He was by far the best interpreter and – when he chose – the most reliable informant, capable of making rigorous distinctions between what he knew and what he merely supposed, between evidence and hypothesis. But he did not generally choose to share information. If knowledge was power, then Njiru kept a firm grasp on his. Indeed, at first he would do no more than translate passively what others said. In particular, he acted as interpreter between Rivers and Rinambesi.
Rinambesi was the oldest man on the island, the liveliest, and, after Njiru, the most vigorous. He seemed immune to the apathy and depression that many of the younger islanders seemed to feel, perhaps because he lived so much in the glories of the past. Like very old people the world over, he was hazy about yesterday’s events, but vividly remembered the triumphs of his youth. He’d been a great head-hunter once, ferocious enough to have secured the rare privilege of a second wife. His memory for the genealogies of the islanders was phenomenal, and this was chiefly what brought Rivers to him. And yet, time and time again, the flow of information faltered, though it was not immediately obvious why.
Sexual intercourse between unmarried young people was very free, though ‘free’ was perhaps the wrong word, since every act had to be preceded by a payment of shells by the young man to the girl’s parents. After marriage complete fidelity was required, and one expression of this was that one must never utter the name of an ex-lover.
All the women’s names in Rinambesi’s generation had to be left blank. Looking at the row of cards in front of him, Rivers turned to Njiru. ‘This fellow make fuck-fuck all women?’
A gleam of amusement. ‘Yes.’
Rivers threw the pencil down. Rinambesi, grinning toothlessly, was making a deeply unsuccessful attempt to look modest. Rivers started to laugh and after a moment Njiru joined in, a curious moment of kinship across the gulf of culture.
A thread-like wail from the baby Njiru held in his hands, one palm cradling the head, the other the buttocks, a morsel of black-eyed misery squirming in between.
Her name was Kwini and her mother was dead. Worse than that, she’d died in childbirth, which made her an evil spirit, likely to attempt to reclaim her child. The body had been dumped at sea, a bundle of rags strapped between the breasts to fool the mother into thinking she had her baby with her, but still … Kwini’s failure to thrive was attributed to her mother’s attempts to get her back.
She certainly wasn’t thriving: skin hung in loose folds from her thighs. Rivers looked round the circle at her grandmother’s wrinkled dugs, the flat chest of her nine-year-old sister, the highly developed pectoral muscles of her father. He asked what she was being fed on. Mashed-up yams softened by spit was the answer. The tiny hands clawed the air as if she would wring life out of it.
Njiru passed the leaves he was holding several times between his legs and then, stretching to his full height, attached them to the rafters at the gable end, where the scare ghost shivered in the draught. ‘Come down and depart, you ghost, her mother; do not haunt this child and let her live.’
‘Will she live?’ Rivers asked.
He had his own opinion, but wanted to know what Njiru would say. Njiru spread his hands.
On their way back to Narovo, Rivers questioned him about the ghosts of women who died in childbirth. This was not a rare form of death, since the custom was for women to give birth alone, and there was no tradition of midwifery. Such ghosts could not be named, he already knew that. In the genealogies they were referred to as evil spirits. It had startled him at first to be told quite casually that such and such a man had married ‘an evil spirit’.
They were called tomate pa na savo – the ghosts of the confining house – Njiru explained, and they were dreaded, since their chief aim was to ensure that as many other women as possible should die in the same way.
One ghost in particular inspired dread: Ange Mate. She was more powerful, more vengeful than any other ghost of the confining house. Rivers had been taken to see Ange Mate’s well, a hole in the ground which had once been a living spring, now choked with coconut husks. Still, he sensed there was something more that Njiru was reluctant to tell him. ‘What does she do?’ he wanted to know. It puzzled him that the men were obviously frightened of her, if it were true that the tomate pa na savo selected women as their victims.
Reluctantly, Njiru said she lay in wait for men, particularly for men who fell asleep on the beach at Pa Njale. ‘But what does she do?’ A ripple of amusement among Njiru’s retinue, a strange response in view of the obvious terror she inspired. Then he guessed. When Ange Mate came upon a man sleeping she forced him to have sex with her. ‘Is he good-fellow after?’ Rivers asked.
