Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

Second Lieutenant Matthew Hallet, aged twenty, admitted 18 October with bullet wounds to the head and to the lower jaw. On admission he was incapable of giving an account of his injuries, and the only information brought with him was a small card saying he had been wounded on 30 September.

So he was now twenty days post-injury.

A rifle bullet had entered just to the left of the inner canthus of the right ear and had made its exit directly above the insertion of the left ear. The wound of entry was marked by a small perfectly healed scar. The wound of exit consisted of a large irregular opening in the bone and tissues of the scalp, and through this protruded a suppurating hernia cerebri which pulsated.

Oh God.

He had so far said nothing spontaneously. When directly addressed he responded, but his speech was incomprehensible. The wound to his lower jaw made it difficult to determine whether this represented a deficit in the power of using language, or whether the failure to communicate was entirely or primarily mechanical He showed some understanding of speech, however, since he had responded to simple questions, when asked to do so, by movements of his unparalysed hand.

Somewhere at the fringe of Rivers's perception was the soft sound of rain continually falling, seeming to seal the hospital away from the darkening afternoon. It had rained incessantly since early morning, the darkness of the day somehow making it even harder to stay awake. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and turned to the window, where each raindrop caught and held a crescent moon of silver light.

* * *

'Do you suppose it's ever going to stop?' Hocart said, turning over restlessly in the gloom of the tent.

It had been raining ever since they'd found Ngea's axe, not restrained English rain but a downpour, a gurgling splatter that flooded into the tent no matter how hard they tried to keep it out. Possibly it was stupid to stay inside at all, though difficult not to when even a five-yard dash into the bush to pee meant you came back with hair plastered to your skull and a transparent shirt sticking to your chest.

They lay and watched it through the open flap, a solid wall of water through which the not too distant trees could be glimpsed only dimly, a wavering blue mass beaten hither and thither by a wind that blew in sudden spiteful squalls. Hocart, in his frustration, had been kicking the roof of the tent where it sloped steeply down over his bed, and his muddy footprints now added to the general squalor and smell. Hot wet bodies, hair washed daily but only in sea water, salt drying to a white scurf on the surface of the skin. The only escape was into the sea, where total immersion relieved the misery of wet.

On the fourth day the rain eased slightly. Rivers stepped out into the clearing and saw Njiru coming along the path towards him, for once without his retinue.

Rivers had been wondering whether to mention the axe, and had decided not to, but as soon as he looked at Njiru he knew it was essential to bring it out into the open.

'Blong you?' he said, holding it out.

'Blong Ngea,' Njiru said, and smiled.

But he took it, putting it into the string basket he carried slung over one shoulder. Rivers heard the chink of one blade on another as it hit Njiru's axe. It was important to be totally steadfast at this moment, Rivers thought. He and Hocart were probably the only white men in the archipelago, apart from the missionaries— some of the missionaries — who didn't carry guns. They didn't carry knives either, though on an island covered in dense bush a machete would have been useful. Nothing that could possibly be mistaken for a weapon. And they went barefoot, as the natives did. Harmlessness was their defence, not guaranteed to succeed by any means, but guns would have made the job impossible.

Njiru had come, he said, because one of the oldest skull houses on the island was being rebuilt, and he had to go to say the prayer of purification over the priest. Would Rivers like to go with him? Of course, there was no question.

They set off, Njiru remarking at one point that it always rained when a skull house was being rebuilt because ' tomate he like bathe all time 'long fresh water'. Soon the narrow path and the steamy heat made conversation impossible. Rivers watched the movement of muscles under the oiled skin, wondering, not for the first time, how much pain

Njiru suffered. He was a mystery in many respects and likely to remain so. He was not married, for example, this among a people to whom the concept of celibacy was wholly foreign. Was that because his deformity caused the girls or their parents to regard him as a poor catch? But then in island terms he was both wealthy and powerful. Did he himself feel a disinclination for the married state? And what had the impact been on a small crippled boy of knowing he was the grandson of Homu, the greatest of the head-hunting chiefs? It was worse, Rivers thought, smiling to himself, than being the great-nephew of the man who shot the man who shot Lord Nelson.

None of these questions could be pursued. It was not lack of words merely, but a lack of shared concepts. The islanders seemed hardly to have discovered the idea of personality, in the western sense, much less to have contracted the habit of introspection. Njiru was one of the most powerful men on the island, perhaps the most powerful. To Rivers and Hocart it seemed abundantly apparent that he owed his position to quite exceptional intelligence, vigour and resolution, but such qualities were never mentioned by the islanders when they attempted to explain his position. His power was attributed entirely to the number of spirits he controlled. He 'knew' Mateana. And above all, he 'knew' Ave. Njiru knows Ave. One of the first things he'd been told, though he hadn't understood the significance of the statement then, and perhaps did not fully understand it even now.

In view of that chink of blade on blade, what accounted for this sudden change of attitude? He was reasonably certain it was Njiru who'd put Ngea's axe in the tent. He hadn't even pretended surprise when

Rivers offered it to him. And yet here he was, being apparently helpful and co-operative, actually inviting him to be present at an important ritual occasion. But then he was like this, one moment clamming up completely, even ordering other people to withhold information, and yet at other times easily the best informant on the island. Standing over them sometimes to make sure they got every detail of a ritual, every word of a prayer exactly right.

The inconsistency probably reflected Njiru's doubts about the reality of his own power. Others were persuaded by it, but he was capable of standing back and asking himself the hard questions. Why, if he controlled the spirits, why, if the rituals did everything he claimed for them, were the white men still here? Not Rivers and Hocart, whom he liked and respected, but the others: the government that forbade the taking of heads though the people lived for it, the traders who cheated them, the plantation bosses who exploited them, and, most of all, the missionaries who destroyed their faith. If you can't prevent such things happening, what is the actual value of your knowledge?

And so he swayed to and fro: sometimes guarding his knowledge jealously, sometimes sharing it freely, sometimes spitting it out with a bitter, angry pride, sometimes almost with gratitude to Rivers, whose obvious interest in what he was being told seemed to confirm its value. And then again he would sheer off, ashamed of ever needing that confirmation.

A stormy relationship, then, on Njiru's side, and yet the mutual respect went deep. He wouldn't kill me, Rivers thought. Then he thought, Actually, in certain circumstances, that's exactly what he'd do.