Whit

by Iain Banks

'Believe it or not.'

  'Why?'

  'It's a long story. Let's meet at the Royal Commonwealth Pool, right?'

  'Royal Commonwealth Pool,' I repeated. Across from me, Sophi looked surprised.

  'Afternoon okay?' Morag asked.

  'Perfect.'

  'Three o'clock?'

  'I'll be there. Shall I bring my costume?'

  'Yes; we'll be at the flumes.'

  'The whats?'

  'The flumes.'

  I frowned. 'Isn't that a thing they send logs down in the Canadian north-west?'

  'Originally, Is, yes. God, you really are out of touch up there, aren't you?'

  'And proud of it,' I said, feeling relatively cheerful for the first time in days.

  'Nothing changes,' Morag sighed. 'Oh, and look, you won't be saying anything to Allan in the meantime, will you?'

  'Absolutely not.'

  'Right. Same here. See you tomorrow, then.'

  'Indeed. Tomorrow. Goodbye, cuz.'

  'Bye.' The phone clicked off.

  I put down the handset and grinned at Sophi. I took her hands in mine and watched with joy as her face gradually lost all traces of worry and doubt and bloomed into a beautiful broad smile, expressing what I felt.

  I laughed quietly. 'Light at the end of the tunnel,' I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  'It is dreams, you see, Isis. Dreams.' Uncle Mo took another drink from his little plastic tumbler, nodding to himself as he watched the grass, cliffs and sea slide past our window. 'Dreams can be terrible things. Oh yes. Terrible, terrible things.'

  'I thought they were called nightmares when they were like that,' I said.

  Uncle Mo laughed in a watery way and leaned over the table to me, patting me on the forearm. 'Ah, Isis, bless you, child, you are so young. You see things so simply but that clarity is gone from me. This is what life does, what dreams do. You are not to know how terrible dreams can be. I,' he said, tapping himself softly on his waistcoated chest, 'I am not old; I am not an old man. I am in my middle ages, no more. But I have lived enough for an old man's memories. I could be old for all that matters. Ah, dreams.'

  'I see,' I said, not seeing at all.

  The train banked round a fast corner, tipping us towards the view of red-cliffed coastline and fractured rocks washed by a lazy, ruffled sea. On the pale blue horizon a grey speck was a ship. The sky was swathed in quiet layers of pastel cloud.

  We were on the eleven o'clock train from Edinburgh to London King's Cross, due to change at York for Manchester. I was supposed to meet Morag at three in Edinburgh and right now I was heading south for England, getting further and further away from my cousin all the time. I had thought seriously about giving Uncle Mo the slip in Waverley station, and had worked out a plan to do just that, but I had changed my mind. I had another plan now. The timing was a little tight and there was no guarantee of its success anyway, but I judged it worth the effort and the risk.

  'Dreams,' Uncle Mo said, unscrewing the top of another miniature bottle of vodka and tipping the bottle's contents into his plastic tumbler. He added a little soda from a larger bottle, shaking his head in time as he shook the miniature, forcing the last few drops out of it. 'Dreams… dreams of ambition, dreams of success… are terrible, my lovely niece, because they sometimes come true, and that is the most awful of things for a man to suffer.'

  'Oh,' I said. 'That sort of dream. I thought you meant dreams when one is asleep.'

  'Those as well, dear child,' Uncle Mo said, sitting wearily back in his seat. We had a four-person table to ourselves, on the eastern side of the train. I was on my Sitting Board, of course, still wearing the leather trousers which I was growing to like, and the jacket that Grandma Yolanda had bought me. Uncle Mo was dapper in a three-piece suit and flamboyant tie, his camel-hair coat carefully folded and placed lining-outwards on the luggage rack overhead. He did not use a Sitting Board, claiming that he had a medical condition and in any event was a Moslem now and had quite enough to worry about what with remembering his prayer mat. I had pointed out that Muslims were not supposed to drink.

