Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Quite poignant,” said Thea, handing her camera across to them.

  Gabriel took it and looked at the screen. She had taken a shot of a charred dhow, its long curved spine reduced to charcoal, everything else gone, but for the detail on its prow.

  “So Abid has been entertaining us with stories about jinn.” Kim’s eyes twinkled at Gabriel. Mid-afternoon light filtered through the door.

  “Jinn,” said Hetty. “You mean like a genie, from a lamp?”

  Oh, how he wanted to lose them!

  A longboat, with a crew of twenty, slid along the magenta water, its oars stretching out on either side. From a vantage-point overlooking the creek, Thea and Kim sat on a hump of hill, their arms around their knees.

  “This is some coincidence,” Thea said.

  “How so?”

  “I row. I row the Irish equivalent of that boat down there—a traditional currach.”

  “No way.”

  “Although ours isn’t quite so long and we don’t go quite so fast, because there are only four of us.”

  A few meters away, Abid was trying to engage Gabriel in an argument about which of them had originally found this ideal spot for photo shoots at sunset, but Gabriel needed him to be quiet. His hearing was stretching, leaning out to catch what it could from the conversation to his right. Hetty and Betty were sitting farther along the ridge, their short legs straight, their toes turned up, while Sue filmed the scene below. Much as these women were a hindrance to his pursuit, so too were they facilitators, his excuse for being there, and he had to keep them sweet.

  “Darn, but this is beautiful,” said Kim. “What a sunset.”

  Abid took his phone from the deep pocket in his dishdasha and went down the slope to call his wife.

  Now Gabriel could eavesdrop, but he kept his gaze on the low white town of Sur, which stretched along a spit of land, and feigned interest in its dhows, lying on the beach below. As the inlet dipped into an orange hue, the mountains in the distance tipped into darkness.

  “Remember the sunsets in Baghdad?” Kim asked Thea. “Driving through the city and seeing this great red ball going down?”

  “I’ve done my best to forget.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “That’s why . . . well. Why I didn’t keep in touch.”

  “I figured that.”

  “I’m so sorry for not writing back. I missed you terribly, but your letters were long and gushy, whereas mine would have been short and flat, and I couldn’t bear the comparison. Your life to mine. You, reaching my horizons. And then other stuff happened.”

  Voices rose from the longboat—the coach driving his team, calling the rhythm, the rowers growling at one another as they slid down the creek.

  “But the truth is, I don’t even know how long you stayed there.”

  “Two years.”

  “Good years?”

  The questions were tentative; the answers more so.

  “It was fun, yeah,” Kim said, looking down at the water, “but it was never quite the same without you. No more belly laughs.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Thea said, and they chuckled.

  “You didn’t mind my getting in touch now, did you?”

  With a warm smile, Thea nudged her. “The best surprise ever. And this trip—what a fantastic way to say hello and cancel out that bloody awful goodbye.”

  “Don’t remind me of that night!”

  Gabriel took out his phone and pretended to text.

  “God, I hated to see you go,” said Kim, “I’m afraid to ask how you got through that journey.”

  “Oh, I managed. The worst bit was waiting at the gate. The airport was heaving with soldiers—passengers, not security. Some were missing limbs, others had eye injuries, but they were mostly the walking-wounded, heading to Britain for treatment. Alex went into overdrive, all fuss and bother. I really, really wanted him to leave me alone and let me block it all out, but he was like a mother hen: ‘What do you need? What can I get you?’ So I asked for the one thing I knew he wouldn’t find, Coke, figuring he’d have to go to Syria to get it, but he zipped off, all eager, and I lay back, wishing the hours away. Next thing, he was right there, damn pleased with himself, holding a can of Coke.”

  “But there was no Coke in—”

  “All of Iraq, yeah,” said Thea. “Except at the airport apparently. When I asked where on earth he’d got it, he said, ‘Umm, the drinks machine.’ I knocked it back in about three gulps.”

  “More than you’d had to drink in days.”

