Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  He threw another mattress onto the growing stack. “Yeah, and that they eat feces and bones, and live in shitholes and outhouses. Give it up, Annie, for Christ’s sake.”

  Whenever he didn’t have to work, he stayed in. Waiting. At night he barely slept, fearing that if she came upon him oblivious, he would be oblivious of her coming. He usually became aware of her before he saw her, but as for actually watching her coming into the room—hardly ever. He no longer questioned it. On the nights she didn’t show up, he would eventually fall into a half-sleep, a world of busy images and fretful dreams, a strange tormenting place in which he found no rest, because Max always made an appearance, looking young and well, seated at a piano, his hands dropped between his knees, his shoulders hunched, rounded, his head hanging over the keys as if they were familiar to him in some unfathomable way. He never looked up. Gabriel was grateful for that. In his dreams, Max never looked at him. But Geraldine did. She came to him also—a gray figure in a gray coat, standing in a doorway, her face uncertain, her hair lank, her staring eyes forcing Gabriel to wake in order to avoid them, only to find himself waiting for a woman in whom nobody else believed.

  When she was with him, the nightmares, the accusations and scorn, withered into retreat, where they lay vigilant, ready for their next opportunity. He lived like a man walking down a dark alley, expecting its ghouls to jump him.

  And jump they did. As the affair crystallized, Prudence added to the layers of torment a layer all of her own.

  One morning, early, his ankle was vibrating when he woke from a deep post-Prudence sleep. Unable yet to open his eyes, he concentrated on the sensation, trying to identify it. Pins and needles? There was a weight on his foot, holding it down, and then he heard the sound that kept time with the vibration: purring. A cat was lying on his ankle. One of the street cats had got in, quite a heavy one by Omani standards, and it occurred to him that he would love to have a pet, especially a cat—so soothing, like this, first thing in the morning—and he hoped, as he raised his head, that it would be a pretty one.

  He looked down at his feet. No cat.

  Gabriel leaped into sitting and pushed himself against the bedstead.

  The purring grew louder.

  He jumped from the bed into the solid silence of his Muscati house. No cat, anywhere, and no purring, now, either. But the blue kaftan was on the floor. Prudence had left behind her only piece of clothing. That had never happened before. He picked it up and brushed chalky dust off its sleeve. She must have put on his clothes. He lurched toward the cupboard—he had only four shirts and two T-shirts—and counted those that were hanging: two short-sleeved shirts and the heavy one he would never wear made three; his T-shirts were chucked on the chair. Where was the other shirt? He pulled on shorts, went downstairs, and found it lying crumpled on the cushions where he and Prudence had pulled it off him the night before.

  His heartbeat tripped into a run. What had she worn going out? He crumpled her kaftan in his fist, smelled it. Desire, fulfillment, abstraction. This woman was killing him. Unless, of course, that was the whole point.

  He hated going to work, not because he was afraid to miss Prudence, as before, but because he was determined to catch her out. She would slip up. There was no magic in this; she was a woman in a dress. There was nothing ethereal about her breath on his face or the mess of sex. He had tried every which way to contain her. He locked the doors; she got out anyway. He locked them both in without food; it didn’t bother her; she could live without sustenance. It was his own hunger that drove him to the market, where he gorged on watermelon until he’d had his fill. In the house, he searched for trapdoors, hidden passages, amused by his role in this B-movie, and he spent hours watching her—a long woman on a long bench, flicking through a magazine. Jesus, he thought, does she know no boredom?

  He loved her. In spite of everything, she had become the skin on his skin, the eyes in his eyes, the heart in his heart. Yet he had to hold firm. Reason was making too many compromises and skepticism taking too many hits. He had to bring Prudence from the closed world they inhabited and out into the day. How lovely it would be to walk together on the Corniche, to see the sunlight on her hair and speak of normal things, because as long as they did not live like others, and among others, they had nothing on which to build their relationship, because he too had become an empty thing, with little to say and no comment to make. There was no air in their cell and yet she would not quit it—not with him, at any rate.

