When he woke, Alice was back at her post downstairs, sitting against the wall beside Mitch. There was blood on the floor, in a mess of brushstrokes from his muzzle. He was almost still.
When he heard Emmet, the dog opened his eyes and looked for Alice’s eyes, and she bent down, offering her face to lick, encouraging his pale tongue to find her chin and mouth. The dog’s teeth were very dark, the gums almost white. She let the dog’s head gently down on the floor and tilted her own head sadly back against the wall. Mitch coughed. The blood that came out was scarlet, and it spattered her pale forearm. Alice looked down at herself, indifferent.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Emmet.
He went outside to the privy and looked up at the fading stars, while he stood to pee. The licking was fine. You can’t get TB from a dog and anyway, the dog did not have TB. It was the blood on her arm that disturbed him, and the dog’s dark teeth. Some feeling he could not identify. And then he did.
It happened just as he finished pissing, whatever that did to you. A darkness pouring down his spine. He had to turn and sit on the toilet, so as not to fall. Emmet’s elbows were on his knees and his hands were out in front of him, and there it was. The forgotten thing, indelibly back. A dog in Cambodia, with a woman’s arm in its mouth.
It was up near the Thai border, his first year out. The area was full of minefields and the medics did fifteen, twenty amputations a day. They threw the remains in a heap outside the hospital tent and, if she had a moment, one of the nurses shot at the scavenger dogs. They put pit teams together, but there were latrines to be dug, and the dogs were not fatal, the way diarrhoea is fatal. So it was hard to believe, but it became true, that for a fortnight at least their only defence against this desecration was a crack-shot nurse called Lisbette from the Auvergne, who took a pistol with her when she stepped outside for a fag.
Then, very quickly, it became ordinary. Not pleasant, of course. Just normal. A dog with a human arm in its mouth.
Now, sitting like a fool on a toilet in West Africa, it wasn’t normal any more.
Emmet braced his hands against the breeze-block walls, listening to his body, thinking, This is how you die.
When he finally got out of there, a wreath of dawn bites around each ankle, Alice was still in her place by the bottom of the stairs. Blood was coming out of the dog’s back end now, and he was nearly dead. She didn’t ask about her cup of tea. She just cried and cried.
Ibrahim let himself in to the house just as the sun came up. He paused at the bloody scene in the dining room then ducked into the kitchen. There was silence. Emmet imagined him in there, steadying himself against the sink.
‘It’s going to get hot, Alice.’
Alice gave a tiny answer, that sounded like ‘Yes’. She stirred herself and picked vaguely at the cloth of her trousers, where the blood had dried.
‘Have a shower.’
He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She trailed upstairs and Emmet went to the kitchen where Ibrahim was standing stock still, holding his bag, ready for the market.
‘All right, Ib?’
‘I pain,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Have you? Little one?’
‘Yes. Little bit sick.’
‘Right. Well off you go. Don’t worry about the dog, Ib. I’ll sort that. N’inquiètes-pas du chien.’
‘Non, Monsieur. Merci, Monsieur.’
When he was gone, Emmet texted Hassan. He stood listening to the light, erratic footfalls in the bedroom above and looked at the dog’s little teeth, exposed in the snarl of death.
‘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.