by Denyse Woods
“Very.”
Gabriel sat down, right there, in the lee of the tent. Even if one of the drivers came past on the way to the drivers’ tent, he was well concealed in the shadow, out of the moon’s sights.
“I have a terrible confession to make.” Thea’s voice was close. She was right next to him, separated only by the coarse fabric of the tent.
“Bring it on!”
“Well, my first crush was . . .”
“Was?”
“The Archangel Gabriel!” They hooted with laughter. “Seriously,” Thea hissed. “When I was little I actually fancied an angel. My little Catholic self was attracted to this shining white knight whom God adored.”
“Beware of shining knights,” said Kim. “I’ve had a few of those myself. Ex-husbands, I call them.”
“I can’t believe you’ve accumulated two already. You were quite prim when I knew you.”
“And should have remained so, clearly!” They laughed again, and Kim said, “Nah, seems I’m not cut out for monogamy.”
“Is anyone?”
“You, maybe?”
“I’ll let you know at my funeral.”
Gabriel ran his fingers through the cold sand, entertained but hungry, and he was about to sneak away to get dinner, when Thea said, “About Gabriel, Kim. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“He is . . . familiar.”
A jerking movement. “Are you kidding me?” Kim hissed. “You tell me this now?”
“Shush!”
“So you think you have met him?”
“I know I haven’t,” said Thea. “That’s the thing. But it keeps coming at me, this sense of familiarity, but then I look at him and there’s no recognition. Nothing.”
Gabriel struggled to keep his breathing in check.
“Maybe he looks like someone you know.”
“No, that’s not it.”
A voice called a name, over at the hub, but the camp was otherwise quiet. No music or generators. Gabriel had to be very, very still.
“He actually reminds me of someone I . . . never knew.”
“I’m getting a little confused here. You’re beginning to sound like him.”
Thea sighed. “I should tell you about those months after Baghdad.”
“That seems like a very good idea. Kill time before dinner.”
Gabriel was aware of Thea moving, rolling onto her side perhaps. “My parents didn’t really get it,” she began, in a quiet, flat voice. “The low. The disappointment. They were so relieved that I was home safe, they thought I’d be fine alone all day, as long as they left me teabags and Cup-a-Soup.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. So Dad’s sister Brona, a redoubtable old biddy if ever there was one, swept me up and carried me off to the wilderness. . . .”
Her voice, right by his ear, almost lulled Gabriel into a trance with her talk of Sheep’s Head—a moody, gutsy narrow strip of land poking the ocean—so easily remembered, and even the aunt, living alone on her widow’s pension, growing vegetables, might have been one of his own.
“Every day I’d wake up surrounded by mountains and ocean. The sky and the sea changed hour to hour. Brona said the Atlantic would heal me, and it did. The sound of it mostly, at night and in the morning, that roaring, gurgling gush, muted by the walls, though at other times it was as calm as sleep—this vast body of water making not the slightest noise.
“Anyway, I was driving myself mad with thoughts of Sachiv, trying to capture him, brand myself with every detail, every exchange between us, and Brona told me to stop. You know, to stop obsessing about it, and to let Sheep’s Head do its work. She even told me to fantasize—seriously. Fantasizing, she insisted, was a form of meditation. ‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Make up a nice place, a beautiful place, and go there, pretend to live there, until real life needs you back.’ Totally barmy.”
“Oh, no,” Kim said gently. “No, I love that. Isn’t it what we all do when we’re sad?”
“When another morning came,” Thea went on, “with that dragging heartache still in my belly, I decided to give it a go, so I looked around inside my head to see what I might find. After a bit of practice, I discovered a bright, light country within reach. Perhaps it had always been there, waiting for me to push open the door and step in, or perhaps I created it only then. Either way, from then on, during my morning lie-in and my long afternoon nap, I went off to a place that was neither Ireland nor Iraq, but which had an excellent climate and warm seas, and where, for good measure,” she added, with a chuckle, “I had a besotted unmarried lover, whose eyes and hands were always where I wanted them to be. He was handsome, but not flawless, warm but edgy, giving but impenetrable.”