  He decided to follow her: to leave the house ahead of her, lurk in a doorway and keep one firm eye on his own front door. She moved quickly; she could zip past him in such a swish that he would have to be sharp, wily. It brought a vile taste to his mouth. Spying on his own lover would break even the wishy-washy rules of their game, whereby Prudence could toy with him all she liked, offering in return sexual ecstasy and a nibble on the carrot of love.

  Nonetheless, he would follow her when she left the house, tail her through the suq and when, as expected, she hailed a cab on the Corniche, he would catch up and confront her. He would be careful not to frighten her—harm was something he would never do again—but he would demand the truth. Other truths, meanwhile, were thwarting the plan: Prudence had no cash for a cab and she wasn’t taking his, so either someone was collecting her nearby or she didn’t need wheels where she was going. Good. He would either follow her all the way to her destination or, at the very least, get a car’s license-plate number.

  There was an alcove along the alley—the entrance to another house, which, to his knowledge, was empty. He chose this as his spot and picked the moment to slip out, one afternoon when Prudence was lying on the cushioned bench against the wall. For an hour he stood in the shade, his eyes on his door until his sight started shimmering. Eyes are like fish: they need to move. His neighbor passed, gave him a look, but in the absence of a mutual language, nothing could be said. It was hot, breathless. No breeze came in from the coast, no air. Only the heat, radiating off the ground, frying his concentration and his eyeballs.

  Ninety minutes into his vigil, Prudence had yet to emerge. Trust me, he thought, to try this on the one day she decides not to leave. His lids wanted to close. The soles of his feet burned through his sandals. His throat was parched. Should have brought water. . . . Young boys began to point and tease, as their parents became suspicious, looking toward him and shouting back at one another, no doubt about why he might be standing there, in the full heat, watching his own front door. They didn’t know him well enough to allow this loitering, and even with a good grasp of Arabic, he would have struggled to explain it, so he gave up. His vision was blurring, his head throbbing, and he couldn’t afford to fall foul of his neighbors, so he crossed back to his house, glancing through the window as he reached the door. Prudence was no longer in the front room, as she had been when he’d left.

  He opened the door; she was lying on her side on the bench, leafing through the National Geographic.

  Gabriel couldn’t move. He could neither step forward nor back, because that would have meant quitting this spot, this certainty. He didn’t wish to leave the realm in which she existed in simple terms.

  And yet, dizzy with apprehension, he forced himself to step outside again and leaned into the window until his nose touched the pane, straining against the reflected glare of the white building behind him.

  Prudence was not in the room.

  He swung back to the open door: she was lying there reading.

  Again and again he moved from the door, where he could see her, to the window, where he could not. He strained against the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes, shutting out all other light, and could see the bench, with its cover creased from their earlier fumbling and his empty mug on the white stone shelf. No one. Nothing.

  Back to the doorway.

  There.

  Gone.

  There.

  Gone.

  They had left the realm of the explicable.

  Offici
ally spooked, Gabriel became fretful, watchful, and tensed whenever Prudence came into sight. With his senses on high alert, he became more focused. She had no odor; at night, she lay as still as a stone, her breath so quiet he had to lean over to make sure she was alive. He heard things, in the house and out of it. Those waves crashing against rocks. Heavy waves, ocean waves. Memory. Had to be. These were sounds streaming from his childhood days on the Irish coast. Could Prudence also be coming at him from behind—an acquaintance back along the way whom he no longer recognized? Memory made flesh. A gentle reminder. Had he retreated into some comfortable pocket of his own mind where he stored happier times? This, he knew, was what most concerned Annie—that the delusion was entirely of his own creation, for his protection from his misdeeds.

  Because although that rumbling ocean was distant, he could have sworn it was getting louder.

  Reason was sitting on the edge of his control, as if waiting for a chance to leap beyond his grasp. Where there is no logic, reason falters. He woke one night, hot. A strange kind of heat covering him, neither clammy—he wasn’t sweating—nor dry, more like lying in the direct path of a beam, as under a sunlamp or the sun. The heat of the sun—yes. All over him, though the room was as dark as Hades.

