Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “Like me,” he muttered.

  She could hear the sea, she said.

  “Not possible.” He ran the backs of his fingers along her neck. “The sea is as languid as jelly out there.”

  Her eyes lost focus, as if she were listening to something on a frequency unavailable to him, and she insisted that she could hear the sea.

  “I wish I could.” A snapshot of the Irish coast followed the thought—the white of the Atlantic throwing itself against the last rocks of Ireland. “I remember standing on a walkway near Mizen Head when I was a kid, near the lighthouse there. A small bridge crossed a gully and we’d been told—me and my brother and sister—that you could see seals frolicking in the surf far below so, heads hanging over the railings, we watched and watched, the waves breaking up in this gash in the rocks, sending up bubbles of foam, until finally we saw a flash of silvery brown slithering around down there. The sea was throwing itself about, deadly dangerous, but the seal was having a lark, diving into the gush of nasty-looking waves, like a kid in snow.”

  Don’t talk, she said. Listen.

  Gabriel held himself still, eyes closed, until he heard in the far-off faraway the sound of the sea battering his island.

  He woke alone. He could barely move, such was the depth of the sleep from which he was emerging, as if he was swimming up from the fathoms. He hadn’t slept so well since the last time he’d got drunk.

  He had thought she meant to seduce him; instead, she had brought him sleep. Solid, fretless sleep.

  In the wake of a dream about home, he had the impression that he had just walked from one room into another—from their family room in Cork to this bare bedroom in Muscat. His mother was right there, beyond his reach yet still close, still loving, as she had been in the dream. Restored by one good night, Gabriel allowed himself to think about his mother. He was able now to look into her face, the face that had turned to him when he had arrived home that morning, disoriented, inebriated, and found her sitting at the table against the wall, one elbow leaning on the patterned plastic tablecloth, her quilted robe buttoned to the neck. Her eyes had been hanging on something he couldn’t see, because he did not yet know. Fearing his father had died, he asked her what was the matter, and she had lifted her eyes and tried, but failed, to say his name.

  The family room—with its aging green couch and brown-tiled fireplace, and a large television in the corner with a plant on top, the fronds of which were pushed sideways, like a comb-over, to stop them flowing across the screen—that room had been the hearth of his life. There, on the day of his Confirmation, spruced up in his school uniform, he had retreated to watch television, until his mother had scolded him for not playing with his cousins. There, he had lost his virginity, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, when his parents were at the pub and his girlfriend’s body was hot along one side where the flames had warmed her skin. There, his home had dissolved forever when he returned hung-over from his pals’ flat and found his mother destroyed. “In God’s name,” she had said, “what have you done?”

  Later that day, in the same room, his father had pushed him, shaken him, shouted until Gabriel feared they would both burst into flames.

  They had breakfast together, he and the woman. After a walk along the Corniche, he had returned to the house, where she soon joined him as he lay curled on the bench in the front room, sobbing. Limp, he was, with self-pity. His life, wreckage. He missed his work, the pub, his parents, but missing Max was another form of branding. Sometimes he fancied he could smell his own flesh burning. The abyss beneath him—the only thing he could see—was a huge thing, empty and dark. He felt himself floating into it, limbs outstretched; it was the only place for him, this great hole into which his soul tumbled.

  And then she was there, holding him back, as if by his shirt-tails.

  “Can’t buckle,” he said, sitting up. “Have to get Annie through.”

  Recovered, he had made coffee and heated bread, while she sat at the counter feeding him slices of watermelon. Her lack of appetite, in food as in conversation, meant she ate only apples and sipped warm water. Gabriel, for now, appreciated being in a room without words. Most words, when it came to it, were superfluous. All the language that had poured out of Annie had done her no good, but in silence her anger had been truly chilling. This was better—a few chosen, necessary words. And touch. He pushed his companion’s kaftan back over her knees to stroke her thigh. They kissed. His resolve weakened. Let them frame me, he thought. There could be no stopping this when she was creeping inside his clothes, and into his heart.

