Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

Last night, our last night in Amiens, there was a great storm, flashes of sheet lightning, wind buffeting and slogging the house.

I'd just got to bed when I heard a strange rumbling from above. Hallet appeared in the doorway, white-faced and staring. Only starlight to see by and the whole house with its broken windows so draughty the candle kept being blown out. We got an oil-lamp from the kitchen. Hallet said, 'Is it the guns?' I said, 'Of course it bloody isn't, it's coming from upstairs.'

The stairway leading to the upper floor and the nursery is narrow. We got to the nursery door, paused, looked at each other. Hallet's face illuminated from below had bulges under the eyes like a second lid. I pushed the door open and a blast of cold wind from the broken window hit me. All I saw at first was movement at the far end of the room and then I started to laugh because it was just the rocking-horse rocking. The wind was strong enough to have got it going, I can't think of any other explanation, and its rockers were grinding away on the bare wooden floor.

It ought to have been an anti-climax, and at first I thought it was. We moved the thing away from the window, out of the draught, and went downstairs still laughing, telling Potts, who peered round the door of his room, there was nothing to worry about, go back to sleep, but in my own room with the lamp out I lay awake and all night long that rumbling went on in my head.

They didn't have to wait long for their proper death.

Ngea was a strong, vigorous man, the most powerful chief on the island after Rembo. Everything to live for, apparently, and yet, as one saw so often in Melanesia, he was not putting up a fight. He lay in his hall, watching the scare ghost turn and turn in the draught, and his life lay, it seemed to Rivers, like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand.

His condition was so bad that, at one point, Emele, his wife, and the other women began to wail, the long, drawn out, throbbing, musical wail of the women, but then the sick man rallied slightly and the wailing was abandoned.

Rivers said goodbye to him, promised to see him again tomorrow, though he knew he wouldn't, and walked back to the tent. It was dark by the time he got back, and the green canvas of the tent glowed with the light of the lamp inside it. Hocart's shadow, sharply black and elongated, reached hugely over the roof. Rivers pushed a heavy weight of damp washing aside and went in.

Hocart was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a pencil held sideways in his mouth, typing up his notes. 'I had to retreat because of the midges.'

'Midges?'

'Whatever.'

Hocart was careless with quinine, careless with the mosquito nets. Rivers threw himself down on his bed, clasped his hands behind his head and watched him. After a few seconds Hocart pulled his shirt over his head, and fanned himself with a sheaf of blank pages.

As always the heat of the day was trapped inside the tent, and their bodies ran with sweat.

'You've lost weight,' Rivers said, looking at the shadows between Hocart's ribs. ' Rakiana , that's the word for you.'

'Well,' Hocart said, round the pencil. 'Just as long as your pal Njiru doesn't start trying to put me out of my misery…'

'Is he my pal?'

A quick glance. 'You know he is.'

They worked for a couple of hours, ate some baked yam pudding that Namboko Taru had made for them, worked again, then turned off the lamp.

An hour or so later Rivers heard the sound of footsteps approaching the tent. Hocart had fallen asleep, one raised arm shielding his eyes, the pressure of the pillow pushing his cheek and mouth out of shape. Enough moonlight filtered through the canvas for the shadow of the passer-by to stalk across the inside of the tent. A minute later another, taller shadow followed.

Mali? Mali was a girl of thirteen who'd recently retired to the menstrual hut for the first time. When she'd re-emerged, five days later, arrangements for her defloration were already well in hand. A young man, Runi — he'd be about eighteen — had paid her parents the two arm rings that entitled him to spend twenty consecutive nights with her, and had decided — it was his decision, the girl had no say in the matter — to share the privilege with two of his friends.

Runi was considered a bit of a pest. Only the other day he and his two closest friends — presumably the two he'd invited to share Mali — had climbed some kanarium trees and pelted their unfortunate owners with unripe nuts. Rivers had been reminded of Rag Week. The old people grumbled, and then said, what can you expect, young men cooped up on the island sitting about like old women, instead of being off in their canoes, as they ought to have been, burning villages and taking heads.

Whispers, quite close by. A startled cry, almost a yelp, then grunts, groans, moans, a long crescendo of sobbing cries.

Hocart woke up, listened. 'Oh God, not again.'

'Shush.'

There was a belief on the island that a girl's defloration is never the first time, because her first bleeding means the moon has already lain with her. The men denied they believed it, insisting it was just a story they told the girls to reassure them, which at least implied a certain tenderness. He hoped so. She looked such a child.

A few minutes' whispering, and the grunts began again. What it is to be eighteen. Another cry, this time definitely male, and footsteps coming back.

'One down, two to go,' Hocart said.

'You realize for the rest of their lives they won't be able to say each other's names?'

No reply. Rivers wondered if he'd drifted back to sleep but when he turned to look, caught the gleam of eye white under the mosquito net. More footsteps. Another shadow climbed the far wall of the tent. A short pause, whispers, then the gasps began again.

Rivers sighed. 'You know, Rinambesi says when a chief dies the last thing that happens, used to happen, rather, is a great head-hunting raid, followed by a feast, and all the girls are available free to all the warriors. And not reluctant either, apparently. They run into the sea to greet them.'

'Head-hunting as an aphrodisiac?'

'Why not?'

They seem to be doing all right without it,' Hocart said, as the moans got louder.

'No babies, though.'

The genealogies made grim reading. Families of five or six had been common three or four generations ago. Now many marriages were childless.

The last shadow came and went. Rivers supposed he must have slept, because it seemed no time at all before the grey early morning light made the mosquito nets as stark and sinister as shrouds. Fowl-he-sing-out was the pidgin term for this pre-dawn hour, and the fowls had started, first a bubbling trickle of notes, always the same bird, he didn't know its name, rising to a frenzy of competing shrieks and cries. But this morning there was a new noise. At first he lay, blinking sleepily, unable to attach meaning to it, but then he realized it was the wailing of women, almost indistinguishable at this distance from the sound of flutes. And he knew Ngea was dead.

* * *

They arrived at Ngea's hall to find the corpse bound into the sitting position, propped up against a pillar. A stout stick had been strapped to its back, keeping the head and neck more or less erect — a sort of external spine. Ngea had been bathed and dressed in his best clothes, the lime on his face and in his hair freshly painted, bunches of riria leaves, a plant forbidden to men in life, fastened to his necklaces. Beside him sat his widow, Emele, not crying or wailing with the other women. Very calm, very dignified.

While the women rocked and wailed Njiru was systematically destroying the dead man's possessions, with the exception of the axe which he had set aside. One rare arm ring after another was smashed. Rivers squatted beside Njiru, and asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb the mourners, why they had to be destroyed.