The Ghost Road (6 page)

CHAPTER
FOUR

Two black lines circled Moffet's legs immediately
above the knee.

'Close your eyes,' Rivers said. 'I want you to tell me
exactly what you feel.'

'Pinprick.'

'How many?'

The pins touched again.

Two.

Again.

'One.'

Again.

'Two.' Moffet sounded bored. 'Two. Two.'
A pause.
'Not sure.'

'All right.
You can open your eyes now.'

He hadn't lied once. He'd lain with closed eyes, a
fluttering visible beneath the thin
lids,
and Rivers
had read in every line and fold of his face the temptation to lie, and yet the
progression of yeses and noes had been totally accurate. True, he couldn't have
hoped to lie convincingly, or not for long, but it was interesting that he
hadn't tried. This was pure hysteria, uncontaminated by malingering.

'Rivers, do you ever think you were born into the
wrong century?'

Rivers looked surprised.
'Survived
into, perhaps.'

'It's just this reminds me of seventeenth-century
witch-finders, you know? They used to stick pins in people too.'

'I expect they were looking for the same thing.
Areas of abnormal sensation.'

'Do you think they found them?'

Rivers lifted Moffet's left leg and began to draw a
line three inches lower than the line he'd drawn yesterday morning. 'I don't
see why not. Some witches were probably hysterics. At least a lot of the
reported phenomena suggest that.'

'And the witch
-finders?

'I don't know.
Simpler.
Nastier.'

'I don't like that word.
Applied to
this.'

'Hysteria?'
He could quite see that 'shell-shock', useless and
inaccurate though the term was, might appeal to Moffet rather more. It did at
least sound appropriately male. 'I don't think anybody likes it. The trouble is
nobody likes the alternatives either.'

'It derives,' Moffet continued, hardening his voice,
'from the Greek
hystera.
The womb.'

'Yes,' Rivers said dryly. 'I know.'

The problem with Moffet was that he was too
intelligent to be satisfied with such a crude solution as paralysis. Hysterical
symptoms of this gross kind-paralysis, deafness, blindness, muteness—occurred
quite frequently in the immediate aftermath of trauma but they normally
lingered only in those who were either uneducated or frankly stupid. Moffet was
neither.

And whether this rather dramatic form of treatment was
helping... Oh, it would get rid of the paralysis, but was there not the
possibility that it might also reinforce a belief in magical solutions? Rivers
sighed and walked round the bed. All his instincts were against it, but he knew
it would get Moffet on his feet again. A witch-doctor could do this, he
thought, beginning to draw, and probably better than I can. Come to think of
it, there was
one
person who'd have done it brilliantly...

* * *

In Melanesia he'd quickly formed the habit of
accompanying Njiru on his rounds. They would set off together, always in single
file, because the path winding through thick bush was too narrow for them to
walk abreast.

Seen from the rear, the extent of Njiru's spinal
curvature was dreadfully apparent. Rivers wondered how such deformities were
explained—which spirit inflicted them, and why? Sweat stung his bitten
eyelids—he
kept having
to wipe his forearm across his
face.
Mainly the heat, but partly also anxiety.
It was
a bit like your first day at a new school, he thought, knowing you've
got
to get things right and that your chances of getting them right are
infinitesimal because you know
nothing.
Only at school,
provided you start at the same time as everybody else, you can solve the
problem by fading into the group, darting about with all the other little grey
minnows, safety in the shoal, but here he was alone, except for Hocart, and
Hocart had been running a fever ever since they arrived, and today had chosen
to stay behind in their tent.

At the village he crawled into a hut and squatted on
the earth floor, watching and listening, while Njiru attended to his patient.
An old woman, evidently a regular to judge by the way she and Njiru laughed and
joked together. She was introduced as Namboko Taru, though 'Namboko', which he
at first took to be a name, turned out to be a title: 'widow'. The same word
also meant 'widower', but was not used as a title when applied to men. Two more
disconnected facts to add to his discouragingly small heap.

Namboko Taru lay
down,
pushing the strip of brown bark cloth she wore down far enough to expose her
belly. Njiru poured coconut oil on to her abdomen and began a massage, while
Rivers tried to find out what was wrong. Constipation, it appeared. Was it, he
wanted to ask, in view of her age, chronic constipation, or had there been a
recent change in bowel habit? And was it simply constipation, or was there
alternating diarrhoea? But his attempts to convey 'alternating diarrhoea' in a
mixture of pidgin and mime threatened to bring the proceedings to a halt
entirely,
and he gave up, while Namboko Taru wiped tears of
laughter from her cheeks. He might not be contributing to the cure but he was certainly
taking her mind off the condition.

Meanwhile the movements of Njiru's hands began to
focus on a region below and to the left of the navel. He was chanting under his
breath, swaying backwards and forwards, scooping the slack flesh together
between the
heel
of his palms, like a woman gathering
dough. The constant low murmur and the rhythmic movement were hypnotic.
Suddenly, with a barking cry, Njiru seemed to catch something, shielded it in
his cupped hands while he crawled to the door, and then threw it as far as he
could into the bush. A brief conversation between doctor and patient, then
Namboko Taru fastened her cloth and went into the bush, from whence, ten
minutes later, a far happier woman emerged.

