The Green Road: A Novel Page 11

  ‘Bam! Back broken.’

  They were walking over to a party, slapping themselves idly, or waving the mosquitoes away with a bit of palm leaf.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  ‘Somebody got dinner,’ he said.

  ‘For sure.’

  He didn’t mention the small child in Mozambique, who cracked off the side of the car, sailed in an arc, and seemed to bounce off the ground, he was up so fast and running – also smiling – the little bag of peanuts he was trying to sell still held high. Bit of a limp. They wanted to stop, but the driver threw some coins out the window and put the foot down. And:

  ‘No, no!’ said the nice aid workers. ‘Stop the car!’

  ‘So what was it like?’ said Alice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Sudan.’

  People always wanted to know about the Sudan.

  Two thousand people sucking water from the same patch of mud. Thirty water pumps stuck at the airport, and every piece of paper shuffled and lost by the bastards in Khartoum. What did she want to hear?

  ‘There was a lot of paperwork,’ he said.

  He wanted to tell her that starvation does not smell sweet, the way death smells sweet. There’s a chemical edge to it, like walking past the hairdresser’s at home.

  Alice took his arm in the silence.

  The streets were very quiet: a few scooters, the distant sound of trucks coming up from the riverside. Through open doorways, families could be seen, murmuring and eating or sitting against the wall. There was no metal cutlery to bang or clatter, the children did not shout, and no baby was crying, anywhere. From an open window, they heard the pop-pop-popping sound of a paraffin lamp that was newly lit. The woman tending the flame wore a green headscarf, elaborately wrapped, and the light, as it grew, seemed to pull her face out of its own beautiful shadows. Emmet could hear the squeak of the little screw, as they passed.

  The party was a desultory thing; with one bottle pretending to be Johnnie Walker and a fetid punch. The next morning they woke to the sound of the muezzin and the relief of a house that was empty of everyone except themselves. They spent the morning catching up on work then packed their togs for an afternoon swim in the tiny pool at the Lebanese hotel. Emmet heated the lunch that Ibrahim had left for them. He was just about to serve up, when he heard Alice open the front door.

  ‘Come on!’ she said.

  There was a noise on the tiles like a scattering of small beads and Emmet thought something had spilt – her necklace, perhaps, had broken. But when she came into the dining room her necklace was intact, and the small noise continued.

  ‘Lunch,’ he said, a little foolishly, with the pot of stew – it was goat – held in both hands. As he set it down on the low table, he saw the dog.

  It was the whiteness of the dog that disturbed him first and, after that, the wan look in its good eye.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Things are bad enough.’

  ‘No they’re not. Are they?’

  ‘I mean in Africa. Things are bad enough in Africa, without bringing a dog into the house.’

  ‘It’s only a dog,’ she said.

  ‘Eat your lunch,’ he said, ladling the stew on to her plate. But Alice took the plate and scraped half of it into the bowl – which he now realised was the dog’s bowl – on the floor. It had been the dog’s bowl for some time.

  ‘Eat your lunch,’ he said again.

  ‘What are you, my mother?’

  Emmet took the pot back out to the kitchen and came back in and sat down and started to eat in what he hoped was a companionable silence. The stew was excellent. The dog liked it, too. Alice said, ‘Good boy, Mitch. Good boy.’

  The dog ate, then clicked across the tiles to offer its nervous love to Alice, feinting and fawning as her hand found the top of its head.

  ‘Poor guy,’ she said. ‘There you go.’

  A whine of pure emotion escaped the dog as it plonked its chin on Alice’s thigh, and looked up into her eyes. Alice ate with one hand, while the other hand scratched under and around its head until the dog collapsed on to the floor and rolled over, paws dangling, back legs agape and her hand worked its way down its ribs and on to the hairless belly.

  Every piece of shit in town was stuck to the dog’s undercarriage, a fact that did not seem to bother Alice despite the hand-washing campaign she ran for the new mothers of Ségou. Because hand washing – there was no doubt about it – saves lives. On the plus side, Emmet decided, the dog did not have rabies. And if he did, Emmet was up to date on his shots.

