Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “I’ve no idea what they’re on about,” Thea said to Gabriel, “but I could listen to this all night. You’re so lucky to be able to speak Arabic.”

  He dipped his chin. “One of the unexpected gifts in my life.”

  Kim was still where they had left her. “What about human women falling for jinn men? It seems to be the other way around in all the stories.”

  “A jinn can make a woman fall in love with him,” Jamil said wearily, “by taking the face of someone else she fell in love with, and he will adopt that character so that he can get her. He can’t marry her, but if there is a child, this child will become powerful, because he will have a human body and jinn magic. He will be able to see in the dark, to make spells. . . .”

  “This stuff is bending my mind.” Kim made some notes.

  The argument about Thesiger rumbled on.

  Complaining of sand in her eye, Thea was the first to say goodnight and headed over to her tent alone.

  When Gabriel put his head around the open flap, she was sitting at the small table, looking at her phone. “May I?”

  “No. Yes.”

  He stepped in, took the seat opposite her. A gas light glowed between them on the table. She put down her phone. “No signal, which isn’t surprising, I suppose, in the clefts of the Wahiba Sands.” She looked past him.

  Gabriel followed her gaze. Above the dark outline of dunes, the sky was lively.

  “I’m out of range,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “The ukulele,” her eyes came back to him, “that was unexpected, but—lovely.”

  “Thanks. I was musical once.”

  “Clearly you still are.”

  “No. No, I’m a lost musician—a fiddler, a tinkler—whereas once I was tagged as a future concert pianist.”

  “You’re a pianist?”

  “Was. Almost.”

  “Why ‘almost’?”

  “I made way for my brother.”

  “There wasn’t room for two pianists in one family?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Ooh,” she said. “Bitter.”

  “Not at all. He was an introspective—”

  “Genius?”

  He held her eye, across the flickering light. “No,” he said. “I was the unfulfilled genius. Max was better than that. A worker bee. The kind of man who made things happen for himself, while I made sure nothing much happened for me.”

  “Why?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Laziness was my default position.”

  “Again, why?”

  So familiar, this questioning. Her simple, direct way of speaking. Hearing it again shook him, but he cleared his throat, regained his composure. He couldn’t allow her to wound him again, and yet with these questions she had already undressed him, so that a rush of childhood words came out in a seamless flow of peevishness. “Oh, no doubt I was subliminally trying to get at my parents,” he retorted. “In the absence of ineptitude, laziness was my only weapon. They used to preen, you see, get off on my success. My mother in particular. Whenever I won some bloody competition or feis ceoil—she’d be there, wearing that smug, repugnant smile. . . . Don’t get me wrong, they’re okay parents, but they paraded me like a performing rooster and I’ve always hated parades.” There was no transparency in her white shirt, or in her face; she sat, like an angel at the table, still and glowing. “It was so transparent,” he went on, because she hadn’t said anything and because he hadn’t spoken of this for a long time. “Whenever anyone crossed our threshold, I was made to play, so everyone would know what a clever, clever boy my parents had produced. ‘It’s a natural instinct,’ my mother would say, with her faux-humility. ‘Music is his first language!’”

  “Parents will always be proud of their kids,” Thea said. “My son is studying music—well, he makes sounds, experimental stuff. I don’t understand it, but I’m proud of him.”

  “I very much doubt you’re a pushy, overbearing mother.”

  “God, I hope not. I can’t bear those types, and I’ve met plenty of them!”

  “You’ll know my mother, then. No tact. No grace.” Gabriel looked into the dark corner of the tent, toward her bed. “I was a sensitive kid. I wanted only to play piano, you know, but other kids hated me because I won stuff. I had one friend, Sam, who had cystic fibrosis, and one day we met his mother in town and Mam started on at her about how many hours’ practice I had to do, and how tough it was, and how a gift like mine was such a responsibility for the whole family. . . . Gut-shrivelling stuff. The only gift Sam’s mum could see in me was health. Later, I tried to point this out to my mother. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I know it’s hard for him, but you have real talent!’”

  Thea chuckled at his impersonation, a light screech in the posh tones of Cork’s well-to-do. “You’re right,” she said. “I do know this woman—just from her vowels!”

  “Maybe I’m too harsh. I mean, the rewards had been great. I loved the applause, the regard of professors and judges, and I liked the way professionals looked at me as if I was a person of consequence, but my life was one long competition and it was like being pressed into a very small tube.”

  “Until?”

  He sighed. “Until one day I realized I’d become like a patient, as much bound to the piano as Sam often was to a hospital bed. So I stopped working. I still sailed through grade eight and into college, but beyond that, I let it go.”

  “I’m beginning to feel for your mother.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it, how one family gets stuck with a debili-tating illness and another with a prodigy? Not,” he added quickly, “that I was any kind of prodigy.”

  “How did your parents take it, when you pulled back?”

  “They were devastated, but at least then they started paying attention to Max, whom they’d ignored, more or less, since I’d shown promise—aged about three—and Max had got relegated to ‘He plays quite well, too.’”

  “Did he begrudge you?”

  Gabriel blinked. “It wouldn’t have occurred to him.”

