Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  “What about that stuff in your aunt’s house? Being there but not being there. That feeling of heat . . .”

  “Kim, stop! God, you are so suggestible!”

  “Just sayin’.” Kim raised her hands. “Did you know that three-quarters of Americans believe in angels?”

  “Does that include you?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Look. Enough. Let’s avoid all spooks and eat here in the room.”

  “I can’t. I have to work—check out the suq, eateries—and besides,” Kim swung from one bed to the other, “we can’t give up on Gabriel now, right when we’re getting to the heart of this thing.”

  “He said he’s never spoken about it before. There’s no chance he’ll speak to you.”

  “No, but I have to get this story out of him!”

  “But it’s sordid! He buries his brother in a piano, runs away to Arabia, and starts having sex with an invisible woman!”

  “Oh, wow—that’s the blurb right there. I can see it on the back of my book.”

  “Kim. Get a grip.”

  “But it’s fantastic. You could—”

  “You cannot go writing about this.”

  “Why not? I’m an investigative journalist.”

  “You write travel articles!”

  “Not for much longer.” Kim got up, thinking, thinking.

  “It’s Gabriel’s story to tell. Not yours.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do—let him tell his story. Over dinner. He’ll say anything to you, with a bit of prompting. I’ll be a mildly interested party, tuning in.”

  “Taking notes, you mean.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Thea shook her head. “You want me to set him up?”

  “You were cursing him a minute ago. Now you’re protecting him.”

  Thea’s phone beeped. She opened the text from Alex: All home n having dinner in front of telly. Boys good. Me too. How you? V cold here, so enjoy! Thea stared at his words. The humdrum of marriage, the predictability, the rituals and routines were dull, dull, dull, perhaps, but also comforting, enhancing; thrilling in their intimacy. And yet, when an unknown person, an undeniably odd person, had crossed her path, she had allowed herself to be sucked in and titillated.

  When she looked up again, Kim had taken out her laptop and was hammering away, her fingers like spiders scurrying across the keys. Spiders on a mission.

  They wandered, with Abid and Gabriel, through the neat, modern suq of Nizwa, among rust-colored arcades where, in brightly lit shops, they browsed through jewelry and pistols, camel sticks and incense burners. Thea strayed from the others. By remaining aloof, she was punishing Gabriel, unfairly perhaps, but he could hardly have expected sympathy. In one shop, she mindlessly tried on an old ring, so the shopkeeper started bringing out ring after silver ring and placing them on the glass counter. Many were grubby, misshapen; she tried them all.

  Gabriel’s arm came over her shoulder, offering a ring with a flat, square top. “Found it in a box at the back.”

  She loved it, wanted it.

  “Let me get it for you.”

  “Absolutely not.” She parted with her cash as a warning to him.

  “Quite right. Et dona ferentes. Beware Greeks bearing gifts.”

  “You aren’t Greek.”

  Elsewhere, he pulled out a musket with silver inlay and a long, thin barrel. “And this for your husband, perhaps?”

  “Thank you, but he won’t ever need such a thing.”

  They ate somewhere. A spartan place with chicken on the menu and soccer on the television. Kim sat opposite Gabriel, her eyes ablaze. Outwardly, her curiosity seemed no more intrusive than when she had engaged him in banter about the paranormal, but the questions were more incisive, more adroit. She was wasted in travel, Thea thought, and Kim clearly did too.

  “So after all this time,” she asked him, “you really remain immune to the common folklore?”

  Gabriel slid his fingers down his upright fork, flipped it around and did the same again, and again. He never stopped moving, fidgeting. If his hands were still, his knees jigged. “I grew up in Ireland,” he said, “and remained immune to our common folklore.”

  “But in Ireland you never had the kind of experience you’ve had here.”

  “Who says?”

  “I . . . well,” said Kim, “I’m assuming.”

  “Assumption is dangerous.”

  Thea stared into the menu. Chicken, chicken. With rice. With roast potatoes. With couscous. On a kebab. In soup. With stuffing.

  “I suppose it has already occurred to you that your lover was neither jinniya nor real,” Kim went on, “but some illusory creation of your own making?”