“Sounds like the kind of man I need.”
“It was amazingly effective. Increasingly, in spite of myself, I’d feel myself tumbling into that nowhere place, into the calm of being with a person who didn’t exist and couldn’t hurt me. It was the distraction that worked. Not having to think or fret. It stopped me wondering about what you were doing, right then, in Baghdad, or if I’d ever see Sachiv again. In that white, easy place, everything suited me. My stranger suffered with love for me, came and went, according to my whim, and, it goes without saying, made passionate love to me on a regular basis. Naturally, I became very attached to him!”
Their shared guffaw made Gabriel smile, but he could barely absorb what he was hearing.
“What you’re talking about right there,” said Kim, “is crea-tive visualization.”
“That makes it sounds less ridiculous, I suppose. Anyway, that’s where I hid, what I did, during my convalescence, having pretend sex and pretend love in a pretend place, while my aunt brought me apples and water, and outside the ocean had a busy day, or a temperate one.”
Apples and water. Apples and water. Apples and water.
“Sounds good to me.”
“But there was something about that house, Kim, and the woman who lived there. Often, I couldn’t quite see the sea or feel the cold or smell the damp. There were times when I wasn’t there at all, not really—and Brona understood that, but I never did. Never have.”
“And you probably shouldn’t try to.”
“Ha. Says she who is going all out trying to get a handle on jinn.”
“What did you call him,” Kim asked, “this lover?”
“I can’t remember. I’m not even sure he had a name. He didn’t need one.”
“A virtual lover—long before the internet.”
“And so real,” Thea said, more quietly, “that I remember him now the way I remember people I knew. Sometimes I even forget that it was not an actual relationship that I had way back when. So you could say he did exist, because I made him exist.”
“Was he not Sachiv, really?”
“That would have defeated the purpose. I can’t really say what he looked like, my rebound guy, except that . . . you’re going to think me bonkers.”
“I already do, hon.”
“He had Gabriel’s mannerisms, Kim. Gabriel’s . . . presence.”
Had a prowling leopard come at him at that moment, Gabriel could not have moved.
Inside the tent, with a sudden jerk, Kim seemed to be on her feet. “What are you saying? That Gabriel is, like, imagi-nation made flesh? And isn’t that what he’s been saying to you?”
“I hope not. I hope we’re not saying the same thing.”
“I mean,” Kim was excited, talking fast, “that would be like, well, as if your daydream became his reality.”
“Put that in your Dictaphone and see if it swallows it.”
An enclosure fenced off by dead branches housed a small brick kitchen, a room with tables and chairs that looked like a low-grade cafeteria, and a broad dining area with low square tables. Kim and Thea were having dinner there, sitting cross-legged on cushions, when Gabriel headed across to them.
“Is she still alive, your aunt?” Kim was asking, as he approached.
/> “No.”
“You must miss her.”
“I do, but we had that time, the two of us. Seven, eight weeks. I arrived thinking my life was over, and when I left, Alex was waiting with a bouquet in one hand and my future in the other.”
“Evening, ladies.”
Kim, chewing, gave Thea a look, then said to him, “Gabriel. Are you attached to us by an invisible string?”
“They’ve sent me over to get ‘Abid’s wives.’ There’s going to be music and stuff by the fire.”
Kim waved her fork around the compound. “Isn’t it rather quiet for high season?”
“There’s been torrential rain in Muscat. Lots of tours didn’t get out.”
With a great dash of incongruity, one of the staff came from the kitchen carrying an almost fluorescent cake, with garish orange and pink icing, and placed it before one of the guests, who hooted with surprise, as her friends started singing “Happy Birthday.”
“Oh, God,” said Thea. “We’re in Butlins.”
