Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

Bats, of course. After the first jolt of fear, it was obvious. He directed the torch at the ceiling where more bats hung, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps, little sooty stalactites. As the torch swept over them, they raised their heads, frenzied little faces, wet pink gums, white fangs, all jabbering with fear.

Moving very slowly and quietly, not wanting to disturb them further, he again shone the torch at the ground, so that they stood, disconnected feet and legs, in a pool of light. He shouldn't have been startled by the bats, because he knew — Njiru had mentioned it — that in the old days it had been a regular outing for the men of Narovo to go and hunt bats in the cave at Pa Na Keru. But then one day, or so the legend said, a man took the wrong turning and, while his companions wound their way out of the mountain, his every step was leading him deeper into it. At last he stumbled upon another exit, and made his way back to the village, but, though he'd been missing less than a week, he returned an old man. He stayed with his mother for three days, but then his face turned black and he crumbled away into dust.

Nobody had followed them into the inner cave. Hocart was busy with his drawings and the islanders were presumably afraid of the legend. Was Njiru also afraid? If he was, he didn't show it. They could hear talk and laughter only a few feet away, in the outer cave, but their isolation in this hot, fur-lined darkness was complete.

This was the first time he'd been alone with Njiru since Ngea's death, and Rivers wanted to talk about Emele: partly because any ceremony connected with the death of a chief was important, but partly too because he felt concern for the woman herself.

'Tongo polo,' he said.

He felt Njiru withdraw.

'How long?' he persisted. 'How many days?'

Njiru shook his head. 'Man old time he savvy tongo polo, now no all same.'

The last words were accompanied by a dismissive chopping movement of his hand, not intended to make contact with anything, but his fingers clipped the end of the torch and sent it clattering to the ground, where it continued to shine, a single yellow eye focused on them in the darkness. Then the walls lifted off and came towards them. Rivers barely had time to see the beam of light become a tunnel filled with struggling shapes before he was enclosed in flapping squeaking screaming darkness, blinded, his skin shrinking from the contact that never came.

He stood with eyes closed, teeth clenched, senses so inundated they'd virtually ceased to exist, his mind shrunk to a single point of light. Keep still, he told himself, they won't touch you. And after that he didn't think at all but endured, a pillar of flesh that the soles of his feet connected to the earth, the bones of his skull vibrating to the bats' unvarying high-pitched scream.

The cave mouth disgorged fleeing human beings; behind them the bats streamed out in a dark cloud that furled over on to itself as it rose, like blood flowing from a wound under water. Eventually, shocked into silence, they all turned to stare, and watched for a full minute, before the stream thinned to a trickle.

Inside the cave, Rivers and Njiru opened their eyes. Rivers was not aware of having moved during the exodus, indeed would have sworn that he had not, but he discovered that he was gripping Njiru's hand. He felt… not dazed, dazed was the wrong word. The opposite of dazed. Almost as if a rind had been pared off, naked, unshelled, lying in contact with the earth.

Wonderingly, in the intense silence, they gazed round the grey granite walls, with here and there in the vastness black squares of baby bats hung upside-down to await their mothers' return.

* * *

A shaft of sunlight struck his eyes.

'Sorry,' Miss Irving said, and pulled the curtain a little way back. 'What sort of night did you have?'

'So-so.'

He seemed to have spent the entire night between hot, fur-lined walls and the fur had got on to his teeth.

'Here's your tea,' she said, putting the tray across his knees.

He drank it gratefully, sending out messages to various parts of his body to find out what the situation was. Ghastly, seemed to be the general response.

'Don't you think you should have a doctor?' She smiled at him. 'Doctor.'

'No. All he'd do is tell me to stay in bed and drink plenty of fluids. I can tell myself that.'

'All right. Ring if there's anything you want.' 'Would you mind drawing the curtains?' The darkness reminded him of the cave. All night he'd had bats clinging to the inside walls of his skull. But now at least there was a breeze, the curtains breathed gently. But he was still too hot. He kicked off the covers, unbuttoned his jacket and flapped the edges, ran his tongue round his cracked lips. Hot.

* * *

The sun beat down the moment they left the cave. It was past noon, but the hard bright white rocks reflected heat into their faces. They walked more slowly on the way back, Rivers intensely aware of Njiru walking just ahead of him, though they did not speak. Near the village they began, by mutual consent, to lag behind the others. Hocart turned to wait, but Rivers waved him on.

They sat down on an overturned tree trunk covered in moss. The sun crashed down, beating the tops of their heads, like somebody hammering tent pegs into the ground. And yet even in these sweaty clothes, the shoulders of his shirt thickly encrusted with bat droppings, Rivers had the same feeling of being new, unsheathed.

They sat tranquilly, side by side, in no hurry to begin the mangled business of communication. A slight breeze cooled their skin.

'Tongo polo', Rivers said at last, because that's where they'd left off. How long? he asked again. How many days?

A bright, amused, unmistakably affectionate look from Njiru. There was no fixed time, he said, though eighteen days was common. His grandmother had observed tongo polo for two hundred days, but that was exceptional because Homu, his grandfather, had been a great chief. The men of Roviana blew the conch for her.

Blew the conch? Rivers asked. What did that mean?

A short silence, though not, Rivers thought, indicating a reluctance to go on speaking. At that moment Njiru would have told him anything. Perhaps this was the result of that time in the cave when they'd reached out and gripped each other's hands. No, he thought. No. There had been two experiences in the cave, and he was quite certain Njiru shared in both. One was the reaching out to grasp each other's hands. But the other was a shrinking, no, no, not shrinking, a compression of identity into a single hard unassailable point: the point at which no further compromise is possible, where nothing remains except pure naked self-assertion. The right to be and to be as one is.

Njiru's grandfather, Homu, was famous for having taken ninety-three heads in a single afternoon. Through his grandmother he was related to Inkava, who, until the British destroyed his stronghold, had been the most ferocious of the great head-hunting chiefs of Roviana. This was his inheritance. Rivers glanced sideways at him, close enough to see how the white lime flaked on the taut skin of his cheekbones. Njiru was speaking, not out of friendship — though he felt friendship — but out of that hard core of identity, no longer concerned to evade questions or disguise his pride in the culture of his people.

The blowing of the conch, he said, signifies the completion of a successful raid. He turned and looked directly at Rivers. The widow of a chief can be freed only by the taking of a head.

Monday, 16 September 1918

We live in tamboos — a sort of cross between a cowshed and an outdoor privy. Corrugated iron walls and roof — bloody noisy when it rains, and it's raining now — carpeted with straw that rustles and smells and gleams in the candle-light. Fields outside — perfectly reasonable fields when we arrived. Now, after last night's heavy rain and the constant churning of boots and wheels, there's a depth of about eighteen inches of mud. The duckboards are starting to sink. Oh, and it gets into everything. The inside of my sleeping-bag is not inviting — I was tempted to sleep outside it last night. But. Mustn't complain. (Why not? The entire army survives on grousing.) In fact mud and duckboards are about the only familiar things left.