“Beware of shining knights,” said Kim. “I’ve had a few of those myself. Ex-husbands, I call them.”
“I can’t believe you’ve accumulated two already. You were quite prim when I knew you.”
“And should have remained so, clearly!” They laughed again, and Kim said, “Nah, seems I’m not cut out for monogamy.”
“Is anyone?”
“You, maybe?”
“I’ll let you know at my funeral.”
Gabriel ran his fingers through the cold sand, entertained but hungry, and he was about to sneak away to get dinner, when Thea said, “About Gabriel, Kim. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“He is . . . familiar.”
A jerking movement. “Are you kidding me?” Kim hissed. “You tell me this now?”
“Shush!”
“So you think you have met him?”
“I know I haven’t,” said Thea. “That’s the thing. But it keeps coming at me, this sense of familiarity, but then I look at him and there’s no recognition. Nothing.”
Gabriel struggled to keep his breathing in check.
“Maybe he looks like someone you know.”
“No, that’s not it.”
A voice called a name, over at the hub, but the camp was otherwise quiet. No music or generators. Gabriel had to be very, very still.
“He actually reminds me of someone I . . . never knew.”
“I’m getting a little confused here. You’re beginning to sound like him.”
Thea sighed. “I should tell you about those months after Baghdad.”
“That seems like a very good idea. Kill time before dinner.”
Gabriel was aware of Thea moving, rolling onto her side perhaps. “My parents didn’t really get it,” she began, in a quiet, flat voice. “The low. The disappointment. They were so relieved that I was home safe, they thought I’d be fine alone all day, as long as they left me teabags and Cup-a-Soup.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. So Dad’s sister Brona, a redoubtable old biddy if ever there was one, swept me up and carried me off to the wilderness. . . .”
Her voice, right by his ear, almost lulled Gabriel into a trance with her talk of Sheep’s Head—a moody, gutsy narrow strip of land poking the ocean—so easily remembered, and even the aunt, living alone on her widow’s pension, growing vegetables, might have been one of his own.
“Every day I’d wake up surrounded by mountains and ocean. The sky and the sea changed hour to hour. Brona said the Atlantic would heal me, and it did. The sound of it mostly, at night and in the morning, that roaring, gurgling gush, muted by the walls, though at other times it was as calm as sleep—this vast body of water making not the slightest noise.
“Anyway, I was driving myself mad with thoughts of Sachiv, trying to capture him, brand myself with every detail, every exchange between us, and Brona told me to stop. You know, to stop obsessing about it, and to let Sheep’s Head do its work. She even told me to fantasize—seriously. Fantasizing, she insisted, was a form of meditation. ‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Make up a nice place, a beautiful place, and go there, pretend to live there, until real life needs you back.’ Totally barmy.”
“Oh, no,” Kim said gently. “No, I love that. Isn’t it what we all do when we’re sad?”
“When another morning came,” Thea went on, “with that dragging heartache still in my belly, I decided to give it a go, so I looked around inside my head to see what I might find. After a bit of practice, I discovered a bright, light country within reach. Perhaps it had always been there, waiting for me to push open the door and step in, or perhaps I created it only then. Either way, from then on, during my morning lie-in and my long afternoon nap, I went off to a place that was neither Ireland nor Iraq, but which had an excellent climate and warm seas, and where, for good measure,” she added, with a chuckle, “I had a besotted unmarried lover, whose eyes and hands were always where I wanted them to be. He was handsome, but not flawless, warm but edgy, giving but impenetrable.”
“Sounds like the kind of man I need.”
“It was amazingly effective. Increasingly, in spite of myself, I’d feel myself tumbling into that nowhere place, into the calm of being with a person who didn’t exist and couldn’t hurt me. It was the distraction that worked. Not having to think or fret. It stopped me wondering about what you were doing, right then, in Baghdad, or if I’d ever see Sachiv again. In that white, easy place, everything suited me. My stranger suffered with love for me, came and went, according to my whim, and, it goes without saying, made passionate love to me on a regular basis. Naturally, I became very attached to him!”
Their shared guffaw made Gabriel smile, but he could barely absorb what he was hearing.
“What you’re talking about right there,” said Kim, “is crea-tive visualization.”
“That makes it sounds less ridiculous, I suppose. Anyway, that’s where I hid, what I did, during my convalescence, having pretend sex and pretend love in a pretend place, while my aunt brought me apples and water, and outside the ocean had a busy day, or a temperate one.”
Apples and water. Apples and water. Apples and water.
“Sounds good to me.”
“But there was something about that house, Kim, and the woman who lived there. Often, I couldn’t quite see the sea or feel the cold or smell the damp. There were times when I wasn’t there at all, not really—and Brona understood that, but I never did. Never have.”
“And you probably shouldn’t try to.”
“Ha. Says she who is going all out trying to get a handle on jinn.”
“What did you call him,” Kim asked, “this lover?”
“I can’t remember. I’m not even sure he had a name. He didn’t need one.”
“A virtual lover—long before the internet.”
“And so real,” Thea said, more quietly, “that I remember him now the way I remember people I knew.
