The Ghost Road (3 page)

Authors: Pat Barker

Moffet had looked at him as if he'd just been accused
of eating peas from a knife. 'One is not a pacifist.'

He'd tried everything with Moffet. No, he hadn't.

He'd not, for example, tried attaching electrodes to
Moffet's legs and throwing the switch, as Dr Yealland would certainly have done
by now. He'd not held tubes of radium against his skin till it burnt. He'd not
given him subcutaneous injections of ether. All these things were being done to
get men back to the Front or keep them there. He'd not even hypnotized him.
What he'd actually tried was reason. He didn't
like
what he was going to
do now, but it had become apparent that, until Moffet's reliance on the
physical symptom was broken, no more rational approach stood any chance of
working.

'You understand what I'm going to do?' he asked.

'I
know
what you're going to do.'

Rivers smiled. 'Tell me, then.'

'Well, as far as I can make out,
you... er...
intend
to draw...'
Minute muscles twitched round Moffet's nose and lips, giving him the look of a
supercilious rabbit. '
Stocking
tops?
On my legs, here.'
With delicately
pointed fingers he traced two lines across the tops of his thighs. 'And then,
gradually, day by day, you propose
to... um...
lower
the stockings, and as the stockings are
unrolled
, so to speak,
the... er...
paralysis
will...'
A positive orgy of twitching.
'Retreat.'

'That's right.'

Moffet's voice drooled contempt. 'And you have no
doubt this procedure will work?'

Rivers looked into the pupils of his eyes so intently
that for a moment he registered no colour except black.
'None
whatsoever.'

Moffet stared at him,
then
turned away.

'Shall we get started?' Rivers lifted Moffet's left
leg and began to draw a thick black line on to his skin, two inches below the
fold of the groin.

'I hope that's not indelible.'

'Of course it's not. I'm going to have to wash it off
in the morning.'

Rivers looked at the length of Moffet's legs and tried
to calculate how long it was going to take him to reach the toes. Two weeks?
And that would have to include Sundays, which put paid to his plans for a
weekend in Ramsgate with his sisters. Katharine was far from well; in fact she
was virtually bedridden and for much the same reasons as Moffet. Rivers frowned
with concentration as he carried the pencil line under the thigh. Moffet's
flabby skin kept snagging the pencil point.

Elliot Smith's comment on the serpent: 'That's
interesting.' It was no more than he'd thought himself. Evidently snakes had
lost the right to be simply snakes. Dodgson had hated them, a quite
exceptionally intense hatred, and the woods round Knowles Bank were full of
them, particularly in spring when you regularly stumbled across knots of
adders, as many as thirty or forty sometimes, drowsy from their winter sleep.
They'd gone for a walk once, the whole family, Ethel and Katharine holding
Dodgson's hands, himself and Charles trailing behind, imitating his rather
prissy, constipated-hen walk, though careful not to let their father catch them
at it. They rounded a bend, Dodgson and the girls leading, and there, right in
the centre of the path, was a snake.
Zigzag markings, black
on yellow, orange eyes, forked tongue flickering out of that wide, cynical
(anthropomorphic rubbish) mouth.
Dodgson went white. He sat down,
collapsed rather, on a tree stump and the girls fanned him with their hats,
while father caught the snake in a cleft stick and threw it far away, a black
s
against the sky unravelling as it fell.

Later he went back to look for it, spending an hour
searching through the flamy bracken, but only found a cast-off skin draped over
a stone, transparent, the brilliant markings faded, the ghost of a snake.

Why was the devil shown in the form of a snake?
he
asked his father, because it was the only question he
knew how to ask.

Later there'd been other questions, other ways of
finding answers. Once, while he was home for the weekend, Katharine sat on an
adder, and ran home screaming. He'd gone straight out and killed it, or so he
thought, intending to dissect it at Bart's. Finding the family in the
drawing-room, he'd tipped the snake out on to the hearthrug to show them, and
found
himself
confronted by an adder that was very far
from dead. The girls screamed and hid behind the sofa, while he and his father
and Charles trampled it to death.

How do you think about an incident like that
now?
he
wondered, beginning the second circle. Probably every
generation thinks the world of its youth has been changed past recognition, but
he thought for his generation—Moffet's too, of course—the task of making
meaningful connections was quite unusually difficult. A good deal of innocence
had been lost in recent years. Not all of it on battlefields.

He lowered Moffet's leg and walked round the bed. From
here he could see, through a gap in the screens, the drawings of Alice.
Suddenly, with Moffet's paralysed leg clamped to his side as he closed the
circle, Rivers saw the drawings not as an irrelevance, left over from the days
when this had been a children's ward, but as cruelly, savagely appropriate.
All those bodily transformations causing all those problems.
But they solved
them too.
Alice in Hysterialand.

'There,' he said, putting the leg down. 'Now can you
prop yourself up a bit?'

Moffet raised himself on to his elbows and looked down
at his legs. 'Quite apart from anything else,' he said, enunciating each word
distinctly, 'it looks bloody obscene.'

Rivers looked down. 'Ye-es,' he agreed. 'But it won't
when we get below the knee. And
tomorrow
the sensation in
this area'—he measured it out with his forefingers—'will be normal.'

