The Ghost Road (23 page)

Across the fire, moving figures shimmered in the heat.
A woman with a baby in her arms, Nanja, whose own child had died in the
confining house and who was now nursing Kwini, the emaciated baby whom Rivers
had first seen with Njiru. The child worried at the nipple, guzzling and
snuffling— already her wasted thighs had begun to fill out. She would live, he
thought, and the idea cheered him for, to western eyes, the stacked-up skulls
made disturbing companions.

Njiru raised Ngea's crowned skull above his head, and
a silence fell, broken only by the careless cries of the children, but they were
some distance away. Rivers could follow most of Njiru's prayer without need of
an interpreter. 'We offer pudding, we offer pig, to you the ghosts. Be
propitious in war, be propitious in the sea fight, be propitious at the fort,
be
propitious at the burning of the thatch. Receive the
chiefly dead...' Here Njiru placed Ngea's skull in the house. 'And be you
propitious and smite our enemies, oh, oh, oh!'

It was a prayer for success in the great headhunting
raid that ought to have concluded the mourning for the dead chief.
The
Vavolo,
the Night Festival, at which all the young women were
free—
tugele
—to
all the returning warriors.
But the raid would not happen. The prayer
could not be answered. Njiru put pork and yam pudding in the sacrificial fire,
whose flames burned dull in the sunlight. Then he took the remains of the
pudding and walked round the stones that encircled the clearing, placing a
mouthful of food on each stone. The stones were called
tomate patu
,
stone ghosts, and were erected as memorials to men who died and whose bodies
could not be brought home. Rivers watched him go from stone to stone.

Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of
banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the
people's lives. Headhunting was what they had lived for. Though it might seem
callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most tremendous
fun
and without it life lost almost all its zest.

This was a people perishing from the absence of war.
It showed in the genealogies, the decline in the birth rate from one generation
to the next—the island's population was less than half what it had been in
Rinambesi's youth—and much of that decline was deliberate.

Against the background of such despair might not the
temptation of taking one small head in honour of a dead chief prove
irresistible? Raids, no, they couldn't do that, the punishment was too severe.
But who was to miss one small boy?

Rivers ate the baked yams and pork offered to him, but
remained thoughtful. Once he looked up to see Njiru on the other side of the
fire, a tall, lean, twisted shape wavering in the column of heat, and surprised
on the other man's face an expression of—bitterness? No, stronger than that.
Hatred, even.

* * *

Kundaite could interpret
talk blong tomate
: the
language of ghosts. Sometimes, he said, a meeting was held on the night the old
ghosts arrived to take the new ghost back to Sonto with them, and he would
question the ghosts and the people would hear them speak. Would this be done
for Ngea? Rivers asked. Kundaite didn't know, he wasn't sure, he didn't think
so. Would it be done if we give you ten sticks of tobacco? Kundaite nodded. He
was given five and promised the other five the following morning. Would they
hear Ngea speak? Hocart asked. No, was the reply. 'Ngea he no
speak
yet.
He all same small fellow
piccanini.'
Kundaite, grasping his tobacco sticks, seemed to be worried.
'Don't tell Njiru,' he said at last.

They all met at sunset in what had been Ngea's hall,
and sat cross-legged around the fire. It had been made with green sticks and
smoked badly. They coughed, their eyes watered, they waited, nothing happened.
Outside it was totally dark, for the moon had not yet
risen
.
Nanja brought in dry sticks, feeding them into the fire skilfully, one by one,
until the flames crackled and spurted. Kwini cried and Nanja jiggled and
soothed her. Older children sat big-eyed in the firelight, and Rivers felt his
own eyelids grow heavy, for he had been up since dawn walking miles in the
heat. He blinked hard, making himself look round the circle. Emele—Namboko
Emele as she must now be called—was there, wearing brown bark cloth without
lime or necklaces.
But not Njiru, a surprising absence
surely, since he'd placed Ngea's skull in the skull house.

Kundaite came in and sat beside the door in the side
of the hut. At a word from him the torches were extinguished, though Rivers
could still see people's faces clearly, leaping and shining in the firelight.
Silence fell, and deepened, and deepened again. Kundaite closed his eyes and
began to moan beneath his breath. Rivers watched him sceptically, wondering
whether the attempt to induce a trance state was genuine or merely histrionic.
Abruptly, Kundaite seemed to come to himself. He put three sticks of tobacco in
the fire as a sacrificial offering, saying casually that the ghosts were on
their way from Sonto.
A long silence.
Nothing
happened. Somebody suggested the ghosts were afraid of a dog that was lying by
the fire. The animal
raised
its head on hearing its
name, decided there was nothing to worry about and settled down again with a
sigh. Others said the ghosts were afraid of the white men.

River's back and thighs were aching from the squatting
position. Suddenly Kundaite said, 'Listen, the canoes.' It was clear, looking
round the circle, that they were hearing the swish of paddles. Joy and grief
mingled on every face. Emele started the musical wailing characteristic of the
women, but stopped when Kundaite held up his hand.

A tense silence.
Then somebody whistled. The sound was curiously
difficult to locate. Rivers looked round the faces, but could not see who was
making the sound. The people began calling out names, familiar to him from the
genealogies, each person calling the name of a relative who had recently died.
Some not so recently.
Namboko Taru called for her
grandmother. Then the name Onda was called and somebody whistled again. Rivers
could see Hocart also looking round the room, trying to locate the whistler.

A discussion about the white men followed, the ghost's
whistles being translated by Kundaite. Who were the white men? Why were they
here? Why did they want to hear the language of ghosts? Did the ghosts object
to the white men's presence? Kundaite asked. 'What do we do if they say
"yes"?' Hocart asked, not moving his lips. 'Get out quick.'

