisters reported back to say they had found many things washed ashore, but no canvas grip. Before he was really well enough, Salvador struggled out of bed and joined them in the search, and the three of them scoured the beaches, coves, islets, inlets and rock pools of the coast. As the search went on, my Grandfather expounded upon his revelations with increasing force and conviction and in greater and greater detail. What the sisters understood, with their imperfect English and lack of a common cultural and religious background, they found both impressive and interesting.

  Mr McIlone loaned Salvador an old army ridge-pole tent and he pitched it in the remains of an old seaweed processing factory a mile along the coast, not far from where Grandfather had been washed ashore. The tumbledown seaweed plant had become the centre of a highly complicated and acrimonious legal dispute before the war and so there was nobody to turn Grandfather and the sisters off the land; gradually they made the old factory their base and then their home. Meanwhile Aasni and Zhobelia continued to run their travelling shop business and Salvador roamed the shoreline further and further in each direction in the shortening daylight hours, still searching for the canvas grip. In the evenings, while the wind moaned through the old building and their paraffin lamps guttered in the draughts which swept the rooms they had refurbished in the factory offices, Salvador took to writing down the revelations the Creator had visited upon him and branded into his brain, while the livid mark on his forehead slowly faded to leave a V-shaped white indentation and his hair grew in prematurely white.

  Often at his elbow were books borrowed from Mr McIlone's library, where he had begun his studies and was still welcome to pursue them. Grandfather had decided to work his way through every book and tract and pamphlet in Mr McIlone's spare room, a task he was accomplishing with voracious expedition as he used their insights and teachings to further refine his own.

  Exactly when Grandfather and the Asis sisters embarked upon the more intimate aspect of their tripartite relationship is not recorded; Grandmother Aasni and Great-aunt Zhobelia were always coy about the details concerning which one took him to their bosom first, or whether they shared him from the start. Whether there was any acrimony over this (especially by the professed standard of the time) unorthodox sexual arrangement was not something they ever talked about. For his part, when asked about such matters Salvador has always assumed an air of regretful silence, implying that while of course he believes in openness and in the unashamed, celebrative sanctity of the bodily communing that is physical love, he is first and foremost a gentleman, and so forsworn from confiding anything on the subject without the express permission of both sisters (which, given that my grandmother Aasni died some years ago, is unlikely to be given unless it is at least partially from beyond the grave).

  Salvador found manual work on Mr McIlone's farm to help himself and the sisters through the next year; meanwhile he continued to search and to write, with gradually less and more conviction respectively as time went by.

  * * *

  It took me some time to fall asleep after the car-wagon train restarted its journey; I suppose I was still excited after the whole business of stopping the train and boarding it.

  The car I was in smelled strongly of plastic; the dashboard and much of the other trim was plastic and there were transparent plastic covers over the seats. I had taken out my compact Sitting Board in case I wanted to sit rather than lie down, then stowed my kit-bag in the front footwell and got into the back seat where there was more room. Judging that it might be rather noisy if I was trying to sleep, I had taken the plastic cover off the back seat and left it folded on the driver's seat, then I'd settled down for the night, but had not been able to sleep.

  I felt uncomfortable just being in the car at all; it smelled so new and seemed somehow designed to be so archetypically bland that a true Luskentyrian could hardly feel otherwise. However my delight at having secured such an Interstitial mode of transport helped to ameliorate the effects of the car's toxic banality.

  While I was still lying there trying to sleep, I thought of my cousin Morag, the apostate, and recalled once sitting with her on the platform of the Deivoxiphone, in the warm sunlight of a summer four years ago, when she was the age I am now and I was fifteen.

  The Deivoxiphone was a piece of army surplus which was there at the farm before the Order took up residence; Mrs Woodbean - the lady who gifted the estate to us - had had a brother who collected strange vehicles and pieces of equipment and stored them at the farm (he was killed at a meeting of like-minded enthusiasts in Perthshire when a jeep he was driving too exuberantly turned over). One of the things he collected was a bizarre-looking device on a trailer which had been used briefly during the Blitz at the start of the Second World War. The instrument consisted of what appeared to be a number of gigantic fluted listening trumpets. Appearances in this case were not deceptive, for that was exactly what the apparatus was: a huge artificial ear for pointing at the skies and trying to hear German bombers before they arrived overhead. A sort of poor-man's radar, in other words, and from the little I have heard concerning their efficacy, about as useful as one might imagine.