Soon after, carrying coffee and halva, she and Kim joined the circle around the fire, where cake was being handed around on paper plates and a hunched Bedouin woman was offering embroidery for sale. A joint of dead tree was thrown on the flames, as a couple of drivers started singing and clapping, and another played the lute. Gabriel went to the 4x4 to get his own instrument, then sat some way behind Thea. When he started to play, she turned in surprise and for a moment watched his fingers moving along the tiny frets of his ukulele, while its unlikely notes found their place with the clapping and the lute and the rhythms of the desert.
But when Abid came out of the gloom and leaned over Kim’s shoulder to speak to her, she and Thea immediately got up and went to the back of the enclosure, where other drivers and guides had gathered around a table.
Compelled to follow, Gabriel elbowed between Thea and Abid. “Was the music that bad?” he asked, taking a tumbler of whiskey from one of the guides.
“Jinn stories,” Thea replied, nodding at Kim. “She’s very taken with the notion.”
Abid was explaining to Kim that Omar, one of the younger guides who was sitting beside her, had been talking about the good jinn who had helped with the family business but had also made him quarrelsome. Kim placed her recorder on the table.
“The jinniya brought him many new customers,” Abid went on, “and also a temper. Bad temper.”
The others baited and teased poor Omar, who laughed, demonstrating no sign of bad temper.
Over at the fire, guests were retreating in clumps to their tents, but around the gas light on the guides’ table, the mood settled and the conversation flourished, plump with stories. Kim’s eyes moved from speaker to speaker, soaking it all up.
Jamil, he of the excellent diction, began another oft-told story. “There was a man who had a big date plantation, and one night he was going to water the plantation, when he felt something jumping on his back. A jinniya. And this one, she was very attracted to strong men. He said: ‘I hope you can hold on properly or you’ll fall down.’ When she wouldn’t let go, he went to a date tree and rubbed against it. She screamed, ‘Stop, stop!’
“But he said, ‘I’m not going to stop unless you tell me what caused you to jump on my back.’
“She said, ‘I’m in love with you. I want you. I’ll do anything for you.’
“He told her, ‘If you are like that, you know I’m married.’
“‘Yes, I know.’
“‘And you know I have kids.’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you show me your face,’ because jinn,” Jamil explained to Kim, “if they want something, they will show themselves as they are. And she did.”
“They show themselves if they want something bad enough,” she repeated, with a cool glance at Gabriel. “I see.”
“That man,” Jamil went on, “never had seen a beautiful woman like that ever in his life, so she started telling him, ‘My father he brought six jinni for me, but I want to marry a human, a strong man, so I will take you to our world and introduce you to our father. Only problem is fear,’ she said. ‘If you have fear, you might not make it, but so far you are the bravest man I’ve ever seen.’ So they agreed she would take him there, to see what would happen.
“Then he went home, slept with his wife, washed and all that, and came back to the plantation. When he’s going there, to her world, all he feels is a lot of strange people coming close to him. He wonders, what the hell? But they’re her brothers, and then he can see a huge light coming through, and it’s her.
“She took him deep into the jinn world, where he met her father and it was agreed, so he married her. He have a place for her and he have his wife as well. These jinn, they give him huge wealth and he never had to water his plantation again—it was done for him every day—and they’re having a fantastic life, but the problem usually comes when the husband dies. Recognition is a huge problem. But this time his human family, because they had seen great things, like wealth and no one getting sick, they recognized his jinn family and all stayed together in that place.”
“Oh, good,” said Kim. “I do like a happy ending.”
Malik, a young driver, then urged Gabriel to tell everyone of his experience, a story Gabriel also knew well. Thea seemed entranced, so he delivered. “Malik,” he began, his eyes on hers, “had a bad experience last year. Not long after his grandfather died, he became immobilized. He couldn’t move from his bed, and at one point he couldn’t even speak. His family tried everything—doctors, medication, but finally they called in a sorcerer, who said his grandfather had had a bad jinn, which had not been able to trouble him—”
“Because he was a strong person, his grandfather,” Abid explained.