  “Exactly, and after watching me guzzle it, Alex said, deadpan, ‘I might get you another of those,’ which was when I started to like him. So I drank that too and, rehydrated and full of sugar, I finally sat up, looked at this guy by my feet and said, ‘So what brings you to Iraq?’ We talked all night and all the way to London.”

  “‘Reader, I married him.’”

  They laughed. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  “Marrying your Mr. Kool-Aid? I think it’s great!”

  Not great at all, Gabriel thought.

  “Anyway, when we got to Heathrow, I walked through the airport unaided and, get this, ate a fry for breakfast. Worst possible thing. So then of course I started thinking that Einstein, the old doc, had got it right. It was all in my head. I’d gone and left the country for nothing. Not a thing wrong with me, except love.”

  Love? Gabriel was afraid to move. He was, at that moment, unseen, like a jinn.

  “Love?” said Kim. “You mean Sachiv? But I thought that was just a crush. A flirtation.”

  “Neither.”

  “You were in love with him? But what did you know of him, really?”

  “Quite a lot, as it happens. You could even say that his must be the only marriage saved by an infectious disease.”

  On their way out of town, in tandem, they passed a group of fishermen who were practicing dances on the promenade. Following Abid’s lead, Gabriel pulled into the curb and they all stepped out to watch. He wandered over to stand with Thea. A few men were sitting on the low wall that ran along the seafront, playing drums or clapping, while others stood in a line, working out steps, trying different formations.

  “Orange T-shirts, brown dishdashas,” Kim said into her machine, “hands clapping, movements coordinated, positions secured. The dance acquires shape—a star turning—while the beat gets harder and faster.”

  By nightfall, they were near the tip of the country and their rendezvous at a maternity ward—the turtle sanctuary at Ras al-Hadd. After a short rest at their hotel, Gabriel drove his group to the beach at midnight, where they stood about in the parking lot behind some dunes, surrounded by vehicles, tourists and guides, all waiting for the sign—a flash of torchlight—which would confirm the presence of laboring leatherback turtles on the beach. An Omani family got out of the car beside them—some women and a man carrying a very small baby. His dishdasha glowed white in the moonlight, while the women’s long, slim shadows on the gravel were like well-meaning spirit guides. There was no sign of Abid’s party.

  When a torchlight flashed on the dunes, Jamil, one of the guides, gathered the crowd of thirty or more around him. “If anyone uses flash, you will be removed from the beach. And do not make noise. Also—there are big craters in the sand, so don’t fall into them, okay? Now we can go. He has found a turtle.”

  With only the moon for light, concentration was necessary to avoid the empty nests that perforated the beach. Hetty grabbed Gabriel’s arm. “Heavens!” she said cheerfully, having stumbled into one of the birthing holes. “Twisted ankle, here we come!”

  The group gathered in a circle to peer at a turtle digging her nest, skimming her flippers across the sand, pushing it back. Working, digging. It never failed to move Gabriel, the sheer effort involved. Mobile phones were held high, pointed in her direction. Jamil, hunkering behind her, said quietly, “She will lay between eighty and one hundred eggs, but if she thinks the sand is too hot, or too cold, or if she is distur
bed, she will go back to the sea and try again later.”

  “And they always come back to the beach where they were born?” someone asked.

  “Yes. They swim for thousands of miles to give birth.”

  “Like salmon,” said another voice.

  This turtle failed to deliver. Surrounded, she paused in her work, looked up, thought about it, and scraped her way out of the unfinished depression. People moved back, creating an exit.

  “She’s had enough,” Hetty whispered. “Can’t say I blame her.”

  The turtle forged her way through the gap in the crowd, her sad earnest eyes reflecting the torchlight, and made as tight a U-turn as a turtle could manage, then took her weight across the sand toward the sea, the birth postponed. “Poor thing,” said Betty. “Now she’ll be in labor even longer.”

