Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

'Dead, is he?' Telford asked cheerfully.

Dead drunk. 'I think he'll be all right.'

Lack of space was the problem. Barely enough room to squeeze between the wash-basin and the bath at knee height. He had to bend from the waist to get his hands round Moffet's chest and then his fingertips slipped on the cold, plump skin. Telford stood, looking on.

'Get his legs.'

They heaved, but without co-ordination, Rivers finally managing to haul the shoulders out of the water just as Telford grew tired of waiting and dropped the legs back in. They were gasping for breath, shoulders bumping in the confined space.

'All right, together,' Rivers said. 'One, two…'

Moffet came clear, only to fall back with a splash, a great plume of water flying up and drenching them both.

'I'll try to get m'leg under him,' Telford said.

They lifted again, and Telford stepped into the water so that Moffet was balanced across his thigh, Rivers supporting the head and shoulders. They froze like that, an improbable and vaguely obscene pietà. 'All right?' Rivers asked.

'Right, I've got him.'

They collapsed in a heap on the floor, blood from Moffet's left wrist flowing more copiously now, bright, distinct drops splashing on to the mottled tiles. Rivers dragged a clean towel off the rail and pressed it hard against the deepest cut. 'There, you take over,' he said. 'I'll get Sister Roberts. Just press now, no need for anything else. No tourniquets'

'Shouldn't dream of it,' Telford said, fluffing his shoulders.

Rivers intercepted Sister Roberts on her way down the ward. 'Moffet,' he said, pointing behind him. 'He's slashed his wrists. We need a wheelchair.'

He returned to find Telford entertaining the now semi-conscious Moffet with a story about an inexperienced groom who'd applied a tourniquet to the leg of his favourite hunter. 'Gangrene set in, would you believe? We had to shoot the poor sod.' Telford looked down at the fluttering lids. 'And it was only a graze.'

Moffet flapped like a landed fish, moaned, vomited yellow bile. Rivers tapped his cheek. 'Have you taken anything?'

Sister Roberts came creaking to the door with a wheelchair. Telford looked up at her, horrified, whipped a flannel off the side of the bath and draped it over Moffet's genitals.

'For God's sake, man,' Rivers snapped. 'She's a nurse' Though with Telford's history it probably wasn't Sister Robert's modesty he thought he was protecting. 'If you could get us a couple of blankets,' he said, twisting in the narrow space.

Moffet's head lolled to one side as they hauled him into the chair and wrapped blankets round him, though Rivers was beginning to suspect he was less drowsy than he seemed.

'Well,' he said, straightening up. 'I think I can manage now, Major Telford. Thank you, you've been a great help.'

'That's all right.' He looked down at Moffet and sniffed. 'Helps break up the afternoon. Anyway, what's all this Major nonsense?' he demanded, punching Rivers playfully in the biceps. 'Don't be such a stuffed shirt, man.'

And off he went, whistling 'A Bachelor Gay Am I'.

They wheeled Moffet into a side ward, since nothing is worse for morale on a 'shell-shock' ward than a suicide attempt. Except a successful suicide of course. He remembered the man at Craiglockhart who'd succeeded in hanging himself. Quite apart from his own tragedy he'd undone weeks of careful work on other people.

The deepest gash required stitching. Rivers set to work immediately, and was rather surprised to find Moffet stoical. He watched the needle dip in and out, only licking his lips once towards the end.

There,' Rivers said. 'All done.'

Moffet rolled his head restlessly. 'I didn't make a very good job of it, did I?'

'Not many people do. The only person I've ever known to succeed by that method was a surgeon — he virtually severed his left hand.' He got up and stretched his legs, pressing a hand hard into the small of his back. 'How much whisky did you have?'

'Half a bottle. Bit more perhaps.'

No point talking to him, then.

'Where did you get it?'

'My mother. Does it matter?'

'And the razor?'

Moffet looked puzzled. 'Mine.'

'All right. You try to get some sleep.'