“—but it transferred itself to Malik, where it could do more damage, because he’s young and impressionable. But the sorcerer told them what to do to get rid of the evil jinn and,” he looked at Malik, “it worked, yeah?”
Malik nodded. “Much better.”
“I don’t get it,” said Kim. “I thought jinn were beings in a parallel world?”
“They can be within as well as without,” Gabriel explained. “Some people believe jinn can take over your body, fight over your soul, that kind of thing.”
“Who usually wins?”
“Generally, the host will undergo an exorcism, as in Christianity.”
“And you believe all this stuff?”
“It isn’t for me to say.”
“Honestly?” Kim eyeballed him. “You have no view?”
“It’s part of my surroundings, and if you live any place long enough, you absorb it and it absorbs you. It’s a question of respect. Anytime someone back home told me they’d seen a ghost or that some building was haunted, I respected that. Same here.”
“Have you ever seen any jinn yourself?” she asked.
“Not as far as I know.”
Abid chortled at his friends, slapping Gabriel across the shoulders.
“So who was she then, your lover?” Kim asked, across the table.
“Kim,” said Thea. “That’s private.”
“It really isn’t,” he said to her. “Everyone has their own jinn story.” He turned back to Kim. “In my view, she was flesh and blood.”
“But why does everyone else say she was a jinn?”
“Your driver talks too much,” he said, and made an affectionate dig at Abid in Arabic. “She knew how to get into my house and how to leave it unnoticed, that’s all.”
“Maybe she existed in a parallel universe,” Kim said, with a glance at Thea.
“Ah, the dark-matter theory.” He nodded. “Yes, jinn do have features in common with that theory.”
“What are you two on about?” Thea asked.
“The multi-verse concept,” Kim said, making space for a solitary South African, who had come to join them. “Your aunt knew about it. She was a woman ahead of her time, because now some scientists believe that ours might not be
the only universe, so it isn’t unique—therefore not a uni- but a multi-verse, so there could be another universe going on, just here, within a centimeter of us, but because we’re restricted to so few dimensions, we can’t see what might be there.”
“Like jinn,” said Abid. “You see? Science has proved it.”
“But I have her shirt,” Gabriel said, “and that is very much within this universe, whether it be multi, twinned or otherwise.”
Kim’s shoulders sagged. “Really?”
Abid shook his head at Gabriel. “She melted away from you. You told me this.”
“What about the shared-consciousness concept?” Kim persisted. “You know, that we own our bodies and brains, but not our minds, which are part of a universal consciousness, and we can dip in and out of it, go anywhere. Maybe you were dipping into your own future.”
Gabriel heard Thea groan. No doubt she would have liked her friend to be more subtle in her pursuit of him, but worse than that, Kim had also managed to exclude the drivers, to interrupt the flow of their stories, the catching up and sharing of news that was often their relaxation at the end of a long day’s driving.
Somewhat off the point, but to the relief of most, the South African stepped into the lull. “You know Wilfred Thesiger?” he asked, in tight, rigid English.
“Ya, ya, of course,” said Jamil. “He was a friend of Oman. In fact, one of the elders from my tribe saved his life when he was in the desert. Some young men wanted to kill Thesiger, but an old man of the tribe, he asked them what would they achieve? And the guys said, ‘We will show that we are greater than the Englishman.’
“And the old man replied, ‘No, if you kill him—one guy doing no harm—you will show yourselves to be smaller than the Englishman.’”
“But this is in the book!” said the South African, taking a well-worn paperback of Arabian Sands from his knapsack. “This very story is in here!”
Jamil shrugged, as if to say, Well, obviously.
Malik asked to see the book.
“Last year,” Jamil said to Thea, “I took a TV crew from Brazil across the Empty Quarter, the same way Thesiger went, but even with GPS,” he laughed, “we got lost!”
The drivers leaned over the book, discussing the various camels in the photographs, nodding and talking, until an argument broke out about which tribes had escorted Thesiger across the Empty Quarter. Voices were raised; eyes flashed.