Iain Banks - Whit

'Your mother should be proud of you.'

'She is not. She calls me a liqueur Moslem; innocent and sweet on the outside - even chocolate coloured - but open me up and I am full of alcohol. It is her family. Her other family.'

'Her other family?' I said, shifting my hand to stroke Uncle Mo's head.

'The Asis family. She says she wants to be in that home but she was happy in Spayedthwaite; they persuaded her, turned her against me, made her say she wanted to be nearer to them. And yet I still pay. I get some help from them and a little from your people but I pay most; I. Me. Mr Muggins McMuggins here. They talked about responsibility and blood ties and they wanted her near them and they made her say that she wanted the same thing too and so she away went, most unfairly. It isn't fair, Isis.' He squeezed my hand. 'You are a good child. You would have been good to your poor mother and father. I don't know I should be doing this for your brother, really. He holds the wallet strings, you know that, but I don't know that I should be taking you away like this. It is so hard to do the right things. I try, but I don't know. You must forgive me, Isis. I am not so strong a man. Not so strong as I should like to be. Then, who is? You are a woman, Isis, you would not understand. Such strength. Please understand…'

He put his head down upon my breast and sobbed then, and after a moment or two I could feel my shirt getting wet.

I looked out of the window. Trees whizzed past. The train rocked us. The trees parted dramatically, like a great green curtain upon a stage, revealing a small steep valley with a river curving through beneath. A flock of birds burst from somewhere underneath us and turned as one, a grey-black cloud of fluttering movement sweeping through the air between the banked walls of the trees. The trees rushed back up in a green blur. I looked upwards to the creamy layers of cloud.

'Where did they take Zhobelia, Uncle Mo?' I asked quietly.

Mo sobbed, then sniffed hard, so that I felt his whole body shake and vibrate. 'I'm not supposed… Oh, what does… ? You're not supposed…'

'I'd love to know, Uncle Mo. I might be able to help, you know.'

'Slanashire,' he said.

'Where's that?'

'It's Lanca… Lanarkshire; a horrid little town in… Lanarkshire,' he said.

That was a relief. I'd thought he was going to name somewhere in the Hebrides, or even back in the sub-continent.

'I'd so much like to write to her,' I said softly. 'What's her address?'

'Oh… The… what is that word again? Gloaming. Indeed. There. The Gloamings. The Gloamings Nursing Home, Wishaw Road, Mauchtie, Lancashire. Lanarkshire,' he said.

I got him to repeat the town's name, too.

'Near Glasgow,' he went on. 'Just outside. Well; near. Bloody horrid little place it is. Oh, excuse me. Don't go…. Miserable…. Write. She would love to hear you… hear from you. She would love to see you, perhaps. Well, maybe. She seems not to want to see us very much… Her own son… but… Well. Who knows? Who ever knows, Isis? Nobody ever knows. Nobody ever… knows nothing… at all. All dreams. Just… dreams. Terrible……dreams.' He gave a single great, ragged sigh, and settled closer into me.

I held him for a while. He seemed very small.

After a while, I shifted one of my hands to Uncle Mo's head and gently placed my palm over his hair, cupping his head like some delicate goblet. I closed my eyes. I settled into the steady rhythm of the rushing, rocking train, letting its hurtling movement become stillness and its shimmering, steely racket become silence, so that I found - in that stillness and that silence - a place to prepare myself and gather my powers and await the awakening sensations that were the presentiment of my Gift.

It came eventually, tingling in my head and in my hand, and I became a conduit, a filter, a heart, an entire system. I felt my uncle's pain and sadness and broken dreams, felt their spare, bleak, numbing terror, felt the choking fullness of his emptiness, and felt it all flowing into me, circulating through me and being cleaned and neutralised and made good through me and then flowing back out through my hand and into him again as something made wholesome from poison, something made positive that had been negative, giving him peace, giving him hope, giving him faith.

I opened my eyes again and flexed my hand.

The trees outside the window gave way to farmland, then houses.

I watched the houses for a while. Uncle Mo breathed on, easily now, and nestled against me like a child.

The guard announced we would soon be arriving at Newcastle upon Tyne. Uncle Mo didn't stir. I thought for a moment, then looked at my hand, the hand that I had touched Uncle Mo's thoughts with.

'Oh, Uncle Mo,' I breathed, too quiet for him to hear, 'I'm sorry.'

I did some quick mental arithmetic and a bit of estimating, then I looked around to make sure nobody could see and shifted Uncle Mo a little in my arms. Then - asking God for Their forgiveness as I did it, and feeling quite wretched and triumphantly predatory in equal measure, yet excited as well - I took Uncle Mo's wallet from his inside jacket pocket.

He had eighty pounds. I took half, then gave him change for twenty-nine from the funds I already held, most of which, admittedly, Uncle Mo himself had unwittingly provided. I pocketed the notes, replaced his wallet and shifted him again, pushing him gently away from me so that he rested with his head partly against the side of the seat and partly against the window. I thought a little more, then reached into his other inside pocket and took his portable telephone. He muttered something, but seemed otherwise oblivious. I scribbled a quick note on a napkin and put it under his tumbler on the table in front of him.

The note said, Dear Uncle Mohammed. I'm sorry. By the time you read this I will be on a train to London. Thank you for all your kindness; all will be explained. Forgive me. Love, Isis .

P.S. Posting phone back .

I got up as the train was slowing, took my travelling hat down from the overhead luggage rack, lifted my Sitting Board and walked up the carriage to collect my kit-bag. I passed an elderly couple sitting in seats whose reservations labels read from Aberdeen to York, and pointed Uncle Mo out to them, asking them to wake him before York and make sure he got off. They agreed and I thanked them.

There was a train like ours pulling into Newcastle station from the south just as ours arrived from the opposite direction. I talked to an official on the platform who told me the other train was a delayed Edinburgh-bound service. I sprinted over the footbridge and was back heading north even before the train carrying Uncle Mo set off again.

I arrived back in Edinburgh with an hour to spare. It was a pleasantly mild day under high, patchy overcast; I went to the main Post Office, purchased a padded bag and posted Uncle Mo's telephone back to his address in Spayedthwaite, then I walked to the Royal Commonwealth Pool, stopping at a bookshop en route to search a motoring atlas for the town of Mauchtie, in Lanarkshire. It was there, indeed, not far from the town of Hamilton.

I continued on to the pool, in the shadow of Arthur's Seat. I took a walk round it and saw what had to be the flumes, at the back of the building; huge coloured plastic pipes which looked a little like the rubbish chutes one sees on buildings under renovation. There were four of these tubes: a broad meandering white one with an upper section which was either transparent or opaque, two steeper convoluted flumes in yellow and blue, and an abrupt black example which looked almost as steep as a rubbish chute.

I sat on the grass on the slopes of Arthur's Seat for a while, looking out across the buildings and soaking up a little soft, cloud-filtered sunlight, then presented myself at the ticket office of the pool, descended to the changing rooms, squeezed carefully into my tired and tight old costume (it was once yellow, but after years of swimming in the silty old Forth it had long since turned oatmeal) and - after some difficulty stuffing my kit-bag into the narrow locker I had been assigned - spent the next twenty minutes swimming lengths, admiring the sheer size of the place and taking an interest in the flumes, the four of which were entered via a tall circular staircase and three of which decanted into their own small pool. The fourth flume - which appeared to the one with black tubing I'd seen outside earlier - deposited its patrons into a long water-filled trough. Judging from the occasional shrieks and the speed with which people were ejected from the black mouth of this last flume, I gathered that this one was the most thrilling.