folklore.” Rolf spoke, waving his hand. “Local folklore.”
Annie shot a look at him, “It’s part of Islam,” then turned to Gabriel. “They’re in the Quran—part of the religion. It simply depends on where you’re from, doesn’t it? I mean, we have our ghosts, but Muslims don’t believe in ghosts. When they die, they go to Paradise. They don’t hang about like our lot can. Jinn, on the other hand, are around us all the time.”
“Us?”
“Yes. I mean, what about fairies? Irish folklore—the serious stuff—they’re exactly like jinn. Living alongside us. Our world and their world and never the twain shall meet, and yet they do. They cross over.”
Gabriel looked at her with a mix of astonishment and ridicule. “Fairies? Are you serious?”
“Not sprites with wings. That’s rubbish.”
“Oh, please don’t mention the Little People!”
“I’m just saying—a girl in my class in secondary school did a whole project on fairy lore and it was chilling. I didn’t sleep for two nights. It’s all the same stuff, you know.”
Rolf was lining watermelon seeds along the rim of his plate, equally spaced.
“And as for jinn, well, they’re like a third being,” Annie went on. “God made angels and jinn and humans. Angels from the air, humans from the earth, jinn from fire. But we can’t see them, unless they want us to.”
“Annie,” Gabriel said gently, “forget jinn and fairies. On the level—you haven’t asked some friend of yours to mess with my head, have you? Because I swear to Christ, if you don’t know who she is, then what’s she doing in your house?”
Annie held his eye. “Is she in the room now?”
Gabriel could see, beyond her listlessness, a longing to buy into this. “If she was, you’d see her—obviously. Like you must have done when she came down this morning and went into the kitchen while we were having breakfast.”
Still she held his eye, biting the side of her lip. “If this is some kind of joke, I want you to drop it.”
“You think I’d be up for joking?”
“Rolf,” she said, “maybe there is—”
“What, Annie? Maybe there is what?”
“Maybe this place has its own resident jinn. Some houses do. We should ask around.”
A droplet of cold sweat ran down Gabriel’s spine.
“That’s all nonsense,” said Rolf.
“Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” his wife snapped. “But lots of people don’t.”
“What people?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s part of the scenery here. Good jinn. Bad jinn.”
“Do you believe in it?”
“About as much as I believed in that ghost at O’Mahony’s farm.”
Gabriel chuckled. “God, I hadn’t thought about him in years.”
“Which ghost is this?” Rolf asked.
“Why would you be interested?” Annie retorted. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I like the stories.”
Gabriel and Annie exchanged glances. “It wasn’t so much a ghost as—”
“His foot,” said Gabriel.
Annie smiled. “On one of the landings of this old house we were sent off to every summer to learn Irish.”
“Everyone said the house was haunted,” Gabriel explained. “On certain nights, so the legend went, you could see the ghost’s foot glowing on the landing. Lots of people claimed to have seen it.”
“But you never did?” Rolf asked, with a supercilious smile. He turned to Annie. “Or you?”
“Don’t be so patronizing!”
“Ghost stories are always the same.” He shrugged. “Someone else sees something. Never the person who tells the story, the person right in front of you. Always second- or third- or tenth-hand. I have never met anyone who had this kind of experience directly.”
“Except Gabriel.”
Another drop of cold sweat slithered down Gabriel’s back.
He walked. Through Muttrah and Muscat and on up into the hills. Usually he could read Annie, because she allowed him to. He would have said that her curiosity about the woman was genuine, especially since there was a touch of fear in it. He wasn’t sure how well Annie could dissemble, but she was doing a persuasive job with this talk of jinn, and he had to be on his guard. This too could be part of the charade.
Over subsequent days, it became clear that Annie’s interest was indeed sincere, though she wouldn’t let on in front of Rolf. One afternoon when she was ironing, she asked Gabriel again, with faux-nonchalance, if his jinn lady was about.
“Nope.”
“You know, jinn are often good. Sometimes they help humans.”
Behind her eyes, Gabriel could see something akin to envy, as if she suspected he had touched on something that was denied her. “They say? Who says?”
“Oh—you hear stories. Sometimes at these women’s parties I go to, the Omanis tell stories. Exactly like we do at home. It’s just a different context.”
“What kind of stories?”
“They’re all, you know, quite touching.” She laid out the sleeve of Rolf’s shirt and ironed. “There was a nice one I heard about an old man in the hills who was injured in a fall, in a gully, and ended up with his arm broken and his leg crushed, but somehow he got back to his house, outside a remote village. No one knew how he’d made it. He said he walked, but he couldn’t have—his foot was smashed—so they said that a jinn must have carried him home. Then his leg got worse. They didn’t know what to do with it—it was suppurating and gangrenous—and he was getting sicker, and after a while, the villagers stopped going to visit him. Then one night he heard a voice calling him, so he crawled to the door, where he found a pot on the step with a sort of paste in it. He rubbed it into his leg, day after day, and it started to get better. He kept applying it until his foot was healed, and that was when a jinn woman appeared and said she had been looking after him, but that he must never tell anyone.” Annie shook out the shirt, flattened another sleeve and ironed the cuff. “When the villagers saw that he was cured, they hounded him until he told them how it had happened. The jinn was very angry with him then and said he would never see her again, and he never did, but he was able to go back into the hills with his goats. So you see—a well-meaning jinn, come to save him.”
Gabriel smiled. “Pure bollocks.”
“Maybe.” She held up the shirt, gave it a shake and put its shoulders around a hanger. “Every culture finds a way to explain the inexplicable.”
“Like Rolf said—folklore.”
“Oh, you know that, do you? You’re so worldly-wise, so all-knowing, that you can dismiss it just like that? Centuries and centuries of belief?”
“Centuries and centuries of storytelling. That’s where all the Irish fables come from.”
“Be careful, Gabriel. You wouldn’t want to be so scornful about something you don’t understand.”
Sometimes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. She chose her moments; Gabriel chose to believe. He chose, also, to stay with her rather than with his sister.
The night before they moved to the new house, he told Annie he wanted