Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Good God. You left the building.”

  “We left the building.”

  Even the ghouls were quiet. The invisible audience of open-mouthed specters held their pose.

  “Frank saw me leave. He recounted afterwards that I had looked around, like I’d left something behind, and I remember that feeling—was it my wallet? My jacket? My brother, as it transpired.”

  Thea couldn’t speak. For a moment neither could he. Then he said, ‘When Max came round, he couldn’t lift his head. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t see.’

  Pulling her fleece around her, Thea edged closer to Gabriel, for warmth, or something.

  His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. “He was so cold when Frank found him. It was January, just before that historic freeze hit Ireland, and lying there, with drink taken, he was cold as a corpse, Frank said.”

  “How long? I mean, when did Frank . . .”

  “Hours later. Almost morning. He thought he heard a sort of a cry, somewhere in the building.” Gabriel swallowed. “He checked out the upper floors, then heard it again and realized it was coming from the hall, which was odd, because the hall was soundproofed. He went in. Nothing unusual. . . . Said he didn’t know what made him get up onto the stage to check the piano or what made him lift the lid. God, he said later, made him open it. There was no other reason to.”

  “Poor Frank.”

  “Max was unconscious. Not sleeping. Unconscious, and hypothermic.”

  Something crackled behind them. Thea swung around. Gabriel put his hand on her knee. “There’s nothing here you need worry about.”

  Only part of his face was lit by the fire; a huge wad of night pressed against Thea’s back. “You remember so much.”

  “I pretend not to, but over the years every bitter little trinket of memory has taken up residence, just to make sure I never forget. Putting him in there wasn’t the problem—people have done worse to grooms. The crime was that we forgot to take him out.”

  The last word went down his throat with a swallow.

  “And the wedding?”

  “Never happened. Geraldine stayed with it, with him, for a year, but I’d turned him into a lump. Not even a gibbering wreck, just a living lump, and a health hazard. He was traumatized, and in those days there was no rush of counselors to sort him out. The buried-alive thing haunted him. Haunted all of us. And, thanks to me, even though living, to him, was playing, his fingers never again felt the soft slide of ivory, and his feet no longer dance with the pedals.”

  “And yours neither. What he can’t have, you won’t have. Even women. Family.” The flames warmed her face, but her back was cold.

  He pressed his fingers into his forehead, then rubbed his eyes.

  “Where did it come from?” she asked quietly. “Such a vile idea.”

  “From a booze-addled brain.”

  “But at some level you must have resented him, blamed him for—”

  “No. Listen to me.” Gabriel turned to her. “I idolized Max, all right? I adored him. When we were kids, I thought he was the best frigging pianist in the whole darn world. I only took up the piano to please him, because he wanted to teach me, and my face used to flush with delight whenever he told the parents how clever his little brother was. It made me feel worthy of him. We were so damn proud of each other, but what neither of us noticed, back then, was the light in our parents’ eyes when they realized what a little gem they had in me. And when I reached the same shitty conclusion—that I was so much better at what Max did best—I wanted to chop off my fingers. Max, of course, encouraged me, coached me, taught me to play more sublimely than he ever would, and had I had the right type of ego—the kind you need to succeed—I might have overcome it. The guilt. I might have handled the conflict in my head and in my hands. But I had to take the baton and run with it, because everyone expected me to, even though that meant leaving Max behind on the track, applauding even while I broke the ribbon. Took all the ribbons.

  “Annie saw it. She knew it was only a matter of time before I threw it in, but it was pointless, giving up. Max would never have reached the same heights as I could. He knew it. We all did. But I couldn’t go on taking the accolades in his place, not when he kept on trying.”

  “So resentment built up,” Thea said, “because he was the reason you stopped.”

  “I didn’t care about that.” Gabriel, now, sounded like a different man, his voice gravelly and thick. “I just wanted him to stop punishing himself for not being me.”

  His eyes held back. His loneliness had to be, could only be, as deep as that cave in the photograph. He had not stayed in Oman for love or jinn, she thought. He had stayed in order not to leave. He had thrown everything he could out of his life, even music, except for that tiny ukulele, as if its size made it less of an instrument. I’m not really playing. This isn’t really an instrument. An insignificant not-really-here-at-all thing.

  You’d never fit a man into a ukulele.

  “So you live like a monk,” she said. “In penitence. Hiding behind a specter.” She turned to him. “She was never real, was she? Not even to you.”

  Without really meaning to, as if he were a child who had scraped his knee, she kissed the back of his hand.

  He didn’t flinch, but after a time he said, “That’s the first real tenderness I’ve known in twenty-six years.”

  Later, he played the ukulele, which made a coy, cheeky sound, backed up by the river, gossiping its way across the stones. No rest for rivers, Thea thought. No nighttime.

  “My aunt nursed me back to health,” she said, “when I was ill.”

  Gabriel slowed his playing, but didn’t stop.

  “She wore nylons and had chunky thighs, and a fat cat called Featherweight.” In this light, Gabriel’s eyes were black, and beautiful. She held them fast. “He purred like a generator.”

