The Green Road (15 page)

‘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 shrieking 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.

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.