The Ghost Road

by Pat Barker

  ‘Are you suggesting head-hunting should be allowed?’

  ‘No.’ Tight-lipped.

  ‘Good. When these people were taking heads they virtually depopulated Ysabel. It had to be stopped.’

  ‘So how are they going to get her out?’

  Rivers hesitated. ‘I don’t know. She can’t stay in there for ever.’

  What he secretly thought, but was superstitiously afraid of saying, was that the situation would end in Emele’s suicide. He could see no other way out.

  The following morning he went to see Namboko Taru. She’d become very fond of him (and he of her) ever since his miming of alternating constipation and diarrhoea had kept her amused while Njiru removed the nggasin from her belly.

  She and her friend Namboko Nali had been bathing in the sea and their hair smelled of salt water. Taru’s scrawny brown arms were folded across her breasts as she sat, with her back against the wall of her hut, steaming gently in the sun, while hens stepped delicately around her, pecking the dust. He sat beside her, admiring the gleam of dull emerald in the cockerel’s neck feathers, as the village came slowly to life.

  After a few minutes’ gossip he started asking her about love charms, the subject they’d talked about at their last meeting. Three other women came out and listened. He got out his notebook and took down the words of the charm Taru supplied, aware that more than the usual amount of whispering and giggling was going on. Taru offered him betel to chew, and thinking, What the hell, who needs teeth? he accepted it. The women giggled again. A little while later Taru offered him lime, and to humour her he let her draw white lines on his cheekbones. The giggling was now almost out of control, but he pressed on to the end of the charm, at which point it was revealed that the words only became efficacious if the man accepted betel and lime from the woman’s basket.

  He laughed with them, and by the time they’d finished they were on such terms that he felt he could ask them anything. Even about Emele and tongo polo. Taru vehemently denied there was any question of suicide. Suicide, ungi, was totally different. Taru and Nali had helped Kera, the widow of the previous chief, to kill herself. She had tried poisoning herself with tobacco and that hadn’t worked. And then she’d tried to hang herself, but the bough had broken. So they’d held a pole for her, high above their heads, and she’d twined a strip of calico round her throat and hanged herself from the pole. Garrotted more like, Rivers thought. It would not have been a quick or an easy death. What decided whether the widow would ungi or observe tongo polo? he asked. It was her choice, they said.

  Returning to the tent, he found Hocart lying outside, having spent the first part of the morning washing clothes. He was asleep, or resting, with his arms across his face shielding his eyes from the sun. Rivers put his foot on his chest and pressed lightly.

  Hocart peered up at him, taking in the white lines on his face. ‘My God.’

  ‘I think I just got engaged.’

  A bubble of laughter shook Hocart’s ribs. ‘Lucky woman.’

  Sleeping was difficult, because of the heat, even after they’d taken their beds outside the tent. Sometimes they gave up altogether, and went to lie in the shallows, where the small waves, gleaming with phosphorescent light, broke over them.

  Rivers had become obsessed by Emele. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, the thought of the woman cramped inside the enclosure, inside the hut, followed him until he saw every other aspect of life on the island in the shadow of her imprisonment.

  In the mornings he would go down to bathe and watch the canoes go out, foam flashing from the paddles, a wordless song drifting across the water: ‘Aie, aie, aie.’ All vowel sounds, it seemed to be, no consonants. And then the smack of water being slapped to lure bonito into the nets.

  It was still idyllic. His own happiness did not lessen, but always, now, there were these two points of darkness: Emele cramped in her enclosure; Ngea rotting in his era. Once he walked up the path on the other side of the beach, unable to explain his desire to see Ngea, for the facts of physical decomposition neither fascinated nor frightened him. A corpse was something one buried or dissected. Nothing more. And yet he needed to see Ngea.

