Anne Enright - The Green Road

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.