Whit

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

'I know you think I'm just a complaining old woman, Isis-'

'Not at-'

'-and I know you don't drive, but you must see what I mean.'

'Well-'

'I mean, it stands to reason; you go into a gas station and you get gas. You get served; somebody fills your tank, maybe gets their hands dirty, checks your oil, washes the bugs off your windshield, kicks the tyres, whatever; you pay the bill, and that's all very fine… but you pull into a gas station, you serve yourself, you get your own hands dirty, maybe break a nail, for God's sakes; no oil check, no windshield wash unless you do it yourself; and you pay the same amount of money! Now, really, I mean, come on; does that seem reasonable to you? Do you think that's right?'

'Put like that-'

'I'm only asking you because maybe you can be objective because you don't drive and maybe you haven't ever thought about all this, maybe you've never noticed all this. I mean, you've never bin to the States, have you?'

'No.'

'No; exactly. So you don't expect service pumps and self-serve pumps, and because you're a good little Orderite you've never even seen movies about the States either, right?'

'Right.'

'Right; unusual in this day and age, believe you me. So you-'

'Grandma?'

'What, honey?'

I laughed. 'Is all this important? I mean to say, does it really matter?'

'Well hell yes! Service matters. This country used to be cute and quaint and kinda socialist; it's got a bit better now since your Mrs Thatcher; people are more polite, they know their jobs are on the line and there are other people who'll do them, they know there are other corporations who'll do the same thing for less money or just plain better, so you're sort of on the way, you know? But you still got a long way to go. And you lost a lot of the cuteness along the way, believe me. You abandon cuteness, you better make damn sure you're pretty goddamn efficient or you're down the tubes, baby. And all this ye olde fuckin' heritage shit ain't gonna fool people forever.'

'… Is that a blue flashing light behind us?'

'Say what? Ah, shee-it…'

'… Now, you see? That was a case in point; if you had on-the-spot fines those traffic cops could have taken me for a couple of hundred bucks; help pay for that fancy bear-mobile there. Instead, what do I get? A ticking-off. I mean, that's sad.'

'I think being American helped,' I said, watching the needle swing back up across the speedometer. 'Are American miles really shorter than British ones?'

'I think so, aren't they? Same with gallons, I think…' Yolanda waved one hand dismissively. 'What the hell; it worked. They let us go; probably thought of all the paperwork involved.'

'Hmm. Anyway…' (I'd been thinking.) '… is efficiency really the best way to measure this sort of thing?'

'What?'

'Well, if you can do a job more efficiently with fewer people, that's all very well for that one particular company, but if you all still have to live in the same society, does it matter? We could probably do a lot of things more efficiently with fewer people at the Community, but that would just leave the people put out of work hanging around feeling useless. What's the point in that? You can't throw people off the farm or lock them up or kill them, so why not let them all have a job, even if that's less efficient?'

Yolanda was shaking her head. 'Honey, that's what the communists used to do, and look what happened to them.'

'Well, perhaps that happened for other reasons. What I'm saying is that efficiency is a strange way to evaluate how a society is doing. After all, the most efficient thing to do might be to kill everybody as soon as they grow old, so they won't be a burden, but you can't do that either because-'

'The Eskimos; the goddamn Inuit; they used to do exactly that,' Yolanda said. 'But it wasn't when you got to a certain numerical age, it was once you couldn't pull your weight. If you looked after yourself you could go on a long time.'

'Maybe they had no choice. But my point is that morality outranks efficiency. And, anyway, extreme efficiency would dictate less choice in the end; the most efficient thing would be for everybody to drive the same sort of car due to the economies of scale. Or for there not to be any private cars at all. You wouldn't like that, would you?'

Yolanda grinned and shook her head. 'You don't really understand Capitalism, do you, Isis?'

'From what I've heard, the best economists in the world don't understand Capitalism either, or do they all agree nowadays, and there are no more booms and slumps, just a steadily rising growth rate?'

'Child, no system is perfect, but this one's the best we got, that's the point.'

'Well, I think our system works better,' I said, settling myself primly in my seat with my hands clasped in my lap. 'The High Easter Offerance estate is a model of archaic working practices, inefficiency, over-manning and job-duplication, and everybody is extremely happy.'

Yolanda laughed. 'Well, good for you guys, Isis, but I don't know that would scale up too successfully.'

'Perhaps not, but it is my belief that contentment speaks for itself and has no need to worship at the altar of monetary efficiency's false and brazen idol.'

