Whit

by Iain Banks

  'Yes, please. Do tell me.'

  'You won't tell anybody else?' she whispered, glancing to either side.

  What to say? She might not tell me if I refused to give such an assurance, yet - if this somehow affected my situation - I might need what she could tell me as ammunition. I wondered what the chances were of her finding out if I promised and then broke my promise, and started calculating the odds. Then some part of my brain further up the chain of command put a stop to such faithlessness.

  'I'm sorry, I can't make that promise, Great-aunt,' I told her. 'I might need to tell somebody else.'

  'Oh.' She looked surprised. 'Oh. Well, I shouldn't tell you then, should I?'

  'Great-aunt,' I said, taking her hand. 'I will promise not to tell anybody else unless to tell them is make things better for all of us.' I didn't feel that really said what I meant, and Zhobelia looked confused, so I fell back and regrouped for another try at it. 'I will promise not to tell anybody else unless telling them is to do good. You have my word on that. I swear.'

  'Hmm. Well. I see.' She looked up at the ceiling, brows gathered. She looked at me again, still puzzled. 'What was I talking about?'

  'The money, Great-aunt,' I said, wringing my poor tired brain of its last drops of patience.

  'Yes,' she said, waggling my hand holding hers up and down urgently. The money.' She looked blank. 'What about it?' she asked, her face like a little girl's.

  I felt tears prick behind my eyes. I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. I closed my eyes briefly, which was a mistake, because it seemed to encourage my tears, leaving me with blurred vision. 'Where did this money come from, Great-aunt?' I asked wearily, in a kind of befogged daze. 'The money you were talking about, from the time of the fire; where did it come from?'

  'Royal Scotland.' She nodded.

  'Royal Scotland?' I said, baffled.

  'The Royal Scottish Linen Bank.'

  I stared at her, trying to work out what on earth she was talking about.

  'That's what it said on the bag,' she said, back in her isn't-it-obvious attitude.

  'What bag, Great-aunt?' I said, sighing. I had the impression 1 actually was already asleep and this was just me sleep-talking or something.

  'The bag.'

  'The bag?' I asked.

  'Yes; the bag.'

  A feeling of déjà vu, intensified by tiredness, swept over me. 'Where did the bag come from?'

  'Royal Scotland, I suppose.'

  I felt like one of two people rowing a boat, only my partner wasn't actually rowing, just stirring their oar in the water, so that we kept going round and round in circles.

  'Where did you find the bag, Great-aunt?' I asked, flatly.

  'On the-' she began, then sat forward and beckoned to me. I leaned towards her so that her mouth was at my ear. 'I forgot,' she whispered.

  'Forgot what, Great-aunt?'

  'We don't have it any more. We burned it. Saw what would happen and thought we'd get rid of it. I'm sorry.'

  'But where did you get the bag, Great-aunt? You said-'

  'From the chest.'

  'The chest?'

  'Our special chest. The one he didn't have a key to. That's where we kept it. And the book.'

  'The book?' Here, I thought, we go again. But no:

  'I'll show you. I still have a box, you know. The chest we lost in the fire, but I saved the book and the other things!' She clutched excitedly at my shoulder.

  'Well done!' I whispered.

  'Thank you! Would you like to see it?'

  'Yes, please.'

  'It's in the wardrobe. You get it for me, there's a good girl.'

  I was directed to the full wardrobe, which was stuffed with colourful saris and other, plainer clothes. At its foot, amongst a litter of old shoes and fragrant white mothballs, there was a battered shoe-box secured with a couple of dark brown elastic bands. The box felt quite light when I lifted it and brought it over to Zhobelia, who seemed quite animated at the thought of what was inside. She bounced up and down on the bed and motioned me to bring her the box, for all the world like a child waiting on a present.

  She pulled the elastic bands off the old shoe-box; one band snapped, seemingly just of old age. She put the lid of the box down on the bed beside her and started sorting through the documents, newspaper cuttings, old photographs, notebooks and other papers inside.

  She handed me the old photographs. 'Here,' she said. 'The names are on the back.'

