Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  But that first afternoon, when they were trekking up a shambling hillside, Gabriel made one last stab at the subject that preoccupied him. “About the girl, Rolf,” he said, panting. “What’s the story?”

  Rolf threw out his free hand in an irritated flurry. “Why do you keep on about this? There is no one coming into the house! I don’t know why you insist, but I wish you would leave it. Annie is worried already about you and this talk only makes her worse.”

  “But I’ve spoken to her.”

  Tapping his camel stick—the short hooked stick that many Omani men carried—against his thigh, Rolf turned. “Gabriel—”

  “Look, I’m not kidding and I’m not thick either. There’s a woman in that house, Rolf, and you bloody well know there is.”

  “There cannot be!”

  “Why not? No one locks the doors—she could come in from the street any time.”

  “But the women of this country would never do such a thing.”

  “She isn’t Omani, she’s a Westerner, who parades around me like some kind of marauding prostitute, and I don’t understand why you allow it. What’s the point? Am I supposed to be learning something? I mean, is she there to tantalize me, like in some Hitchcock film?”

  Rolf was looking down at him from a few meters up the track. “You’re dreaming, that’s all. Sleepwalking.”

  “In the middle of the day?” Gabriel wiped sweat from his neck. “You’ll have to do better than that, Rolf. Sleepwalking, my arse.”

  “What else can I say when we are only three of us at home?”

  “Most of the time, yes, but you have a regular visitor. I’ve spoken to her. For Christ’s sake, I’ve even kissed her! So won’t you tell me, please, who it is that I’ve kissed?”

  After a moment, Rolf turned away with a dismissive “She must be a jinniya then.”

  “What?”

  “This is jinn country.” Rolf hiked on up the track.

  “You mean . . . some kind of ghost?”

  “Jinn are not ghosts.”

  “Well, do they have knobbly toes and legs as long as—?”

  “You are exasperating me, Gabriel! It was a good joke for a day or two, but enough now.”

  The slate-like hills threw back the dazzling light and the only sound—of stones rolling away from Rolf’s tread—scraped against the still air. Some of the rocks had faces like grinning gargoyles.

  As they scrambled on, Gabriel had to wonder: Jinn country?

  The journey back to Muscat seemed interminable. Gabriel couldn’t wait to get to the house. He hoped she would come and he hoped there would be no hint of her, and when finally they stepped into the dimly lit front room, he knew she was there already, ahead of him.

  The following evening Annie’s tone had quite changed when she asked him if he had seen his jinn lady that day.

  He never knew from which direction she might come, or when. At night, he lay on his back facing the door, nervous and expectant, like a virgin bride, or if he stood on the roof he faced the stairwell, because he wanted to see her coming. She never did it that way, though—creeping up like some kind of spook: she was either there or she was not, and yet he grew fidgety for fear of missing out, missing even her fleeting passage across a room. He wanted to see her, any time, every time.

  Annie, noticing his distraction, became irritable one evening when they were having dinner in the diwan. “Gabriel, what is it with you? Even when I’m speaking to you, your eyes are jumping around and you keep wandering from room to room. You’re hardly ever still!”

  “Just trying to keep track of your occasional guest.”

  Annie stared. “You still think there’s someone here?”

  “I know there is.”

  Rolf tore up some bread. “So where is she now?”

  “Excellent question.”

  His sister shook her head. “You really think there’s some woman coming in and out of our house without us knowing about it?”

  “Either that or you do know about it.”

  “But it isn’t even possible! I mean, who is she? I’ve asked around, you know. No one knows anything about an expat on the loose, and she can’t be in Muscat on her own. She’d either have to be working or married to someone, or she’d never have got into the country.”

  “I’m neither working nor married and I got in.”

  “Yeah, and it wasn’t easy either. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t bothered!”

  “Hey, don’t get miffed with me, Annie. How the fuck am I supposed to know what gives? This is your town, your house. You tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know.” She screwed up her paper napkin and threw it onto her plate.

  Stalemate.

  “I don’t like this,” Annie said quietly. “It’s this bloody house.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There might be something here . . . a presence or . . .”

  “Oh, not the jinn thing again! Look,” said Gabriel, “she didn’t come out of any bottle, all right? And if she had, it’d be pretty damn hard to get her back in again.”

  “Don’t confuse jinn with pantomime genies.” Annie’s voice was still low. “People believe in them. There are loads of stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “It’s folklore.” Rolf spoke, waving his hand. “Local folklore.”

  Annie shot a look at him, “It’s part of Islam,” then turned to Gabriel. “They’re in the Quran—part of the religion. It simply depends on where you’re from, doesn’t it? I mean, we have our ghosts, but Muslims don’t believe in ghosts. When they die, they go to Paradise. They don’t hang about like our lot can. Jinn, on the other hand, are around us all the time.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes. I mean, what about fairies? Irish folklore—the serious stuff—they’re exactly like jinn. Living alongside us. Our world and their world and never the twain shall meet, and yet they do. They cross over.”

