Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “That’s because the water is both salty and fresh apparently.” Annie pointed to where it disappeared into a low cave. “The channel leads out to the sea. The boys swim through it sometimes. Not to be recommended.”

  The sea, behind them, made for a bland horizon.

  Gabriel was still staring into the sinkhole. “She’ll be here.”

  “Who?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said someone will be here,” Annie said.

  The sun was burning a hole through his scalp, the sweat soaking into his shirt. He couldn’t remember how to speak.

  “Gabriel?”

  He pulled back his shoulders and looked up at the harsh brown hills. “I . . . tourists. They’d come in their hordes if they could only get into the country.”

  “Oman doesn’t need a tourist industry, and it doesn’t want one either.”

  “You mean you don’t want it to have one.”

  “Exactly. The fewer people who know about it, the better. And you’ll agree after we’ve had lunch in Wadi Shab.”

  Gabriel did agree. Jutting ridges, brown and bare, followed the stone riverbed on either side, like spirit guides. On a sandy patch in a grove of date palms, they stopped for a picnic, and sat with Abid, the driver, enjoying flatbread stuffed with cold lamb.

  Gabriel squinted up at the fronds that were giving them shade. “I could really get to like this place,” he said, thinking about the little house in Muttrah that would soon be seeking a tenant.

  “Well, don’t.”

  A few months earlier, Annie had longed to share this with him—her letters had been full of what they could do if he ever managed to visit—but now they were merely in cahoots. Playing roles; playing at being on holiday. Lying to each other every day, every minute from the moment they got up.

  “Sleep well?”

  “Yeah, not bad,” one or the other would say, though both had tossed and fretted.

  “Hungry?”

  “Umm, starving.”

  And they would sit over a nice Omani breakfast, which Annie would force down and Gabriel would eat, though the void in his belly could never be met. He had thought it would be easier with Annie, but it was hardest, because he loved her the most. There was so much he could not say. He could not ask, as he would once have done, about the other emptiness—the baby that would not come—because that too was his fault. He could see it, clear as day. Annie had not yet conceived because she was so thin. She had lost a lot of weight. Skin and bones were no home for a baby, Nature knew that, and Annie was not eating properly because of him. He imagined sometimes that he would come down one morning and she would be standing there, holding down the news with rosy cheeks and a sucked-in grin, until it burst out of its own accord: “We’ve done it!” The whole family could then rejoice. Good news. New life, new birth; a fresh start for all of them. Meanwhile, Gabriel could not mention the thing that wasn’t happening.

  They couldn’t even admit that they were haunted by the same thoughts and no longer knew enough of each other to discover that their very nightmares were moving up and down the house, from one restless mind to the other, changing very little along the way.

  Stag nights. Max hated stag nights. He had no stomach for all those relentlessly slopping pints, the forced conviviality, the putrid jokes and mandatory inebriation, but even that was nothing compared with the humiliation that the mob, the groom’s own friends, inflicted on their helpless prey. Never having been part of a pack, he couldn’t understand the pack instinct, the inherent, irrepressible violence of men, one to another. Neither could he grasp the point of initiation ceremonies seen the world over, from sailors inflicting Neptune’s sadistic pleasure on every innocent who crossed the Equator, to the Japanese delight in televisual abasement, and the cruel rituals with which Western men initiated boys into gangs and men into marriage.

  Max didn’t get it. Gabriel and Annie knew this, and tossed and turned and wondered.

  Annie wondered, often, what had become of the wedding dress that had been hanging on the back of a bedroom door, pristine, glittering, ready for the excited bride to lift her arms and dive upward into its silk on her wedding day. Whatever had Geraldine done with it?

  She came into the room, swiftly and with purpose, like a wave racing to the shore. Rolf was kneeling over photographs spread on the floor of the diwan, but Gabriel’s eyes followed her as she came across the room, barefoot, silent, wearing the same blue kaftan with a silvery panel of embroidery down the front. She was about his age, he reckoned, but she didn’t look in his direction when she took an apple from the fruit bowl on the dining-table and bit into it.

  “Rolf, introduce us, would you?” Gabriel hissed at Rolf who, with half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose and tilted forward over his pictures, reminded him of a mole in a children’s story. No sooner had he spoken than she had left the room.

