The Ghost Road (25 page)

'No,' Wansbeck said at last.

'You had to think.'

'Yes, well, I used to believe in it. I was brought up
to. I suppose one doesn't like to have to admit it's gone.
Faith.'

'What changed your mind?'

A flare of the eyebrows.
Rivers waited.

'Corpses.
Especially in cold weather when they couldn't be
buried. And in summer in No Man's Land.
The flies buzzing.'

They rose from
Ngea's body in a black cloud.

'It needn't have that effect, though, need it? What
about priests keeping a model of a skull on their desks?
Because
it reminds them of their faith.'

Or
Njiru.
Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto.
A simple, casual statement of fact.

'Well, that's the effect it had on
me.
I'd like to believe. I'd like to believe in the possibility of—you're right, it
is
embarrassing—redemption.'

Silence.

'Anyway,' Rivers
said,
when
it became clear there would be no more, 'you don't believe that the apparition
is the man you killed? You don't believe it's his ghost?'

'No, though I'm not sure I'd believe that even if I
were still a

'So what is it?'

'A projection of my own mind.'

'Of your guilt?'

'No.
Guilt's
what I feel sitting here, I don't need an apparition. No,
it's...'
A deep sigh.
'Guilt as objective fact—not
guilt as
feeling.
It's
not...
well, I was going
to say it's not subjective, but of course it has to be, doesn't it?'

'It's the representation to yourself of external
standards that
you
believe to be valid?'

'Yes.'

'What language does it speak?'

A blank look.
'Doesn't.
Doesn't
speak.'

'What language would it speak if it spoke? Yes, I know
it's an irrational question but then the apparition isn't rational either. What
language would
—'

'English.
Has to be.'

'So why don't you speak to it?'

'It's only there for a second.'

That's not the way you described it. You said it was
endless.'

'All right, it's an endless second.'

'You should be able to say a lot, then.'

Tell it my life story?'

Rivers said gently, 'It knows your life story.'

Wansbeck was thinking deeply.
'All
right.
It's bloody mad, but I'll have a go.'

'What will you say?'

'I have absolutely no idea.'

After Wansbeck had gone, Rivers sat quietly for a few
minutes before adding a note to the file. Sassoon had been much in his mind while
he was speaking to Wansbeck, Sassoon and the apparitions that gathered round
his bed and demanded to know
why
he was not in France. Also, another of his patients at
Craiglockhart, Harrington,
who'd
had dreadful
nightmares, even by Craiglockhart standards, and the nightmares had continued
into the semi-waking state, so that they acquired the character of hypnagogic
hallucinations. He saw the severed head, torso and limbs of a dismembered body
hurtling towards him out of the darkness. A variant of this was a face bending
over him, the lips, nose and eyelids eaten away as if by leprosy. The face, in
so far as it was identifiable at all, was the face of a close friend whom
Harrington had seen blown to pieces. From these dreams he woke either vomiting
or with a wet bed, or both.

At the time he witnessed his friend's death Harrington
had already been suffering from headaches, split vision, nausea, vomiting,
disorder of micturition, spells of forgetfulness and a persistent gross tremor
of the hands, dating from an explosion two months before in which he'd been
buried alive. Despite these symptoms he had remained on duty (shoot the MO,
thought Rivers) until his friend's death precipitated a total collapse.

What was interesting about Harrington was that instead
of treatment bringing about an elaboration of the nightmares, so that the
horrors began to assume a more symbolic, less directly representational
form—the normal path to recovery—something rather more remarkable had happened.
His friend's body had begun to reassemble itself. Night after night the
eaten-away features had fleshed out again. And Harrington talked to him. Long
conversations, apparently, or they seemed long to him on waking, telling his
friend about Rivers, about life at Craiglockhart, about the treatment he was
receiving...

After several weeks of this, he awoke one day with his
memory of the first hour after the explosion restored. He had, even in his
traumatized state and under heavy fire, crawled round the pieces of his
friend's body collecting items of equipment—belt, revolver, cap and lapel
badges—to send to the mother. The knowledge that, far from having fled from the
scene, he had behaved with exemplary courage and
loyalty,
did a great deal to restore Harrington's self-esteem, for, like most of the
patients at Craiglockhart, he suffered from a deep sense of shame and failure.
From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with
the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he
was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the
unlived years.

Wansbeck's predicament was worse than either of these
cases. Siegfried's apparitions vanished as soon as he agreed to give up his
protest and go back to France. The external demands the nocturnal visitors
represented, and which Siegfried himself believed to be valid, had been met.
Harrington had been enormously helped by the discovery that he'd behaved better
than he though he had. From that moment on, his recovery had been one of the
most dramatic Rivers could recall. Neither of these outcomes was available to
Wansbeck, who'd fought a perfectly honourable war until one action had made him
in his own eyes—and in the eyes of the law—a criminal. Almost everything one
could say to console him either obscenely glossed over the offence or was in
some other way insulting, and would have been instantly recognized as such by
Wansbeck. A lesser man would have borne this better.

Rivers wondered whether Sassoon and Harrington had
been
too
much in the forefront of his mind while he was listening to
Wansbeck. At best, on such occasions, one became a conduit whereby one man's
hard-won experience of self-healing was made available to another. At worst,
one no longer listened attentively enough to the individual voice. There was a
real danger, he thought, that in the end the stories would become one story,
the voices blend into a single cry of pain.

