Whit

by Iain Banks

  Aasni and Zhobelia were called as witnesses but were unable (unwilling, actually) to provide any help; their English and Gaelic - both of which they were reasonably at home in - seemed to deteriorate to the point of almost total incomprehensibility the instant they crossed the threshold of the Court. When an interpreter was called for, the only people capable of helping proved to be other members of the Asis family, which might or might not have been acceptable to the defence, but in the end didn't matter because the family simply refused to speak or listen to the two brazenly shameless, marriage-wrecking hussies who had once been their daughters, and no threat of being charged with contempt of court was going to change their minds.

  Faced with such intransigence in a case which was, in the end, only concerned with the destruction of a factory nobody who mattered had really cared about, the exasperated sheriff thought the better of pressing the point; Aasni and Zhobelia were excused from providing evidence.

  Salvador, who had never met the rest of the Asis family, took its rejection of its daughters more personally than they did themselves, and swore never to enter the store they had opened in Stornoway or, later, the branch in Tarbert. Somehow this ban became an article of faith and extended - as the Asis family's commercial interests expanded and shops opened in Portree, Oban and Inverness - to all retail premises, presumably just to be on the safe side.

  The trial ended; the cowed, murmuring, Sunday-best-dressed men accused of the dastardly drunken factory incendiarism were found neither guilty nor innocent but were told that the charges against them had been found Not Proven, a uniquely Scottish verdict that has exactly the same legal force as Not Guilty but is often popularly taken to mean, We think you did it but we're not certain, and which has the twin merits both of introducing into the usually monochrome guilty/innocent, decent folk/criminal classes, good/bad world of the law the concept of quantum uncertainty, and leaving a lingering cloud of public dubiety and suspicion over the accused just so they didn't get too cocky in future.

  Grandfather and the sisters returned to the farm at Luskentyre, Salvador to work alongside Mr McIlone with the animals on the farm and continue reading, studying and writing the Orthography, and the sisters to continue driving round the isles in their converted library van, making bad deals and not much of a living. Come the first summer my Grandfather spent on the islands, that of 1949, the two sisters found themselves doing something else together, as their bellies started to swell. Salvador - while suffused with virile pride, of course - was already wondering how they were going to cope with two extra mouths to feed when the Fossils arrived.

  Cecil (pronounced See-sill, apparently) and Gertie Possil were an eccentric couple of independent means who wiled away their otherwise relatively pointless lives by joining different sects, cults and churches as though they were trying to collect the set. Cecil was a tall, awkward man who had been unable to take part in the War because he only possessed one eye, the other one having been hooked out when he was a child when his father - a keen angler - was teaching him to cast; a traumatic incident one might have thought would put the young Cecil off fishing, and possibly fish, for life, but which in fact had had exactly the opposite effect. When Cecil disappeared on one of his frequent fishing trips in the Highlands or to the chalk streams of southern England, Gertie would spend the time attending seances and talking to mystics.

  They had read something about Grandfather and his strange new faith - including his emphasis on the importance of the 29th of February - in their daily newspaper on the first of March that year, and realised that that was the day that would have been the 29th of February had 1949 been a leap year. Convinced that this meant something entirely profound, they had determined to make a pilgrimage to Luskentyre later that year. (Though it has to be said that Cecil later confessed he had also been thinking of the opportunities for sporting fishing to be had in the Hebrides, had he and his wife proved unwelcome at or been disillusioned with Grandfather's proto-church.)

  Salvador was wary of the Fossils at first, though Mr McIlone seemed happy to have them stay, and the sisters appeared politely indifferent. Cecil and Gertie arrived on Harris in a large pre-war shooting break (a kind of estate car or station wagon which Sister Jess assures me a lady called Everidge once memorably termed a half-timbered car) packed with Mesopotamian scatter cushions, Afghan rugs, Ceylonese onyx incense holders and all the other essentials required for prolonged survival on a modest island farm.

