Over subsequent days, it became clear that Annie’s interest was indeed sincere, though she wouldn’t let on in front of Rolf. One afternoon when she was ironing, she asked Gabriel again, with faux-nonchalance, if his jinn lady was about.
“Nope.”
“You know, jinn are often good. Sometimes they help humans.”
Behind her eyes, Gabriel could see something akin to envy, as if she suspected he had touched on something that was denied her. “They say? Who says?”
“Oh—you hear stories. Sometimes at these women’s parties I go to, the Omanis tell stories. Exactly like we do at home. It’s just a different context.”
“What kind of stories?”
“They’re all, you know, quite touching.” She laid out the sleeve of Rolf’s shirt and ironed. “There was a nice one I heard about an old man in the hills who was injured in a fall, in a gully, and ended up with his arm broken and his leg crushed, but somehow he got back to his house, outside a remote village. No one knew how he’d made it. He said he walked, but he couldn’t have—his foot was smashed—so they said that a jinn must have carried him home. Then his leg got worse. They didn’t know what to do with it—it was suppurating and gangrenous—and he was getting sicker, and after a while, the villagers stopped going to visit him. Then one night he heard a voice calling him, so he crawled to the door, where he found a pot on the step with a sort of paste in it. He rubbed it into his leg, day after day, and it started to get better. He kept applying it until his foot was healed, and that was when a jinn woman appeared and said she had been looking after him, but that he must never tell anyone.” Annie shook out the shirt, flattened another sleeve and ironed the cuff. “When the villagers saw that he was cured, they hounded him until he told them how it had happened. The jinn was very angry with him then and said he would never see her again, and he never did, but he was able to go back into the hills with his goats. So you see—a well-meaning jinn, come to save him.”
Gabriel smiled. “Pure bollocks.”
“Maybe.” She held up the shirt, gave it a shake and put its shoulders around a hanger. “Every culture finds a way to explain the inexplicable.”
“Like Rolf said—folklore.”
“Oh, you know that, do you? You’re so worldly-wise, so all-knowing, that you can dismiss it just like that? Centuries and centuries of belief?”
“Centuries and centuries of storytelling. That’s where all the Irish fables come from.”
“Be careful, Gabriel. You wouldn’t want to be so scornful about something you don’t understand.”
Sometimes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. She chose her moments; Gabriel chose to believe. He chose, also, to stay with her rather than with his sister.
The night before they moved to the new house, he told Annie he wanted to stay in Muttrah.
She was packing a suitcase, putting in the last of their belongings. “How do you mean?”
“I’ll pay the rent and hang on for a bit.”
“But why?”
“It’s central, which is handy when I don’t have transport, and you shouldn’t have to put up with me every single day.”
“I don’t mind that.”
“Really?”—
She rolled some socks one into the other. “I don’t . . . I haven’t exactly been good company, I know, or maybe as welcoming as I should have been but—”
He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve been everything you should have been, but I’m not really in the right frame of mind for lounging around the suburbs in between dinner parties and barbecues, and you need space. Us being on top of each other every hour of the day is proving counter-productive, wouldn’t you say?”
“Being on your own could also be counter-productive. Too much time to think.”
She believed, no doubt, that he thought a lot about Max and, if left alone, would do so even more as he tried to come to terms with what had happened—a laughable concept. None of them would ever come to terms with it, least of all Gabriel, and although he could have grieved for Max—that much at least, in his empty time—he did not. Even when he walked under that high, light sky, with seagulls coasting overhead and goats wandering about, even then he didn’t think much about Max any more, or of his parents, or his spoiled prospects and the prominent stain on his character. But he did want more time alone to think. To think and delight in this intriguing woman.
Annie resumed her packing, piling in clothes way beyond the capacity of the suitcase. “I suppose, if you’re going to stay for a while, it makes sense to have your own place,” she looked up, “but how long are you planning to stay?”
“A bit longer, if I can, but I don’t want to tread on your toes.”
“Don’t be stupid. I don’t own Muscat.” The suitcase lid, as she pulled it over the mound of clothes, was like a glutton’s jaw closing over a greedy mouthful. “What about money?”
They leaned on the suitcase. “I could get a job.”
“You’ll have to talk to Rolf about that. We can’t ask Rashid for too many favors.”
“Let’s sit on it.”
They sat on the case. “We’ve paid the rent until the end of next month,” said Annie, “so you might as well stay. But I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with that specter of yours.”
After they had made the final move the next day, Rolf dropped Gabriel back to Muttrah in the early evening. Walking toward his house was like walking from one world into another. He had longed for solitude these many
