After a couple of hours of intense fluming, producing raw heels, shoulders and other pointy bits, we did a few lengths of the pool for exercise, and then decided to call it a day. Once we'd changed we'd headed for the café.
Morag put away her nail file in her little shoulder bag and sat back in her seat, stretching with lithe magnificence, her hands at the back of her neck pulling her damp hair away from her blouse. Lifting her arms like that had a dramatic effect on her bosoms; the effect it had on those present, however, seemed to obey a sort of inverted inverse square law; she gave no sign whatsoever of noticing. I wasn't about to, either, but men sitting at nearby tables stole furtive glances, males further away looked on with appreciative directness, and those surrounded by toddlers and damp towels twenty yards off across the cafe floor suddenly sat up straight and adjusted the position of their little plastic seats for a better view.
I gave a small laugh, leaning over the table. 'So, cousin, do I take it you've absolved me of being a stalker or an obsessive or whatever it was you thought I was?'
'Yeah,' she said, looking a little bashful. 'Well, I'm sorry about that, but it wasn't my fault, right?'
'No, I know,' I said. 'I think I know who's to blame.'
Ricky returned from the counter with a tray. I had a little pot of tea, Morag a black coffee and a mineral water, and Ricky a cola and a cheeseburger.
'So, what do you think's going on, then?' Morag asked me in a business-like manner.
'At the Community?' I asked. She nodded. 'I'm not certain,' I admitted. 'But I think Allan wants to take over.'
She frowned. 'But he's not a Leapyearian; how can he?'
'He's the one helping Grandfather with the revisions at the moment; that might even be the whole reason for getting me out of the way in the first place. I can't see how he can remove Leapyearianism from the Faith entirely and leave anything worth believing in, but he might be able to persuade Salvador that a real Leapyearian is male and so I don't count, or that there should be a division between the Elect of God, who'd be just a… a sort of figure-head, and the… executive, I'd suppose you'd call it - whoever actually runs the Order and the Community. They'd hold the reins.'
I looked over at Ricky, who was staring at me over his cheeseburger, his jaws wrestling with the food.
Morag saw me looking and glanced at him too. 'It's all right, Rick,' she said. 'Just God talk.'
He nodded, mollified, and redirected his concentration back to the cheeseburger.
'Maybe it's just me,' I said, shrugging. 'Maybe he feels I've wronged him somehow and he wants to destroy me personally…' I shook my head. 'No. No; I think he's doing it for himself, and for Mabon, his son.'
'Maybe he's frightened of you.'
I opened my mouth to protest that this could not be the case, but then thought of Allan's face and the expression I had seen on it too many times to count, the first time on the day I brought life back into the fox lying dead in the field by the road. I closed my mouth again and just looked down, shrugging.
'Or what about Salvador?' Morag asked. 'Sure it isn't the old man behind it all?'
'Not sure, but… fairly so. I think he just took advantage of the situation.' I laughed bitterly. 'To try to take advantage of me.'
'Old bastard,' Morag said. Ricky looked up again.
'Please, Morag,' I said. 'He is still the Founder, still my Grandfather. It's just the man… and the drink, maybe, got the better of the prophet in him.'
'That's crap, cuz,' Morag said.
'He gave us everything, Morag,' I told her. 'Our whole way of life. I'll not deny the treasure he found just because the hand that opened the chest was human and soiled.'
'Very poetic,' Morag told me, 'but you're too bleedin' generous, that's your problem.' It was probably the least perspicacious statement she had made that afternoon.
'Well,' I said, 'I don't intend to be very generous with Allan, once I have my case ready to present before the Order.'
'Good,' she said, with relish.
'Will you help me?' I asked her.
'How?' She looked neutral, Ricky looked suspicious.
'Come to the Community? Back up my story? I mean; simply tell the truth about these letters and Allan's phone calls and what he's told you; how he's lied. Will you?'
'Think they'll listen to me?' She sounded doubtful.
'I think so. We mustn't let Allan suspect anything or he'll attempt to discredit you with everybody else beforehand, as he has me, but if we say nothing about us having met, we should be able to surprise him. If we had it all out in front of a meeting everyone attends, a full Service, there should be no opportunity for him to poison people's minds with rumours and lies. We ought to be able to denounce him without retort.'
'But what about the porn?' Morag asked warily.
'Well, it is hardly the most blessed of professions, certainly, but it was your apparent apostasy that alarmed us most, and I think there would be more rejoicing over your return to the fold than resentment due to the fact that your fame derives from an artistic area other than music, were you to return,' I said, with only a little more conviction than I felt. 'Salvador is upset apparently - at the deception more than the true nature of your… career, I suspect - but I think he'll come round.' I smiled. 'You'll charm him.'
'I can try,' Morag said, with a smile that would have charmed blood from a stone.
'It might be best,' I said, thinking it through as I sat there, 'if you and I didn't turn up together. At around the same time, certainly, but not obviously together. Well, maybe.'
'All right. Whatever. It's a deal. But when?' she asked.
I nodded, still thinking. The next big Service would be on Sunday evening, for the Full Moon. That was only two days away and so probably too soon, but you never knew. 'Let's keep in touch, but it might be as early as… day after tomorrow?'
Morag sat back, looking thoughtful. 'We're here tonight,' she said, glancing at Ricky, who had finished his cheeseburger and was now picking little bits of melted cheese and blobs of pickle off the surface of the tray. He looked up guiltily. 'Leven and Dundee tomorrow,' Morag continued. 'We were going to go to Aberdeen next, but we could make it Perth instead, and do Stirling as well, now. I'll give you the hotel numbers where we'll be staying. How'd that be?'
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.