Not, in fairness, that any of them had been white.
So he plied his fork like an old man and remembered the leaky corpses he had seen in one place or another, then he put the corpses out of his mind while Alice clinked her elegant bangles over her plate.
The computers had finally arrived, she said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Two of them.’
‘No shit.’
‘Telling you.’
‘Do they work?’
‘Up to a point,’ she said. They were mains powered, so they couldn’t switch them on until the generator was sorted, and when this happened, some time in the middle of the afternoon, they had discovered one of them was Windows 97 and the other was Windows 95. It was not that they were antiques, it was that they were differently antique. You could move stuff from the older to the newer software but not the other way around. And there was no modem.
‘I mean, what’s the fucking point?’
‘Training?’ he said, but Alice had already started to cry.
‘It’s not just the computers,’ she said.
She cried the way she always cried in the evening: vague tears. Her face was simply wet.
‘I know.’
Alice was working on child mortality. Children were hard.
‘You should stay in the office more,’ he said.
It sounded like a joke, but he meant it. She should focus on delivery of mosquito nets and stop gazing at malarial babies, while they died.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
Good, sweet, kind-hearted Alice. Endlessly sweet. Endlessly kind. Emmet had to oblige himself to stay seated and to continue eating and to smile back at her. He was thirty-eight years old, beyond confusion. He was lucky to have her. But he was not yet sure that you could call it love.
The next trip took him beyond Mopti. They drove along the wide Niger, then east along a scratch in the dust that was the road inland. Seven hours out, they saw the shadow where locusts had stripped the land, the edge of it faint but cruelly precise, a secret map that shifted across the paper map, like the landscape’s own weather. This was the line they travelled for the next ten days, with wind-up radios and pesticide packs. When he arrived back at the house Alice washed him, and he washed Alice, and this tenderness was as much as either of them could muster. Alice sat cross-legged inside the mosquito net while he lay behind her on the bed. She said, ‘I have fifteen bites.’
‘Fifteen?’
She said, ‘Active bites. I have five fading. I can, you know, sense them. I find each one, with my eyes closed. I find it, and then I breathe slowly, letting it go. Letting the itch go.’
There was silence.
‘And how is that working out for you?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said. And then, ‘How was the road?’
‘Good. Fine.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘You know.’
‘Did you have some meetings?’
‘I did.’
‘And were these meetings held under a convenient tree?’
‘They were,’ he said.
He asked her did she ever, when she was a child, break the top off a fuchsia and suck the nectar out, just where the skirts of the flower began.
‘Oh dear me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. No.’
He noticed the bowl again, when they went out that evening. This time it was inside the house, on the hall floor. He was going to mention it to Ibrahim but it was a Thursday and Ibrahim was anxious to be gone. He let the driver go too. Emmet could not get back into the Land Cruiser, he was tired of Hassan driving like a bastard, shaving past some old woman so the pot wobbled on her head. So many women unkilled by so many white four-wheel-drives in the various countries where he had been driven by men like Hassan, a little more crazy, or less.
‘Mind the pot!’
Thousands of miles on dust roads, and gravel roads, and potholed tarmac: roads that turned into rivers, or forest, or crowded marketplaces; roads you drove beside because the road was so bad.
Total kill, he told Alice, as they walked along the river, one goat, a few chickens, something that flew like a pheasant and shattered the windscreen in Bangladesh, and many small bumps that felt, when you thought about it, a bit soft. The biggest was a tiny antelope in the Sudan, suspended mid leap for an endless moment in front of them, before a rear hoof caught the bonnet, and it was upended under their front fender.
‘Bam! Back broken.’
They were walking over to a party, slapping themselves idly, or waving the mosquitoes away with a bit of palm leaf.
‘Oh no,’ she said.
‘Somebody got dinner,’ he said.
‘For sure.’
He didn’t mention the small child in Mozambique, who cracked off the side of the car, sailed in an arc, and seemed to bounce off the ground, he was up so fast and running — also smiling — the little bag of peanuts he was trying to sell still held high. Bit of a limp. They wanted to stop, but the driver threw some coins out the window and put the foot down. And:
‘No, no!’ said the nice aid workers. ‘Stop the car!’
‘So what was it like?’ said Alice.
‘What?’
‘The Sudan.’
People always wanted to know about the Sudan.
Two thousand people sucking water from the same patch of mud. Thirty water pumps stuck at the airport, and every piece of paper shuffled and lost by the bastards in Khartoum. What did she want to hear?
‘There was a lot of paperwork,’ he said.
He wanted to tell her that starvation does not smell sweet, the way death smells sweet. There’s a chemical edge to it, like walking past the hairdresser’s at home.
Alice took his arm in the silence.
The streets were very quiet: a few scooters, the distant sound of trucks coming up from the riverside. Through open doorways, families could be seen, murmuring and eating or sitting against the wall. There was no metal cutlery to bang or clatter, the children did not shout, and no baby was crying, anywhere. From an open window, they heard the pop-pop-popping sound of a paraffin lamp that was newly lit. The woman tending the flame wore a green headscarf, elaborately wrapped, and the light, as it grew, seemed to pull her face out of its own beautiful shadows. Emmet could hear the squeak of the little screw, as they passed.
The party was a desultory thing; with one bottle pretending to be Johnnie Walker and a fetid punch. The next morning they woke to the sound of the muezzin and the relief of a house that was empty of everyone except themselves. They spent the morning catching up on work then packed their togs for an afternoon swim in the tiny pool at the Lebanese hotel. Emmet heated the lunch that Ibrahim had left for them. He was just about to serve up, when he heard Alice open the front door.
‘Come on!’ she said.
There was a noise on the tiles like a scattering of small beads and Emmet thought something had spilt — her necklace, perhaps, had broken. But when she came into the dining room her necklace was intact, and the small noise continued.
‘Lunch,’ he said, a little foolishly, with the pot of stew — it was goat — held in both hands. As he set it down on the low table, he saw the dog.
It was the whiteness of the dog that disturbed him first and, after that, the wan look in its good eye.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Things are bad enough.’
‘No they’re not. Are they?’
‘I mean in Africa. Things are bad enough in Africa, without bringing a dog into the house.’
‘It’s only a dog,’ she said.