Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

By the time they reached the turning off the coastal path, the sun was at its highest point. Sweat tickled the tip of Rivers's nose, producing a constant frenzy of irritation. His groin was a swamp. At first the darkness under the trees was welcome, after the dreadful white glare, but then a cloud of stinging insects fastened on the sweat.

Abruptly, they came out into a clearing, sharp blades of sunlight slanting down between the tress, and ahead of them, rising steeply up the slope, six or seven skull houses, their gratings ornamented with strings of dangling shells. The feeling of being watched that skulls always gave you. Dazzled by the sudden light, he followed Njiru up the slope, towards a knot of shadows, and then one of the shadows moved, resolving itself into the shape of Nareti, the blind mortuary priest who squatted there, all pointed knees and elbows, snails' trails of pus running from the corners of his eyes.

The furthest of the skull houses was being repaired, and its occupants had been taken out and arranged on to the ground so that, at first sight, the clearing seemed to be cobbled with skulls. He hung back, not sure how close he was permitted to approach, and at that moment a sudden fierce gust of wind shook the trees and all the strings of votary shells rattled and clicked together.

Njiru beckoned Rivers to join him and, without further preliminary, began the prayer of purification, rubbing leaves down Nareti's legs from buttock to ankle.

'I purify at the great stream of Mondo. It flows down, it flows up, it washes away the poisonous water of the chiefly dead. The thatch is poisonous, the rafters are poisonous, the creepers are poisonous, the ground is poisonous…'

Among the skulls laid out on the ground were several that had belonged to children. Children loved and wept over? Or children brought back from Ysabel and Choiseul and sacrificed?

'Let me purify this priest. Let him come down and pass under. Let him come down and step over. Let him not waste away, let him not get the rash, let him not get the itch. Let him be bonito in the sea, porpoise in the sea, eel in the fresh water, crayfish in the fresh water, vape in the fresh water. I purify, I purify, I purify with all the chiefs.'

Njiru's voice, which had risen in pitch, dropped on the final words.

Always in Melanesia, the abrupt transition from ritual to everyday life. Njiru was soon chatting and laughing with Nareti, then he summoned Rivers to follow him. A short path led to Nareti's hut and there, squatting in the dust, having the remains of lunch licked off his face by a dog, was the small boy whom Lembu had brought from Ysabel. Healthy, well-fed. Unbruised, Rivers saw, looking closely, not happy, but then that was hardly to be hoped for. He watched him for a few minutes. At least the dog was a friend.

He was to assist Nareti, Njiru said. When he grew up he would be a mortuary priest in his turn. An odd fate, to spend one's life tending the skulls of a foreign people, but at least he would have a life, and perhaps not a bad one, for the mortuary priests became wealthy and enjoyed considerable respect. This taking of captives had been the custom even in the days of head-hunting, Njiru explained. He was in one of his communicative phases. Some of the 'heads' taken on a raid were always brought back alive, and kept for occasions when they might be quickly needed. A sort of living larder of heads. Such captives were never ill-treated — the idea of deliberate cruelty was foreign to the people — and indeed they often attained positions of wealth and honour, though always knowing that, at any moment, their heads might be required.

On their way back across the clearing Njiru stopped, selected the central skull from the middle row, and held it out to Rivers. 'Homu.'

Rivers took the skull, aware of the immense honour that was being done to him, and searching for something to say and the words to say it in. He ran his fingers round the occiput and traced the cranial sutures. He remembered a time at Bart's, holding a human brain in his hands for the first time, being amazed at the weight of it. This blown eggshell had contained the only product of the forces of evolution capable of understanding its own origins. But then for Njiru too the skull was sacred not in or of itself, but because it had contained the spirit, the tomate.

He looked at Njiru and realized it wasn't necessary to say anything. He handed the skull back, with a slight inclination of his head, and for a moment their linked hands grasped it, each holding the object of highest value in the world.

The bullet caused gross damage to the left eye as it passed backwards in the direction of the temporal lobe. Left pupil fixed, cornea insensitive, eyelid droops, no movement of the globe except downwards. Eye blind because of rupture of the choroid and atrophy of the optic nerve. Yes. A tendency to clonus at the right ankle joint… All right.

Switching off the lighted screen and replacing the notes in the file, Rivers glanced at the cover and noticed that Hallet was in the 2nd Manchesters. He wondered if he knew Billy Prior, or whether, if he did, he would remember.

19 October 1918

Marched all day through utter devastation. Dead horses, unburied men, stench of corruption. Sometimes you look at all this, craters, stinking mud, stagnant water, trees like gigantic burnt matches, and you think the land can't possibly recover. It's poisoned. Poison's dripped into it from rotting men, dead horses, gas. It will, of course. Fifty years from now a farmer'll be ploughing these fields and turn up skulls.

A huge crow flew over us, flapping and croaking mournfully. One for sorrow. The men didn't rest till they'd succeeded in spotting another.

Joy awaits us, then.

The unburied dead, though not cheerful companions for a march, had one good result. A boot for Wilson. Getting it wasn't pleasant, but once the debris left by the previous owner (of the previous owner) had been cleaned out it did well enough. He looks happier.

Men very cheerful for the most part, a long singing column winding tirelessly along (but we've a long way to go yet!). I found myself thinking about Longstaffe. Not dead three weeks, and yet he rarely crosses my mind. In Tite Street, three doors down from Beattie's shop, there was an old couple who'd been married over fifty years and everybody thought when one of them went the other would be devastated. But when the husband died the old lady didn't seem all that upset, and hardly talked about him once the funeral was over. In spite of all the young male vigour around here — and my God it's bloody overwhelming at times — we're all in the same position as that old woman. Too close to death ourselves to make a fuss. We economize on grief.

Later

Men bivouac in the open, but the officers are in dug-outs, the remains of an elaborate German system. The dug-outs are boarded off, but behind the planks are tunnels which reach back very deep. You can put your eye to a gap in the boards and look into darkness and after a while the eyeball begins to ache from the cold air. The extraordinary thing is everybody's slightly nervous about these tunnels, far more than about the guns that rumble and flicker and light up the sky as I write. And it's not a rational fear. It's something to do with the children whom the Pied Piper led into the mountain, who never came out again, or Rip Van Winkle who came out and found that years and years had passed and nobody knew him. It's interesting, well, at least it interests me, that we're still afraid in this irrational way when at the same time we're surrounded by the worst the twentieth century can do: shells, revolvers, rifles, guns, gas. I think it's because it strikes a particular chord. Children do go into the mountain and not come back. We've all been home on leave and found home so foreign that we couldn't fit in. What about after the war? But perhaps it's better not to think about that. Tempting fate. Anyway, here comes dinner. I'm hungry.