“A jinn can make a woman fall in love with him,” Jamil said wearily, “by taking the face of someone else she fell in love with, and he will adopt that character so that he can get her. He can’t marry her, but if there is a child, this child will become powerful, because he will have a human body and jinn magic. He will be able to see in the dark, to make spells. . . .”
“This stuff is bending my mind.” Kim made some notes.
The argument about Thesiger rumbled on.
Complaining of sand in her eye, Thea was the first to say goodnight and headed over to her tent alone.
When Gabriel put his head around the open flap, she was sitting at the small table, looking at her phone. “May I?”
“No. Yes.”
He stepped in, took the seat opposite her. A gas light glowed between them on the table. She put down her phone. “No signal, which isn’t surprising, I suppose, in the clefts of the Wahiba Sands.” She looked past him.
Gabriel followed her gaze. Above the dark outline of dunes, the sky was lively.
“I’m out of range,” she said.
“Good.”
“The ukulele,” her eyes came back to him, “that was unexpected, but—lovely.”
“Thanks. I was musical once.”
“Clearly you still are.”
“No. No, I’m a lost musician—a fiddler, a tinkler—whereas once I was tagged as a future concert pianist.”
“You’re a pianist?”
“Was. Almost.”
“Why ‘almost’?”
“I made way for my brother.”
“There wasn’t room for two pianists in one family?”
“Apparently not.”
“Ooh,” she said. “Bitter.”
“Not at all. He was an introspective—”
“Genius?”
He held her eye, across the flickering light. “No,” he said. “I was the unfulfilled genius. Max was better than that. A worker bee. The kind of man who made things happen for himself, while I made sure nothing much happened for me.”
“Why?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Laziness was my default position.”
“Again, why?”
So familiar, this questioning. Her simple, direct way of speaking. Hearing it again shook him, but he cleared his throat, regained his composure. He couldn’t allow her to wound him again, and yet with these questions she had already undressed him, so that a rush of childhood words came out in a seamless flow of peevishness. “Oh, no doubt I was subliminally trying to get at my parents,” he retorted. “In the absence of ineptitude, laziness was my only weapon. They used to preen, you see, get off on my success. My mother in particular. Whenever I won some bloody competition or feis ceoil—she’d be there, wearing that smug, repugnant smile. . . . Don’t get me wrong, they’re okay parents, but they paraded me like a performing rooster and I’ve always hated parades.” There was no transparency in her white shirt, or in her face; she sat, like an angel at the table, still and glowing. “It was so transparent,” he went on, because she hadn’t said anything and because he hadn’t spoken of this for a long time. “Whenever anyone crossed our threshold, I was made to play, so everyone would know what a clever, clever boy my parents had produced. ‘It’s a natural instinct,’ my mother would say, with her faux-humility. ‘Music is his first language!’”
“Parents will always be proud of their kids,” Thea said. “My son is studying music—well, he makes sounds, experimental stuff. I don’t understand it, but I’m proud of him.”
“I very much doubt you’re a pushy, overbearing mother.”
“God, I hope not. I can’t bear those types, and I’ve met plenty of them!”
“You’ll know my mother, then. No tact. No grace.” Gabriel looked into the dark corner of the tent, toward her bed. “I was a sensitive kid. I wanted only to play piano, you know, but other kids hated me because I won stuff. I had one friend, Sam, who had cystic fibrosis, and one day we met his mother in town and Mam started on at her about how many hours’ practice I had to do, and how tough it was, and how a gift like mine was such a responsibility for the whole family. . . . Gut-shrivelling stuff. The only gift Sam’s mum could see in me was health. Later, I tried to point this out to my mother. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I know it’s hard for him, but you have real talent!’”
Thea chuckled at his impersonation, a light screech in the posh tones of Cork’s well-to-do. “You’re right,” she said. “I do know this woman—just from her vowels!”
“Maybe I’m too harsh. I mean, the rewards had been great. I loved the applause, the regard of professors and judges, and I liked the way professionals looked at me as if I was a person of consequence, but my life was one long competition and it was like being pressed into a very small tube.”
“Until?”
He sighed. “Until one day I realized I’d become like a patient, as much bound to the piano as Sam often was to a hospital bed. So I stopped working. I still sailed through grade eight and into college, but beyond that, I let it go.”
“I’m beginning to feel for your mother.”
“It’s odd, isn’t it, how one family gets stuck with a debili-tating illness and another with a prodigy? Not,” he added quickly, “that I was any kind of prodigy.”
“How did your parents take it, when you pulled back?”
“They were devastated, but at least then they started paying attention to Max, whom they’d ignored, more or less, since I’d shown promise—aged about three—and Max had got relegated to ‘He plays quite well, too.’”
“Did he begrudge you?”
Gabriel blinked. “It wouldn’t have occurred to him.”
“And you weren’t bitter when the attention turned to him?”
“Bitterness isn’t really my thing.”
“What is your thing, Jibril?” she asked, with a flicker of a smile that hit him in the groin. “Apart from scaring women with your scary past?”
“Don’t you mean women from my past?”
“Kim is intrigued.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, I picked up on that.”
“Don’t let her bully you. She’s a journalist.”
“Don’t