  They also brought with them at least twenty different types of tea, which they kept in airtight Javanese cinerary urns. This greatly endeared them to my Grandfather, and was probably the difference between them being trusted and accepted when they first appeared or being treated with such suspicion they felt obliged to leave. Blithely bestowing the Luskentyre farm with batiks, lacquer screens and silver candelabra, the Fossils were able to bring an air of luxury to the place that at first appealed to all concerned, including my Grandfather. Until then the farm had been a place of creaking iron beds, smoky paraffin lamps and bare floorboards relieved by off-cuts of linoleum. By the time the Fossils were finished all of those were still there but by all accounts they didn't seem to define the place any more.

  The Fossils stayed initially for two months, providing the farm with its veneer of opulence, Grandfather with all the speciality teas, pens and paper he desired, and the locals with both a rich new vein of gossip and a lurid new example to brandish in front of children and weak-minded adults whenever a paradigm of hedonistic immorality and heathen decadence was required.

  I think they also gave our Founder something else: an outside perspective, a calibratory check, a chance to measure his revelations, thoughts, insights and future teachings against the experience of people who'd pretty well played the field as far as odd new sects were concerned, and quite assuredly knew their way round a decent cult when they saw one.

  Cecil and Gertie became converts. Something about Salvador's new religion seemed to chime with them; it was, if you like, both backward and forward looking, and they found elements in each direction that agreed with them. They had, years earlier, decided against having their house in Edinburgh's Morningside connected to the electricity mains and were already curiously hermetic in their private lives. Trying to keep up with all the services and meetings of so many splintered faiths left them little or no time to socialise with the real faithful afterwards, and each had few acquaintances outside respectively game fishing and seance attending, and no real friends at all. I think even Salvador's patently scandalous relationship with the two sisters seemed a breath of fresh air to them after the small-minded and hysterical attitude to sexuality the other sects and faiths they had paid court to tended to display, and in both that and a desire to live frugally and unfussily out-with conventional society, with a respect for the wisdom of the past, for nature and for all mystic faiths, it might be true that my Grandfather was one of the first hippies.

  Cecil and Gertie left at the end of that first summer, as Aasni and Zhobelia bloomed bigger, and shortly after Gertie discovered, to her alloyed joy, that she too had fallen pregnant (this was the lump that would turn out to be Lucius). They swore that they would return, and that they would spread the good tidings of the new Faith's birth, both by word of mouth and by financing the publication of the Orthography once Salvador had completed it. They took all their exotic trappings with them, stowing them in the back of the shooting break without a thought for the finer sensibilities of the pregnant sisters, who to their dismay suddenly found themselves dumped back into the world of creaking iron beds and curling lino after a heady existence amongst the luxuries of perfume-saturated cloth-of-gold cushions and silk rugs of fabulous design.

  I think that was when Salvador, who bore the brunt of the sisters' complaints in this matter, finally turned his back on extravagance and luxury and made simplicity an article of faith.

  The Fossils kept up an almost daily correspondence with the farm at Luskentyre, telling of their mission amongst
the heathen folk of Edinburgh and their efforts at spreading the good word amongst those who sought game fish in still pools and those who angled after the words, warnings and entreaties of the dear-departed.

  Meanwhile Aasni and Zhobelia each grew big with child, and jointly developed a passion at a certain point in their confinement for the pungent pickles and condiments they remembered from their childhood. Forbidden from contacting their parents, having no wish to do so anyway and knowing of no other nearby source of spiciness, they started to make their own, ordering supplies of the rarer raw ingredients - chillis, coriander, cardamom, etc. - by mail from an Indian grocer in Edinburgh whom Gertie had put them in touch with.

  Their experiments with the likes of chilli and garlic sauce, lime and brinjal pickle, apple and ginger chutney and so on did not always meet with complete success, but they persisted, and Salvador - discovering along with Mr McIlone a liking for the sisters' fiery concoctions which might not have been totally unconnected with the commonality of effect produced in the mouth by both cheap whisky and any chilli-laced comestible - happily encouraged these fragrant forays into the Epicurean realm.

