In the empty house, he sat in the dim light of an inadequate lamp and waited.
He had left the front door unlocked when he went to bed, then lay, listening, and staring across the darkness toward the doorway.
He didn’t see her come. When the mattress dipped by his hips, his eyes struggled to fix on her outline, but her warmth spread over to him like a low mist. He found her wrist and gripped it in an uncompromising hold. “How much are they paying you?”
It was the first of many questions; she answered none.
And yet she lay like this in a stranger’s bed. . . . What were the limits, he wondered, and the rules? What would she allow? With a restraint just short of painful, he contained the urge to make love to her, because he would have done so with neither tenderness nor affection, only with the desperation that had festered over months of enforced celibacy. In all that time he had enjoyed not one shared spasm of pleasure, no intimate release, and yet turned on, again, at last, by the woman lying alongside him, he managed to hold back.
The drip-drop of conversation became as tantalizing, over the next few days, as her body. It wasn’t that she didn’t speak—she did, in short, neat sentences, although when he thought about it after she’d left, he was aware more of her having spoken than of having heard her voice. There was no substance to any of it. She answered questions with questions and spoke in vague terms about little of consequence, which explained nothing about anything. She was there and that was all; she didn’t know much else. Not even her own name. Apparently.
When he said one day, “They say you might be a jinn,” she put her hand on his thigh. This was more dangerous than ice on the roads. If someone was trying to frame him, this was the way to go: one accusation of rape or assault and he’d never see the light of day again. But even that didn’t stand up. His family hated him, for sure, but not forever. They couldn’t wish to have him jailed for a long spell in some distant outpost.
“Why do you keep coming here?”
She needed to be away from somewhere else, she said.
“Like me,” he muttered.
She could hear the sea, she said.
“Not possible.” He ran the backs of his fingers along her neck. “The sea is as languid as jelly out there.”
Her eyes lost focus, as if she were listening to something on a frequency unavailable to him, and she insisted that she could hear the sea.
“I wish I could.” A snapshot of the Irish coast followed the thought—the white of the Atlantic throwing itself against the last rocks of Ireland. “I remember standing on a walkway near Mizen Head when I was a kid, near the lighthouse there. A small bridge crossed a gully and we’d been told—me and my brother and sister—that you could see seals frolicking in the surf far below so, heads hanging over the railings, we watched and watched, the waves breaking up in this gash in the rocks, sending up bubbles of foam, until finally we saw a flash of silvery brown slithering around down there. The sea was throwing itself about, deadly dangerous, but the seal was having a lark, diving into the gush of nasty-looking waves, like a kid in snow.”
Don’t talk, she said. Listen.
Gabriel held himself still, eyes closed, until he heard in the far-off faraway the sound of the sea battering his island.
He woke alone. He could barely move, such was the depth of the sleep from which he was emerging, as if he was swimming up from the fathoms. He hadn’t slept so well since the last time he’d got drunk.
He had thought she meant to seduce him; instead, she had brought him sleep. Solid, fretless sleep.
In the wake of a dream about home, he had the impression that he had just walked from one room into another—from their family room in Cork to this bare bedroom in Muscat. His mother was right there, beyond his reach yet still close, still loving, as she had been in the dream. Restored by one good night, Gabriel allowed himself to think about his mother. He was able now to look into her face, the face that had turned to him when he had arrived home that morning, disoriented, inebriated, and found her sitting at the table against the wall, one elbow leaning on the patterned plastic tablecloth, her quilted robe buttoned to the neck. Her eyes had been hanging on something he couldn’t see, because he did not yet know. Fearing his father had died, he asked her what was the matter, and she had lifted her eyes and tried, but failed, to say his name.
The family room—with its aging green couch and brown-tiled fireplace, and a large television in the corner with a plant on top, the fronds of which were pushed sideways, like a comb-over, to stop them flowing across the screen—that room had been the hearth of his life. There, on the day of his Confirmation, spruced up in his school uniform, he had retreated to watch television, until his mother had scolded him for not playing with his cousins. There, he had lost his virginity, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, when his parents were at the pub and his girlfriend’s body was hot along one side where the flames had warmed her skin. There, his home had dissolved forever when he returned hung-over from his pals’ flat and found his mother destroyed. “In God’s name,” she had said, “what have you done?”
Later that day, in the same room, his father had pushed him, shaken him, shouted until Gabriel