  “I’m sorry?” Rolf didn’t look up from his work.

  Gabriel was stretched across the cushions, reading. “Who’s yer woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “The one who just came in.”

  Rolf lifted his chin. “Someone came in?”

  “She walked right past you,” Gabriel whispered.

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  Gabriel looked at him deadpan. “That’s wearing a little thin.”

  His brother-in-law went back to his photos. “This again? There is no woman, Gabriel, apart from your sister.”

  “You sure about that?” Once again, he went through to the kitchen: empty. So he took the stairs four at a time and checked the two bedrooms on the second floor and the bathroom. Rolf was right. There was no woman, and yet there was. All the time. Even when Gabriel couldn’t see her, he was aware of her. Yet he could hear no footfall, no sound. Odd, how she made no noise.

  In subsequent days, the swift passes by their unmentioned guest became unnerving and increasingly perplexing. She wandered about, coming in and out of rooms, but Gabriel’s were the only eyes that followed her if she moved, and noticed if she did not. That the others failed to acknowledge her was not a little disconcerting. In fact, they were remarkably adept at turning their heads a fraction too late to see her. He couldn’t fathom their reasoning. This was no time for practical jokes and Annie looked no more in the mood for games than Rolf did. So what then? Why the denials? It seemed too deliberately cruel to be some kind of retribution. Since Annie had derived no satisfaction from slapping him, perhaps this was her way of making him suffer—tantalizing him with visions, trying to make him crazy with sightings of an apple-eating beauty, like throwing poisoned cheese at a hapless mouse.

  This, however, was not the way to hurt him. On the contrary, he was gaining strength, somehow, from the woman’s presence. Her un-present presence. Instead of feeling more adrift, less attuned to reality, he was beginning to feel connected, if not to the world or to his sister, at least to himself.

  He felt bolstered, and for the first time in weeks he had something fresh to think about: a new preoccupation. It was a delightful conundrum to ponder during those wakeful nights, wondering about their motivation, where they had found her, what she would sound like if she spoke and feel like if he touched her. He thought about touching her, about calling her bluff, since she too was playing a role, teasing him with glimpses—there again, gone again, real and not-so-real. By arrangement or whimsy, she was messing with his head and that too was flirtation; a delectable flirtation. He wanted to respond; he wanted in. Annie and Rolf meant to humiliate him, perhaps, but their motivation was of less interest than the woman herself. She was in the house, and they were lying.

  During another bad night, he went downstairs, treading quietly to avoid disturbing Rolf and Annie, but also hoping to disturb the secluded guest—to catch her out. He might steal upon her munching cornflakes in the kitchen, making up for all the meals she missed during the day when she was hiding in whichever cupboard they kept her. By the window in the small kitchen, he poured him
self a glass of water and stood looking out into nothing. He didn’t hear her coming; he didn’t need to.

  A flush of desire seeped through him. It had been too long. Nothing Sandra could do, tried to do, had brought back the comforting rush of heat. His impotence was simply another by-product. He could not allow himself any release. He had to live his brother’s life, depriving himself of the joys Max no longer knew and even striving on his behalf. Before he’d left Ireland, he had been playing himself ragged to perfect Bartók’s Second, which Max had been working on, as if he could somehow finish it for him. But for whom, he wondered vaguely, as he turned to the woman, had he intended to play it?

  They made eye contact at last. Sitting on one of the high stools by the counter, legs crossed, one foot bouncing slightly, she looked at him steadily. The kaftan, slit to her thighs, fell over her knees. Her hand rested around a glass of water. This was no trick of his troubled mind—she was as real as he was. Absolutely solid. Her toenails showed the remains of brown nail polish. Gabriel was thinking fast. He needed to provoke a reaction, to shock her into revealing the game, but if he grilled her too harshly, she might take flight or raise her voice, causing a showdown that would bring Annie from her bed. He would then, at least, get some sort of explanation from this deceiving trio. Trouble was, he didn’t much want Annie to come.

  There was an exchange, short and inconsequential: “You don’t say much,” he said.

  No need to, she replied.

