I thought. 'Fine.  It might take a few more days, though.'

'Whatever,' Morag said, nodding and looking determined. 'What have you got to do next?'

It crossed my mind to lie, shame upon me, but it also occurred to me that there comes a point in such a campaign when you just have to trust, and let it be known that you trust. 'I'm going to visit Great-aunt Zhobelia,' I said.

Morag's eyes widened. 'You are?  I thought she'd disappeared.'

'Me too.  Uncle Mo held the key.'

'Did he now?  And how's he?'

I looked at the wall clock. 'Hung-over, probably.'

CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

If you travel the same route as everybody else, all you will see is what they have already seen.  This has expressed our Faith's attitude to travel and Interstitiality for many years, and so it was with some regret that I reviewed the course of my recent journeys as I sat on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow the evening after I had met Morag and Ricky.

It had long seemed to me that the best way one of our Faith might travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow, or vice versa, would be to walk the route of the old Forth and Clyde canal, and I had travelled that route a few times in my mind and on maps while I sat in the Community library.  Yet here I was, taking a train from east to west, just like any normal Bland.  My only -and rather pitiable - concession to the Principle of Indirectness had been to take the slow rather than the express line from one city to another; the fast route takes a trajectory via Falkirk, the stopping service bellies south through Shotts.  I would change at Bellshill for the Hamilton loop, so in a way this route was frustratingly more, not less, direct.  However, it was slower than heading straight for Glasgow and changing there, which alleviated the mundanity somewhat.

Morag and Ricky had invited me to stay for dinner with them; they would be eating at an Indian restaurant that evening.  I'd been sorely tempted, but I'd thought it best to head straight for Mauchtie in the hope of obtaining an audience with Great-aunt Zhobelia that evening.  Morag and I had parted with a hug at Waverley station; Ricky had shaken my hand grudgingly but gently.  Morag had asked me if I needed any money; I'd thought about it.

I had determined early on - in the Community office, that Monday almost a fortnight ago, in fact - that twenty-nine pounds was a blessed and significant amount to carry, but that had been before I'd realised I was up against a brother prepared to use something as underhand and outrageous to our principles as a portable telephone in the heart of the Community, and I had certainly never been under any illusions about the importance of adequate finance in this cruelly acquisitive society.  I said I'd be grateful for a loan of twenty-nine pounds.  Morag laughed, but coughed up.

The train ride through the sun-rubbed landscape of assorted fields, small towns, industrial ruins, faraway woods and still more distant hills was the first chance I'd had to concentrate on all that had happened over the last couple of days.  Before, I had still felt shocked, or I had been with people, or - on the train journey back from Newcastle - I had been rehearsing what I would say to Morag, trying to plan out the conversation we might have, especially if she had returned to her former scepticism and distrust.  I still had a similar interview with my great-aunt ahead, but its parameters were so vague that there was little to hang a serious obsessive fugue on, so I could stop and think at last.

I reviewed my actions so far.  To date, I had stolen, lied, deceived, dissembled and burgled, I had used the weakness of a relative to winkle information out of him, I had scarcely talked to my God for two weeks and I had used the works of the Unsaved almost as they did themselves, telephoning, travelling by car and bus and train and plane, entering retail premises and spending an entire evening enjoying a large proportion of all the exorbitantly hedonistic delights one of the world's largest cities could provide, though admittedly this last sin had been while in the company of a forceful and determinedly sensualistic relative from an alien culture where the pursuit of fun, profit and self-fulfilment was regarded practically as a commandment.  Beyond all that, I had made an adamantinely pitiless commitment to myself - again, standing in that office in the mansion house - that I would use whatever truth I could discover like a hammer, to lay waste all those about me who were vulnerable to its momentous weight, without knowing what fragility might exist even in those I loved.

What a pretty alteration had taken place in me, I thought.  I shook my head as I looked out across that motley landscape.  I wondered - for the first time, oddly enough - whether I really could go back to my old life.  I had stood in my little room in the farmhouse just two days ago, thinking that my life was represented not by my possessions but rather entirely defined by my relationship with the people of the Community and the Order, and with the farm and the lands around us… but now I had been exiled from all that - not as successfully in terms of distance as my brother had intended, but determinedly, and with a continuance of ill-wished intent that I did not doubt - and I wondered that I did not feel more abandoned and ostracised, even excommunicated, than I did.

Certainly I had my Gift, but its uncanny - and now spurned - ability to cure others hardly constituted much of a comfort by itself; rather it provided another criterion by which I might be judged different, set apart.

Perhaps it was that I did not intend to stay cast out for very long, and that I nursed a fierce but perversely comforting determination to return gloriously, wielding the fiery sword of truth with which to smite those who had wronged me.  Perhaps it was simply that my upbringing had forged in me a strength and independence that, while undeniably in part a result of all the support and affection I had received from my family, Faith and surroundings, now possessed an autonomy from all of them, just as the tender sapling, shielded from the wind's harsh blast by the encircling forest, grows gradually to adulthood and is later found - should those sheltering trees be felled - no longer to need their help, capable of standing alone, secure in its own vigour and fortitude, and itself capable in turn of providing protection for others, should that time come.

So I mused, at any rate, as the train puttered through little stations, rumbled between the green walls of cuttings and threw its shadow down the northern faces of embankments to the roads, fields, forests and hills beyond, taking me closer, I hoped, to my Great-aunt Zhobelia.  My plans for the evening were to see Zhobelia and then either sleep rough near the village, or perhaps find a bed and breakfast.  It had occurred to me that, if there was time to catch a train back, I might repair to Glasgow and look up Brother Topee, who was a university student there, but I was not sure about this.

Topee is a friend as well as a relation (his mother is Sister Erin, his father Salvador), and I could probably rely on his discretion regarding the fact that I had turned up on his doorstep rather than going with Mo to Spayedthwaite or heading to London, as I'd intimated in my note to my uncle; however I wasn't sure it would be right to implicate Topee in my deception unless I had to, especially as his mother seemed to be Allan's lieutenant.

The train was warm.  I closed my eyes, trying to recall the exact lay-out of the map I had seen in the bookshop in Edinburgh, so that I'd know which way to walk out of Hamilton.

I fell asleep, but woke before Bellshill and was able to change trains after a half-hour's wait.  I followed road signs from Hamilton to Mauchtie and arrived there before nine on a fine, clear blue evening.