Their eyes met. Moffet would have liked to deny it was
possible, but his gaze shifted. He'd already begun to invest the circles with
power.

Rivers touched his shoulder. 'See you tomorrow
morning,' he said.

Quickly, he ran downstairs and plunged into the warren
of corridors, wondering if he'd have time to read the files on the new patients
before the first of them arrived for his appointment. He glanced at his watch,
and something about the action tweaked his memory. Now that
would
be 'interesting', he thought. An innocent young boy becomes aware that he is
the object of an adult's abnormal affection. Put bluntly, the Rev. Charles
Do-do-do-do-Dodgson can't keep his hands off him,
but
—thanks to that
gentleman's formidable conscience—nothing untoward occurs. The years pass,
puberty arrives, friendship fades. In the adult life of that child no
abnormality appears, except perhaps for a certain difficulty in integrating the
sexual drive with the rest of the personality (What do you mean 'perhaps'? he
asked himself), until, in middle age, the patient begins to suffer from the
delusion that he is turning into an extremely large, eccentrically dressed
white rabbit, forever running down corridors consulting its watch. What a case
history. Pity it didn't happen, he thought, pushing the door of his
consulting-room open, it would account for quite a lot.

He thought, sometimes, he understood Katharine's
childhood better than his own.

Cheshire
Cat
! Cheshire
Cat
!
he
and Charles had chanted
as she sat enthroned in Dodgson's lap, grinning from ear to ear. The nickname,
so casually bestowed, had lasted all her childhood, and his only consolation
was she hadn't minded it a bit. Poor Kath, she'd had little enough to smile
about since.

Files
, he told himself. He took them out of his briefcase
and started to read.
Geoffrey Wansbeck, twenty-two years old.
Wansbeck had—well,
murdered
,
he supposed the word would have to be—a German prisoner, for no better reason
(Wansbeck said) than that he was feeling tired and irritable and resented
having to escort the man back from the line.
For...
eight months—in fact, nearer ten—he'd experienced no remorse, but then, while
in hospital recovering from a minor wound, he'd started to suffer from
hypnagogic hallucinations in which he would wake suddenly to find the dead
German standing by his bed. Always, accompanying the visual
hallucination,
would be the reek of decomposition. After a few weeks the olfactory
hallucination began to occur independently, only now the smell seemed to
emanate from Wansbeck himself. He was convinced others could smell it and, no
matter how often he was reassured, avoided close contact with other people as
much as he could.

Hmm.
Rivers took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes,
swinging his chair round to face the window.

He'd had a bad night and was finding it difficult to
concentrate. Late August sunlight, the colour of cider, streamed into the room,
and he was suddenly seized by sadness, a banal, calendar-dictated sadness, for
the past summer and all the summers that were past.

At dinner one evening Mr Dodgson had leant across to
mother and said, 'I l-l-l-love all ch-ch-ch-ch-'

'Train won't start,' Charles had whispered.

'Children, M-Mrs R-Rivers, as l-l-l-long as they're
g-g-g-girls.'

He had looked down the table at the two boys, and it
had seemed to Rivers that the sheer force of his animosity had loosened his
tongue.

'Boys are a mistake'

Charles hadn't minded that Mr Dodgson disliked them,
but
he
had. Mr Dodgson was the first adult he'd met who stammered as
badly as he did himself, and the rejection hurt.

'Are w-we
a
m-m-m-m-mistake?'
he'd asked his mother at bedtime. 'W-why are w-we?'

'Of course you're not a mistake,' his mother had said,
smoothing the hair back from his forehead.

'So w-why d-d-does h-
he
s-say
w-w-w-w-we are?'

'I expect he just likes girls more than boys.'

'B-b-b-b-but w-w-why d-d-does he?'

* * *

Wansbeck's eyes were inflamed, whether from crying or
because of his cold was difficult to tell.

Rivers waited for the latest paroxysm of coughing to
pass. 'You know we don't
have
to do this now. I can equally well see you when you're
feeling better.'

Wansbeck wiped his raw nose on the back of his hand.
'No, I'd rather get it over with.' He shifted in his seat, flicking his tongue
over cracked lips, and gazed fretfully round the room. 'Do you think we could
have the window open?'

Rivers looked surprised—in spite of the sunshine, the
wind was bitingly cold—but he got up and opened the window, realizing, as he
did so, that Wansbeck's request was prompted by his fear of the smell. The
breeze sucked the net curtains through the gap. Rivers went back to his chair
and waited.

'I used a bayonet I found on a corpse. We were going
through a wood, and there'd been a lot of heavy fighting. I remember the man I
took it from, he'd died with an expression of absolute agony on his face. Big
man, very dark, lot of blood round his nose, black, covered with flies, a sort
of...
buzzing moustache. I remember him better than the man
I killed. He was walking ahead of
me,
I couldn't do it
in his back, so I shouted at him to turn round. He knew straight away. I stuck
it in, and he screamed,
and... I
pulled it out, and stuck it in.
And again.
And again.
He was on the
ground and it was easier. He kept saying, "
Bitte, Bitte
," and
putting his
hands...'
Wansbeck raised
his
own
, palms outwards. 'The odd thing was I heard it in English.
Bitter, bitter.
I knew the word, but I didn't register what
it meant.'