Whit

CHAPTER FOUR

My thoughts that night - as I lay in my hammock in my room in the farmhouse - centred around the coming trip, and the possible reasons for my cousin Morag's apostasy. I knew that sleep was probably impossible and that if I did drift off it would probably be just before I was due to be awakened, leaving me feeling shaky and disoriented and tired for much of the day, but I was resigned to this, and it is anyway well known that in such waking tiredness one can often experience a trance-like state which opens one all the better to the voice of the Creator.

Morag and I had been close friends even though she was four years my senior - I had always mixed easily with Community children older than myself, my special status as the Elect conferring the equivalent of a handful of years added to my actual age. Morag and I got on especially well, despite the difference in our years, sharing an interest in music and, I suppose, a similar demeanour. Morag is the daughter of my aunt Brigit, who left us six years ago. Aunt Brigit joined a Millennialist cult based in Idaho in the United States of America; one of those strange sects who appear to think salvation grows out of the barrel of a gun. She came back for the last Festival of Love, but spent most of her time trying to convert us to her new faith, although to no avail, of course (we are, arguably, far too tolerant sometimes). Aunt Brigit was never entirely sure who Morag's father was, which is a not uncommon result of the Community's informality, and one of those unfortunate trends which can help give credence to the more sensationalistic media reports about us. Certainly my Grandfather always treated her like a daughter, but then Salvador has always behaved as though all the Order children are his own, probably just to express his love for all the Saved, but perhaps just to be on the safe side.

Brigit's daughter is a tall, perfectly proportioned creature with bounteous brown-red hair and eyes deep and blue and big as an ocean; her saving flaw was a rather wide gap between her two front teeth, though - much to our disappointment - she'd had that seen to when she too came back to visit us four years ago.

I think that in any other upbringing Morag would never have developed the talent she had for music; she would have learned too early that her looks were a facile passport to whatever she might desire, and so have been spoiled, wasted, even as a person, fit only to hang on a rich man's arm, signalling his status by her pampered glamour and her over-priced clothes, and with nothing more to temper the vacuity of her existence than the prospect of bearing him children they could spoil together.

Instead, she grew up with us, in the Community, where plain clothes, no make-up, a practical hair-cut and just a general lack of concern with looks mitigates against such distraction, and so was given the time to discover that the greatest gift God had seen fit to bestow upon her was something less ephemeral than physical beauty. Morag learned to play the violin, then the cello, then later the viola da gamba, and eventually the baryton (a kind of viola da gamba with extra, resonating strings) not just with fluent, flawless technique but with an emotional intensity and an intuitive understanding for the music that at first belied her lack of years, and later continued to develop and mature. Though they are expressed with all due modesty, it is obvious from her letters that she, almost alone, has been responsible for the revival of interest in the baryton as an instrument, and through her appearances and recordings given pleasure to many thousands of people. I hope we are not guilty of vanity in feeling as proud of her as we do, and even in some small way partially responsible for her achievements.

The weather turned bright and sunny; I put on my hat to shield my head from the sun. I floated alongside acres of huge, windowless warehouses and passed Alloa with the ebbing tide, taking a rest from my paddling as I lunched on clapshot naan and ghobi stovies and drank some water from my bottle. During the afternoon the wind freshened from the west and helped drive me down river, past a huge power station and under Kincardine Bridge. I paddled with renewed vigour, hugging the southern shore with its gleaming mud-flats; to the north lay another gigantic generating station, while to my right the smokes, steams and flares of the Grangemouth oil refinery leaned away from the breeze, pointing the way towards Edinburgh.

I had been to Gertie Fossil's in Edinburgh once before, when I was sixteen, so at least as far as there I knew where I was going. London was another matter. That city is almost as much a magnet for young Orderites as it is for the average youthful Scot, and as well as my cousin Morag and Brother Zeb, it had attracted various others from the Community, including, for a year, my brother Allan, who had also harboured some musical ambitions. He went to London with two friends he had made at the agricultural college in Cirencester where he'd been sent to study farm management. He has played the whole thing down since, but I got the impression he was sorely disappointed by his failure to make something of himself in the big city. I know that he joined a rock music ensemble while he was there and apparently played some form of portable electric organ, however it would seem that whatever visions of stardom he may have cherished came to nothing, and after what I suspect was a generally humiliating experience he returned, adamant both that his place and his work and his destiny were with us in the Order and that he would never again set foot in that vast inhuman fleshpot, epicentre of Clutter and scourge of dreams.

