Whit

And should I a

And by God, even my Gift was not unquestioned, in my own mind; here I was suffused with self-righteous anger at my Grandfather for having lied to us when there was still a question hanging over the validity of my own renown, if people only knew.  The problem of action at a distance, with which I had been struggling for over a decade, took on a new, shiftier significance in the present climate of poisonous suspicion, and suddenly the hope I had clung to that I might have a gift greater than people knew of, rather than lesser, looked distinctly dubious.

'Cheer up, Isis; might never happen,' Topee's friend Mark said, winking at me across the glass-crowded table.

I gave him a tolerant smile. 'I'm afraid it already has,' I told him, and drank my beer.

I fell out of the system of buying rounds, unable and unwilling to keep up.

I went to the dance with the lads, and continued slowly drinking beer out of plastic pint containers, but my heart was not really in the proceedings.  I found the music boring and the men who came up to our group to ask me to dance no more attractive than the sounds.  I could not bring myself to join in the dancing even when Topee asked.  Instead I found myself watching everybody else dance, reflecting what a strange and comical activity it could appear.  How odd that we should get such pleasure just from moving rhythmically.

I supposed you could link the urge to dance to the sexual drive, and certainly there was both a correspondence between the regularity of the movements the two activities tended to involve and an obvious element of something between courtship and foreplay in the coming together of two people on the dance floor, but I had watched young children and very old people take part in dances at the Community and had myself danced there when I had been convinced there was no aspect of sexuality involved, and had seen the obvious delight experienced by young and old alike and felt a kind of transcendent joy in myself that I was even more sure shared nothing with carnality except the feeling that what one was experiencing was good and pleasant.

The elation I had felt while dancing, in fact, seemed to have more in common with religious ecstasy, as I understood it, than with sexual bliss; one could feel almost mystically taken out of oneself, transported to another plane of existence where things became clearer and simpler and more co

Certainly this effect was difficult - and took a long time - to achieve while dancing (I thought of whirling dervishes, and African tribespeople, spi

A strange species, humanity, I found myself thinking, quite as though I was some visiting alien.

I do not belong here, I thought.  My place is with my people, and their future rests in my hands now.  I suddenly wanted to be away from the noise and the heat and the smoke of this place, and so borrowed a key from Topee, donated the remains of my pint to him and stood and made my apologies and left, stepping out into the clear black night and breathing in its cool air as though released from a fetid prison after many years' incarceration.

The stars were mostly hidden by the city's glare, but the moon, less than a day away from being full, shone down almost undiminished, and as coolly serene as ever.

I did not go straight back to the flat, but wandered the streets for a while, still troubled by my conflicting thoughts, my conscience and will buffeted this way and that by the opposing arguments that racked my soul.

Eventually, I stood on the bridge that carries Great Western Road over the river Kelvin, leaning on the stone balustrade and looking down into the dark waters far beneath while the traffic grumbled and roared at my back and groups of people went chattering past.

A feeling of calmness gradually stole over me as I stood there, thinking and thinking and trying not to think.  It was as though the warring forces in my soul were both so evenly matched and so precisely targeted upon their opposite that they eventually cancelled each other out, fighting each other to a standstill, to exhaustion and a stop, if not a conclusion.

Let what would be, be, I thought.  The shape of tomorrow was already half decided, and how exactly it would all end I would simply have to wait and see, playing events as they fell rather than trying to decide precisely what I would do now.  At the least, I could sleep on my decision.

Sleep seemed a very good idea, I thought.

I returned to the flat, extended my hammock between the wardrobe and the bed's headboard in Topee's room - both articles of furniture were massive enough to support the weight, and both were also of such an anciently elaborate design that there was an almost embarrassing choice of stoutly carved curlicues and knobbly extrusions on which to loop the hammock cords.  I took off my jacket, shirt and trousers, climbed into my hammock and fell asleep almost instantly.

I was only dimly aware of a party going on much later.  Topee crept in and whispered to me he'd got lucky and swapped rooms with Stephen so that he could be alone with his new conquest, but Stephen, true to Topee's guarantee, did not disturb me during the night and I awoke - to Stephen's unconscious snuffles and snorts - bright and early the next morning.  I arose, washed and dressed before anybody else awoke.

The living room was carpeted with sleeping bodies.  I stood at the hall table to write a note to Topee and a letter to Grandmother Yolanda, then left to find a post box.

Sophi - who had been the next person I'd telephoned after talking to Mr Womersledge last night - arrived in her little Morris half an hour later, to discover me sitting on the flat's doorstep, eating a filled roll from a wee shop down the road.

Sophi looked blithe and summery in jeans and a striped T-shirt; her hair was gathered up in a pony-tail.  She kissed me when I got into the car.

'You look tired,' she told me.

'Thank you.  That's how I feel,' I told her.  I held out the white paper bag I'd got from the wee shop. 'Would you like a filled roll?'

'I had breakfast,' she told me. 'So.' She clapped her hands. 'Where first?'

'Mauchtie, Lanarkshire,' I told her.

'Righty-ho,' she said, and put the car into gear.

The day, and the last, decisive part of my campaign, had begun.

It had crossed my mind that if I did decide that discretion concerning Grandfather's misdemeanours was the prudent course, then bringing Zhobelia back into the bosom of our family and Community might prove unwise, even catastrophic.  What were the chances that she would be able to hold her tongue regarding the pay-book and the money now that she had broken the dam of that secrecy?  Having her staying with us might well mean that the truth would be bound to leak out eventually, and perhaps in the most damaging way: over time, through rumour and gossip.

But I could not leave her in that place; it had been clean enough at the Gloamings Nursing Home, Zhobelia had a generously sized room, she obviously shared and enjoyed some sort of social contact with the other residents, and she had not complained of much there, but it had all seemed so loveless, so cold after the warmth of the Community.  I had to take her away.  If doing so forced my hand concerning the telling of the truth, then so be it; I would not sacrifice my great-aunt's happiness to such expediency.  Telling the truth was what I had sworn to myself I would do, after all, even if now my instinct was to conceal rather than to reveal.