Whit

by Iain Banks

  I saw boots appear to one side and my kit-bag, lying on the ground beside me, was wrenched from my hand.

  'You're going to break my arm!' I shouted. The pressure eased a little until it was merely very uncomfortable. I felt my face flush as I realised how easily I'd been first fooled and then brought down. Any self-satisfaction I'd felt at my exploits in Essex two days earlier was being wrung out of me now.

  'What's that?' my attacker asked.

  'What?' the other one said.

  'That there. What's that?'

  'Bottle of something.'

  'Yeah; and that?'

  'Yeah… could be something, couldn't it?'

  The pressure came back on my arm again and I sucked in breath, trying not to cry out. I sensed the policeman who was pinning me down lower his head to mine, then felt his breath on my neck. 'I think we've found a suspicious substance here, young lady,' he said.

  'What are you talking about?' I gasped.

  I was dragged upright and held, still painfully, in front of the one who'd brought me down as the second policeman held two of my vials in front of me. I could feel my hat, crushed between my back and the policeman's chest.

  'What're these, then?' the other one asked.

  I grimaced. 'That on the left's hearth ash!' I said. I was having to work hard at not appending 'you oaf!' or 'you idiot!' to a lot of these utterances. The contents of my kit-bag had been strewn over the tarmac. The bag itself had been turned inside-out.

  'Harthash?' said the one holding the vial.

  'You mean hashish?' the one behind me said.

  'No! Ash from a hearth,' I said, seeing some other policemen walking over towards us. 'It's for a ceremony. The other jar's for my mark. The mark on my forehead. Can't you see it? These are religious substances; holy sacraments!'

  The second officer was taking the top off the ash vial. 'Sacrilege!' I yelled. The second officer sniffed at the ash, then dipped a moistened finger in. 'Desecration!' I screamed, as the other policemen came up towards us. I struggled; the grip on my arm tightened as I was lifted onto my tiptoes. Pain surged through my arm and I shrieked again.

  'Steady on, Bill,' one of the other officers said quietly. 'We've got a telly crew back there.'

  'Right, sarge,' the one behind me said. The pain eased again and I gulped some deep breaths.

  'Now then, young lady; what's all this about?'

  'I am trying,' I said through clenched teeth, 'to make my lawful and peaceable way to visit my cousin Morag Whit in Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club, in Dudgeon Magna. This… person behind me was most insulting and when I asked to speak to his superior officer to report his unmannerliness he tricked me and attacked me.'

  'Suspicious-looking substance, sarge,' the one with the vial said, presenting it to the older man, who frowned and also sniffed it.

  'That is gross irreverence!' I yelled.

  'Hmm,' he said. He looked at the kit-bag's contents on the ground. 'Anything else?'

  'Other jars and stuff here, sir,' one of the others said, squatting and picking up the vial of dried river mud. A crunch sounded from under his foot as he rose. He looked down and moved something sideways with the edge of his shoe. I saw the remains of the tiny zhlonjiz jar.

  'My God! What have you done?' I screamed.

  'Now now,' somebody said.

  'Heresy! Impiety! Desecration! May God have mercy on your Unsaved souls, you wretches!'

  'This could be something, too,' the desecrator said, rubbing the dust between his fingers.

  'Are you people listening?' I shouted. 'I am the Elect of God, you buffoons!'

  'Put her in the wagon,' the sergeant said, nodding his head. 'Sounds like she might have escaped from somewhere.'

  'What? How dare you!'

  'And get this stuff bagged for checking out,' the sergeant said, tapping the vial of hearth ash and turning over the limp kit-bag with his foot as he turned away.

  'Let me go! I am an officer of the True Church! I am the Elect of God! I am on a sacred mission! You heathens! By God, you will answer to a higher court than you have ever glimpsed for this insult, you ruffians! Let me go!'

  I might have saved my breath. I was marched off past numerous other vehicles, groups of people, white lights and flashing blue lights and bundled into a police van some way up the road, still protesting furiously.