The day wore on; I paddled through the chopping water, taking rests when my arms grew too tired and sore and shifting my position as best I could to ease an ache in my back, which was wet from getting splashed by the waves. Ahead, perhaps ten miles in the distance, I could see the two great bridges over the river, and was heartened by the sight, knowing Edinburgh was not too far beyond. I took the trenching tool in my by now rather raw hands and paddled on.

If I was finding my journey tiring and painful, I reflected that it was as nothing compared to the seminal aquatic rebirth undergone by my Grandfather, four and half decades earlier.

The seeds of our sect were sown one wind-fierce night on the shores of the island of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides.

It was the last hour of the last day of September 1948 and in the first great storm of the season, the Atlantic wind threw the oceanic rollers at the fractured coast in waves of darkness edged by boiling foam; rain and salt-spray merged in the darkness of the storm to roll across the seaward land, bringing the taste of the sea miles inland, beyond even the thunderous hollow booming of the waves falling on the rocks and sands.

Two frightened Asian women sat huddled together around a single scented candle in an old van sheltering in the dunes behind a long dark beach, listening to the waves pound and the wind howl and the rain rattle on the wood and canvas roof of the ancient vehicle, which rocked and creaked on its leaf springs with each furious gust and seemed likely to tip over and crash into the sand at any moment.

The two women were sisters; their names were Aasni and Zhobelia Asis and they were outcasts, refugees. They were Khalmakistanis, daughters of the first family of Asians to settle in the Hebrides. Their family had established a business running a travelling shop round the islands and had become surprisingly well accepted for a place where hanging out washing on a Sunday is considered tantamount to blasphemy.

Khalmakistan is a mountainous region on the southern fringes of the Himalayas currently disputed by India and Pakistan; in this it is similar to Kashmir, though the inhabitants of each statelet share little else except a mutual contempt. Aasni and Zhobelia were the first of the family's second generation, and generally regarded as having had their heads turned by the bright lights of Stornoway; at any rate they were thought too head-strong and Westernised for their own good or that of the family. Had their family acted quickly enough they might have had the two girls successfully married off to suitable suitors summoned from the sub-continent before they got too used to making up their own minds, but as it was the Second World War intervened and almost seven years were to pass before an easing of both travelling and rationing restrictions created favourable conditions for a match to be arranged. By then, however, it was too late.

It was determined that the two sisters should be offered in marriage to two brothers from a family well known to their parents; certainly the brothers concerned were elderly, but their family was well off, known to be long-lived, and the menfolk in particular were notorious for being fecund well into their twilight years. Besides, as their father told them, he was sure they would be the first to admit that a steadying hand, even if it was wrinkled and a bit shaky, was exactly and manifestly what the two girls needed.

Perhaps infected by the spirit of independence sweeping the Raj itself, and catching something of the mood of female emancipation the war had helped to bring about by putting women into factories, uniforms, jobs and a degree of economic control - perhaps simply having seen one propaganda film too many about jolly Soviet crane drivers at the Stornoway Alhambra -the sisters refused point blank, and the eventual result was that they took the extraordinary step - in the eyes of both their original culture and that which they now found themselves part of - of estranging themselves completely from their family and going into competition with them.

They had some savings and they borrowed money from a sympathetic free-thinking farmer who was himself something of an outsider in that land of the Free Kirk. They bought an old van which had been used as a mobile library round the islands, and some stock; they sold the bacon, lard and beef that their family would not touch and for a few months they sold alcohol too until the excise men brought them to book and explained the niceties of the licensing system to them (luckily they were not also asked to produce a driving licence). They were barely making a living, they had to sleep in the back of the van, they were forever ordering far too much or much too little stock, they were constantly running foul of the rationing authorities and they were utterly miserable without their family but at least they were free, and that and each other's company was about all they had to hold on to.

That day, before the storm had darkened the horizon, they had washed their bedding on some stones in a river which decanted into Loch Laxdale and left it to dry while they went about their business in Lewis.(Lewis and Harris are referred to as separate islands though in fact they are both thoroughly linked and decisively separated by a range of - by Himalayan standards - small but impressively craggy mountains. The Harris folk are generally smaller and darker than the people of Lewis, a phenomenon popular myth ascribes to the romantic efforts of hordes of swarthy Spaniards washed ashore after Armada ships were wrecked off the rock-ragged Harris coast but which is probably no more than the difference between Celtic and Norse ancestry.)