  He didn’t blink, but his fingers stopped. She wished he would blink.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know you know. But how?”

  Gabriel put down the ukulele. “I gave up looking for explanations long ago.”

  “It’s as if, somehow, when I was ill, you heard my world and I saw yours.”

  “Jinn magic can be powerful. She might have used you as an unwitting host.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in jinn magic?”

  “In the best of us,” he said, with lowered eyes, “belief fluctuates.”

  Rigid, Thea lay in the tent, her mind whirring. It wouldn’t let her sleep or think or stem her seasick apprehension.

  Outside, Gabriel was shuffling around, but he soon went quiet, abandoning her to the night, which took up residence inside the tent. She missed Kim’s soft breathing and she needed to pee—she kept needing to pee: that it involved going out among the ifrit and jinn made her bladder fill as soon as she’d emptied it. Gathering her courage and the torch, she crawled out. Gabriel snored quietly on the roof of his jeep. It had been a long, tiring day for him. All that driving around U-bends.

  She crouched not far from the camp, not sure where to point the torch, but inclined to hold it over her shoulder so that they might be repulsed by its beam, and wondered if domestic boredom had driven her to wander too far from the school run.

  Back in her sleeping bag, she became prey to her own bantering consciousness. Awake, completely. Spectacularly awake, not a wisp of drowsiness within reach. There seemed no safe direction in which she could cast her mind: all led her along unsavory passages. Where there had been certainty—Gabriel was spinning a yarn—now there was doubt. Perhaps he was not? Had she, like him, got too close? With a fragile lengthening of her imagination, she sensed a presence, outside, that was not Gabriel’s. An angry jinn such as his could cause havoc where it willed.

  But this was not her religion, not her folklore.

  Rolling over in her sleeping bag, she felt an ill-placed stone dig into her hip.

  The piano—the closed Steinway concert grand—came firmly behind her eyes and w
ould not be nudged aside. She could not have an opinion about Gabriel until she formed one about this. It was, in fact, quite a middle-class story—not a real horror, or even a real tragedy, just a boozy disgusting night gone badly wrong, and a talented family thrown into disarray. Even Gabriel’s lover was no longer mysterious. Prudence had been, no doubt, a by-product in the mind of a young man, guilty, perturbed, and vilified. The other lads, no doubt, had got off without much censure; to do it to a friend was one thing, to your brother—unspeakable.

  She turned over again. The stones digging into her seemed to be multiplying. Were they all jinn?

  He had given up a glittering career because he loved his brother so much. On a dark night with drink on board, the poison of that decision had come out, as it was bound to do. Gabriel was the one buried inside a piano.

  She had handled it well, his full confession. Come morning, he would be refreshed, a little cured even, having spoken about the events that had exiled him to a place of such deep remorse that he seemed unable to quit it. When a place calls, Abid had said, you should go, because it holds something for you. Perhaps she had been called to help Gabriel, to move him along to brighter things, and this was at the source of their deeply felt connection.

  That connection had its paws all over her. Had she not learned? A light flirtation was no stroll in the park: it was a teeter on the rim of Snake Gorge. Pretend it can go nowhere and your flirtation will arrive somewhere else, unhindered, as it had before, and was doing again. Gabriel. Under her skin. Feelers becoming roots. The tingle in her ribcage.

  On the back of these thoughts, sleep shimmied toward her.

  They were in Eden. Pale sunlight made the water bubble and sparkle; black mountains in the distance were like the Gates of Mordor; and a red goat, standing downriver on a rock, watched Thea emerge from her tent. Gabriel was lying in the shallow water, his head on a rock. How many people, she wondered, loved him?

  “Morning,” he called.

  “Morning.” After sending the family a text, describing her surroundings, she paddled over to him. He reached up to take her hand as she hobbled toward a rock and sat down. Still holding her fingers, he said, “What am I to do about you?”

  “You could give me back my hand.”

  He squeezed her fingers. “I wouldn’t ask for much.”

  “Don’t ask for anything. You’d only be disappointed again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She took her hand away.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  Gooseflesh across his ribcage; nipples erect in the cold water; red board-shorts flopping about in the current.

  “If I could see you, once a year, twice,” he said, sitting up, “that would be worth ten lifetimes to me.”

  He had it all worked out: she would come to Oman for a few weeks every year, or they could meet elsewhere. Damascus. Venice. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to wreck any marriage—she could hang on to all that, but only come to him enough to help him breathe. “It’s you,” he said, “or no one.”

  “Really? What about her?”

  “Look, I never really thought you were her; more that she was you. Sometimes we see the future before we get there.”

  “Time in a tombola?”

  “Why not? Maybe we were both—”

  “Ahead of our time?” she quipped.

  “Seems like it.”

  Her feet and calves were cold. She drew in her breath, let out the prodding night. “You might have killed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Took his music, everything, from him.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You’re defending it.”

  Water trickled down his arm. “I don’t defend it, ever.” His voice was tight, locked in his throat. “Look, with respect, you don’t really know—”

  “You buried him. That’s what I know.”

