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.