Iain Banks - Whit

I smiled as confidently as I could. 'Well, yes, it's possible that I might be expected to be one of the centres of attention, this time round.'

'Wow,' Roadkill said. 'You got anybody lined up yet, as a father I mean?'

I shrugged. 'I'm still thinking it over,' I said, which contained an amount of truth.

'So do you have to get married first or anything?'

'No. We regard marriage as optional to love and procreation; some people actually treat their partners better without that form of commitment, and some people are better as single parents, especially in our Community, where child care can be shared. But if I did want to marry, I could. In fact, I could marry myself,' I told Roadkill, who looked a little dubious at this. I explained. 'As an officer of the Luskentyrian Sect I'm empowered to officiate at all religious ceremonies including marriages, and there is a precedent for the officiating cleric himself - or herself - being one of the parties to the marriage.'

'Freaky,' Roadkill said.

'Hmm,' I said. 'Ah.' I nodded at the lane that led round to the back of the squat. 'Here we are.'

In February 1949 my Grandfather decided to marry Aasni and Zhobelia Asis; he had - not just with God's permission but indeed at Their insistence - bestowed upon himself the title Very Reverend, which meant that he could carry out religious ceremonies. The sisters agreed that their ménage à trois ought to be regularised, and a ceremony was duly held in the specially decorated hall of the old seaweed factory. The only witness was Eoin McIlone, the farmer who had given the sisters and later Grandfather shelter and succour. He and Salvador had taken to playing draughts several evenings a week in the spare room-cum-study at Luskentyre Farm, a couple of miles along the road from the seaweed factory. They argued incessantly each evening, and with increasing vehemence as they gradually drank more and more of Mr McIlone's whisky, but - partly because they both enjoyed arguing and partly because neither could ever remember what they had been arguing about when they woke up the following morning (Mr McIlone alone in his narrow bunk set into the wall of his old farm house, Grandfather in between the two Asis sisters in his bed on the floor of the old factory office) -they both entirely looked forward to their draughts games, whisky and arguments.

Salvador and his two brides spent their wedding night in the seaweed factory as usual, but the sisters had redecorated a different room in the offices and moved the bed - two mattresses covered with bedding - through to their candle-lit marital suite. That night, a rat ran across the bed, terrifying the two sisters and rather spoiling the whole event, and the next day Salvador constructed a kind of huge, three-person hammock out of various lengths of rope, stout wooden battens and a large piece of sailcloth, all of which he'd found washed ashore over the previous few months while he'd been scouring the shores for the lost canvas grip.

Slung from the iron roof-beams of the old factory office in their giant hammock, the sisters felt much safer, and when the factory and almost everything in it were burned a few months later by a crowd of indignant locals with flaming torches and Grandfather and his two wives moved into a barn at Mr McIlone's farm, the one thing the girls had rescued from the fire and bundled into the back of the van - apart of course from Great-aunt Zhobelia's special chest sent to her from Khalmakistan by her grandmother, and repository of the zhlonjiz - had been the giant hammock.

Actually I strongly suspect, from hints dropped by Calli and Astar, who heard the original story from Aasni and Zhobelia, that it was a very small crowd of indignant locals, and I know that it was late one Friday night, and that drink had been taken, and the men concerned had probably heard some grotesque exaggeration of Grandfather and the sisters' marital arrangements, and they probably didn't mean to torch the factory, they were just looking for Salvador to give him a good hiding. He was, however, already hiding, having taken refuge in the sisters' van which was outside; they had concealed him beneath some bolts of reject tartan they'd picked up for a song from a fire-sale in Portree, but being drunk and clumsy one of the men fell and smashed his lantern and the fire started and the rest ran away while Grandfather cooried deeper under the bales of tartan and the sisters at first tried to put the fire out and then just saved what they could. But the way Grandfather tells it is better.

At any rate, although the original monumental hammock was left behind in Luskentyre when the Community moved to High Easter Offerance, and Salvador and the sisters thereupon enjoyed more normal sleeping arrangements in the shape of a couple of beds shoved together, that is why hammocks are sacred to us and why an Elect is expected to sleep in one at least every now and again, and whenever they are away from the Community (and preferably with their head pointed towards the Community, to show their thoughts lie in that direction). Personally I've always liked hammocks and never really felt comfortable in ordinary beds, so I rarely sleep in anything else.

I lay in my hammock. The loft was spinning. I suspected I had put away too much of the Litening Stryke cider over the course of the evening. At home, when we wish to partake of alcohol we almost invariably drink our own ales, produced in the brew house at the farm. There are certain ceremonies in which small amounts of a special Holy Ale are used, and generally the fact that fermented or distilled fluids have a certain effect on the human brain is taken as being at best a benediction and a gift from God, and at worst an example of Their irritatingly inventive sense of humour which it would be dangerously unwise as well as distinctly unsporting not to be a willing party to. At the same time, however, while a degree of tipsiness is welcomed and indeed even encouraged at certain social events in the Order, extreme inebriation and loss of control of one's mental and bodily functions is very much frowned upon.

Community beers tend to be relatively heavily flavoured but mild in strength, whereas the cider we had consumed with the evening meal had been just the opposite, and I was suffering the effects of having treated one like the other.

The evening had passed very pleasantly; the others in the squat were Dec, the Irishman who'd walked in as Brother Zebediah had been washing my feet; Boz, a most sizable and lustrously black Jamaican man with a fabulously deep, slow voice; Scarpa, his interestingly pale south London girlfriend; and Wince, a smaller version of Boz but, confusingly, with an Irish accent.

They had been a little wary of me at first, but things had gradually become more convivial, first over the meal of vegetable curry, sweet potatoes and chicken (the last of which I couldn't eat, of course, and was glad to see Brother Zebediah passed on as well) and later while watching a videotaped film in the squat's living room, which was bare but functional and - in terms of new-looking electrical entertainment equipment - surprisingly well-equipped. I was, especially initially, distinctly uncomfortable sitting in the presence of all this cluttering technology, but felt that it was my duty to be sociable; I was, after all, the ambassador for my Faith amongst these people, as well as owing them the normal courtesies a guest owes hosts.

Partly, no doubt, the feeling of relaxation I experienced was due to the effects of the Litening Stryke as well as the 'blow' drug cigarettes they smoked, but partly too it was thanks to my somewhat playing the holy fool, regaling them with tales of our life at High Easter Offerance, our history, Revealed truths, commandments and rituals.