The Green Road: A Novel Page 12

  Better a dog.

  Ibrahim knew, by now. There was no hiding it, though it was unfortunate he discovered the dog’s stool before he discovered the dog – a dry enough turd that Mitch had deposited in a small room off the kitchen. Emmet arrived in to find all three of them looking at it, Alice and Ibrahim and Mitch. The watchman, when he thought about it, had been unusually dignified about opening the gate.

  ‘Bonsoir, Monsieur.’ Emmet did not even know the guy spoke French.

  Ib was not at the door to take his things. At first he thought the house was empty, then he heard Alice’s voice and made his way through the kitchen to find them all crouched over the thing.

  ‘How was the office?’ said Alice, with a flare of the eyes to tell him that things were under control, and he said, ‘Fine.’

  Emmet did not look at Ibrahim so much as feel his silence, over dinner. And his silence felt OK. The food was good, the service almost meditative. If he was angry, Emmet could not locate it, even when Alice fed the dog with her hands from her own bowl. After that, the dog slept inside, on a bed of rags pushed up against the living room wall.

  ‘I think they like each other,’ she said. She thought there was a genuine connection. Ib, for example, called the dog by name.

  ‘Which is more than you do.’

  But it was clear that Alice felt herself humiliated by the scene in the pantry, and by Ibrahim’s silken looks in the days that followed. She saw the edge of his contempt, or imagined she saw it, and was ready at all times to take offence. The more careful he was, the worse it got. Water was poured so beautifully, crockery laid with such utter grace and tactfulness, that she thought she would actually give the man a slap.

  ‘He creeps me out,’ she said, and ‘You never know where he is in the damn house.’ She started stripping the sheets off the bed herself, after sex, and leaving them in a clump on the floor.

  It was a relief to go down to the capital for a week-long traffic jam, and a bit of compound living with the government boys and the UN boys and the boys from the FAO. Bamako was not exactly Geneva airport, but still it was a shock. Sometimes, Emmet thought he wanted a nice air-conditioned office with Nespresso coffee and Skype on tap, but then he thought a nice air-conditioned office was an open invitation to his nervous breakdown. Emmet and his breakdown spent some quality time together after the Sudan, when his father was dying and Emmet sat about the house waiting for his own meds to work. How long did it take? Three months? Five? One way or another, that whole year was fucked.

  He was fine now. Ten years on. He and his breakdown had kept a respectful distance in various steaming, stinking towns from Dhaka to Nampula, though he did not underestimate it, or consider it gone. Lying on the clean sheets of the Bamako Radisson, Emmet felt it in the ducts, like Legionnaires’.

  On his last morning, Emmet made contact with a guy who knew a guy in Vétérinaires Sans Frontières and set up a meeting for him in the Radisson bar. The vet turned out to be a woman from Nebraska called Carol with a tough little body and a nice line in clean khakis. She listened to the problem of the dog’s eye in rapt silence, then said, ‘First off, let’s get another drink.’ When it arrived, she said, ‘OK, let’s fix this little guy,’ sending Emmet back north with the good news that the dog’s cherry eye could be massaged back into place. ‘Unless it has insurance, in which case, it’s a three-man job under full anaesthetic.’ She pushed her fingertips up under her own eye to demonstrate, and then under his, saying, ‘Hey, he has urethritis, you get to do this to his dick.’ After which, Emmet could not extricate himself until she’d had far too much to drink. But it was worth it, to bring something of value to Alice; sweet, soft-hearted Alice, with her passion for micro finance, and her body of medieval whiteness under the revolving fan.

  He also brought a twelve-pack of Andrex toilet paper back with him, three boxes of Twinings tea bags, and a jar of Nutella. He entered the house, laden, and went from room to room until he found her upstairs with Mitch, both of them under the mosquito net, on the bed.

  ‘Well hellooooo,’ she said.

  Mitch lifted his tail for a surprising wag that pushed out the netting like some vague stump. Then Alice climbed out from under it, and Emmet knew at once that something was wrong.

  ‘Where’s Ib?’

  The house was too silent, for a start.

  ‘Sick.’

  ‘How sick? How are you? Look! Look what I got!’

