that you’re drinking green tea. It’s good for you, which I often heard you complain is said about all things disgusting. Here I drink gahwa which is spiced Arabic coffee served in tiny brightly painted cups with a plate of fresh dates.
I’ve never read PD James. I hate mysteries. They give me a headache. I like fantasies where you enter the pages, and everything is new and exotic. Maybe that’s why I needed to travel so far away from home. Maybe the sights and wonders I’ve seen have simply been because I ran out of Terry Pratchett books in Wales.
On evenings when I’m not on duty, I sit out on my balcony. The heat is slowly dying then, and the air feels refreshing with a breeze blowing in from the sea. I sit on a cushioned lounger and read and talk to the small cat who climbs my balcony with the casual confidence of someone who knows they won’t fall. She’s a tiny thing, black with four neat white paws. She will sit daintily at my feet washing her paws, but I don’t try to pet her because if I do, she will give me a look of such disdain. It’s eerily similar to the one you used to give me when I made you take your medication.
To: Eli Jones
From: Gideon Ramsay
Today I had my first cooking lesson at the big house, as they call it here. I know you’re dying to laugh and honestly, you wouldn’t have been able to help it if you’d seen me wrapped up in an apron that was so huge the mind boggles over who it belonged to. I was lectured by a lady on the correct way to make cottage pie. Maggie is a woman in her forties. She’s spare-framed with a head of bright red curls. She also has a sense of humour which has got to help in the madness that is Silas’s home.
Every second here someone is shouting at someone. People flock around the house like nosy sheep poking their noses into every cranny. I hear American, German, French, and Spanish spoken, and it’s strangely wonderful to hear that in the halls of an old manor house that has lain dreaming and mostly empty for years.
I watch Silas and Niall, my friends of so many years, and how they have settled into domesticity, and I marvel at it and am slightly wistful. Don’t tell anyone because I’m confiding that to only you because I trust you. You’re one of the few that I do.
I took my cottage pie back with me to the cottage where the quiet settled back around me like a comfy blanket. Like one of those soft throws you used to put around my shoulders on the deck. I heated it up and ate it at the small table in the kitchen with the door open to let in the scent of fresh-cut grass. It was only slightly burned because I had become absorbed in reading a Bill Bryson book. Even the charred bit tasted delicious.
I’ll cook this for you when I see you again, but you’ll have to keep an eye on the cooking bit as I’m far too absentminded to be in charge of an oven.
To: Gideon Ramsay
From: Eli Jones
Is it wrong that the thought of you cooking fills me with fear?
I think you would like the food here. We had majboos for dinner. It’s meat and rice that’s so delicately spiced that every mouthful seems to wake up your taste buds. For dessert, we had luquaimat which are tiny crunchy dumplings that are sprinkled in sesame seeds and dipped in date syrup.
I’m sitting on my balcony writing this. The call to prayer seems to shimmer in the air. It’s hauntingly beautiful and ancient enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
I believe you about hearing the old battle. I read somewhere that the curtain between other worlds and times is very thin. Maybe sometimes there are rips and tears, and we hear things that we aren’t supposed to before someone patches the holes.
I’m trying to find an excuse for not going home. It was my birthday before I met you. I used the excuse that I was working to get out of going home. I don’t think my parents were even bothered. They probably approved because work has always seemed like the reason for their existence. Does that sound bitter? Maybe a little.