  Gabriel’s eyes flashed at her.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s what she said. Word for word.”

  “Who?”

  “The other you.”

  They were almost in the desert when they saw the camel, standing on a ridge, high above the road. They were driving between steep, stark hills, the road curving downward toward the plain, when Thea saw him—a fine figure silhouetted against the sky, his head raised, his posture arrogant, yet searching. He was looking about, across the desert, as if waiting for someone.

  “That’s very rare,” Gabriel said. “Camels don’t like hills. They climb only if they have to. They never do it alone.”

  “So what’s he doing up there?”

  He glanced up again. “Maybe he’s searching for a mate.”

  “He looks bereft.” Thea twisted in her seat to catch a final glimpse of the magnificent, forlorn beast, memories of the caravan by Lake Razzaza soaking through her. No photos, she thought. Not then, not now.

  Hours later—many long hours spent crossing an inhospitable landscape that nonetheless attracted her, like an ugly man with charm—Gabriel pulled over to let down the tires and they set off again.

  It had been a long day’s driving, as he had warned her it would be, and at an apparently arbitrary point he turned off the road and headed fast across the plain until the swell of sands sucked them in, as into the belly folds of a fat white nude. For over an hour the 4x4 strained up and slid down. Gabriel drove, his fingers tapped the steering wheel, as if it were a keyboard; even strapped into a car seat, he jittered. He was wearing a green shirt and faded jeans. Sunglasses.

  These dunes were very high, and they came one after another, like waves in a hurricane, relentlessly lashing against them, as they went up and down, and up, and down again. Thea braced her knees and squealed as they tumbled over another sharp crest and saw an almost vertical drop below them.

  “Here you are.” Gabriel smiled. “Desert proper. The Empty Quarter is bigger than France, and there’s more sand here than in the whole of the Sahara, which is fifteen times larger. It’s also one of the most beautiful places on earth.”

  The heat spread into the car, like a swarm of bees, when they stopped and opened the doors. It was late afternoon. Silent, but for a whine of wind, of sand rushing across sand. The view didn’t change no matter where Thea turned. She twisted this way and that, loving the ordered disorder; the champagne horizons.

  The arc-shaped crest on which they sat was creamy and smooth on the leeside, while the rougher, burnt-orange grain accrued in the dips behind it, creating rippled ridges with rust on the top, cream beneath. Sand flew across the ocher ridges, like a sheet being pulled out, scattering in the wind. In every direction, desert peaks crowded upon one another, like the heads of commuters in a packed train. Alex would have loved it, and so would the boys, but Thea didn’t miss them, or want them there. This was hers: the desert, again. This was her return. How often had she thought of it since she and Kim had sat on top of an old ruin, with scruffy children huddled against them and a bare plain floating around them? Emptiness appealed. She wanted to penetrate it, to find something in it or get something back—she wasn’t sure which—but all it relinquished was sameness and deadliness. There was nothing to take, apart from the uncompromising look of it. Even its unctuous belly fluids were being drained away. Soon enough, the desert would have nothing left to offer beyond its smart beauty.

  “‘The desert within the desert,’ Thesiger called it,” said Gabriel, standing up. “We’ll go on a bit before setting up camp.”

  She loved his hands, the way he flicked his keys around his fingers. Had he been untroubled, she could have loved him. Or perhaps his trouble made her love him a little. Love came in the oddest places. “Where are we going? Not to those salt flats, I hope?”

  “No, they’re south of here.”

  “How do you not get lost?”

  He tapped the side of his nose. “Instinct.” Heading back to the car, he added, “And GPS.”

  “Can I drive?”

  He showed her the rudim
ents of 4x4 driving and let her take a few dunes. Leaning close to her, he covered her hand with his to help with the gears, coached her and laughed with her. Good times. Good times, in the desert.

  It was almost dark when he pitched her tent on the floor of a flat basin, surrounded by sand heaps. Thea went as far as she dared to pee, then hurried back. “I’ll bet there are jinn out there and good old Western ghouls.”

  “You’re a believer now?” He was squatting, lighting a fire, but he tipped back and sat, one knee pulled up against him as he prodded burning twigs with a stick.

  “I’m beginning to.”

  “Too many stories this last week. Look, it’s a variation on the same theme. In Western tradition, it’s the dead wandering around making things happen. We are hardwired to believe—be it in God or the supernatural or shamans. It’s on our circuit boards.”

  “Even yours?”

  His eyes barely flickered. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I do wonder about the night in the music school. Some people would explain it—one inexplicable moment of irrational behavior—by saying I was possessed of a bad jinn.”

  “That could explain all evil acts.”

  “Exactly.” He poked the fire. “Good and evil. Those are the only things that make real sense to me, and I’ve been to evil and I don’t want to go there again.”

  The remaining rim of light on the horizon pitched itself into night. They ate bread and cheese, made tea and stared at the flames, because the growing cushion of red beneath the burning twigs was the only thing puncturing the black cylinder around them.