  ‘Nutella!’

  And Emmet held it high, making her fight for the jar.

  Down in the kitchen, he said, ‘What’s wrong with Ib?’

  ‘He sick.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘He siiiick. Went home on Thursday.’

  People here were always siiiick, always waving vaguely over bits of themselves. Pain in your back, pain in your head; it amazed Emmet that people who could barely scrape a meal together had time to notice their frozen shoulders or acid reflux, but they really did. They thought everything was about to kill them. And sometimes they were right.

  ‘Did someone come?’

  Alice said a boy stuck his head out of the kitchen, without so much as a by your leave, put his hand out for money and said, ‘I shopping.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he shopped,’ she said. ‘Whoever he is.’

  Later, over a cobbled-together dinner that was just an excuse for a Nutella dessert, she said, ‘I went over to see him this afternoon.’

  And now Emmet thought there was something really wrong with Ibrahim, she had waited so long to mention it.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Just the malaria coming back at him.’ She had brought over some Malarone and paracetamol, found Ibrahim shaking under six blankets, the sweat pouring out of him and ‘everybody in the room’, she paused for the right word. ‘All the kids and the wife.’

  ‘Scat,’ she said. Mitch was mooching for food, and Alice pushed him away. He nuzzled back in and she gave him a proper shove, ‘I said, get off!’

  Mitch gave Alice a hurt, sidelong look, but she did not apologise. She just watched him slope away.

  ‘Maybe we should turn vegetarian,’ she said. ‘You think dogs can be vegetarian?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Something happened.’

  ‘It’s just stupid,’ she said. And she tried to swallow the annoying small smile, that happened in her mouth and would not go away.

  After she left Ibrahim’s she was followed down the track by the usual posse of children and when she tried to wave goodbye, one of them started to make a noise. One of Ibrahim’s. A little guy with big solemn eyes. She didn’t know what he was doing and then she realised he was barking.

  ‘And then they all did it,’ she said. Six, maybe ten, little children all barking at her and rubbing their bellies.

  A passing woman started to laugh at the white lady, who could not get free of the barking children. Open derision – like the time she had to crap out in the bush and everyone fell around the place because she got someone else’s shit on her foot, and it was like, ‘I am here to save your babies’ lives, you bastards.’ Anyway, there was much mockery and pointing from the passers-by, and she backed away from the pack of children like a bad B movie, and then she turned and fled.

  ‘The thing was,’ she said, ‘I thought they wanted to eat the dog.’

  Emmet realised that he was allowed to laugh now.

  ‘I thought they wanted to eat Mitch.’

  ‘I really don’t think that was what they wanted,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  They wanted to eat the dog’s food. Alice had realised, by the time she got home, that Mitch ate more meat than Ibrahim’s children got in a week. Which wasn’t exactly news. She just hadn’t . . .

  ‘Bang the bread,’ said Emmet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Weevils. Bang it.’ You could tell that Ibrahim was off sick, the bread was full of moving black dots.

 
‘No such thing as vegetarian bread in this town,’ said Emmet. He slammed his hard bit of loaf on to the floor, shouting, ‘Die, you bastards!’ while Alice picked up hers and peered into it.

  ‘Ew.’

  He flung the bread against the wall.

  ‘Out! Out!’ while Alice squealed and fumbled her piece on to the table, flapping her hands in alarm.

  Emmet got up to retrieve his and was distracted by a gentle sound that became, as he noticed it, dreadful. They both listened, then looked to Mitch, to see a pool forming at the end of one shivering hind leg, the other leg nervously half cocked.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Alice.

  The pool did not spread so much as swell, until the tension gave and a runnel of piss broke across the floor.

  ‘Mitch! Stop it!’

  Alice said, ‘Sit down! What are you doing?’

  ‘What am I doing? Look what he’s doing.’

  ‘Why are you shouting? He is doing it because you are shouting.’ She was shouting, herself, now. ‘Why are you like this?’

  Mitch was cowering against the wall, eyes locked on Emmet. When Alice moved to comfort him, a last pathetic gout of liquid came out on to the floor.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Emmet.