  “Well,” Gabriel rested his elbows on the table, “there’s fantasy, and then there’s the real thing, if you get my drift.”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “Perhaps she was some manifestation of your inner demons?”

  The waiter came. They ordered.

  “You must have some?” Kim persisted.

  “Demons?” Gabriel handed the menus to the waiter. “Absolutely. But my demons are ugly devils, and she was—is—very beautiful.”

  He was enjoying this, Thea realized. Toying with Kim in order to flirt with her.

  Kim was not the same person Thea had known in Iraq. Neither was she anyone else. It was difficult to transpose her from the eighties in Baghdad to Oman in the twenty-first century, because then they had been young and game, starting out. Now they were slightly worn down and strangers of sorts, but it was lovely to be with Kim again and to like her still. This trip, it transpired, was a journey neither forward nor back. In the moment, they were friends again, and loyal.

  On the overhead television some soccer player with dreadlocks scored a goal and leaped about in self-congratulation. “Abid,” Thea said, without any warning to herself, “in all your years in tourism, have you ever come across a hotel manager called Sachiv Nair? We knew him in Baghdad, but he grew up in Oman, and he might have come—”

  “I knew him,” said Gabriel.

  Kim’s eyes shot to Thea and back to Gabriel.

  “You remember him, Abid,” he went on. “Worked with the Taj group.”

  Chewing, with a scrap of bread in hand, Abid raised his eyebrows.

  “Is he still here?” Kim’s voice was scratchy.

  It was as well she interceded because Thea couldn’t breathe. It was as if she had imbibed some curious potion and it was rising in her, shading her from the neck up.

  Gabriel ripped bread. “Mauritius, last I heard. But that was a few years ago.”

  “Ah, yeah,” said Abid. “Tall guy.”

  “He set up a hotel in Musandam Province,” said Gabriel. “Got married when he was based there.”

  Oh, isn’t he just having a blast of an evening? Thea thought. Kim probing, and now this, for her, a stinging whip of words.

  Kim ran her hand around the back of her neck. “He left his first wife?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “He was a widower when I first knew him.”

  Tiredness, melting into the inexplicable, made for a moulded confusion behind Thea’s sand-sore eyes. Sleep had not dislodged the dusty particles scraping the lids because there had been no sleep. She had tossed about, as had become the norm, her head buzzing. Sachiv—a widower! His children had lost their mother and the chess champion had probably never reached her potential. So sad, for all of them.

  In spite of what she had said so adamantly to Gabriel in the tent, the past was not an empty room. Not at all. Kim’s cards, when they had started arriving in the autumn, had thrown her into a reflective, restless mood. Whenever she’d managed to catch a moment’s solitude, she had taken to sitting on the bench they had placed between two apple trees on a small hill beside the house, and gazed across the sloping lawn to the wooded valley below. A slow whirring had started up in the back catalogues of her mind, a slipstream of memory p
ulling her all the way back to Baghdad. And they say you can’t go back, she thought, that time is linear, moving only in one direction, but a couple of mysterious cards written in a script that might have been his, and she was as good as there. Time wasn’t linear at all.

  One by one the postcards had got their toes across the threshold until she went rooting in the cubbyhole, that unexplored hinterland at the back of the house where they dumped everything and found nothing. There were the boxes of baby clothes, the travel cot and a set of drawers, stacked one on top of another, no longer in their chest; there were the rugs and fabrics Alex had bought in Turkey, rolled up and dusty, their swirls of Eastern glory stashed away lest their bright colors brought memories of more exotic times (Alex, after all, had traveled more than Thea); and there too were the boxes of old photos, the ones that had never earned an album, including, in a red Kodak envelope, the few she had taken in Iraq. Few, because she had thought at the time that Iraq lay mostly ahead, and only one image of Sachiv, in which he stood with Kim, in that chilly wind, with Lake Razzaza shimmering behind them.

