Authors: Pat Barker
Despite the hour the curtains let in a little light,
starlight, he supposed, there was no moon tonight. It was curiously reminiscent
of the light in the tent on Eddystone. He beat the pillows into a more
comfortable shape, and tried to get back to sleep.
* * *
'Leave the flap open,' Rivers said.
It had been hotter than usual, an oven of a day in
which people and trees had shimmered like reflections in water. The earth
outside the tent was baked hard. He watched a line of red ants struggle across
the immensity, a group at the rear carrying a dead beetle many times their own
size.
Hocart emerged from the tent. 'I don't think I can
face sleeping in there tonight.'
'We can sleep out here if you like.
As
long as you're careful with the net.'
The remains of their evening meal lay on the table.
Neither of them had felt like eating much.
'What do we do?' Hocart said, sitting cross-legged on
the ground beside Rivers. 'What do we do if they come back with a head? Or
heads
,
God help us.'
Rivers said slowly, 'Logically, we don't intervene.'
'Logically, we're dead. Even if we decide we won't
tell the authorities, how do they know we won't? From their point of view, the
only safe thing to do is—'
'Obey the law.'
'Get rid of us.'
'I don't think they'll do that.'
'Could they?'
'Well, yes, probably. The point is, it won't happen,
there isn't going to be a head.'
'But if—'
'If there is we'll deal with it.'
A long, stubborn, unconvinced silence from Hocart.
'Look, you know what the penalties are. If they go on
a raid there's no way the British Commissioner isn't going to hear about it.
And then you've got a gunboat off the coast, villages on fire, trees cut down,
crops destroyed, pigs killed. Screaming women and children driven into the
bush. You
know
what happens.'
'Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?'
'Are you suggesting head-hunting should be allowed?'
'No.' Tight-lipped.
'Good. When these people were taking heads they
virtually depopulated Ysabel. It
had
to be stopped.'
'So how are they going to get her out?'
Rivers hesitated. 'I don't know. She can't stay in
there for ever.'
What he secretly thought, but was superstitiously
afraid of saying, was that the situation would end in Emele's suicide. He could
see no other way out.
The following morning he went to see Namboko Taru.
She'd become very fond of him (and he of her) ever since his miming of
alternating constipation and diarrhoea had kept her amused while Njiru removed
the
nggasin
from her belly.
She and her friend Namboko Nali had been bathing in
the sea and their hair smelled of salt water. Taru's scrawny brown arms were
folded across her breasts as she sat, with her back against the wall of her
hut, steaming gently in the sun, while hens stepped delicately around her,
pecking the dust. He sat
beside
her, admiring the
gleam of dull emerald in the cockerel's neck feathers, as the village came
slowly to life.
After a few minutes' gossip he started asking her
above love charms, the subject they'd talked about at their last meeting. Three
other women came out and listened. He got out his notebook and took down the
words of the charm Taru supplied, aware that more than the usual amount of
whispering and giggling was going on. Taru offered him betel to chew, and
thinking,
What
the hell, who needs teeth?
he
accepted it. The women giggled again. A little while
later Taru offered him lime, and to humour her he let her draw white lines on
his cheekbones. The giggling was now almost out of control, but he pressed on
to the end of the charm, at which point it was revealed that the words only
became efficacious if the man accepted betel and lime from the woman's basket.
He laughed with them, and by the time they'd finished
they were on such terms that he felt he could ask them anything. Even about
Emele and
tongo polo.
Taru vehemently denied there was any question of
suicide. Suicide,
ungi
, was totally different. Taru and Nali had helped Kera, the
widow of the previous chief, to kill herself. She had tried poisoning herself
with tobacco and that hadn't worked. And then she'd tried to hang herself, but
the bough had broken. So they'd held a pole for her, high above their heads,
and she'd twined a strip of calico round her throat and hanged herself from the
pole. Garrotted more like, Rivers thought. It would not have been a quick or an
easy death. What decided whether the widow would
ungi
or observe
tongo polo
?
he
asked. It was her choice, they said.
Returning to the tent, he found Hocart lying outside,
having spent the first part of the morning washing clothes. He was asleep, or
resting, with his arms across his
face
shielding his
eyes from the sun. Rivers put his foot on his chest and pressed lightly.
Hocart peered up at him, taking in the white lines on
his face.
'My God.'
'I think I just got engaged.'
A bubble of laughter shook Hocart's ribs.
'Lucky woman.'
* * *
Sleeping was difficult, because of the heat, even
after they'd taken their beds outside the tent. Sometimes they gave up
altogether, and went to lie in the shallows, where the small waves, gleaming
with phosphorescent light, broke over them.
Rivers had become obsessed by Emele. Wherever he was,
whatever he was doing, the thought of the woman cramped inside the enclosure,
inside the hut, followed him until he saw every other aspect of life on the
island in the shadow of her imprisonment.
In the mornings he would go down to bathe and watch
the canoes go out, foam flashing from the paddles, a wordless song drifting
across the water:
'Aie,
aie, aie
.' All vowel sounds, it seemed to be, no consonants.
And then the smack of water being slapped to lure bonito into the
nets.
It was still idyllic. His own happiness did not lessen,
but always, now, there were these two points of darkness: Emele cramped in her
enclosure; Ngea rotting in his
era.
Once he walked up
the path on the other side of the beach, unable to explain his desire to see
Ngea, for the facts of physical decomposition neither fascinated nor frightened
him. A corpse was something one buried or dissected.
Nothing
more.
And yet he needed to see Ngea.