  There was nothing for it but to be nice to the dog, which Alice did, and to clean up the piss, which Emmet did, using up many valuable sheets of Andrex two-ply classic white.

  After which, they sat back down to finish their dinner.

  ‘Right,’ said Emmet.

  Mitch lay in a swoon of reconciliation beside Alice, who fed him and stroked him as they ate in silence. After a while, with the slow air of a woman who doesn’t even know that she is looking for a fight, Alice said she had decided to give Ibrahim a raise.

  ‘Great,’ said Emmet.

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Sure. By all means. Let’s give Ibrahim money. Lots of money. I have no problem with that.’

  ‘You’re just mean,’ said Alice.

  ‘Check your guidelines,’ he said.

  ‘You are,’ said Alice. ‘You’re a cold bastard.’

  They ate on.

  ‘Let me try something,’ he said. ‘Can I try?’

  Emmet petted the dog and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to eat you, Mitch.’ He took the dog’s muzzle in both hands and glanced up at Alice. Then he applied a gentle thumb to the dog’s bad eye.

  Mitch pulled back and scrambled to his feet, but Alice put her arms about the dog’s ribcage and held on while Emmet took his head in his hands again and circled his thumb round the eye’s inner corner. He pressed the balloon of flesh down into the orbital socket, closing his own eyes, the better to sense the lump beneath the dog’s trembling underlid. He could feel it flatten and go, as though the air had been let out of it, and when he released Mitch for a look, the dog blinked, clear and aggrieved. Then he blinked again. Mitch braced his front legs and turned his head from side to side. Then he shook himself, with violent precision, from top to tail. He lolloped off to his rag bed in the corner, where he turned and turned, and lay down. Then he was up again, pouncing on a cushion as if it was a small animal that had moved.

  ‘It might pop out again tomorrow,’ said Emmet. ‘In which case, we do it again, apparently.’

  ‘Good trick.’

  He was a shallow creature, really – just in it for the sex, Emmet thought, as he looked at Alice’s face made hazy by delight.

  ‘Nutella?’ he said.

  In the middle of December, Alice went home. She left like a schoolgirl, with folders of notes for head office and an implausible, chunky-knit, black and white scarf.

  Emmet tried to imagine her wearing something so uncomfortable and hot. He saw her in a kitchen filled with unlikely daffodils; the mad mother, the two brothers ‘who never said much’. The colonial house was empty of tat. Alice had brought it all back with her; the mud-cloth hangings, the Dogon masks; it was all sitting in a suitcase on that seventies lino in Newcastle, smelling of camel shit. Emmet went around the stripped-down rooms like a visitor, and did not know where to sit. Ibrahim, too, was more serious now they were alone: dutiful and male, he acted as though they had an understanding. Which they had, sort of. The dog stayed outside, for a start.

  He barked every evening. Confined to the space between the house and the wall, he called the sudden sunset, as though doubting the dawn.

  On the 24th, Emmet went on the road, leaving instructions that Mitch should be fed in his absence, though he did not expect him to be fed much. He topped up the bowl before he left. And it was something, when he came back after a week, to be welcomed with doggy joy; a little dashing about.

  ‘Hiya! Hiya!’

  Though, when he looked into the dog’s clear eyes and the dog looked into his, they were both thinking of Alice.

  ‘Back soon, boyo. She’ll be back soon.’

  In the middle of January, she rang from Bamako. Emmet went out to buy beer and soap, and brought Mitch back inside.

  ‘Don’t tell, eh?’ It had only been a month, but the dog seemed confused. He walked from one place to another as though he did not recognise the rooms. Then he went back to the front door, and scratched to be let out. When Emmet opened the door, he sicked up on the front step.

  ‘Shit,’ said Emmet. He tried to tempt him in with a biscuit, but Mitch did not seem interested in biscuits and Emmet had to pull him inside, finally, to his rag bed. He called to Ibrahim.

  ‘Monsieur Emmet, sir?’

  They looked at the dog, who was panting where he lay. Every breath was a rasp in his throat.

  ‘He sick,’ said Ibrahim.

  ‘Yes.’

  They stood for a moment.

