Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

Despite the hour the curtains let in a little light, starlight, he supposed, there was no moon tonight. It was curiously reminiscent of the light in the tent on Eddystone. He beat the pillows into a more comfortable shape, and tried to get back to sleep.

* * *

'Leave the flap open,' Rivers said.

It had been hotter than usual, an oven of a day in which people and trees had shimmered like reflections in water. The earth outside the tent was baked hard. He watched a line of red ants struggle across the immensity, a group at the rear carrying a dead beetle many times their own size.

Hocart emerged from the tent. 'I don't think I can face sleeping in there tonight.'

'We can sleep out here if you like. As long as you're careful with the net.'

The remains of their evening meal lay on the table. Neither of them had felt like eating much.

'What do we do?' Hocart said, sitting cross-legged on the ground beside Rivers. 'What do we do if they come back with a head? Or heads , God help us.'

Rivers said slowly, 'Logically, we don't intervene.'

'Logically, we're dead. Even if we decide we won't tell the authorities, how do they know we won't? From their point of view, the only safe thing to do is—'

'Obey the law.'

'Get rid of us.'

'I don't think they'll do that.'

'Could they?'

'Well, yes, probably. The point is, it won't happen, there isn't going to be a head.'

'But if—'

'If there is we'll deal with it.'

A long, stubborn, unconvinced silence from Hocart.

'Look, you know what the penalties are. If they go on a raid there's no way the British Commissioner isn't going to hear about it. And then you've got a gunboat off the coast, villages on fire, trees cut down, crops destroyed, pigs killed. Screaming women and children driven into the bush. You know what happens.'

'Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?'

'Are you suggesting head-hunting should be allowed?'

'No.' Tight-lipped.

'Good. When these people were taking heads they virtually depopulated Ysabel. It had to be stopped.'

'So how are they going to get her out?'

Rivers hesitated. 'I don't know. She can't stay in there for ever.'

What he secretly thought, but was superstitiously afraid of saying, was that the situation would end in Emele's suicide. He could see no other way out.

The following morning he went to see Namboko Taru. She'd become very fond of him (and he of her) ever since his miming of alternating constipation and diarrhoea had kept her amused while Njiru removed the nggasin from her belly.

She and her friend Namboko Nali had been bathing in the sea and their hair smelled of salt water. Taru's scrawny brown arms were folded across her breasts as she sat, with her back against the wall of her hut, steaming gently in the sun, while hens stepped delicately around her, pecking the dust. He sat beside her, admiring the gleam of dull emerald in the cockerel's neck feathers, as the village came slowly to life.

After a few minutes' gossip he started asking her above love charms, the subject they'd talked about at their last meeting. Three other women came out and listened. He got out his notebook and took down the words of the charm Taru supplied, aware that more than the usual amount of whispering and giggling was going on. Taru offered him betel to chew, and thinking, What the hell, who needs teeth? he accepted it. The women giggled again. A little while later Taru offered him lime, and to humour her he let her draw white lines on his cheekbones. The giggling was now almost out of control, but he pressed on to the end of the charm, at which point it was revealed that the words only became efficacious if the man accepted betel and lime from the woman's basket.

He laughed with them, and by the time they'd finished they were on such terms that he felt he could ask them anything. Even about Emele and tongo polo. Taru vehemently denied there was any question of suicide. Suicide, ungi , was totally different. Taru and Nali had helped Kera, the widow of the previous chief, to kill herself. She had tried poisoning herself with tobacco and that hadn't worked. And then she'd tried to hang herself, but the bough had broken. So they'd held a pole for her, high above their heads, and she'd twined a strip of calico round her throat and hanged herself from the pole. Garrotted more like, Rivers thought. It would not have been a quick or an easy death. What decided whether the widow would ungi or observe tongo polo ? he asked. It was her choice, they said.

Returning to the tent, he found Hocart lying outside, having spent the first part of the morning washing clothes. He was asleep, or resting, with his arms across his face shielding his eyes from the sun. Rivers put his foot on his chest and pressed lightly.

Hocart peered up at him, taking in the white lines on his face. 'My God.'

'I think I just got engaged.'

A bubble of laughter shook Hocart's ribs. 'Lucky woman.'

* * *

Sleeping was difficult, because of the heat, even after they'd taken their beds outside the tent. Sometimes they gave up altogether, and went to lie in the shallows, where the small waves, gleaming with phosphorescent light, broke over them.

Rivers had become obsessed by Emele. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, the thought of the woman cramped inside the enclosure, inside the hut, followed him until he saw every other aspect of life on the island in the shadow of her imprisonment.

In the mornings he would go down to bathe and watch the canoes go out, foam flashing from the paddles, a wordless song drifting across the water: 'Aie, aie, aie .' All vowel sounds, it seemed to be, no consonants. And then the smack of water being slapped to lure bonito into the nets.

It was still idyllic. His own happiness did not lessen, but always, now, there were these two points of darkness: Emele cramped in her enclosure; Ngea rotting in his era. Once he walked up the path on the other side of the beach, unable to explain his desire to see Ngea, for the facts of physical decomposition neither fascinated nor frightened him. A corpse was something one buried or dissected. Nothing more. And yet he needed to see Ngea.

The smell reached him when he was no more than half way up the path. He pinched his nostrils, breathing through his open mouth, but even so a few yards further on he had to abandon the attempt. A black cloud of flies, so dense it looked solid, rose at his approach, heat made audible. He backed away, as much as anything because they reminded him of the bats in the cave, and that experience, the sense of being unshelled, peeled in some way, that had seemed so positive at the time, now made him afraid. He was open to whatever might happen in this place, open in the way that a child is, since no previous experience was relevant.

The heat continued. From mid-afternoon onwards there was a curious bronze light in the sky, which became brownish towards evening, as if even the air were singed. Occasional flicks of wind teased the outermost branches of the trees, but did not disturb the intense brooding stillness.

Rivers slept uneasily, waking finally at 'fowl-he-sing-out', aware of having heard a new and different sound. He lay and listened and was just about to turn over and try to snatch an extra hour when it came again: the brazen blare of a conch shell.

He was on his feet and outside the tent in a matter of minutes. The bush distorted sounds, bouncing echoes back, but then he was aware of the crash of hurrying footsteps through the undergrowth, people running down to the beach. He shook Hocart awake, and followed the crowd, holding back a little, not knowing how secret this was, or how much it might matter that he was witnessing it.