'Whoa,' Yolanda said, glancing over at me with narrowed eyes. 'You speaking ex-cathedra there, oh Elect one?'

'Let's just say that when the Community passes into my charge, as it sadly must one day, there will be no change in the way the farm and the Order is run.'

'Good for you, honey; you do it your way. Don't let me persuade you no different.'

'Whatever you say,' I said.

We had returned to Bath from Dudgeon Magna to discuss what to do next. We had another margarita. We suspected that Morag might have returned to La Mancha, Mr Leopold's home in Essex; Yolanda attempted to call the house, but the number was ex-directory and I had not thought to look for the number when I'd had the chance, in the hallway by the phone when Tyson was distracting the young man.

'How far's Essex?' Yolanda asked.

'A hundred and… fifty miles?' I hazarded. 'Beyond London.'

'Wanna go, or d'you want to head north now?'

'I don't know,' I confessed, pacing up and down the sitting room of Grandmother Yolanda's suite, my hands clasped behind my back. I was in a quandary. I really didn't like the sound of the way things were going back at High Easter Offerance, and my first instinct was to return there as quickly as possible to discover what was going on and do whatever sorting out might be required. Nevertheless, I was here on an important mission, and Morag/Fusillada's trail had not yet gone totally cold. My duty remained as it had been: to attempt to track and intercept my cousin and reason with her. I continued pacing. My new leather trousers creaked and squeaked, and I kept wanting to giggle at this. Which reminded me. I stopped and looked Yolanda in the eye. 'Are you fit to drive, Grandma?'

Yolanda raised her glass. 'Almost up to operating level.'

'Maybe we should get the train.'

'Nonsense. But where are we going?'

'Essex,' I decided. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my fancy trousers. 'Do you think my old clothes are ready yet?'

La Mancha was dark, silent and locked. It was evening by the time we got there and we'd have seen any lights on inside. There was no sign of Tyson or the young man or anybody else.

We stood on the back lawn, looking into a smoked-glass conservatory which held a huge round bath. The light faded slowly from the skies above.

'They're outa town, we're outa luck,' Yolanda growled.

'Oh dear.'

We stepped back and walked round the side of the house. A small bright light came on under the eaves. 'Ah-ha!' I said.

'Ah-ha nuthin',' Yolanda said, shaking her head. 'Those are security lights, child; automatic. Must of just got dark enough.'

'Oh.'

We returned to the car, past the painted plough, cartwheel and buggy, which I realised now were just ornamental. The gate had been padlocked so we had to get back over as we'd got in, over the top.

'Well, hell,' Grandma Yolanda said, settling into the driver's seat of the hired car, 'we'll just be forced to go into London, stay at the Dorchester, eat at Le Gavroche, catch a show and party the night away in some grotesquely expensive club drinking vintage champagne.' She made a clicking noise with her mouth and fired up the car. 'I hate it when that happens.'

'How's your head?'

'It feels like the china shop just after the bull's paid a visit.'

'What, full of bull shit? Haw haw haw.'

I opened my eyes and gave my grandmother what was supposed to be a withering look. She glanced at me over the top of her Wall Street Journal and winked. The grey-suited chauffeur slid the car -a 'Jag-waar' according to Yolanda - into a gap in the mid-morning traffic near Harrods. We were heading for Heathrow Airport. I shifted on my Sitting Board, making the leather trousers squeak. I'd had little choice over what to put on that morning; the hotel in Bath had not been able to extricate my old clothes from the laundry in time for us leaving for London. We had left the Order's address and been assured they would be forwarded, but it meant I had to wear the gear my grandmother had bought for me, which didn't seem altogether suitable for a return to the Community. However, I was in no state to try to find different clothes. Yolanda wore boots, dark blue culottes and a short matching jacket.

'… Oh dear,' I said. 'I think I'm going to-'

'You know how to open the window?' Yolanda said urgently. 'It's this button here-'

'Oh,' I said, farting audibly inside my leather trousers. 'Sorry,' I said sheepishly.

Grandma Yolanda sniffed the air. She shook her head, then buried it in the newspaper.

'Hell, child; smells like a skunk crawled up your ass an' died.'

As I've indicated, our Faith is happy with tipsiness but frowns upon drunkenness taken to the point of incapacity, inarticulacy and insensibility. Nevertheless, it is recognised that people who normally only ever get slightly intoxicated may occasionally become utterly inebriate, and that one state can lead to the other. Unless this starts to happen rather too frequently, the hang-over will itself be seen as quite sufficient punishment for the transgression, and nothing will be said.

