Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  Quiet, they allowed the thirsty heat to drink their thoughts until the old man looked past Gabriel into the grove. He did it a few times, his eyes narrowing and his lips closing over that dental protrusion, and then he spoke.

  Gabriel recognized one word and swung around.

  Trees, silence, filtered light.

  The man went on, repeating the word “sayyida” and pointing.

  The blood turned in Gabriel’s veins. “La. La sayyida,” he insisted, opening his mouth to Arabic and hoping he was saying, No. No lady.

  The man blinked, moved his jaw around, as if chewing his bottom lip, then called out, over Gabriel’s shoulder, what sounded like verses. Quranic verses.

  “And all that food!” Annie exclaimed.

  “Food?”

  “Yes, egg, beans, halva . . . honey. It’s part of the krama—is that the word, Sabah? Like offerings, you know? And saffron, henna—”

  “And clothes,” said Marie.

  “Money.”

  “All offered up?” Gabriel pulled onto the main road.

  Annie was giddy, full-on, relieved that she’d gone through with it and that it was over. “But the drumming and the chanting!” She widened her eyes, threw up her hands. “Oh, I’ll never forget it. There are different rhythms, beats, for different jinn. It’s unbelievable. It goes on for days.”

  “So it wasn’t scary?”

  “Well . . .”

  “There was some kind of exorcism,” Marie said. “That was quite alarming.”

  “That lady, she had a bad jinniya,” Sabah explained.

  “She was only a girl,” Annie said, “no more than eighteen, and she was moaning and calling out, but she sounded like a man.”

  “Or some kind of beast.” Marie looked out. “Horrible, really.”

  Gabriel feigned nonchalance. “That’s what I’ve heard—that in the course of an exorcism the person has a low growl, a devilish voice. Same with Christian exorcisms.”

  “And afterwards,” Marie said, and Gabriel could see in the mirror that she was pale, “afterwards she was fine.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do, now, with all my disbelief.”

  “What did the witch do for you?” he asked Annie.

  “Don’t call her that. At home she’d be called a healer.”

  “Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “She gave me stuff—some kind of gemstone, amulet thing, and recited verses over me, but just being there, the chanting and, oh, it was powerful, Gabriel. Powerful.” She turned to him. “You should go—get rid of your jinn.”

  He didn’t know how to tell her that he might have picked up another.

  Something had changed. Often Prudence teased, but left him wanting; pulled away when he was close to coming, so that he cried out in frustration. The sweetness had faded. Her reti-cence had become grating and the sex unpredictable, and her beauty, her indifference, were harder to endure. She knew too much about him now. He still loved the sense of her and yet increasingly felt an inclination to be cruel, which alarmed him, because he knew how to be cruel. Perhaps he wanted to punish her for breaking her own silence.

  It was academic. He could neither leave her nor ask her to leave.

  The sound of a siren broke into the night and came closer until, when it was nearby, it stopped. Gabriel listened for the follow-up—voices outside, urgency in the streets—but the night was as lifeless as a dead rat. He got up and went down to Annie and Rolf’s empty bedroom to look out. The ambulance, its blue lights still flashing, had parked on the corner. Concerned for his neighbors, he hurried downstairs and went outside, but the alley was empty. He went to the end. No ambulance.

  Fuck’s sake, he thought. More creepy stuff.

  With a skip in his step, and a sense of something rushing at his back, he hurried back to the house, still spooked by the story one of the traders had told of a man who was going through his oasis one night when a jinniya jumped on him from a tree, attaching herself to him, and although he swung around to shake her off, she hung on, saying she wanted him, had to have him, until he pressed against a tree trunk and scraped her off his back.

  Gabriel slammed the door behind him and leaned into it, shaking so hard his legs barely held him.

  Dreaming about ghost ambulances now. Always fucking dreaming.

  His heart was getting some bloody workout in this country, he thought, but as he made his way to the stairwell, he stopped. Blue lights were flashing in the diwan. He went in and across to the window and, looking out, saw the ambulance on the corner of the street. No one was getting out; no one was rushing over. No people at all. Just a white ambulance, lights spinning, throwing blue beams across his walls.

  He went back to the front door where, after a moment’s hesitation, he steeled himself to look out. Sure enough, the only thing standing on the street was the night.

  He had one foot in each of two different worlds.

  Prudence was standing across the room by the entrance to the kitchen, her face lit by the flashing light—blue, gone, blue, gone.

  Gabriel backed away, and out. Out! And he walked the coast until morning slid under the dark, its light under his feet.

  Annie knocked timidly and let herself in. Gabriel was in the breathless diwan, stretched out, half asleep.

  “Are you sick?” she asked, standing over him.

  “Could be.” He wasn’t quite sure when he had last seen her, given the weeks were passing in a muddle of slothful days and wretched nights.

  “You haven’t been to work in ages. They asked me about you. I’ve tried to ring, but you won’t pick up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You had me worried.”

  Gabriel kicked out his legs and sat up, leaning back against cushions.