  He told her, afterward, that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. Then he laughed. “Beheld? What’s with the virginal language? I’m coming on all Catholic again. Behold the Angel of the Lord. Behold the Virgin Mary!” Gabriel chuckled. “Mind you . . .” His lover was hardly virginal, but in some respects she shared characteristics with apparitions of the Virgin, from Lourdes to Fatima: she was an incontrovertible fact to a chosen few, air to others, and deeply controversial.

  Light on his feet, he wandered through Muttrah, knowing no malevolent eyes were upon him, no whispers breaking out behind. He went every morning to buy bread and came back to eat in the bare kitchen, listening to the voices in the alley—the woman next door, with her tendency to screech, the boys running along the lane, the bleat of goats. It was cozy. Tight. No prying eyes. No bloody foreigners.

  He was, by all accounts, having an affair with a woman no one else could see. A woman who had coasted into his life, into the room in which he stood, and, just like that, had saved him and doomed him all at once. Had he been at home, he would have assumed that he had fallen into a liaison with a high-class call girl, set up as an elaborate joke at his expense or even as some kind of punishment, but who would have any motive to tease or torment him beyond his own shores? Either way, he went with it. It took some time to get used to her selective invisibility, but when he came to grasp her occasional nature, he embraced it. That no one else believed in her became an abstraction, a curiosity, because the woman in question was clearly defined in his eyes, and her flesh was quite, quite solid. To him, she was real to the point of distraction.

  Since his lover had no known name, he called her Prudence, after the woman who wouldn’t come out to play. She liked it, especially when he explained he’d taken it from a great song by a great man. “She was a real person, Prudence was,” he said. “Mia Farrow’s sister. Lennon wrote it when they were in India with the Maharishi, because Prudence wouldn’t leave her hut and he was worried about her. Thought she must be depressed because she wouldn’t come outside, so he penned “Dear Prudence.” Brilliant song. Inspired.”

  His appreciation of silent companionship had been short-lived. Her reticence, a few days in, was giving him a new respect for conversation, enunciation, and indeed his own voice. He had taken to rambling—the inevitable result of spending time with someone who had little to say—and his capacity for drivel astounded him. He had never realized he knew so much about nothing in particular or that he was quite handy at impersonations. One afternoon when he was telling Prudence about his most peculiar student, he began imitating him—rather accurately, he thought. The humor, however, was lost on her.

  He spent most of the week in the house, venturing out only to get food. He even lied to Annie, saying he had a stomach bug and could not go over to see them. “Stay in bed,” she said. “It’ll pass.”

  He stayed in bed. They made love, a lot, and Prudence slept a lot, and Gabriel feared leaving the room because sometimes when he did she was no longer there when he came back, and then he would have to kill the shapeless hours until her return. Boredom set in. He had no work, no friends, and the house had been stripped of all but necessary utensils. All books, games, and magazines had moved to the suburbs. Walking was the only thing to do when she was gone, and it used up the energy, the pent-up desire that made him jittery. Sometimes he would dive into the suq to make contact with liv
ing, working people, and chat to the shopkeepers in the shaded alleys. They would talk to him in their limited English and taught him to say “Hello, how are you?” in Arabic. Other times he would go farther afield, out of town and into the hills, hiking for hours until, suddenly panicked that he’d been gone too long, he would hurry home, passing shrouded women and floppy-eared goats, arriving back, hot and frazzled, to find that Prudence was there, or not.

  One afternoon Annie called over, and sat on the rampart of the roof with him, the sea breeze ruffling her spiky hair.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Still not pregnant. How’s your stomach?”

  “Still rumbly.”

  “I hope you kept yourself hydrated.”

  “I kept myself hydrated.”

  Prudence stepped out of the house and moved to another corner of the roof.

  Annie did not react, not in any flickering way Gabriel could detect. Instead she looked at her toes, dusty in her sandals. “I’m getting desperate, Gabriel. Rolf is pushing forty.”

