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.

CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

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.

I'd been keeping an eye on the exits from the changing rooms, and after twenty minutes saw somebody I was reasonably certain was the young man Cousin Morag had called Ricky, whom I had met at La Mancha a week earlier.  His trunks were brief and he presented a fine figure of a man: he was tanned, blond and muscled, and I was far from the only female looking at him.  I imagined a fair few males were sizing him up too, most with jealousy.  He walked halfway along the edge of the pool and stood at the side, his feet spread, his arms crossed bulkily beneath impressive pectorals.  There was a frown on his face as he stared round the pool.  I did the backstroke past him a couple of times but he didn't seem to notice.

Cousin Morag appeared five minutes later, and drew even more stares.  She wore a one-piece, as I did, but there the resemblance ended.  Her costume was glossy black.  It rode high on the hip and featured sheer-looking black mesh side panels which rose from hip-hem to armpit, huggingly displaying her narrow waist.  The swimsuit possessed what was technically a high neck, the concealing effect of which was, however, entirely undone by another deep and wide see-through panel which exhibited the swelling tops of her considerable breasts.

She joined the young man at the side of the pool, gods amongst mortals.  They both looked out over the swimmers and those walking or sitting around the side; Morag glanced up at the flumes.  She wore her long chestnut hair gathered up into a bun held with a black band.  I raised my hand and waved as her gaze swept past me.

She waved back, an uncertain smile on her face.  I turned onto my front and swam over to them, reckoning that - if she still believed herself to be in some way threatened by me - Morag would feel less so if I was in the water and beneath her and the young man.

I pulled in at the side; Morag squatted; the young man remained standing, looking down, frowning.

'Hello,' I said, nodding and smiling at both of them.

'Hi, Is.  You've met Ricky, haven't you?'

'Yes.  Hello again,' I said cheerily. 'How's Tyson?'

He scowled, and appeared to think. 'All right,' he said eventually.

'Good.  I'm sorry if my friends and I alarmed you, back at La Mancha.'

'Wasn't alarmed,' Ricky said indignantly.

'I should have said annoyed,' I said, apologetically. 'Sorry if we annoyed you.'

'All right,' Ricky said, apparently appeased.

'So, how's things, cuz?' Morag asked with a small smile.

'Oh, pretty traumatic,' I said, smiling bravely. 'But I'm surviving.'

'Good,' she said, standing.  She nodded across the pool to where the circular stairs led to the flume's entrance. 'Shall we flume?' she asked.

'Why not?' I said.

Morag dived gracefully overhead, entering the water behind me with a dainty splash.  Ricky launched himself a moment later, creating a disturbance hardly any greater.  I kicked away from the side and splashed inelegantly after their sleek shapes.