Iain Banks - Whit

'What?' the other one said.

'That there. What's that?'

'Bottle of something.'

'Yeah; and that?'

'Yeah… could be something, couldn't it?'

The pressure came back on my arm again and I sucked in breath, trying not to cry out. I sensed the policeman who was pinning me down lower his head to mine, then felt his breath on my neck. 'I think we've found a suspicious substance here, young lady,' he said.

'What are you talking about?' I gasped.

I was dragged upright and held, still painfully, in front of the one who'd brought me down as the second policeman held two of my vials in front of me. I could feel my hat, crushed between my back and the policeman's chest.

'What're these, then?' the other one asked.

I grimaced. 'That on the left's hearth ash!' I said. I was having to work hard at not appending 'you oaf!' or 'you idiot!' to a lot of these utterances. The contents of my kit-bag had been strewn over the tarmac. The bag itself had been turned inside-out.

'Harthash?' said the one holding the vial.

'You mean hashish?' the one behind me said.

'No! Ash from a hearth,' I said, seeing some other policemen walking over towards us. 'It's for a ceremony. The other jar's for my mark. The mark on my forehead. Can't you see it? These are religious substances; holy sacraments!'

The second officer was taking the top off the ash vial. 'Sacrilege!' I yelled. The second officer sniffed at the ash, then dipped a moistened finger in. 'Desecration!' I screamed, as the other policemen came up towards us. I struggled; the grip on my arm tightened as I was lifted onto my tiptoes. Pain surged through my arm and I shrieked again.

'Steady on, Bill,' one of the other officers said quietly. 'We've got a telly crew back there.'

'Right, sarge,' the one behind me said. The pain eased again and I gulped some deep breaths.

'Now then, young lady; what's all this about?'

'I am trying ,' I said through clenched teeth, 'to make my lawful and peaceable way to visit my cousin Morag Whit in Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club, in Dudgeon Magna. This… person behind me was most insulting and when I asked to speak to his superior officer to report his unmannerliness he tricked me and attacked me.'

'Suspicious-looking substance, sarge,' the one with the vial said, presenting it to the older man, who frowned and also sniffed it.

'That is gross irreverence!' I yelled.

'Hmm,' he said. He looked at the kit-bag's contents on the ground. 'Anything else?'

'Other jars and stuff here, sir,' one of the others said, squatting and picking up the vial of dried river mud. A crunch sounded from under his foot as he rose. He looked down and moved something sideways with the edge of his shoe. I saw the remains of the tiny zhlonjiz jar.

'My God ! What have you done ?' I screamed.

'Now now,' somebody said.

'Heresy! Impiety! Desecration! May God have mercy on your Unsaved souls, you wretches!'

'This could be something, too,' the desecrator said, rubbing the dust between his fingers.

'Are you people listening ?' I shouted. 'I am the Elect of God, you buffoons!'

'Put her in the wagon,' the sergeant said, nodding his head. 'Sounds like she might have escaped from somewhere.'

'What? How dare you!'

'And get this stuff bagged for checking out,' the sergeant said, tapping the vial of hearth ash and turning over the limp kit-bag with his foot as he turned away.

'Let me go! I am an officer of the True Church! I am the Elect of God! I am on a sacred mission! You heathens! By God, you will answer to a higher court than you have ever glimpsed for this insult, you ruffians! Let me go!'

I might have saved my breath. I was marched off past numerous other vehicles, groups of people, white lights and flashing blue lights and bundled into a police van some way up the road, still protesting furiously.

In the police van I was handcuffed to a seat and told to shut up. A burly policeman in overalls and crash helmet sat at the far end of the passenger compartment, twirling a baton in his hands and whistling. The only other people in the van were a sorry-looking young couple who smiled at me nervously and then went back to holding each other tight.

The van smelled of antiseptic. I found myself breathing quickly and shallowly. There was a queasiness in my stomach.

I flexed my wrists and scowled at the officer, then closed my eyes and arranged my limbs as comfortably as I could. I attempted to do some deep breathing, and might have succeeded had we not shortly been joined by some loudly protesting youths who were bundled into the van by a clutch of overalled, crash-helmeted policemen.

Shortly thereafter we were driven off at high speed.

The True Church of Luskentyre underwent something of a schism - albeit an amicable one - in 1954, when we were gifted the estate at High Easter Offerance on the flood-plain of the river Forth by Mrs Woodbean, who had become a convert three years earlier. Mrs W was about the dozenth full convert, lured to the now quietly flourishing farm/community at Luskentyre by my Grandfather's reputation for holiness and lack of interest in taking money off even the richest of his followers (an aspect of his renown which he had realised early on only made people all the more generous; another example of the Contrariness of life).

It was, sadly, a tragedy which spurred Mrs W to act. The Woodbeans had a son called David, their only child. Mrs W had been told after his birth that she could not bear another baby, and so the boy was all the more precious to them, and was kept cosseted and pampered. In 1954, when he was seven, he walked through a glass door in a shop in Stirling. He wasn't mortally wounded but he lost a lot of blood and an ambulance was called to take him to hospital; it crashed en route and the boy was killed. Mrs Woodbean took this as a sign that the modern world was too saturated with technology and cleverness for its - or her family's - own good, and decided to renounce the majority of her worldly goods and devote her life to Faith (and allegedly to having another child at all costs, an ambition which was fulfilled years later, when she gave birth to Sophi at the age of forty-three, though at the cost of her own life).

Mrs Ws extraordinary act of charity was unique in its scale, but converts were bountiful in smaller ways all the time, though by all accounts Salvador produced a great show of grumpy reluctance when accepting a gift, and made sure the donor always knew that he was doing it for the good of their soul (on the grounds that it was indeed more blessed to give than to receive, and Salvador's soul was already doing quite well, thank you, and so could afford to be generous when it came to accepting tribute).

People heard about our Order through the media (very occasionally), sometimes through the warnings of sincere but misguided priests and ministers who had not heard the adage concerning the non-existence of bad publicity, but most often just by word of mouth (it has to be admitted that no attempt to spread the word through the commercial distribution of the Orthography has ever been successful). As I have said, there is a sense in which we were the first Hippies, the first Greens, the first New Agers, and so a few brave souls who were in the vanguard of social change, and at least twenty years ahead of their time, were sure to be attracted to a cause that would shake the world in various guises a few decades later.

In the years following the establishment of our Order, my Grandfather gradually stopped looking for the - by now almost mythic - canvas bag, and settled down to the life of what we now call a guru, dispensing wisdom, experiencing visions which helped guide our Faith and providing a living example of peaceful holiness. The sisters continued to share my Grandfather and have his children - most notably and wonderfully my father, born on the 29th of February 1952 - and, with gaps for pregnancies, continued with their mobile shop business until the year of the schism.