  In the police van I was handcuffed to a seat and told to shut up. A burly policeman in overalls and crash helmet sat at the far end of the passenger compartment, twirling a baton in his hands and whistling. The only other people in the van were a sorry-looking young couple who smiled at me nervously and then went back to holding each other tight.

  The van smelled of antiseptic. I found myself breathing quickly and shallowly. There was a queasiness in my stomach.

  I flexed my wrists and scowled at the officer, then closed my eyes and arranged my limbs as comfortably as I could. I attempted to do some deep breathing, and might have succeeded had we not shortly been joined by some loudly protesting youths who were bundled into the van by a clutch of overalled, crash-helmeted policemen.

  Shortly thereafter we were driven off at high speed.

  * * *

  The True Church of Luskentyre underwent something of a schism - albeit an amicable one - in 1954, when we were gifted the estate at High Easter Offerance on the flood-plain of the river Forth by Mrs Woodbean, who had become a convert three years earlier. Mrs W was about the dozenth full convert, lured to the now quietly flourishing farm/community at Luskentyre by my Grandfather's reputation for holiness and lack of interest in taking money off even the richest of his followers (an aspect of his renown which he had realised early on only made people all the more generous; another example of the Contrariness of life).

  It was, sadly, a tragedy which spurred Mrs W to act. The Woodbeans had a son called David, their only child. Mrs W had been told after his birth that she could not bear another baby, and so the boy was all the more precious to them, and was kept cosseted and pampered. In 1954, when he was seven, he walked through a glass door in a shop in Stirling. He wasn't mortally wounded but he lost a lot of blood and an ambulance was called to take him to hospital; it crashed en route and the boy was killed. Mrs Woodbean took this as a sign that the modern world was too saturated with technology and cleverness for its - or her family's - own good, and decided to renounce the majority of her worldly goods and devote her life to Faith (and allegedly to having another child at all costs, an ambition which was fulfilled years later, when she gave birth to Sophi at the age of forty-three, though at the cost of her own life).

  Mrs Ws extraordinary act of charity was unique in its scale, but converts were bountiful in smaller ways all the time, though by all accounts Salvador produced a great show of grumpy reluctance when accepting a gift, and made sure the donor always knew that he was doing it for the good of their soul (on the grounds that it was indeed more blessed to give than to receive, and Salvador's soul was already doing quite well, thank you, and so could afford to be generous when it came to accepting tribute).

  People heard about our Order through the media (very occasionally), sometimes through the warnings of sincere but misguided priests and ministers who had not heard the adage concerning the non-existence of bad publicity, but most often just by word of mouth (it has to be admitted that no attempt to spread the word through the commercial distribution of the Orthography has ever been successful). As I have said, there is a sense in which we were the first Hippies, the first Greens, the first New Agers, and so a few brave souls who were in the vanguard of social change, and at least twenty years ahead of their time, were sure to be attracted to a cause that would shake the world in various guises a few decades later.

  In the years following the establishment of our Order, my Grandfather gradually stopped looking for the - by now almost mythic - canvas bag, and settled down to the life of what we now call a guru, dispensing wisdom, experiencing visions which helped guide our Faith and providing a li
ving example of peaceful holiness. The sisters continued to share my Grandfather and have his children - most notably and wonderfully my father, born on the 29th of February 1952 - and, with gaps for pregnancies, continued with their mobile shop business until the year of the schism.

  Mr McIlone elected to remain at Luskentyre, which was, after all, his, though he insisted that Salvador accept his entire library as his parting gift. By this time there were five full converts, that is, people who had come to stay at Luskentyre, to work the land and fish the sea and be on hand to listen to our Founder's teachings. There were perhaps another dozen followers like the Fossils, who would come to stay (usually providing their own keep in some form or another) for a few weeks or months at a time. Two of the more ascetic full converts - apostles, as they called themselves by now - decided to stay at the farm on Harris after the gifting of High Easter Offerance and Grandfather, doubtless wisely, put no pressure on anybody to go or to stay.