But the ghosts did not object. Onda, whistling, said
he had never seen white men. Kundaite pointed to Rivers and Hocart. Onda,
apparently satisfied, fell silent. Kundaite's father, also called Kundaite,
came next and asked for tobacco. The living Kundaite put his last two sticks in
the fire, saying, 'Here is tobacco for you, Kunda. Smoke and depart.' Namboko
Rupe, Ngea's mother, spoke next, saying she had come to take Ngea to Sonto.
Other relatives of Ngea followed. At last Kundaite said that Ngea himself was
in the room.

A deeper silence fell. Rivers felt the hairs on his
arms rise. Namboko Emele began to wail for her husband. Kundaite said,
Don't
cry. He's going to Sonto.
Ngea's mother
said, He must go now.
He must blow the conch and come to Sonto. By now
the room was full of whistles, slithering up and down the walls and all across
the floor. At times the sounds seemed almost to be a ripple running across the
skin. Namboko Emele began to wail again, and the other women joined in. 'Don't
cry,' Ngea's mother said again, through Kundaite's mouth. 'I have come to take
him to Sonto.' Then, Kundaite said, Ngea blew the conch. Everybody in the room,
except Rivers and Hocart, heard it, and then the whistles faded and there was
silence save for the musical wails and cries of the women.

*
* *

Ten years later, throwing off hot sheets, Rivers
reflected that the questions the ghosts had asked had all been questions the
living people wanted answered. What
were
the white men doing
on the island?
Were
they as harmless as they appeared?
Why
did they want to hear the language of ghosts?
Was
it possible the
spirits might be offended by their presence?

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon, trying to decide whether he
should abandon his protest and go back to France, had woken to find the ghost
of a dead comrade standing by his bed. And thereafter, on more than one
occasion, shadowy figures had gathered out of the storm, asking him,
Why
was he not in the line? Why had he deserted his men?

The ghosts were not an attempt at evasion, Rivers thought,
either by Siegfried or by the islanders. Rather, the questions became more
insistent, more powerful, for being projected into the mouths of the dead.

* * *

Walking back to the tent, a circle of torchlight
swaying round their feet, their shoulders bumping as they tried to stay abreast
on the narrow path, Rivers and Hocart talked about the seance. A silly word
that didn't seem to suit the occasion, but Rivers couldn't think of a better.

'Who was whistling?' Hocart asked.

'I don't know.'

The occasion had moved him in a way he'd never
expected when they sat down by that fire. They talked about it for a while,
getting the sequence of events clear in their minds, for they had not been able
to take notes. Then Rivers said, 'Njiru wasn't there.'

'No, I noticed that.'

Back at the tent Hocart said, 'Shall I light the
lamp?'

'No, don't bother. Not for me anyway. I can't wait to
get to bed.' He was unbuckling his belt as he spoke, rubbing the skin
underneath where trapped sweat prickled. He kicked his trousers to one side and
lay down on the bed, only to cry out as his head came into violent contact with
something hard and cold. Hocart came in with the torch, his face white behind
the beam. On the pillow, indenting it as River's head would have done, was an
axe. Rivers picked it up and held it closer to the light. The carving on the
handle was rather fine by the standards of the island, and there was a knot, a
flaw in the wood, close to the blade.

'Somebody must have left it behind,' Hocart said
uncertainly.

'Well, yes, obviously.'

'No, I mean by accident. Whoever it is, he'll be back
for it in the morning.'

'I hope not,' Rivers said dryly. 'It's Ngea's.'

'Are you sure?'

Rivers indicated the knot in the wood. 'Yes, I
remember
this,
I noticed it when they put it in the
era
with
him.' He stroked the blade. 'No, I'm afraid we've been asking too many awkward
questions.

We're being warned.'

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

10 October 1918

Back into corrugated iron privies again, which are dry
but in other ways less comfortable than dug-outs. Owen has somehow managed to
stick a portrait of Siegfried Sassoon to the wall of his. Sassoon in distinctly
Byronic mode, I should say—not the Sassoon
I
remember, legging it
down the main corridor at Craiglockhart with his golf-clubs on his back,
hell-bent on getting out of the place as fast as possible. I stood and stared,
gawped at it. And suddenly I was back in Rivers's room, watching the late
afternoon sun glint on his glasses during one of his endless silences. Rivers's
silences are not manipulative. (Mine are.
Always.)
He's not trying to make you say more than you
want,
he's trying to create a safe space round what you've said already, so you can
think about it without shitting yourself.
White net curtains
drifting in on the breeze.
Pok-pok, pok-pok
, from
the tennis courts, until somebody misses and the rhythm goes.

Owen said, tentatively, something I didn't quite
catch.
Something to the effect that we 'old
Craiglockhartians' must stick together.
Once that
would have made me puke.
I always felt, watching Owen at Craiglockhart,
that there was some kind of fantasy going on, that he was having the public-school
education he'd missed. I always wanted to say, it's a loony-bin, Owen. Who do
you think you're kidding? I don't feel that now—perhaps because Craiglockhart
was a shared experience of failure, and the past few weeks have expunged it for
both of us.

Wiped it out in blood, you might say
,
if you were histrionic, and I am. And not our own blood either.

Would that remark deserve one of River's silences?

I don't know. Sometimes I used to think he was back
with his fucking head-hunters—he really does love them, his whole face lights
up when he talks about them—and that gives him a slightly odd perspective on
'the present conflict' as they say.