  She shuffled through the other stuff in the box, stopping to read occasionally while I looked at the old snaps. Here were the two sisters, looking young, wary and uncertain in front of their old ex-library van. Here they were with Mr McIlone, whom I recognised from the few other photographs that we had at High Easter Offerance. Here was the farm at Luskentyre, here the old seaweed factory, before and after renovation, and before and after the fire.

  There was only one photograph of Grandfather, sitting in bright sunlight on a kitchen chair outside what I guessed was Luskentyre, turning his head away and putting his arm up to his face in an action the camera had captured as a blur. It was the only representation I had ever seen of him, apart from a couple of even more blurred newspaper photographs. He was barely recognisable, but looked very thin and young.

  'Ah. Here now…' Zhobelia lifted a small brown book - about the size of a pocket diary, but much thinner - from the shoe-box. She looked inside the little book, taking off her glasses to read. A piece of white paper fell out. She picked it up and handed it to me.

  I put the photograph of my Grandfather down on the knee of my leather trousers. 'Ah-ha,' she said matter-of-factly.

  I unfolded the piece of paper. It felt crinkly and old, but also thick and fibrous. It was a bank-note. A ten-pound note, from the Royal Scottish Linen Bank. It was dated July 1948.1 inspected it, turned it over, smelled it. Musty.

  Zhobelia tapped my knee again. Having attracted my attention, she gave me a stagy wink as she handed me the small brown book.

  I put the bank-note on my knee along with the photograph of Grandfather.

  The little brown book looked faded and worn and very old. It was warped, too, as though it had once been saturated with water. There was a British Royal Crown on the front cover. It was really just two bits of card, one thinner piece placed inside the other thicker cover, and not secured. The inner card carried a list of dates and amounts of money, expressed in pounds, shillings and pence. The last date was in August 1948. That piece of card was marked AB 64 part two. I put it down on the bed cover. The other piece of card was marked AB 64 part one. It seemed to be some sort of pass book. It belonged, or had belonged, to somebody called Black, Moray, rank: private. Serial number 954024. He was five feet ten inches tall, weighed eleven stone five pounds and had dark brown hair. No distinguishing marks. Born 29.2.20.

  The rest was a description of injections he had received and what sounded like army punishments: fines, detentions and losses of leave. Perhaps it was just tiredness that meant I didn't haul up short at the date of birth, for I found myself thinking that I had no idea what any of this had to do with anything, until I looked from the book to the photograph of my Grandfather as a young man, still on my knee.

  The world tipped again, my head swam. I felt faint, dizzy and sick. A terrible shiver ran through me as my palms pricked with sweat and my mouth went dry. My God. Could it be? Height, weight; hair colour. Of course the scar wouldn't be there… And the birth-date, to settle it.

  I looked up into the eyes of my great-aunt. I had to attempt to swallow several times before I had enough saliva in my mouth to make it possible to speak. My hands started shaking. I rested them on my thighs as I asked Zhobelia, 'Is this him?' I held up the small brown book. 'Is this my Grandfather?'

  'I don't know, my dear. We found that in his jacket. The money was on the beach. Aasni found it.'

  'The money?' I croaked.

  'The money,' Zhobelia said. 'In the canvas bag. We counted it, you know.'

 
'You counted it.'

  'Oh yes; there were twenty-nine hundred pounds.' She gave a sigh. 'But it's all gone now, of course.' She looked at the ten-pound note sitting on my knee. 'We burned all the rest, in the canvas bag.' She nodded at the white ten-pound note resting on my leg. 'That's the last one left.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE

  I sat with my great-aunt, gradually piecing together the story, going over it from what seemed like slightly different angles in her memory. The story of my Grandfather being found on the sandy ground outside the mobile shop at Luskentyre on the night of the storm was all true, but what we had never been told was that the sisters had found an army pay-book inside the jacket he had been wearing.

  They had also kept quiet the fact that the next day, after the storm, Aasni had walked along the beach at Luskentyre and found a zippered canvas hold-all, washed up on the sands. It contained a pair of brown leather shoes, sodden with sea water, and a money sack containing two hundred and ninety ten-pound notes, all from the Royal Scottish Linen Bank.