  When I was nine I thought this piece of junk was just the most wonderful mechanism on God's earth, and somehow got it into my head that it was important to rescue the thing from the paddock where it was being slowly submerged in weeds, and set it up somewhere. My Grandfather had been dubious, thinking the device had too much of an aura of clutter about it, but he could refuse
me nothing, and so he'd had the thing taken off its trailer and hoisted up onto a wooden platform built especially on top of the old circular barn at the back of the farm. Grandfather named it the Deivoxiphone.

  I did not, of course, believe that we would literally be able to hear the voice of God any better using this extraordinary contraption, but as a symbol of our ideals I thought it was powerful and important (I was going through a serious stage at that age and objects and stories which seemed symbolic meant a lot to me).

  Of course, as soon as the instrument had been raised to its position of prominence I lost all interest in it, but there it sat, perched on its octagonal wooden rostrum to the south of the farm, aimed at the heavens like an olive-green multi-barrel blunderbuss. There was enough space on the decking around it for sunbathing or just sitting looking out over the gardens, woods and distant hills, and that was where I'd sat, legs dangling over the platform edge, arms flat on the platform's lower rail, four years earlier, talking to Morag.

  'The Pendicles of Collymoon,' she said.

  'What?'

  'The Pendicles of Collymoon,' she repeated. 'It's a place. I saw it on the map.'

  'Oh, Collymoon,' I said, placing the name. 'Yes; up near Buchlyvie.' Buchlyvie is a wee village about a dozen miles west from the Community, due south of Scotland's only lake, the Lake of Menteith. In between is Collymoon, a scatter of houses on the north shore of the Forth east of Flanders Moss. I'd noticed it on a map too, and had passed it once, on one of my long-range walks a couple of years earlier. It was a pleasant enough situation, but nothing special.

  Morag lay back in the sunlight, gazing up at the sky, or perhaps the Deivoxiphone's preposterous trumpets. 'Don't you think that's the most wonderful name, though? Don't you think that's just the most romantic name you ever heard?' (I shrugged.) 'I think it is,' she said, nodding emphatically. 'The Pendicles of Collymoon,' she said once more, with languorous grace. 'It sounds like a romantic novel, doesn't it?'

  'Probably a hopelessly slushy one,' I said.

  'Oh, you're so unromantic,' Morag said, slapping my hip.

  'I'm not,' I protested awkwardly, 'I just have a higher threshold of… romanticism, that's all.' I lay down on my side, one arm supporting my head, facing her. I envied Morag her shiningly auburn hair; it was a billowed halo on the sun-bleached planks around her head; a wild red river sparkling in the sun. 'It takes more than a few words on a map to make me go all gooey.'

  'Who's all gooey? I didn't say I was-all gooey.'

  'I bet you imagined some dishy guy coming from the Pendicles of Collymoon-'

  'Dishy?' Morag said, her face screwing up as she started giggling. 'Dishy?' she laughed. Her breasts shook under her T-shirt as she chortled. I felt my face go red.

  'Well, hunky, then,' I said, pinching her arm to no effect. 'Sorry if I'm not up with the latest slang; we live a sheltered life here.' I pinched harder.

  'Aow!' she said, and slapped my hand away. She raised her head up, turning on her side to face me. 'Anyway,' she smiled, 'what does make you romantic?' She made a show of looking about. 'Any of the guys here?'

  I looked away; now it was my turn to lie down on my back and stare up at the sky.

  'Not really,' I admitted, frowning.

  She was silent for a while, then she tapped me on the nose with one finger. 'Maybe you should get out more, cuz.'

  I took her finger in my hand and held it and turned to look at her, my heart suddenly beating wildly. She looked puzzled for a moment, as I gently squeezed her finger and gazed into her eyes, then gave a small, perhaps regretful smile. She took her finger gently from my grasp and said, 'Oooh…' very softly, nodding. 'Really?'

  I looked away, crossing my arms across my chest. 'Oh, I don't know,' I said miserably. I felt like crying all of a sudden, but refused to. 'I have so many feelings, so much… passion inside me, but it never really seems to come out the way it should. It's like…' I sighed, struggling to find the right words. 'It's like I feel I ought to be interested in boys, or if not in boys then in girls, but I almost have to force myself to feel anything. Sometimes I think I do feel something, like I'm normal, but then…' I shook my head. 'I do the laying on of hands, and it's like all that passion is… earthed then, like lightning.' I looked imploringly at her. 'Please don't say anything to anybody.'

  'Don't worry,' she said, and winked. 'You'd be amazed at just how discreet I am. But listen; love is all that matters. That's what I think. Love and romance. People get all worked up about things they think are unnatural or perverted, but the only thing that's really unnatural and perverted is thinking there's something wrong with people loving each other.' She patted my shoulder again. 'You do what you think's right, Is; it's your life.'

