Iain Banks - Whit

'What's that got to do with anything? Look, I'll come to Essex, or London; anywhere. But I'm not stalking you, for goodness' sake…'

'Well, the thing is, as you were going to be heading south - well, the north of England - but you know what I mean, and as we're stalled here with Frank's… ah, business dealings-'

'Ah yes. The VAT problems,' I nodded.

'How do you- ? Oh, never mind.' I heard her take a breath. 'Okay, look; yes, we'll meet, but I'm going to bring Ricky - the cute guy you saw at the house?'

'With Tyson.'

That's right. And it'll be a public place, okay?'

'Fine by me.'

'Right. Well, the thing is, we're going to be in Edinburgh tomorrow.'

'Edinburgh!' I exclaimed.

'Believe it or not.'

'Why?'

'It's a long story. Let's meet at the Royal Commonwealth Pool, right?'

'Royal Commonwealth Pool,' I repeated. Across from me, Sophi looked surprised.

'Afternoon okay?' Morag asked.

'Perfect.'

'Three o'clock?'

'I'll be there. Shall I bring my costume?'

'Yes; we'll be at the flumes.'

'The whats?'

'The flumes.'

I frowned. 'Isn't that a thing they send logs down in the Canadian north-west?'

'Originally, Is, yes. God, you really are out of touch up there, aren't you?'

'And proud of it,' I said, feeling relatively cheerful for the first time in days.

'Nothing changes,' Morag sighed. 'Oh, and look, you won't be saying anything to Allan in the meantime, will you?'

'Absolutely not.'

'Right. Same here. See you tomorrow, then.'

'Indeed. Tomorrow. Goodbye, cuz.'

'Bye.' The phone clicked off.

I put down the handset and grinned at Sophi. I took her hands in mine and watched with joy as her face gradually lost all traces of worry and doubt and bloomed into a beautiful broad smile, expressing what I felt.

I laughed quietly. 'Light at the end of the tunnel,' I said.

'It is dreams, you see, Isis. Dreams.' Uncle Mo took another drink from his little plastic tumbler, nodding to himself as he watched the grass, cliffs and sea slide past our window. 'Dreams can be terrible things. Oh yes. Terrible, terrible things.'

'I thought they were called nightmares when they were like that,' I said.

Uncle Mo laughed in a watery way and leaned over the table to me, patting me on the forearm. 'Ah, Isis, bless you, child, you are so young. You see things so simply but that clarity is gone from me. This is what life does, what dreams do. You are not to know how terrible dreams can be. I,' he said, tapping himself softly on his waistcoated chest, 'I am not old; I am not an old man. I am in my middle ages, no more. But I have lived enough for an old man's memories. I could be old for all that matters. Ah, dreams.'

'I see,' I said, not seeing at all.

The train banked round a fast corner, tipping us towards the view of red-cliffed coastline and fractured rocks washed by a lazy, ruffled sea. On the pale blue horizon a grey speck was a ship. The sky was swathed in quiet layers of pastel cloud.

We were on the eleven o'clock train from Edinburgh to London King's Cross, due to change at York for Manchester. I was supposed to meet Morag at three in Edinburgh and right now I was heading south for England, getting further and further away from my cousin all the time. I had thought seriously about giving Uncle Mo the slip in Waverley station, and had worked out a plan to do just that, but I had changed my mind. I had another plan now. The timing was a little tight and there was no guarantee of its success anyway, but I judged it worth the effort and the risk.

'Dreams,' Uncle Mo said, unscrewing the top of another miniature bottle of vodka and tipping the bottle's contents into his plastic tumbler. He added a little soda from a larger bottle, shaking his head in time as he shook the miniature, forcing the last few drops out of it. 'Dreams… dreams of ambition, dreams of success… are terrible, my lovely niece, because they sometimes come true, and that is the most awful of things for a man to suffer.'

'Oh,' I said. 'That sort of dream. I thought you meant dreams when one is asleep.'

'Those as well, dear child,' Uncle Mo said, sitting wearily back in his seat. We had a four-person table to ourselves, on the eastern side of the train. I was on my Sitting Board, of course, still wearing the leather trousers which I was growing to like, and the jacket that Grandma Yolanda had bought me. Uncle Mo was dapper in a three-piece suit and flamboyant tie, his camel-hair coat carefully folded and placed lining-outwards on the luggage rack overhead. He did not use a Sitting Board, claiming that he had a medical condition and in any event was a Moslem now and had quite enough to worry about what with remembering his prayer mat. I had pointed out that Muslims were not supposed to drink.

'That is different,' he had said defensively. 'I was a Luskentyrian, then an alcoholic, then a Moslem, you see?' I'd said I'd seen, but bit my lip on a remark about which of his three faiths he seemed most devout in serving. 'But I shall beat the demon drink,' he insisted, 'be in no doubt. I drink, and drink and drink and then-' he made a sweeping, cutting motion with the flat of his hand. 'I stop. You will see.'

I said I saw.

'All dreams can destroy a man,' he said, staring with heavy, deeply lidded eyes at the calm vistas of sea and shore unreeling beyond our window. I was glad I'd chosen this flank of the train; I had not travelled on the line before, but I knew from maps and the tales of other travellers that this was the best side for the view.

'Just men are destroyed by dreams?'

'Yes. And I say that as a man who is not a chauvinist, no; I am aware of the equalness of women in most matters, and celebrate and sanctify their ability to bring forth life. In this much I am in advance of many of my co-religionists, I dare to admit, though… well, the West is not the end all of being.' He leaned over the table again, wagging the same finger and staring intently at me. 'What good is equality if it is just the equality of being disrespected just as much as men, and violence… done violence against?'

I nodded noncommittally. 'You may have a point there.'

'I have indeed.' He looked up, as though checking his camel-hair coat was still there. Then he looked back at me. 'What was I saying?'

'Dreams. Doing terrible things. To men, mostly.'

'Exactly!' he cried, waving his finger in the air. 'Because men are the obsessivists, Isis! Men are the driven half of our kind; they are the dreamers, the creatives who have brains in recompensation for not being the creationists with their wombs! We are even you might say the slightly mad half of the human races, because we are tormented with our visions, our ambitions, our ideas!' He slapped the table with his hand.

I was trying to think where I'd heard this sort of stuff before. Recently. Oh yes; Grandma Yolanda.

'It is men who are afflicted the worst by dreams,' he told me. 'That is our curse just as women have theirs.' He looked hurt, and touched his forehead with one set of fingers, closing his eyes, then held out one hand to me. 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be indelicate. Your pardon, Isis.'

'That is quite all right, Uncle.'

He held up the plastic tumbler with its almost-melted ice and its cargo of liquid. 'Perhaps I am drinking a little too much,' he said, smiling through the plastic at me.

'We're just enjoying ourselves,' I said. 'Nothing wrong with that. It passes the journey.' I raised my own tumbler, which was half full of beer. 'Cheers.'

'Cheers,' he said, swallowing. I sipped.

Uncle Mo had started drinking at the buffet bar in Stirling station after we'd been dropped there by the bus.