  'That is different,' he had said defensively. 'I was a Luskentyrian, then an alcoholic, then a Moslem, you see?' I'd said I'd seen, but bit my lip on a remark about which of his three faiths he seemed most devout in serving. 'But I shall beat the demon drink,' he insisted, 'be in no doubt. I drink, and drink and drink and then-' he made a sweeping, cutting motion with the flat of his hand. 'I stop. You will see.'

  I said I saw.

  'All dreams can destroy a man,' he said, staring with heavy, deeply lidded eyes at the calm vistas of sea and shore unreeling beyond our window. I was glad I'd chosen this flank of the train; I had not travelled on the line before, but I knew from maps and the tales of other travellers that this was the best side for the view.

  'Just men are destroyed by dreams?'

  'Yes. And I say that as a man who is not a chauvinist, no; I am aware of the equalness of women in most matters, and celebrate and sanctify their ability to bring forth life. In this much I am in advance of many of my co-religionists, I dare to admit, though… well, the West is not the end all of being.' He leaned over the table again, wagging the same finger and staring intently at me. 'What good is equality if it is just the equality of being disrespected just as much as men, and violence… done violence against?'

  I nodded noncommittally. 'You may have a point there.'

  'I have indeed.' He looked up, as though checking his camel-hair coat was still there. Then he looked back at me. 'What was I saying?'

  'Dreams. Doing terrible things. To men, mostly.'

  'Exactly!' he cried, waving his finger in the air. 'Because men are the obsessivists, Isis! Men are the driven half of our kind; they are the dreamers, the creatives who have brains in recompensation for not being the creationists with their wombs! We are even you might say the slightly mad half of the human races, because we are tormented with our visions, our ambitions, our ideas!' He slapped the table with his hand.

  I was trying to think where I'd heard this sort of stuff before. Recently. Oh yes; Grandma Yolanda.

  'It is men who are afflicted the worst by dreams,' he told me. 'That is our curse just as women have theirs.' He looked hurt, and touched his forehead with one set of fingers, closing his eyes, then held out one hand to me. 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be indelicate. Your pardon, Isis.'

  'That is quite all right, Uncle.'

  He held up the plastic tumbler with its almost-melted ice and its cargo of liquid. 'Perhaps I am drinking a little too much,' he said, smiling through the plastic at me.

  'We're just enjoying ourselves,' I said. 'Nothing wrong with that. It passes the journey.' I raised my own tumbler, which was half full of beer. 'Cheers.'

  'Cheers,' he said, swallowing. I sipped.

  * * *

  Uncle Mo had started drinking at the buffet bar in Stirling station after we'd been dropped there by the bus.

  I had returned to my own room after my phone call to Morag from the Woodbeans'; I had already decided I would be departing for somewhere in the morning and, tempted though I was to stay again with Sophi, I felt it appropriate and fitting to spend a night - at last - in my own old hammock in my own room in the Community, after so long away from it.

  It had taken a good hour for my feverish thoughts to subside sufficiently to let me sleep, but I awoke at my usual time, dressed, packed and went down to the kitchen, where I informed a bleary-eyed Uncle Mo that I would be coming with him to Spayedthwaite. The atmosphere in the kitchen became glacial the moment I entered; much worse than the day before. When I made my announcement to Uncle Mo in the sudden silence, there was a muttered 'Good riddance' from somebody at the far end of the table, and no voice raised in my support.

  I knew then that all my politicking yesterday had been in vain, and the scurrilous lie about the attempted seduction of Grandfather had already been disseminated.

  I made to leave, but stopped at the door and looked back
in at them.

  'You have been deceived in this,' I told them. 'Wickedly deceived.' I was able to keep my voice low; the kitchen had probably never held such numbers and such silence at the same time. I was unable to keep the sadness and the hurt from my voice. 'With God's help I will prove this to you one day and reclaim your good regard.' I hesitated, unsure what more to say, and aware that the longer I stood there the greater became the possibility that somebody - perhaps the one who had wished me good riddance - would rob me of my chance to say my piece. '… I love all of you,' I blurted, and closed the door and walked quickly away across the courtyard, a strange high keening ringing in my ears, my fists clenched painfully, nails digging into my palms and my teeth clenched together so hard my nose hurt. It seemed to work; no tears came.

