Whit

by Iain Banks

  'Well,' I said, 'I don't intend to be very generous with Allan, once I have my case ready to present before the Order.'

  'Good,' she said, with relish.

  'Will you help me?' I asked her.

  'How?' She looked neutral, Ricky looked suspicious.

  'Come to the Community? Back up my story? I mean; simply tell the truth about these letters and Allan's phone calls and what he's told you; how he's lied. Will you?'

  'Think they'll listen to me?' She sounded doubtful.

  'I think so. We mustn't let Allan suspect anything or he'll attempt to discredit you with everybody else beforehand, as he has me, but if we say nothing about us having met, we should be able to surprise him. If we had it all out in front of a meeting everyone attends, a full Service, there should be no opportunity for him to poison people's minds with rumours and lies. We ought to be able to denounce him without retort.'

  'But what about the porn?' Morag asked warily.

  'Well, it is hardly the most blessed of professions, certainly, but it was your apparent apostasy that alarmed us most, and I think there would be more rejoicing over your return to the fold than resentment due to the fact that your fame derives from an artistic area other than music, were you to return,' I said, with only a little more conviction than I felt. 'Salvador is upset apparently - at the deception more than the true nature of your… career, I suspect - but I think he'll come round.' I smiled. 'You'll charm him.'

  'I can try,' Morag said, with a smile that would have charmed blood from a stone.

  'It might be best,' I said, thinking it through as I sat there, 'if you and I didn't turn up together. At around the same time, certainly, but not obviously together. Well, maybe.'

  'All right. Whatever. It's a deal. But when?' she asked.

  I nodded, still thinking. The next big Service would be on Sunday evening, for the Full Moon. That was only two days away and so probably too soon, but you never knew. 'Let's keep in touch, but it might be as early as… day after tomorrow?'

  Morag sat back, looking thoughtful. 'We're here tonight,' she said, glancing at Ricky, who had finished his cheeseburger and was now picking little bits of melted cheese and blobs of pickle off the surface of the tray. He looked up guiltily. 'Leven and Dundee tomorrow,' Morag continued. 'We were going to go to Aberdeen next, but we could make it Perth instead, and do Stirling as well, now. I'll give you the hotel numbers where we'll be staying. How'd that be?'

  I thought. 'Fine. It might take a few more days, though.'

  'Whatever,' Morag said, nodding and looking determined. 'What have you got to do next?'

  It crossed my mind to lie, shame upon me, but it also occurred to me that there comes a point in such a campaign when you just have to trust, and let it be known that you trust. 'I'm going to visit Great-aunt Zhobelia,' I said.

  Morag's eyes widened. 'You are? I thought she'd disappeared.'

  'Me too. Uncle Mo held the key.'

  'Did he now? And how's he?'

  I looked at the wall clock. 'Hung-over, probably.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

  If you travel the same route as everybody else, all you will see is what they have already seen. This has expressed our Faith's attitude to travel and Interstitiality for many years, and so it was with some regret that I reviewed the course of my recent journeys as I sat on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow the evening after I had met Morag and Ricky.

  It had long seemed to me that the best way one of our Faith might travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow, or vice versa, would be to walk the route of the old Forth and Clyde canal, and I had travelled that route a few times in my mind and on maps while I sat in the Community library. Yet here I was, taking a train from east to west, just like any normal Bland. My only -and rather pitiable - concession to the Principle of Indirectness had been to take the slow rather than the express line from one city to another; the fast route takes a trajectory via Falkirk, the stopping service bellies south through Shotts. I would change at Bellshill for the Hamilton loop, so in a way this route was frustratingly more, not less, direct. However, it was slower than heading straight for Glasgow and changing there, which alleviated the mundanity somewhat.

  Morag and Ricky had invited me to stay for dinner with them; they would be eating at an Indian restaurant that evening. I'd been sorely tempted, but I'd thought it best to head straight for Mauchtie in the hope of obtaining an audience with Great-aunt Zhobelia that evening. Morag and I had parted with a hug at Waverley station; Ricky had shaken my hand grudgingly but gently. Morag had asked me if I needed any money; I'd thought about it.