And he was tired. Because of the flu epidemic he'd
been on duty for thirty of the last forty-eight hours and he was on duty again
tonight too. Sighing, he reached for an envelope, took out an X-ray and clipped
it to the screen.

A skull stared out at him. He stood back and looked at
it for a moment, one lens of his glasses illumined by the lighted screen, the
other reflecting the rainy light of a November afternoon. Then he reached for
the notes.

Second
Lieutenant Matthew Hallet, aged twenty, admitted 18 October with bullet wounds
to the head and to the lower jaw. On admission he was incapable of giving an
account of his injuries, and the only information brought with him was a small
card saying he had been wounded on 30 September.

So he was now twenty days post-injury.

A rifle bullet
had entered just to the left of the inner canthus of the right ear and had made
its exit directly above the insertion of the left ear. The wound of entry was
marked by a small perfectly healed scar. The wound of exit consisted of a large
irregular opening in the bone and tissues of the
scalp,
and through this protruded a suppurating hernia cerebri which pulsated.

Oh God.

He had so far
said nothing spontaneously. When directly addressed he responded, but his
speech was incomprehensible. The wound to his lower jaw made it difficult to
determine whether this represented a deficit in the power of using language, or
whether the failure to communicate was entirely or primarily mechanical He
showed some understanding of speech, however, since he had responded to simple
questions, when asked to do so, by movements of his unparalysed hand.

Somewhere at the fringe of Rivers's perception was the
soft sound of rain continually falling, seeming to seal the hospital away from
the darkening afternoon. It had rained incessantly since early morning, the
darkness of the day somehow making it even harder to stay awake. He took his
glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and turned to the window, where each raindrop caught
and held a crescent moon of silver light.

*
* *

'Do you suppose it's ever going to stop?' Hocart said,
turning over restlessly in the gloom of the tent.

It had been raining ever since they'd found Ngea's
axe, not restrained English rain but a downpour, a gurgling splatter that
flooded into the tent no matter how hard they tried to keep it out. Possibly it
was stupid to stay inside at all, though difficult not to when even a five-yard
dash into the bush to pee meant you came back with hair plastered to your skull
and a transparent shirt sticking to your chest.

They lay and watched it through the open flap, a solid
wall of water through which the not too distant trees could be glimpsed only
dimly, a wavering blue mass beaten hither and thither by a wind that blew in
sudden spiteful squalls. Hocart, in his frustration, had been kicking the roof
of the tent where it sloped steeply down over his bed, and his muddy footprints
now added to the general squalor and smell. Hot wet bodies, hair washed daily
but only in sea water, salt drying to
a white
scurf on
the surface of the skin. The only escape was into the sea, where total
immersion relieved the misery of wet.

On the fourth day the rain eased slightly. Rivers stepped
out into the clearing and saw Njiru coming along the path towards him, for once
without his retinue.

Rivers had been wondering whether to mention the axe,
and had decided not to, but as soon as he looked at Njiru he knew it was
essential to bring it out into the open.

'Blong you?' he said, holding it out.

'Blong Ngea,' Njiru said, and smiled.

But he took it, putting it into the string basket he
carried slung over one shoulder. Rivers heard the chink of one blade on another
as it hit Njiru's axe. It was important to be totally steadfast at this moment,
Rivers thought. He and Hocart were probably the only white men in the
archipelago, apart from the missionaries—
some
of the
missionaries—who didn't carry guns. They didn't carry knives either, though on an
island covered in dense bush a machete would have been useful.
Nothing that could possibly be mistaken for a weapon.
And
they went barefoot, as the natives did. Harmlessness was their defence, not
guaranteed to succeed by any means, but guns would have made the job
impossible.

Njiru had come, he said, because one of the oldest
skull houses on the island was being rebuilt, and he had to go to say the
prayer of purification over the priest. Would Rivers like to go with him? Of
course, there was no question.

They set off, Njiru remarking at one point that it
always rained when a skull house was being rebuilt because '
tomate
he like bathe all time 'long fresh water'. Soon the narrow path and the steamy
heat made conversation impossible. Rivers watched the movement of muscles under
the oiled skin, wondering, not for the first time, how much pain

Njiru suffered. He was a mystery in many respects and
likely to remain so. He was not married, for example, this among a people to
whom the concept of celibacy was wholly foreign. Was that because his deformity
caused the girls or their parents to regard him as a poor catch? But then in
island terms he was both wealthy and powerful. Did he himself feel a
disinclination for the married state? And what had the impact been on a small
crippled boy of knowing he was the grandson of Homu, the greatest of the
head-hunting chiefs? It was worse, Rivers thought, smiling to himself, than
being the great-nephew of the man who shot the man who shot Lord Nelson.

None of these questions could be pursued. It was not
lack of words merely, but a lack of shared concepts. The islanders seemed
hardly to have discovered the idea of personality, in the western sense, much
less to have contracted the habit of introspection. Njiru was one of the most
powerful men on the island, perhaps the most powerful. To Rivers and Hocart it
seemed abundantly apparent that he owed his position to quite exceptional
intelligence, vigour and resolution, but such qualities were never mentioned by
the islanders when they attempted to explain his position. His power was
attributed entirely to the number of spirits he controlled. He 'knew' Mateana.
And above all, he 'knew' Ave.
Njiru knows Ave.
One of
the first things he'd been told, though he hadn't understood the significance
of the statement then, and perhaps did not fully understand it even now.