“It must have been nerve-racking,” Gabriel said, “waiting.”
“Yes. Sorry for dashing off on you that day in the lobby, but I was nervous about who was going to show up. I mean, it could have been my worst nightmare—that horrible teacher I had in fifth class or the awful woman I was in hospital with once. But those cards, those images, created their own story and I wanted to get to the end of it.” Behind her shades, her eyes were still; still with disappointment.
She had been expecting someone else, he was sure of it.
“And when it came to it,” she went on, “we met up in the Ladies, of all places. You can imagine the screeching.”
“I don’t have to. I heard it. I was coming out of the Gents.” He tried to sit up. His hips wouldn’t let him. “Look,” he said, slithering about. “I’m sorry for freaking you out with all that talk of, you know, thinking you were someone else. It won’t happen again.”
“You sure?”
“I can do small talk instead. Honestly. I do it all the time in my job.”
“Oh, great. From freaky to chitchat.”
She was cheekier than she’d been before; funnier. She had acquired confidence and character. It was a furious turn-on.
“Forget small talk,” she said. “Tell me about the woman you thought I was, or am, or . . . should be?”
Gabriel looked up at the white cliff that rose from just beyond their toes. “I don’t talk about it.”
“You’ve barely spoken of anything else!”
His shoulder blades were straining with the effort of holding his elbows in place. He looked at her again. Surely she noticed it—the intimacy, the easiness of their exchanges. How could she imagine them to be strangers? “You’ll think I’m mad,” he said. “Everyone else does.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“You don’t make much sense.”
“I never have.”
“That’s true,” she said. “You’ve made very little sense in our short acquaintance thus far.”
Not so short, he wanted to say.
She shivered—he saw it ripple up her arm, like uncertainty. Better, he thought, not to speak of their past here, in the hypnotizing quiet, at the foot of those expressive rock faces, with their mealy-mouthed openings, like angered lips. “What’s wrong?”
Thea looked past Kim, along the gully. “It’s moody here, isn’t it? There’s a sort of foreboding or something. I wish I could shake it off.”
“You can’t. It’s embedded in the rocks.”
Droplets of water drying on her shoulders were turning white. “I blame Abid,” she said. “He’s been talking about jinn. Kim keeps pumping him for stories. I don’t quite get it, though, how some people see them and others don’t.”
“Better to say they reveal themselves to some and not to others,” Gabriel explained. “Although, strictly speaking, according to the Quran, they can never be seen by humans. Depends what you believe.”
“And what do you believe?”
“Call me agnostic.”
“I’ve heard that men can fall in love with them.”
Gabriel finally managed to sit up, and leaned over his knees. “All right, all right. Stop beating around the gully. Abid’s told you, clearly.”
“Told me what?”
“My own personal folklore.”
She hooked her big toes together.
“What did he say?” he asked, adding, in spite of himself, “You have nice toes.” In truth, although her legs were still slim, her feet had not improved with age.
“He said you’re a sad man.”
“Ah.”
“He said you came to Oman in the eighties to stay with your sister, because the woman you wanted to marry loved someone else.”
Gabriel let out an involuntary cough. This still had currency? How effective had been Rolf’s myth-making!
“But then you fell in love with a jinn, and that’s why you’re still here, still alone.”
Gabriel nodded.
“So it’s true?
“Except the jinn bit. I did fall in love, but she wasn’t a jinniya.”
“So why did Abid say she was?”
“Because . . .” How, where, to go with this? He sighed. “Because no one else ever saw her, even when they were in the same room.”
Thea slid her sunglasses down her nose to look over them. “No wonder they think you’re a bit deluded.”
“Oh, they don’t think I’m mad because I fell in love with her—lots of men fall for jinn and take them as wives. No, they like to tease me because I managed to lose her and haven’t replaced her.”
“But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Some things can never be left behind.”
Thea pushed her sunglasses back up. “That’s true.”
A light cloud dimmed the sun, then let it out again.
“And that affair saved me,” Gabriel said.
“They call this work.” Kim’s voice echoed along the gully.
He turned to Thea. “You saved me.”
She sat up. “Stop doing that.”
He reached out, touched her elbow. “I’m sorry. I’m trying, honestly, but I’ve . . . I’m totally thrown. The resemblance is—”
“The resemblance to whom? Your jinn person?”
“You even sound like her.”
“Oh, Christ.” She turned. “Kim! Lunch is ready!”
Kim twisted around in a slithery spin. “Hi, Gabriel. You been sneaking up on us again?”
“More like arriving with a great splash.”
The teenagers clambered over the rocks and came across the stones. Thea gingerly got to her feet. Gabriel offered his hand, but so too did Khaled and she took his instead.
Kim joined them, muttering to Gabriel, “Who’s the old guy?”
Thea looked back. “What old guy?”
Kim turned. “Oh. Gone. He was standing on that rock up there, watching us.”
“That’s the old boy who guards the cave,” said Gabriel.
“Where’d he go?” Kim twisted around. “He was leaning on a camel stick, clear as day.”
“He didn’t go anywhere. He’s one of the local jinn.”
“No way!”
“Let’s get back,” said Thea.
“Are you messing with me?” Kim nudged Gabriel.
“If I am, where is he?”
Unable to take her eyes from the cliffs, Kim said, “You mean I’ve actually seen one? How cool is that? Those years in Iraq, I never got as much as a whisper from the other world.”
“We go this way,” Khaled said, helping Thea across the nipping gravel to a stream that had forged its own smooth slide
