‘Bonsoir, Monsieur.’ Emmet did not even know the guy spoke French.
Ib was not at the door to take his things. At first he thought the house was empty, then he heard Alice’s voice and made his way through the kitchen to find them all crouched over the thing.
‘How was the office?’ said Alice, with a flare of the eyes to tell him that things were under control, and he said, ‘Fine.’
Emmet did not look at Ibrahim so much as feel his silence, over dinner. And his silence felt OK. The food was good, the service almost meditative. If he was angry, Emmet could not locate it, even when Alice fed the dog with her hands from her own bowl. After that, the dog slept inside, on a bed of rags pushed up against the living room wall.
‘I think they like each other,’ she said. She thought there was a genuine connection. Ib, for example, called the dog by name.
‘Which is more than you do.’
But it was clear that Alice felt herself humiliated by the scene in the pantry, and by Ibrahim’s silken looks in the days that followed. She saw the edge of his contempt, or imagined she saw it, and was ready at all times to take offence. The more careful he was, the worse it got. Water was poured so beautifully, crockery laid with such utter grace and tactfulness, that she thought she would actually give the man a slap.
‘He creeps me out,’ she said, and ‘You never know where he is in the damn house.’ She started stripping the sheets off the bed herself, after sex, and leaving them in a clump on the floor.
It was a relief to go down to the capital for a week-long traffic jam, and a bit of compound living with the government boys and the UN boys and the boys from the FAO. Bamako was not exactly Geneva airport, but still it was a shock. Sometimes, Emmet thought he wanted a nice air-conditioned office with Nespresso coffee and Skype on tap, but then he thought a nice air-conditioned office was an open invitation to his nervous breakdown. Emmet and his breakdown spent some quality time together after the Sudan, when his father was dying and Emmet sat about the house waiting for his own meds to work. How long did it take? Three months? Five? One way or another, that whole year was fucked.
He was fine now. Ten years on. He and his breakdown had kept a respectful distance in various steaming, stinking towns from Dhaka to Nampula, though he did not underestimate it, or consider it gone. Lying on the clean sheets of the Bamako Radisson, Emmet felt it in the ducts, like Legionnaires’.
On his last morning, Emmet made contact with a guy who knew a guy in Vétérinaires Sans Frontières and set up a meeting for him in the Radisson bar. The vet turned out to be a woman from Nebraska called Carol with a tough little body and a nice line in clean khakis. She listened to the problem of the dog’s eye in rapt silence, then said, ‘First off, let’s get another drink.’ When it arrived, she said, ‘OK, let’s fix this little guy,’ sending Emmet back north with the good news that the dog’s cherry eye could be massaged back into place. ‘Unless it has insurance, in which case, it’s a three-man job under full anaesthetic.’ She pushed her fingertips up under her own eye to demonstrate, and then under his, saying, ‘Hey, he has urethritis, you get to do this to his dick.’ After which, Emmet could not extricate himself until she’d had far too much to drink. But it was worth it, to bring something of value to Alice; sweet, soft-hearted Alice, with her passion for micro finance, and her body of medieval whiteness under the revolving fan.
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.