Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Who did?”

  “Family. When my sister was living here, people got to her, told her to have me exorcized.”

  Kim leaned forward, her head coming between the seats. “Somebody performed an exorcism on you? To get rid of what’s-her-name?”

  He shook his head. “It was after Prudence left. Annie thought I could be cured of missing her. As if sadness itself is a bad jinn.”

  “It surely is,” Thea said quietly.

  “The way I understand it,” Kim said, “almost anything can be put down to jinn—alcoholism, depression, illnesses, bad temper—but a broken heart?”

  He glanced in the side mirror. “My broken heart ran deep. I wouldn’t go out. Saw no one. Did nothing. I was on the point of vaporizing.”

  Kim’s Dictaphone slid between the seats. “So what happens at these ceremonies?”

  “All the usual stuff. Drumming, dancing, unguents and ruqya, chanting, and the sorcerer does his thing, invoking certain suras of the Quran. As in Catholicism, there are two kinds of exorcism. In the official sort, condoned by Islam, there’s no messing—they recite Surat al-Jinn to banish the evil spirit.” He recited what he knew of it, mostly because Thea had already confessed a susceptibility to the bewitchery of Arabic. “Then there’s the off-the-record approach, where anything can happen.”

  “Wasn’t it scary?”

  “I was scared I’d catch a bad jinn, not be cured of the one I didn’t have.” He swung his eyes to Thea. “Whatever you believe, it is powerful. I’ve been to a few and there’s an atmosphere, for sure. You feel relaxed, lifted. Maybe it’s the force of belief, or those pounding rhythms, but you sense a strong sense of something beyond yourself.”

  Kim leaned toward Thea. “Sounds like your aunt’s place.”

  “What’s with your aunt’s place?”

  “My place. It’s mine now.”

  “It has jinn?”

  “Something like that.”

  Kim’s head turned to Gabriel. “Abid said that subjects writhe and gag as the jinn leaves them. Did you?”

  “No. I was a very meek subject. Just wanted it over with.”

  “But have you seen that happen?” Kim persisted. “People struggling and grunting?”

  “Often. I’ve even held a guy down. Their strength can be overwhelming—that much is certainly true.”

  “So how do you explain it, rationally?”

  “I can’t. I don’t try to.”

  Bahla, until then a huddle of greenery in the distance, was stretching out to them. An impressive modern mosque, its twin minarets magnificent against the fading blue sky, staked its claim on the outskirts of the town.

  “If you’re so sure it’s all hokum,” Thea said, “why did you subject yourself to it?”

  “For my sister. She was very caught up in it, for her own reasons. But the truth is, we were both masking something else. We were . . .” he looked in the mirror, pulled out to give room to a man on a donkey “. . . crevés. You know, shattered. We’d had a family tragedy. Double tragedy, you could say, and my crash into self-pity was too much for Annie, so if getting myself exorcized would make her feel better, it was the least I could do.”

  “Did it help?” Kim asked.

  “It helped Annie get pregnant.”

  “Really?” Thea turned.

  “She came to Bahla when she was having trouble conceiving and, voilà, she conceived soon afterwards. The woman told her bad stuff had been preventing her from becoming pregnant. They called it exorcism,” he said, with a shrug. “I call it the placebo effect. She believed it would make her feel better, so she did feel better, and that helped her relax. Job done.”

  “That’s rather dismissive,” said Kim, “not to say arrogant.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “But don’t you . . .”

  “What?” He glanced at Kim in the mirror.

  “Well, it happened to you. Stories about the supernatural are always about the friend of a friend of a friend, but you were at the center of it. And you can’t explain what happened to you, so you have very little with which to back up your cynicism.”

  “Except that I’ve been proved right,” he said, jerking his thumb toward Thea. “That’s no jinniya.”

  “That is someone who has never set foot in Oman before,” said Kim, “and who, when you were romancing your invisible woman, was flat on her back in the West of Ireland recovering from hepatitis.”