  Grandfather and the sisters had seen many photographs of High Easter Offerance and some silent ciné film too, projected onto a sheet in the parlour of our only other sympathiser local to Harris, whose house happened to have electric power. Still, it must have been an adventure for them when, in the spring of 1954, they finally packed all their belongings in the ex-mobile library - now ex-mobile shop - and drove to Stornoway, where the van was driven onto a huge net on the quay side and then winched aboard the ferry for the long, rolling journey to Kyle of Lochalsh. From there they headed slowly south on the narrow, winding roads of the day, away from the fractured geometries of the storm-flayed western isles to the comparatively balmy climes of central Scotland, and the abundant expanses of smooth-sloped hills, coiled river, breeze-rustled forests and sunny pastures of the Forth's broad run.

  Mr and Mrs Woodbean had already moved out to the little turreted house over the iron bridge from the main farm. My Grandfather, the sisters, their children and assorted followers - including the Fossils, who had come along to help with the move - held a service and then a party to celebrate the relocation, installed themselves and their modest possessions in the mansion house and old farm, added Mr McIlone's library to the already impressive if under-used one which existed in the mansion house and in the weeks, months and years that followed, got down to the business of renovating the farm buildings and restoring the neglected fields to productivity.

  Mrs Woodbean's brother had made a fortune after the War dealing in scrap and army surplus; he toyed with the idea of becoming a convert for a while and during this period either generously donated to the Order several pieces of potentially valuable ex-service equipment which would in many cases later be pressed into previously unthought-of practical applications, or used the farm as a dump for useless junk on which there was no quick profit to be made (depending who you listen to).

  The only things he did provide which really were useful - I suppose the Deivoxiphone doesn't count - were a couple of short-wave radio sets mounted on sturdy, if wheel-less, army trailers. Mr McIlone was persuaded to accept one, and both were eventually persuaded to work, powered by wind generators. The radios provided a link between the two outposts of our Faith which was both fairly reliable and relatively secure (my Grandfather was starting to worry about the attentions of the government, and at one stage appeared to be convinced there was an entire Whitehall agency called the Department Of Religious Affairs, or DORA for short, which had been set up specifically to spy upon us and disrupt our every dealing, though he laughingly dismisses this as an exaggeration nowadays; a parable taken literally).

  Of course, the radios had a very definite air of clutter and newfanglehood about them, but - perhaps because the radio provided such a perfect image of the human soul - Grandfather had always had a soft spot for the device, and was more inclined to suffer the presence of one of them than any other symptom of the material age.

  The radio also provided a new aspect of - one might even say weapon for - our Faith when Grandfather awoke one morning from an obviously Divinely inspired dream with the idea of Radiomancy, whereby one tunes the radio at random, then turns it on, and uses the first words one hears - either immediately or as a result of sweeping gradually further and further along the frequencies to either side - as a means of prediction and divination.

  So we were not so remote from our original home, but more importantly, with our relocation to this leafy arable alcove just off the central industrial belt, it was easier for potential converts to visit and make up their minds whether they wanted to Believe, or even to come and stay and Work and Believe. A slow trickle of people, young and old, mostly British but with the occasional foreigner, paid court to my Grandfather, listened to his teachings, read his Orthography, conversed with him and thought about their own lives, and - in some cases - decided that he had found the Truth, and so became Saved.

  Grandfather thought up the Festival of Love in 1955. It occurred to him that it might not be wise to rely entirely on providence to provide Leapyearians, who were now seen very much as prophets and perhaps potential Messiahs. Indeed it might even be seen as impious to expect the Creator to ensure a child was born on any given 29th of February; it could be thought of as taking God for granted, which did not sound like a good idea.