  Annie sat beside him, her feet tucked under her rump on the edge of the mattress. “Have you been eating?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you’re planning to stay, you need to go back to work. We can’t support you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What I mean is, we won’t be here. To help.”

  He forced his eyes to focus on her. The mist was clearing.

  “We’re leaving,” she said. “Rolf wants the baby to be born in Switzerland, where I’ll be closer to Mam and Dad.”

  “Baby?” His voice thickened. “Annie—” Her smile lit up the inside of his head. He reached out to her. “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She bit her bottom lip as if to stop the grin spreading too far.

  “God, that’s excellent. Fecking brilliant! Congratulations! That’s just so . . .” Suddenly overcome, he started to weep.

  “Don’t,” she said, touching his face. “We’ve done enough crying. I was so completely convinced it was never going to happen, until—”

  “No way,” he said, regaining composure. “Don’t put this down to Bahla.”

  “Something unblocked that day. I felt it, Gabe.”

  He smiled. “Okay. Whatever. Who cares?”

  She nodded. All giddy.

  Who is this beautiful, delighted woman, he wondered, and where has she been all this time? “So, umm, you’re off?”

  “Rolf’s contract is up in July. He won’t be renewing. I’ll leave in a few weeks. End of May, maybe.”

  “So you needn’t have bothered making that whole move out to the villa.”

  “Oh, I think we did.” She glanced around. “This place is stagnant. Made me stagnant. Anyway, now we want to be where we want to be and do what we want to do.”

  “Rolf is finally going to paint?”

  “Yup.” She widened her cheerful eyes. “No more plant machinery!”

  Gabriel wanted to say, That’s excellent. Bloody great. But another slice of his heart was being chipped off as she sat there, glowing.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Gabriel. You can leave too. You’ve been skittering about in that stupid job long enough. It’s time you got back to the real world.”
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  “Wherever that is.”

  “You could come to Europe with us. Work in France. Play again.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  Her expression stiffened and her shoulders suddenly seemed pointed. “Not because of that woman? Or that spell, I should say—because that’s all she is, Gabriel. Some apparition you’ve conjured up.”

  “And this from the woman who believes she conceived as a result of sihr?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  Looking around again, Annie said, “This place is disgusting.”

  “Yeah, my poltergeist cleaning lady is really letting things go.”

  “Is she here? Now?” She said it warily, as if there might be another person in the room.

  He fell back on the cushions. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “What? But . . . that’s good.”

  He turned his sadness on her, though it threw no shade on the deep contentment that poured from all her features. “If you say so.”

  Annie got up and wandered up and down, stopping in a shaft of light, where dust particles sparkled. “The air is dustier than usual. Dead. It’s as if no one moves or breathes in this house.” She looked over at him. “You absolutely must leave with us. At best that woman was a trickster. At worst, a devil. A shaytan.”

  “The devil was in me in Ireland, Annie.”

  “I know.”

  She stood; he lay; the air didn’t move.

  “So?”

  “. . . There was an ambulance,” he said. “Lights. Flashing. Outside—no ambulance. Inside, lights. Flashing. There. Gone. There.”

  Annie kneeled in front of him. “Ambulance?”

  “Flashing.”

  “Where?”

  “Nowhere. That’s the thing.”

  For the first time in months, his sister properly looked at him. “You’re not well. You probably haven’t been well for . . . maybe for a long time. Which is good. What you did,” she looked to the side, talking to herself, comforting herself, “that would have been diminished responsibility. It explains everything.” She took his hand. “You must come with us and be treated, made well again. There’s no need to live in exile like this.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You have to! The authorities will throw you out.”

  “I’ll get around that.”

  “Come to Switzerland. This child, Gabriel, this baby is going to fix things. Make us all better. Mam sounds like a different person alr—”

  “I have to be here. She’ll come back.”

  Annie stood up. “This really isn’t what I want to talk about right now!” And just as swiftly she softened again. “Why did she leave, anyway?”

  “You see, I tried to . . .” Gabriel stared at his bare feet “. . . remove her. Called her bluff, and she called mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He wondered about telling her; he even wondered if Annie was really there and if he was actually lying in the diwan or only thought he was. He spent his days and nights wondering.

  Prudence had said, the night after the blue lights, when he was in the kitchen and she was standing in the doorway, that she would be going now. She had never said that before.

  “We’ll go together,” he insisted.

  She had leaned against the doorjamb, watching him. I love you, she said, whoever you are, but I’m better now. Thank you for being here.

  As she turned to go, he lurched toward her and grabbed her wrist. “Yes, let’s do that. Let’s leave. But where shall we go, Prudence?”

  Not together, she said, wincing.

  He was hurting her and didn’t care. “It’s late. There’s no one about. We’ll walk by the sea.”

  No.

  “You want to see the sea, don’t you? I’ll take you. I’ll take you right now.”

