Anne Enright - The Green Road

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.