  Alarmed, he sat up. The heat vanished. He reached for water, trembling, but the glass was empty, and he longed for those other dark nights when Max’s hunched figure and limp fingers haunted him. That he could explain. He could unclench it. But what kind of dreams were these—the weight of a purring cat and dark heat burning him—and what had they to do with Prudence?

  More sounds came, filtering through his attempts to keep them out. Alert in the course of another unquiet night, he heard someone coming along the corridor—a woman—nylons rubbing together. He leaped from the bed, again, and stood naked halfway across the room, his panting breaking the silence. Heart thundering, he turned on the landing light, fearful of confronting some woman with large thighs, but no one stood on the whitewashed landing, even though he could not have dreamed it, since he had not been asleep, and when he turned, Prudence was no longer in the bed.

  The lady in the stockings had taken her away.

  In the broad light of morning—and this place was very bright—Gabriel rationalized. He wanted Annie to come but didn’t want to scare her more than he already had, and there was no one else to talk to, except Prudence, who was rather short on commentary and opinion. She was not unintelligent. There was more to her than flesh—he could see it, behind her eyes, a life of some sort, hurt, pain, even wisdom. But all she needed from him, it seemed, was to be physically close. And water. The glass of water he left on the bedside table at night was always empty in the morning, whether he had seen her or not, and he found empty glasses all over the house, which he had not put there. This was a thirsty phantasm.

  Prudence was dream and nightmare entwined. No way to reject the ecstasy, no way of escaping the fear. All in, it was beginning to cost him.

  “What kind of family do you hail from?”

  Prudence didn’t reply.

  “Don’t want to talk about it?”

  Still nothing.

  “Nah, me neither. I never mention the parents, if I can help it. Don’t think about them either. If I did, I’d see them. I’d see them as they were when I left. Did I tell you about that? About the day I left?” He dipped his chin toward the head on his shoulder. Her fingers were dallying on his chest, her eyelids lowered, but she showed no inclination to respond. “Not much to tell, as it happens,” he went on. “I went into the living room, said, ‘Bye, I’m off to Muscat,’ and Dad didn’t even look up from the newspaper. Thin. Got very thin, he had, like my sister. Mam, though, she came to the door and wished me Godspeed, her face hollow. Dead inside. It could be her fault. Parents blame themselves for everything, apparently, and maybe that’s right. Maybe mine didn’t handle it well, having, you know, the gifted son and the grinder. Max, he was a grinder. He didn’t accept his limitations. I hated the way he kept on trying, wanting to be as good as me. ‘Don’t bother,’ I felt like saying. ‘It’s not so great up here on the pedestal.’ I felt like St. Simeon on his column, but Max never got that. He thought he could work himself into being me, as if my so-called talent could be earned. Deserved. How mad is that? I didn’t earn it and I certainly didn’t deserve it. He did, though. . . . He probably did.”

  Prudence rolled onto her back. She was listening, maybe.

  “Mam used to weed a lot,” he went on, regardless. “I’d watch her, from the window by the piano, kneeling on a kind of mat in her tweed skirt and woolly tights, and her knees would be muddy when she stood up, with the trowel in one hand, and she’d be calling at the back of the house—at me. ‘Why have you stopped, Gabriel? Carry on or you won’t know the movement by Thursday. Play on, Gabriel.’ That’s all I ever heard. ‘Oh, do play for us, Gabriel. Play for the Joneses/the Murphys/the Looneys! They so want to hear you play, and even if they don’t, they’re going to anyway. Go on, now, we’re all ready, dying for a performance, so don’t be silly/shy/mean/selfish/contrary, play, you damn stubborn boy, and make us look good, because we did shit-all ourselves and we’re living this tiny life where we look like everyone else and act like everyone else and do dull jobs and have no talents—so perform, Gabriel! Make us look bigger than our unremarkable lives. . . .’”