The smell reached him when he was no more than half
way up the path. He pinched his nostrils, breathing through his open mouth, but
even so a few yards further on he had to abandon the attempt. A black cloud of
flies, so dense it looked solid, rose at his approach, heat made audible. He
backed away, as much as anything because they reminded him of the bats in the
cave, and that experience, the sense of being unshelled, peeled in some way,
that had seemed so positive at the time, now made him afraid. He was open to
whatever might happen in this place, open in the way that a child is, since no
previous experience was relevant.
The heat continued. From mid-afternoon onwards there
was a curious bronze light in the sky, which became brownish towards evening,
as if even the air were singed. Occasional flicks of wind teased the outermost
branches of the trees, but did not disturb the intense brooding stillness.
Rivers slept uneasily, waking finally at 'fowl-he-sing-out',
aware of having heard a new and different sound. He lay and listened and was
just about to turn over and try to snatch an extra hour when it came again: the
brazen blare of a conch shell.
He was on his feet and outside the tent in a matter of
minutes. The bush distorted sounds, bouncing echoes back, but then he was aware
of the crash of hurrying footsteps through the undergrowth, people running down
to the beach. He shook Hocart awake, and followed the crowd, holding back a
little, not knowing how secret this was, or how much it might matter that he
was witnessing it.
He saw Njiru at the water's edge, draped in a white
cloth, with a staff in his hand, looking out over the bay.
A canoe was heading in, quickly, paddled by Lembu, and
in the stern was a bundle of some kind. He was too far away to see what it was,
but an
ah
went up from the crowd, and suddenly, the
women and girls began running into the sea, prancing like horses until they
reached a depth where they could cast themselves forward and swim. Clinging to
the canoe's side, they escorted it into the shallow water, and Lembu got out,
everything about him shining, teeth, hair, eyes, skin, and hauled the canoe up
the beach. He walked back to the stern,
unwrapped
the
bundle, and dragged the contents out on to the sand.
A small
boy about four years old.
Rivers walked down to the canoe, since nobody seemed
to care whether he saw this or not. The child's face was tear-stained, streaked
with dirt and snot. He was not actually crying now, though irregular hiccups
shook his thin chest. As people surged towards him and stared, he moved closer
to his captor, resting one grubby hand on Lembu's naked thigh.
Rivers went up to Njiru. 'Is that your head?' he
asked, unaware that he spoke English, not pidgin.
'Yes,' Njiru said steadily.
He took the child from Lembu and, surrounded by
excited, smiling people, carried him up the beach path to the village. Rivers
followed, but kept well back as the crowd gathered outside Ngea's hall. Lembu
blew the conch as they entered the village, and again inside the hall. After a
while Emele emerged, hobbling, resting her arms on the shoulders of Taru and
Nali. Lembu and Njiru followed her out, and there was general rejoicing, except
from the small boy, who stood alone at the centre of the throng, his eyes like
black bubbles that at any moment might burst.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
4 October 1918
What can one say? And yet I've got to write something
because however little I remember now I'll remember less in years to come. And
it's not true to say one remembers nothing. A lot of it you know you'll never
forget, and a few things you'll pray to forget and not be able to. But the
connections go. Bubbles break on the surface like they do on the flooded
craters round here—the ones that've been here years and have God knows what
underneath.
The night of I
think
the 1st (dates go
too) we lay all night in a trench one foot deep—the reward of success because
this was a
German
trench. Another reward of success was that we had no
British troops on our
left,
we'd raced ahead of them
all. I think I'm right in saying we were the only units that broke through the
Hindenburg line
and
maintained the position. It was dark, early evening, deep
black, and we expected a counter-attack at dawn. Until then there was nothing
to do but wait, both intolerably cramped and intolerably exposed, enfilading
machine-gun fire on three sides. 'Cramped' isn't a figure of speech either. The
trench was hardly more than a scraping in the earth. Any careless movement and
you'd had it. And for a lot of the time we wore gas masks, because there'd been
a very heavy gas barrage put down by our side and it lingered. The whole area
smelled like a failed suicide attempt, and I kept hearing Sarah's voice saying
about Johnny,
It was our own gas, our own bloody gas.
In spite of all the
drills some of the men were slow to put their masks on, one or two had bad
reactions, and then Oakshott decided to have a panic attack. I crawled along to
him, not past people, over them, one eel wriggling across the others in the
tank, and tried to calm him down. I remember at one point I burst out laughing,
can't remember why, but it did me good. There's a kind of angry laughter that
gets you back to the centre of yourself. I shared a bar of chocolate with
Longstaffe and we huddled together under my greatcoat and tried to keep warm.
And then the counter-attack came.
Two bubbles break here.
Longstaffe
sliding back into the trench with a red hole in his forehead and an expression
of mild surprise on his face.
And the bayonet work.
Which
I will not remember.
Rivers would say, remember
now
—any
suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to
think's the only way I can survive and anyway what future?
The whole thing was breakdown territory, as defined by
Rivers.
Confined space, immobility, helplessness, passivity,
constant danger that you can do nothing to avert.
But my nerves seem to
be all right.
Or at least no worse than anybody else's.
All our minds are in flight, each man tries to reach his own accommodation with
what he saw. What he did. But on the surface it's all jollity. We're marching
back
,
through the same desolation, but towards safety. Another battalion has
leap-frogged us into the line. And every time my right foot hits the ground I
say,
over, over, over.
Because the war's coming to an end, and we all
know it, and it's coming to an end partly because of what we did.
We
broke through.
We
held the position.