Meanwhile Rivers and Njiru talked. Namboko Taru's
complaint belonged to a group of illnesses called
tagosoro
, which were
inflicted by the spirit called Mateana. This particular condition—
nggasin
—was
caused by an octopus that had taken up residence in the lower intestine, from
where its

tentacles
might spread until they reached the throat. At this
point the disease would prove fatal. As so often happened, one could detect
behind the native belief the shadowy outline of a disease only too familiar to
western medicine, though perhaps this was not a helpful way of looking at it.
Namboko Taru believed she was cured. And certainly as a treatment for simple
constipation the massage could hardly have been bettered, and had not differed
in any essential respect from western massage, until very near the end.

Rivers pointed to himself and then to the coconut oil.
Njiru nodded, poured oil into his palms and began the massage, chanting,
rocking...
Once again that curious hypnotic effect, a sense
of being totally focused on, totally cared for. Njiru was a good doctor,
however many octopi he located in the colon. The fingers probed deeper, the
chanting quickened, the movements of the hands neared a climax, and
then—nothing. Njiru sat back, smiling, terminating the physical contact as
tactfully as he'd initiated it.

Rivers sketched the movement Njiru hadn't made. 'You
no
throw...
nggasin?'

A gleam of irony.
'You no got
nggasin.'

*
* *

But
you
have, Rivers thought,
sponging yesterday's black lines off Moffet's legs.

'And tomorrow,' he said authoritatively, measuring
with his forefingers, 'this area will be normal.'

Moffet glared at him. 'You are consciously and
deliberately destroying my self-respect.'

'I think you'll find that starts to come back once you're
on your feet.'

Sister Carmichael was hovering on the other side of
the screens, waiting to snatch the trolley from him. She was shocked by his
insistence on doing everything himself, including the washing off of the
previous lines. Consultants do not wash patients.
Nurses
wash patients. She would have been only marginally more distressed if she'd
come on to the ward and found him mopping the floor. What he could not get
across to her was that the rules of medicine are one thing, the rules of ritual
drama quite another.

Wansbeck had had a bad night, she said, once the
trolley had been snatched away. Temperature of 103, and he kept trying to open
the window.

'All right, I'll see him next.'

The nurses had just finished sponging Wansbeck down,
and he lay half naked, his skin a curdled bluish white against the snowy white
of the sheets. As Rivers watched a shiver ran along his arms and chest,
roughening and darkening the skin. They finished drying him, covered him up,
and he was free to talk, though too weak to manage more than a few words.

Rivers was beginning to feel concerned about Wansbeck.
Spanish influenza was quite unusually virulent and he had it badly, and yet he
seemed indifferent to the outcome. Rivers grasped him firmly round the wrist.
'You know you've got to fight this.'

Probably 'fight' was the only word he understood.
'Done enough of that,' he muttered, and turned away.

* * *

In Westminster the leaves were already beginning to turn.
Not to the brilliant reds and golds of the countryside, but a shabby tarnished
yellow. In another few weeks they would start to fall. The worst thing about
London was that summer ended so soon.

'You know, sometimes,' Rivers said carefully, his
glasses flashing as he turned back from the window, 'it helps just to go back
and try to to to
to...
gather things together.
So.
Let's see if I've got this right. You were in hospital
after a riding accident—'

'Yes, that's right. I didn't notice the mare—'

'Yes.
And while you were there, one of the nurses cut your
penis off and put it in
a jar
of formaldehyde in the basement.'

Telford shook his head. 'I didn't say for
for...'

'Formaldehyde.
No, I know you didn't. They don't use pickling
vinegar.'

'Ah, well, you see, you'd know that.'

A deep breath.
'Why do you think she did that?'

Telford shrugged. 'Dunno.'

'But you must have
wondered.
I mean it was
quite an astonishing thing to do, wasn't it?'

'Wasn't for me to ask questions.'
Telford leant
forward,
delivering what he obviously thought was the
coup de grace.
'You
wouldn't want me teaching you
your
job, would you?'

At the moment he'd have welcomed assistance from any
quarter. 'Didn't the doctor say anything?'

'Not a dicky bird.'

'Telford.'
Rivers clasped his hands. 'What do you pee out of?'

'M'cock, you stupid bugger, what do you pee out of?'

Rivers concentrated on straightening his blotter. 'I
wonder if it would help if we talked a little about
women?
'

It might have done. He was never to know. A few
minutes later Telford said, 'I can't say I care for the tone of this
conversation, Rivers. It may have escaped your notice, but we're not in a
barracks.' He stood up. 'God knows, the last thing I want to do is pull rank,
but I'd be grateful if you'd address me as
Major
Telford in future.'

He went out, slamming the door.

* * *

Moffet lay back, eyes closed, grinding, '
Yes, yes, yes,
yes,'
as the pin pricked his skin.

The usual routine, and yet something was different.
The air of indifference had gone. Deliberately, Rivers let the pin stray across
the line on to skin
that
should still have been numb.