Prudence rolled onto her back. She was listening, maybe.
“Mam used to weed a lot,” he went on, regardless. “I’d watch her, from the window by the piano, kneeling on a kind of mat in her tweed skirt and woolly tights, and her knees would be muddy when she stood up, with the trowel in one hand, and she’d be calling at the back of the house—at me. ‘Why have you stopped, Gabriel? Carry on or you won’t know the movement by Thursday. Play on, Gabriel.’ That’s all I ever heard. ‘Oh, do play for us, Gabriel. Play for the Joneses/the Murphys/the Looneys! They so want to hear you play, and even if they don’t, they’re going to anyway. Go on, now, we’re all ready, dying for a performance, so don’t be silly/shy/mean/selfish/contrary, play, you damn stubborn boy, and make us look good, because we did shit-all ourselves and we’re living this tiny life where we look like everyone else and act like everyone else and do dull jobs and have no talents—so perform, Gabriel! Make us look bigger than our unremarkable lives. . . .’”
Rain falling, falling on a roof, some other, slated, roof—a steady stream, soft yet determined, like whispers behind the wall. He was becoming accustomed to this other soundtrack, but he didn’t mind the shush of the rain so much. It calmed him. He could even hear it slashing on to broad green leaves, as if he were surrounded by woodland, and since he was homesick, he stepped out into it and felt the soft Irish rain on his shoulders, smelled it, tasted it, almost became it, until the Gulf heat drew him back, like a possessive lover.
Some other world had become entwined in theirs. The stockinged legs, they came again and again. Often when he dozed during the day, he heard the scrape of nyloned thigh against nyloned thigh. Swish, swish. And sometimes the low murmur of a radio, muttering voices and a jangle of jingles. He narrowed his concentration, pulled it in tight, like focusing on the eye of a needle, to properly hear what was being said—was it an English station? Arabic? Straining toward another existence—his? Hers? He was almost certain that the muffled banter was coming in an Irish voice. A jolly, smug housewives’ presenter. The static he was listening to sounded very much to him like Radio Éireann.
The slop and slime of love distracted him. Touching her, feeling her, insinuating himself upon her, he heard only her cries and his grunts and saw nothing beyond the undulations of her body, the small of her back, the incline of her breasts, the peak of hipbone and lull of waist. He needed more fingers, another mouth, better lips to fully appreciate her because, no matter how heightened the pleasure, he now reached the end of every coupling short of absolute fulfillment. There remained always a part of him untouched, a gap left empty. Next time, he always thought, next time they would hit the greater height.
“You have to come swimming with me,” he said to her, one warm afternoon in the front room when he wanted to be on the beach. “I’m not doing so well, being indoors so much, and if it’s getting to me, it must be getting to you.”
No. No, I’m fine like this. I don’t mind.
“I mind. I’m sleeping badly, seeing things. The honeymoon period—all sex and no living—has gone on long enough. We have to begin a normal life. You could get a job, if you don’t already have one.”
You’re tired of me.
“I’m tired of the way we live, Prudence. I came to Muscat to escape confinement, only to build my own prison around us. When I wake up every morning I have no idea where my mind is or in which direction I should reach to retrieve it. Is that what you want—that I should live in a permanent state of mystification?”
No.
“So let’s go for a swim.”
The water would be too cold.
“Cold? Here? Ha! This isn’t Ireland, you know. But we don’t have to swim. Let’s go for a wander. Just to the corner and back.”
No.
“Yes.” He gripped her elbow and tried to hustle her toward the front door, but Prudence wriggled and struggled, insisting that he could not make her leave. He couldn’t even get her near the threshold, let alone beyond it, and he came off worse for trying. Anger took him. He grabbed her by the waist and hauled her across the room until, near the door, she bit his arm and he dropped her, and when they both fell to the floor he found that he was crying.
Saturated with love and terror, Gabriel began making inquiries about the house. With Ali and his friends, he had tea in the suq, where the air, trapped under the makeshift roofing all day, was like a warm soup that had solidified as it cooled. The house he lived in, he learned, had been built by a wealthy merchant and had once incorporated the building next door. No one knew of any jinn ever taking up residence there, and it owned no stories, beyond that of the owner, who had fallen on hard times and gone to Abu Dhabi to work. His sister now rented it out. “Talk to her,” they said.