  A flash of light farther along the strand indicated that another warden had found another turtle; the tourists hastened over. Gabriel followed in his own darkness. He knew the beach well. The Milky Way was bristling and the sea breaking in white gushes. He stood on the outskirts of the crowd, beside the young woman from the parking lot, who was handing her bundle of baby back to her husband, and, from somewhere within this group, he heard the low voice that talked to itself: “. . . this organic prehistoric ritual. These great creatures, which move in the sea like paper drifting, are unwieldy, inelegant lumps on land.”

  People were talking loudly, and Jamil had been set upon by an old woman who kept asking questions about the mating rituals of turtles. “Madam,” he said finally, “I am a tourist guide. I do not work here at the sanctuary.”

  A dedicated tourist, trying to film the ping-pong eggs plopping into the excavated funnel, pushed his way deeper into the huddle, forcing someone else to back out. She stumbled on the rim of a crater. Gabriel reached out and caught her. “Careful.”

  “Jesus!”

  He couldn’t see her face, but he knew the feel of her. “Gabriel, actually.”

  “Yes. Thanks.” Thea withdrew her elbow from his grasp.

  The surf pounded beside them. He sought her eyes in the shadows of her face. “How is our performing turtle doing in there?”

  “She’s in full delivery,” Thea whispered. “It’s mortifying. Nothing like the moving, timeless experience I’d envisaged. It’s actually upsetting to be disturbing a natural process that has gone on, right on this spot, for millennia.”

  “People have mixed feelings about it.”

  “I don’t. It’s intrusive. Horrible. I feel humiliated on her behalf. They’re lifting up her tail!”

  “She’s in a trance,” he said gently. “They go into a kind of trance.”

  “That doesn’t excuse it.”

  “No.”

  “Wish I’d been in a trance when I gave birth.”

  “You have kids?”

  “Two boys. Kieran and Marcus.”

  “Careful!” one of the wardens called.

  A baby turtle was rushing between the shifting feet. It scurried over the humpy sand, hampered by its own design, desperate to reach the sea. The warden scooped it up in his palm—it was barely two inches long—and put it down away from the tourist stampede, near Thea. “You see,” he said, shining his torch just in front of the hatchling, “see how he follows the light.” Patiently, he showed the baby the way to the sea. Its flippers pulled against the grains as it hurried into the beam and after it, until the warden had led it all the way into the breaking waves, safe from those agile predators that fancied the occasional delicacy of baby turtle for breakfast.

  “Why does he follow light?” Thea asked. “Don’t animals feel safer in the dark?”

  “Yes, but they’re programed to hatch at dawn,” the warden explained, “to follow the sun.”

  The group was dispersing, moving back toward the parking lot. Two men were trailing Jamil, asking how best to go through the sands.

  “You have four-wheel drive, yes?” he asked them.

  “Ah, no. Just a car.”

  “You are crazy, yes?”

  “I’d swear no one cares what he says,” Hetty declared. “We’re all following Jamil just to hear that beautiful enunciation.”

  “I’m with her,” Kim muttered to Thea, then saw Gabriel alongside her. “Gabriel! Hi! Are you stalking us?”

  “The tours generally follow the same route,” he said.

  “I love your accent. Reminds me of Thea.”

  “Well, it’s much diluted. I haven’t been to Ireland in over twenty years.”

  “Really?” Kim was leaning forward to see around Thea. “Not even on a visit? That must be hard.”

  “Not particularly. I’m not a turtle. I don’t need to return to where I started.”

  “I can’t imagine being away from Ireland for more than a few months,” Thea said.

  “Is that why you went back?” he asked her.

  “How do you mean?”

  They’d stopped on the last dune before the parking lot. Abid and Kim went ahead.

  “Is that why you left Oman?”

  “As you can see,” she said curtly, “I have not yet left Oman.”

  “Last time, I meant.”

  Her breast lit up. Her phone was flashing in the pocket of her shirt. She took it out, saying, “Look, if we’re going to keep running into each other, I would ask you to stop speaking to me as if you know me, because you don’t.”

  The whites of her eyes glimmered; he nodded; they walked back to their cars.