Occasionally, when a Luskentyrian has a bad hang-over, they are inclined to wish that Salvador had been instructed to ban the use of alcohol entirely when he was being given the rules which would govern our Faith. In fact, right at the start, that is exactly what did happen; for a whole week, as my Grandfather scribbled down the results of his having tuned in to God's frequency, there was a commandment - there is no other word for it - written on page two of Salvador's original notes which stated that strong liquor had to be avoided, strenuously. It was crossed out during week two of our Founder's revelations, around the time when Mr McIlone started giving my Grandfather medicinal measures of whisky, reminding Salvador that there was a place for such things and causing him to realise that what he'd heard when he thought he was being told to prohibit drink was in fact a false signal.

Before I'd left High Easter Offerance I'd been helping my Grandfather with his latest revisions to the Orthography, our holy book and repository of all Salvador's wisdom and insights. Part of this process had comprised weeding out false signals, the results of Dispatches our Founder had been the medium for which had turned out not fully to represent God's message. I regard it as a sign of strength and the influence of a higher Truth that our OverSeer is happy to look back and admit that some of his pronouncements were flawed, or at least capable of improvement. Of course, this wasn't really his fault; he has consistently tried to report the Voice which he hears as accurately and faithfully as possible, but he is only human, and to be human is to err. But to be human is also to be flexible and adaptable, and - if the individual does not succumb to the terrible influence of Pride - it is also to be capable of admitting one has been wrong, and to try to make corrections.

So, having originally held that God was male, our Founder later realised that the Voice he had heard had only sounded male because he himself was male; he had been expecting a male voice, he had grown up in a Christian society which took it as read that God was male and always depicted God as a man, and so it was understandable that while undergoing the revelatory whirlwind which had swept through him, my Grandfather had missed the fact that God was not as he'd been brought up to believe.

It is true that we can only take so much revelation at one time, only bring on board a certain amount of change; otherwise we simply become confused and start to lose context. We must have some sort of framework to understand ideas within, and when the ideas you are using are so powerful and so important that they threaten to change the nature of that framework itself, you have to be careful to change only a little at a time, or you risk losing the pattern for the whole fragile artifice that is human understanding. So it might even be, Grandfather has hinted, that God deliberately misled him, or at least made no attempt to correct him when it became clear that he was making such mistakes, because to have done so would effectively have been saying, Everything you have believed until now has been false, which, if it had not caused my Grandfather to doubt his very sanity, might well have caused him to take the easier course of ignoring what God was telling him, dismissing the Voice as some aberration, just some banal medical condition, not a profound paradigm-shift in the spiritual history of the world and the birth of a fresh and vital new religion.

However it may have been, it is the case that having put in place the skeleton of Salvador's faith, God later fleshed out this new creation, and gradually revealed to our Founder the tripartite nature of Their being: both male and female and sexless (this was what God had been saying to Christians, but they had misinterpreted it as Father, Son and Holy Ghost because of the nature of society of the time, which was profoundly patriarchal).

Similarly, Salvador originally thought that there was a Devil - old Redtop as he sometimes referred to him - and that there was a Hell, too, a place submerged in eternal darkness whose walls were made of glass, where tormented souls burned like a billion scattered embers on a million blackly towering levels, forever sliced and cut by the razor-sharp edges of their frozen prison.

Later, he was able to separate this fevered, fearful vision from the quiet, calm articulation of perfection that is the true Voice of God, and realise that - again - what he had been experiencing was something from inside himself. These were his visions, not God's; they were the result of the fear and terror and guilty dread that exist in everyone and which certain faiths, especially Christianity, prey upon and exaggerate the better to control their flocks. My Grandfather was a new voice bringing glad tidings of joyful, ultimate hope and a whole new way of looking at both the world and God, but he still had to speak in the tongue he'd been taught as a child and which other people understood, and that language itself carried with it a host of assumptions and prejudices, telling its own old stories even as Salvador was using it to reveal his brand-new one.