'Will you have to tell the police?'

'No.' Rivers looked down at him. 'You're a soldier. You're under military discipline.'

He found Sister Roberts waiting for him. 'I'm afraid we can't let this go,' he said. 'The lockers are supposed to be searched regularly.'

'I'll ask Miss Banbury. She was the last person to do it.'

She was also Sister Roberts's bête noire , for no better reason than that she was well-meaning, clumsy, enthusiastic, unqualified and upper class.

'His mother gave him the whisky.'

'Can't say I'm surprised. Silly woman.'

Sister Roberts, as he knew from numerous air-raid conversations of the previous winter, was the eldest girl in a family of eleven. She'd clawed her way out of the Gateshead slums and therefore felt obliged to believe in the corrosive effects on the human psyche of good food, good housing and good education.

'Telford was a bit of a revelation, wasn't he?' she said. 'Surprisingly cool.'

'Oh, Telford's fine. Until he opened his big mouth nobody noticed he was mad.' He added, not entirely as an afterthought, 'He works at the War Office.'

Outside in the corridor he met Wansbeck, now much better though surely not well enough to be up and about.

'How do you feel?' Rivers asked.

'Bit weak. Throat's still sore, but I'm not coughing as much.'

'You'd be better off in bed. Go on, back with you.'

As the doors banged shut behind Wansbeck, Rivers became aware of an insistent clicking. Nothing to account for it. The long corridor stretched ahead, empty, its grey, palely shining floor faintly marked with the shadows of the window frames. Click, click, click. And then he realized the sound was being caused by the bobbles on the end of the blind strings, tapping against each other in the slight breeze. But identifying the sound didn't seem to lessen its potency. It was almost the sound of a yacht's rigging, but the memory went deeper than that.

He had reached the lift before he managed to dredge it up. That day Njiru took him to see the skull houses at Pa Na Gundu, they'd walked for miles in sweltering heat, scarcely a breath of wind, and no sound except the buzzing of flies. Then, abruptly, they came out into a clearing, sharp blades of sunlight slanting down between the trees, and ahead of them, rising up the slope, six or seven skull houses, their gratings ornamented with strings of dangling shells. The feeling of being watched that skulls always gave you. Dazzled by the sudden light, he followed Njiru up the slope, towards a knot of shadows, and then one of the shadows moved, resolving itself into the shape of Nareti, the blind mortuary priest who squatted there, all pointed knees and elbows, snail trails of pus running from the corners of his eyes.

The furthest of the skull houses was being repaired, and its occupants had been taken out and arranged on the ground so that at first sight the clearing seemed to be cobbled with skulls. He'd hung back, not sure how close he was permitted to approach, and at that moment a sudden fierce gust of wind shook the trees and all the strings of votary shells rattled and clicked together.

The lift doors clanged open in his face, startling him back into the present day.

Ada Lumb always wore black, less in mourning for her husband — if she'd ever had one — than because black enabled an air of awesome respectability to be maintained at minimal cost.

Respectability was Ada's god. She'd arrived in this neighbourhood eighteen years before, recently widowed, or so she claimed, with two pretty, immaculately dressed little girls in tow. The house had belonged to a man called Dirty Dick, who rambled and muttered and frightened children on street corners. Yellowing newspapers were stacked high in every room. Within a few weeks Ada had the house painted, doorstep scrubbed, range black-leaded, net curtains up at every window. At a safe distance from the house, she bought a lock-up shop, selling boiled boots, second-hand clothes and— below the counter — a great variety of patent medicines designed to procure abortion or cure clap. Pennyroyal Syrup, Dr Lawson's Cure for Female Blockages and Obstructions, Dr Morse's Invigorating Cordial, Curtis's Manhood, Sir Samuel Hannay's Specific, Bumstead's Gleet Cure, The Unfortunate's Friend, and Davy's Lac-Elephantis, a foul-smelling suspension of chalk and God knows what, which claimed to be the medicated milk of elephants.