Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

'Just faded gradually. I suppose about the middle of last week I suddenly realized I wasn't worried about it any more.'

'And the dream?'

'It isn't a dream.'

'The apparition, then.'

'Oh, we still see quite a bit of each other.'

'Do you ever miss a night?'

A faint smile. 'You mean, does he ever miss a night? No.'

A long silence. Rivers said, 'It's difficult, isn't it, to talk about… beliefs?'

'Is it?'

'I find it so.'

Wansbeck smiled. 'What a very honest man you are.'

'I wanted to ask if you believe in life after death?'

A groan, followed by silence.

It is difficult, Rivers thought. He could list all the taboo topics on Eddystone, but in his own society it seemed to him the taboos had shifted quite considerably in recent years. It was almost easier now to ask a man about his private life than to ask what beliefs he lived by. Before the war… but one must beware of attributing everything to the war. The change had started years before the war.

'No,' Wansbeck said at last.

'You had to think.'

'Yes, well, I used to believe in it. I was brought up to. I suppose one doesn't like to have to admit it's gone. Faith.'

'What changed your mind?'

A flare of the eyebrows. Rivers waited.

'Corpses. Especially in cold weather when they couldn't be buried. And in summer in No Man's Land. The flies buzzing.'

They rose from Ngea's body in a black cloud.

'It needn't have that effect, though, need it? What about priests keeping a model of a skull on their desks? Because it reminds them of their faith.'

Or Njiru. Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto. A simple, casual statement of fact.

'Well, that's the effect it had on me. I'd like to believe. I'd like to believe in the possibility of — you're right, it is embarrassing — redemption.'

Silence.

'Anyway,' Rivers said, when it became clear there would be no more, 'you don't believe that the apparition is the man you killed? You don't believe it's his ghost?'

'No, though I'm not sure I'd believe that even if I were still a

'So what is it?'

'A projection of my own mind.'

'Of your guilt?'

'No. Guilt's what I feel sitting here, I don't need an apparition. No, it's…' A deep sigh. 'Guilt as objective fact — not guilt as feeling. It's not… well, I was going to say it's not subjective, but of course it has to be, doesn't it?'

'It's the representation to yourself of external standards that you believe to be valid?'

'Yes.'

'What language does it speak?'

A blank look. 'Doesn't. Doesn't speak.'

'What language would it speak if it spoke? Yes, I know it's an irrational question but then the apparition isn't rational either. What language would—'

'English. Has to be.'

'So why don't you speak to it?'

'It's only there for a second.'

That's not the way you described it. You said it was endless.'

'All right, it's an endless second.'

'You should be able to say a lot, then.'

Tell it my life story?'

Rivers said gently, 'It knows your life story.'

Wansbeck was thinking deeply. 'All right. It's bloody mad, but I'll have a go.'

'What will you say?'

'I have absolutely no idea.'

After Wansbeck had gone, Rivers sat quietly for a few minutes before adding a note to the file. Sassoon had been much in his mind while he was speaking to Wansbeck, Sassoon and the apparitions that gathered round his bed and demanded to know why he was not in France. Also, another of his patients at Craiglockhart, Harrington, who'd had dreadful nightmares, even by Craiglockhart standards, and the nightmares had continued into the semi-waking state, so that they acquired the character of hypnagogic hallucinations. He saw the severed head, torso and limbs of a dismembered body hurtling towards him out of the darkness. A variant of this was a face bending over him, the lips, nose and eyelids eaten away as if by leprosy. The face, in so far as it was identifiable at all, was the face of a close friend whom Harrington had seen blown to pieces. From these dreams he woke either vomiting or with a wet bed, or both.

At the time he witnessed his friend's death Harrington had already been suffering from headaches, split vision, nausea, vomiting, disorder of micturition, spells of forgetfulness and a persistent gross tremor of the hands, dating from an explosion two months before in which he'd been buried alive. Despite these symptoms he had remained on duty (shoot the MO, thought Rivers) until his friend's death precipitated a total collapse.

What was interesting about Harrington was that instead of treatment bringing about an elaboration of the nightmares, so that the horrors began to assume a more symbolic, less directly representational form — the normal path to recovery — something rather more remarkable had happened. His friend's body had begun to reassemble itself. Night after night the eaten-away features had fleshed out again. And Harrington talked to him. Long conversations, apparently, or they seemed long to him on waking, telling his friend about Rivers, about life at Craiglockhart, about the treatment he was receiving…

After several weeks of this, he awoke one day with his memory of the first hour after the explosion restored. He had, even in his traumatized state and under heavy fire, crawled round the pieces of his friend's body collecting items of equipment — belt, revolver, cap and lapel badges — to send to the mother. The knowledge that, far from having fled from the scene, he had behaved with exemplary courage and loyalty, did a great deal to restore Harrington's self-esteem, for, like most of the patients at Craiglockhart, he suffered from a deep sense of shame and failure. From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the unlived years.

Wansbeck's predicament was worse than either of these cases. Siegfried's apparitions vanished as soon as he agreed to give up his protest and go back to France. The external demands the nocturnal visitors represented, and which Siegfried himself believed to be valid, had been met. Harrington had been enormously helped by the discovery that he'd behaved better than he though he had. From that moment on, his recovery had been one of the most dramatic Rivers could recall. Neither of these outcomes was available to Wansbeck, who'd fought a perfectly honourable war until one action had made him in his own eyes — and in the eyes of the law — a criminal. Almost everything one could say to console him either obscenely glossed over the offence or was in some other way insulting, and would have been instantly recognized as such by Wansbeck. A lesser man would have borne this better.

Rivers wondered whether Sassoon and Harrington had been too much in the forefront of his mind while he was listening to Wansbeck. At best, on such occasions, one became a conduit whereby one man's hard-won experience of self-healing was made available to another. At worst, one no longer listened attentively enough to the individual voice. There was a real danger, he thought, that in the end the stories would become one story, the voices blend into a single cry of pain.

And he was tired. Because of the flu epidemic he'd been on duty for thirty of the last forty-eight hours and he was on duty again tonight too. Sighing, he reached for an envelope, took out an X-ray and clipped it to the screen.

A skull stared out at him. He stood back and looked at it for a moment, one lens of his glasses illumined by the lighted screen, the other reflecting the rainy light of a November afternoon. Then he reached for the notes.