Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘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.

He also wanted to tell her that she was lovely and eternally right and that he, Emmet, was a failure as a human being.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She was gone when he got back. There was money on the desk, for rent, which made Emmet sad, and a note on the bed he really did not want to read. Alice had the kind of handwriting that put little circles over the i’s, and sticky-out puppy tongues where the full stop should be. Alice’s handwriting made him feel like a child-molester. The note was a single sheet of paper, inside which she had written the verse everyone quotes, by Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

Emmet did not take a shower. He shoved the hat back on his head and went downstairs, calling, ‘I’ll be back late,’ and Ibrahim, who had not emerged from the kitchen since he had arrived, called back, ‘OK, Monsieur Emmet. Bonsoir !’

The Tuareg at the gate was wearing a new cloth of indigo blue, freshly dyed; for a wedding, perhaps. Original blue. The veil across the bottom of his face had stained the man’s cheeks — what Emmet could see of them — with years of dye. It occurred to Emmet that the Tuaregs came and went, that there might have been many different men at his gate, and this was why he never knew which one he was talking to and which one had poisoned the fucking dog.

Poor Mitch. Poor bastard.

Emmet went to a shebeen on the side of the marketplace and cracked a beer, watching out for the mad, sweaty guy on his left, nodding at the young lads drinking cola at the low table, and then turning, with the heels of his boots hooked on to the cross-bar of the stool, to watch the world go by.

It was all as it should be. The market was a sea of tat that nobody seemed to buy, and the vegetables were laid out on decorative cloths, like handmade things.

After a while, the bumpy woman came by; the one who was covered in tiny lumps, from the top of her head to the underside of her heels. She turned, as she passed, to level at Emmet a smile of great sweetness and sympathy. Emmet gave her a wan smile back and she continued on, gravely smooth, as though there was a pot balanced on her head.

IN NOVEMBER OF 2005 Rosaleen decided to do her Christmas cards, which were few enough, and most of them local. Not, she thought, that she would be getting many back this year, as people died off, or their habits died off, through forgetfulness or the neglect of their families who would not think to go down to the post office and buy them a book of stamps.

The cards were small and square shaped with ‘Merry Christmas’ written in copperplate writing across the top. All of them were the same design: a block of red, and on it a brown dune, with little camels and kings drawn on the sand in black ink. Above them was the Christmas star, long — like a crucifix with added rays bursting out from the crux of it. The light of the star was made with the white of the paper itself. The printer just left a gap.

The cards were very simple but they were good cards. The red was very satisfying; not so much a sky as a background, like something you would see in a Matisse. Vermilion. Rosaleen closed her eyes in pleasure at a word she had not expected and at the memory of Matisse: a red room with a woman sitting in it, from a postcard or a library book, perhaps. Years since she had given it a thought, and there the woman still sat in her head, waiting to surprise her for never having left. Waiting for her moment, which was an ordinary moment — half past four on a Thursday in November, the sun about to set, sinking towards New York and, below New York as the world turned, all of America.

Straight across the ocean.