The Ghost Road

by Pat Barker

  Then they were moving forward, hundreds of men eerily quiet, starlit shadows barely darkening the grass. And no dogs barked.

  The clock at the end of the ward blurred, then moved into focus again. He was finding it difficult to keep awake now that the rounds were done, the reports written and his task was simply to be there, ready for whatever emergencies the night might throw his way. Sister Roberts put a mug of orange-coloured tea, syrupy with sugar, in front of him, and he took a gulp. They sat together at the night nurses’ station – there were no night nurses, they were all off with flu – drinking the too strong, too sweet tea, watching the other end of the ward, where the green screens had been placed round Hallet’s bed. A single lamp shone above his bed so the green curtains glowed against the darkness of the rest of the ward. Through a gap between the screens Rivers could see one of the family, a young boy, fourteen, fifteen years old perhaps, Hallet’s younger brother, wriggling about on his chair, bored with the long hours of waiting and knowing it was unforgivable to be bored.

  ‘I wish the mother would go home and lie down,’ Sister Roberts said. ‘She’s absolutely at the end of her tether.’ A sniff. ‘And that girl looks the hysterical type to me.’

  She never liked the girls. ‘Is she his sister?’

  ‘Fiancée.’

  A muttering from behind the screen, but no discernible words. Rivers stood up. ‘I’d better have a look.’

  ‘Do you want the relatives out?’

  ‘Please. It’ll only take a minute.’

  The family looked up as he pushed the screens aside. They had been sitting round this bed off and on for nearly thirty-six hours, ever since Hallet’s condition had begun to deteriorate. Mrs Hallet, the mother, was on Hallet’s right, he suspected because the family had decided she should be spared, as far as possible, seeing the left side of Hallet’s face. The worst was hidden by the dressing over the eye, but still enough was visible. The father sat on the bad side, a middle-aged man, very erect, retired professional army, in uniform for the duration of the war. He had a way of straightening his shoulders, bracing himself that suggested chronic back pain rather than a reaction to the present situation. And then the girl, whose name was … Susan, was it? She sat, twisting a handkerchief between her fingers, often with a polite, meaningless smile on her face, in the middle of the family she had been going to join and must now surely realize she would not be joining. And the boy, who was almost the most touching of all, gauche, graceless, angry with everything, his voice sometimes squeaking humiliatingly so that he blushed, at other times braying down the ward, difficult, rebellious, demanding attention, because he was afraid if he stopped behaving like this he would cry.

  They stood up when he came in, looking at him in a way familiar from his earliest days in hospital medicine. They expected him to do something. Although they’d been told Hallet was critically ill, they were still hoping he’d ‘make him better’.

  Sister Roberts asked them to wait outside and they retreated to the waiting-room at the end of the main corridor.

  He looked at Hallet. The whole of the left side of his face drooped. The exposed eye was sunk deep in his skull, open, though he didn’t seem to be fully conscious. His hair had been shaved off, preparatory to whatever operation had left the horseshoe-shaped scar, now healing ironically well, above the suppurating wound left by the rifle bullet. The hernia cerebri pulsated, looking like some strange submarine form of life, the mouth of a sea anemone perhaps. The whole of the left side of his body was useless. Even when he was conscious enough to speak the drooping of the mouth and the damage to the lower jaw made his speech impossible to follow. This, more than anything else, horrified his family. You saw them straining to understand, but they couldn’t grasp a word he said. His voice came in a whisper because he lacked the strength to project it. He seemed to be whispering now. Rivers bent over him, listened, then straightened up, deciding he must have imagined the sound. Hallet had not stirred, beyond the usual twitching below the coverlet, the constant clonus to which his right ankle joint was subject.

  Why are you alive? Rivers thought, looking down into the gargoyled face.

  Mate, would have been Njiru’s word for this: the state of which death is the appropriate and therefore the desirable outcome. He would have seen Hallet as being, in every meaningful way, dead already, and his sole purpose would have been to hasten the moment of actual death: mate ndapu, die finish. Rivers fingered his lapel badge, his unimpaired nerves transmitting the shape of the caduceus to his undamaged brain, his allegiance to a different set of beliefs confirmed without the conflict ever breaking the surface of consciousness.

