Authors: Pat Barker
They stood together, breathing. Rivers shone his torch
at the floor and cautiously they moved deeper into the cave. He put a hand out
and touched something that slithered away under his fingers,
then
swung the torch round, a weak sickly ring of yellow light that revealed what
for a second made him doubt his sanity: the walls were alive. They were covered
in heaving black fur.
Bats, of course.
After the first jolt of fear, it was obvious. He
directed the torch at the ceiling where more bats hung, thousands of them,
hundreds of thousands perhaps, little sooty stalactites. As the torch swept
over them, they raised their heads, frenzied little faces, wet pink gums, white
fangs, all jabbering with fear.
Moving very slowly and quietly, not wanting to disturb
them further, he again shone the torch at the ground, so that they stood,
disconnected feet and legs, in a pool of light. He shouldn't have been startled
by the bats, because he knew—Njiru had mentioned it—that in the old days it had
been a regular outing for the men of Narovo to go and hunt bats in the cave at
Pa Na Keru. But then one day, or so the legend said, a man took the wrong
turning and, while his companions wound their way
out
of the mountain, his
every step was leading him deeper into it. At last he stumbled upon another
exit, and made his way back to the village, but, though he'd been missing less
than a week, he returned an old man. He stayed with his mother for three days,
but then his face turned black and he crumbled away into dust.
Nobody had followed them into the inner cave. Hocart
was busy with his drawings and the islanders were presumably afraid of the
legend. Was Njiru also afraid? If he was, he didn't show it. They could hear
talk and laughter only a few feet away, in the outer cave, but their isolation
in this hot, fur-lined darkness was complete.
This was the first time he'd been alone with Njiru
since Ngea's death, and Rivers wanted to talk about Emele: partly because any
ceremony connected with the death of a chief was important, but partly too
because he felt concern for the woman herself.
'Tongo polo
,' he said.
He felt Njiru withdraw.
'How long?' he persisted.
'How many
days?'
Njiru shook his head. 'Man old time he savvy
tongo polo,
now no all same.'
The last words were accompanied by a dismissive
chopping movement of his hand, not intended to make contact with anything, but
his fingers clipped the end of the torch and sent it clattering to the ground,
where it continued to shine, a single yellow eye focused on them in the
darkness. Then the walls lifted off and came towards them. Rivers barely had
time to see the beam of light become a tunnel filled with struggling shapes
before he was enclosed in flapping squeaking screaming darkness, blinded, his skin
shrinking from the contact that never came.
He stood with eyes closed, teeth clenched, senses so
inundated they'd virtually ceased to exist, his mind shrunk to a single point
of light. Keep still, he told himself, they won't touch you. And after that he didn't
think at all but endured, a pillar of flesh that the soles of his feet
connected to the earth, the bones of his skull vibrating to the bats' unvarying
high-pitched scream.
The cave mouth disgorged fleeing human beings; behind
them the bats streamed out in a dark cloud that furled over on to itself as it
rose, like blood flowing from a wound under water. Eventually, shocked into
silence, they all turned to stare, and watched for a full minute, before the
stream thinned to a trickle.
Inside the cave, Rivers and Njiru opened their eyes.
Rivers was not aware of having moved during the exodus, indeed would have sworn
that he had not, but he discovered that he was gripping Njiru's hand. He
felt... not dazed, dazed was the wrong word.
The opposite of
dazed.
Almost as if a rind had been pared off, naked,
unshelled, lying in contact with the earth.
Wonderingly, in the intense silence, they gazed round
the grey granite walls, with here and there in the vastness black squares of
baby bats hung upside-down to await their mothers' return.
* * *
A shaft of sunlight struck his eyes.
'Sorry,' Miss Irving said, and pulled the curtain a
little way back. 'What sort of night did you have?'
'So-so.'
He seemed to have spent the entire night between hot,
fur-lined walls and the fur had got on to his teeth.
'Here's your tea,' she said, putting the tray across
his knees.
He drank it gratefully, sending out messages to
various parts of his body to find out what the situation was.
Ghastly, seemed to be the general response.
'Don't you think you should have a doctor?' She smiled
at him.
'Doctor.'
'No. All he'd do is tell me to stay in bed and drink
plenty of fluids. I can tell myself that.'
'All right.
Ring if there's anything you want.' 'Would you mind
drawing the curtains?' The darkness reminded him of the cave. All night he'd
had bats clinging to the inside walls of his skull. But now at least there was
a breeze, the curtains breathed gently. But he was still too hot. He kicked off
the covers, unbuttoned his jacket and flapped the edges, ran his tongue round
his cracked lips. Hot.
* * *
The sun beat down the moment they left the cave. It was
past noon, but the hard bright white rocks reflected heat into their faces.
They walked more slowly on the way back, Rivers intensely aware of Njiru
walking just ahead of him, though they did not speak. Near the village they
began, by mutual consent, to lag behind the others. Hocart turned to wait, but
Rivers waved him on.
They sat down on an overturned tree trunk covered in
moss. The sun crashed down, beating the tops of their heads, like somebody
hammering tent pegs into the ground. And yet even in these sweaty clothes, the
shoulders of his shirt thickly encrusted with bat droppings, Rivers had the
same feeling of being new, unsheathed.
They sat tranquilly, side by side, in no hurry to
begin the mangled business of communication. A slight breeze cooled their skin.
'Tongo
polo',
Rivers said at
last, because that's where they'd left off. How long?
he
asked again. How many days?
