Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  Thea took her arm, for balance, pulled off her shoe and shook out a pebble. “What’s brought this on?”

  “A letter from Mom. Says she doesn’t get it—why didn’t I stay with that nice boy in London? ‘Oh, hey, Mom, you mean the guy who stole my keys and let himself into my house during the night? The guy who waited for me on the street any time I went out with friends—that guy?’” She shook her head.

  “Do you miss him, at all?”

  “No. I’m only embarrassed I didn’t see the signs. Do you miss Surfer Boy?”

  “Not since the day he told me I had no business on a surfboard.”

  “Was he right?”

  “Absolutely. Water’s too bloody cold in Ireland. No, I’m going to fly instead. I need to be up in the air. But first I need the little plane.” They laughed, but Thea didn’t much feel like laughing. Bewildered and overwhelmed by the turn she had taken with Sachiv, she couldn’t help blurting, “Kim, this thing with Sach—”

  “Isn’t a thing. That’s how you have to think. He’s married. A no-go area, period.”

  “Nothing’s that simple, is it?”

  “Come on, Thea. He’s cute, no denying, but seriously? Three kids? You don’t want to get in the middle of that.”

  Disaster crept up in an insidious manner. It tapped her on the shoulder, but when she turned—no one there. A flutter of nausea. There. Gone. Had it been there? They were in a line for gasoline. Sitting on some of the wealthiest oil reserves in the world, they were in a long line to buy gas on their way to a St. Patrick’s Day party at the house of a German expatriate. Thea thought she felt sick, and dread swept through her as she imagined her evening spoiled: a night spent on the tiles—the bathroom tiles. It passed. They reached the forecourt of the gas station, edging ever closer to the pump. Reggie fiddled with the radio, from the dolorous voice of a newsreader to cheerful Arab tunes and back again.

  By the time they drove out with a full tank, there was no doubt: Thea did feel sick. Love, probably. Yes, that was it. Her body was all in a pother.

  And it continued to be so at the party, the nausea sliding around inside her like an oil slick until she was eventually forced to retreat to a bedroom, in the stranger’s house, where she lay down among a pile of coats. Kim came to check on her. She had probably eaten something, they agreed. Probably a dose of Baghdad belly. They’d been lucky so far. In almost three months neither of them had got sick. It struck Thea as strange that she didn’t feel like throwing up; that delight probably lay ahead. When Reggie brought her a glass of whiskey, saying it would settle her stomach, she sipped it, though it was the last thing she felt like, and she did improve enough to join the party, which brought such relief—she was not sick, after all—that she ended up dancing for hours.

  In the middle of a small living room, in a slightly shabby house, Reggie took center-stage, swinging about with his hands over his head, and Thea jived away with him, elbowing Germans and Swiss and Scottish engineers out of the way, giddy with relief. Not sick, after all.

  The next morning, when they stepped into their office building, the woman who swept the floor, already hunkered down, caught Thea’s eye and let out a little cry, then scurried away along the corridor.

  When Alia came in behind them, the old woman ranted at her.

  “What’s she saying?” Thea asked, one foot on the bottom step. “She seemed to take fright when she saw me.”

  Alia spoke to the woman, glanced at Thea, and went on up, saying, “Don’t worry. She is . . . a little crazy.”

  “No, but, please. Tell me what she said. Have I offended her in some way?”

  “No.” Alia stopped. “Not at all. Nothing like that.”

  “What then?” asked Kim, behind her.

  “She. . . . It’s nothing.”

  “It’s clearly something. She ran away as if I was about to kick her.”

  Her hand on the banister, Alia glanced from one to the other. “She saw a shadow, that’s all. Like a . . .”

  “Ghost?”

  “Some would call it jinn.”

  Kim looked nonplussed. “She saw a jinn on Thea?”

  “Really, it means nothing.”

  It meant something. Thea had no sooner sat behind her typewriter than the nausea returned, along with a withering weakness. As the morning went on, she could barely hold herself upright, as if her inner frame had stepped outside her body and gone on a break, leaving her languishing at the desk. Perhaps that was what the old woman had seen—her skeleton taking flight. She hesitated to leave the office: she had only twenty sick days available and those were best saved for whatever nasty surprises the Iraqi summer might deliver. But after several hours of encroaching misery, she conceded defeat and allowed Reggie to drive her back to the hotel.

