“Yeah.”
“Rashid might be able to find something with one of the companies.”
“Thanks. A job would put an end to awkward questions.”
“We need a story,” Rolf said again, “even so. People are curious, and I don’t want to expose Rashid to gossip.”
“You’re getting over a broken heart,” Annie said to Gabriel. “You were about to propose to her when she told you she’d fallen in love with someone else. You couldn’t stay in Cork any longer, because . . . because—”
“You worked with her lover,” Rolf interjected. “He was your boss.”
“Or your friend.”
“Your boss and your friend,” Rolf went on, shaking his head. “Everyone knew.” He turned a steak. “Everyone in the office. Except you.”
Gabriel looked over his shoulder. “Did you?”
Rolf glanced at Annie, who nodded and said, “We didn’t know how to tell you.”
Morning. The inside of his eyelids glowing with early light. Before he could stir, Prudence put her mouth to his ear and asked him to find her.
There was little to go on, since she had no name that she knew of. Neither did it help that she had no memory, no sense of her past, nothing to tap into that could point him in any direction. No memory either of recent events, not even of Annie and Rolf. She knew only Gabriel. She remembered so little, in fact, that she sometimes came looking for love five minutes after she had worn him out.
He stood her in front of the mirror, gently bit into the flesh on her wrist, tasteless but chunky, and said, “There you are. I’ve found you.”
That’s not me, she said.
“Then we must go out. Someone might recognize you, or you might see something that has meaning for you. If you honestly don’t know where you go to when you leave this house, then the only possible explanation is that you’ve been hypnotized.”
Hypnotized, she repeated.
“Yes—you do what you’re told to do and remember none of it afterwards. It isn’t impossible, but it would mean that I’ve been set up and I’ve drawn a blank with that. Most of the people I know have no clue where I am.”
I do, she said.
The Intercontinental Hotel needed pool attendants who could swim well enough to assist any patrons who might get into trouble in the water. Gabriel had laughed when Rolf put it to him: “I’m no lifeguard!”
“You can swim, you need a job and they need you. Thursdays and Fridays.”
And so, on those days, Gabriel spent his time poolside, tidying and handing out towels while club members and businessmen lay around gossiping and making deals. Embarrassed by his weedy legs and shapeless arms, he was tempted to say to the sunbathing women who flirted with him, “I’m a pianist. The muscles are all in my fingers.” Friends of Annie tried to poach from him the story of his broken heart, but he wasn’t as good at invention as his sister, which appeared to leave them all the more intrigued.
One afternoon Annie turned up at the pool, when Rolf was off painting mountains, and stayed until the evening, lying in the dimming sun. “I can’t bear to see you do this,” she said, watching him stack lounger mattresses. “There’s a grand piano in the bar, you know. Maybe you could play in the evenings?”
“Cabaret?”
“You mustn’t forget how to play.”
“I’ll never forget.”
“You don’t come over anymore,” she said.
“Well, I have work and—”
“The woman? So bring her with you. God knows we’d all like to meet her.”
Gabriel folded a damp towel instead of dropping it into the basket. The sun beat down on the back of his neck. “I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve tried to get her to come out with me, but it’s like she’s been brainwashed. She won’t budge.”
“That fits. They don’t move about much,” Annie said vaguely. “They tend to stay in one place.”
“They?” he asked sharply. “Who’s behind this? Because if you know, Annie, own up. I want it wound up, finished. Let’s call a halt to the whole charade so Prudence and I can be together properly.”
“I meant jinn. They tend to be shy. They’re usually found in isolated spots, and they certainly don’t go around socializing and bumping shoulders with expats at swimming parties.”
“Christ, not this again. In all the stories I’ve heard—and I’ve heard a few—I’ve never come across an Irish jinni.”
Annie looked at her freshly manicured nails and said quietly, “Have you been told that they can make themselves look like anything and anyone? That they can make mortals see exactly what they want to see?”
He threw another mattress onto the growing stack. “Yeah, and that they eat feces and bones, and live in shitholes and outhouses. Give it up, Annie, for Christ’s sake.”
Whenever he didn’t have to work, he stayed in. Waiting. At night he barely slept, fearing that if she came upon him oblivious, he would be oblivious of her coming. He usually became aware of her before he saw her, but as for actually watching her coming into the room—hardly ever. He no longer questioned it. On the nights she didn’t show up, he would eventually fall into a half-sleep, a world of busy images and fretful dreams, a strange tormenting place in which he found no rest, because Max always made an appearance, looking young and well, seated at a piano, his hands dropped between his knees, his shoulders hunched, rounded, his head hanging over the keys as if they were familiar to him in some unfathomable way. He never looked up. Gabriel was grateful for that. In his dreams, Max never looked at him. But Geraldine did. She came to him also—a gray figure in a gray coat, standing in a doorway, her face uncertain, her hair lank, her staring eyes forcing Gabriel to wake in order to avoid them, only to find himself waiting for a woman in whom nobody else believed.
When she was with him, the nightmares, the accusations
