The Ghost Road (5 page)

Prior tugged at his tie, looking around for somewhere
to put his clothes, and noticed a chair by the fireplace. Rather a grand
fireplace, with a garland of flowers and fruit carved into the mantel, but
boarded up now, of course, and a gas fire set into it. He was pulling his
half-unbuttoned tunic over his head when he noticed a smell of gas.
Faint but unmistakable.
Tented in dark khaki, he fought back
the rush of panic, sweat streaming down his sides, not the gradual sweat of
exercise but a sudden drench, rank, slippery, hot, then immediately cold. He
freed himself from the tunic and went to open the window, looking out over
sharp-angled, moonlit roofs to the sea. He told himself there was no reason to
be afraid, but he was afraid. All the usual reactions: dry mouth, wet armpits,
skipping heart, the bulge in the throat that makes you cough.
Tight scrotum, shrivelled cock.
Jesus Christ, he was going
to have to put a johnny on that, talk about a kid in its father's overcoat. He
heard his own voice, awkward, sounding younger than he felt. 'I'm afraid this
isn't going to work.'

'Aw, don't say that, love, it'll be al—'

Phoney warmth.
She was used to pumping up limp pricks.

'No, it won't.'

He came back into the room and looked at her. Her hair
had fallen across her shoulders, not in a cloudy mass but in distinct coils,
precise crescents, like you see on the floor of a barber's shop. He picked up
one of the coils and wound it round his fingers. Red stripes marked the places
where the bones of her stays bit into the skin. Catching the direction of his
glance, she rubbed ineffectually at them. He wasn't behaving as clients
generally behaved, and any departure from the usual run of things made her
nervous.
Two people's fear in the room now.
But her
gaze remained steady, surprisingly steady, when you thought that only five
minutes ago she'd been too tipsy to walk straight.
Now
...
well, she'd had a few, but she certainly wasn't drunk.
Perhaps she needed the mask of drunkenness more than she needed drink.

'Have I got a spot on the end of me conk or what?'

'No,' he said stupidly.

They stared at each other.

'Wouldn't hurt to lie down,' she said.

He finished undressing, reached out and tentatively
took the weight of her breasts in his hands. So far, he realized, he hadn't had
the shopping list, the awful litany that started whenever you met a woman's
eyes in Convent Garden or the
Strand.'
... and five bob extra to suck me tits.'

'Two quid,' she said, reading his thoughts.
'On the table there.'

He got into bed, telling himself the cold damp patch
under his left buttock was imagination. He put his hand down. It wasn't. Dotted
here and there on the sheet were tiny coils of pubic hair. He wondered whose
spunk he was lying in, whether he knew him, how carefully she'd washed
afterwards. He groped around in his mind for the appropriate feeling of
disgust, and found excitement instead, no, more than that, the sober certainty
of power.

All the men who'd passed through, through Scarborough,
through her, on their way to the Front... And how many of them dead? As she
squatted over the bowl to wash—a token affair, he was glad to see—he felt them
gathering in the hall, thronging the narrow stair, pressing against the door.
Halted on the threshold only by the glare of light.

'Can we have that out?' he said. 'It's in my eyes.'

And now they were free to enter.
Waiting,
though, till the springs creaked and sagged beneath her weight.
His
hands were their hands, their famished eyes were his. Pupils strained wide in
starlight fastened on a creamy belly and a smudge of dark hair. He stroked and
murmured and her fingers closed round him. 'There you are, you see. I told you
it'd be all right.'

He fucked her slowly. After a while her hands came
round and grasped his arse, nails digging in, though whether this was
a pretence
to hurry things along or a genuine flicker of
response he couldn't tell. He was aware of their weight on
him,
his arms were braced to carry
it...

And then something went wrong. He looked down at the
shuttered face and recognized the look, recognized it not with his eyes but
with the muscles of his own face, for he too had lain like this, waiting for it
to be over. A full year of fucking, before he managed to come, on the narrow
monastic bed, a crucifix above it, on the far wall—he would never forget it—a
picture of St Lawrence roasting on his grid. The first time Father Mackenzie
knelt, holding him round the waist, crying,
We
really
touched bottom that time, didn't we?
One way of putting it, but
we
?
What
the fuck
did he mean by
we
?
Later— though not much later, he'd been a
forward child— he'd begun to charge, not so much resorting to prostitution as
inventing it, for he knew of nobody else who got money that way.
First Father Mackenzie.
Then others.

The only way not to be her was to hate her. Narrowing
his eyes, he blurred her features, ran them together into the face they pinned
to the revolver targets.
A snarling, baby-eating boche.
But they didn't want that, the men who used his eyes and hands as theirs. He
felt them withdraw, like a wave falling back.

All right, then, for
me.
He lowered his
forehead on to hers, knowing without having to be told that she wouldn't let
him kiss her. She wriggled beneath him, and he lifted his weight. Slowly and
deliberately, she put her index finger deep into her mouth, and brought it out
with a startling
pop
, and then—he had time to guess what she intended—scratched
the small of his back delicately so that he shivered and thrust deeper, and
rammed the finger hard up his arse.
Ah,
he cried, more with
shock than pleasure, but already he was bursting, spilling, falling towards
her, gasping for breath, laughing, gasping again,
tears
stinging his eyes as he rolled off her and lay still. Hoist on
his own
petard. That had always been one of
his
tricks to speed the unreasonably lingering guest.

