Iain Banks - Whit

At about this time, too, they began to experiment with other more substantial dishes, and made their first tentative excursions into the strange and exciting new world of cross-cultural cuisine-combining, as though through such provisional promiscuity and the amalgamation of the Scottish and the sub-continental, they could participate in their own terms in the freshly formulated Festivities. It was then that the process really began that would lead to such dishes as lorne sausage shami kebab, rabbit masala, fruit pudding chaat, skink aloo, porridge tarka, shell pie aloo gobi, kipper bhoona, chips pea pulao, whelk poori and marmalade kulfi, and I think the world is a better place for all of them.

Briefly I spent the night in the cells, in a police station in Bristol. The police seemed suspicious that I had no way of proving my identity, but amused at my name and my protestations of innocence and outrage, at least until they got upset with my persistence and told me - very rudely, I thought - to shut up.

The following morning I was told I was free to go, and that there was somebody to see me.

I was too surprised to say anything; I was led down a corridor between the cell doors towards the desk at the front of the station, trying to work out who could possibly be waiting there for me. Not just that; how could they have found me?

It must, I supposed, be Morag. My heart lifted at the thought, but somehow, nevertheless, I suspected I was wrong.

A few steps before I entered the office, I knew I was.

'God dammit !' a strident female voice rang out ahead of me. 'Call yourselves policemen; you haven't even got any goddamn guns !'

I felt my eyes widen.

' Grandmother ?' I said, incredulous.

My maternal grandmother, Mrs Yolanda Cristofiori, five foot nothing of bleached blonde, leather-skinned Texan, flanked by two tall but cowed-looking men in suits carrying briefcases, turned from berating the duty sergeant and fixed a dramatic smile on me.

'Isis, honey!' she exclaimed. She strode over. 'Oh, my, look at you !' she squealed. She threw her arms around me, lifting me off my feet as I struggled to respond, hugging her in return.

'Grandmother…' I said, feeling dizzy, almost overcome by surprise and Yolanda's perfume. I was so astonished I hadn't even remembered to make the Sign.

'Oh, it's so good to see you! How you doin'? Are you okay? I mean have these bozos treated you good?' She waved at the two men in suits she'd been standing between at the counter. 'I brought some lawyers. Do you want to file a complaint or anything?' She put me down.

'I - well, no; I'm, ah-' I said, somewhat lost for words. My grandmother Yolanda's face was less lined than I remembered; it as still painted with make-up. Her hair looked like spun gold, except harder. She was dressed in highly decorated alligator-hide cowboy boots, embroidered jeans, a silk shirt in what looked like bar-code tartan and a little suede waistcoat studded with pearls. Yolanda's two lawyers looked on, smiling insincerely; the duty sergeant she'd been talking to seemed exasperated.

'Right,' he said. 'You two belong to each other?' He didn't wait for an answer. He pointed to the door with one hand and with the other reached down, produced my kit-bag and plonked it on the counter. 'Out,' he said.

Yolanda took my hand firmly in hers. 'Come on, honey; we'll discuss filing a suit against these jerks over a margarita or two. They fed you yet? You had breakfast? We'll go to my hotel; get them to fix you something.' She marched me to the door, glancing back at the lawyers. 'Get the child's bag, would you, George?'

Grandmother Yolanda originally came to High Easter Offerance in the summer of 1954 with her first husband, Jerome. She was eighteen; he was sixty-two and suffering from cancer. He had just sold some sort of oil company (mud logging, whatever that is), and had decided to spend some of his millions travelling the world, investigating cancer clinics and indulging a recently developed interest in sects and cults in general (I suppose technically we're a cult, though at the time some people still considered us to be a Christian sect; it took a while to get that misunderstanding cleared up). When Yolanda and Jerome left after a few weeks, Yolanda was pregnant. She came back to the Community with another husband, Francis, and her first child, Alice, in 1959, for the second Festival of Love (the first had failed to produce any Leapyearians, but had otherwise been acclaimed a success by all concerned) and continued to visit us every few years, often in May, for the Festival when there was one and in any event usually with a new husband in tow.

Yolanda's second husband, whom she divorced after a couple of years, was called Michael. She once told me Michael had made a fortune in malls and then lost it all in Las Vegas and ended up valet parking in LA. For four years, between two of her visits, I had assumed she meant gangsters' molls and that valet parking was a specialised form of landscape gardening, so had formed entirely the wrong impression of the man.

Her third husband was Steve, who was much younger than her and something called a garage software wizard; apparently he became a multi-millionaire overnight while back-packing in Europe. He died in the Andes three years ago, while attempting to develop the sport of avalanche surfing, which seemingly - and obviously, I suppose - is every bit as dangerous as it sounds.

Yolanda has inherited at least two fortunes, then, and leads what sounds like an energetic and restless existence; I think her daughter and her visits to High Easter Offerance were almost the only two things that introduced any stability into her antsy life.

Due to those visits, my mother and father knew each other as children, though they used to meet only every four years. My father, Christopher, was the Elect of God, of course; the first Leapyearian to be born after the founding of our Faith, he was used to being spoiled. I'm told that Alice, my mother, grew up teasing him terribly and making fun of the arguably excessively reverent treatment he had become used to receiving from those around him in the Community. Alice was three years younger than my father, but I imagine that her US-based but globe-trotting life made her seem at least as old as he. They became sweethearts when she was fourteen and wrote lots of letters while she was alternately travelling the world with her mother and attending school in Dallas. They were married by Salvador himself in 1973, and obviously wasted no time, for Allan arrived later that year and I was born, to Order-wide rejoicing, by all accounts, on the 29th of February 1976.

'Television?' I said, slightly shocked.

'Checked in, turned on to see what miserable handful of channels you had over here these days and almost the first thing I saw was you, being strong-armed into a paddy wagon shouting imprecations.'

'Good heavens,' I said. I thought about it, taking time off from tearing into my breakfast. 'Well, I suppose the Creator can use the works of the Benighted to tip the hand of Providence should They so desire; who are we to question?' I shrugged and tucked back into my smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, pancakes and syrup.

We were in Grandmother Yolanda's suite on the top floor of her hotel, a Sybaritically luxurious former mansion on a hill overlooking the city. I had just stepped out of the shower in the marble and mahogany bathroom and now sat on the floor of the sitting room, wrapped in a huge white fluffy robe, my back resting against a beautiful floral-patterned couch. Yolanda had dried my hair and then wrapped the towel round my head. In front of me on the coffee table sat a huge silver tray loaded with food. I slurped coffee and chomped salmon, looking out over Bath, visible beyond the tall windows and between the sweeping vertical folds of sumptuous green velvet curtains. I felt clean, fresh, wickedly perfumed from the soap in the shower and just generally submerged in heady opulence; meanwhile my stomach gradually filled with food. It will not have escaped the more alert reader that my maternal grandmother has never really gone wholeheartedly for the more ascetic aspects of our faith and probably never will, even if - in her own words - we show her a hair-shirt designed by Gootchy.