  Sometimes Alex interrupted her musings, looking over her shoulder—“Is that al-Ukhaidir?”—and one day he came in from the garden to present her with a four-breasted berry, fuchsia pink. “A spindleberry from our tree. Isn’t it beautiful?” The spindleberry had four bulbs, like their family, and a velvety coat. Holding it between her fingertips, Thea had squeezed to see what would happen, but it was hard, tough, not easily pulped. Still, the temptation to press remained. To squeeze and see what happened.

  She had brought that spindleberry to Oman, kept it in the back pocket of her suitcase. This was their first holiday apart, although she and Alex had started out with ambitions of independence, vowing to follow their own interests and take separate trips so that they wouldn’t end up as one of those couples who were plastered together like two bricks in a wall and both wearing the same jumpers. They had never worn the same jumpers, but neither had they done much apart because, simply, they enjoyed one another’s company. In urging her to go to Muscat, to see who turned up—if only to add a bit of splash to their lives (even their close friends had been delighted with this postal intrigue)—Alex had admitted to his own restlessness. Their children, like all children, had used up much of their parents’ energy and intellect, and he wanted to adjust the balance. It had been too long since he had been sailing with his pals. He missed it, and other things too, and now that the boys were more independent, he suggested they should make an effort not to vegetate their middle years away in front of the television.

  They watched far too much television.

  Recently, he had taken to falling asleep with his hand on her hip. It was lovely, loving, but she asked him to stop. “It’s like you’re laying claim to me.”

  “You fall asleep with your toes in my groin.”

  “Only when my feet are cold. I’m using you, not owning you.”

  Maybe that was why she couldn’t sleep. She was missing the feel of Alex’s thighs on the soles of her feet. Frustrated, she threw off the sheet and stood by the window, which looked out onto the parking lot, trying to shake off the jitters in her limbs.

  Kim stirred. Not asleep yet either. “Do you believe him?”

  “Hmm? Who?”

  “Gabriel.”

  “About Sachiv? Yeah. Why not?”

  “He has an agenda. And he’s quite the fantasist, let’s face it.”

  “He’d hardly lie about a guy being widowed.”

  Kim stretched. “Maybe not about that. But Sachiv being available right now would not suit our Gabriel, so don’t get too upset over the remarriage bit.”

  “I’m not upset. Wistful, maybe.”

  “Did you ever look Sachiv up online?”

  “Course I did, and you, and Reggie, but he hasn’t left much of a trail, which is odd for a hotelier. Maybe he retired early, to be kept by his new wife.”

  “If she exists.”

  “I would have liked to see him again,” Thea admitted. “He was such a kind, generous guy—”

  “And not unattractive.”

  “And not unattractive, but I’m not unduly devastated that I missed the bus. These last months I got a bit caught up in the idea of a frantic fling, which brought on a bout of dissatisfaction, and a longing to see him again, but it’s unlikely I’d have gone through with anything if I had.”

  “So what has you staring out of the window?”

  “Insomnia.” Thea went back to bed.

  “You mean the Gabriel Effect?”

  “You don’t really think he’d tell a barefaced lie about Sachiv just to throw me off?”

  Kim was still for a moment. “I think he’s capable of lying about a lot of things. Including his brother.”

  “How so?”

  “Maybe the poor guy actually died. At the time, or later. I mean, why has Gabriel never gone back? Not once. Not even for Christmas. Isn’t it possible he’s got some questions to answer? Charges hanging over him?”

  “Fratricide? Really? You said you think he’s kind.”

  “It has nothing to do with kindness. It’s about booze. It wouldn’t be the first time a groom has inadvertently died at his own bachelor party.”

  “No,” said Thea. “No. He would say so. He’s admitted everything. If you ask me, he’s haunted by the fact that he came extremely close to exactly that outcome. He nearly killed Max, and he’ll never get away from that.”

  “I guess.”

  As her breathing evened out and deepened, Kim made no further contributions. Thea tried again to sleep, but her mind was in a spin. A whirlpool. The Gabriel Effect. Coincidence. Intersections. Supernatural chat. Something about him. About him, something. She wanted more of his deluded certainty; to taste again the way he knew her, though he did not. Even though Alex was back home, with her kids, looking after her hearth, her heart, and sending her messages of love and longing, she wanted more of Gabriel.