  The smell reached him when he was no more than half way up the path. He pinched his nostrils, breathing through his open mouth, but even so a few yards further on he had to abandon the attempt. A black cloud of flies, so dense it looked solid, rose at his approach, heat made audible. He backed away, as much as anything because they reminded him of the bats in the cave, and that experience, the sense of being unshelled, peeled in some way, that had seemed so positive at the time, now made him afraid. He was open to whatever might happen in this place, open in the way that a child is, since no previous experience was relevant.

  The heat continued. From mid-afternoon onwards there was a curious bronze light in the sky, which became brownish towards evening, as if even the air were singed. Occasional flicks of wind teased the outermost branches of the trees, but did not disturb the intense brooding stillness.

  Rivers slept uneasily, waking finally at ‘fowl-he-sing-out’, aware of having heard a new and different sound. He lay and listened and was just about to turn over and try to snatch an extra hour when it came again: the brazen blare of a conch shell.

  He was on his feet and outside the tent in a matter of minutes. The bush distorted sounds, bouncing echoes back, but then he was aware of the crash of hurrying footsteps through the undergrowth, people running down to the beach. He shook Hocart awake, and followed the crowd, holding back a little, not knowing how secret this was, or how much it might matter that he was witnessing it.

  He saw Njiru at the water’s edge, draped in a white cloth, with a staff in his hand, looking out over the bay.

  A canoe was heading in, quickly, paddled by Lembu, and in the stern was a bundle of some kind. He was too far away to see what it was, but an ah went up from the crowd, and suddenly, the women and girls began running into the sea, prancing like horses until they reached a depth where they could cast themselves forward and swim. Clinging to the canoe’s side, they escorted it into the shallow water, and Lembu got out, everything about him shining, teeth, hair, eyes, skin, and hauled the canoe up the beach. He walked back to the stern, unwrapped the bundle, and dragged the contents out on to the sand. A small boy about four years old.

  Rivers walked down to the canoe, since nobody seemed to care whether he saw this or not. The child’s face was tear-stained, streaked with dirt and snot. He was not actually crying now, though irregular hiccups shook his thin chest. As people surged towards him and stared, he moved closer to his captor, resting one grubby hand on Lembu’s naked thigh.

  Rivers went up to Njiru. ‘Is that your head?’ he asked, unaware that he spoke English, not pidgin.

  ‘Yes,’ Njiru said steadily.

  He took the child from Lembu and, surrounded by excited, smiling people, carried him up the beach path to the village. Rivers followed, but kept well back as the crowd gathered outside Ngea’s hall. Lembu blew the conch as they entered the village, and again inside the hall. After a while Emele emerged, hobbling, resting her arms on the shoulders of Taru and Nali. Lembu and Njiru followed her out, and there was general rejoicing, except from the small boy, who stood alone at the centre of the throng, his eyes like black bubbles that at any moment might burst.

  Thirteen

  4 October 1918

  What can one say? And yet I’ve got to write something because however little I remember now I’ll remember less in years to come. And it’s not true to say one remembers nothing. A lot of it you know you’ll never forget, and a few things you’ll pray to forget and not be able to. But the connections go. Bubbles break on the surface like they do on the flooded craters round here – the ones that’ve been here years and have God knows what underneath.

  The night of I think the 1st (dates go too) we lay all night in a trench one foot deep – the reward of success because this was a German trench. Another reward of success was that
we had no British troops on our left, we’d raced ahead of them all. I think I’m right in saying we were the only units that broke through the Hindenburg line and maintained the position. It was dark, early evening, deep black, and we expected a counter-attack at dawn. Until then there was nothing to do but wait, both intolerably cramped and intolerably exposed, enfilading machine-gun fire on three sides. ‘Cramped’ isn’t a figure of speech either. The trench was hardly more than a scraping in the earth. Any careless movement and you’d had it. And for a lot of the time we wore gas masks, because there’d been a very heavy gas barrage put down by our side and it lingered. The whole area smelled like a failed suicide attempt, and I kept hearing Sarah’s voice saying about Johnny, It was our own gas, our own bloody gas. In spite of all the drills some of the men were slow to put their masks on, one or two had bad reactions, and then Oakshott decided to have a panic attack. I crawled along to him, not past people, over them, one eel wriggling across the others in the tank, and tried to calm him down. I remember at one point I burst out laughing, can’t remember why, but it did me good. There’s a kind of angry laughter that gets you back to the centre of yourself. I shared a bar of chocolate with Longstaffe and we huddled together under my great-coat and tried to keep warm. And then the counter-attack came.

