The Ghost Road (14 page)

The woman who'd
pulled his arm looked amused at first, then, when she was sure she'd
understood, horrified. And so it went on. Because the questions were very
carefully chosen, they gradually formed an impression—and not a vague
impression either, in some respects quite precise—of the life of a bachelor don
in a Cambridge college. Hilarity was the main response.
And
if the questions had led on to more intimate territory?
If he'd been
able, or willing, to lay
before them the whole
constricting business of trying to fit into society, of living under and around
and outside the law, what would have been their reaction then?
Laughter.
They'd have gone on laughing. They would not have
known how to pity him. He looked up, at the blue, empty sky, and realized that
their view of
his
society was neither more nor less valid than his of
theirs. No bearded elderly white man looked down on them, endorsing one set of
values and condemning the other. And with that realization, the whole frame of
social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned—and sane—collapsed,
and for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed
people.
A condition of absolute free-fall.

Then, next day,
after a restless night, he and Hocart transferred to a tramp steamer for the
last stage of the journey, and there he met the logical end product of the
process of free-fall—the splat on the pavement, as it were—Brennan.

* * *

Smells of engine
oil and copra, of sweaty human beings sleeping too close together in the little
covered cabin on deck.
Above their heads, offering no clear reference point
to northern eyes, foreign constellations wheeled and turned.

Brennan slept
opposite, his profile, under a fringe of greying curls, like that of a Roman
emperor's favourite run to seed. He snored, gargled, stopped breathing, gargled
again,
muttered
a protest as if he thought somebody
else had woken him, returned to sleep. On the other side of the cabin was
Father Michael, trailing behind him the atmosphere of the
theological college he'd not long left behind—cups of cocoa and late-night
discussions on chastity in other people's bedrooms.
Then
Hocart, looking much younger than twenty-five, his upper lip pouting on every
breath.

Rivers supposed
he must have slept eventually, though it seemed no time at all before they were
stretching and stumbling out on deck.

The deckhands,
emerging from their airless hellhole next to the engine, swabbed passengers
down along with the deck. They finished off with a bucket of cold water thrown
full into the face so that one was left gasping and blinded. Brennan stood,
eyes closed, one hand resting between his plump breasts, a hirsute Aphrodite,
water dripping from his nose, his foreskin, the hairs on his wrinkled and baggy
scrotum. It was impossible to dislike somebody who brought such enormous zest
to the minute-by-minute business of living.

As the sun rose,
beating down on to the steaming deck, they began the day-long search for
patches of shade. Father Michael and Hocart came close to quarrelling about the
record of missionaries in the islands. Hocart was the product of a Victorian
vicarage, and something of a rebel. Michael obviously thought he'd fallen among
atheists, or worse. Brennan listened to the argument, scratched his neck, then
gathered phlegm in his throat, a rich, bubbling sound—his zest for life became
a bit much at times—and spat it on the deck, where he inspected it carefully,
and Rivers, cursing his medical training, found himself inspecting it too. 'I
knew a missionary once' Brennan said, with a look of placid, lazy malice.
'Didn't speak a word of the language—just sets up shop—Jesus saves. And then he
starts to get worried 'cause they all come flocking round but he can't get the
buggers to kneel down. So down on his knees he goes. "What's the word for
this?" Well
you
know and I know,' Brennan said, turning to Rivers,
'there's only one thing
they
do kneeling down. Come next Sunday, bloody great
congregation, up he stands—raises his arms.' He looked at Michael and, in an
amazingly pure counter-tenor, sang, 'Let us fuck.'

A bray of
laughter from the open door of the engine-room where the skipper stood, wiping
his fingers on an oily rag.

'I wish you'd
leave Michael alone,' Rivers said to Hocart after the others had gone below
deck.

'Why? He's an
arrogant little—'

'He's a baby.'

But Hocart, a
baby himself, saw no need for mercy.

After dark,
packed round the rickety table on which they ate their dinner, there was no
escaping each other's company. Elbows jarred, knees joggled, the leather seats
tormented patches of prickly heat. Much covert and not so covert scratching of
backsides went on. The skipper joined them for the meal, but contributed little
to the conversation, preferring to be amused in silence. His trade had made him
a connoisseur of social discomfort.

Brennan, sensing
that Rivers liked him, embarked on what threatened to become his life story,
interspersed with swigs of whisky and great breathy revelations of dental
decay. He showed Rivers a photograph of his three naked brown babies tumbling
over each other in the dust. Behind them, face, neck and breasts covered in
tattoos, stood a young girl. 'She must be from Lepers Island,' Rivers said.

Brennan took the
photograph back and stared at it. 'Yeh, that's right.
Bitch:

He seemed about
to say more. Rivers said quickly, 'I didn't realize you'd been in the New
Hebrides.'

'Started there.'

He'd started as
a 'blackbirder', as so many of the older traders had, kidnapping natives to
work on the Queensland plantations, and he was frank about his methods too.
Make friends with them, invite them on board ship, get them drunk and Bob's
your Uncle. By the time they come round they're out at sea and there's bugger
all they can do about it. Used to give the girls a bit of a run round the deck,
mind.
We-ll
Why not, they're
all gunna get their arses fucked off when they get to the plantations anyway.
'Do you know,' he went on, leaning across the table in search of somebody to
shock, and fixing on Michael, though Hocart't expression might have made him
the more obvious choice, 'you can buy a woman—
white,
mind—for forty
quid in Sydney?'