  “Yeah, but you’re only twenty-eight. You’ve loads of time,” he said, unsettled by her desperation, since he could do nothing about it. “And there are so many likely causes right now. You’re stressed and unhappy, but it will happen.”

  “I wish I had the luxury of that kind of certainty.”

  “Putting pressure on yourself isn’t going to help, is it?” Gabriel glanced sideways at Prudence, willing her to go away. This was family stuff, private.

  “How can I not stress about it?” Annie’s eyes were brimming. “Rolf longs for a family and it just . . . it isn’t happening and I’m worn out with all the trying, and the disappointment that comes back every time. It’s crushing. I’m even sick of having sex!”

  Gabriel flinched. Prudence was sitting on a low wall, her face to the sun, well within earshot. He hadn’t given the logistics of her mysterious comings and goings much thought—how she got in and out of the house, that kind of thing—because he didn’t care, but Annie would never speak of something so personal in front of a stranger. So either she knew Prudence, very well, or she was genuinely oblivious of her presence.

  “Sometimes I worry that our marriage won’t survive the strain,” Annie went on, staring straight past Prudence.

  There were limits even to Gabriel’s skepticism.

  He had to find out more about jinn.

  Chocolate-colored mountains rimmed Muscat—a wall encasing him. His own chosen prison wall. Sea on one side, mountains on the other. Beyond, he knew, was desert. Space. Anonymity. He would see it soon. These arrogant hills would not contain him for long. In the desert, he might find his real thoughts, the ones concealed by the disdain of others. There, he might shake off the weight of shame and meet himself. Find the person who had destroyed his own brother. Even discover the why of it. Envy, they said. In Cork, it was widely peddled that Gabriel had resented Max’s success, modest though it was, which he had achieved by overcoming mediocrity with sheer hard work, while Gabriel let his talent dribble away, boozing and fucking. That was what they said, what even his parents thought, though they would not have used those terms, and it was true that beneath the blasé veneer, Gabriel did care about his so-called gift. Of course he did. He cared that he had ditched it when still too young to value it. So perhaps he had wanted to make Max pay. How else to explain what he had done, three days before the wedding? Under the broad blue sky of the desert, in solitude and silence, he might find out what had sparked that one warped, thwarted idea, so ghastly to him now that he hesitated to look over his shoulder in case it was right behind him. Like a devil on his back. It was a devil—something nobody could look at, face on. His own sister seemed wary of being alone with him in case it popped up, joined them, his disgusting idea. We all have them, he wanted to say, we all have putrid imaginings, beyond our control. The difference was that he, and some others, had carried it out. Perhaps, in the wilderness, he would have a biblical encounter with himself and slay his own sins, like Jesus had done.

  He snorted. Where was this religious stuff coming from?

  Abid, their driver, was a tall man with a thin mustache and a glint in his eyes. He glanced over, smiling and curious, while he drove. He had offered to take him out for the day. Annie had probably engineered it, concerned that Gabriel was becoming too reclusive, so now they were on the Nakhal road, heading into the grooves of landscape.

  “Nakhal is a nice place,” Abid told him. “The fort is two hundred and fifty years old. It is built on a big rock, to keep them safe.”

  There were forts in a state of collapse everywhere. On every excuse for a hill, there stood at least one tower, looking all around over the humps of its own ruins.

  “One of the ways they pushed back the enemy,” Abid gesticulated, “at Nakhal is—they poured down boiling date honey over them.”

  “Agh, Jesus!” Gabriel grimaced. “Talk about sweet torture.”

  Nakhal was surrounded by an ocean of date palms, fed by the falaj, Abid explained—an ancient irrigation system of channels bringing water from al-Hajar. The fort curled around its own rock base, like a creeper climbing a tree, until the main tower sat up on its perch with a 360-degree view of al-Batinah Plain on one side and al-Hajar Mountains on the other. A purple cloud had gathered over their peaks.