The idea that there is a Devil is obviously a powerful one, and common to many different cultures, but I think our Founder is right in emphasising the Satan-free nature of our Faith. We have no need of bogeymen to frighten our children with, and do not believe in giving adults any excuse for their own faults; ours is a modern faith, born after the War's great blood-letting in the midst of our century of pain, when humanity finally revealed itself as the ultimate devil. Just as there is both fear and comfort to be drawn from devils - the fear speaks for itself, the comfort comes from being able to absolve oneself of responsibility for one's actions - so there is, inversely, both comfort and fear to. be drawn from the realisation that there are no such things after all.

Of course, this means that we must shoulder more responsibility for our lives than other religions would allow, and one of the other errors in this area my Grandfather has cleared up over the years includes the Heresy of Prudishness.

The Heresy of Prudishness was a result of Grandfather originally teaching that while it was wrong to restrict sexual relations between people of the same generation, it was right to do so between generations. He later amended this to specify that only if one full generation lay between the two people concerned should their love be forbidden. Again, I think one can see the divinely inspired but still humanly limited prophet struggling to hear the Creator's voice above the clutter of a hypocritical and morally constipated society whose restrictive teachings still echoed in his ears. Let cynics find their own shortcomings and denied desires in what they blame our Founder for; I believe he has only ever tried to tell the truth as best he can, and if the truth leads him - as our leader - to a better, fuller personal life then we ought all to be grateful, both for him and for ourselves.

There is an afterlife, and our Faith's ideas on that too have evolved over the years. Originally, incorporating the idea of Heaven and Hell, it was fairly conventional and recognisably Christian in inspiration. However, as Grandfather has tuned in more and more accurately to what God is saying, the afterlife, in the shape of the all-absorbing Godhead, has become more complicated and more sophisticated. Indeed it might almost be more true to say that what we live in is the pre-life; a sort of minor overture to the grandly symphonic opera that follows; a scrawny solo before the richly glorious massed choir. Most religions have some sort of angle on the truth in this regard, but I think it obvious that Luskentyrianism, with elements of almost all of them, decisively out-does the lot.

I did not enjoy my flight from London to Edinburgh, which was the first I had ever made. For one thing, I did not feel well, and the various movements and changes of pressure involved in flight seemed almost designed to introduce a reeling of discomfort even without the effects of far too much alcohol the night before. In addition, though, there are various mistakes and errors of practice and etiquette one can make when travelling by aircraft, and I think I made all of them.

Grandmother Yolanda found my gaffs most amusing; the business-suited fellow sitting to my other side was less impressed. My first mistake was to tell him - in a spirit of vigilant and caring friendliness and general camaraderie - to study his safety instructions when the conductress told him to; he looked at me as if I was quite mad. My final mistake - on the plane itself, anyway - was a result of trying to show off (how often is that the case!).

The cup of tea I asked for after my miniaturised meal was a little hot, and I'd noticed that above each seat was a small swivelling nozzle which dispensed cold air. I decided to redeem myself in the eyes of the businessman at my side by using the stream of air to lower the temperature of my tea. This was a fine idea in theory and would undoubtably have worked perfectly well if I hadn't ostentatiously held my cup right up to the nozzle and twisted it fully on, producing a fierce and highly directed pulse of air which displaced the tea in the cup and showered it over the businessman and the person in the seat behind him. Yolanda found the whole episode quite hilarious, and even stopped complaining about the lack of First Class for a few moments.

Yolanda's good mood evaporated rapidly when we got to Edinburgh Airport and she couldn't remember where she'd left her hire car.

'Thought it'd be quicker just leaving it here instead of turning it in and having to hire another one,' she said, stamping down another row of cars.

I followed, pushing a trolley. 'What sort of car was it?' I asked. Not that it would make much difference to me; cars are cars.

'Don't know,' Yolanda said. 'Small. Well, smallish.'

'Doesn't the car key tell you something?'

'I left the keys inside the exhaust pipe,' she said, with a hint of embarrassment. 'Saves carrying zillions of keys around.'

I'd noticed that some cars had stickers in the back window identifying hire companies.

'Can you remember what company it belonged to?'

'No.'

'They've got these letters on posts all over the car park; was it near- ?'

'Can't remember. I was in a hurry.'

'What colour was the car?'

'Red. No; blue…. Shit.' Yolanda looked frustrated.

'Can you remember what cars it was parked between?'

'Get real, Isis.'

'Oh. Yes, I suppose they might have moved. But maybe they're still here!'

'Range Rover. One was a Range Rover. One of those tall things.'

We checked all the Range Rovers in the car park before Yolanda thought to check her credit card slips. There was no sign of a car hire from Glasgow Airport.