By the time the sisters had rushed back through the quickly steepening gloom of mid-afternoon the rain had already started, and when they got to where they had left their bedding the wind had flung most of it against a barbed-wire fence and thrown the rest of it into the swollen river. The rain was heavy and almost horizontal by then and the sheets and blankets on the fence could hardly have been wetter had they too been dumped in the river. The sisters salvaged their sodden bedding and retreated to their van, driving it to a hollow in the dunes nearby where they could shelter from the storm.

And so they sat in their coats, clutching each other while their little scented candle flickered in the draught, surrounded by tea chests and boxes full of lard - both symptoms of Aasni's inability either to resist a good deal or to remember how little storage space they had; meanwhile water from their sheets pooled about their feet and threatened to spoil the bags of sugar, flour and custard powder piled under the shelves.

Then there was a thump as something heavy hit the seaward side of the van. They both jumped. Outside, a male voice moaned, barely audible over the noise of the wind and the waves.

They had a lantern; they put the little scented candle inside and ventured out into the bellowing blackness of the drenching gale. Lying on the sandy grass by the side of the van was a young white man in a cheap two-piece suit; he had black hair and a terrible head wound in his upper forehead which oozed blood the beating rain washed away.

They dragged him towards the open rear door of the van; the man came to and moaned again and managed to stand up for a moment; he fell onto the vehicle's floor and they pulled him far enough inside - on a floor lubricated with water and now with blood - to close the banging, wind-blown door.

He looked deathly white, and shivered uncontrollably, still moaning all the while; blood dribbled from the wound in his forehead. They wrapped their coats around him but he wouldn't stop shivering; Aasni remembered that people who swam the English channel would cover themselves with grease, and so they broke out the lard (of which they had rather more than they needed, due to an irresistible grey-market deal with a man in Carloway who'd found several cases washed ashore) and - setting modesty aside - stripped the man to his sodden underpants and started to cover him in lard. He still shivered. Blood still trickled from his forehead; they cleaned the wound and dabbed some antiseptic on it. Aasni found a bandage.

Zhobelia opened the special chest her grandmother had sent her from Khalmakistan on her twentieth birthday and took out the bottle of cherished healing ointment called zhlonjiz, which she had been told to keep for extra special emergencies; she made a poultice and put it on the wound, binding his head with the bandage. The man still shivered. They didn't want to get their coats covered with lard, so they opened one of the chests of tea (the tea wasn't in the best of condition anyway, having been stored too long in a barn near Tarbert by a farmer who'd hoped to turn a profit on the wartime black market) and tipped the dark tea leaves over the man's quivering, white-larded form; it took two tea chests to cover him entirely; he seemed half unconscious, still moaning from within his covering of tea and lard, but at least and at last he appeared to have stopped shivering, and for a moment his eyes opened and he looked briefly around and into the eyes of the two sisters before falling back into unconsciousness.

They started the van with the intention of taking the man to the nearest doctor, but the grass in the little hollow they had parked in was so slippery from the rain they couldn't move the vehicle more than a few feet. Aasni put on her coat and went out into the storm to summon help from the nearest farm with a phone. Zhobelia was left in charge of their deathly white storm-waif.

She checked that he still breathed, that his poultice was in place and the bleeding had stopped, then she did her best to wring the water out of his clothes. He babbled, talking in a language that Zhobelia could not understand and suspected nobody else would be able to understand either. A couple of times, however, he mumbled the word, 'Salvador…'

The man, of course, was my Grandfather.

God spoke to Salvador. They were waiting, enthroned in and surrounded by glorious light, at the end of a dark tunnel which my Grandfather seemed to ascend to from the banal world. He assumed he was dying and this was the way to Heaven. God told him it was the way to Heaven but he was not going to die; instead he had to return to the earthly world with a message from Them to humanity.

Cynics might suggest that it had something to do with the poultice, the potent, exotic, unknown Khalmakistani herbs seeping from it to enter Salvador's bloodstream and poisoning his mind, producing something akin to a hallucinatory 'trip', but the small-(and fearful-) minded will always try to reduce everything to the triviality and mundanity which their stunted, de-spiritualised minds feel safe dealing with. The fact remains that our Founder woke a different man, and - for all that he had almost died from hypothermia aggravated by loss of blood - a better, more whole one; one with a mission, one with a message; a message God had been attempting to transmit complete to Man for a long time through the aggregating clutter of modern life and technology; a message that only somebody whose ambient mental activity had been reduced to something close to quietitude by the proximity of death would be capable of hearing. Possibly other men had heard God's message, but been too close to that edge of death, and slipped over it, unable to transmit the signal on to their fellow men; certainly there had been no shortage of death over the previous decade.