  He said: ‘You know, Ibrahim has first dibs on the leftovers. Usually.’

  Alice paused and then scratched on.

  ‘Poor Mitch,’ she said.

  He said, ‘It’s just a pain, when they start to pilfer. The staff.’

  She looked up. ‘Ib is stealing stuff?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. No.’

  But she was back to cooing at the dog. And Emmet needed to think, so he just shut up for a while.

  They walked over to the hotel. On the last stretch of road, Emmet saw a woman afflicted with tiny lumps. They covered her from head to toe. Even her eyelids were lumpy, even the insides of her ears. Emmet had seen her before, and she always greeted him with the sweet, sad smile of a woman who is happy you have not thrown a stone at her. It was hard to know what the problem was. The lumps were under the skin, so they weren’t warts, and there was no sign of infection so you couldn’t – even in your own mind – dose her with antibiotics and sleep contented. It was a parasite, perhaps, though not one he had ever encountered. It was a syndrome. An autoimmune thing. It was a biblical plague of boils. It was something genetic, because poverty wasn’t enough of a curse, clearly, you had to have your own extra, personal curse, just to make you feel special.

  And the street was a medical textbook, suddenly. People with bits missing. The bulge of a tumour about to split the skin. The village idiot was a paranoid schizophrenic. A man with glaucous eyes was sweating out a fever in a beautiful carved chair, his head tipped back against the wall.

  Emmet fell into the cool of the hotel foyer.

  ‘Good to see you Mister Emmet,’ said Paul the receptionist. ‘Ms Alice. Very happy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emmet. ‘Hot enough out there!’

  The small pool was so warm, it was like swimming in a bowl of soup. Emmet did a few short lengths, keeping his face dry and clear, then he hauled himself out beside the sun loungers where Alice had set their bags.

  He ordered a mojito.

  ‘Local?’ said the waiter, meaning the alcohol, and Emmet said, ‘Imported.’

  Alice looked at him. The drink was obscenely expensive and, when it arrived, full of sugar.

  ‘Mud in your eye,’ he said, remembering his manners after the first gulp and lifting the glass.

  ‘Here’s to you,’ said Alice, who was taking the ice out of her cola with doggy hands, and throwing it in to melt in the pool.

  The next morning, Emmet woke into the tender hour before the hangover hit and he sat to meditate for the first time since he had moved in with Alice. He crossed his legs and shifted a cushion under the bones of his backside and sighed his way through each breath. Sadly the air entered him and sadly it left as he counted to three on each inhale, and then to four, and then stopped counting. The town was quietly awake. The drinker’s morning dread came to tap him on the shoulder. And then it left. Emmet watched his thoughts, which were all, for the moment, about dying. A man falling out of a Portaloo in Juba, half cooked. The used tissues on his father’s bedside. A girl in Cambodia with her ribs showing and her little pubic bones jutting out. Then, after a while, his thoughts were not about dying. He was swimming in Lahinch. He was walking the land in Boolavaun. He remembered the taste of fuchsia, when you suck the nectar out. He remembered the taste of Alice.

  Just before sunrise, she opened her eyes.

  She said, ‘I was dreaming about
the river.’

  There was a noise downstairs, as Ibrahim opened the front door and their eyes locked. Where was the dog?

  Emmet was halfway down the stairs when he remembered letting the creature out of the house before making his way to bed the night before. Which meant that only the watchman knew what company they had kept the previous evening. In which case, everyone knew: Emmet and Alice had a dog.

  Sort of.

  Dogs are unclean to Muslims, as Alice well knew – she had done that course at college – so she also knew not to bring him inside when the help was around.

  Still.

  ‘Look at him,’ she had said, when they arrived back from their hotel swim and the dog met them in the yard. Emmet looked. The dog’s tail was hooked under a shivering rump, that dabbed low and began to swing.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ said Alice, and her fingers kneaded the loose hide of his neck.