'Probably left it in the car,' she admitted. '… Oh, the hell with this. Let's hire another one.'

'What about the one that's here?'

'Fuck it. They'll find it eventually.'

'Won't you get charged?'

'Let them sue. That's what lawyers are for.'

If our Faith had a Golden Age it was probably between the years 1955 to 1979; that was when our Order grew from just a few people, many of them related in one way or another, to a fully functioning religion with a complete theology, an established base (indeed, two established bases, the original at Mr McIlone's farm at Luskentyre and the new one at High Easter Offerance), a settled succession of Leapyearians - through my father, Christopher, and then myself - and a steadily growing number of converts, some of whom came to stay and work at the Community and some of whom were happier in the outside world, though remaining committed to the Order and pledged both to come to its aid if required and to act as our missionaries to the Unsaved.

Then, in 1979, two disasters befell us, one affecting each of our two spiritual and physical homes. On Harris in April, Mr Eoin McIlone died. To our astonishment - and it has to be said, to our Founder's fury - he died intestate, and his farm was inherited by an Unsaved: Mr McIlone's vile step-brother from the town of Banff, who was interested only in selling the place as quickly as possible and making as much money as he could. He had no sympathy with our Faith, and as soon as he took possession of the property he turned out the Brothers and Sisters who lived and worked there. Some of those people had been there for thirty years, working the land and maintaining the fabric of the buildings, putting three decades of sweat and toil into the place for no more reward than a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, but they were ejected without a thought, without as much as a Thank you or a By-your-leave, as though they were criminals. We were told that Mr McIlone's step-brother went to church every Sunday, but by God there was little Christian charity in the man. If his Hell was true he'd rot in it.

Of the five Brothers and Sisters who were living at Luskentyre when Mr McIlone passed on, two came to us at the Community, one stayed in the islands to work on another farm, one remained there to fish, and one returned to her original family in England. Our world was suddenly smaller, and for all that High Easter Offerance was a fine, productive place, and far more balmily easeful than Luskentyre, still we felt, I think, the loss of our original home as though we had lost an old friend. Of course, I was barely three when this happened and can remember little or nothing of the time, but I'm sure I must have been affected by the mood of the people around me and surely joined in the mourning in my own childish way.

Luskentyre remained and remains a holy place for our Order, and many of us have been on pilgrimage to the area - I myself travelled there last year, attended by Sisters Fiona and Cassie - though we are denied access to the farm itself by its current owners and must content ourselves with staying in local Bed and Breakfasts, wandering the coastline and the dunes and surveying the remnants of the ruined seaweed factory.

Our grief at losing Luskentyre proved to be only a presentiment of what was to come, however, at the other end of the year.

'I have to be in Prague tomorrow,' Yolanda said as we finally made the motorway that would take us to within a few miles of High Easter Offerance. 'Sure you don't want to come?'

'Grandma, apart from anything else, I don't have a passport.'

'Shame. You should get one. I'll get you one.'

'I think it causes problems when we apply for passports.'

'I'll bet. What do you expect from a country where they not only won't let you bring a gun into the country but won't even let you buy one when you get here?' She shook her head.

'Will you be coming straight back?'

'Nope; then I head for Venice, Italy.'

I thought about this. 'I thought your other house was in Venice, California.'

Yolanda nodded. 'I've a house there, and an apartment in the original Venice.'

'Doesn't that get confusing?'

'Does for the IRS,' Yolanda said, glancing over at me and grinning.

I was shocked. 'Aren't they some sort of terrorist organisation?'

Grandmother Yolanda had a good laugh at that. 'Kind of,' she agreed. 'Come to think of it, now that Russia's opened up, I might buy places in both Georgias. That would confuse the hell out of them, too.'

'Do you think you'll ever settle down, Grandmother?'

'Not even in an urn, child; I want to have my ashes scattered to the four winds.' She glanced at me. 'You could do that for me, maybe. If I left you instructions in my will, would you?'

'Um,' I said, 'well, I… I suppose so.'

'Don't look upset; I might change my mind, anyway; get myself frozen instead. They can do that nowadays, you know.'

'Really?' I had no idea what she was talking about.

'Anyway,' Yolanda said. 'Prague, Venice, then Scotland again.' (She pronounces it Skatlind.) 'I'm goin' to try and get back for the end of the month.'

'Oh, for the Festival.'

'Well, no, not specifically, but what is happening with that? For you personally, I mean.'

