The Ghost Road (29 page)

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 at 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.