Of Sea and Sand

Abid went on, “one of the sons, his little baby disappeared. Two months old. The whole village went searching, looking, until finally, when it was almost dark, a young girl heard a baby crying deep in the oasis and found him on the ground beside a tree. The son’s wife, she took her children and moved back to her mother, saying she would never again go near that place, but the husband, he stayed, until one night he woke and there was a fire burning in his room. It happened many nights—fire burning, like that. So he left also, and the jinn family stayed, undisturbed until today. Still now, nobody goes there. It is full of jinn.’

“So humans can marry jinn?”

“Yes.”

And have children, Gabriel thought, and therefore have sex.

Back in Muscat, late that night, Gabriel checked every room in the house, and the first-floor windows, before locking the front door and the door to the roof. Then he waited, more apprehensive than usual, his chest tight, his bedsheets cold and crinkling. He thought about Annie, her longing to conceive, and shivered.

He didn’t want a jinn-child roaming the earth, the issue of this beautiful creature and his mangled conscience, and he fell asleep wondering what kind of a jinn he might create—evil or good?

When he woke, Prudence was lying with him. He went downstairs—the door was still bolted from the inside. Doubts pricked at him, but not enough to stop him going back upstairs to do what they did best.

“Come out with me,” he said to her afterward. “You always speak of the sea. Let’s get a blast of sea air.”

There was no moving her. She couldn’t go from where she was, she said, and it made sense that she didn’t want to be seen around town with him. It would be all over the expat community within hours.

She had to stay, she insisted, where she could hear the sea.

“You’d hear the sea a whole lot better if you were walking beside it,” Gabriel insisted, and with a faint sense of irritation he got up and left the house before she did.

On Yiti Beach, Annie stood by the water, loose waves fussing over her feet. Marie and Jasper’s pretty daughter was playing in the sea with Thomas and Margarethe’s trio of blond babes and Rashid’s moon-eyed sons.

“Gabriel was almost washed away in a flash flood last week,” Rolf said behind her, to their gathered friends.

“Oh, you have to be so careful!” Marie was sitting in the deckchair next to Gabriel’s. “It can be dangerous. You shouldn’t go driving around the country, especially when the weather isn’t good.”

“It was fine. I was with Abid. We sat it out.”

The children’s high-pitched screeches, their simple joy, held Annie there, adrift from the reclining adults who, apart from Rashid and his wife, Sabah, were oiling themselves against the blistering sun. Annie tried not to mind. She and Rolf were the only couple she knew in Oman who had no children, but she tried not to mind.

Yiti Beach, east of Muscat, was accessible only by 4x4, but worth every jolt of the physical shake-up that had to be endured before getting there. At one end, two huge rocks lifted out of the shallow waters and Annie stood gazing at them, her hands on her haunches, her toes sinking into the sand.

“Walk?” Gabriel asked, coming alongside her.

They paddled toward the jagged humps of rock.

“It’s nice to meet Rashid at last,” he said. “I owe him.”

“He’s a lovely man, and Sabah is a good friend of mine. She’s teaching me Arabic. Or trying to.” Annie raised her chin. “They’re called the Sama’un Rocks. Sabah told me they were inhabited by a jinni called Sama’un and that people used to leave gifts at the base at low tide.”

“Like an Irish shrine. A few pennies for a miracle.”

“I suppose.”

“So what does Sama’un have to offer? Sight for the blind? Cash for the strapped?”

“Fertility for the barren.”

Even through sunglasses, she could feel Gabriel’s eyes shoot over to hers. “So that’s why you organized this little expedition.”

“Don’t tell Rolf.”

The rocks were turning to a shade of burnt orange in the late-afternoon sun. “Do you know what gifts he likes, your Sama’un?”

“Dead goat, probably. Anyway, he’s gone now. Legend has it he took off after the British tried to bomb his rocks in the fifties.”

They paddled all the way to the rocks, where some fishermen were sitting on the sand mending their nets, then returned to the party. Rolf pointed toward the muddy lagoon farther along the strand and told Gabriel it was good for waders. “Fantastic bird-watching.”

“Fantastic everything,” said Gabriel. “Is Sultan Qaboos ever going to let tourists in?”

“I hope not,” said Marie.

“Give him time,” said Jasper. “There’s no infrastructure yet for tourism.”

“I do love your name,” Stéphanie said, out of the blue, looking at Gabriel with her fox-like eyes. “Were you named after the angel?”

Gabriel threw Annie a weary look. The question of his life. “Remember to put that on my tombstone, won’t you?” he said to her. “‘P.S. He was not named after the angel.’” He turned back to Stéphanie. “An uncle,” he said. “Sort of.” He sat on a towel and perched a sunhat on his head.

“Sort of?” said Marie, as Jasper handed her flatbread, stuffed with lamb and salad. “Thanks, darling. How do you mean ‘sort of”?”

“In that he wasn’t actually called Gabriel himself. My uncle. Our uncle.”

“How then can you be named after him?” Stéphanie asked in her tetchy French accent.

Rashid wandered back from where he had been playing with his younger son and sat on the sand near Sabah who, in spite of the heat, remained cloaked in her abaya.

“Go on, Gabriel,” said Annie. “It’s a nice story.”

“Oh, do,” said Marie.

Clearly unsettled at finding himself the center of attention, Gabriel hesitated.

Annie felt a pull of compassion. He had probably grown accustomed to averted eyes in recent months, but now these people were staring, waiting, as if asking him to account for himself, not simply