  He took Hallet’s pulse. ‘All right,’ he said to Sister Roberts. ‘You can let them back in.’

  He watched her walk off, then thought it was cowardice not to face them, and followed her down the corridor, passing Mrs Hallet on the way. She hesitated when she saw him, but the drive to get back to her son was too strong. Susan and the younger brother followed on behind. He found Major Hallet lingering by an open window, smoking furiously. A breath of muggy, damp, foggy air came into the room, a reminder that there was an outside world.

  ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’ Major Hallet said, raising the cigarette. ‘Well?’

  Rivers hesitated.

  ‘Not long now, eh?’

  ‘No, not long.’

  In spite of his terseness, tears immediately welled up in Major Hallet’s eyes. He turned away, his voice shaking. ‘He’s been so brave. He’s been so bloody brave.’ A moment during which he struggled for control. ‘How long exactly do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hours.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Keep talking to him. He does recognize your voices and he can understand.’

  ‘But we can’t understand him. It’s terrible, he’s obviously expecting an answer and we can’t say anything.’

  They went back to the ward together, Major Hallet pausing outside the screen for a moment, bracing his back. A muttering from the bed. ‘You see?’ Major Hallet said helplessly.

  Rivers followed him through the gap in the screens and leant over to listen to Hallet. His voice was a slurred whisper. ‘Shotvarfet.’

  At first Rivers could only be sure of the initial consonant and thought he might be trying to say ‘Susan’, but the phrase was longer than that. He straightened and shook his head. ‘Keep talking to him, Mrs Hallet. He does recognize your voice.’

  She bent forward and shyly, covered with the social embarrassment that crops up so agonizingly on these occasions, tried to talk, telling him news of home, Auntie Ethel sent her love, Madeleine was getting married in April …

  Susan had that smile on her lips again, fixed, meaningless, a baboon rictus of sheer terror. And the boy’s face, a mask of fear and fury because he knew that any moment now the tears would start, and he’d be shamed in front of some merciless tribunal in his own mind.

  Rivers left them to it. Sister Roberts and the one orderly were busy with Adams who had to be turned every hour. He sat in the night station’s circle of light, looking up and down the ward, forcing himself to name and recall the details of every patient, his tired mind waiting for the next jerk of the clock.

  The glowing green screens round Hallet’s bed reminded him of the tent on Eddystone, on the nights when the insects were really bad and they had to take the lamp inside. You’d go out into the bush and come back and there’d be this great glow of light, and Hocart’s shadow huge on the canvas. Safety, or as close to it as you could get on the edge of the dark.

  On their last evening he sat outside the tent, packing cases full of clothes and equipment ranged around him, typing up his final notes. Hocart was away on the other side of the island and not due back for hours. Working so close to the light his eyes grew tired, and he sat back rubbing the inner corners; he opened them again to find Njiru a few feet away watching him, having approached silently on his bare feet.

  Rivers took the lamp from the table and
set it on the ground, squatting down beside it, since he knew Njiru was more comfortable on the ground. The bush exuded blackness. The big moths that loved a particular flowering bush that grew all round the tent bumped furrily against the glass, so that he and Njiru sat in a cloud of pale wings.

  They chatted for a while about some of the more than four hundred acquaintances they now had in common, then a long easy silence fell.

  ‘Kundaite says you know Ave,’ Rivers said very quietly, almost as if the bush itself had spoken, and Njiru were being asked to do no more than think aloud.

  Njiru said, almost exactly as he’d said at the beginning, ‘Kundaite he no speak true, he savvy gammon ’long nanasa,’ but now he spoke with a faint growl of laughter in his voice, adding in English, ‘He is a liar.’

  ‘He is a liar, but I think you do know Ave.’

