Iain Banks - Whit

There is a perhaps perverse pleasure to be had from not taking the obvious course bred into all Luskentyrians and diligently developed all our lives; the longer I stood on the slip road leading to the motorway and turned down the offers of lifts - sometimes successfully waving on one of the other people hitch-hiking there to take the vehicle instead - the better I felt about this latest leg of my mission. I was experiencing an odd mix of emotions; elation at my feats of guile and arms the day before, relief at leaving the big city, a nagging homesickness and general feeling of missing everybody at the Community, disquiet that - unless either I or the young man at La Mancha had entirely got hold of the wrong end of the stick - my cousin Morag seemed to have developed an antipathy towards me and might even be avoiding me, and an undercurrent of paranoia that one or more of the men I'd attacked with the pepper sauce yesterday might for some reason drive past while I was standing here and jump out and attack me.

I kept telling myself there were getting on for seven million people in London alone and Brentwood was really quite far away and almost directly opposite from the direction I'd be travelling in, but I think it was that fear that finally overcame the prideful feeling of blessed righteousness I was experiencing by turning down all those offered rides and made me accept a lift from a nice young couple in a small, old and rather tinny French car. They were only going as far as Slough, but it got me started. They commented on my Sitting Board; I started explaining about Luskentyrianism and our ascetic tendencies. They looked glad to get rid of me.

I estimated it took me ninety minutes or more first to make my way out of Slough and then to get another lift, this time in the back of a builder's pick-up whose cab was crammed with three young men in what looked like football strips. They took me as far as Reading; cement dust flew up in the slipstream and stung my eyes.

I spent about an hour by the side of the A4 on the outskirts of Reading - mostly spent studying my map and brushing cement dust off my jacket and trousers - then accepted a ride from a well-groomed but casually dressed chap heading for an amateur cricket match in Newbury. He asked about the Sitting Board too; I told him it was a kind of prayer mat, which I think just confused him. I studied the book of maps in his car and decided against the obvious course of being dropped at the junction with the motorway to continue along the M4, accepting it as more blessed to stay with the byways. I stuck with the man - a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, though obviously off-duty, as it were - all the way to Newbury and chatted easily enough to him. I suspect that I was being flirted with but I'm really a novice in such matters so perhaps he was just being friendly. While walking out of Newbury I ate the sandwiches Roadkill had given me the previous evening.

In succession, my next hitches took me to Burbage (with a chain smoker; more eye watering), Marlborough (courtesy of a youngish off-duty soldier who kept brushing my thigh and hip with his hand when he changed gear, until I ostentatiously extracted the six-inch hat-pin from my lapel and started picking my teeth with it), Calne (a kindly greying fellow on his way back from what sounded like an assignation), Chippenham (in a delivery lorry with a sorry soul who was to become a father for the first time later that month, and due to hear the following morning whether he had lost his job in something ominous called a rationalisation) and finally, with the light fading fast, to a village called Kelston with another couple. They were rather older and even more chatty than the two who'd begun the day. They commented on my Sitting Board, too; I told them it was to combat a back problem. They invited me to stay at their house in Kelston. I declined politely, though I availed myself of a look at their road atlas. I slung my hammock in a wood on the village outskirts. It rained for a while during the night; I used my kit-bag as an extra covering, but still got wet.

I woke feeling damp and stiff and cold shortly after dawn and washed my face in the heavy dew that lay upon the grass, then climbed the most scalable-looking tall tree I could find, partly for the exercise and partly so that I would warm up.

Above the tree tops, the sky looked worryingly red, but beautiful all the same, and I sat there, wedged in amongst the branches for a while just watching the soft clouds move and listening to the birds sing, and praising God and Their Creation with a song of my own, sung silently in my soul.

I walked through Bath's outskirts to the A39 and after about an hour's walk started hitching just past a large roundabout. The traffic seemed much busier than the day before, and it was only as I stood at the side of the road trying to account for this that I realised today was Monday and yesterday had been Sunday; I cursed myself for a fool, not having realised this the day before. It made no difference to my journey or quest for Morag, but I had been slow not to ask myself why so few of the people who'd given me lifts the day before had been working.

It was not unusual for Luskentyrians to lose track of the days - we work on the natural cycles of lunar month and year, not artificial divisions like weeks - but I had thought that living in the midst of the Norms I would naturally fall into their ways;

I suppose the squat in Kilburn had been less than archetypically Bland. I thought of home again, and everybody there. I hoped Mr Warriston wouldn't be too worried when I didn't turn up to play the Flentrop. For a while, as the traffic roared past on its way back in towards Bath, I wallowed in a sweet, lost feeling of self-pity, imagining what everyone back home would be doing now, and hoping some of them were missing me.

I shook off the mood and concentrated on feeling positive and looking pleasant and eager, but not seductive. Within a few more minutes I got a lift from a baker returning home after a night shift; I walked from a village called Hallatrow to one called Farrington Gurney and - courtesy of a commuting office manager - was in Wells before the shops were open.

Wells possesses an attractive cathedral and seemed altogether quite a pleasant, holy place. I felt a certain pleasing fitness that I had ended up here this morning when normally I would have been visiting Dunblane, and was tempted to stay and take a look around, but decided to press on. A traffic warden gave me directions for Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club, which was less than ten miles away, near the village called Dudgeon Magna. I started walking west and kept my thumb out as I left the small town behind; a strange-looking van stopped within a minute, barely a furlong beyond the speed-limit sign.

The van's bodywork appeared at first sight to be constructed of bricks. The back door opened to reveal a group of motley-dressed young people sitting on sleeping bags, rucksacks and bed-rolls.

'Headin' for the gig?' one called.

'No, a place called Dudgeon Magna,' I said. There was some muttering amongst the young people. Finally somebody up front looked at a map and the message came back to hop in. I sat on the ridged metal floor

'Yeah, 'pparently it used to belong to a company that sold stone cladding and wall coverings and stuff,' said the lass I was sitting next to, who was about my age. I'd commented on the van's odd appearance.

The old vehicle had sheets of artificial brick stuck to the inside as well as the outside. The ten young people it contained were on their way to some sort of party in a field near Glastonbury.

I thought back to the map I'd looked at the night before. 'Isn't this a rather strange route to take to Glastonbury?' I asked.

''Voiding the filth,' the chap at the wheel called back cheerfully.