  Grandfather's Faith had embraced something very like the idea of free love from the start, thanks to Aasni and Zhobelia's generosity, and he had had revelations which certainly appeared to sanction the extension of his physical communing beyond the two sisters, and to allow his followers the same leeway with their partners, providing those concerned were agreeable and sufficiently enlightened to reject possessiveness and unreasoning, unholy jealousy (which had been Revealed to be a sin against God's bountiful and forgiving nature).

  So, if the Order was to give nature a gentle helping hand with producing a child at the end of February in a leap year, it obviously made sense to encourage those ready, willing and able to assist in this matter to enjoy themselves as much as possible nine months earlier. Our Founder therefore decreed that the end of May before a leap year should be the time for a Festival; a Festival of Love in all its forms, including the holy communing of souls through the blessed glory of sexual congress. The month before should be a time of abstinence, when the Believers ought to deny themselves the most intense of pleasures in order to prepare for - and fully appreciate the advent of - the Festival itself.

  Of course, the cynics, apostates and heretics - and those sad souls who hold it an article of their own perverted faiths that everybody else's motives can never be any better than their own - will point to the presence of several attractive young women amongst Grandfather's followers at this time as some sort of reason for our Founder's idea concerning the Festival. Well, we have grown to expect such shameful drivel from the ranks of the profoundly Unsaved, but it has been pointed out by no less than Salvador himself that even if the beauty he saw around him at that time did somehow lead his thoughts towards such a happy and Festive conclusion, what was that but an example of God using the Fair to inspire the Wise?

  Not coincidentally, I think the first real attempt by the press to sabotage our cause occurred around this time, and confirmed to our OverSeer that he was right to shun publicity and refuse cameras access to the estate.

  Aasni and Zhobelia seem not to have been discomfited by the concept of the Festival; they apparently felt secure in their joint relationship with Salvador and had devoted themselves both to the upbringing of their children and the upgrading of their home. They had, also, made friends with Mr and Mrs Woodbean and seemed to draw comfort from that as well. The sisters had not ceased to develop their culinary and condimentary skills; now that they were free of the need to travel the islands peddling their wares in the ancient van, they could devote even more time to the expansion and refinement of their range of sauces, pickles and chutneys.

  At about this time, too, they began to experiment with other more substantial dishes, and made their first tentative excursions into the strange and exciting n
ew world of cross-cultural cuisine-combining, as though through such provisional promiscuity and the amalgamation of the Scottish and the sub-continental, they could participate in their own terms in the freshly formulated Festivities. It was then that the process really began that would lead to such dishes as lorne sausage shami kebab, rabbit masala, fruit pudding chaat, skink aloo, porridge tarka, shell pie aloo gobi, kipper bhoona, chips pea pulao, whelk poori and marmalade kulfi, and I think the world is a better place for all of them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Briefly I spent the night in the cells, in a police station in Bristol. The police seemed suspicious that I had no way of proving my identity, but amused at my name and my protestations of innocence and outrage, at least until they got upset with my persistence and told me - very rudely, I thought - to shut up.

  The following morning I was told I was free to go, and that there was somebody to see me.

  I was too surprised to say anything; I was led down a corridor between the cell doors towards the desk at the front of the station, trying to work out who could possibly be waiting there for me. Not just that; how could they have found me?

  It must, I supposed, be Morag. My heart lifted at the thought, but somehow, nevertheless, I suspected I was wrong.

  A few steps before I entered the office, I knew I was.

  'Goddammit!' a strident female voice rang out ahead of me. 'Call yourselves policemen; you haven't even got any goddamn guns!'

  I felt my eyes widen.

  'Grandmother?' I said, incredulous.

  My maternal grandmother, Mrs Yolanda Cristofiori, five foot nothing of bleached blonde, leather-skinned Texan, flanked by two tall but cowed-looking men in suits carrying briefcases, turned from berating the duty sergeant and fixed a dramatic smile on me.

  'Isis, honey!' she exclaimed. She strode over. 'Oh, my, look at you!' she squealed. She threw her arms around me, lifting me off my feet as I struggled to respond, hugging her in return.