The Dhow House Read Online Free

breakfast island. Their faces swivelled around, then lunged towards her and shook her hand. One was the boy – a man, now – from the photograph who looked like her aunt, so much so he might be a copy. He was six foot one or two, long-limbed; there were parts of him yet to be soldered together. He had light brown hair with a metallic glint, a vein of colour like brushed chrome. His eyes were the depthless blue of swimming pools. He had a strong face, not a young man’s face. There was an Easter Island stasis about it, as if he had spent his formative years looking out to sea.
    As she took her cousin’s hand, she felt briefly unsteady. The sea roared so suddenly she started. She heard water birds screech. Then a strange dead moment of silence.
    ‘When did you get here?’ he asked.
    ‘Today. Well, not long ago. I fell asleep.’
    ‘Awesome,’ said the other, immediately friendly, face. ‘Great to meet you.’
    How old would they be? Her mother had never spoken about Julia’s children. Julia called them boys only as a term of affection. She used her medical student yardstick. Her cousin was not quite as old as a newly qualified doctor, straight out of med school, who were twenty-five or six, an engaging age. They were intelligent, chatty, charming. They still had the newly minted quality of the young.
    She heard herself say, ‘It’s great to be here. It’s so much hotter than up north.’
    She had not worn shorts or bared her arms at night for four months now, and for a very long time in England either. She felt almost giddy. She could not convince her body to forget the notion that she would not need a pullover or jacket soon. She was used to that moment in Gariseb when the sun was deflected by the horizon, followed by an automatic cooling, as if the day had been a charade.
    The young men reassumed the rhythm she’d interrupted. She continued her conversation with her aunt, but her eyes tracked their movements behind her aunt’s shoulder.
    Her cousin moved in a series of explosions. He opened the fridge door, took something out – she missed what it was – plunked it on the counter, went towards the pool, grabbed his phone off the table. His friend – he’d said his name but she had instantly forgotten it – stood stock-still and kept her under a steady gaze that was a combination of warmth and wariness. He looked younger than her cousin. He was an ephebe – a word she had learned in her classics elective in her first year of medical school, and which she had instantly loved. Only his face, held tense and self-protective with a certain masculine pride, gave away his age.
    ‘Bill will be home in an hour,’ Julia said. ‘Do you want a drink?’
    ‘What have you got?’
    Her aunt shrugged. ‘Everything.’
    She perched herself on a stool as her cousin and his friend flitted away. She looked around to find them gone. ‘Where did they go?’
    ‘Who knows? They come and go like the wind.’
    A flare of noise tore the sky open. She sprang off her stool and ducked her head.
    When the noise had swallowed itself she emerged from her crouch to find Julia peering at her. ‘They fly low on the way back. I’m sorry, I should have warned you.’
    ‘Who was it?’
    ‘Army, returning from over the border. They go and come back every day. In England it would be illegal to fly that low, but here the army do what they like.’ Julia paused. ‘I thought you’d be used to this kind of thing.’
    ‘I am. I was. I haven’t been around fighter jets in a while.’
    Julia’s slim silver mobile phone emitted a discreet chime. She took it and walked into the living room, towards the garden. Julia returned, the phone clutched by her thigh. ‘Bill’s stuck in town on business. We can all have our own suppers.’
    ‘I really don’t feel like eating. I think I’ll just go to bed.’
    She retreated to her room. There, she sat on the edge of her bed, her head heavy from the afternoon, from encounters with strangers who