The Ghost Road

  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.

  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.’ Moffett 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 hysterā. 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 grâce. ‘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.’
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  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.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  The pin stopped. Moffet opened his eyes and smiled wearily. ‘You can go all the way down if you like.’ He closed his eyes again. Rivers moved the pin down the leg at intervals of two inches. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Wearily now, each ‘yes’ coming precisely at the moment the pin touched the skin. Over the shin, across the arch of the foot, down to the tip of the big toe. ‘YES.’

  Moffet had yelled the word. Through the gap in the screens, Rivers saw the other patients turn and stare at the shrouded bed. He put the pin down. ‘Well.’

  He wasn’t particularly surprised: the removal of hysterical paralysis was often – one might almost say generally – as dramatic as the onset. Moffet lay still, his face sallow against the whiteness of the pillow, making no attempt to hide his depression, and indeed why should he? His sole defence against the unbearable had been taken away and nothing put in its place.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘First thing.’

  ‘Have you tried to walk?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Seems the logical next step. So to speak.’

  ‘Can you swing yourself round? Sit on the side.’

  Rivers knelt and began massaging Moffet’s calves, chafing the slack flesh between his hands.

  ‘I suppose I’m expected to be grateful.’

  ‘No.’ He stood up. ‘All right, shall we try? Put your hands on my shoulders.’