  Gabriel forced himself to blink. Hepatitis. The sunlit room, her wafting presence. Weak, watery . . . ill. It pulled on him. Apples and water. One step, one dip in concentration, and he would be there again with the limpid Prudence. So vague. So thirsty. Absolutely no energy. . . . Of course.

  The convalescence she had spoken of was not, as he had supposed, in reference merely to her broken heart, but more than that. . . .

  Back. Back to the road. He adopted an impassive mien. “Hepatitis, eh? No wonder. You didn’t look at all well. I kept telling you so.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said flatly, “being in two places at the one time plays hell with your complexion.”

  They smiled at one another. Something had changed. No longer angered by his assertions of intimacies past, she now made fun of them. She had taken the power back—he would not unsettle her—and was consequently warmer toward him; affectionate almost.

  He was getting there. By holding this course, he would get to where he intended to be.

  “So Bahla worked for your sister, but did it work for you?”

  Oh, God, he thought, glancing at Kim in the mirror. Is she still here? “They still call me the most miserable man in Oman. Reach your own conclusions.”

  “You didn’t stop missing her, even a little bit?”

  “I stopped missing her four days ago.”

  “The city of sorcerers flickers in the evening light,” Kim told her Dictaphone. “A mud-brick wall snakes around the date palms, holding in bits of the town, which has nonetheless spewed out, through gaps, into pockets of homes and yards. Behind it, a soccer match, boys in red and white, and the solitary figure of a man, sitting on the wall, watching. Jebel Akhdar rises on the right, glowing in the sunny areas, but dark on those slopes already in night shade.” She clicked it off. “Why they call it the green mountain is anyone’s guess. It looks black to me.”

  “Black gold,” said Thea. “Like a pint of Guinness.”

  “Or the wrapping on an expensive bar of chocolate.”

  “Eighty-five percent cocoa.” Thea smiled over her shoulder.

  “Abid told us we mustn’t make eye contact with anyone,” said Kim, “in case we get the evil eye.”

  “Look sideways, they say of Bahla,” Gabriel agreed, “or you could pick up bad karma in a blink.”

  “I’ve never been to a place and not looked at the people,” said Thea.

  “Pretty town, though, isn’t it?” said Kim. “The ramparts are impressive.”

  “We’ll head up to a vantage-point now,” said Gabriel, “where you can get a good view of them. The city walls were designed by a woman and once extended for seven kilometers, making Bahla one of the finest walled towns in the world in its day, but I’m afraid the fort is closed for renovations.”

  “Spot the tour guide,” Kim said drily, again lifting the Dictaphone. “The light is perfect—evening, gentle, and Bahloul Mountain glows at its touch. The date palms give Bahla a juicy look, even though it is surrounded by bleak, parched hills, but modernity and normalcy have cast their own features across the town. Like a modern extension on an old house, the refurbished section of the fort, with its perfect turrets, seems to grow out of the yet-to-be-treated ancient wall. Scaffolding conceals much of the edifice but, behind it, the old wall runs up one side of a hill, then down another slope and off into the distance, like a convict taking flight.”

  After the photo op, Gabriel took them down to the potteries—Bahla’s other dying industry—and showed them hive-shaped mud huts, full of clay pots, where pott
ery was made and stored. Kim took the requisite photographs, but he knew she was looking out for something a camera would never capture, and she soon expressed disappointment at finding no detectable eeriness, no sense of the other. Even the suq was closed. “I’m not much impressed with your capital of spooks,” she said. “It’s a bit difficult to be creeped out when the sorcerers are keeping such low profiles.”

  “Don’t be fooled.” Gabriel walked backward in front of them. “If you wanted to buy a spell and ruin a life, you’d only have to speak too loudly and someone would appear and lead you down one of these alleys.”

  “D’ya have to haggle?” Kim smiled.

  “Of course.”

  “Would they rid me of my unwelcome jinn?” Thea asked him.

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  He grinned. She was flirting now. “You’ll never be rid of me,” he said.

  Back at the hotel, Thea hesitated to get out of the car after Kim had hurtled inside, desperate for the restroom. “I’m sorry to hear about your family,” she said.