  There, time and days blurred into one immutable image: the dim bedroom, the tossed sheets, loneliness from early morning until mid-afternoon, and long nights. Very long nights.

  At some point she had started vomiting—signs of food poisoning at last, or a stomach virus, something that would clean itself out. . . . Except for this other thing—the acute listlessness. And worse than that, worse even than being unable to eat, she was unable to drink. No matter what she ordered from room service—tea, water, juice—she could not swallow it because her stomach didn’t want it. Desperate to get well, she became the midnight prankster, calling room service several times a night, ordering whatever seemed palatable, and when it came, so did the inevitable letdown: she could not eat. Nonetheless, the menu obsessed her. Food would make her better. This weakness, this jelly-limbed sensation, was the result of having taken no sustenance, so she would look at the menu, day and night, and call the kitchens, asking for chicken and ice cream, salads and cake, yoghurt and toast. . . . In the small hours of morning, the friendly old waiter from Kirkuk would arrive with a veritable cornucopia, leave the tray on the table and take another away. Ever hopeful, Thea would lift the tin lid and stare at the meal, disenfranchised from her own appetite, unable to bargain with it. If she did not eat soon, her health would be dangerously compromised, but more important than that, she needed to drink.

  Coke. That was the one drink she craved. She asked for it, repeatedly. “No Coke, madam. Because of the war.” There was no Coke in all of Iraq because of the war, as well she knew, but it was the only thing she thought she could swallow. Water was too heavy, tea made her gag.

  She longed to phone her mother, but didn’t want to alarm them at home, when there was nothing they could do and probably nothing to be worried about, although Reggie was clearly concerned. There were no health facilities he trusted. “Go into hospital here,” the saying went, “and you’ll come out with something worse.” The hotel had a doctor on call, though, and after two days without improvement he was summoned.

  He looked like Einstein: white hair, long silver mustache, and a pocket watch. A lovely man, chatty. He had trained in Russia, he told Thea, and spoke four languages, but he didn’t know what to make of her symptoms. His diagnosis was unexpected: “You are homesick.”

  “But I don’t want to go home.”

  “Nausea, no appetite, this is symptomatic of being upset.”

  “I’m very happy here.”

  He smiled. “Perhaps you are in love.”

  Perhaps you’re right, she thought, since she was certainly not pining for Dublin’s city streets. Her determination to get well was rooted in her dread of being forced to leave Iraq—but love. . . . Love could certainly disable appetite, and romantic turmoil had a habit of lodging itself in the stomach, but why then could she not drink? Einstein had no answer, but prescribed some pills, insisting, still, that the source of her indisposition was emotional, not physical.

  So she continued, sick, and becoming more so.

  Sachiv called up whenever no one was about, and fussed and flapped, feeling her forehead and urging her to drink water, lots of water. He seemed slightly panicked, as was she.

  Unbidden, Kim moved into Thea’s
room to help her through the dark hours, going with her on the relentless treks to and from the bathroom, where Thea delivered nothing into the bowl. They pondered what was wrong with her and cursed her rotten luck, because with every long, slow, miser-able day that passed like this, the risk of being sent home grew stronger. One evening Kim took her for a walk around the pools. The air would help, they told one another. It didn’t. Thea felt wretched. Kim’s arm linked hers. “I guess the woman who sweeps was right. There was a shadow over you, the other day.”

  They walked back into the hotel slowly, both quiet, both scared.

  What the hell was this?

  Sachiv kept phoning. “Can I send some tea?”

  “Coke,” she said. “Send up some Coke.”

  “There is no Coke in—”

  “All of Iraq. Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  On the fourth afternoon, Reggie came. “You know you can be repatriated. You have only to say the word.”

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Okay, but bear in mind that it’ll take up to four days to get you an exit visa. And if you’re not improving, that’s quite a long wait.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  He nodded grimly and left the room.