  Aasni and Zhobelia's original cravings proved to be the pump-priming inspiration for an avocation that lasted decades, and after a long period of initial reluctance which persisted well beyond the time when Aasni had been delivered of Brigit and Zhobelia of Calli and the sisters again fitted comfortably behind the counter of their converted library van, their chutneys and pickles eventually became their most successful line in the travelling shop, giving the more broad-minded citizens of Lewis and Harris a taste for palate-scalding sub-continental condiments that has persisted to this day.

  * * *

  The train carrying Zeb, Boz and me back to London broke down just outside the town of Brentwood and limped into the station at little more than walking pace. We detrained, and encountered some confusion amongst the railway staff on the subject of a relief service, but the consensus seemed to be that we might have an hour or so to wait.

  'Fuck. Shit. Man. Trains. Fuck.'

  'How annoying.'

  'Hey, maybe we should get somethin' to eat, yeah?' Boz suggested.

  We headed off to find a public house. Outside the station on the street we passed four men with very short hair dressed in large boots, short jeans, and shiny green blouse-style jackets; they seemed to be selling papers. I don't think I'd have noticed them further but for the fact they started to make a sort of 'Oo-oo oo-oo-oo' noise as we passed by. One of them spat on the pavement in front of Boz, who just lifted his head a little and strolled serenely on.

  'Who are they?' I asked Zeb, who was at my side. 'Do they know Boz?'

  'Na. Fascists,' Zeb said. 'BNP. Bad fucks.'

  I looked back at the men, who were still staring after us. One of them threw something yellow; I reached up and caught a half-eaten banana that might have been aimed at Boz, who was a little in front of us. I stopped.

  'Fuck. Sake. Just. Walk,' Zeb said tersely, pulling on my sleeve. I slid my arm free and walked back to the group of men.

  'Good afternoon,' I said to them as they came forward. I held up the half-eaten banana. 'Why did you throw this?'

  'It's for the coon, dear,' said the tallest and blondest of them. 'You give it to your black monkey,' he told me. The others sniggered.

  I stared at them; probably my mouth was hanging open. 'Good heavens,' I said. 'Are you people racists?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Yeah. Want to buy a fucking newspaper, darlin'?' One of them shook a tight bundle of newspapers in my face; the headline said something about Enough being Enough and Paki Death Gangs.

  'Yeah, we're fucking racist; we believe in white rights,' said the tall blond one. 'What do you believe in, apart from associatin' wif niggers?'

  'Well, I'm sorry,' I said, 'but I believe in love and understanding and the worship of the Creator through the-'

  'Worshipping nigger cock more like.'

  'Yeah; you let him fuck you up the bum, do you?'

  'Look at 'im; back there, fucking shittin' himself 'e is; look at 'im; 'im an' the little cunt; fuckin' shittin' themselves, they are!' one of the others said, then shouted over my head, 'Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? You want some? I said do you fucking want some?

  'Excuse me,' I said, tapping that one on the shiny shoulder of his jacket. 'There's no need for that sort of thing.'

  He looked down at his shoulder and then turned on me. The tall blond one stepped between us and said, 'Look, just fuck off back to your nigger friend, all right?'

  I looked into his eyes. I turned to go, then swivelled back again. 'Could I have one of your newspapers?' I asked. 'I'm just interested in what you think.'

  The tall blond one sneered, then pulled a newspaper from the pile he held. He held it in front of me. I reached out to take it but he lifted it beyond my reach. 'Fifty pence,' he said.

  'I do beg your pardon,' I said. 'I haven't any money, but it occurred to me that if you believe in the justice of what you say, you might let me have it free.'

  'We'll fuckin' let you have it, Jock tart,' the tall blond one said, bending very close to me. He slapped my face with the paper then shoved it into my chest, pushing me backwards; I dropped the half-eaten banana, grabbed the paper with both hands and took another step to the rear.

  'Fuck off,' the man said again, pointing at me. 'I'm not fuckin' telling you again.'

  I nodded and touched my hat. 'Okay. Thanks for the paper,' I said.

  I walked away to jeers and sudden laughter. The banana went sailing over my head and landed at the feet of Boz and Zeb, who were standing ten metres away at a street corner, looking distinctly anxious.

  'I-sis,' Boz said once we were out of sight. 'You got to stop doin' that sorta thing. I think I walk behind you from now on; you always turnin' back into danger. Those guys are more dangerous than that damn Baskerville dog.'