  He jangled the keys, leaning his back against the car door. “Hmm?”

  “You mentioned a tragedy.”

  “Oh.”

  “What happened?”

  “My brother,” he said.

  The parking lot was quiet and dark. He had drawn up in front of a hedge.

  “My talented, hard-working brother was . . .” He braced himself. As in an exorcism, he was about to regurgitate the nastiest of all nasties. “My brother was locked inside a grand piano on his stag night. He nearly died.”

  Thea’s eyes flickered.

  “Yes,” he replied, “you can fit a man inside a piano. A small man and a concert grand, anyway. When Max woke from a drunken stupor and found himself in a coffin made by Steinway, his heart gave out. Turned out he didn’t have a very good one. Heart, I mean. He never played another chord and tried to take his own life a few months later.”

  “My God.”

  He touched the keys again. They tinkled.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “And the other? You mentioned another—”

  “The other tragedy, for my family, was that I was the one who put him in there.”

  IV

  Out of Range

  Lobby. Gardens. Outdoor passage. Room. Minibar.

  Thea leaned into the fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer; opened it. There was no sign of Kim. She sat back against her pillows, lifting the bottle to drink. The room was too quiet.

  I want to make sex with you.

  She jumped up, went to the door to chain-lock it, and turned on the television. Voices, faces. CNN offered good news and bad: a crashed plane with no dead; Gaza strangled; Tom Cruise embarrassed—a Scientology interview leaked, making him seem ever more alien. She paced the narrow space between the beds, one eye on Tom Cruise. Scientologists are the only ones who can really help, he was saying, when they come across a car crash.

  We are all mad, Thea thought.

  And she thought: Drunken boys, lads. A night out. A prank gone wrong. But from what dark place had come such a plan? She imagined him—this man, Max—imagined him waking, confused, trapped. Boxed in. Blacked-out.

  The lid of a grand piano is a heavy thing.

  A prank? They weren’t schoolboys. They were drunk. To their addled brains, it must have seemed . . . funny. A laugh. Harmless, stag-night raucousness. How?

  The door slammed against its chain. “Thea?”

  She hurried over to let Kim in.

  “Why the chain?” she asked, coming in with two bottles of water.

  Thea went back to sit on her bed, and drank.

  “Now you really do look like you’ve picked up a jinn. Please tell me you haven’t.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Gabriel, huh?”

  “Yup.” Thea longed to say more. If it had not yet been spoken about, this fraternal obscenity, it should be.

  “Don’t beat up on yourself, sweetie. So your eyes have wandered a little. It happens. Doesn’t mean you’re going to act on it. And even if you did—heck, a shot of infidelity can do the world for a marriage.”

  “Yeah, like wrecking it.”

  “Touché.”

  “I have no intention of being unfaithful—at least not with him.”

  “Gabriel would be very sorry to hear that.” Kim twisted around a little comically. “Is there someone else?”

  Thea wobbled her head, slugged back some beer. “Had the postcards come from a delicious Indian we once knew, who knows what might have happened?”

  “But I turned up instead. Man, I’m disappointing.”

  “Not at all. Not one bit.”

  “Hey, maybe I even saved your marriage.”

  “It doesn’t need saving.”

  “Good, because we’re having dinner with Gabriel tonight.”

  “What?”

  “I just ran into him and asked him to join us.”

  “Kim, no! We can’t have dinner with him!”

  “Why not?”

  Thea pulled her knees closer to her chest. “We shouldn’t get involved. This jinn stuff. It’s creeping up on us. That old man you saw in the gully, and all these damn stories, we’re getting pulled in. Because of Gabriel. He’s—”

  “Deluded, yes. Haunted, certainly. But you can always see the core of a person in their eyes, Thea, and he has kind eyes.”

  “I feel exposed around him.”

  “Well, of course you do, honey. He undresses you every time he looks at you. And you pretty much do the same thing.”

  “Well. Just because I’m married doesn’t mean I can’t window-shop.”