  “And you weren’t bitter when the attention turned to him?”

  “Bitterness isn’t really my thing.”

  “What is your thing, Jibril?” she asked, with a flicker of a smile that hit him in the groin. “Apart from scaring women with your scary past?”

  “Don’t you mean women from my past?”

  “Kim is intrigued.”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, I picked up on that.”

  “Don’t let her bully you. She’s a journalist.”

  “Don’t worry. Multi-verses don’t really do it for me. Prudence was as real as you are.”

  “So how come no one else ever set eyes on her?”

  “Because . . .” Gabriel stalled. How to explain it rationally when even he struggled to understand it, especially now, when the very woman whom he had only ever seen within the whitewashed walls of his home, and usually between hand-washed sheets, sat with him now asking questions about their affair as if it had never happened? How should he tell her about herself? He had to get into the right gear. He had to play it her way, for now, which meant finding the words and the mindset to disassociate this woman, Thea, from everything he knew of her. He sucked in his breath, and set his eyes on hers to let her know that if she so much as flinched he would see it. “There was something else,” he said, “about her.”

  “Go on.”

  “We were only ever together in one place—my house. She wouldn’t shift from there, though she was pale and wan and craved light. It was as if she had her ear on a wormhole to somewhere else. The jinn world, some would say. And the more I insisted we went out, the less I saw of her. But things were getting pretty weird by then.”

  “Only by then?” Thea teased.

  He dipped his head, conceding her point. “There was other stuff. Noises, in the house.”

  “Ooh, spooky!” But the jokiness was contrived. He was reeling her in.

  “Not spooky, no. Mundane. Irish.
Like a radio in the background, and purring—I sometimes heard a cat purring, though there was no cat, and no radio, and no woman in the house who wore stockings.”

  “Stockings?”

  “Yeah, I used to hear that sound—nylons rubbing against each other. That was fairly scary, all right.”

  The muscles beneath her eyes tightened. She leaned forward to turn up the lamp. “Why did Abid say she melted away?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “the punch line—how an invisible woman disappeared.” He spread his fingers across his thighs. “I lost patience one night and I thought . . . I mean, I was fairly sure I picked her up to carry her out of the house, because she was there, but then she wasn’t there and I wasn’t holding anything, or anyone, and it was as if she had dribbled away to nothing.” He raised his hands in a cavalier manner. “Easily explained, in retrospect. I wasn’t eating properly at the time and was dehydrated so, obviously, I was hallucinating. She had already left me.”

  The low murmur of conversation at the top end of the camp lifted into a gush of laughter, then dropped again to near silence.

  “How long had it lasted, the affair?”

  “Not long. A couple of months, but it has an extended tail—like a comet, gritty and fiery,” he turned his head toward the flap, “and I haven’t been able to escape the debris. Twenty-six years on, I’m still dust in her wake.”

  “You must have tried to find her?”

  He shrugged. “She wasn’t to be found. There wasn’t a hint of her anywhere in Muscat. But it comes back at me,” he said, dropping the offhand tone, “like a kind of torment. When I least expect it, I’ll suddenly feel her in my arms, writhing and thrashing.”

  Thea ran her hand around the back of her neck. “Sounds very jinn-like to me.”

  “Sometimes I think,” his voice was so low that he wondered if she could hear him, “not that she was a jinn, but that the jinn took her from me. Some kind of punishment.”

  “But you don’t believe in jinn.”

  “No. No, I don’t, but skepticism sometimes comes a cropper on this one.”

  “And why would they punish you, anyway?”

  He thought about kissing her. Instead he said, “One day she’ll slip into view, like someone coming in the back door, as she did before.”

  “Why do you think that?” she asked, with unexpected sharpness. “The past doesn’t owe us any favors, you know. We all try to go back. We think we can walk into it, like into a room, and find everything the way we left it, but it isn’t there, any of it.”

  Gabriel leaned forward, then changed his projection and made it part of his upward propulsion as he got to his feet. She wasn’t ready yet. “To each our own imaginings,” he said, bending over to peck her cheek. “Night.”

  Kim came in as he went out. He walked around the brick bathroom and came again to the back of the tent.

  “Entertaining strange men now, are we?” Kim asked.

  “He’s certainly strange. Trying to get a handle on him is like trying to make a sculpture—you chip away only to find more stone.”

  Gabriel heard her move, stand up maybe.

  “But I know Gabriel, Kim. He is right about that.”

  Early the next day, Gabriel was talking to the cook by the door of the brick kitchen when he saw Thea come out of her tent, pulling on a sweater, and head toward the enclosure in jeans and bare feet.

  “At last,” he said, as she came over. “Sit down. I’ll get tea.”

  She did as she was told. Like a couple, they were—easy together in the ragged morning.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, bringing two glasses of tea to the low table.

  “A few hours of light oblivion. Oblivion lite, I call it. I haven’t had a good night since I arrived. You guys talking late in your tent didn’t help.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And, come dawn, I was freezing.” She sipped the tea, turned her engagement ring around her finger, like Annie did, and looked across the dunes. “You were right about not seeing much desert. It’s beautiful here, but these aren’t the mountainous dunes I’d hoped for.”