  No. Her voice had rumbled then, reached into his chest like a quake deep in the earth. It frightened him, but when he tightened his hold, Prudence whipped, lashed, spun out of his grasp, and made across the room. He lurched again, got hold of her elbow, but she fought dirty, scratching, spitting, a cat gone wild. Still, he managed to pick her up, though the twisting creature he carried was no longer a beautiful woman, erotic and supine, but an evil grunting thing with foul breath, and when, near the threshold, he reached for the door handle, he was suddenly overcome, knocked down by a cacophony of voices—his father’s, his mother’s, his aunts’, even his brother’s—and a hologram of faces, all of them hissing at him, cursing and berating him, and he wished it was Max in his arms, that he might carry him away from the place in which he had left him, but the clatter of condemnation grew louder until he pulled his arms around his head and begged them for quiet.

  By the time they fell silent, Prudence had slithered away, like water into a drain, steam into the air.

  Since then, he had tried to conjure up an alternative departure—Prudence walking out of the door with a fond farewell and a backward glance, as lovers do—and he could almost see it, just as he had almost heard the scrape of stockings and the sea moaning and the rain falling on broad green leaves.

  All imagined, perhaps. All imagined.

  Annie was still there, seated right by him. “Come with me, Gabriel. Please. This is over now.”

  II

  Into Temptation

  Red double-deckers crossing the bridge in the post-dawn gloom; palm trees and minarets; low white buildings in mud-brick enclosures, and the river, lazy blue in the early light. . . . Thea stepped onto the balcony, into the cool morning air. How peculiar, she thought, that this should be her first sight of the East: London buses.

  Rush-hour in Baghdad.

  Reggie, her new boss, had unruly light brown hair and a shaggy beard to match, and had seemed on first impression to be genial, a bon vivant Englishman who loved Iraq. When he had picked her up at the airport the night before, he had told her that, jetlag notwithstanding, she would have to be in the lobby at ten to seven the following morning.

  “Because of the intense heat in the summertime,” he had explained, “everyone starts work at seven and finishes at three.”

  But this was not the summer: it was cold and still dark when her breakfast was brought by a young waiter wearing a gray jacket and white gloves. Hotel living had its advantages, she would discover, such as breakfast in bed every day, which was just as well, since her team was likely to be there for some time. The company intended to find apartments for them, but nothing happened fast in Iraq, Reggie had warned her, and finding suitable accommodation would be a laborious process, so this dim hotel bedroom, with its narrow windows (to keep out the heat) and the balcony shaded by another balcony overhead (to keep out the heat), with its single beds and limited leg-space, was home for the foreseeable future.

  She made it to the lobby before seven and met up with the rest of her cadre—Kim, an American girl who had been living in London, and an English surveyor, Geoffrey. They set off in a jeep to drive the short distance to the office. Kim was slim, pretty—blond hair in a tight curly perm, light brown eyes—and lively. So lively, and unspeakably chatty at that ungodly hour. She had been in Baghdad for a month and liked it, she said, but she longed to get out of the hotel and into proper housing. “I feel as if I’m passing through, you know? Like a tourist. Not someone who’s going to be living here for a few years.”

  Thea found it difficult to look out without being rude, but she wanted to see the city rather than hear about it, especially since Baghdad was standing there, like a debutante in her ball gown, waiting to be noticed and admired.

  Or pitied. The war was on every corner. Sandbags, piled high, concealed the soldiers but not the barrels of their protruding guns. Thea was more interested than alarmed, which was curious, since it was alarming—the Iranians might invade and then she’d be done for, caught, trapped, unable to get home, but what of it? She had made the decision to come; she had arrived. If the war should go badly for Saddam Hu
ssein, there was nothing she could do about it now. Saddam was everywhere: posters, flyers, graffiti, photos dangling in the rear windows of cars. The cult of personality was doing its work. No space in Iraq could be left bare of his image.

  The first thing she noticed about their otherwise unremarkable office building was the cold. It was freezing. There was no heating, even in the middle of winter, and that, Thea realized too late, was why Kim and Geoffrey looked conspicuously bulky. “Layers,” Kim explained. “It’s the only way to keep warm.”

  “Jayzus, I only brought a couple of sweaters. I never imagined it could be so cold.”

  “Me too. They should have warned us.”

  Their offices, on the fifth floor at the top of the building, were bright and a little chaotic—the desks sprinkled around large rooms in no particular order. Thea’s desk was a wobbly table pressed against the wall beside a ceiling-high set of shelves. Her typewriter was electric, but only just: it was old and clunky, in contrast to the nippy, whispering golf-ball IBM she had used in Dublin. Her work was undemanding—typing reports and correspondence, filing, sending the occasional telex. Brainless stuff, but brainless stuff in stimulating surroundings. Reggie took her around, introducing her to their Iraqi colleagues; the women wore navy suits, mostly, and had come into work gripping their black abayas, pulled over their heads and clutched with one hand at their chests. The men were quite slight in build, had sharper features, and all wore the mean Saddam mustache, without which they would have invited suspicion. They were all professionals—architects and engineers—and, although welcoming, only a handful had enough English to make any degree of communication possible.