CHAPTER NINE

I think my Grandfather still holds that one of the greatest achievements of his ministry was the conversion of Mr McIlone to the set of beliefs which at the time our Founder was still in the act of formulating.  If I say that I suspect it was also an accomplishment my Grandfather found extremely enjoyable and hence craved to repeat, I think I am paying our Founder a compliment, given the intrinsic goodness and holiness of the act concerned.

Mr McIlone was a kindly, generous man, but a free-thinker; an atheist of long standing who had had the strength of will and character - however fundamentally misguided and wrong-headed - to maintain and preserve his sinful belief in the face of the opprobrium and isolationary contempt of a conservative and even self-righteous community of the sort that tends to get called 'close-knit' by those not inclined to search overly long for their images of social cohesion.

While by our creed we must count the dour Presbyterians of the Western Isles, with their cruelly humourless, fear-demanding and vindictive-sounding idea of God, our allies (whether they like it or not), and the humanely compassionate Mr McIlones of this world our evangelical prey at best and outright opponents at worst, and it is undeniably more effective preaching to the already half converted than attempting to plant the seeds of faith in souls hardened by a history of material Falseness, there is nevertheless often more common cause spiritually to be found with those who are naturally generous, sharing, wise and enlightened (but by chance brought up out-with the sight and hearing of God) than with those who - while part of a community or faith whose beliefs are in some strategic sense more in keeping with our own - are by the very strictness and severity of that persuasion individually far less happily unrestricted in the joy of their worship of God and the appreciation of the beauty of the Universe, the World and the Human, in both its spiritual and its physical form.

I think myself that by the sound of it Mr McIlone was one of those sensitive souls prone rather to Despair.  He was like my Grandfather in seeing little but cruel idiocy in the actions of his fellow humans, but different from him in choosing for his response the easy, easeful option of simply condemning everybody and turning his back on the world.

From what I have read - and I think I may fairly claim to have read a fair amount, for my age - I think it must have seemed a world worth turning one's back on; the most destructive war in all history was finally over, but only at the cost of ushering in - with those two diabolic nuclear dawns over Japan - an age which seemed to have finally brought the epoch of Apocalypse to earth.  The thunderous, earth-shaking power to annihilate whole cities in an instant that Humanity had habitually ascribed to its gods was now at Man's own beck and call, and no god ever seemed so fearful and capricious as the new possessor of that power.

Humanity had thought itself progressing, after that earlier war to end wars, only to discover, once the dust and soot had settled, that one of the world's most civilised and sophisticated nations had found no better outlet for its ingenuity than to attempt to annihilate industrially an ancient people who had probably contributed more to the world's store of learning than any other single group (and perhaps knew, too, that their own nations had colluded in the prelude to that terminal obscenity).

And what future beckoned, after this spasm of destruction and the death of any idea that Humanity was in some way rational, that Humanity, indeed, was reliably humane?

Why, only the continuation of war in another, colder form, with weapons fit for the end of the world; Allies becoming enemies and the real victors of the European war turning upon themselves and their new conquests with redoubled savagery, as though their twenty million dead had only given the apparatus a taste for it. (Meanwhile Mr Orwell, on another Hebridean island, near the whirlpool, wrote what he almost called 1948.)

This was Mr McIlone's world, then, as was the pallid, washed-out Britain of the still-rationed late 'forties, and for all that the semi-independent croft and fishing economy of the Western Isles softened the blow of some of the shortages most keenly felt in cities on the mainland, it was still a hard, cold, windswept place, where a man lived close to land or sea with only his God, family and friends and sometimes the drink to sustain him and provide a little comfort.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that Mr McIlone, brought into contact with my Grandfather's messianic, blazing certainty and the unconventional but obvious love he shared with his two exotically foreign beauties, should feel that he was missing out somewhere, that there was another retort to the world's absurdities and viciousness besides hermetic, hermit-like withdrawal.

Whatever factors, emotional, personal or philosophical, eventually produced this holy sea-change in Mr McIlone, by the end of 1949 it was complete, and our Founder had his first real convert (I don't think he ever felt his wives fully Believed, though they gave every appearance of Behaving).

He also had the run of the farm at Luskentyre, the continuing opportunity to study in its library, the use of its buildings, access to whatever funds and produce it gave rise to, and an eventually decisive say in its running.  And so it was there that our sect, the True Church of Luskentyre, made its first home, from 1949 until 1954, when Mrs Woodbean gifted us the estate at High Easter Offerance, on the green and ancient flood plain of the river Forth, far to the south-east of those wild isles.

'Well, it smells like that liniment stuff me mother used to slap on us soon as we coughed out of turn,' Dec said, flopping into a huge cushion on the floor beside me.

I had partaken of the precious zhlonjiz unguent some hours earlier, in my loft bedroom, shortly after Zeb and I had made our way back to Kilburn from the South Bank (happily this required no changes of Underground train line).  I had pulled up the loft ladder and closed the loft door, placing the ladder on top of it.  I removed all my clothes save for my knickers and sat in the lotus position, meditating for some time beforehand.  A cup of water I'd brought from the bathroom sat to one side, a scented Order candle to the other.

I struggled to open the tiny jar; the cap gave an audible crack when it finally turned.  The sharp, spicy salve inside was black in the candlelight.  I took a little of the thick dark cream on my little finger and placed some on my forehead, some behind my ears and some on my belly-button.  I slipped the rest into my mouth, scraping it off against the back of my teeth and quickly swallowing it.  I washed it down with the cup of water; the gritty black cream burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth as it slid down my throat.

I coughed and my nose ran and the fierce dark smell of the stuff seemed to surround me, fiery and raw and dissolving, reeking of a mountainous, half-mythical East.  I sniffed back, breathing deeply to suffuse my being with the magical balm, relaxing and trying to let my soul open to the voice of the Creator, attempting both to ignore the vast city and its millions of Cluttered, Unsaved souls, and at the same time to use their untapped, ignorant capacity for Receiving to focus the signals of God upon myself.

In short, it did not work.  I waited for the blink of an eye and the life of an old God, I waited until the next heart beat and the next Ice Age, I waited for the merest whisper of murmured acknowledgement and the erupting scream of God at last losing patience with us all; I waited long enough for the candle to flicker and go out, my legs to grow sore and my skin to prickle with goose-bumps.