These dunes were very high, and they came one after another, like waves in a hurricane, relentlessly lashing against them, as they went up and down, and up, and down again. Thea braced her knees and squealed as they tumbled over another sharp crest and saw an almost vertical drop below them.
“Here you are.” Gabriel smiled. “Desert proper. The Empty Quarter is bigger than France, and there’s more sand here than in the whole of the Sahara, which is fifteen times larger. It’s also one of the most beautiful places on earth.”
The heat spread into the car, like a swarm of bees, when they stopped and opened the doors. It was late afternoon. Silent, but for a whine of wind, of sand rushing across sand. The view didn’t change no matter where Thea turned. She twisted this way and that, loving the ordered disorder; the champagne horizons.
The arc-shaped crest on which they sat was creamy and smooth on the leeside, while the rougher, burnt-orange grain accrued in the dips behind it, creating rippled ridges with rust on the top, cream beneath. Sand flew across the ocher ridges, like a sheet being pulled out, scattering in the wind. In every direction, desert peaks crowded upon one another, like the heads of commuters in a packed train. Alex would have loved it, and so would the boys, but Thea didn’t miss them, or want them there. This was hers: the desert, again. This was her return. How often had she thought of it since she and Kim had sat on top of an old ruin, with scruffy children huddled against them and a bare plain floating around them? Emptiness appealed. She wanted to penetrate it, to find something in it or get something back—she wasn’t sure which—but all it relinquished was sameness and deadliness. There was nothing to take, apart from the uncompromising look of it. Even its unctuous belly fluids were being drained away. Soon enough, the desert would have nothing left to offer beyond its smart beauty.
“‘The desert within the desert,’ Thesiger called it,” said Gabriel, standing up. “We’ll go on a bit before setting up camp.”
She loved his hands, the way he flicked his keys around his fingers. Had he been untroubled, she could have loved him. Or perhaps his trouble made her love him a little. Love came in the oddest places. “Where are we going? Not to those salt flats, I hope?”
“No, they’re south of here.”
“How do you not get lost?”
He tapped the side of his nose. “Instinct.” Heading back to the car, he added, “And GPS.”
“Can I drive?”
He showed her the rudiments of 4x4 driving and let her take a few dunes. Leaning close to her, he covered her hand with his to help with the gears, coached her and laughed with her. Good times. Good times, in the desert.
It was almost dark when he pitched her tent on the floor of a flat basin, surrounded by sand heaps. Thea went as far as she dared to pee, then hurried back. “I’ll bet there are jinn out there and good old Western ghouls.”
“You’re a believer now?” He was squatting, lighting a fire, but he tipped back and sat, one knee pulled up against him as he prodded burning twigs with a stick.
“I’m beginning to.”
“Too many stories this last week. Look, it’s a variation on the same theme. In Western tradition, it’s the dead wandering around making things happen. We are hardwired to believe—be it in God or the supernatural or shamans. It’s on our circuit boards.”
“Even yours?”
His eyes barely flickered. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I do wonder about the night in the music school. Some people would explain it—one inexplicable moment of irrational behavior—by saying I was possessed of a bad jinn.”
“That could explain all evil acts.”
“Exactly.” He poked the fire. “Good and evil. Those are the only things that make real sense to me, and I’ve been to evil and I don’t want to go there again.”
The remaining rim of light on the horizon pitched itself into night. They ate bread and cheese, made tea and stared at the flames, because the growing cushion of red beneath the burning twigs was the only thing puncturing the black cylinder around them.
Thea hugged her knees. “You should forgive yourself.”
“You think?”
She nodded. “I rate forgiveness. It’s a good concept.”
“I’ve been waiting for it to come along for years, but no sign of it yet.”
“It isn’t a bus, Gabriel. You have to go looking for it.”
“What would you know?” he said dismissively.
“I know about guilt.”
Lying on his side, curved around the fire, he looked up, the whites of his eyes challenging her. “You think?” he said again.
“Yes, I do think.”
“So?”
Thea ran her fingers through the cooling sand. “Do you know Sheep’s Head?”
“A bleak sort of place, as I remember. Straw-colored and rocky.”
“Beautiful and bleak. That’s where I went to recuperate after Baghdad.”
“Your aunt’s place. The one who nursed you.”
“Yes. Anyway, one evening when I was feeling better, I went for a walk. My first long walk, towards the marsh near the lighthouse. I hadn’t meant to go far, but there’s a lake along the way, long and still, so I sat on a rock, looking over it for a while, and I realized, after a bit, that Ireland was reclaiming me. I knew then that I could get on without Iraq. If you have Ireland, you need no other place. So it was good. I felt good. Properly recovered, you could say.
“Then the cold started to seep in—stupid of me, to stay out like that—and it wasn’t fair, either, because Brona would be worrying, but when I turned back, my energy store was suddenly empty. I had to take it slowly and rest along