She got up immediately and squatted over the bowl. He
took the hint and started to dress, sniffing round the fireplace as he buttoned
his tunic.

'What's the marra with
you?’

'I thought I could smell gas.'

'Oh that, yeh, you probably can. Tap leaks. I'm tired
of telling her.'

He wouldn't do this again, he decided, buckling his
belt. It might work for some men,
but...
not for him. For him, it was all slip and slither, running across shingle. He
hadn't been sure at the end who was fucking who. Even the excitement he'd felt
at the idea of sliding in on another man's spunk was ambiguous, to say the
least. Not that he minded ambiguity—he couldn't have lived at all if he'd
minded
that
—but this was the kind of ambiguity people hide behind.

And he was too proud to hide.

* * *

On his way back to the barracks he forgot her. A few
hundred yards from the gate he drew level with a group of officers. Most had
paced themselves well, and were now rather more sober than they'd been when he
bumped into them earlier in the evening. But Dalrymple was in a desperate
state, striding along with the exalted, visionary look of somebody whose sole
aim in life is to get to the lavatory in time.

'Will he be all right?' Prior asked.

'We'll get him there,' said Bainbrigge.

As they entered the barracks gates, thunder rumbled on
the horizon; the clouds were briefly lit by lightning. Prior waited till the
crowd cleared before going across to the main building to get washed, thinking,
as he stripped off and splashed cold water over his chest and groin, that a
deserted wash-room at night, all white tiles and naked lights, is the most
convincing portrayal of hell the human mind can devise. He peered into the
brown-spotted glass, remembering the moment when Nellie's face had dissolved
into the face of the boche target.

— What's the worst thing you could have done?
Rivers asked.

A phoney question.
Rivers didn't believe in the worst things. He thought
Prior
was being histrionic. And perhaps I was, Prior
thought, staring into the glass at the row of empty cubicles behind him,
feeling 'the worst things' crowd in behind him, jostling for the privilege of
breathing down his neck. He'd even, coming to himself at four or five o'clock
in the morning with no idea of how the night had been
spent,
thought it possible he might have killed somebody. And yet, why should that be
'the worst thing'? His reflection stared back at him, hollow-eyed. Murder was
only killing in the wrong place.

The wind was rising as he hurried across the gritty
tarmac to his tent. Bent double, he braced himself to face the smell of armpits
and socks, heavy on the day's stored heat, for though they left the flaps open,
nothing could prevent the tents becoming ovens in hot weather. He took a deep
breath, as deep as he could manage, and crawled into the stinking dark.

A voice said, 'Hello.'

Of course.
Hallet.
The past week he'd
had the tent to himself, because Hallet had been away on a bombing course in
Ripon.

'Can you see all right?'

The beam of a torch illuminated yellow grass littered
with cigarette butts.

'I can
manage,
thanks.'

Blinking to reaccustom himself to the blackness,
Prior
wriggled into his sleeping-bag.

'You're just back from London, aren't you?'

He resigned himself to having to talk. 'Yes.
Week ago.'

A flicker of lightning found the whites of Hallet's
eyes. 'Have you been boarded yet?'

'Out next draft.
You?'

'Next draft.'

Voice casual, but the
mouth dry
.

'First time?'
Prior asked.

'Yes, as a matter of fact it is.'

Now that Prior was accustomed to the gloom he could
see Hallet clearly: olive-skinned, almost Mediterranean-looking, a nice crooked
mouth with prominent front teeth that he was evidently self-conscious about,
for he kept pulling his upper lip down to hide them.
Quite
fetching.
Not that in these circumstances
Prior
ever permitted himself to be fetched.

'I'm really rather looking forward to it.'

The words hung on the air, obviously requiring an
answer of some kind, but then what could one say? He was scared shitless, he
was
right
to be scared
shitless,
and any
'reassuring' remark risked drawing attention to one or other of these
unfortunate facts.

'Some of the men in my platoon have been out three
times,' Hallet said. 'I think that's the only thing that bothers me, really.
How the hell do you lead men who know more than you do?'

'You pray for a good sergeant. A really good sergeant
tells you what orders to give him, doesn't let anybody else see him doing it,
and doesn't let himself know he's doing it.'

'How many times have you—?'

'This'll be the fourth. Wound, shell-shock, trench
fever. Not in that order.'

Hallet was lying on his back, hands clasped behind his
head, nothing much visible from Prior's angle except his chin. How appallingly
random it all was. If Hallet's father had got a gleam in his eye two years
later than he did, Hallet wouldn't be here. He might even have missed the war
altogether, perhaps spent the rest of his life goaded by the irrational shame
of having escaped.
'Cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends
who died.'
That was it exactly, couldn't be better put.
Ghosts everywhere.
Even the
living were
only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This
moment in this tent already had the quality of
remembered
experience. Or
perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he
was
old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve
weeks. He was this boy's great-grandfather.

He looked at Hallet again, at the warm column of his
neck, and tried to think of something to say, something light-hearted and easy,
but could think of nothing. He stared instead at the stained canvas, lit by
flickers of summer lightning, and noticed that the largest stain looked like a
map of Africa.