Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

But the ghosts did not object. Onda, whistling, said he had never seen white men. Kundaite pointed to Rivers and Hocart. Onda, apparently satisfied, fell silent. Kundaite's father, also called Kundaite, came next and asked for tobacco. The living Kundaite put his last two sticks in the fire, saying, 'Here is tobacco for you, Kunda. Smoke and depart.' Namboko Rupe, Ngea's mother, spoke next, saying she had come to take Ngea to Sonto. Other relatives of Ngea followed. At last Kundaite said that Ngea himself was in the room.

A deeper silence fell. Rivers felt the hairs on his arms rise. Namboko Emele began to wail for her husband. Kundaite said, Don't cry. He's going to Sonto. Ngea's mother said, He must go now. He must blow the conch and come to Sonto. By now the room was full of whistles, slithering up and down the walls and all across the floor. At times the sounds seemed almost to be a ripple running across the skin. Namboko Emele began to wail again, and the other women joined in. 'Don't cry,' Ngea's mother said again, through Kundaite's mouth. 'I have come to take him to Sonto.' Then, Kundaite said, Ngea blew the conch. Everybody in the room, except Rivers and Hocart, heard it, and then the whistles faded and there was silence save for the musical wails and cries of the women.

* * *

Ten years later, throwing off hot sheets, Rivers reflected that the questions the ghosts had asked had all been questions the living people wanted answered. What were the white men doing on the island? Were they as harmless as they appeared? Why did they want to hear the language of ghosts? Was it possible the spirits might be offended by their presence?

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon, trying to decide whether he should abandon his protest and go back to France, had woken to find the ghost of a dead comrade standing by his bed. And thereafter, on more than one occasion, shadowy figures had gathered out of the storm, asking him, Why was he not in the line? Why had he deserted his men?

The ghosts were not an attempt at evasion, Rivers thought, either by Siegfried or by the islanders. Rather, the questions became more insistent, more powerful, for being projected into the mouths of the dead.

* * *

Walking back to the tent, a circle of torchlight swaying round their feet, their shoulders bumping as they tried to stay abreast on the narrow path, Rivers and Hocart talked about the seance. A silly word that didn't seem to suit the occasion, but Rivers couldn't think of a better.

'Who was whistling?' Hocart asked.

'I don't know.'

The occasion had moved him in a way he'd never expected when they sat down by that fire. They talked about it for a while, getting the sequence of events clear in their minds, for they had not been able to take notes. Then Rivers said, 'Njiru wasn't there.'

'No, I noticed that.'

Back at the tent Hocart said, 'Shall I light the lamp?'

'No, don't bother. Not for me anyway. I can't wait to get to bed.' He was unbuckling his belt as he spoke, rubbing the skin underneath where trapped sweat prickled. He kicked his trousers to one side and lay down on the bed, only to cry out as his head came into violent contact with something hard and cold. Hocart came in with the torch, his face white behind the beam. On the pillow, indenting it as River's head would have done, was an axe. Rivers picked it up and held it closer to the light. The carving on the handle was rather fine by the standards of the island, and there was a knot, a flaw in the wood, close to the blade.

'Somebody must have left it behind,' Hocart said uncertainly.

'Well, yes, obviously.'

'No, I mean by accident. Whoever it is, he'll be back for it in the morning.'

'I hope not,' Rivers said dryly. 'It's Ngea's.'

'Are you sure?'

Rivers indicated the knot in the wood. 'Yes, I remember this, I noticed it when they put it in the era with him.' He stroked the blade. 'No, I'm afraid we've been asking too many awkward questions.

We're being warned.'

10 October 1918

Back into corrugated iron privies again, which are dry but in other ways less comfortable than dug-outs. Owen has somehow managed to stick a portrait of Siegfried Sassoon to the wall of his. Sassoon in distinctly Byronic mode, I should say — not the Sassoon I remember, legging it down the main corridor at Craiglockhart with his golf-clubs on his back, hell-bent on getting out of the place as fast as possible. I stood and stared, gawped at it. And suddenly I was back in Rivers's room, watching the late afternoon sun glint on his glasses during one of his endless silences. Rivers's silences are not manipulative. (Mine are. Always.) He's not trying to make you say more than you want, he's trying to create a safe space round what you've said already, so you can think about it without shitting yourself. White net curtains drifting in on the breeze. Pok-pok, pok-pok , from the tennis courts, until somebody misses and the rhythm goes.

Owen said, tentatively, something I didn't quite catch. Something to the effect that we 'old Craiglockhartians' must stick together. Once that would have made me puke. I always felt, watching Owen at Craiglockhart, that there was some kind of fantasy going on, that he was having the public-school education he'd missed. I always wanted to say, it's a loony-bin, Owen. Who do you think you're kidding? I don't feel that now — perhaps because Craiglockhart was a shared experience of failure, and the past few weeks have expunged it for both of us.

Wiped it out in blood, you might say, if you were histrionic, and I am. And not our own blood either.

Would that remark deserve one of River's silences?

I don't know. Sometimes I used to think he was back with his fucking head-hunters — he really does love them, his whole face lights up when he talks about them — and that gives him a slightly odd perspective on 'the present conflict' as they say.

I've been recommended for the MC for going out to bring Hallet in. I'd have been like a dog with two tails three years ago. Hallet's still alive, anyway. More than a medal, I wish somebody would just tell me I did the right thing.

11 October

Today we all had to stand up in front of the men and promulgate a new order. 'Peace talk in any form is to cease immediately in the Fourth Army.'

The brass hats needn't worry. Some of the men were sitting on bales of straw cleaning equipment while one read aloud from the paper: Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses, peace imminent, etc. Jenkins, a wizened weasel of a man (must be over age, surely), hawked the accumulated phlegm of four long years into his mouth and spat on his rifle. Then he went back to polishing it. Can't think of a better comment.

And yet. And yet. We all, at some level, think we may have made it, we may be going to be all right. At any moment now the guns may stop. Oddly enough it doesn't help.

We spend our time in the usual way while 'at rest'. Baths, change of clothes, general clean-up, exercises, compulsory games, church parade. Oh, and of course, gas drills. A lot of the men are coughing and hoicking and wheezing because they were slow putting on their masks. And perhaps deliberately in some cases; perhaps some people thought they'd get sent back. If so, they've been thoroughly disillusioned, and the proof is the endless cough, cough, cough, cough that accompanies all other activities. Owen irritated me profoundly by saying it was their own fault. He put his mask on in time, he's all right, he says. I'm afraid I let fly. The only person round here who has the right to be smug about surviving a gas attack is me. ME.

When we got here we found a new draft had arrived from Scarborough. They're sitting around at the moment, expecting to be welcomed, though so far they haven't been. Difficult to say why the other men avoid them, but they do. Heads too full of battle to be able to cope with all those clean, innocent , pink faces. A couple of them I remember. One particularly useless boy, the bane of Owen's life at the Clarence Gardens Hotel, until he upset some hot soup in the CO's lap, after which everybody, including Owen, found him a lot more tolerable. Waiters, drummer boys. They sit around, when they're not being chivvied from one place to another, most of them dejected, miserable. Frightened. A few strut up and down — hard men — real killers — and succeed only in looking even more like baby thrushes than the rest.