  Gabriel looked at her with a mix of astonishment and ridicule. “Fairies? Are you serious?”

  “Not sprites with wings. That’s rubbish.”

  “Oh, please don’t mention the Little People!”

  “I’m just saying—a girl in my class in secondary school did a whole project on fairy lore and it was chilling. I didn’t sleep for two nights. It’s all the same stuff, you know.”

  Rolf was lining watermelon seeds along the rim of his plate, equally spaced.

  “And as for jinn, well, they’re like a third being,” Annie went on. “God made angels and jinn and humans. Angels from the air, humans from the earth, jinn from fire. But we can’t see them, unless they want us to.”

  “Annie,” Gabriel said gently, “forget jinn and fairies. On the level—you haven’t asked some friend of yours to mess with my head, have you? Because I swear to Christ, if you don’t know who she is, then what’s she doing in your house?”

  Annie held his eye. “Is she in the room now?”

  Gabriel could see, beyond her listlessness, a longing to buy into this. “If she was, you’d see her—obviously. Like you must have done when she came down this morning and went into the kitchen while we were having breakfast.”

  Still she held his eye, biting the side of her lip. “If this is some kind of joke, I want you to drop it.”

  “You think I’d be up for joking?”

  “Rolf,” she said, “maybe there is—”

  “What, Annie? Maybe there is what?”

  “Maybe this place has its own resident jinn. Some houses do. We should ask around.”

  A droplet of cold sweat ran down Gabriel’s spine.

  “That’s all nonsense,” said Rolf.

  “Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” his wife snapped. “But lots of people don’t.”

  “What people?” asked Gabriel.

  “It’s part of the scenery here. Good jinn. Bad jinn.”

  “Do you believe in it?”

  “About as much as I believed in that ghost at O’Mah
ony’s farm.”

  Gabriel chuckled. “God, I hadn’t thought about him in years.”

  “Which ghost is this?” Rolf asked.

  “Why would you be interested?” Annie retorted. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “I like the stories.”

  Gabriel and Annie exchanged glances. “It wasn’t so much a ghost as—”

  “His foot,” said Gabriel.

  Annie smiled. “On one of the landings of this old house we were sent off to every summer to learn Irish.”

  “Everyone said the house was haunted,” Gabriel explained. “On certain nights, so the legend went, you could see the ghost’s foot glowing on the landing. Lots of people claimed to have seen it.”

  “But you never did?” Rolf asked, with a supercilious smile. He turned to Annie. “Or you?”

  “Don’t be so patronizing!”

  “Ghost stories are always the same.” He shrugged. “Someone else sees something. Never the person who tells the story, the person right in front of you. Always second- or third- or tenth-hand. I have never met anyone who had this kind of experience directly.”

  “Except Gabriel.”

  Another drop of cold sweat slithered down Gabriel’s back.

  He walked. Through Muttrah and Muscat and on up into the hills. Usually he could read Annie, because she allowed him to. He would have said that her curiosity about the woman was genuine, especially since there was a touch of fear in it. He wasn’t sure how well Annie could dissemble, but she was doing a persuasive job with this talk of jinn, and he had to be on his guard. This too could be part of the charade.

  Over subsequent days, it became clear that Annie’s interest was indeed sincere, though she wouldn’t let on in front of Rolf. One afternoon when she was ironing, she asked Gabriel again, with faux-nonchalance, if his jinn lady was about.

  “Nope.”

  “You know, jinn are often good. Sometimes they help humans.”

  Behind her eyes, Gabriel could see something akin to envy, as if she suspected he had touched on something that was denied her. “They say? Who says?”

  “Oh—you hear stories. Sometimes at these women’s parties I go to, the Omanis tell stories. Exactly like we do at home. It’s just a different context.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “They’re all, you know, quite touching.” She laid out the sleeve of Rolf’s shirt and ironed. “There was a nice one I heard about an old man in the hills who was injured in a fall, in a gully, and ended up with his arm broken and his leg crushed, but somehow he got back to his house, outside a remote village. No one knew how he’d made it. He said he walked, but he couldn’t have—his foot was smashed—so they said that a jinn must have carried him home. Then his leg got worse. They didn’t know what to do with it—it was suppurating and gangrenous—and he was getting sicker, and after a while, the villagers stopped going to visit him. Then one night he heard a voice calling him, so he crawled to the door, where he found a pot on the step with a sort of paste in it. He rubbed it into his leg, day after day, and it started to get better. He kept applying it until his foot was healed, and that was when a jinn woman appeared and said she had been looking after him, but that he must never tell anyone.” Annie shook out the shirt, flattened another sleeve and ironed the cuff. “When the villagers saw that he was cured, they hounded him until he told them how it had happened. The jinn was very angry with him then and said he would never see her again, and he never did, but he was able to go back into the hills with his goats. So you see—a well-meaning jinn, come to save him.”