  They wondered if perhaps there had been a shipwreck during the storm, and Grandfather and the money had been washed ashore from the foundering ship, but when they asked Mr McIlone and some other locals, then and later, nobody had heard of a ship going down that night off Harris.

  My Grandfather had been in no fit state to appreciate all this, lying with his zhlonjiz poultice over his head wound, hallucinating. When he eventually woke up days later and claimed to be called Salvador Whit, the sisters thought the better of disabusing him of this notion while he was in such an obviously fragile and fevered state. They had already agreed to hide the money in their special chest, worried that the small fortune they had found washed up represented the proceeds of some nefarious exploit; when Grandfather started pleading with them to look for just such a canvas bag, they became even more worried.

  By the time my Grandfather was well enough to start looking for the canvas bag himself, both Aasni and Zhobelia had rather fallen for him, and jointly arrived at the conclusion that if he was given the money - whether it was rightfully his or not - he would probably disappear out of their lives. The two sisters agreed that they would share the white man, assuming that that was what he wanted, and they would keep the money safe, only revealing its existence if there should arise some emergency which could be dealt with in no other way except financially.

  They also agreed that, one day, they would reveal the truth to their joint husband, if it seemed like a good idea, and they were certain that he wouldn't beat them or leave them or cast them out. Somehow, that day never did arrive.

  Eventually, one afternoon at High Easter Offerance in 1979, they decided to dispose of the money altogether, after something that Zhobelia saw (she had so far been very vague as to exactly what it was that had had this effect). They originally intended to burn it in the tandoor oven in the farm kitchen, but even in the middle of the night people sometimes came down to the kitchen, so that might be risky. They decided they would incinerate the notes in the stove in the mansion-house kitchen, where the sisters usually carried out their experiments with Scottish-Asiatic cuisine.

  Zhobelia didn't actually know what had happened in the kitchen on the night of the fire, but had managed to convince herself that the money - evil influence to the last - had somehow caused the pressure-cooker explosion and subsequent conflagration, and that it was therefore all her fault. She had seen Aasni's ghost in her dreams, and once, a week after the fire, she had woken up in her bed in the darkness, and been quite fully awake but unable to move or breathe properly, and knew that Aasni's ghost was there in the room with her, sitting on her chest, turning her lungs into a pressure cooker for her guilt. She knew that Aasni would never forgive her or leave her alone so she decided that night that she would leave the Community and seek out her old family to ask their forgiveness.

  The Asis family had moved too, setting up home in the Thornliebank district of Glasgow, from where they ran a chain of food shops and Indian restaurants. There were still Asis family members in the Hebrides but they were a younger generation; the people Aasni and Zhobelia had known had all decanted to Glasgow, and apparently there had been great debate amongst them regarding whether they wanted Zhobelia back at all. Zhobelia had gone to stay with Uncle Mo instead - swearing her son to secrecy in the process - while the Asis family were making up their collective mind.

  Then Zhobelia had had a stroke, and needed more constant care than Mo could provide alone; she was moved out to a nursing home in Spayedthwaite. Uncle Mo had eventually contacted both our family and the Asis clan, pleading for support, and received guarantees that the financial burden of looking after his mother would be shared by all three parties. Later, the Asis family insisted that Zhobelia be moved closer to them, and the Gloamings Nursing Home, Mauchtie was the result.

  'They come to see me, but they talk too fast,' Zhobelia told me. 'Calli and Astar have been too, you know, but they are very quiet. I think they're embarrassed. The boy doesn't come very often at all. Not that I care. Stinks of drink, did I tell you that?'

  'Yes, Great-aunt,' I said, squeezing her hand. 'Yes, you did. Listen-'

  'They look after us here. That Mrs Joshua, though; she's a horror. Teeth!' Zhobelia shook her head, tutting. 'Miss Carlisle, now; soft in the head,' she told me, tapping her temple. 'No, they look after us here. Though you can lie in bed and nobody will talk to you. Sit in your chair; the same. Rushed off their feet. Apparently the owner is a doctor, which is good, isn't it? Not that I've ever seen him, of course. But still. Television. We watch a lot of television. In the lounge. Lots of young Australian people. Shocking.'