  “They’re farther south.”

  “I could lie, I suppose. Tell the boys I climbed dunes as high as the Twelve Pins, and pretend my camera wasn’t working.”

  “Two sons, you said? What age?”

  Her face softened. “Nineteen and fifteen.”

  “And the very thought of them makes you smile,” he added.

  “You should try it. It’d give you something to smile about.”

  “I have things to smile about.”

  “It happens to us all, you know,” she said, fiddling now with the top button of her shirt, “the big love affair we never want to get over, but the fact is we have to get on, grow up, have families.”

  “Says who?”

  “Our DNA.”

  “We can’t all live the same life. Some of us have to buck the trend. Besides, why do parents always assume that people who don’t have kids are missing out?”

  “I don’t know, now you ask.”

  He crossed his arms on the edge of the table. “So who was he, the big love affair you don’t want to get over?”

  She looked away, as if, beyond the uneven, clotted cream sand, she saw that other man. Gabriel could almost see his reflection in her eyes. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the Indian.”

  Her eyes swung back. “What?”

  “You told me about him.”

  Thea pushed back from the table. Other people were emerging from the tents and coming toward breakfast. “I never told you any such thing.”

  “Not now. Last time.”

  “Have you . . . have you been eavesdropping?”

  “No.” He shook his head firmly. “No, Thea. You told me about Sachiv.”

  Abid was hovering on his phone, kicking the sand with his sandals. Word had come from Muscat: the rains had been so heavy, there was concern about flash floods. “There are twenty wadis between here and Nizwa,” Gabriel heard him say to Kim. “Any of them could flood when the rain comes from the mountains. We must leave quickly.”

  Gabriel was delivering the same message to his charges and, not long afterward, in great spits of sand, several 4x4s took off. Now he had a proper excuse to speed, and he took his ladies flying across high dunes on the way back to the sandy superhighway, the vehicle at times perched as if about to somersault, until they reached the broad, track-marked valley that led out of the sands. The pale dunes poured into the dull brown of the valley floor, and as they came past a Bedouin encampment, a herd of children materialized from behind the fences and ran toward them. Betty insisted he stop, and when the children gathered around the window, she handed out cookies. A little girl in a long red dress emerged from the nearest reed hut—no more than three—and came waddling over, as many fingers shoved into her mouth as could fit, and reached up to his window with her other hand. Her eyes were as big as planets. Gabriel gave her a cookie. Thea was right about DNA. He longed to have children, to have a daughter like this.

  The drive to Nizwa proved floodless, in spite of purple clouds sitting over the mountains, and they arrived in the old fort town by noon. After checking the women into their hotel rooms, Gabriel went in search of Thea and found her sitting on a lounger in the garden, watching Kim doing laps in the kidney-shaped pool.

  “Hello,” he said, sitting on the end of the adjacent lounger. “What you up to?”

  Thea pushed her hair behind her ear, but didn’t look at him. Through her shirt, he could see the outline of bra, the slight bump of nipple. “Not much. Abid says it wouldn’t be safe now to go into the mountains.”

  Gabiel’s phone rang. He picked up. “Annie, hi. Can I call you back in ten?”

  “No, I’m heading out in a bit,” she said, “but it’s fine. Just ringing for a chat.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. You?”

  He looked across at Thea, caught her eye. “Oh, I’m fine, all right. You’ll never beli
eve who I ran into the other day.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Kids all good?”

  “Your adult nieces and nephew are very well, thank you. Stop calling them kids. They hate it, and so do I.”

  He chuckled. “Right. Bye, talk soon.” He put his phone in his shirt pocket, saying, “Abid’s right. The wadis will be unpredictable.”

  “Which means we’ll miss out on Wadi Bani Awf.” She looked toward the mountains. “Is it really so spectacular?”

  “Do you want me to lie?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Seen one wadi, seen ’em all.”

  “And the truth?”

  “Mind-blowing.”

  “Shit.”

  “What will you do instead?”

  “We had thought Bahla maybe.”

  “Ah. Jinn-town.”

  “Apparently. That’s why Kim wants to go, but Abid isn’t keen. Says his wife wouldn’t have him back in the house if he went there.”

  “People worry about the evil eye,” Gabriel explained. “Look, my lot have opted to rest up. They’re done in. So I could take you over to Bahla later, if you’d like.”

  “Kim would like that very much.”

  “What exactly happens there?” Kim asked, when they were heading out of Nizwa that afternoon. “I mean, why is it called the City of Jinn?”

  “It’s a tradition,” Gabriel said. “If you’re lumbered with an evil jinn, Bahla’s the place to get rid of it. Lots of wise men and exorcists used to live there and some still do, but not a lot of people pay much attention to that stuff these days. The drivers and guides love to entertain, as you’ll have noticed, but the Omani population is highly educated and youngsters are more interested in Facebook than magic, which in some ways is a pity. The wealth of lore that Oman enjoys, the mix of Arab and African myth, is being left behind.”

  “Same as everywhere else,” said Thea.

  “All the more reason for me to write about it,” said Kim.

  He glanced at Thea. “They took me there, you know.”