  I had determined early on - in the Community office, that Monday almost a fortnight ago, in fact - that twenty-nine pounds was a blessed and significant amount to carry, but that had been before I'd realised I was up against a brother prepared to use something as underhand and outrageous to our principles as a portable telephone in the heart of the Community, and I had certainly never been under any illusions about the importance of adequate finance in this cruelly acquisitive society. I said I'd be grateful for a loan of twenty-nine pounds. Morag laughed, but coughed up.

  The train ride through the sun-rubbed landscape of assorted fields, small towns, industrial ruins, faraway woods and still more distant hills was the first chance I'd had to concentrate on all that had happened over the last couple of days. Before, I had still felt shocked, or I had been with people, or - on the train journey back from Newcastle - I had been rehearsing what I would say to Morag, trying to plan out the conversation we might have, especially if she had returned to her former scepticism and distrust. I still had a similar interview with my great-aunt ahead, but its parameters were so vague that there was little to hang a serious obsessive fugue on, so I could stop and think at last.

  I reviewed my actions so far. To date, I had stolen, lied, deceived, dissembled and burgled, I had used the weakness of a relative to winkle information out of him, I had scarcely talked to my God for two weeks and I had used the works of the Unsaved almost as they did themselves, telephoning, travelling by car and bus and train and plane, entering retail premises and spending an entire evening enjoying a large proportion of all the exorbitantly hedonistic delights one of the world's largest cities could provide, though admittedly this last sin had been while in the company of a forceful and determinedly sensualistic relative from an alien culture where the pursuit of fun, profit and self-fulfilment was regarded practically as a commandment. Beyond all that, I had made an adamantinely pitiless commitment to myself - again, standing in that office in the mansion house - that I would use whatever truth I could discover like a hammer, to lay waste all those about me who were vulnerable to its momentous weight, without knowing what fragility might exist even in those I loved.

  What a pretty alteration had taken place in me, I thought. I shook my head as I looked out across that motley landscape. I wondered - for the first time, oddly enough - whether I really could go back to my old life. I had stood in my little room in the farmhouse just two days ago, thinking that my life was represented not by my possessions but rather entirely defined by my relationship with the people of the Community and the Order, and with the farm and the lands around us… but now I had been exiled from all that - not as successfully in terms of distance as my brother had intended, but determinedly, and with a continuance of ill-wished intent that I did not doubt - and I wondered that I did not feel more abandoned and ostracised, even excommunicated, than I did.

  Certainly I had my Gift, but its uncanny - and now spurned - ability to cure others hardly constituted much of a comfort by itself; rather it provided another criterion by which I might be judged different, set apart.

  Perhaps it was that I did not intend to stay cast out for very long, and that I nursed a fierce but perversely comforting determination to return gloriously, wielding the fiery sword of truth with which to smite those who had wronged me. Perhaps it was simply that my upbringing had forged in me a strength and independence that, while undeni
ably in part a result of all the support and affection I had received from my family, Faith and surroundings, now possessed an autonomy from all of them, just as the tender sapling, shielded from the wind's harsh blast by the encircling forest, grows gradually to adulthood and is later found - should those sheltering trees be felled - no longer to need their help, capable of standing alone, secure in its own vigour and fortitude, and itself capable in turn of providing protection for others, should that time come.

  So I mused, at any rate, as the train puttered through little stations, rumbled between the green walls of cuttings and threw its shadow down the northern faces of embankments to the roads, fields, forests and hills beyond, taking me closer, I hoped, to my Great-aunt Zhobelia. My plans for the evening were to see Zhobelia and then either sleep rough near the village, or perhaps find a bed and breakfast. It had occurred to me that, if there was time to catch a train back, I might repair to Glasgow and look up Brother Topee, who was a university student there, but I was not sure about this.