  'Hmm,' I said.

  'Jeez. Fuck. Christ. Shit. God…'

  '… Language, Brother Zebediah,' I said absently, leafing through the newspaper as we walked. '… Good grief!'

  We ate lunch in a pub. I read the paper, half-page by half-page, keeping it tightly folded at Boz's request so that it was hard to tell from any distance what I was reading. I asked a few questions of Zeb and Boz regarding what I was reading, and can only assume they answered truthfully.

  We spent half an hour or so eating lunch (I stood leaning against a wooden partition while Boz and Zeb sat). The sandwich I ate looked attractive but was damp and almost totally lacking in flavour. I drank a pint of beer which tasted rather of chemicals, and may also have led to what happened next.

  'They prob'ly gone from there by now,' Boz said confidently. We were approaching the corner where he and Zeb had waited for me while I'd talked to the four young men. I looked in a shop window and saw their black-green reflections; they were just where we'd encountered them earlier.

  'Yes, I'm sure they have,' I said, slowing and looking round. We were passing an interesting-looking shop called a Delicatessen. 'Boz,' I said brightly, halting and causing the other two to stop. 'I would like to contribute to the meal this evening. Unfortunately I am not allowed to enter retail premises; would you mind going into this shop here and purchasing an ingredient or two?'

  'No problem, I-sis; what you want?'

  'I have some money,' I said, pulling out a couple of one-pound notes.

  Boz looked at the notes and laughed. 'I'll stand you it, I-sis. Just tell me what you wantin'.'

  'Some fresh coriander, please,' I said.

  'Comin' right up.'

  Boz disappeared into the shop. I handed the two one-pound notes to Zeb. 'There was a toy shop back there,' I said. 'Could you get me a couple of water pistols?'

  Zeb looked blank, an expression that I confess I thought suited him. 'Please,' I said. 'They're a present.'

  Zeb walked back to the toy shop, still looking blank. Boz reappeared from the Delicatessen shop. 'Oh,' I said, touching my forehead. 'And a
couple of bottles of that red pepper sauce; what's it called?'

  'Tabasco?' Boz said, handing me the clump of fresh coriander. I stuffed it in a pocket and nodded. 'That's it.'

  Boz grinned. 'That's strong stuff, I-sis. You sure you need two bottles?'

  I considered. 'No,' I said. 'Make it four.'

  * * *

  I approached the group of shiny-green-jacketed men. They formed a line in front of me. I walked with my head bowed and my hands pressed in front of me in a gesture of supplication.

  The fascists towered in front of me; a wall of crew-cut, black denim and green shiningness plinthed by bulbous brown leather boots. I bowed my head further and let my hands drop to my sides. I hoped my pockets weren't dripping.

  'Sirs,' I said, smiling. 'I have read your publication. I have read of your hatred and despite of people different from you…'

  'Yeah?'

  'Fuck, really?'

  'Despite wot?'

  'You just don't fuckin' listen, do you?'

  '… And I would like you to know that I feel exactly the same way as you do.'

  'Wot?'

  'Oh yeah?'

  'Yes; I feel exactly the same way about people like you.'

  'What- ?'

  'Right-'

  'God, forgive me,' I muttered, taking the little water pistols from my jacket pockets, one in each hand, and firing them in the faces of the green-jacketed men, straight into their eyes.

  * * *

  'Somerset,' Boz said, on the train into Liverpool Street.

  'Apparently,' I confirmed, still carefully cleaning the watery red liquid off my hands with damp toilet paper. I had been thinking, trying to work out what Morag could have meant by talking about me bothering her. I still had no idea. It was troubling. 'I shall leave tomorrow,' I told Boz and Zeb.

  Zeb stood with his arms crossed, staring at me. 'Mad.'

  * * *

  Boz kissed me hard on the lips when we got into the squat. 'Don't mean nuthin' by it, you understand, I-sis,' he said, still holding my shoulders. We looked at each other for a moment or two 'But,' he said. '… well…' He patted me on one shoulder and walked off.