The Ghost Road (16 page)

Hocart came into
the hut, edging round the walls, keeping well clear of the malanjari leaves,
until he reached Rivers. Now that all eyes were focused on Njiru, Rivers could
take Mbuko's pulse. He shook his head. 'Not long.'

Scattered all
round were bits of calico and bark cloth streaked with mucus, with here and
there a great splash of red where Mbuko had haemorrhaged. Now gobs of phlegm
rose into his mouth and he lacked the strength even to spit them out. Rivers
found a fresh piece of cloth, moistened it with his own saliva, and cleaned the
dying man's mouth. His tongue came out and flicked across his dry lips. Then a
rattle in the throat, a lift and flare of the rib-cage, and it was over. One of
the women wailed briefly, but the wail faltered into silence, and she put a
hand over her mouth as if embarrassed.

Rivers
automatically reached out to close the eyes, then stopped himself. Mbuko's body
was bound into a sitting position by bands of calico passed round his neck and
under his knees. He was tied to a pole, and two men carried him out into the
open air. Rivers and Hocart followed the little group down the path to the
beach.

The body was
propped up, still in a sitting position, in the stern of a canoe, his shield
and axe were placed beside him, and he was quickly paddled out to sea. Rivers
waited until the canoe was a shadow on the glittering waters of the bay, then
went back to the hut and gathered together the stained cloths, which he buried
at a safe distance from the village. As he scraped dry earth over the heap of
rags, he felt an intense craving to scrub his arms up to the elbow in boiled
water. That would have to wait till he got back
to the
tent. For the moment he contented himself with wiping his palms several times
hard on the seat of his trousers.

He went back to
the beach, where a disgruntled Hocart lingered by the waterline. They had both
been hoping that this death would shed light on the cult of the skull.
Instead...

'They don't keep
the skull,' Hocart said.

As they watched,
the paddlers in the canoe tipped the corpse unceremoniously over the side,
where it sank beneath the water with scarcely a splash.

Rivers shook his
head. 'I'm afraid what we need is a proper death.'

CHAPTER NINE

Wyatt had
embarked on some interminable anecdote about a brothel he'd been to in which
there was a whore so grotesquely fat you got your money back if you succeeded
in fucking her.

Prior rested his
cheek on the cold glass of the train window, glancing sidelong at the doubled
reflection of cheekbone and eye, and then deeper into the shadowy compartment
with its transparent occupants laughing and gesturing, floating shapes on the
rain-flawed pane.

A roar of
laughter as the story climaxed. Gregg, happily married with a small daughter,
smiled tolerantly. Hallet uneasily joined in. One young lad brayed so loudly
his virginity became painfully apparent to everybody but himself. Only Owen made
no attempt to disguise his disgust, but then he hated 'the commercials', as he
called them.

They'd been on
the train for three hours, jammed together on slatted wooden seats, stale sweat
in armpits, groin and feet, a smoky smell of urine where some half-baked idiot
had pissed into the wind.

Five minutes
later the train slipped into the dark station, a few discreet naphtha flares
the only light.

Prior walked
along to the trucks, where the men were stirring.
Strange faces
peered blearily up at him as he swept the torch across them, shading the beam
in his cupped hand, so that he saw them—not figuratively but quite literally—in
a glow of blood. They were not his, or anybody's, men, just an anonymous draft
that he'd shepherded a stage further to their destination.

This section of
the train had stopped well short of the platform, and there was a big drop from
the truck. Repeated crunches of gravel under boots as men, still dazed from
sleep, grappled with the shock of rain and windswept darkness. Marshalled together,
they half stumbled, half marched alongside the train, on to the platform and
through into the station yard where, after an interminable wait, guides finally
appeared, their wet capes reflecting a fish gleam at the sky, as they
gesticulated and gabbled, directing units to their billets.

Prior saw his
draft settled in a church hall, said goodbye and wished them luck. Their faces
turned towards him registered nothing, subdued to the impersonality of the
process that had them in its grip.

Then he was
free. Felt it too, following the guide through unlit streets, past that
sandbagged witch's tit of a cathedral, along the canal accompanied in the water
by a doddering old crone of a moon.

The night, the
silent guide, the effort of not slipping on broken pavements, sharpened his
senses. An overhanging branch of laburnum flung a scattering of cold raindrops
into his eyes and he was startled by the intensity of his joy.
A joy perhaps not unconnected with the ruinous appearance of these
houses.
Solid bourgeois houses they must have been in peace-time, the
homes of men making their way in the world, men who'd been sure that certain
things would never change, and where were they now? Every house in the road was
damaged, some ruined. The ruins stood out starkly, black jagged edges in the
white gulf of moonlight.

'Here you are,
sir.'

A gate hanging
from its hinges, roses massed round a broken pergola, white ruffled blooms with
a
heavy scent,
unpruned, twisting round each other for support.
Beyond,
paths and terraces overgrown with weeds.
Lace curtains hanging limp
behind cracked or shattered glass; on the first floor the one window still
unbroken briefly held the moon.

The guide preceded him up the path. No lock on the
door, black and white tiles in the hall—a sudden sharp memory of
Craiglockhart—and then a glimmer of light at the top of the stairs and Hallet
appeared, holding a candle. 'Come on up. Mind that stair.'

Hallet had got his sleeping-bag out and arranged his
belongings carefully in a corner of what must once have been the master
bedroom. His fiancée’s photograph stood on a chair.

'Potts and Owen are upstairs.'

