The Green Road (16 page)

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 indifferent 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.

Then, very quickly, it became ordinary. Not pleasant, of course. Just normal. A dog with a human arm in its mouth.

Now, sitting like a fool on a toilet in West Africa, it wasn’t normal any more.

Emmet braced his hands against the breeze-block walls, listening to his body, thinking,
This is how you die.

When he finally got out of there, a wreath of dawn bites around each ankle, Alice was still in her place by the bottom of the stairs. Blood was coming out of the dog’s back end now, and he was nearly dead. She didn’t ask about her cup of tea. She just cried and cried.

Ibrahim let himself in to the house just as the sun came up. He paused at the bloody scene in the dining room then ducked into the kitchen. There was silence. Emmet imagined him in there, steadying himself against the sink.

‘It’s going to get hot, Alice.’

Alice gave a tiny answer, that sounded like ‘Yes’. She stirred herself and picked vaguely at the cloth of her trousers, where the blood had dried.

‘Have a shower.’

He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She trailed upstairs and Emmet went to the kitchen where Ibrahim was standing stock still, holding his bag, ready for the market.

‘All right, Ib?’

‘I pain,’ said Ibrahim.

‘Have you? Little one?’

‘Yes. Little bit sick.’

‘Right. Well off you go. Don’t worry about the dog, Ib. I’ll sort that. N’inquiètes-pas du chien.’

‘Non, Monsieur. Merci, Monsieur.’

When he was gone, Emmet texted Hassan. He stood listening to the light, erratic footfalls in the bedroom above and looked at the dog’s little teeth, exposed in the snarl of death.

‘Oh man,’ said Hassan when he walked in. ‘So dirty this thing. Blood. Dead fucking dog. I can’t touch this thing, man, or I spew. You know? For this I spend three weeks in hell.’

‘Come on, Hassan my friend. Come on.’

‘It’s like you ask me to dirty my soul. I love you Emmet, but no way I can do that disgusting thing.’

‘How much?’

‘How much, my soul? OK. OK. Put him in something. OK. I’ll come back.’

And in surprisingly short order, he did. He brought a small, stocky-looking ‘Christian man’, who helped Emmet roll the dog into a square of hessian then shouldered the body so that the white plume of Mitch’s tail was hanging down his back. They were just about set when Alice appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Where are you taking him?’ she said.

Emmet looked at her.

‘Can you clean that up?’ he said, pointing at the blood on the floor, but Alice did not even pretend to hear.

‘Bury him,’ she said. ‘I want him properly buried.’ She looked very proud, standing there.

‘Yes, Madame,’ said Hassan.

Outside the door, Emmet said, ‘Don’t throw it in the fucking river, Hassan. People drink that stuff.’

He had his roll out. Hassan said, ‘Three bucks.’

‘Three?’

‘No commission.’

He fumbled out the notes, and they left, the Tuareg opening the gate with great ceremony. But instead of going to the Land Cruiser to put the dog in the boot, the ‘Christian man’ walked away from them, without a word, down towards the market and the river.

Emmet watched him go.

‘Give me half an hour,’ he said to Hassan.

Hassan let a big laugh out of him. ‘I love you, my man,’ he said. ‘I’ll kiss you when you’re clean.’

That night Alice said it was Ibrahim who had poisoned Mitch.

‘Rat poison. He gave him rat poison. He had internal bleeding. That was how he died.’

‘Ib’s a good guy.’

‘Is he?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘So I am supposed to live with this man. I am supposed to eat his food?’

‘Yes. Yes you are. Yes.’

She started to weep.

Emmet had a fair idea, by now, who had poisoned the dog, but he wasn’t about to get a different man fired. He said, ‘Can we draw a line under this one?’

‘Draw a line?’

Emmet steadied himself.

‘Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s only a dog.’

And that, he knew, was the end of them.

After sex that night, she lifted one short white leg and looked at it in the dim light, turning her foot this way and then the other. Stefan, the Swedish guy, said she had an ‘old-fashioned body’, which she thought just meant ‘fat’, but then he said she wasn’t fat, she was just ‘pre-war’. What about Emmet, did he think she was fat?

‘Certainly not,’ said Emmet.

‘I saw him down in Bam,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

Within a week, she had stopped speaking much, and there was nothing else for it – late one night, Emmet said, ‘I love you, Alice. I think I am in love with you.’

She paused where she was, and then walked on.

The next evening, which was Thursday, she had too much to drink and said, ‘You always leave it too late, don’t you? You wait until it’s all over and then you say you’re only starting. And then it’s like, Oh but I love you, and why are women so mean to me, and why can I never settle down?’

Emmet said nothing.

He was wrapping things up anyway. Alice, too, would be moving on. So there was no reason to hate her the way he seemed to hate her now. He wanted to yell at her. Hit her, maybe. He wanted to tell her to go home and rescue some fucking gerbils, because she was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, she would end up killing more people than she ever helped. And it was all very well, he wanted to say, it was all very nice
as a feeling
, but love was no use, at the end of the day, to man or beast, when there was no fucking justice in the world.