  He was reminded suddenly of an incident in the Torres Straits when Haddon had been trying to get skulls to measure. One man had said, with immense dignity, ‘Be patient. You will have all our skulls in time.’ It was not a comfortable memory. He was not asking for skulls but he was asking for something at least equally sacred. He leant forward and their shadows leapt and grappled against the bush. ‘Tell me about Ave.’

  Ave lives in Ysabel. He is both one spirit and many spirits. His mouth is long and filled with the blood of the men he devours. Kita and Mateana are nothing beside him because they destroy only the individual, but Ave kills ‘all people ’long house’. The broken rainbow belongs to him, and presages both epidemic disease and war. Ave is the destroyer of peoples.

  And the words of exorcism? He told him even that, the last bubbles rising from the mouth of a drowning man. Not only told him, but, with that blend of scholarly exactitude and intellectual impatience for which he was remarkable, insisted on Rivers learning the words in Melanesian, in the ‘high speech’, until he had the inflection on every syllable perfect. This was the basis, Rivers thought, toiling and stumbling over the words, of Njiru’s power, the reason why on meeting him even the greatest chiefs stepped off the path.

  ‘And now,’ Njiru said, lifting his head in a mixture of pride and contempt, ‘now you will put it in your book.’

  I never have, Rivers thought. His and Hocart’s book on Eddystone had been one of the casualties of the war, though hardly – he glanced up and down the ward with its rows of brain-damaged and paralysed young men – the most significant.

  He had spoken them, though, during the course of a lecture to the Royal Society, and had been delighted to find that he didn’t need to consult his notes as he spoke. He was still word-perfect.

  A commotion from behind the screens. Hallet had begun to cry out and his family was trying to soothe him. A muttering all along the ward as the other patients stirred and grumbled in their sleep, dragged reluctantly back into consciousness. But the grumbling stopped as they realized where the cries were coming from. A silence fell. Faces turned towards the screens as if the battle being waged behind them was every man’s battle.

  Rivers walked quietly across. The family stood up again as he came in. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘No need to move.’

  He took Hallet’s pulse. He felt the parents’ gaze on him, the father’s red-veined, unblinking eyes and the mother’s pale fierce face with its working mouth.

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’ Major Hallet said in a whisper.

  Rivers looked down at Hallet, who was now fully conscious. Oh God, he thought, it’s going to be one of those. He shook his head. ‘Not long.’

  The barrage was due to start in fifteen minutes’ time. Prior shared a bar of chocolate with Robson, sitting hunched up together against the damp cold mist. Then they started crawling forward. The sappers, who were burdened by materials for the construction of the pontoon bridge, were taking the lane, so the Manchesters had to advance over the waterlogged fields. The rain had stopped, but the already marshy ground had flooded in places, and over each stretch of water lay a thick blanket of mist. Concentrate on nothing but the moment, Prior told himself, moving forward on knees and elbows like a frog or a lizard or like – like anything except a man. First the right knee, then the left, then the right, then the left again, and again, and again, slithering through fleshy green grass that smelled incredibly sharp as scrabbling boots cut it. Even with all this mist there was now a perceptible thinning of the light, a gleam from the canal where it ran between spindly, dead trees.

  There is to be no retirement under any circumstances. That was the order. They have tied us to the stake, we cannot fly, but bear-like we must fight the course. The men were silent, staring straight ahead into the mist. Talk, even in whispers, was forbidden. Prior looked at his watch, licked dry lips, watched the second hand crawl to the quarter hour. All around him was a tension of held breath. 5.43. Two more minutes. He crouched further down, whistle clenched between his teeth.

  Prompt as ever, hell erupted. Shells whined over, flashes of light, plumes of water from the drainage ditches, tons of mud and earth flung into the air. A shell fell short. The ground shook beneath them and a shower of pebbles and clods of earth peppered their steel helmets. Five minutes of this, five minutes of the air bursting in waves against your face, men with dazed faces braced against it, as they picked up the light bridges meant for fording the flooded drainage ditches, and carried them out to the front. Then, abruptly, silence. A gasp for air, then noise again, but further back, as the barrage lifted and drummed down on to the empty fields.