  “It will rain,” Abid said, frowning.

  “Have we time to check out the hot springs before it does?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  Down by the river, Gabriel pulled on his trunks and fell backward into the water. His body exulted. He was getting used to the contrasts in this country—the way crevassed slopes of gray rock were suddenly interrupted by a bulge of green, and blinding white gravel riverbeds invariably led toward a suburb of Paradise hidden in an S-bend.

  Abid sat on the bank, munching hard-boiled eggs and bread. It took only one prompt from Gabriel: “My sister has been trying to explain to me about jinn,” he said, lying in the shallows, and Abid was off, one story hurrying after another, flowing out in his imperfect English.

  “There is a house in Muttrah,” he began, “a house like any other, where no one lives any more. The family who owned it, they tried to live in there, but every time they brought their things and put them inside the house, the jinn removed them.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The family would come home and find their belongings outside. On the street, on the roof. So they would bring them back in again, but whenever they went out, they came home and even the furniture was outside the house. They said, ‘No more!’ and left, but another man, he came and said he would live there. He did not mind about jinn. Jinn, you see, are weaker than men. They cannot control us. We have the stronger soul. So he moved into the house and he brought some things, and for two days everything was fine. Until one night, he was thrown from his bed. The wall pushed him out. He was very frightened, but he stayed another night. And the same thing—something pushed from behind and he fell on the floor. Still he would not leave. He did not want to be weaker than the jinn, but he had no sleep and was afraid of being hurt, and he was becoming crazy. His sister, she say, ‘Come to my house, and you will sleep like a baby.’ So he went with her and slept for two days and then he went back to his house—and, ya Allah! All his belongings were in the street. He left then and that house is still empty. The jinn have it now. They wanted it. They have it.”

  “So . . . in this case, they were stronger than the humans?”

  “This man had a weak soul.”

  He had another story, and then another, in which jinn were angels of mercy.

  The warm waters of the spring were tingling on Gabriel’s skin. “So they’re not evil? I mean, dangerous?”

  Abid wobbled his head. “Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Men are stronger, so bad men can use jinn to do bad things to their enemies.”

  “You mean like casting a spell on someone?”

  “A spell, yes.”

  “And you believe in them?” />
  “God made man and jinn to worship Him. They are like us—Muslim and Jew and non-believer.”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  Abid looked down along the gurgling river. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  But Abid got up, wiping the dust off the back of his dishdasha.

  “So humans can see jinn, yeah?”

  “If the jinni wants you to see him, you can see him. We must hurry.” Abid was heading back to the car. “It will rain soon.”

  A black cloud had darkened the river, which no longer seemed so tame; in the gloaming, it looked very much like a hideaway for spooks and specters. Gabriel felt edgy as they set off for Rustaq to see another fort, especially when a few drops of water on the windscreen suddenly became slashing rain that thundered down onto the jeep.

  With a glance at the sky, Abid invoked Allah as the vehicle bumped off the stones and back up to the track. “This is not good. It has been raining in the mountains. The wadis will flood.”

  “Flash floods? Really?”

  “Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

  They managed to get across one wadi, where the river was rising, before coming to another just as a great torrent of brown water came roiling past. Abid drove back to a more elevated spot and parked. They could go neither forward nor back. “We have to wait.”

  “So this is a flash flood?” Gabriel asked, raising his voice to be heard above the lashing on the roof and watching the slow flow of sludge. “Not exactly flashy, is it?”

  “But it is very strong.”

  Raindrops bounced around the bonnet, furious.

  “How long will we be here?”

  “A few hours maybe.”

  “How many hours?”

  Abid shrugged. “Five. Six.”

  “Jesus.” They might be there all night. Omanis were loose with time. It was an elastic concept: five, six hours could mean ten, or two, and Gabriel loved it. He’d be happy to get into the groove of a time-loose existence—but this flood was keeping him from her.