  Topee is a friend as well as a relation (his mother is Sister Erin, his father Salvador), and I could probably rely on his discretion regarding the fact that I had turned up on his doorstep rather than going with Mo to Spayedthwaite or heading to London, as I'd intimated in my note to my uncle; however I wasn't sure it would be right to implicate Topee in my deception unless I had to, especially as his mother seemed to be Allan's lieutenant.

  The train was warm. I closed my eyes, trying to recall the exact lay-out of the map I had seen in the bookshop in Edinburgh, so that I'd know which way to walk out of Hamilton.

  I fell asleep, but woke before Bellshill and was able to change trains after a half-hour's wait. I followed road signs from Hamilton to Mauchtie and arrived there before nine on a fine, clear blue evening.

  The Gloamings Nursing Home was a substantial old building of red sandstone which had been inelegantly extended to either side with square, ugly wings covered with roughcast. The house stood a little way out of the drab main village in a garden of grass and sycamore. A lane between the Gloamings and a similar, unextended house led to farmland on the low ridge beyond; an electricity substation lay on the other side of the home, pylons humming over the flank of the hill. The Gloamings looked out over more fields on the other side of the road. I took the ramp that led to the front door rather than the steps.

  'Yes?' said the harassed young woman who came to the door. She wore a blue overall, like a real nurse, and had wildly frizzy black hair, large round red glasses and a distracted appearance.

  'Good day,' I said, tipping my hat. 'I'm here to see Ms Zhobelia Whit, née Asis.'

  'Zhobelia?' the girl said, her face screwing into an exasperated expression.

  'That's right. May I come in?'

  'No, I'm sorry, dear,' she said, 'ye canny.' She had a high, nasal voice. Her glasses went up and down with each word. She glanced at her watch. 'It's past time, so it is.'

  I gave her my most tolerantly condescending smile. 'I don't think you understand, young lady. It is very important,' I said. 'Allow me to introduce myself; I am The Blessed Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Elect of God, III.'

  She looked blank.

  I continued. 'I believe I am expected. Our lawyers did send a letter to that effect. You haven't heard anything?'

  'Naw, ah'm sorry… ah'm just here masel, no one's told me anything. But ah canny let ye in, see, 'cos ah'm just here masel, ye know?'

  'Please,' I said. 'I really must see Ms Zhobelia this evening. I regret to say that if I have to, I am instructed to authorise an interdict to be issued which would require that you give me access to her, but obviously the proprietors of this establishment - and indeed I - would rather avoid such legal action if it can be avoided.'

  'Aw, wait a minute,' the lass said, looking so tired and hurt that I felt a pang of guilt at subjecting her to this nonsense. 'Look, ah'm no allowed tae let ye in, hen; it's as simple as that. It's more than ma job, ye know what ah mean? They're dead strict wi' the staff here, so they are.'

  'All the more reason to let me-'

  There was pale movement in the dark hall behind the girl.

  'Is that my Johnny?' said a weak and faltering old voice, and an ancient face, like translucent parchment stretched over bleached bone, peered round the girl's shoulder. I could smell antiseptic.

  'Naw, it's naw, Miss Carlisle,' the girl shouted. 'Get back tae yer seat.'

  'Is that my Johnny?' the old lady asked again, her thin white hands up near her face fluttering like two weak, chained birds.

  'Naw, it's no your Johnny, Miss Carlisle,' the girl shouted again, in that flat, even raising of the voice that indicates one is talking not in anger or for emphasis but to somebody who is deaf. 'Now, you away back tae yer seat; ah'll be through to put you to your bed soon, all right?' The girl turned Miss Carlisle around gently with one hand and carefully blocked her from the doorway, half closing the door.

  'Look,' the girl said to me. 'Ah'm awfy sorry, hen, but ah canny let ye in; ah just canny. Ah've got ma hands full here as it is, ye know?'

  'Are you sure it's not my Johnny, dear?' said the faint, shaky voice from the hallway.

  'Well,' I said, 'I'm just going to stay here until you do let me in.'

  'But ah just canny. Honest. Ah just canny. Ah'm sorry.' There was a crash from the background, and the lass glanced behind her. 'Ah've got tae go now. Ah've just got tae. Sorry…'

  'Look; you're risking civil proceed-' I began,- but the door closed and I heard a lock snick.