  'Great-aunt?' I said, still troubled by something Zhobelia had said, and starting to link it with a couple of other things I'd been confused about earlier.

  'Hmm? Yes dear?'

  'What was it you saw that made you want to burn the money. Please; tell me.'

  'I told you; I saw it.'

  'What did you see?'

  'I saw the money was going to bring a disaster. It just came to me. Didn't do any good, of course, these things rarely do, but we had to do something.'

  'Do you mean you had a vision?' I asked, confused.

  'What?' Zhobelia said, frowning. 'Yes. Yes; a vision. Of course. I think the Gift passed on to you after me, except you got it as healing. Think yourself lucky; healing sounds easy compared to those visions; I was glad to see the back of them. It'll pass on from you, too, eventually; only one of us ever has it at a time. Just one of those things that has to be borne.' She patted my hand.

  I stared at her, mouth agape.

  'Grandmother Hadra's mother had the seeing, like me. Then when she died, Hadra found she could talk to the dead. When Hadra had her stroke back in the old country it passed to me and I started seeing things. I was about twenty. Then, after the fire, you started healing.' She smiled. 'That was it, you see? I could go then. I was tired of it all and anyway I wasn't going to be any more use to anybody, was I? I knew the seeing would stop after you started healing and I knew everybody else would look after you and, anyway, I knew Aasni would blame me for not seeing it properly in the first place and getting her killed; she was annoying that way and she'd always gone on at me for not treating the Gift with more respect; said it would have been better if she'd had the visions, but she didn't; it was me.'

  I don't know how long the next moment lasted. Long enough for me to be aware that Great-aunt Zhobelia was patting my cheek and looking with some concern into my eyes.

  'Are you all right, dear?'

  I tried to talk, but couldn't. I coughed, finding my mouth and throat quite dry. Tears came to my eyes and I doubled up, coughing painfully but still trying to keep quiet. Zhobelia tutted and clapped me on the back as my face lowered to the bedclothes.

  'Great-aunt,' I spluttered eventually, wiping the tears from my eyes and still swallowing dryly with every few words. 'Are you telling me that you had visions, not Grandfather; that you saw-'

  'T
he fire; I saw a disaster coming, from the money. I didn't know it was going to be a fire, but I knew it was coming. That was the last thing I saw. Before that; oh, lots of things.' She laughed quietly. 'Your poor Grandfather. He only ever had one real seeing; I think I must have loaned him the Gift for the time he was lying on the floor of the van, covered in all that tea and lard. Poor dear; he thought it was this twenty-ninth of February thing that made people different. There was something special about him, though. There must have been. The only thing that ever really surprised me in my whole life was him turning up like that; I hadn't any inkling of that. None at all. That was how we knew he was special. But visions? No, he had that one, and woke up with it and started babbling, trying to make something of it. Just like a man; give them a toy and they have to play with it. Never content. All the rest though…' She set her mouth in a tight line, shaking her head.

  'All the rest… what?' I asked, gulping.

  'The visions. The seaweed factory, the hammock, those Fossil people, Mrs Woodbean, your father being born, and then you, and the fire; I saw all that, not him. And if I didn't actually see it every time, at least I knew what I wanted - what Aasni and I wanted, and got your Grandfather to do what we thought was right, what we thought was needed, for all of us. That's the trouble with men, you see? They think they know what they want, but they don't, not usually. You have to tell them. You have to give them a bit of a hand now and again. So I told him. You know; pillow-talk. Well, suggested. You can't be too careful. But if it's a warning of a disaster, well, there you are; you see what happened with the money.'

  'You foresaw the fire at the mansion house?' I whispered, and suddenly my eyes were filling with tears again, though this time not because my throat was sore.

  'A disaster, dear,' Zhobelia said matter-of-factly, seeming not to notice the tears welling in my eyes. 'I saw a disaster, that was all. If I'd seen it was going to be a fire then of course the last thing I'd have suggested doing with the money would have been burning it. All I saw was a disaster, not exactly what sort. Should have known it would still happen, of course.' She put on a sour face and shook her head. 'The Gift is like that, you see. But you have to try. Here, my dear,' she said, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve. 'Dry your eyes.'