  Gabriel smiled. “Pure bollocks.”

  “Maybe.” She held up the shirt, gave it a shake and put its shoulders around a hanger. “Every culture finds a way to explain the inexplicable.”

  “Like Rolf said—folklore.”

  “Oh, you know that, do you? You’re so worldly-wise, so all-knowing, that you can dismiss it just like that? Centuries and centuries of belief?”

  “Centuries and centuries of storytelling. That’s where all the Irish fables come from.”

  “Be careful, Gabriel. You wouldn’t want to be so scornful about something you don’t understand.”

  Sometimes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. She chose her moments; Gabriel chose to believe. He chose, also, to stay with her rather than with his sister.

  The night before they moved to the new house, he told Annie he wanted to stay in Muttrah.

  She was packing a suitcase, putting in the last of their belongings. “How do you mean?”

  “I’ll pay the rent and hang on for a bit.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s central, which is handy when I don’t have transport, and you shouldn’t have to put up with me every single day.”

  “I don’t mind that.”

  “Really?”—

  She rolled some socks one into the other. “I don’t . . . I haven’t exactly been good company, I know, or maybe as welcoming as I should have been but—”

  He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve been everything you should have been, but I’m not really in the right frame of mind for lounging around the suburbs in between dinner parties and barbecues, and you need space. Us being on top of each other every hour of the day is proving counter-productive, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Being on your own could also be counter-productive. Too much time to think.”

  She believed, no doubt, that he thought a lot about Max and, if left alone, would do so even more as he tried to come to terms with what had happened—a laughable concept. None of them would ever come to terms with it, least of all Gabriel, and although he could have grieved for Max—that much at least, in his empty time—he did not. Even when he walked under that high, light sky, with seagulls coasting overhead and goats wandering about, even then he didn’t think much about Max any more, or of his parents, or his spoiled prospects and the prominent stain on his character. But he did want more time alone to think. To think and delight in this intriguing woman.

  Annie resumed her packing, piling in clothes way beyond the capacity of the suitcase. “I suppose, if you’re going to stay for a while, it makes sense to have your own place,” she looked up, “but how long are you planning to stay?”

  “A bit longer, if I can, but I don’t want to tread on your toes.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I don’t own Muscat.” The suitcase lid, as she pulled it over the mound of clothes, was like a glutton’s jaw closing over a greedy mouthful. “What about money?”

  They leaned on the suitcase. “I could get a job.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Rolf about that. We can’t ask Rashid for too many favors.”

  “Let’s sit on it.”

  They sat on the case. “We’ve paid the rent until the end of next month,” said Annie, “so you might as well stay. But I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with that specter of yours.”

  After they had made the final move the next day, Rolf dropped Gabriel back to Muttrah in the early evening. Walking toward his house was like walking from one world into another. He had longed for solitude these many weeks, and the dark alleys were like a squiggled path leading out of his head. When the time was right, he planned to make his way back into it by another route.

  In the empty house, he sat in the dim light of an inadequate lamp and waited.

  He had left the front door unlocked when he went to bed, then lay, listening, and staring across the darkness toward the doorway.

  He didn’t see her come. When the mattress dipped by his hips, his eyes struggled to fix on her outline, but her warmth spread over to him like a low mist. He found her wrist and gripped it in an uncompromising hold. “How much are they paying you?”

  It was the first of many questions; she answered none.

  And yet she lay like this in a stranger’s bed. . . . What were the limits, he wondered, and the rules? What would she allow? With a restraint just short of painful, he contained the urge to mak
e love to her, because he would have done so with neither tenderness nor affection, only with the desperation that had festered over months of enforced celibacy. In all that time he had enjoyed not one shared spasm of pleasure, no intimate release, and yet turned on, again, at last, by the woman lying alongside him, he managed to hold back.

  The drip-drop of conversation became as tantalizing, over the next few days, as her body. It wasn’t that she didn’t speak—she did, in short, neat sentences, although when he thought about it after she’d left, he was aware more of her having spoken than of having heard her voice. There was no substance to any of it. She answered questions with questions and spoke in vague terms about little of consequence, which explained nothing about anything. She was there and that was all; she didn’t know much else. Not even her own name. Apparently.

  When he said one day, “They say you might be a jinn,” she put her hand on his thigh. This was more dangerous than ice on the roads. If someone was trying to frame him, this was the way to go: one accusation of rape or assault and he’d never see the light of day again. But even that didn’t stand up. His family hated him, for sure, but not forever. They couldn’t wish to have him jailed for a long spell in some distant outpost.

  “Why do you keep coming here?”

  She needed to be away from somewhere else, she said.