  Two bubbles break here. Longstaffe sliding back into the trench with a red hole in his forehead and an expression of mild surprise on his face. And the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now – any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think’s the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

  The whole thing was breakdown territory, as defined by Rivers. Confined space, immobility, helplessness, passivity, constant danger that you can do nothing to avert. But my nerves seem to be all right. Or at least no worse than anybody else’s. All our minds are in flight, each man tries to reach his own accommodation with what he saw. What he did. But on the surface it’s all jollity. We’re marching back, through the same desolation, but towards safety. Another battalion has leap-frogged us into the line. And every time my right foot hits the ground I say, over, over, over. Because the war’s coming to an end, and we all know it, and it’s coming to an end partly because of what we did. We broke through. We held the position.

  5 October

  I think the worst time was after the counter-attack, when we lay in that trench all day surrounded by the dead. I still had Longstaffe by my side, though his expression changed after death. The look of surprise faded. And we listened to the wounded groaning outside. Two stretcher-bearers volunteered to go out and were hit as soon as they stood up. Another tried later. After that I said, No more, everybody keep down. By nightfall most of the groaning had stopped. A few of the more lightly wounded crawled in under cover of darkness and we patched them up as best we could. But one man kept on and on, it didn’t sound like a human being, or even like an animal, a sort of guttural gurgling like a blocked drain.

  I decided I ought to try myself, and took Lucas with me. Not like going over the top used to be, climbing out of the bloody trench. Just a quick slither through the wire, barbs snagging the sleeves, and into the mud. I felt the coldness on my cheek, and the immense space above, that sense you always get when lying on the ground in the open of the earth as a ball turning in space. There was time to feel this, in spite of the bullets – which anyway frightened me less than the thought of having to see what was making that sound.

  The gurgling led us to him. He was lying half way down the side of a flooded crater and the smell of gas was stronger here, as it always is near water. As we started down, bullets peppered the surface, plop, plop, plop, an innocent sound like when you skim a flat stone across a river, and bullets flicked the rim where we’d been a second before and sent cascades of loose earth down after us. The gurgling changed as we got closer so he knew something different was happening. I don’t think he could have known more than that. I got right up to his feet, and started checking his legs for wounds, nothing, but then I didn’t expect it. That sound only comes from a head wound. What made it marginally worse was that the side of the head nearest me was untouched. His whole frame was shaking, his skin blue in the starlight as our skins were too, but his was the deep blue of shock. I said ‘Hallet’ and for a second the gurgling stopped. I gestured to Lucas and he helped me turn him further over on to his back, and we saw the wound. Brain exposed, a lot of blood, a lot of stuff not blood down the side of the neck. One eye gone. A hole – I was going to say in his left cheek – where his left cheek had been. Something was burning, casting an orange light into the sky which reflected down on us. The farm that had been one of our reference points. The underside of the clouds was stained orange by the flames.

  We got a rope underneath him and started hauling him round the crater, up the other side, towards our trench and all the time I was thinking, What’s the use? He’s going to die anyway. I think I thought about killing him. At one point he screamed and I saw the fillings in his back teeth and his mouth filled with blood. After that he was quiet, and it was easier but then a flare went up and everything paled in the trembling light. Bastards, bastards, bastards, I thought. I heard a movement and there on the rim of the crater was a white face looking down. Carter, who, I later discovered, had come out entirely on his own initiative. That was just right. More than three and we’d have been getting in each other’s way. We managed to drag him back through fire that was, if anything, lighter than before, though not intentionally I think. Too little mercy had been shown by either side that day for gestures of that sort to be possible.