  But the tour was over. The finishing line—Muscat—was in sight. She had arrived with one mystery in her suitcase, those teasing postcards, and would be leaving with quite another. Unless she could get to the core of Gabriel Sherlock, she would be left to wonder forever how it was that he had heard her aunt’s nylons brushing against each other.

  Most of the now-familiar faces were at breakfast and new ones too—those parties going counter-clockwise.

  Ignoring his group and his friends, Gabriel took a seat beside Kim.

  “He looks the worse for wear,” she said, when the hot-headed Omar went past.

  Gabriel stirred his coffee. “There was a row last night.”

  “About what?”

  “The usual thing—details. An alternative route to Dhofar. Abid said he’d gone a particular way, but Omar said that wasn’t possible, you couldn’t get through that way. In fact, you can—I’ve done it myself. It goes to the coast north of Salalah and there’s a spot, miles from anywhere, a deserted bay, which is great for fishing.”

  “Fishing in the desert,” said Thea. “What a concept.”

  “Stay a bit longer and I’ll take you there.”

  “She is staying longer,” Kim said, popping pancake into her mouth. “She doesn’t go back till Tuesday. So did it end badly, this argument?”

  “Hmm? Oh, umm, yeah, in stalemate. Bedouin hate to lose face, so no one can back down. Omar categorically insisted that Abid could not possibly have done what he certainly did do.”

  When Kim went to get more coffee, Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “You’re staying on? That’s great. There are places I’d like to show you.”

  “You really think I’d go away with you after what you’ve told me?”

  He leaned forward. “Haven’t you ever done something nasty you shouldn’t have done?”

  “Not—”

  “Something like, I dunno, seducing a married man and father of three in his place of work?”

  Kim trotted behind Thea, as she strode past the gardens to their room. “What is wron
g?”

  “He knows stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “About Sachiv. His kids. Everything. Where would he have heard all that?”

  “He knew the guy!”

  Thea turned to her at their door. “He mentioned Sachiv before I ever did—yesterday morning in the camp—and just now he accused me of seducing a married man in his place of work.” She shoved the key-card into the slot.

  “Guesswork,” said Kim, as they went in. “You asked about a hotel manager from years back—it isn’t a huge leap from there to an affair, in a hotel, but he got it wrong. You didn’t seduce Sachiv, which proves Gabriel’s chancing his arm.”

  “One problem with that theory.”

  “What’s that?” Kim reached for her nightshirt and started to fold it for packing.

  Thea threw her bag onto her bed and turned to Kim, whose expression reflected the contortions of her mind.

  “Thea?”

  “There were things I didn’t tell you about Sachiv.”

  “For instance?”

  “He started coming to my room.”

  “He what?”

  Thea nodded. “After the prank calls.”

  “But—”

  “Yeah, I know, his family, his sweet wife, now dead.”

  “But you said his marriage was saved by your illness. I presumed nothing . . .”

  Thea narrowed her lips, raised her eyebrows.

  “Oh, Lord. I see.”

  “Good.”

  “How did I miss that?”

  “I made sure you did. And it was only the once.”

  “Was he . . .” Kim twisted the nightshirt around her wrist, “. . . was he on duty?”

  “On duty?”

  “I’m thinking about that suit.”

  “Suit?”

  “He looked so damned hot in that uniform. The silver tie . . .”

  Thea gaped and laughed at the same time. “You! So disapproving and—”

  “Judgmental, yeah. Well?”

  “Yes! He was on duty.”

  By lowering herself onto the bed with minimum movement, Kim asked for more.

  Thea gave in. “It was very sudden. I came in from work. He watched me pass. We didn’t speak, but there was a look of, I suppose, desperation. In my room, I sat in the dimness, thinking this would certainly break me. Every day, every week, seeing him first thing in the morning, last thing at night, knowing there was no escape, no release, and then he was there. He’d let himself in—not for the first time. We’d managed to resist once, but the second time we fell to it. Done, before conscience could intervene, before thinking could stop us. Done.”