  ‘Look into those eyes,’ she said to Emmet, and her own eyes, when she turned her face up to him, were happy. Ardent.

  Emmet obliged. He looked at the dog and the dog looked quickly away, then back at him. The red lump was not a cyst, he decided, it was a membrane that had popped out somehow.

  ‘He has an old soul,’ said Alice.

  Emmet ducked around the corner of the house and retrieved a bottle of Bushmills from its hiding place under the outhouse rafters. Then they went inside – all three of them – and shut the door.

  They sat and drank in the living room with the dog curled up on the tiles, snout to the floor: every shift or move they made questioned with a gather of its white brows, a forward twitch of the ears.

  ‘Bless,’ said Alice.

  After a while, she said that Ibrahim was not the most devout Muslim you could meet. They had never seen him roll out a mat to pray, for example, and he had been known to take a beer – not in the house, but in a bar by the market. He was also very keen on mobile phones, and on ringtones that sounded like a woman having an orgasm – which was something she just had to pretend she wasn’t hearing, really; even so, she volunteered to keep the dog away from rooms where food was eaten or prepared.

  Emmet poured another drink.

  ‘I don’t know if it is a food thing,’ he said.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘So much as a ritual thing? I mean the dog being “unclean”. It’s not a question of hygiene the way we think of hygiene, in the Western sense.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But of, you know, things being sacred, or defiled.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Ritual cleanliness is, I think, not so much about what you put into the body, as what comes out of the body. Shit. Semen.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alice. She would only bring him inside in the evening, when Ibrahim had gone home.

  They sat in silence.

  ‘Are you coming to bed?’ she asked after a while and Emmet lifted his drink and looked down into it. He said, ‘I think I’ll just stay here for a while. With the dog.’

  The next morning, he came tearing down the stairs, to find the animal, as he remembered, no longer inside the house, and Ibrahim sublimely indifferent to whatever had gone on, or not gone on, the night before.

  On Sunday evening, they sat and worked in the living room listening to the World Service from the BBC, and the dog sat there too. When Alice finished her paperwork, she joined Emmet on the bamboo sofa and they lay against each other, for as long as the heat allowed. It made their relationship feel strangely normal, having a dog in the room.

  Alice leaned back from him and rearranged his hair lightly with her fingers. She asked, in a lazy way, about previous girlfriends.

  One or two lasted a while, he said. The rest, not so long.

  ‘Though they felt pretty epic at the time.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Nothing like a quiet upbringing to make you feel the thrill and the shame of it.’

  The dog slept on.

  ‘Ah,’ she said.

  In fact, the dog slept a surprising amount of the time.

  ‘At home, or where?’

  Emmet looked at her; her head rolled on to the back of the sofa, the teasing fingertips picking at his hair. He wondered where it came from, this unreachable pain she had, that made her so sweet and wild.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  Later, after he had taken the discussion upstairs, so to speak, Alice told him that her mother spent every Easter in hospital. It was just her time of year. It started with the daffodils, she pulled them out of every garden on the road. Alice would come home from school to find the house shouting yellow, and welts on her mother’s hands where she had ripped the stalks out of the ground. The neighbours she robbed said nothing. And, for two or three weeks, they had the best time ever. They had so much fun. By Easter Sunday, her mother would be sitting in hospital like the bunny who ran out of battery, not able to lift the fag to her mouth, and Alice is facing the next however many weeks looking after things at home.

  ‘What age?’ he said.

  ‘Whatever. I could work the washing machine at nine.’

  This was why Alice wanted to help people. This was also why she was so much fun.

  ‘Well I think you’re great,’ he said.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘The way you turned it all to the good.’

  Alice, lying on her back, began to laugh: a delicious gurgle that Emmet thought might get out of hand, there was so much hurt in it. Then she stopped and said, ‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

  After a long while she turned in to him like a child, with her two arms out. By the time he could see her eyelashes in the darkness they had settled in sleep.