A bright, amused, unmistakably affectionate look from
Njiru.
There was no
fixed time, he said, though eighteen days was common. His grandmother had
observed
tongo polo
for two hundred days, but that was exceptional because
Homu, his grandfather, had been a great chief. The men of Roviana blew the
conch for her.
Blew the conch? Rivers asked. What did that mean?
A short silence, though not, Rivers thought,
indicating a reluctance to go on speaking. At that moment Njiru would have told
him anything. Perhaps this was the result of that time in the cave when they'd
reached out and gripped each other's hands. No, he thought.
No.
There had been
two
experiences in the cave, and he was quite certain Njiru
shared in both. One was the reaching out to grasp each other's hands. But the
other was a shrinking, no, no, not shrinking,
a
compression
of identity into a single hard unassailable point: the point at which no
further compromise is possible, where nothing remains except pure naked self-assertion.
The right to be and to be
as one is.
Njiru's grandfather, Homu, was famous for having taken
ninety-three heads in a single afternoon. Through his grandmother he was
related to Inkava, who, until the British destroyed his stronghold, had been
the most ferocious of the great head-hunting chiefs of Roviana. This was his
inheritance. Rivers glanced sideways at him, close enough to see how the white
lime flaked on the taut skin of his cheekbones. Njiru was speaking, not out of
friendship—though he felt friendship—but out of that hard core of identity, no
longer concerned to evade questions or disguise his pride in the culture of his
people.
The blowing of the conch, he said, signifies the
completion of a successful raid. He turned and looked directly at Rivers. The
widow of a chief can be freed only by the taking of a head.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Monday, 16
September 1918
We live in tamboos—a sort of cross between a cowshed
and an outdoor privy.
Corrugated iron walls and roof—bloody
noisy when it rains, and it's raining now—carpeted with straw that rustles and
smells and gleams in the candle-light.
Fields
outside—perfectly reasonable fields when we arrived.
Now, after last
night's heavy rain and the constant churning of boots and wheels, there's a
depth of about eighteen inches of mud. The duckboards are starting to sink. Oh,
and it gets into everything. The inside of my sleeping-bag is
not
inviting—I was tempted to sleep outside it last night.
But.
Mustn't complain.
(Why not?
The entire army survives on grousing.) In
fact mud and duckboards are about the only familiar things left.
I've got a permanent feeling of
wrongness
at the nape of my neck. Exposure's the right word, I suppose, and for once the
army's bad joke of a haircut isn't to blame. We're out in the open all the time
and I'm used to a war where one scurries about below ground like a mole or a
rat. (Rats thrived on us—literally. We must have devastated the moles.) It
occurred to me last night that Rivers's idea of my using myself as a test
case—the football he told me to dribble across—has one fundamental flaw in it.
Same loony—different war.
As far as I can make out, Rivers's
theory is that the crucial factor in accounting for the vast number of
breakdowns this war has produced is not the horrors—war's always produced
plenty of those—but the fact that the strain has to be borne in conditions of
immobility, passivity and helplessness.
Cramped in holes in
the ground waiting for the next random shell to put you out.
If that
is
the crucial factor, then the test's invalid—because every exercise we do now is
designed to prepare for open, mobile warfare. And that's what's happening—it's
all different.
I told Rivers once that the sensation of going over
the top was sexy. I don't think he believed me, but actually there
was
something in common—racing blood, risk, physical exposure, a kind of awful
daring
about
it. (Obviously I'm not talking about sex in bed.) But I don't feel anything
like that now. There's,
for
me
, a nagging, constant apprehension, because I'm out in the open
and I know I shouldn't be.
New kind of war.
The
trouble is my nerves are the same old nerves. I'd be happier with a ton or two
of France on top of my head.
Day was spent on general clean-up. The men's reward
was compulsory games. I stood obediently on the touchline and yelled and waved.
A cold grey day.
The ball seemed to fly across the
lowering sky like a drenched, heavy, reluctant bird. The men were coated in
mud, plumes of steam rising from their mouths.
All
tremendously competitive, of course—'C' against 'D'—and curiously unreal.
Street-corner football played in the spirit of public-school rugby. I stood and
watched my red-faced, red-kneed compatriots charging up and down a social No
Man's Land. But at least officers and men play together—it's the only informal
contact there is outside the line.
At half-time some of them stripped off their shirts
and the steam rose from their bodies, red and white, chapped hands and faces,
as they stood panting.
Jenkins waved at somebody off the pitch and for a
moment his face was turned towards me, greenish eyes, red hair, milky white
skin blotched with freckles,
I
had to make an effort
to look away.
Mustn't get the reputation of 'having an eye
for Tommy'.
Bad for discipline.
Though I don't
know what the fuck else there is to look at.
That's the other change: the men's expressions.
That look on Jenkins's flee
as he turned to wave. Before,
there were basically two expressions. One you saw at Étaples, the
rabbit-locked-up-with-a-stoat look. I've only ever seen that expression in one
other place, and that was the Royces' house.
Family of four
boys in the next street to us.
Their father used to make them line up
every night after he'd had a few pints, and lift their shirt-tails. Then he'd
thrash them with a ruler on their bare bums.
Every night
without fail.
One of them asked once, 'What's it for, Dad?' And he said,
'It's for whatever you've done that you think you've got away with.' But my God
they could fight. One of them was the bane of my life at school.