One afternoon Annie called over, and sat on the rampart of the roof with him, the sea breeze ruffling her spiky hair.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Still not pregnant. How’s your stomach?”
“Still rumbly.”
“I hope you kept yourself hydrated.”
“I kept myself hydrated.”
Prudence stepped out of the house and moved to another corner of the roof.
Annie did not react, not in any flickering way Gabriel could detect. Instead she looked at her toes, dusty in her sandals. “I’m getting desperate, Gabriel. Rolf is pushing forty.”
“Yeah, but you’re only twenty-eight. You’ve loads of time,” he said, unsettled by her desperation, since he could do nothing about it. “And there are so many likely causes right now. You’re stressed and unhappy, but it will happen.”
“I wish I had the luxury of that kind of certainty.”
“Putting pressure on yourself isn’t going to help, is it?” Gabriel glanced sideways at Prudence, willing her to go away. This was family stuff, private.
“How can I not stress about it?” Annie’s eyes were brimming. “Rolf longs for a family and it just . . . it isn’t happening and I’m worn out with all the trying, and the disappointment that comes back every time. It’s crushing. I’m even sick of having sex!”
Gabriel flinched. Prudence was sitting on a low wall, her face to the sun, well within earshot. He hadn’t given the logistics of her mysterious comings and goings much thought—how she got in and out of the house, that kind of thing—because he didn’t care, but Annie would never speak of something so personal in front of a stranger. So either she knew Prudence, very well, or she was genuinely oblivious of her presence.
“Sometimes I worry that our marriage won’t survive the strain,” Annie went on, staring straight past Prudence.
There were limits even to Gabriel’s skepticism.
He had to find out more about jinn.
Chocolate-colored mountains rimmed Muscat—a wall encasing him. His own chosen prison wall. Sea on one side, mountains on the other. Beyond, he knew, was desert. Space. Anonymity. He would see it soon. These arrogant hills would not contain him for long. In the desert, he might find his real thoughts, the ones concealed by the disdain of others. There, he might shake off the weight of shame and meet himself. Find the person who had destroyed his own brother. Even discover the why of it. Envy, they said. In Cork, it was widely peddled that Gabriel had resented Max’s success, modest though it was, which he had achieved by overcoming mediocrity with sheer hard work, while Gabriel let his talent dribble away, boozing and fucking. That was what they said, what even his parents thought, though they would not have used those terms, and it was true that beneath the blasé veneer, Gabriel did care about his so-called gift. Of course he did. He cared that he had ditched it when still too young to value it. So perhaps he had wanted to make Max pay. How else to explain what he had done, three days before the wedding? Under the broad blue sky of the desert, in solitude and silence, he might find out what had sparked that one warped, thwarted idea, so ghastly to him now that he hesitated to look over his shoulder in case it was right behind him. Like a devil on his back. It was a devil—something nobody could look at, face on. His own sister seemed wary of being alone with him in case it popped up, joined them, his disgusting idea. We all have them, he wanted to say, we all have putrid imaginings, beyond our control. The difference was that he, and some others, had carried it out. Perhaps, in the wilderness, he would have a biblical encounter with himself and slay his own sins, like Jesus had done.
He snorted. Where was this religious stuff coming from?
Abid, their driver, was a tall man with a thin mustache and a glint in his eyes. He glanced over, smiling and curious, while he drove. He had offered to take him out for the day. Annie had probably engineered it, concerned that Gabriel was becoming too reclusive, so now they were on the Nakhal road, heading into the grooves of landscape.
“Nakhal is a nice place,” Abid told him. “The fort is two hundred and fifty years old. It is built on a big rock, to keep them safe.”
There were forts in a state of collapse everywhere. On every excuse for a hill, there stood at least one tower, looking all around over the humps of its own ruins.
“One of the ways they pushed back the enemy,” Abid gesticulated, “at Nakhal is—they poured down boiling date honey over them.”
“Agh, Jesus!” Gabriel grimaced. “Talk about sweet torture.”
Nakhal was surrounded by an ocean of date palms, fed by the falaj, Abid explained—an ancient irrigation system of channels bringing water from al-Hajar. The fort curled around its own rock base, like a creeper climbing a tree, until the main tower sat up on its perch with a 360-degree view of al-Batinah Plain on one side and al-Hajar Mountains on the other. A purple cloud had gathered over their peaks.
“It will rain,” Abid said, frowning.
“Have we time to check out the hot springs before it does?”
“Of course. Yes.”
Down by the river, Gabriel pulled on his trunks and fell backward into the water. His body exulted. He was getting used to the contrasts in this country—the way crevassed slopes of gray rock were suddenly interrupted by a bulge of green, and blinding white gravel riverbeds invariably led toward a suburb of Paradise hidden in an S-bend.
Abid sat on the bank, munching hard-boiled eggs and bread. It took only one prompt from Gabriel: “My sister has been trying to explain to me about jinn,” he said, lying in the shallows, and Abid was off, one story hurrying after another, flowing out in his imperfect English.
“There is a house in Muttrah,” he began, “a house like any other, where no one lives any more. The family