  Emmet lay there, jealous of her repose. The heat was worse at night – there was no shade, because it was all shade. In the dark, the heat was the same and everywhere, it was like drowning in your own blood-temperature blood.

  He tried to remember the freshness of an April day at home, the cool inside of a chocolate Easter egg.

  He remembered Geneva airport, a place where he had, after a tough sixteen months in the Sudan, experienced an overwhelming urge to lie down on the clean, perfumed floor. Shop after shop of leather goods and fluffy toys, chocolate shops and Swatch shops, Cartier, Dior. Emmet went into each one of them, trying to buy something for his mother. He looked at this beautiful obscenity of stuff, bags of fine leather and silver chains that turned out to be made of platinum. He ran fifty silk scarves through his shaking hands, trying to imagine what she might like about each one. He ended up with a box of Swiss chocolates, stuck them in his stinking canvas bag, with the red dirt of the Sudan still rimed along the seams. Through security, up into the overhead bin: his father was too sick by then to meet him at the airport, so he carried them on to the bus and walked them up over the humpy bridge home.

  ‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen said, because she was on a diet. ‘Oh, no! Chocolates!’

  Emmet had more than his mother to forgive, of course. He had a whole planet to forgive for the excesses of Geneva airport. For the frailty of his father. For the shake in his own hands that he thought was giardiasis but turned out to be his life falling apart. His mother had a lot to answer for, but not this.

  Emmet was sitting on the side of the bed now, with his feet dangling below the net. Outside the bedroom door, he heard the soft scritter-scrat of the forgotten dog. Then the sigh of a furred body sliding down the wood. Then silence.

  ‘Here, Mitch!’

  Alice had a ‘special’ voice for the dog that annoyed Emmet no end. She put strings of beads around his neck, and held a biscuit between her lips for him to snaffle with his mouth.

  Something about Emmet’s tone, meanwhile, just brought out the whipped cur in Mitch. If he lifted his hand, the dog backed away from him in a palsy of hind limbs.

  ‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

  If he stepped any closer a shrie
king yelp would come out of the dog.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ said Alice, the first time it happened. ‘What did you do?’

  It was a tough cycle to break. The more the dog dragged its belly on the floor, the more it tried Emmet’s patience and Alice became increasingly suspicious of Emmet, as Mitch trembled against the wall. Sex was off, that much was clear. Love me, love my dog. Emmet ended up courting the creature with biscuits, which he set in a line on the floor. Every evening, the dog came a little closer, until finally he took the biscuit from Emmet’s fingers. Then he pushed his narrow skull up under Emmet’s hand and whined.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Alice.

  After a moment’s delay, Emmet patted the dog and scratched behind his ears.

  ‘There you go.’

  The delay interested him, for being chilly. The delay was nice.

  ‘You can see the temptation,’ he said. ‘To give him a kick.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Alice.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Emmet. But she really didn’t know, and called Mitch to her. ‘What’s he saying?’ she said. ‘What is he talking about?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Emmet.

  And Alice looked up at him and said, ‘No, actually. No.’

  Alice wanted to get antibiotic drops for the dog’s eye, but the cyst-thing was weeping clear and Emmet did not think this was the way to go. Besides, the town was not exactly brimming over with antibiotic drops. So she boiled up some saline instead and squirted it from a blunt syringe she took from the maternity clinic and after a week the weeping stopped. Once this happened they saw how sleek the dog was getting. Its baldy, pink hide was filling in with white hair. Its tail uncurled out from between its legs and swung level, sometimes even proud.

  It might have been worse. It might have been a child.

  Emmet fell in love with a child in Cambodia, his first year out. He spent long nights planning her future, because the feel of her little hand in his drove him pure mad: he thought if he could save this one child, then Cambodia would make sense. These things happen. Love happens. There are things you can do, if you have the foresight and the money, but there isn’t that much you can do, and the child is left – he had seen it many times – the aid worker cries on the plane, feeling all that love, and the abandoned child cries on the ground, because they are damaged goods now, and their prospects worse than they might have been before.