Prior went to the window and looked out at the houses
opposite, fingering the lace curtains that were stiff with dried rain and dirt.
'This is all right, isn't it?' he said suddenly, turning into the room.

They grinned at each other.

'Bathroom's just opposite,' Hallet said, pointing it
out like a careful host.

'You mean it works?'

'Well, the bucket works.'

Prior sat down abruptly on the floor and yawned. He
was too tired to care where he was. They lit cigarettes and shared a bar of
chocolate,
Prior
leaning against the wall, Hallet
sitting cross-legged on his sleeping-bag, both of them staring round like
big-eyed children, struggling to take in the strangeness.

It'll wear off,
Prior
thought, lighting a candle and venturing across the landing to find a room of
his own. It'll all seem normal in the morning.

*
* *

But it didn't. Prior woke early, and lay lazily
watching the shadows of leaves on a wall that the rising sun had turned from
white to gold. He was just turning over to go back to sleep, when something
black flickered across the room. He waited, and saw a swallow lift and loop
through the open window and out into the dazzling air.

On that first morning he looked out on to a green
jungle of garden, sun-baked, humming with insects, the once formal flower-beds
transformed into brambly tunnels in which hidden life rustled and burrowed. He
rested his arms on the window-sill and peered out, cautiously, through the
jagged edges of glass, at Owen and Potts, who were carrying a table from one of
the houses across the road. He shouted down to them, as they paused for breath,
and they waved back.

He would have said that the war could not surprise
him, that somewhere on the Somme he had mislaid the capacity to be surprised,
but the next few days were a constant succession of surprises.

They had nothing to do. They were responsible for no
one. The war had forgotten them.

There were only two items of furniture that went with
the house. One was a vast carved oak sideboard that must surely have been built
in the dining-room, for it could never have been brought in through the door;
the other was a child's painted rocking-horse on the top floor of the house, in
a room with bars at the window. Everything else they found for themselves.
Prior moved in and out of the ruined houses, taking whatever caught his eye,
and the
houses, cool and dark in the midday heat,
received him placidly. He brought his trophies home and arranged them carefully
in his room, or in the dining-room they all shared.

In the evenings he and Hallet, Owen and Potts lit
candles, sitting around the table that was Owen's chief find, and with the tall
windows, the elaborately moulded ceilings, the bowls of roses and the wine
created a fragile civilization, a fellowship on the brink of disaster.

And then ruined it by arguing about the war.
Or Potts and Hallet argued. Potts had been a science
student at Manchester University, bright, articulate,
cynical
in the thorough-going way of those who have not so far encountered much to be
cynical about. The war, he insisted loudly, flushed with wine, was feathering the
nests of profiteers. It was being fought to safeguard access to the oil-wells
of Mesopotamia. It had nothing, absolutely
nothing
, to do with
Belgian neutrality, the rights of small nations or anything like that. And if
Hallet thought it had, then Hallet was a naive idiot. Hallet came from an old
army family and had been well and expensively educated to think as little as
possible; confronted by Potts, he floundered, but then quickly began to
formulate beliefs that he had hitherto assumed everybody shared.

Prior and Owen exchanged secretive smiles, though
neither probably could have said of what the secret consisted. Owen was playing
with the fallen petals of roses he'd picked that afternoon. Pink, yellow, white
roses, but no red roses,
Prior
saw.

'What do
you
think?' Potts asked,
irritated by Prior's silence.

'What do I think? I think what you're saying is
basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories it's
optimistic. What you're saying is, OK the war isn't being fought for the
reasons we're told, but it
is
being fought for a reason. It's not benefiting the people it's
supposed to be benefiting, but it
is
benefiting somebody.
And I don't believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than
you think because there isn't any kind of rational justification left. It's
become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody
knows how to stop.'

Hallet looked from one to the other. 'Look, all this
just isn't
true.
You're—no, not you—
people
are letting
themselves get demoralized because
they're having
to
pay a higher price than they thought they were going to have to pay. But it
doesn't alter the basic facts. We
are
fighting for the
legitimate interests of our own country. We
are
fighting in defence
of Belgian neutrality. We
are
fighting for French independence.
We
aren't in Germany. They
are
in France.' He looked round the table and, like a little boy,
said pleadingly, 'This is still a just war.'

'You say we kill the Beast,' Owen said slowly. 'I say
we fight because men lost their bearings in the night.' He smiled at their
expressions, and stood up. 'Shall we open another bottle?'

Alone that night, the smell of snuffed-out candle
lingering on the air, Prior remembered the bowl of pink and gold and white
roses, but did not bother to recall Potts's and Hallet's arguments. This house
they shared was so strange in terms of what the war had hitherto meant that he
wanted to fix the particular sights and sounds and smells in his mind. He felt
enchanted, cocooned from anything that could possibly cause pain, though even
as the thought formed, a trickle of plaster leaked from the ceiling of the back
bedroom where a shell had struck,
the
house bleeding
quietly from its unstaunchable wound.

* * *

In the mornings he went into town, wandering round the
stalls that had been set up in front of the cathedral to sell 'souvenirs'. So
many souvenirs were to be found in the rubble of the bombed city that trade was
not brisk. Prior saw nothing that he wanted to buy, and anyway he had a shelf
of souvenirs at home, mainly collected on his first time in France. He'd
thought of them often at Craiglockhart as Rivers probed his mind for buried
memories of his last few weeks in France.
Souvenirs, my God.
When the mind will happily wipe itself clean in the effort to
forget.