  I turned and looked at her. I still hadn't cried, but I had to sniff a bit, and blink to clear my eyes. I cleared my throat. 'It doesn't always feel that way,' I told her.

  'Well, look, whatever it is you feel, if it doesn't feel like sex, then it isn't. All right, you're feeling something, and maybe it is to do with love, but I don't think it's necessarily got that much to do with sex. If that's the way it is, don't try to make it into something it isn't just because you feel it's expected of you.'

  I thought about this, then said, 'Yes, but what about the Festival and everything?'

  She frowned, and for a while I was able to look into her handsome, firm face. Then she said, 'Oh,' and took a deep breath and lay back beside me, looking up at the strange device above us. 'Oh, yes, the Festival, and everything,' she said. 'There's that.'

  'There certainly is,' I said unhappily, lying back.

  * * *

  I sat in the plastic-fragranced car and watched the yellow lights of towns roll past in the distance; suddenly bright white lights strobing through the carriages ahead announced a train passing in the opposite direction. I ducked down to lie on the seat while the locomotive thundered past, then sat up again when the train had disappeared up the track heading north.

  A moment's dizziness afflicted me as I sat back up, the immediate memory of the white lights flickering through the sides of the wagons ahead seeming to reflect and multiply inside my mind as though my brain was transparent and my skull a mirror; my heart raced and my mouth tasted of something metallic.

  The moment passed and I returned to my thoughts of my cousin, realising, as though to sum up, that I had another reason for wanting Morag to come back to us; if she did not return and be our Guest of Honour at the Festival then I might be expected to step into the breach (not to mention having somebody step into mine, so to speak).

  That was not a prospect I relished.

  Sleep finally claimed me around the border, I would guess, and I dreamed of High Easter Offerance and our Community, and in my dream I was a ghost, floating through the farm's busy courtyard, calling to everybody I knew, but unheeded, unheard, somehow exiled.

  * * *

  I awoke with the dawn. I yawned and stretched, then peeked over the top of the windowsill. The train was passing through damp, flat countryside which I guessed was in the middle of England. I took a drink of water then snoozed some more. Later I sat up and watched the view while eating a light breakfast of cheese and pickle sandwiches and consulting my map of London.

  I detrained at a red signal north of Hornsey, climbed a low embankment, relieved myself behind a bush, then scrambled over a brick wall by a bridge and dropped onto a pavement in front of a surprised-looking Indian lady. I tipped my hat to her and strolled away, feeling distinctly pleased with myself at getting to London in such a sanctified but relatively effortless manner. I took it as a good omen that the first person I should encounter down south had been another person of sub-continental origin.

  It was mid-morning; half past eight according to the clock displayed in the corner of a programme playing multitudinously in a TV-shop window. Time for some Back Bussing.

  Back Bussing is a way of minimising travel expenditure which we have used on buses for decades and which can occasionally
be employed on other forms of transport. It consists of getting on the bus and asking the conductor - preferably in a strange, alien accent - for a ticket for a stop in the opposite direction one is travelling in. On being informed one is heading the wrong way, it is vital to look most confused and be extremely apologetic. Usually one will then be allowed to get off (almost invariably without paying) at the next stop along the route, from where one may begin to repeat the process until one arrives at one's destination.

  I waited at a bus stop on High Road, Wood Green, having selected a stop which served the route numbers I required. The kit-bag was over my shoulder, my Sitting Board was in my hand. I got onto the first bus that came along. It had folding doors at the front and the driver seemed to double as the conductor; this threw me somewhat. I mumbled unintelligibly and got off again, blushing. The next few buses were all of the same sort. I stood looking at the traffic, which was slow and noisy, and at the buildings, which were low and undistinguished. After a while, and a few more one-person operated buses, I gave up and walked south, which was roughly the right direction for Kilburn, where my half-brother Zeb lived (I read my map as I walked and decided I would take the A503 south-west when I came upon it). Eventually, however, I was passed by an old-fashioned bus with an open rear platform heading in the right direction. I found the next bus stop with the relevant route-number and waited.

  * * *

  A bus came; I jumped on and went upstairs. Unfortunately, the four front seats were already taken. I chose the next row back, put my wooden Sitting Board down, and sat. While still in the car on the train I had peeled the top four pounds off my roll of cash and stuck the notes in my jacket's inside pocket; when the conductor came I held out a pound note and said, 'A ticket to Enfield, plis.'

  'What's this, then?' the conductor asked, taking the note and looking at it.