However that may have been, my Grandfather knew when he finally awoke - on a calm, milky-skyed day, with warm tea being poured down his throat by the two dark-skinned women he had assumed were figments of his imagination - that he was The One; the Enlightened, the OverSeer, to whom God had given the task of establishing an Order which would disseminate the Truth of Their message on earth.

Thereafter, then, whoever our Founder had been before, whatever had driven him to that place on that night, however he had made his way through the storm - out of the sea, off the land, or even falling from the sky - became unimportant. All that mattered was that Salvador awoke, remembering his vision and the task he had been charged with, and decided he had a purpose in life. He had work to do.

First, however, there was the matter of a canvas bag…

The last leg of my water-borne journey, in the early evening, seemed to take forever. I had passed beneath the bowed deck of the grey road bridge and the straight bed of the rail bridge fighting an incoming tide with only the wind at my back to aid me; once through the narrows between the Queensferries I could slacken my efforts a little, but every muscle in my upper body felt as if it were on fire.

Finding that the bottom of my small craft was sloshing with water which had splashed in during my battle with the tides, and fearful for the contents of my kit-bag, I stopped for a while and bailed out the water, using my handkerchief, then I paddled on, between golden sands and quiet wooded shores to my right, and two long, land-isolated jetties to my left, to each of which a huge oil tanker was tied up.

A motor boat left one of the jetties and swung round towards me. The boat proved to be full of surprised-looking workmen in brightly coloured overalls. At first they seemed reluctant to believe that I was not in some difficulty, but then laughed and shook their heads and told me if I had any sense I'd head for shore and continue on foot. They called me 'hen', which I found mildly insulting, though I think it was meant congenially enough. I thanked them for their advice and they powered off, heading upstream.

I came ashore, at last, at Cramond, at the point where a line of tall obelisks strides out across the sands to a low island. Just before I touched the sands, I heaved my kit-bag out from under me - it was only a little damp - and dug out the vial of Forth mud to freshen up the mark on my forehead, which I suspected must have been washed off by a combination of spray and sweat. My strange craft bumped ashore onto grey-blond sands, and I got out. I had a little difficulty in standing, and then in straightening, but eventually did so, and luxuriated in a long if painful stretch, all under the quizzical gaze of numerous swans floating in the waters of the river Almond, and a few suspicious-looking youths standing on the promenade.

'Hey, mister; you ship-wrecked, aye?' one of them shouted.

'No,' I said, pulling my kit-bag out of the inner-tube and packing the folded trenching tool away. I left my craft lying on the sand by a small slipway and climbed up to the youths. 'And I am a Sister, not a mister,' I told them, drawing myself up.

They wore baggy clothes and long-sleeved T-shirts with hoods. Their short hair looked greasy. One of them looked down at the inner-tube. 'Zat big tyre goin' spare then, hen?'

'It's all yours,' I told them, and walked away.

I felt a kind of exhilaration then, having accomplished the first part of my journey. I strode out along the esplanade, munching on another naan with my kit-bag slung over my shoulder while my shadow lengthened in front of me. I consulted my map, negotiated a few roads and found the abandoned railway line - now a cycle-way - at Granton Road. Within a hundred yards I discovered a thin, straight, broken branch hanging off a tree by the trail; I tore it down and used my penknife to remove a few twigs, and soon had a serviceable staff to accompany me on my way. The old railway path took me almost three miles towards my destination, by turns under and over the evening traffic; the air was full of the smell of engine exhaust and the sky was lit with flagrant red clouds as I crossed to pick up the towpath of the Old Union Canal and then took the footpath skirting school playing grounds. The last part of my trip was as well accomplished in near darkness, given that it took me along a stretch of railway line which was still in occasional use. I hid in some bushes up the embankment as a loud diesel engine came swinging round the bend from the east, pulling a long train of open, double-deck wagons stacked with cars.

The red tail-light on the last wagon blinked fast as a racing heart as it disappeared round the turn in the cutting, and I sat there on my haunches for a moment or two, thinking.

After a moment I got up and continued along the track-side, passing through an abandoned station and then walking under a busy-sounding road junction until I came to within a couple of streets of the home of Gertie Possil, in the douce Edinburgh suburb of Morningside, and arrived there in time to take part in a ceremonial supper.