  Rain falling, falling on a roof, some other, slated, roof—a steady stream, soft yet determined, like whispers behind the wall. He was becoming accustomed to this other soundtrack, but he didn’t mind the shush of the rain so much. It calmed him. He could even hear it slashing on to broad green leaves, as if he were surrounded by woodland, and since he was homesick, he stepped out into it and felt the soft Irish rain on his shoulders, smelled it, tasted it, almost became it, until the Gulf heat drew him back, like a possessive lover.

  Some other world had become entwined in theirs. The stockinged legs, they came again and again. Often when he dozed during the day, he heard the scrape of nyloned thigh against nyloned thigh. Swish, swish. And sometimes the low murmur of a radio, muttering voices and a jangle of jingles. He narrowed his concentration, pulled it in tight, like focusing on the eye of a needle, to properly hear what was being said—was it an English station? Arabic? Straining toward another existence—his? Hers? He was almost certain that the muffled banter was coming in an Irish voice. A jolly, smug housewives’ presenter. The static he was listening to sounded very much to him like Radio Éireann.

  The slop and slime of love distracted him. Touching her, feeling her, insinuating himself upon her, he heard only her cries and his grunts and saw nothing beyond the undulations of her body, the small of her back, the incline of her breasts, the peak of hipbone and lull of waist. He needed more fingers, another mouth, better lips to fully appreciate her because, no matter how heightened the pleasure, he now reached the end of every coupling short of absolute fulfillment. There remained always a part of him untouched, a gap left empty. Next time, he always thought, next time they would hit the greater height.

  “You have to come swimming with me,” he said to her, one warm afternoon in the front room when he wanted to be on the beach. “I’m not doing so well, being indoors so much, and if it’s getting to me, it must be getting to you.”

  No. No, I’m fine like this. I don’t mind.

  “I mind. I’m sleeping badly, seeing things. The honeymoon period—all sex and no living—has gone on long enough. We have to begin a normal life. You could get a job, if you don’t already have one.”

  You’re tired of me.

  “I’m tired of the way we live, Prudence. I came to Muscat to escape confinement, only to build my own prison around us. When I wake up every morning I have no idea where my mind is or in which direction I should reach to retrieve it. Is that what you want—that I should live in a permanent state of mystification?”

  No.

  “So let’s go for a swim.”

  The water would be too cold.

  �
�Cold? Here? Ha! This isn’t Ireland, you know. But we don’t have to swim. Let’s go for a wander. Just to the corner and back.”

  No.

  “Yes.” He gripped her elbow and tried to hustle her toward the front door, but Prudence wriggled and struggled, insisting that he could not make her leave. He couldn’t even get her near the threshold, let alone beyond it, and he came off worse for trying. Anger took him. He grabbed her by the waist and hauled her across the room until, near the door, she bit his arm and he dropped her, and when they both fell to the floor he found that he was crying.

  Saturated with love and terror, Gabriel began making inquiries about the house. With Ali and his friends, he had tea in the suq, where the air, trapped under the makeshift roofing all day, was like a warm soup that had solidified as it cooled. The house he lived in, he learned, had been built by a wealthy merchant and had once incorporated the building next door. No one knew of any jinn ever taking up residence there, and it owned no stories, beyond that of the owner, who had fallen on hard times and gone to Abu Dhabi to work. His sister now rented it out. “Talk to her,” they said. “She will know more.” So, later that week, Gabriel asked the man who collected the rent if there had ever been jinn around the place, but people, he had noticed, didn’t like to speak of jinn too specifically, and this man also shied away from the question.

  His landlady, however, showed up without warning the following evening in the company of a man, Juma, who spoke English and introduced himself as her nephew. Gabriel invited them in; she pulled her abaya around her, strode in and perched on the end of the bench against the wall. Her name was Farida. She had heard reports, Juma explained, of jinn in her brother’s house.

  Farida’s eyes wandered around the walls.

  “You have questions,” Juma said. He was as thin as a board, had high pointy cheekbones, and wore tiny round spectacles.