‘Ew.’
He flung the bread against the wall.
‘Out! Out!’ while Alice squealed and fumbled her piece on to the table, flapping her hands in alarm.
Emmet got up to retrieve his and was distracted by a gentle sound that became, as he noticed it, dreadful. They both listened, then looked to Mitch, to see a pool forming at the end of one shivering hind leg, the other leg nervously half cocked.
‘Oh no,’ said Alice.
The pool did not spread so much as swell, until the tension gave and a runnel of piss broke across the floor.
‘Mitch! Stop it!’
Alice said, ‘Sit down! What are you doing?’
‘What am I doing? Look what he’s doing.’
‘Why are you shouting? He is doing it because you are shouting.’ She was shouting, herself, now. ‘Why are you like this?’
Mitch was cowering against the wall, eyes locked on Emmet. When Alice moved to comfort him, a last pathetic gout of liquid came out on to the floor.
‘Jesus,’ said Emmet.
There was nothing for it but to be nice to the dog, which Alice did, and to clean up the piss, which Emmet did, using up many valuable sheets of Andrex two-ply classic white.
After which, they sat back down to finish their dinner.
‘Right,’ said Emmet.
Mitch lay in a swoon of reconciliation beside Alice, who fed him and stroked him as they ate in silence. After a while, with the slow air of a woman who doesn’t even know that she is looking for a fight, Alice said she had decided to give Ibrahim a raise.
‘Great,’ said Emmet.
‘Seriously.’
‘Sure. By all means. Let’s give Ibrahim money. Lots of money. I have no problem with that.’
‘You’re just mean,’ said Alice.
‘Check your guidelines,’ he said.
‘You are,’ said Alice. ‘You’re a cold bastard.’
They ate on.
‘Let me try something,’ he said. ‘Can I try?’
Emmet petted the dog and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to eat you, Mitch.’ He took the dog’s muzzle in both hands and glanced up at Alice. Then he applied a gentle thumb to the dog’s bad eye.
Mitch pulled back and scrambled to his feet, but Alice put her arms about the dog’s ribcage and held on while Emmet took his head in his hands again and circled his thumb round the eye’s inner corner. He pressed the balloon of flesh down into the orbital socket, closing his own eyes, the better to sense the lump beneath the dog’s trembling underlid. He could feel it flatten and go, as though the air had been let out of it, and when he released Mitch for a look, the dog blinked, clear and aggrieved. Then he blinked again. Mitch braced his front legs and turned his head from side to side. Then he shook himself, with violent precision, from top to tail. He lolloped off to his rag bed in the corner, where he turned and turned, and lay down. Then he was up again, pouncing on a cushion as if it was a small animal that had moved.
‘It might pop out again tomorrow,’ said Emmet. ‘In which case, we do it again, apparently.’
‘Good trick.’
He was a shallow creature, really — just in it for the sex, Emmet thought, as he looked at Alice’s face made hazy by delight.
‘Nutella?’ he said.
In the middle of December, Alice went home. She left like a schoolgirl, with folders of notes for head office and an implausible, chunky-knit, black and white scarf.
Emmet tried to imagine her wearing something so uncomfortable and hot. He saw her in a kitchen filled with unlikely daffodils; the mad mother, the two brothers ‘who never said much’. The colonial house was empty of tat. Alice had brought it all back with her; the mud-cloth hangings, the Dogon masks; it was all sitting in a suitcase on that seventies lino in Newcastle, smelling of camel shit. Emmet went around the stripped-down rooms like a visitor, and did not know where to sit. Ibrahim, too, was more serious now they were alone: dutiful and male, he acted as though they had an understanding. Which they had, sort of. The dog stayed outside, for a start.
He barked every evening. Confined to the space between the house and the wall, he called the sudden sunset, as though doubting the dawn.
On the 24th, Emmet went on the road, leaving instructions that Mitch should be fed in his absence, though he did not expect him to be fed much. He topped up the bowl before he left. And it was something, when he came back after a week, to be welcomed with doggy joy; a little dashing about.
‘Hiya! Hiya!’
Though, when he looked into the dog’s clear eyes and the dog looked into his, they were both thinking of Alice.
‘Back soon, boyo. She’ll be back soon.’
In the middle of January, she rang from Bamako. Emmet went out to buy beer and soap, and brought Mitch back inside.
‘Don’t tell, eh?’ It had only been a month, but the dog seemed confused. He walked from one place to another as though he did not recognise the rooms. Then he went back to the front door, and scratched to be let out. When Emmet opened the door, he sicked up on the front step.
‘Shit,’ said Emmet. He tried to tempt him in with a biscuit, but Mitch did not seem interested in biscuits and Emmet had to pull him inside, finally, to his rag bed. He called to Ibrahim.
‘Monsieur Emmet, sir?’
They looked at the dog, who was panting where he lay. Every breath was a rasp in his throat.
‘He sick,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Yes.’
They stood for a moment.
Emmet said, ‘You know, Ib, I never gave you your Christmas box.’ Then he palmed the guy ten bucks and left it at that.
By the time Alice got in that evening, the dog was bleeding from the nose. This she discovered when he left a trail across her cargo pants and her homecoming turned, on the instant, from gladness to disaster. She was barely in the door.
Mitch was bleeding from somewhere and heaving with unidentifiable pain. Alice felt around his belly, which was swollen and, as he nuzzled under her palm, he cried, like a baby gone wrong. Alice, still in her blood-smeared travelling clothes, sat beside him and lifted his head on to her lap. Ibrahim came in with newspaper and old cloths, and left quietly for home.
‘Did somebody hit him?’ she said. ‘He must have been hit by a motorbike. Or a car.’ But Emmet said — and he was pretty sure it was true — that the dog had not been beyond the gate. Alice was deep in panic. She sat beside Mitch, who cried for another while and then slept. He barked in his dreams, and that strange, uncompleted sound was like crying too. There was more blood.
Emmet tried Carol, the vet from Nebraska, but her African SIM made funny noises and the Bamako office was, naturally, closed.
‘Did you get her?’ said Alice.
‘I think she’s gone back home.’
‘Let’s see,’ she said, gesturing for the vet’s business card, stained (though Alice was not to know this) with Jack Daniel’s.
‘What time is it in America?’ she said, pushing the numbers into her little slab phone and Emmet was so angry, suddenly, he had to turn away.
An hour later, as though continuing where they had left off, Alice suddenly said, ‘What are you even here for?’
He said, ‘Come to bed.’
‘I mean, if you don’t believe in anything? Really. What are you doing here?’
He did not remind her that he was the one who fixed the dog’s bad eye; that, although he did not love the dog, he had helped the dog. He said, ‘Come on.’
And she dragged herself upstairs for an hour or two, rummaging in her bag first to find her little box alarm.
Emmet watched Alice in her sleep, the imperceptible rise and fall of her breast, the slopes of her body under the white sheet. Downstairs the dog gave a peculiar brief whistle on the top of each inhale and Alice looked indifferent to it, almost happy. Emmet thought about work. His next trip would take him out beyond the Bandiagara escarpment — one hundred and fifty kilometres of cliff, stuck with mud houses like the nests of swifts. Mankind, living in the crevices. Sometimes Emmet thought it was the landscape he loved, the way it stretched as you travelled through it and the hills unfolded. The pleasure of the mountain gap.