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and looked at the scenery of fields and hills. 'How do you -?'

'You know what I mean, Isis,' she said, not unkindly.

I knew what she meant. I knew so well that I had been trying hard not to think about it for some long time by then, and this whole excursion to look for Morag had itself provided a way of not thinking about it. But now that Morag's trail had finally gone cold and there seemed to be some sort of problem requiring my presence at the Community, I had no choice but to confront the question: what to do?

'Isis. Are you happy taking this part in this Love-Fest or not?'

'It's my duty,' I said lamely.

'Bullshit.'

'But it is,' I said. 'I'm the Elect of God.'

'You're a free woman, Isis. You can do what you please.'

'Not really. There are expectations.'

'Fooey.'

'I am the third generation; there's nobody else. As far as Leapyearians go, I'm it,' I said. 'I mean, anybody can be a Leapyearian; it doesn't have to be somebody in the family or even somebody in the Community, just somebody in the Order, but it would be… neater if it was kept in the family. Grandfather hoped it might be Morag who provided the next generation, but if she's not even part of our Faith any more…'

'That doesn't mean you have to try to produce the next generation now if you don't want to.' My grandmother looked over at me. 'Do you, Is? Do you want to be a mother now? Well?'

I had the sinking feeling that Yolanda wasn't going to look back at the road until I answered her. 'I don't know,' I said, looking away and watching the spire of Linlithgow Palace appear round the side of a low hill to my left. 'I really can't decide what to do.'

'Isis, don't let them put pressure on you. If you don't want to have a child yet, just tell them. Hell, I know that old tyrant; I know he wants another 'Elect' to keep this… well, to keep the Order going, but you're just young; there's still plenty of time; there's always the next goddamn Festival. And if you decide it's never going to be the right time, then-'

'But by the next Festival the pressure will be even worse!' I cried.

'Well then-' Yolanda began, then glanced at me, frowning. 'Wait a minute; you sure 2000 is a leap year?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I thought if the year's divisible by four it's a leap year, unless it's divisible by four hundred, when it isn't a leap year.'

'No,' I said wearily (we had all this drummed into us preschool at the Community). 'It's not a leap year if it's divisible by one hundred. But if it's divisible by four hundred, it is a leap year.'

'Oh.'

'Anyway,' I said. 'I don't think Salvador believes he'll see 2000.'

'Let's cut to the chase here, Is. The question is, are you ready to be a mother or not? That's what they expect of you, isn't it?'

'Yes,' I said, miserably. That's what they want.'

'Well, are you ready?'

'I don't know!' I said, louder than I meant, and looked away, chewing on a knuckle.

We drove on in silence for a while. The smokes and steams of Grangemouth oil refinery swung past to our right.

'You seeing anybody, Isis?' Yolanda asked gently. 'You got anybody special?'

I swallowed, then shook my head. 'No. Not really.'

'You had any boyfriends yet?'

'No,' I confessed.

'Isis, I know you seem to develop slower out here, but shit, you're nineteen; don't you like boys?'

'I like them fine, I just don't…' My voice trailed off as I wondered how to put it.

'You don't want to fuck them?'

'Well,' I said, blushing, 'I don't think so.'

'What about girls?' Yolanda sounded a little surprised but mostly just very interested.

'No, not really.' I leaned forward, elbows on thighs, chin in hands, staring glumly at the cars and trucks ahead of us on the motorway. 'I don't know what I want. I don't know who I want. I don't know that I want.'

'Well then, God's sakes, Isis!' Yolanda said, waving one hand around. 'All the more reason to tell Salvador to take a hike! Christ almighty; get yourself sorted out first. No one who loves you is going to give a damn if you're gay or want to stay celibate, but don't get pregnant on the off chance you'll drop on the twenty-ninth of February just to keep that old letch happy!'

'Grandmother!' I said, genuinely shocked. 'You mean Salvador?'

'Who the hell else?'

'He is our Founder! You can't talk about him like that!'

'Isis, child,' Yolanda said, shaking her head. 'You know I love you, and God help me I even have a lot of time for that old rogue because I think basically he's a good man, but he is a man; I mean, he's human and he's very male, you know what I'm saying? I don't really know that he's anything holy at all; I'm sorry to say that because I know it hurts you, but-'

'Grandmother!'

'Now! Just hear me out, child. I've seen just about every damn cult and faith and sect and religion and pseudo-religion the world has to offer in my time, and it seems to me maybe in some sense your Grandfather is right about one thing: they are all searching for the truth, but they never find it, not all of it, not any of them, and that includes you people; you're no more right than anybody else.'