  Sickness and Iraq raged battles over her; Sachiv too was in the mix. And Kim, and the desert, and the Tigris, and the tangerine dawns. . . . Impossible. So much more to learn, so much still to do. Too much to do without. Leaving would be as insupportable as nausea, and every time she kneeled over the toilet and threw up the nothing from her gullet, she hoped that this would be the last time, that she was purging the dregs of this mystery disease. It would pass. Soon she would feel a change, a turn, and then she would wake, recovered.

  Despairing, she longed to be in the office with Kim and the girls, to be anywhere other than this hotel sickroom, especially after another fiasco. Reggie thought he had sent for a doctor from one of the hospitals, but a very young man arrived in Thea’s room, claiming he had to examine her. She backed away, told him to get out.

  A mere ambulance driver, it turned out, trying his luck—and once again Reggie and Sachiv had cause to hang their heads on Thea’s account.

  Soon afterward, Reggie stood with his hands in his pockets at the end of her bed. “You should go home, Thea. Get this sorted, whatever it is, and come back in a few weeks.”

  “No.” Orderly palm trees lined along the Euphrates. “I’ll be fine.” Babylon, where the voices still whispered and the brick foundations of houses lay like skeletons in the earth. The Marshes—the Marshes, of which there was no like in the world—the arched mudhif, the women punting through the reeds in their tarada—it all had to be seen, had yet to be seen! And the deserts, where she had once glimpsed in the distance a nomad encampment, with their tents and flocks, and the sand whipping over them. No. She could not let it out of her grasp. “I can’t go, Reggie.”

  After he left, Thea lay thinking about the evening they had helped fishermen pull in their catch on the shores of Lake Habbaniyah. The net was so vast that another group of men, pulling at the other end, were so far along the beach that their grunting could barely be heard. The Westerners, quickly exhausted, had soon collapsed on the sand, but Thea had watched and photographed: the men, their eyes glinting, had rolled their skirts above their knees and wrapped the rope many times around their chests, which were protected by bits of cloth, and as they heaved and leaned, their feet slid in the muddy sand. The net stretched to such a distance that it would be hours yet before the catch was in, but the fishermen, hauling their weight against the lake, sang to keep the rhythm flowing, and, weeks later, Thea could still, almost, hear their song.

  Good times. Good times in Iraq.

  That was the weekend they had spent at a holiday complex full of vacant houses skirting the big, featureless lake. There was an impressive restaurant, designed like a Bedouin tent, which had been all but empty of people and food. They had had to make do with chocolate éclairs for lunch, she remembered, and before going back to Baghdad that evening, they had driven around the surrounding desert looking for Saddam’s weekend villa. It had been Thea’s mad idea that they should try to catch a glimpse of it, but they had to be careful not to come upon it suddenly, so they drove up and over mounds, skidding sideways down dunes, the music loud, the setting perfect, laughing and looking for Saddam.

  And then she thought about her camels, following one another along the shore of Lake Razzaza, searing themselves into her soul. Perhaps she had known, even then, that Iraq would not be hers for long.

  In the quiet afternoon lull of the fifth day, tears slipped onto the pillowcase: defeat. Nothing had improved. She had been five days without food or water. Wishful thinking could only do so much.

  She called Reggie. “I want to go home.”

  “Done.”

  As desperate as she had been to stay, she suddenly became frantic to leave, knowing it could be four days before an exit visa was issued—and how sick would she be by then? Within a few hours, however, Reggie reported that Tariq would rush her application through on the grounds of a medical emergency. With luck, she might be able to leave tomorrow on the British Airways midnight flight—the only flight—to London.

  Now there was nothing for her to do but dread the journey ahead. Barely strong enough to walk, she would have to get through Iraqi Immigration and face a long wait because check-in had to take place four hours before every flight—the war, the war—and those four hours worried her more than seven in the air. The airport was basic. How would she manage? And then, at Heathrow, she would have to get across to Terminal One for the Dublin flight. She might collapse, pass out. The fifteen-hour ordeal stretched before her like a long, dark airport tunnel, and she had a whole night and day to contemplate it. Apprehension lay on her, like a person.

  Then, in an unexpected turn, word came that her visa had been so swiftly issued that she could travel that very night. Reggie was happy for her, and probably, she suspected, relieved to get her off his hands.