  We fell into the trench, Hallet on top of us. I got something damp on my face that wasn’t mud, and brushing it away found a gob of Hallet’s brain between my fingertips. Because he’d gone quiet on the last stretch I expected to find him unconscious or dead, but he was neither. I gave him a drink of water. I had to press my hand against his face to get it down, because otherwise it slopped out of the hole. And all the time I was doing it I was thinking, Die can’t you? For God’s sake, man, just die. But he didn’t.

  When at last we were ordered to pull back I remember peering up at the sky and seeing the stars sparse and pale through a gauze of greenish light, and thinking, Thank God it’s evening, because shells were still coming over, and some of them were falling directly on the road. At least we’d be marching towards the relative safety of night.

  The sun hung on the lip of the horizon, filling the sky. I don’t know whether it was the angle or the drifting smoke that half obscured it, but it was enormous. The whole scene looked like something that couldn’t be happening on earth, partly the sun, partly the utter lifelessness of the land around us, pitted, scarred, pockmarked with stinking craters and scrawls of barbed-wire. Not even birds, not even carrion feeders. Even the crows have given up. And I stumbled along at the head of the company and I waited for the sun to go down. And the sodding thing didn’t. IT ROSE. It wasn’t just me. I looked round at the others and I saw the same stupefaction on every face. We hadn’t slept for four days. Tiredness like that is another world, just like noise, the noise of a bombardment, isn’t like other noise. You see people wade through it, lean into it. I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

  6 October

  We’re far enough back now for officers from different companies to mess together again. I sit at a rickety little table censoring letters, for the post has arrived, including one for me from Sarah saying she isn’t pregnant. I don’t know what I feel exactly. I ought to be delighted and of course I am, but that was not the first reaction. There was a split second of something else, before the relief set in.

  Letters arrive for the dead. I check names against the list and write Deceased in a firm bold hand i
n the top left-hand corner. Casualties were heavy, not so much in the initial attack as in the counter-attacks.

  Gregg died of wounds. I remember him showing me a letter from home that had big ‘kisses’ in red crayon from his little girl.

  Of the people who shared the house in Amiens only a month ago, Potts is wounded, but likely to live. Jones (Owen’s servant) wounded, likely to live. Hallet’s wounds are so bad I don’t think he can possibly survive. I see him sometimes lying in the lily pond in the garden with the golden fish darting all around him, and silver lines of bubbles on his thighs. More like a pattern than a picture, no depth to it, no perspective, but brilliantly clear. And Longstaffe’s dead.

  The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?

  I look across at Owen, who’s doing casualty reports with a Woodbine – now blessedly plentiful again – stuck to his bottom lip, and his hair, rather lank at the moment, flopping over his forehead. For days after the battle he went round with his tunic stiff with blood, but then I had blood and brains on me. We must have stunk like the drains in a slaughter-house, but we’ve long since stopped smelling each other. He looks like one of the boys you see on street corners in the East End. Open to offers. I must say I wouldn’t mind. He looks up, feeling himself the subject of scrutiny, smiles and pushes the fags across. I saw him in the attack, caped and masked in blood, seize a machine-gun and turn it on its previous owners at point-blank range. Like killing fish in a bucket. And I wonder if he sees those faces, grey, open-mouthed faces, life draining out of them before the bullets hit, as I see the faces of the men I killed in the counter-attack. I won’t ask. He wouldn’t answer if I did. I wouldn’t dare ask. For the first time it occurs to me that Rivers’s job also requires courage.

  We don’t even mention our own dead. The days pass crowded with meaningless incident, and it’s easier to forget. I run the ball of my thumb against the two first fingers of my right hand where a gob of Hallet’s brain was, and I don’t feel anything very much.