  So she did, it turned out, have a voice, a language. In fact, a few languages, he discovered, when she came across to where he was leaning against the sink, and kissed him. It was so sudden that he was the one to pull away, but she followed, leaning into his mouth so that their contact wasn’t broken, and from within the closed box, the tomb in which he had been living, he stepped into warmth. He closed his eyes to reconfigure this, and when he opened them—she was gone. In the blink of a kiss, she had vanished.

  Sleepwalking. Damn it all if he wasn’t sleepwalking. Annie was right, again. Trauma had shocked his body into altered states of mind and turned him into a sleepwalker. There was no arguing it: he was standing alone in the kitchen by the sink in the middle of the night, with an erection sticking out of his shorts—all dressed up and nowhere to go.

  It might be revenge, he thought. Max’s revenge.

  Desire was still there when he woke, his bedroom stagnant with late-morning airlessness. Restive and horny, he kicked off the tangled sheet, her kiss dragging off him still, squeezing him with frustration. Sleepwalking could not account for its lingering taste.

  Annie and Rolf were sitting at the glass table, drinking coffee and eating dates.

  “I wish you’d eat something substantial,” Gabriel said to Annie, sitting down.

  “You look tired,” she said. “Didn’t you sleep? I thought you were taking pills.”

  “I should leave. It’s not doing you any good, my being here.”

  “You’re not here for my good, or yours. You’re here so that our parents don’t have to look at you all day long. Anyway, where would you go?”

  “Africa, maybe? I’ve been thinking about volunteering for an aid agency.”

  She snorted. The loving, tender Annie he’d always known was drifting farther into the distance. “You won’t find atonement in Africa looking after little children,” she said. “You won’t find it anywhere,” she added, more to herself than to him, and she sounded so aggrieved that a surge of despair rose in his gut.

  He went into the kitchen, hoping to find at least a sense, if not a sighting, of their other guest. Though she might be nothing—a wisp, a non-dimensional fantasy working of its own accord on his sad little mind—he sought her out. The glass from which she had been drinking was no longer on the counter, but Annie could have moved it.

  He sought her out again when they had left—Rolf to work, Annie to her villa—but this time he was looking for hard evidence, scrabbling around in search of shoes, toiletries, underwear, signs of a hidden life. There were none. Nothing. It came as a relief. It gave him ownership. Any signs of ordinary living on her part would mean that she was just another woman—and not a very nice one at that, if she conspired with Annie to toy with someone she didn’t even know. That would be a particularly nasty trick, one that became nastier with every showing, and he could not believe that Annie wished him such ill. That the woman should also be a mystery to Annie and Rolf was a far more attractive proposition, but the mystery made no sense. They had to see her. No one was damn well invisible.

  The next time she came among them, he tried honesty.

  “Listen, lads,” he said, with a glance toward the end of the room where she was actually sitting among the cushions her legs curled around her, gripping her ugly toes with her fingers, as if to hide them. “You should call this off, whatever it’s about. It isn’t very fair to her, or to me.”

  Neither of them responded. It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

  Perhaps he hadn’t.

  All right, he thought. I’ll play along. They couldn’t ignore her forever. Poor girl would starve. Levity might work. “Don’t you think you should give the ghost some breakfast?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t start,” said Annie.

  “You don’t want her going hungry, do you?”

  Annie and Rolf glanced at one another. He hated the way they kept doing that but, undeterred, he kept up the banter. “At the very least a cup of coffee, no? Here, let me get her one.” He turned to speak to the woman, “Hi, I’m—Oh, shucks, gone again!”

  “Gabriel . . .”

  “Now, where the hell did she get to?” he asked, looking at them wide-eyed. “Darn it all if she doesn’t keep doing that!”

  Rolf stood up, saying, “Non, non, she must be somewhere.” He looked under the table. “No one. Ah,” he stepped across the room and opened a closet, “she must be in here. . . . No again. What a mystery!” He poked his head into the corridor. “Perhaps she went through the wall?”

  His antics made Annie smile. “Honestly, you two.”

  Gabriel smiled also. If he could assuage Annie, engage her with talk of their wandering friend, that would do for now. “I swear to God,” he said, “there’s a woman in this house who loves apples.”