  But Sachiv! He was off-duty. No goodbyes, no telling him even that she was leaving! He would come to work the next day and find her gone.

  Reggie had a more pressing concern. “You’re not fit to travel alone.”

  “Don’t have much choice.”

  “I’ll see if I can find someone going to London who could keep an eye on you. But those flights are block-booked by the government to get the wounded to England for treatment. That flight’s a bit of a troop-carrier.”

  When Kim got in from work, Thea told her that her departure had been brought forward. Quietly Kim started packing a few basics for Thea to take with her. “You’d better get your ass back here,” she said, “before I’ve had time to notice you’re gone.”

  “Try and stop me.”

  “Why don’t you get some air while I tidy up?” Kim suggested, but when she had helped Thea to a chair on the balcony, she gave her a second look. “You know what? Your eyes have gone yellow.”

  “Huh?”

  “The whites of your eyes—they’re yellow.”

  Thea gaped at her.

  “You’re jaundiced.”

  “Jayzuz. That means it must be hepatitis. I don’t bloody believe it!”

  “Shoot.”

  The doorbell rang. Kim let Geoffrey in. “Just came to say goodbye,” he said. “Lucky you, eh? Getting out of here.”

  “We’ve just worked out what’s wrong with her,” said Kim.

  “What?”

  “Hepatitis,” Thea said. “I don’t know much about it, but I know I’ve got it.”

  Geoffrey chortled, stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his cheap trousers, and shook his head. “Thea, if you had hepatitis, you’d be an awful lot sicker than you are now.”

  “I nearly threw him over the fucking balcony,” she told Kim, after he’d gone. “How much sicker does he want me to be?”

  Another ring at the door and Reggie came out to the balcony. “Good news! Christ, your eye
s are yellow!”

  “Yeah. Nobody noticed while I was in my room. Too dim. Hepatitis, anyone?”

  “God, yeah. That’d make sense. Wonder where you got it.”

  “There was a suspect cup of tea about ten days ago—remember, Kim? Silt in the bottom of my cup when I’d finished. Like I’d been drinking pure Tigris.”

  Reggie looked at Kim. “Oh, no. Not you too?”

  She shook her head. “I was on bottled water that day, but I’ve been wondering about that place you took us, down by the river. Those weird sausages. . . .”

  “Dodgy water’s more likely.”

  “What’s the good news?” Thea asked. “I need some.”

  “We’ve found a guy to take you home. And he’s Irish. Sachiv found him.”

  “Sachiv? Isn’t he off today?”

  “He came in specially to help on this. He knows just about everyone in the hotel and this bloke’s a regular here, comes and goes a fair bit. An engineer, apparently. From Dublin. Anyway, he’s on his way to a meeting in Stockholm, via London, but he’s agreed to fly to Dublin with you instead.”

  “That’s so great!” said Kim. “How did you persuade him to change his plans?”

  Reggie chuckled. “Poor sucker was minding his own business, having a bit of lunch. Next thing, Sachiv and I sidled up to him, like a couple of heavies. Sachiv did the rest. Said we had a very sick young lady who needed to get home. He said okay.” He smiled at Thea. “So you relax, all right? This time tomorrow you’ll be in your own bed.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. Reggie had read her anxiety, seen through her bravado.

  “What’s his name,” Kim asked, “her knight in shining boarding card?”

  “Alex Cassidy.”

  “So that’s it, then.” Thea looked across the city. “I’m as good as gone from here.”

  And so she was. Quick as a slap, in the turn of her head, Iraq had vanished and Ireland stood in its place. An unfathomable jolt. Disconcerted, she wondered if she had woken from a trance when, less than a week later, she found herself side by side with her father in West Cork, driving the length of the Sheep’s Head peninsula, a wild ridge of old red sandstone and white limestone. Dunmanus Bay was inky blue and Atlantic clouds offered a mix of celestial fare—blue, purple, pristine white, slim, flat, tall as pinnacles, puffed-out like a lizard’s chest. . . . This long, undulating road led to the end of Europe, where Thea’s aunt Brona lived in isolation, surrounded by sloping fields that dropped down to cliffs, which, in turn, dropped into the ocean. To this remote place, far from Dublin, Thea was coming to convalesce.