  “Trouble with window-shopping is, it’s real easy to buy.” Kim puffed up her pillows. “And therein lies the demise of my marriages.”

  “At least you get to have affairs and a great job and travel all over the place.”

  Kim looked down at her, hands on her hips. “You make two divorces sound like fun. It wasn’t. And no kids either.”

  “I know—and don’t worry, I’m not going to cheat.” Thea looked up at her. “Alex is the best. Honestly. And it’s lovely, where we are. We’ve drifted into a mellow life. Wishy-washy warm. Companionable. I value it, I really do . . .”

  “Here it comes.”

  Thea threw up her hands. “It just seems to me that contentment is another word for complacency, and complacent another word for lazy! I’d hate to be lazy in the way I live my life, but I suspect I have been. Lovely kids, adoring husband, comfortable middle-class home and convenient part-time job that pays for our holidays, but allows enough time for my domestic chores. This is my little life, Kim. It’s not what I expected.”

  Kim turned off the television and sighed. “It’s true what they say. Women go quietly mad in marriage.”

  “While children thrive on it, which is why women stay. But we’re not birds! We’re not naturally monogamous.”

  “Look, if it’s any consolation, I do get it. I mean, an attractive guy comes on with this stuff about you being the invisible woman he’s been in love with for a quarter of a century, like he’s got a screw loose, and makes no apology for it—it’s pretty full-on.”

  “Which is why we’re not having dinner with him.”

  Kim looked at her. “He didn’t try something, did he, in the car?”

  “No.”

  “So are you going to tell me what has you so rattled?”

  Thea got up, started to pace. Gabriel had said, as she got out of the car, “I have never spoken those words, or any variation of them, since the day I set foot in this country, so I would ask that you never repeat them.” Fine, but she owed him no such indulgence. He had taken a chance on the discretion of a stranger. How true, she thought, that we can know nothing of strangers. She paced about. “Their family tragedy. He told me about it. I wish he hadn’t.”

  Kim’s eyes followed her.

  “Turns out his brother nearly died
, because . . . because your Gabriel with the kind eyes . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “Put him inside a grand piano.”

  Kim sniggered. “He what?”

  “Funny, isn’t it? Gabriel obviously thought so. A great stag-night stunt. Quite a lark, really, but for the fact that when his brother came round, he thought he’d been buried alive and had a heart attack. He’s never been right since.”

  Kim reached for the bed and sat down.

  “I don’t know how long he was in it, or how he got out or what the hell Gabriel and his mates thought they were doing. All I know is, I feel sick.”

  “My Lord.”

  “The cruelty. You wouldn’t do it to a dog. I mean—the dark, the cold, the weird moaning of the strings you’re lying on, then trying to move and finding . . .” Thea covered her face and sank onto the end of her bed. “Awful!”

  Her arms taut, hands on her knees, Kim frowned at the carpet. “That’s why he came to Oman.”

  “And why he’s never left. He’s stuck here, in his own remorse. Can’t face the shell of a brother he left behind.”

  “Yes.” Kim nodded. “It’s all over him. I can see it now. Shame. Self-loathing.”

  Thea leaned over her knees.

  “That apparition was his bad conscience.”

  “A bad conscience would never have left him,” said Thea, sitting up.

  “But she hasn’t, has she?”

  “No. She’s bloody everywhere. Even in this room. I wish we could shake her off.”

  For several moments Kim didn’t seem to move. Then she said tentatively, “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? About the sweeper in Baghdad?”

  “The one who said I had a shadow?”

  “I think she called it a jinni.”

  “I call it hepatitis. She must have seen the yellow in my eyes before anyone else did, and thought I was some kind of devil.”

  “I guess.”

  Thea looked over. “Are you suggesting that I’ve been carrying around bad karma since then?”

  “No, no, of course not. It’s just a little odd, is all.”

  “If I picked up a Baghdadi jinn, it’s been very good to me. I’ve had a charmed life since I last saw you. That dose of hepatitis gave me everything I have.”