  I ascended to the office to tell Allan I was leaving. I was given five pounds spending money; Uncle Mo would get my ticket for me. I found it surprisingly easy to look Allan in the face, though I suspect he found me cold and oddly unconcerned at leaving the Community again so soon. I should perhaps have made a show of regret or even distress, but could not bring myself to do so.

  He assured me again that he would be doing all he could to help restore my reputation and my standing in the Community while I was away, and would both keep in touch and be ready to call me back on the instant that the situation improved and Grandfather's humour ameliorated. Please God that would not be long.

  I just nodded and said I agreed.

  Polite, restrained, dissembling, I stood there with an aspect outwardly quite banal, but in my heart, in my deepest soul, it was as though great cold stones slid grinding and grating across each other into some dreadful new configuration, like a vast lock fit to secure one continent to another, but now undoing, freeing its great ladings to the demands of their different influences, different courses, different velocities, and to the catastrophes incumbent upon their now opposed and antagonistic movements.

  Within me there was now set in place a cruel desire; a will, a determination to seek the lode of truth amongst this flinty wilderness of lies and follow its path and its consequences wherever they might lead. I would seek to do no more than lay bare the truth, to mine the gold from this mountain of leaden falseness, but I would expose that vein of truth utterly and without fear, favour or qualification, and if the result of its revelation meant the destruction of my brother's reputation and his place within our Order, even if it meant the humbling of my Grandfather, then I would not shrink from it, nor hesitate to pursue this course to the very limit of my abilities, no matter what balances my actions shook or what structures my excavations threatened.

  And, I decided - there and then, in the Community office in the mansion house, at the epicentre of my hours-old astonishment and wrath, with that key still hanging round my brother's neck, that locked drawer with its treacherous cargo not more than a few feet away - I would embark upon my mission sooner rather than later, before the trail or the dish grew cold, and before the results of these most recent infamies became too set in stone to suffer amendment.

  My brother and I parted with an insincerity only I knew was quite mutual.

  As I left the office I met Sister Amanda, coming downstairs with her and Allan's child, Mabon, in her arms. Amanda is a few years older than Allan, a slim, red-haired woman I've always been on good terms with. I said hello to her but she just hurried past me, averting her head and clutching the one-year-old to her chest as though I was a monster who might rip the infant from her arms and tear it asunder. The child looked back at me over her shoulder, his big dark eyes full of what looked like dismayed surprise. He and his mother disappeared into the office.

  * * *

  The bus took Uncle Mo and me into Stirling half an hour later. Brother Vitus was sent to see us off. He carried our bags and seemed monosyllabic with embarrassment or shame.

  He waved back, once, perfunctorily, as the bus took us away, and I was left thinking that the contrast with the last time I had left High Easter Offerance - upon the slow rolling river in that misty dawn, with the well-wishes of all the Community sounding hushed but resonant in my ears - could not have been much greater.

  I might have cried then, but there was something cold and stony and sharp in me now that seemed to have frozen all my tears.

  * * *

  When we got to the station at Stirling we had twenty minutes to spare before our connecting service with Edinburgh arrived, which time, Uncle Mo informed me - even allowing a couple of minutes for making our way to the appropriate platform - was exactly the decent minimum for drinking a large and comforting vodka and soda at a civilised pace, without unseemly gulping towards the end and an undignified gallop along the platform. It more or less behoved him so to do, therefore, and he wondered if I would join him in a fast-breaking drink, it being a very early hour in the morning for him, all things and current style of life considered. I accepted an orange juice and a sandwich.

  Uncle Mo pronounced the vodka a particularly good one for a public bar, and knocked the drink back as if it was water. He ordered another. 'One must make hay while the sun shines, Isis,' he said as he paid the bar lady. 'Grab one's opportunities. Seize the time!' He seized the glass and sampled that vodka, too. It turned out to be equally worthy of note.

  I ate my sandwich quickly, but paced my sips of the orange juice so that I finished it a couple of minutes before our train was due. Uncle Mo managed to cram in another vodka and soda before we heard the train arrive and had to quit the bar quickly to run for the train. He purchased my ticket on board. It was a single, I noticed. I mentioned this.