'I'd've thought
forty quid was a bit steep,' Hocart said.

'Buy
, man, I'm not
talking about fucking rent.'

'So why didn't
you?'

'Nah,' Brennan
said morosely, swishing whisky round his glass. 'Years on their backs.' He
turned to Rivers. 'Half way through the honeymoon you'd be pissing hedgehogs
backwards.
He
knows what I mean,' he said, jerking his thumb at
Rivers.

'We all know
what you mean,' Hocart said.

The skipper
leant forward, smiling a positively old-maidish smile.
'How
about a nice game of cards?'

And then there
was no further talk, only the creaking of the spirit-lamp above their heads,
and the plump slap of cards on the table. Rivers, amused, watched Hocart slowly
realize that when confronted by a dwindling stock of coins, Father Michael
cheated and Brennan didn't.

Next morning—a
small triumph for Melanesia— Father Michael, who'd hitherto crouched over a
bucket to wash, stripped off with the rest of them, his white arum lily of a
body with its improbable stamen looking almost shocking beside Brennan's.

The conversation
that morning meandered on amicably enough, as they leaned together, sweating,
in their patches of shade, until a smudge of blue-green on the horizon restored
them to separateness.

By late
afternoon they'd moored by a rotting landing stage on Eddystone, and clambered
ashore to supervise the unloading of their stores. Rivers was used to
missionized islands where canoes paddled out to meet the incoming steamer,
brown faces, white eyes, flashing smiles, while others gathered at the landing
stage, ready to carry bags up to the mission station for a few sticks of
tobacco or even sheer Christian goodwill. A cheerful picture, as long as you
didn't notice the rows and rows of crosses in the mission graveyard, men and
women in the prime of life dead of the diseases of the English nursery:
whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, chicken pox, scarlet fever—all were fatal
here. And the mission boat carried them from island to island, station to
station, remorselessly, year after year.

Instead of
that—nothing.
Nobody appeared. Rivers and Hocart waved till the
steamer dwindled to a point on the glittering water,
then
lugged the tent and enough food for the night up to a small clearing a hundred
yards or so above the beach. Spread out below them was the Bay of Narovo. The
village, whose huts they could just see between the trees, was
also called Narovo.

'Aren't we a bit
close?' Hocart asked.

'We don't want
to be
too
far away. If we're isolated we'll be frightening. The
wicked witch lives in the
wood
, remember.'

'What do you
suppose they'll do?'

Rivers shrugged.
'They'll be along.'

By the time
they'd erected the tent the swift tropical darkness was falling. After sunset
the island breathed for a moment in silence; from the bush
arose
the buzz of different insects, the cries of different birds. Rivers was
intensely aware of the fragility of the small lighted area round the tent. He
kept peering into the trees and thought he saw dark shapes flitting between the
trunks, but still nobody appeared.

After a meal of
tinned meat and turnipy pineapple, Hocart said he would lie down. He looked
utterly exhausted, and Rivers suspected he might be running a slight fever.
Shrouded in his mosquito net, Hocart talked for a while, then switched off his
torch and turned over to sleep.

Rivers sat at a
table immediately outside the tent, trying to mend the oil-lamp which was
smoking badly. A small figure alone in the clearing, in a storm of pale wings,
for every moth in the bush appeared and fluttered round the light. Now and then
one succeeded in finding a way in, and there was a quick sizzle, a flare, more
smoke. Rivers shook out the charred corpse and started again.
An oddly nerve-racking business, this.
Working so close to
the light, he was almost blinded and could see virtually nothing even when he
raised his head. He was aware of the thick darkness of the bush around him, but
more as a pressure on his mind than through his senses. Once he stopped,
thinking he heard a flute being played in the village. He sniffed the oil on
his fingers, wiped his chin on the back of his hand, and sat back for a rest,
his retinas aching as they do after an optician has shone his torch on to them.
He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. When he put them on again
he saw a figure had come out from among the trees, and was standing on the edge
of the clearing. A man in early middle age, white lime streaks in his hair,
around the eye sockets, and along the cheek and jaw-bones, so that it
seemed—until he caught the glint of eye white—that he was looking at a skull.
He sat absolutely still, as the man came towards him.
Alone,
or apparently alone.
He indicated the other chair, thinking it might be
refused, but his visitor sat down, inclined his head slightly, and smiled.

Rivers pointed
to himself and said his name.

A thin brown
hand
raised
to his shell necklace.
'Njiru.'

They stared at
each other. Rivers thought he ought to offer food, but the only food easily
available was the remains of the pineapple, and he was chary of breaking off
the encounter by going into the tent to look for it.

Njiru was
deformed. Without the curvature of the spine he would have been a tall man—by
Melanesian standards very tall—and he carried himself with obvious authority.
In addition to the shell necklace he wore ear-rings, arm rings and bracelets
all made of shells, and somehow it was immediately apparent that these
ornaments had great value. His earlobes, elongated by the constant wearing of
heavy shells, almost brushed his shoulders when he moved. The eyes were
remarkable: hooded, piercing, intelligent, shrewd.
Wary.