Iain Banks - Whit

She nodded. 'I guess so.'

'You've done so much for me,' I told her. 'I hate-'

'Forget it. You sure you don't want me to stick around?'

'Really, no.' I gave a brave smile. 'You go and see Prague; go and see your red diamond.'

'Fuck the diamond. And Prague will still be there.'

'Honestly; it'd be better. I won't feel I've disrupted your life totally too.' I gave a small laugh and looked around with an expression that spoke of an optimism I didn't feel. 'This'll all get sorted out. Just one of those daft things that comes along in a place like this where everybody lives on top of each other all the time; storm in a tea cup. Storm in a thimble.' I fashioned what I hoped was a cheeky grin.

Yolanda looked serious. 'You just look out, Isis,' she told me, putting her hand on my shoulder and lowering her head a little as she fixed her gaze upon me. It was a curiously affecting gesture. 'It ain't never been all sweetness and light here, honey,' she told me. 'You've always seen the best of it, and it's only now you're getting the shitty end of the stick. But it's always been there.' She patted my shoulder. 'You watch out for Salvador. Old Zhobelia once told me…' She hesitated. 'Well, I don't rightly know exactly what it was she was trying to hint at, to tell the truth, but it was something, for sure. Something your Grandfather had to hide; something she knew about him.'

'They were… they were married,' I said, falteringly. 'The three of them were married. I imagine that they had lots of little secrets between them…'

'Hmm,' Yolanda said, obviously not convinced. 'Well, I always wondered about her heading off, just disappearing like that after the fire; seemed kind of suspicious. You sure she is alive?'

'Pretty sure. Calli and Astar seem still to be in touch. I can't imagine they'd… lie.'

'Okay, well, look; I'm just saying there might be more than one hidden agenda here. You will take care now, won't you?'

'I will. I swear. And you mustn't worry; I'll be fine. You come back in a week or two. Come back for the Festival and I'll have everything running back on track again. I'll sort it out. Promise.'

'There was a deal to get sorted, Isis, even before this, like we were talking about in the car today.'

'I know,' I told her, hugging her. 'Just have faith.'

'That's your department, honey, but I'll take your word for it.'

One night in November 1979 a fire destroyed half the mansion house; it killed my mother Alice and father Christopher and Grandmother Aasni and it might have killed me too if my father hadn't thrown me out of the window into the garden fishpond. He might have saved himself then, too, but he went back to look for my mother; they were eventually found huddled together in the room I had shared with Allan, overcome by smoke. Allan had escaped on his own.

Grandmother Aasni died in her kitchen in the house, seemingly the victim of her own culinary experimentation.

The fire engine called from Stirling that night could not be taken across the already holed and tumbledown bridge by the Woodbeans' home; the Community put out the fire itself, mostly, with some help later on from a portable pump brought over the bridge by the fire brigade. My Grandfather had always known that, with the number of candles and paraffin lamps we used, especially in winter, the risk of fire at the farm was high; accordingly he had always treated fire prevention with the utmost seriousness, had bought an old but serviceable hand-powered pump from another farm, and ensured that there were lots of buckets of water and sand stationed at various points throughout the farm, as well as carrying out regular drills so that everybody knew what to do in the event that a fire did break out.

Fire officers came the next day to survey the gutted wreckage of the mansion house and to attempt to discover how the fire had started. They determined that the seat of the fire had been the kitchen stove, and that it looked very much as though a pressure cooker had exploded, showering the room with burning oil. Aasni had probably been knocked unconscious in the initial blast. Zhobelia - distraught, weeping, incoherent, hair-tearing Zhobelia - left off her wailing just long enough to confirm that her sister had been trying to develop a new type of pressure-cooked pickle whose ingredients included ghee and a variety of other oils.

I don't remember the fire. I don't remember smoke and flames and being thrown from the window into the ornamental fish pond; I don't remember my father's touch or my mother's voice at all. I don't remember a funeral or a memorial service. All I remember- with a strange, static, photographic clarity - is the burned-out shell of the mansion house, days or weeks or months later, its soot-shadowed stones and few remaining roof beams stark black against the cold blue winter skies.

I think Allan felt my parents' loss more; he was old enough to know that he would never see them again whereas I could not really understand this idea, and just kept waiting for them to come back from wherever it was they had gone. I suppose the nature of the Community itself made the blow less keenly felt than it might have been in Benighted society; Allan and I would have been brought up much the way we were even if our parents had not perished, our care, upbringing and education spread out amongst the many faithful of the Community rather than left solely to one binary nuclear family.

I believe it dawned on me that my parents weren't coming back only as the burned-out mansion house was rebuilt during the following year, as though while the building's shell was still open to the weather and the skies my mother and father could somehow find a way to return… but as the roof was rebuilt and the new beams and rafters hoisted into place, the roof boards laid and the slates nailed down, that possibility was gradually but irrevocably removed, as though the wood and planks and nails and metal fittings that went to complete the house were not making a new place for people to live, but making instead a huge, too-lately-made mausoleum my mysteriously vanished parents ought somehow to inhabit, yet were forever excluded from.

I have a vague, contrary recollection of thinking then that my parents were still there somehow, hanging around in a sort of ghostly, spectral way, snagged there, caught by all those fresh floorboards and shining nails, but even that feeling gradually slipped away over time, and the completed, refurbished house became just another part of the Community.

I suppose, according to the more facile schools of psychology, I ought to have resented the mansion house, and especially the library, which survived undamaged but which for many, many years thereafter had about it the lingering odour of smoke, but if anything the effect was quite to the contrary, and I came to love the library and its books and its old, musty, smoky scent, as though through that faint aroma of the past I soaked up more than just the knowledge contained in the books as I sat there reading and studying, and so was still in touch with my parents and our happy past before the fire.

I think that for my Grandfather the loss of his son was probably the worst thing that ever happened to him. It was as if there was a God of the sort he did not believe in: a cruel, capricious, closely involved God who did not just speak from some great, passionless distance, but moved people and events around like pieces in a game; a greedy, spiteful, manipulative, hands-on God who took as much as He gave, and - provoked, or simply to prove His power - fell upon the lives and fates of men like an eagle upon a mouse. If my Grandfather's faith was shaken by his son's death, he gave no sign at the time, but I know that to this day he still grieves for him, and still wakes himself from sleep every few months with nightmares of burning buildings and shouts and screams inside rolling flame-lit billows of black smoke.