  “Okay, Abid,” Kim was saying, “you can tell us—did that hatchling come out of the warden’s pocket for effect? They usually hatch at dawn, don’t they?”

  “Most times, but there are always a few babies on the beach.”

  “No! Does that mean we might have squished infants in the nursery?”

  Thea’s phone was throwing a creamy light on her smile, as she leaned against the bonnet reading a text.

  “Believe me,” said Abid, “many more make it to the ocean than they would if they were not protected.”

  “Crabs love them,” said Gabriel. “And birds.”

  “Come, come,” said Abid, ushering the two women into the jeep. “It is very late now. We will have a long day tomorrow.”

  Another wadi. Another swim. Another sighting.

  This time, Gabriel found Thea in the belly of a canyon. He had led his charges to one of his favorite places—a sliver of water that ran like a crystal snake through a gully, which ended at a turnstile of rocks, above which were more pools and some caves. Stopping on the pebbly shore, the women demurred. Too much clambering, they said. Too much heat. He didn’t argue. Thea’s bag and towel were on the ground with Kim’s, guarded by Khaled, a wiry teenager, and one of his pals.

  Sue was wriggling out of her dress, her silver hair up in a tight bun—everything about her was tight, Gabriel thought, while the other two, who complained so much about the heat, refused to swim. He threw off his top and waded in, chatting to the boys, who joined him, and all three allowed the water to carry them around the bend to the end of the narrow channel, where they hoisted themselves up and squeezed through a fissure to the next level.

  There, with her back to him, Thea was reclining on a slimy curve of rock, half in, half out of a crescent-shaped pool, her face lifted to the sunlight that had fought its way past the morning’s clouds.

  “Fuck!”

  The sudden grunt and gush of water initially startled her, but then she said languidly, “Oh. Gabriel.”

  The gold-tinged rocks that dipped into the shallow water were treacherous. He had slipped and crashed down, sliding into the pool some meters from where she lay.

  “Be careful. It’s deadly.”

  He grasped his elbow. “Yeah, just figured that out.”

  “I’d help, but if I move I might break something.”

  The two boys scampered like goats over the ice-smooth boulders, past Kim, who had climbed into a natural jacuzzi one level up and lay with her head on the rocky rim.

&
nbsp; “I have a message,” he said, rubbing his arm, “from Abid. Lunch will be ready in ten minutes. I hope that information is worth a cracked elbow.”

  “Not really, no,” Thea smiled, “but I am very hungry.”

  “He’s built a fire back at the picnic site. Smells good.”

  “We bought barracuda straight from the sea. We left the tourist trail this morning and powered along a beach instead. Unbelievable.”

  He slid closer, like a seal paddling around a curved rock. Such a relief to find her, after the scraping disappointment of waiting fruitlessly over a breakfast of industrial toast and grainy coffee in the hotel restaurant that morning, listening to some American girl at the table behind him talk about her hair, and her mother, and her Visa account.

  Thea tilted her face toward the sun. The water fussed around her breasts. “Like an Irish summer’s day—trying to catch a few rays between the clouds.” She squinted at him. “Or have you forgotten what an Irish summer is like?”

  “Even if I hadn’t, I’m sure it’s different now. Hotter?”

  “Wetter. There was talk of vineyards in climate-changed Ireland, but so far all we’ve had is more rain. Still, you must miss it?”

  “Irish rain?”

  “Ireland. Both.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “So why don’t you go back?”

  “Because it brought out the worst in me.”

  “Don’t you have family in Cork?” she asked.

  “My parents, yeah. But they like coming here for the weather.” He smiled.

  She looked around the rock room in which they lay. “Where are your women?”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow in the direction of the fissure, thinking about the proverbial camel and the eye of the needle, but said only, “Bit too much of a climb for them.”

  “Why do you do it? Taking clients out, when it’s your own business?”

  “Actually I run the company for an Omani friend, but I hate paperwork—there’s a lot of bureaucracy and schmoozing required to keep government departments happy—and I prefer the open road, so if I get the chance to fill in for a driver, I take it.”