Pat Barker: The Ghost Road

'I hope that's not indelible.'

'Of course it's not. I'm going to have to wash it off in the morning.'

Rivers looked at the length of Moffet's legs and tried to calculate how long it was going to take him to reach the toes. Two weeks? And that would have to include Sundays, which put paid to his plans for a weekend in Ramsgate with his sisters. Katharine was far from well; in fact she was virtually bedridden and for much the same reasons as Moffet. Rivers frowned with concentration as he carried the pencil line under the thigh. Moffet's flabby skin kept snagging the pencil point.

Elliot Smith's comment on the serpent: 'That's interesting.' It was no more than he'd thought himself. Evidently snakes had lost the right to be simply snakes. Dodgson had hated them, a quite exceptionally intense hatred, and the woods round Knowles Bank were full of them, particularly in spring when you regularly stumbled across knots of adders, as many as thirty or forty sometimes, drowsy from their winter sleep. They'd gone for a walk once, the whole family, Ethel and Katharine holding Dodgson's hands, himself and Charles trailing behind, imitating his rather prissy, constipated-hen walk, though careful not to let their father catch them at it. They rounded a bend, Dodgson and the girls leading, and there, right in the centre of the path, was a snake. Zigzag markings, black on yellow, orange eyes, forked tongue flickering out of that wide, cynical (anthropomorphic rubbish) mouth. Dodgson went white. He sat down, collapsed rather, on a tree stump and the girls fanned him with their hats, while father caught the snake in a cleft stick and threw it far away, a black s against the sky unravelling as it fell.

Later he went back to look for it, spending an hour searching through the flamy bracken, but only found a cast-off skin draped over a stone, transparent, the brilliant markings faded, the ghost of a snake.

Why was the devil shown in the form of a snake? he asked his father, because it was the only question he knew how to ask.

Later there'd been other questions, other ways of finding answers. Once, while he was home for the weekend, Katharine sat on an adder, and ran home screaming. He'd gone straight out and killed it, or so he thought, intending to dissect it at Bart's. Finding the family in the drawing-room, he'd tipped the snake out on to the hearthrug to show them, and found himself confronted by an adder that was very far from dead. The girls screamed and hid behind the sofa, while he and his father and Charles trampled it to death.

How do you think about an incident like that now? he wondered, beginning the second circle. Probably every generation thinks the world of its youth has been changed past recognition, but he thought for his generation — Moffet's too, of course — the task of making meaningful connections was quite unusually difficult. A good deal of innocence had been lost in recent years. Not all of it on battlefields.

He lowered Moffet's leg and walked round the bed. From here he could see, through a gap in the screens, the drawings of Alice. Suddenly, with Moffet's paralysed leg clamped to his side as he closed the circle, Rivers saw the drawings not as an irrelevance, left over from the days when this had been a children's ward, but as cruelly, savagely appropriate. All those bodily transformations causing all those problems. But they solved them too. Alice in Hysterialand.

'There,' he said, putting the leg down. 'Now can you prop yourself up a bit?'

Moffet raised himself on to his elbows and looked down at his legs. 'Quite apart from anything else,' he said, enunciating each word distinctly, 'it looks bloody obscene.'

Rivers looked down. 'Ye-es,' he agreed. 'But it won't when we get below the knee. And tomorrow the sensation in this area'—he measured it out with his forefingers—'will be normal.'

Their eyes met. Moffet would have liked to deny it was possible, but his gaze shifted. He'd already begun to invest the circles with power.

Rivers touched his shoulder. 'See you tomorrow morning,' he said.

Quickly, he ran downstairs and plunged into the warren of corridors, wondering if he'd have time to read the files on the new patients before the first of them arrived for his appointment. He glanced at his watch, and something about the action tweaked his memory. Now that would be 'interesting', he thought. An innocent young boy becomes aware that he is the object of an adult's abnormal affection. Put bluntly, the Rev. Charles Do-do-do-do-Dodgson can't keep his hands off him, but —thanks to that gentleman's formidable conscience — nothing untoward occurs. The years pass, puberty arrives, friendship fades. In the adult life of that child no abnormality appears, except perhaps for a certain difficulty in integrating the sexual drive with the rest of the personality (What do you mean 'perhaps'? he asked himself), until, in middle age, the patient begins to suffer from the delusion that he is turning into an extremely large, eccentrically dressed white rabbit, forever running down corridors consulting its watch. What a case history. Pity it didn't happen, he thought, pushing the door of his consulting-room open, it would account for quite a lot.

He thought, sometimes, he understood Katharine's childhood better than his own.

Cheshire Cat! Cheshire Cat! he and Charles had chanted as she sat enthroned in Dodgson's lap, grinning from ear to ear. The nickname, so casually bestowed, had lasted all her childhood, and his only consolation was she hadn't minded it a bit. Poor Kath, she'd had little enough to smile about since.

Files , he told himself. He took them out of his briefcase and started to read. Geoffrey Wansbeck, twenty-two years old. Wansbeck had — well, murdered , he supposed the word would have to be — a German prisoner, for no better reason (Wansbeck said) than that he was feeling tired and irritable and resented having to escort the man back from the line. For… eight months — in fact, nearer ten — he'd experienced no remorse, but then, while in hospital recovering from a minor wound, he'd started to suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations in which he would wake suddenly to find the dead German standing by his bed. Always, accompanying the visual hallucination, would be the reek of decomposition. After a few weeks the olfactory hallucination began to occur independently, only now the smell seemed to emanate from Wansbeck himself. He was convinced others could smell it and, no matter how often he was reassured, avoided close contact with other people as much as he could.

Hmm. Rivers took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, swinging his chair round to face the window.

He'd had a bad night and was finding it difficult to concentrate. Late August sunlight, the colour of cider, streamed into the room, and he was suddenly seized by sadness, a banal, calendar-dictated sadness, for the past summer and all the summers that were past.

At dinner one evening Mr Dodgson had leant across to mother and said, 'I l-l-l-love all ch-ch-ch-ch-'

'Train won't start,' Charles had whispered.

'Children, M-Mrs R-Rivers, as l-l-l-long as they're g-g-g-girls.'

He had looked down the table at the two boys, and it had seemed to Rivers that the sheer force of his animosity had loosened his tongue.

'Boys are a mistake'

Charles hadn't minded that Mr Dodgson disliked them, but he had. Mr Dodgson was the first adult he'd met who stammered as badly as he did himself, and the rejection hurt.

'Are w-we a m-m-m-m-mistake?' he'd asked his mother at bedtime. 'W-why are w-we?'

'Of course you're not a mistake,' his mother had said, smoothing the hair back from his forehead.

'So w-why d-d-does h-he s-say w-w-w-w-we are?'