Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

'Some of the men in my platoon have been out three times,' Hallet said. 'I think that's the only thing that bothers me, really. How the hell do you lead men who know more than you do?'

'You pray for a good sergeant. A really good sergeant tells you what orders to give him, doesn't let anybody else see him doing it, and doesn't let himself know he's doing it.'

'How many times have you—?'

'This'll be the fourth. Wound, shell-shock, trench fever. Not in that order.'

Hallet was lying on his back, hands clasped behind his head, nothing much visible from Prior's angle except his chin. How appallingly random it all was. If Hallet's father had got a gleam in his eye two years later than he did, Hallet wouldn't be here. He might even have missed the war altogether, perhaps spent the rest of his life goaded by the irrational shame of having escaped. 'Cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends who died.' That was it exactly, couldn't be better put. Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. He was this boy's great-grandfather.

He looked at Hallet again, at the warm column of his neck, and tried to think of something to say, something light-hearted and easy, but could think of nothing. He stared instead at the stained canvas, lit by flickers of summer lightning, and noticed that the largest stain looked like a map of Africa.

Two black lines circled Moffet's legs immediately above the knee.

'Close your eyes,' Rivers said. 'I want you to tell me exactly what you feel.'

'Pinprick.'

'How many?'

The pins touched again.

Two.

Again.

'One.'

Again.

'Two.' Moffet sounded bored. 'Two. Two.' A pause. 'Not sure.'

'All right. You can open your eyes now.'

He hadn't lied once. He'd lain with closed eyes, a fluttering visible beneath the thin lids, and Rivers had read in every line and fold of his face the temptation to lie, and yet the progression of yeses and noes had been totally accurate. True, he couldn't have hoped to lie convincingly, or not for long, but it was interesting that he hadn't tried. This was pure hysteria, uncontaminated by malingering.

'Rivers, do you ever think you were born into the wrong century?'

Rivers looked surprised. 'Survived into, perhaps.'

'It's just this reminds me of seventeenth-century witch-finders, you know? They used to stick pins in people too.'

'I expect they were looking for the same thing. Areas of abnormal sensation.'

'Do you think they found them?'

Rivers lifted Moffet's left leg and began to draw a line three inches lower than the line he'd drawn yesterday morning. 'I don't see why not. Some witches were probably hysterics. At least a lot of the reported phenomena suggest that.'

'And the witch -finders?

'I don't know. Simpler. Nastier.'

'I don't like that word. Applied to this.'

'Hysteria?' He could quite see that 'shell-shock', useless and inaccurate though the term was, might appeal to Moffet rather more. It did at least sound appropriately male. 'I don't think anybody likes it. The trouble is nobody likes the alternatives either.'

'It derives,' Moffet continued, hardening his voice, 'from the Greek hystera. The womb.'

'Yes,' Rivers said dryly. 'I know.'

The problem with Moffet was that he was too intelligent to be satisfied with such a crude solution as paralysis. Hysterical symptoms of this gross kind-paralysis, deafness, blindness, muteness — occurred quite frequently in the immediate aftermath of trauma but they normally lingered only in those who were either uneducated or frankly stupid. Moffet was neither.

And whether this rather dramatic form of treatment was helping… Oh, it would get rid of the paralysis, but was there not the possibility that it might also reinforce a belief in magical solutions? Rivers sighed and walked round the bed. All his instincts were against it, but he knew it would get Moffet on his feet again. A witch-doctor could do this, he thought, beginning to draw, and probably better than I can. Come to think of it, there was one person who'd have done it brilliantly…

* * *

In Melanesia he'd quickly formed the habit of accompanying Njiru on his rounds. They would set off together, always in single file, because the path winding through thick bush was too narrow for them to walk abreast.

Seen from the rear, the extent of Njiru's spinal curvature was dreadfully apparent. Rivers wondered how such deformities were explained — which spirit inflicted them, and why? Sweat stung his bitten eyelids — he kept having to wipe his forearm across his face. Mainly the heat, but partly also anxiety. It was a bit like your first day at a new school, he thought, knowing you've got to get things right and that your chances of getting them right are infinitesimal because you know nothing. Only at school, provided you start at the same time as everybody else, you can solve the problem by fading into the group, darting about with all the other little grey minnows, safety in the shoal, but here he was alone, except for Hocart, and Hocart had been running a fever ever since they arrived, and today had chosen to stay behind in their tent.

At the village he crawled into a hut and squatted on the earth floor, watching and listening, while Njiru attended to his patient. An old woman, evidently a regular to judge by the way she and Njiru laughed and joked together. She was introduced as Namboko Taru, though 'Namboko', which he at first took to be a name, turned out to be a title: 'widow'. The same word also meant 'widower', but was not used as a title when applied to men. Two more disconnected facts to add to his discouragingly small heap.

Namboko Taru lay down, pushing the strip of brown bark cloth she wore down far enough to expose her belly. Njiru poured coconut oil on to her abdomen and began a massage, while Rivers tried to find out what was wrong. Constipation, it appeared. Was it, he wanted to ask, in view of her age, chronic constipation, or had there been a recent change in bowel habit? And was it simply constipation, or was there alternating diarrhoea? But his attempts to convey 'alternating diarrhoea' in a mixture of pidgin and mime threatened to bring the proceedings to a halt entirely, and he gave up, while Namboko Taru wiped tears of laughter from her cheeks. He might not be contributing to the cure but he was certainly taking her mind off the condition.

Meanwhile the movements of Njiru's hands began to focus on a region below and to the left of the navel. He was chanting under his breath, swaying backwards and forwards, scooping the slack flesh together between the heel of his palms, like a woman gathering dough. The constant low murmur and the rhythmic movement were hypnotic. Suddenly, with a barking cry, Njiru seemed to catch something, shielded it in his cupped hands while he crawled to the door, and then threw it as far as he could into the bush. A brief conversation between doctor and patient, then Namboko Taru fastened her cloth and went into the bush, from whence, ten minutes later, a far happier woman emerged.

Meanwhile Rivers and Njiru talked. Namboko Taru's complaint belonged to a group of illnesses called tagosoro , which were inflicted by the spirit called Mateana. This particular condition— nggasin —was caused by an octopus that had taken up residence in the lower intestine, from where its

tentacles might spread until they reached the throat. At this point the disease would prove fatal. As so often happened, one could detect behind the native belief the shadowy outline of a disease only too familiar to western medicine, though perhaps this was not a helpful way of looking at it. Namboko Taru believed she was cured. And certainly as a treatment for simple constipation the massage could hardly have been bettered, and had not differed in any essential respect from western massage, until very near the end.