  “Apples?”

  “Yeah. Noticed your supply dwindling recently?”

  “I eat apples,” said Rolf.

  “Careful, Gabriel.” That flicker of a smile was still on Annie’s lips. “We don’t want the men in white coats coming to take you away, now, do we?”

  For a moment they were there, back in their old relationship, when they had nothing between them beyond uncluttered affection. So their vanishing friend was at least serving a purpose, creating light relief, if nothing else.

  When Rolf suggested, the following week, that he and Gabriel should take an excursion that Friday, Gabriel was torn. He wanted to see the country but he liked staying put too, enclosed behind the walls of the house, where he could take the air from his tiny stretch of roof, looking across Muttrah’s skyline. The town was laying claim to him, and he to it, as it became his quarter. Most mornings he wandered through the suq, acknowledging calls from traders who had come to know him, as he passed on his way to the Corniche, then walked out to old Muscat and back again, sidestepping cars and goats. As the district grew more familiar, so his surroundings embraced him.

  Still, it was time to go farther afield and Rolf was restless, fed up with to-ing and fro-ing between town and their new villa, and desperate to get out to his waiting panoramas. Gabriel embodied a good excuse. So they set off early and headed up the coast. The mountains were reticent, as if shy of the very sea from which they had emerged.

  “These are ophiolites.” Rolf waved at the craggy lumps that passed for hills along the road. They had a curious composition—tubes of rock compressed in and around one another.

  “Looks like intestines,” said Gabriel.

  “Well, yes. ‘Ophio’ is Greek for ‘snake,’ so th
is serpentine formation gives them their name. Oman is unique,” he went on, “in its geology. It used to be at the bottom of the sea. When the continental plates moved, the oceanic crust was pushed up and the land buckled, like a carpet rippling. So we have this extraordinary mountain range—the Hajar—and at the edge here, the Tethyan ophiolites.”

  “Tethyan?”

  “The Tethys Ocean separated Laurasia from Gondwanaland during the Triassic.”

  “Gondwanaland and Laurasia?”

  Rolf smiled. “Asia and Europe to you.”

  They turned inland at Barka Fort and crossed the plain to reach the foothills. Children dallied by the roadside, sometimes waving, sometimes scowling, at the passing jeep, the girls in flowing patterned dresses, the boys big-eyed and curious.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “The Ghubrah Bowl. You’ll see. It’s quite amazing.”

  The countryside dipped and humped as they made their way into a wadi—the Wadi Mistal—with foothills closing in until they were in a narrow gray gorge. Gabriel went with the sway as Rolf negotiated boulders and steep ridges along the zigzagging watercourse, but suddenly the limestone walls fell back to reveal a vast natural amphitheater.

  “Wow.” Gabriel gaped at the surrounding rim of mountains and mishmash of hills. “I understand why you get so fidgety to come up here.”

  “This is nothing. The view from Jebel Shams, now that—that view belongs to God.”

  They headed out across the plain. Already Gabriel was impatient to stray between those bare ridges, where the creases, plump with greenery, were flush with goodness: streams and fruits and flowering trees. A small village was perched on the flank of the southern mountain, but Rolf parked before they got there and began to prepare for a hike.

  They followed tracks, scrambling over scree and sliding rocks, while Rolf looked for his spot and Gabriel, in his wake, breathless and unfit, tried to keep up. Whenever Rolf stopped to photograph or sketch, Gabriel perched on a rock to rest, then dragged his feet when his grumbling brother-in-law scurried on in search of a more suitable viewpoint. He was a grumpy, irritable companion on this and other outings they would make over subsequent weeks, but Gabriel liked this Rolf—the one who was not in control; the one who had to be cared for, babied almost. He liked to make him tea on their burner and persuade him to put down his tools and his frustration. It was easier man-to-man, with no Annie, confusing the fact that they were friends as well as brothers-in-law. Out here, in Oman’s best wilderness, they were pals again. It was like going fishing together as they had in Ireland—Rolf hissing and fussing as he failed to get his catch; Gabriel calm, flinging his fly forward, absorbing the scenery, the feel of his boots in the cold river, while the trout, caught or not, were incidental to the day’s pleasures.