  He looked discomfited. 'Your brother gave the money,' he said. 'He will send additional funds for a ticket back later, along with some money for your keep.'

  I nodded, saying nothing.

  There proved to be a trolley service on the train from Stirling to Edinburgh. Uncle Mo found this out by asking another passenger. For a while he sat fretting and turning to look back up the aisle every few moments, then he announced he was going in search of the toilet. He reappeared a few minutes later with four miniatures of gin, a larger bottle of tonic and a small can of orange. 'I bumped into the buffet trolley,' he explained, setting his supplies down on the table and passing the orange juice to me. 'No vodka. Tsk.'

  'Hmm,' I said.

  I was already starting to reconsider my plans.

  At Waverley, having dispatched the four gins with the swift contempt they apparently deserved for not being vodkas, Uncle Mo still did not seem particularly drunk, though he was slurring his words slightly on occasion, and his turn of phrase - tricky and ill-cambered at the best of times - seemed to be tightening.

  There was a half-hour to spare; it seemed only natural to repair to the bar. Uncle Mo appeared to have hit a plateau by that time and managed to cruise through the thirty minutes on nothing more than a brace of vodkas (obviously not counting the twelve that went into his hip flask straight from the optic on the discovery that there was no off-licence in the station).

  We left the bar, I picked up a timetable for the east-coast line from the information centre, and then we boarded the train which was due to take us to York. My original plan had involved getting on the train with Uncle Mo and then saying I was going to the toilet or the buffet car just before the train was due to depart. I deliberately stowed my kit-bag on the luggage shelf at the end of the carriage, near the door, and claimed the seat that faced in that direction from Uncle Mo after he sat in it originally, claiming that I got sick if I didn't have my back to the engine. All this meant that I could leave my seat, collect my bag and get off the train just before it left, and not even risk being seen as the departing train went past me.

  However, I had been thinking.

  Despite the obvious importance of everything else I had had to take on board over the last twelve hours - Cousin Morag's allegations and revelations, the promise that at long last I might catch up with her, Allan's sacrilegious use of a piece of high-technical electronic
equipment within the Community, his lies to Morag, his lies to me, his lies to the whole Community and the sheer selfish greed for power that these symptoms hinted at, not to mention my Grandfather's profane, misguided weakness and his attempt to seduce me - I could not stop thinking about that note on the address list in the desk, the note alongside my Great-aunt Zhobelia's name. 'Care of Unc. Mo'.

  I remembered Yolanda's words. Something, for sure.

  It spoke of the corrupting atmosphere engendered by the deception that had been revealed to me that what had once seemed innocent, or at any rate of no great consequence, I now found deeply suspicious. Great-aunt Zhobelia's decision to seek but her original family and her effective disappearance as far as the Community was concerned had always seemed odd before, but certainly well within the normal parameters of human contrariness; people are constantly doing things we find incomprehensible for what they regard as good and obvious reasons, and I had never really wondered about Zhobelia's decision any more than I had about Brigit or Rhea becoming apostate, accepting that people just did do strange, even stupid things sometimes.

  But now, in the infecting climate of mistrust and apprehension brought about by my discovery of Allan's mendacity and the realisation that behind the curtain of familial and religious trust and love was hidden the machinery of perfidious malevolence, much that I had previously taken blithely on trust now set me thinking what sinister purpose might be concealed therein.

  Great-aunt Zhobelia. Care of Uncle Mo. I wondered…

  I felt a moment of dizziness, just as I had the night before, perched on the storeroom window. The moment passed, as it had just the night before when I had teetered on the fulcrum of that window at the back of the mansion house, leaving me in a moment of giddy clarity.

  I made my decision; my mouth felt dry and there was a metallic taste in it. Heart thumping; again. This was becoming habitual.

  What the heck. I would stay on the damn train. The timetable said I could get off at Newcastle upon Tyne and catch a train back to Waverley in time to get to the swimming pool for my rendezvous with Cousin Morag. If everything ran to time, that was. I'd risk it.