Iain Banks - Whit

Allan stared at the older man.

I turned towards the windows. Ricky looked bored. Morag still had her arms crossed. She was frowning, but gave me a small smile. Sophi looked half terrified but then, when I winked at her, broke into a relieved if nervous smile. I turned back.

Allan brought his arms up from his sides until they were straight out and level, his face still white, his eyes still huge. His voice seemed to come from somewhere a long way away. 'Whatever you say,' he breathed.

I sat on the small wooden chair on the podium, looking out over a meeting room full of astonished faces. My brother kneeled before me; he put the basin full of warm water to one side, accepted the towel from my Grandfather, and began to dry my feet.

Allan's face was still wet after weeping during his confession, which Grandfather had announced. His admission of guilt had been brief but comprehensive; I didn't think he'd left anything out. It had been greeted with utter silence and then, when it was over, with a rising tumult of noise that had taken all my Grandfather's authority, and volume, to quieten again.

Grandfather had asked for silence once more while the ceremony that had been unjustly neglected on my return a few days earlier was belatedly carried out now, then asked Morag to bring forward the bowl of water and the towel. There were a few gasps when she walked forward from the back of the meeting room, soon hushed by a scowl from Grandfather.

As my brother dried my feet in the stunned silence, fresh tears fell from his eyes, extending his task by a few seconds.

Soon it was over though, and after Allan had gone to sit in the body of the kirk again and I had risen to stand, bare-footed, at the lectern, my Grandfather called once again for quiet, then left the podium to me and sat in the front row of the pews.

There were more gasps of astonishment and mutterings at this unprecedented action. I waited for them to pass.

When they did, I looked out over my people, and smiled. I gripped the smooth, polished wood of the podium and felt the hard surface beneath the papery softness of my skin.

Suddenly I remembered the way the fox had felt in my hands, when I had lifted it from the field, all those years ago. That tiny, feathery hint of a beat, there as soon as I'd picked it up. I had always been unsure whether it had been my own pulse I'd been feeling, or the animal's, and then - beyond that, if it had indeed been the fox's heartbeat I'd sensed - uncertain whether the animal had simply lain there unconscious until we'd come along (and Allan had poked it with his stick) or whether it really had been dead, and my Gift - working at a distance, without touching, doubly miraculously - had brought it back to life.

Was my Gift real? Was it genuine? Could I be certain? All these questions - or that one question in those different guises - had come to depend, in my mind, on the precise physical state of that small wild animal, that summer's day with Allan in the stalk-stubbled field, when I had been a child.

I had never known the answer. For a time I had thought that I might come to know it, but now I could accept that I never would, and in that acceptance found a liberating realisation that it didn't really matter. Here was what mattered; here, looking out over these stunned, bewildered, awed, even fearful faces, here was action at a distance, here was palpable power, here was where belief - self-belief and shared belief - could truly signify.

Truth, I thought. Truth ; there is no higher power. It is the ultimate name we give our Maker.

I took a deep breath and an abrupt, fleeting dizziness shook me, energising and intoxicating and leaving me feeling strong and calm and able and without fear.

I cleared my throat.

'I have a story to tell you,' I said.

END