  I could just make out the muffled words from behind the door. 'Naw, Miss Carlisle, it's no…'

  I decided to wait. I would try again later and see if sheer persistence paid off. I wondered if this girl was the night shift or if she would be replaced. I put down my kit-bag on the step and sat on it. I fished out my copy of the Orthography and read a few passages by the slowly fading light from the still clear sky.

  I couldn't settle, though, and after a while got up and walked round the house. There was a locked gate to one side but a clear passageway on the other. Tall wheeled rubbish bins in grey and yellow were lined against the roughcast wall beneath a black metal fire escape. The back garden was full of white sheets and grey blankets, hung out to dry and dangling limply in the still air. I walked round the back of the house. I tried the back door, gently, but it was locked.

  Then I heard a tapping noise. I expected it was going to be the girl in the nurse's uniform, shooing me away, but it was the same old lady who'd appeared behind the nurse earlier: Miss Carlisle. She was wearing a dark dressing-gown, standing at a small window to the side of the wing that overlooked the farm lane. She tapped again and motioned to me. I went over and stood under the window. She fiddled with something at the bottom of the window-frame. After a while the window cracked open, pivoting horizontally about its centre line. She lowered her head.

  'Ssh,' she said, putting one thin, milk-coloured finger to her lips. I nodded and mirrored the gesture. She motioned me in. I looked around. It was getting dark and hard to see well, but there didn't appear to be anybody watching. I pushed my kit-bag through first, then scrambled over the sill.

  Her room was small and smelled… of old person; of bodily wastes that were somehow genteel because the failing system had done little processing on their raw materials, so that the offensive became unobjectionable. There was a faint scent of something pleasant, too; lilacs, I thought. I could make out a wardrobe, drawers, a dressing table and a small chair. There was a narrow single bed, its covers disturbed as if she'd just got up.

  'I always knew you'd come back, dear,' she said, and gave me what was probably meant to be a fierce hug. She was tiny and so frail; really she just leaned against me and put her arms round my back. Her tiny head was against my breast. I looked down into translucent, wispily white hair; as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see that the skin on her scalp was very pale pink, and covered in little faint brown patches. She gave a sigh. />
  I put my arms round her and gave her the gentlest of hugs, fearful of crushing her.

  'Dear Johnny,' she sighed. 'At last.'

  I closed my eyes, holding her lightly to me. We stayed like that, holding each other for a while, until it gradually dawned on me that she had fallen asleep.

  I pulled carefully back, unclasped her hands from the small of my back, and laid her gently down on the bed, pulling out the covers to slide her feet and legs in, adjusting her trailing nightie and tucking her in properly. She gave a tiny snore and turned onto her side. From what I could see, there was a smile on her face.

  I opened the door. There was a light on in the corridor; no noise. There was a faint smell of institutional cooking. Miss Carlisle's door had number 14 on it and a little plastic apparatus at about eye level which contained a slip of white cardboard with her name on it. I relaxed a little. That ought to make things easier. I looked back into the room. Through the window, I could see the girl in the nurse's uniform in the garden, bringing in the washing, grabbing the sheets and blankets off the line and throwing them into a wash basket. I hoisted my kit-bag and went silently out into the corridor, closing the door quietly behind me.

  I checked all the names in that corridor; no sign of Zhobelia. There was a fire door with a glass and wire-mesh window to one side off the corridor, leading to the main house. I peeked through to a dimly lit hall.

  The door creaked as I went through. I paused. I could hear music, and then a man's voice, distorted and professionally cheery, then more music. I went on, and found another couple of rooms with names on them, looking to the front of the house.

  The first one I looked at said 'Mrs Asis'. I looked around, gave the gentlest of knocks for form's sake, then slowly opened the door and stepped into the darkened room.

  It was bigger than Miss Carlisle's. I saw two single beds and worried that Zhobelia might be sharing; that would complicate matters. I need not have worried initially; there was nobody in the room. I was wondering what to do when I heard slow footsteps and two voices approaching.