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.
Emmet lay there, jealous of her repose. The heat was worse at night — there was no shade, because it was all shade. In the dark, the heat was the same and everywhere, it was like drowning in your own blood-temperature blood.
He tried to remember the freshness of an April day at home, the cool inside of a chocolate Easter egg.
He remembered Geneva airport, a place where he had, after a tough sixteen months in the Sudan, experienced an overwhelming urge to lie down on the clean, perfumed floor. Shop after shop of leather goods and fluffy toys, chocolate shops and Swatch shops, Cartier, Dior. Emmet went into each one of them, trying to buy something for his mother. He looked at this beautiful obscenity of stuff, bags of fine leather and silver chains that turned out to be made of platinum. He ran fifty silk scarves through his shaking hands, trying to imagine what she might like about each one. He ended up with a box of Swiss chocolates, stuck them in his stinking canvas bag, with the red dirt of the Sudan still rimed along the seams. Through security, up into the overhead bin: his father was too sick by then to meet him at the airport, so he carried them on to the bus and walked them up over the humpy bridge home.
‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen said, because she was on a diet. ‘Oh, no! Chocolates!’
Emmet had more than his mother to forgive, of course. He had a whole planet to forgive for the excesses of Geneva airport. For the frailty of his father. For the shake in his own hands that he thought was giardiasis but turned out to be his life falling apart. His mother had a lot to answer for, but not this.
Emmet was sitting on the side of the bed now, with his feet dangling below the net. Outside the bedroom door, he heard the soft scritter-scrat of the forgotten dog. Then the sigh of a furred body sliding down the wood. Then silence.
‘Here, Mitch!’
Alice had a ‘special’ voice for the dog that annoyed Emmet no end. She put strings of beads around his neck, and held a biscuit between her lips for him to snaffle with his mouth.
Something about Emmet’s tone, meanwhile, just brought out the whipped cur in Mitch. If he lifted his hand, the dog backed away from him in a palsy of hind limbs.
‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’
If he stepped any closer a shrieking yelp would come out of the dog.
‘What did you do to him?’ said Alice, the first time it happened. ‘What did you do?’
It was a tough cycle to break. The more the dog dragged its belly on the floor, the more it tried Emmet’s patience and Alice became increasingly suspicious of Emmet, as Mitch trembled against the wall. Sex was off, that much was clear. Love me, love my dog. Emmet ended up courting the creature with biscuits, which he set in a line on the floor. Every evening, the dog came a little closer, until finally he took the biscuit from Emmet’s fingers. Then he pushed his narrow skull up under Emmet’s hand and whined.
‘Bingo,’ said Alice.
After a moment’s delay, Emmet patted the dog and scratched behind his ears.
‘There you go.’
The delay interested him, for being chilly. The delay was nice.
‘You can see the temptation,’ he said. ‘To give him a kick.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Alice.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Emmet. But she really didn’t know, and called Mitch to her. ‘What’s he saying?’ she said. ‘What is he talking about?’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Emmet.
And Alice looked up at him and said, ‘No, actually. No.’
Alice wanted to get antibiotic drops for the dog’s eye, but the cyst-thing was weeping clear and Emmet did not think this was the way to go. Besides, the town was not exactly brimming over with antibiotic drops. So she boiled up some saline instead and squirted it from a blunt syringe she took from the maternity clinic and after a week the weeping stopped. Once this happened they saw how sleek the dog was getting. Its baldy, pink hide was filling in with white hair. Its tail uncurled out from between its legs and swung level, sometimes even proud.
It might have been worse. It might have been a child.
Emmet fell in love with a child in Cambodia, his first year out. He spent long nights planning her future, because the feel of her little hand in his drove him pure mad: he thought if he could save this one child, then Cambodia would make sense. These things happen. Love happens. There are things you can do, if you have the foresight and the money, but there isn’t that much you can do, and the child is left — he had seen it many times — the aid worker cries on the plane, feeling all that love, and the abandoned child cries on the ground, because they are damaged goods now, and their prospects worse than they might have been before.
Better a dog.
Ibrahim knew, by now. There was no hiding it, though it was unfortunate he discovered the dog’s stool before he discovered the dog — a dry enough turd that Mitch had deposited in a small room off the kitchen. Emmet arrived in to find all three of them looking at it, Alice and Ibrahim and Mitch. The watchman, when he thought about it, had been unusually dignified about opening the gate.