And Thea quipped, “Gin? An alcoholic? That explains a lot,” and looked up to see him leading the women to the table next to them. He smirked; she blushed.
“Hello again!” Betty exclaimed.
“Well, hi,” said Kim.
Betty maneuvered a roll of belly behind the table.
“Have you come from the boatyard?” Kim asked her.
“Sadly, no. Apparently we didn’t have time.”
“Such a pity,” Sue said primly, “since it is one of the highlights of Sur.”
“You didn’t miss a thing,” said Kim. “There’s been an inferno. Hardly anything left.”
Gabriel looked at Abid. “Madha hadath?”
“Some guy.” Abid tapped his head. “A bit mad. Burned it down.”
“Instead of a bustling hive of carpenters creating traditional, ocean-going dhows,” Kim rattled on, “all we found were the burned-out skeletons of boats and sheds, with a few men working on carved miniature dhows for tourists.”
“Quite poignant,” said Thea, handing her camera across to them.
Gabriel took it and looked at the screen. She had taken a shot of a charred dhow, its long curved spine reduced to charcoal, everything else gone, but for the detail on its prow.
“So Abid has been entertaining us with stories about jinn.” Kim’s eyes twinkled at Gabriel. Mid-afternoon light filtered through the door.
“Jinn,” said Hetty. “You mean like a genie, from a lamp?”
Oh, how he wanted to lose them!
A longboat, with a crew of twenty, slid along the magenta water, its oars stretching out on either side. From a vantage-point overlooking the creek, Thea and Kim sat on a hump of hill, their arms around their knees.
“This is some coincidence,” Thea said.
“How so?”
“I row. I row the Irish equivalent of that boat down there—a traditional currach.”
“No way.”
“Although ours isn’t quite so long and we don’t go quite so fast, because there are only four of us.”
A few meters away, Abid was trying to engage Gabriel in an argument about which of them had originally found this ideal spot for photo shoots at sunset, but Gabriel needed him to be quiet. His hearing was stretching, leaning out to catch what it could from the conversation to his right. Hetty and Betty were sitting farther along the ridge, their short legs straight, their toes turned up, while Sue filmed the scene below. Much as these women were a hindrance to his pursuit, so too were they facilitators, his excuse for being there, and he had to keep them sweet.
“Darn, but this is beautiful,” said Kim. “What a sunset.”
Abid took his phone from the deep pocket in his dishdasha and went down the slope to call his wife.
Now Gabriel could eavesdrop, but he kept his gaze on the low white town of Sur, which stretched along a spit of land, and feigned interest in its dhows, lying on the beach below. As the inlet dipped into an orange hue, the mountains in the distance tipped into darkness.
“Remember the sunsets in Baghdad?” Kim asked Thea. “Driving through the city and seeing this great red ball going down?”
“I’ve done my best to forget.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“That’s why . . . well. Why I didn’t keep in touch.”
“I figured that.”
“I’m so sorry for not writing back. I missed you terribly, but your letters were long and gushy, whereas mine would have been short and flat, and I couldn’t bear the comparison. Your life to mine. You, reaching my horizons. And then other stuff happened.”
Voices rose from the longboat—the coach driving his team, calling the rhythm, the rowers growling at one another as they slid down the creek.
“But the truth is, I don’t even know how long you stayed there.”
“Two years.”
“Good years?”
The questions were tentative; the answers more so.
“It was fun, yeah,” Kim said, looking down at the water, “but it was never quite the same without you. No more belly laughs.”
“Glad to hear it,” Thea said, and they chuckled.
“You didn’t mind my getting in touch now, did you?”
With a warm smile, Thea nudged her. “The best surprise ever. And this trip—what a fantastic way to say hello and cancel out that bloody awful goodbye.”
“Don’t remind me of that night!”
Gabriel took out his phone and pretended to text.
“God, I hated to see you go,” said Kim, “I’m afraid to ask how you got through that journey.”
“Oh, I managed. The worst bit was waiting at the gate. The airport was heaving with soldiers—passengers, not security. Some were missing limbs, others had eye injuries, but they were mostly the walking-wounded, heading to Britain for treatment. Alex went into overdrive, all fuss and bother. I really, really wanted him to leave me alone and let me block it all out, but he was like a mother hen: ‘What do you need? What can I get you?’ So I asked for the one thing I knew he wouldn’t find, Coke, figuring he’d have to go to Syria to get it, but he zipped off, all eager, and I lay back, wishing the hours away. Next thing, he was right there, damn pleased with himself, holding a can of Coke.”
“But there was no Coke in—”
“All of Iraq, yeah,” said Thea. “Except at the airport apparently. When I asked where on earth he’d got it, he said, ‘Umm, the drinks machine.’ I knocked it back in about three gulps.”
“More than you’d had to drink in days.”
“Exactly, and after watching me guzzle it, Alex said, deadpan, ‘I might get you another of those,’ which was when I started to like him. So I drank that too and, rehydrated and full of sugar, I finally sat up, looked at this guy by my feet and said, ‘So what brings you to Iraq?’ We talked all night and all the way to London.”
“‘Reader, I married him.’”
They laughed. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“Marrying your Mr. Kool-Aid? I think it’s great!”
Not great at all, Gabriel thought.
“Anyway, when we got to Heathrow, I walked through the airport unaided and, get this, ate a fry for breakfast. Worst possible thing. So then of course I started thinking that Einstein, the old doc, had got it right. It was all in my head. I’d gone
