Annie, noticing his distraction, became irritable one evening when they were having dinner in the diwan. “Gabriel, what is it with you? Even when I’m speaking to you, your eyes are jumping around and you keep wandering from room to room. You’re hardly ever still!”
“Just trying to keep track of your occasional guest.”
Annie stared. “You still think there’s someone here?”
“I know there is.”
Rolf tore up some bread. “So where is she now?”
“Excellent question.”
His sister shook her head. “You really think there’s some woman coming in and out of our house without us knowing about it?”
“Either that or you do know about it.”
“But it isn’t even possible! I mean, who is she? I’ve asked around, you know. No one knows anything about an expat on the loose, and she can’t be in Muscat on her own. She’d either have to be working or married to someone, or she’d never have got into the country.”
“I’m neither working nor married and I got in.”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy either. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t bothered!”
“Hey, don’t get miffed with me, Annie. How the fuck am I supposed to know what gives? This is your town, your house. You tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know.” She screwed up her paper napkin and threw it onto her plate.
Stalemate.
“I don’t like this,” Annie said quietly. “It’s this bloody house.”
“How do you mean?”
“There might be something here . . . a presence or . . .”
“Oh, not the jinn thing again! Look,” said Gabriel, “she didn’t come out of any bottle, all right? And if she had, it’d be pretty damn hard to get her back in again.”
“Don’t confuse jinn with pantomime genies.” Annie’s voice was still low. “People believe in them. There are loads of stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“It’s folklore.” Rolf spoke, waving his hand. “Local folklore.”
Annie shot a look at him, “It’s part of Islam,” then turned to Gabriel. “They’re in the Quran—part of the religion. It simply depends on where you’re from, doesn’t it? I mean, we have our ghosts, but Muslims don’t believe in ghosts. When they die, they go to Paradise. They don’t hang about like our lot can. Jinn, on the other hand, are around us all the time.”
“Us?”
“Yes. I mean, what about fairies? Irish folklore—the serious stuff—they’re exactly like jinn. Living alongside us. Our world and their world and never the twain shall meet, and yet they do. They cross over.”
Gabriel looked at her with a mix of astonishment and ridicule. “Fairies? Are you serious?”
“Not sprites with wings. That’s rubbish.”
“Oh, please don’t mention the Little People!”
“I’m just saying—a girl in my class in secondary school did a whole project on fairy lore and it was chilling. I didn’t sleep for two nights. It’s all the same stuff, you know.”
Rolf was lining watermelon seeds along the rim of his plate, equally spaced.
“And as for jinn, well, they’re like a third being,” Annie went on. “God made angels and jinn and humans. Angels from the air, humans from the earth, jinn from fire. But we can’t see them, unless they want us to.”
“Annie,” Gabriel said gently, “forget jinn and fairies. On the level—you haven’t asked some friend of yours to mess with my head, have you? Because I swear to Christ, if you don’t know who she is, then what’s she doing in your house?”
Annie held his eye. “Is she in the room now?”
Gabriel could see, beyond her listlessness, a longing to buy into this. “If she was, you’d see her—obviously. Like you must have done when she came down this morning and went into the kitchen while we were having breakfast.”
Still she held his eye, biting the side of her lip. “If this is some kind of joke, I want you to drop it.”
“You think I’d be up for joking?”
“Rolf,” she said, “maybe there is—”
“What, Annie? Maybe there is what?”
“Maybe this place has its own resident jinn. Some houses do. We should ask around.”
A droplet of cold sweat ran down Gabriel’s spine.
“That’s all nonsense,” said Rolf.
“Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” his wife snapped. “But lots of people don’t.”
“What people?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s part of the scenery here. Good jinn. Bad jinn.”
“Do you believe in it?”
“About as much as I believed in that ghost at O’Mahony’s farm.”
Gabriel chuckled. “God, I hadn’t thought about him in years.”
“Which ghost is this?” Rolf asked.
“Why would you be interested?” Annie retorted. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I like the stories.”
Gabriel and Annie exchanged glances. “It wasn’t so much a ghost as—”
“His foot,” said Gabriel.
Annie smiled. “On one of the landings of this old house we were sent off to every summer to learn Irish.”
“Everyone said the house was haunted,” Gabriel explained. “On certain nights, so the legend went, you could see the ghost’s foot glowing on the landing. Lots of people claimed to have seen it.”
“But you never did?” Rolf asked, with a supercilious smile. He turned to Annie. “Or you?”
“Don’t be so patronizing!”
“Ghost stories are always the same.” He shrugged. “Someone else sees something. Never the person who tells the story, the person right in front of you. Always second- or third- or tenth-hand. I have never met anyone who had this kind of experience directly.”
“Except Gabriel.”
Another drop of cold sweat slithered down Gabriel’s back.
He walked. Through Muttrah and Muscat and on up into the hills. Usually he could read Annie, because she allowed him to. He would have said that her curiosity about the woman was genuine, especially since