  Prior blew the whistle, couldn’t hear it, was on his feet and running anyway, urging the men on with wordless cries. They rushed forward, making for the line of trees. Prior kept shouting, ‘Steady, steady! Not too fast on the left!’ It was important there should be no bunching when they reached the bridges. ‘Keep it straight!’ Though the men were stumbling into quagmires or tripping over clumps of grass. A shell whizzing over from the German side exploded in a shower of mud and water. And another. He saw several little figures topple over, it didn’t look serious, somehow, they didn’t look like beings who could be hurt.

  Bridges laid down, quickly, efficiently, no bunching at the crossings, just the clump of boots on wood, and then they emerged from beneath the shelter of the trees and out into the terrifying openness of the bank. As bare as an eyeball, no cover anywhere, and the machine-gunners on the other side were alive and well. They dropped down, firing to cover the sappers as they struggled to assemble the bridge, but nothing covered them. Bullets fell like rain, puckering the surface of the canal, and the men started to fall. Prior saw the man next to him, a silent, surprised face, no sound, as he twirled and fell, a slash of scarlet like a huge flower bursting open on his chest. Crawling forward, he fired at the bank opposite though he could hardly see it for the clouds of smoke that drifted across. The sappers were still struggling with the bridge, binding pontoon sections together with wire that sparked in their hands as bullets struck it. And still the terrible rain fell. Only two sappers left, and then the Manchesters took over the building of the bridge. Kirk paddled out in a crate to give covering fire, was hit, hit again, this time in the face, went on firing directly at the machine-gunners who crouched in their defended holes only a few yards away. Prior was about to start across the water with ammunition when he was himself hit, though it didn’t feel like a bullet, more like a blow from something big and hard, a truncheon or a cricket bat, only it knocked him off his feet and he fell, one arm trailing over the edge of the canal.

  He tried to turn to crawl back beyond the drainage ditches, knowing it was only a matter of time before he was hit again, but the gas was thick here and he couldn’t reach his mask. Banal, simple, repetitive thoughts ran round and round his mind. Balls up. Bloody mad. Oh Christ. There was no pain, more a spreading numbness that left his brain clear. He saw Kirk die. He saw Owen die, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arc in the air as it fell. It seemed to take for ever to fall, and Prior’s consciousness fluttered down with it. He gazed a
t his reflection in the water, which broke and reformed and broke again as bullets hit the surface and then, gradually, as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.

  The light was growing now, the subdued, brownish light of a November dawn. At the far end of the ward, Simpson, too far gone himself to have any understanding of what was happening, jargoned and gobbled away, but all the other faces were turned towards the screens, each man lending the little strength he had to support Hallet in his struggle.

  So far, except for the twice repeated whisper and the wordless cries, Hallet had been silent, but now the whisper began again, only more loudly. Shotvarfet. Shotvarfet. Again and again, increasing in volume as he directed all his strength into the cry. His mother tried to soothe him, but he didn’t hear her. Shotvarfet. Shotvarfet. Again and again, each time louder, ringing across the ward. He opened his one eye and gazed directly at Rivers, who had come from behind the screens and was standing at the foot of his bed.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Major Hallet asked.

  Rivers opened his mouth to say he didn’t know and then realized he did. ‘He’s saying, “It’s not worth it.” ’

  ‘Oh, it is worth it, it is,’ Major Hallet said, gripping his son’s hand. The man was in agony. He hardly knew what he was saying.

  ‘Shotvarfet.’

  The cry rose again as if he hadn’t spoken, and now the other patients were growing restless. A buzz of protest not against the cry, but in support of it, a wordless murmur from damaged brains and drooping mouths.

  ‘Shotvarfet. Shotvarfet.’

  ‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ Major Hallet said. The mother’s eyes never left her son’s face. Her lips were moving though she made no sound. Rivers was aware of a pressure building in his own throat as that single cry from the patients went on and on. He could not afterwards be sure that he had succeeded in keeping silent, or whether he too had joined in. All he could remember later was gripping the metal rail at the end of the bed till his hands hurt.