  Emmet said, ‘You know, Ib, I never gave you your Christmas box.’ Then he palmed the guy ten bucks and left it at that.

  By the time Alice got in that evening, the dog was bleeding from the nose. This she discovered when he left a trail across her cargo pants and her homecoming turned, on the instant, from gladness to disaster. She was barely in the door.

  Mitch was bleeding from somewhere and heaving with unidentifiable pain. Alice felt around his belly, which was swollen and, as he nuzzled under her palm, he cried, like a baby gone wrong. Alice, still in her blood-smeared travelling clothes, sat beside him and lifted his head on to her lap. Ibrahim came in with newspaper and old cloths, and left quietly for home.

  ‘Did somebody hit him?’ she said. ‘He must have been hit by a motorbike. Or a car.’ But Emmet said – and he was pretty sure it was true – that the dog had not been beyond the gate. Alice was deep in panic. She sat beside Mitch, who cried for another while and then slept. He barked in his dreams, and that strange, uncompleted sound was like crying too. There was more blood.

  Emmet tried Carol, the vet from Nebraska, but her African SIM made funny noises and the Bamako office was, naturally, closed.

  ‘Did you get her?’ said Alice.

  ‘I think she’s gone back home.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ she said, gesturing for the vet’s business card, stained (though Alice was not to know this) with Jack Daniel’s.

  ‘What time is it in America?’ she said, pushing the numbers into her little slab phone and Emmet was so angry, suddenly, he had to turn away.

  An hour later, as though continuing where they had left off, Alice suddenly said, ‘What are you even here for?’

  He said, ‘Come to bed.’

  ‘I mean, if you don’t believe in anything? Really. What are you doing here?’

  He did not remind her that he was the one who fixed the dog’s bad eye; that, although he did not love the dog, he had helped the dog. He said, ‘Come on.’

  And she dragged herself upstairs for an hour or two, rummaging in her bag first to find her little box alarm.

  Emmet watched Alice in her sleep, the imperceptible rise and fall of her breast, the slopes of her body under the white sheet. Downstairs the dog gave a peculiar brief whistle on the top of each inhale and Alice looked indiff
erent to it, almost happy. Emmet thought about work. His next trip would take him out beyond the Bandiagara escarpment – one hundred and fifty kilometres of cliff, stuck with mud houses like the nests of swifts. Mankind, living in the crevices. Sometimes Emmet thought it was the landscape he loved, the way it stretched as you travelled through it and the hills unfolded. The pleasure of the mountain gap.

  When he woke, Alice was back at her post downstairs, sitting against the wall beside Mitch. There was blood on the floor, in a mess of brushstrokes from his muzzle. He was almost still.

  When he heard Emmet, the dog opened his eyes and looked for Alice’s eyes, and she bent down, offering her face to lick, encouraging his pale tongue to find her chin and mouth. The dog’s teeth were very dark, the gums almost white. She let the dog’s head gently down on the floor and tilted her own head sadly back against the wall. Mitch coughed. The blood that came out was scarlet, and it spattered her pale forearm. Alice looked down at herself, indifferent.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Emmet.

  He went outside to the privy and looked up at the fading stars, while he stood to pee. The licking was fine. You can’t get TB from a dog and anyway, the dog did not have TB. It was the blood on her arm that disturbed him, and the dog’s dark teeth. Some feeling he could not identify. And then he did.

  It happened just as he finished pissing, whatever that did to you. A darkness pouring down his spine. He had to turn and sit on the toilet, so as not to fall. Emmet’s elbows were on his knees and his hands were out in front of him, and there it was. The forgotten thing, indelibly back. A dog in Cambodia, with a woman’s arm in its mouth.

  It was up near the Thai border, his first year out. The area was full of minefields and the medics did fifteen, twenty amputations a day. They threw the remains in a heap outside the hospital tent and, if she had a moment, one of the nurses shot at the scavenger dogs. They put pit teams together, but there were latrines to be dug, and the dogs were not fatal, the way diarrhoea is fatal. So it was hard to believe, but it became true, that for a fortnight at least their only defence against this desecration was a crack-shot nurse called Lisbette from the Auvergne, who took a pistol with her when she stepped outside for a fag.