I was sitting with my mouth hanging open, appalled by what I was hearing. I'd always known Grandmother Yolanda wasn't the strictest adherent of our Order, but I'd like to think that somewhere underneath all this restless, rootless, wasteful consumerism there was still a core of Faith.

'And you know what I think? I think it's all a load of crap. I don't doubt there is a God, although maybe even that's more habit than true faith, God knows, but I don't think anybody in any religion has ever said one damn useful thing about Him or Her or It. You never noticed religions always seem to get invented by men? When you ever hear of a cult or a sect started by a woman? Hardly ever. Women have the power of creation in them; men have to fantasise about it, create Creation itself, just to compensate; ovary envy. That's all it is.' Yolanda nodded with self-certitude while I looked on. 'Know what decided me on all this?'

She looked at me. I shrugged, too choked to speak. 'Koresh,' she said. 'Remember him?'

'I don't think so.'

'What? WACO: We Ain't Comin' Out? Were you on the moon or something? You must have seen…' Yolanda rolled her eyes. 'No, I guess you didn't.'

'Wait,' I said. 'Yes; I think my friend Mr Warriston might have told me something about it. Wasn't that in Texas?'

'Town called Waco,' my grandmother confirmed. 'About a hundred miles south from Dallas. Drove down there the day it happened. Day it ended. Saw the embers. Made me mad as hell, goddamn government doing that… not that it was right to bomb Oklahoma City, mind… But the point was Koresh,' she said, wagging one finger at me. 'They showed film of him from before, holding a Bible and leading his followers in some marathon worship session and said he wanted to be a rock star; tried to be one, in fact, but didn't get anywhere. Became a prophet instead. And how did he end up living? Worshipped, that's how, in a place where he could have any woman he wanted and smoke dope and drink all night with his buddies. Hog heaven. He got the rock-star life without having to become one; he got what he really wanted: sex and drugs and worship. He was no more holy than, I don't know, Frank Zappa or somebody, but he got to pretend he was, got his own farm, all the guns he could play with and at the end he even got to become some sort of dumb martyr, thanks to the Feds and that fat dick Clinton. Frankly I didn't care Koresh died, or care very much that his followers did, though I probably should; you like to think they knew the choice they were making and were just plain stupid, and if you'd somehow gotten into the same situation you'd have been smarter… No, it was the children that made me cry, Isis; it was knowing they died, knowing they suffered, and weren't old enough to have made up their own minds about whatever insane fucking power-trip that egotistical asshole Koresh was taking his people on.'

I stared at my grandmother. She nodded as she looked ahead. 'That's my thoughts on the subject, Grand-daughter. Seems to me women have been falling for this holy-man shit down through all the centuries and we ain't stopped falling for it yet. Jesus. The KKK: Koresh, Khomeini, Kahane; well, to hell with the lot of them, all the fundamentalists, and that Aum Shitface gang from Japan, too.' Yolanda shook her head angrily. 'World's more like a goddamn comic-book every fuckin' day.'

I nodded, and thought the better of asking my grandmother exactly what she was talking about. She took a deep breath and seemed to calm herself somewhat. She smiled briefly at me. 'All I'm saying is, Isis, don't be in too big a hurry to join up too. You get your head sorted out, but remember: men are a bit crazy and a bit dangerous, and they're jealous as hell, too. Don't sacrifice yourself for them, because they sure as shit won't do it for you; fact is they'll try and sacrifice you.'

I watched her drive for a while. Eventually I said, 'So, are you apostate too, Grandmother?'

'Hell,' Yolanda said, looking annoyed. 'I was never really part of your Order in the first place, Is. I just went along with it. Jerome was interested in trying to save his soul. I found Salvador… charismatic at first, then later I just got to know all the people at the farm, and then Alice married Christopher; that tied me in tight.' She glanced over at me again. 'Then you came along.' She shrugged, looked back at the road. 'I'd have taken you from them if I could, Is.' She looked at me again, and for the first time ever, I thought, she looked uncertain. 'If you hadn't been born the day you were… well, I might have been allowed to take you; they might have let me, after the fire. However.' She shrugged once more and concentrated on the road again.

I turned to watch the road unwind towards us, the traffic like little purposeful packets of metal, glass and rubber, containing their fragile cargoes of humanity.