No, seemed to be the answer, he suffered from a long list of complaints, not the least of which was a disappearing penis. Rivers would have liked to ask about the psychological effects, but that was almost impossible. The language of introspection was simply not available.
By the time they reached Narovo, the sun was low in the sky. Rivers went down to the beach, following the narrow bush path that petered out into fine white sand. Hocart’s head was a dark sleek ball, far out, but then he saw Rivers, waved and shouted.
Slowly Rivers waded out, looking down, rather liking the dislocation the refraction of the light produced, the misalignment of knees and feet. As usual he was joined by a shoal of little darting black fish who piloted him out into deeper waters – always a moment of absolute magic. Behind him, the bluish shadows of rocks crept over the white sand.
After their swim they lay in the shallows, talking over the events of the day. In the rough division of labour they’d mapped out between them, death, funerary rites and skull houses belonged to Hocart, ghosts, sex, marriage and kinship to Rivers, but it had already become clear that no division really made sense. Each of them was constantly acquiring information relating to one of the other’s specialities.
Hocart, though, was in a mood to tease. ‘Why’ve I got death when you’ve got sex?’ he wanted to know. ‘Ghosts and sex don’t go together. Now ghosts and death…’
‘All right, you can have ghosts.’
‘No…’ Hocart began, and then laughed.
Not true anyway, Rivers thought. On Eddystone ghosts and sex did go together, or so at least it must seem to men who fell asleep on the beach at Pa Njale and woke between the ravening thighs of Ange Mate.
They lay in silence, almost too lazy to speak, as the shadows lengthened and the sun began its precipitate descent. Nightfall on Eddystone was abrupt, as if some positive force of darkness in the waters of the bay had risen up and swallowed the sun. At last, driven back to shore by the cooling water, they snatched up their clothes and ran, laughing, back to the tent.
Mbuko was dying of a disease caused by the spirits of Kita, and had no more than a few hours to live.
Kita, Njiru explained, causes a man to waste away ‘till he too small all bone he got no meat’. Certainly Mbuko could not have been more emaciated. He looked more like an anatomical drawing than a man, except for the persistent flutter of his heart under the stretched skin. He lay on the raised wooden platform that was used for sleeping, though nobody else now slept in the hut. Njiru said they were afraid. Outside, bright sunshine, people coming and going. Now and then a neighbour would look in to see if he were still alive. ‘Soon,’ the people sitting round would say, indifferently, shaking their heads. Some were obviously amused or repelled by his plight. ‘Rakiana’ was the word one heard over and over again. Rakiana. Thin.
Even Njiru who, within the framework of his culture, was a compassionate man (and we can none of us claim more, Rivers thought), seemed to feel, not indifference or contempt exactly, but that Mbuko had become merely a problem to be solved. Njiru looked across the barely breathing heap of bones at Rivers and said, ‘Mate.’
‘Mate’ in all the dictionaries was translated as ‘dead’.
‘No mate,’ Rivers said, breathing deeply and pointing to Mbuko’s chest.
There and then,
across the dying man, he received a tutorial, not unlike those he remembered from his student days in Bart’s. Mate did not mean dead, it designated a state of which death was the appropriate outcome. Mbuko was mate because he was critically ill. Rinambesi, though quite disgustingly healthy, still with a keen eye for the girls, was also mate because he’d lived to an age when if he wasn’t dead he damn well ought to be. The term for actual death, the moment when the sagena – here Njiru breathed in, slapping his belly in the region of the diaphragm – the ‘something he stop long belly’ departed, was mate ndapu. In pidgin, ‘die finish’. ‘Was the sagena the same as the soul?’ Rivers wanted to know. ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Njiru snapped, nostrils flaring with impatience. Oh God, it was Bart’s all over again. Heaven help the unsuspecting public when we let you loose on them. The problem with Mbuko, Njiru pressed on, as with all those who fell into the power of Kita, was that he couldn’t die. He seemed to be making a very creditable stab at it, Rivers thought rebelliously. Kita could ‘make him small’, but not kill him. ‘Kita pausia,’ Njiru said, stroking Mbuko. ‘Kita loves him?’ Rivers suggested. No, Njiru would know the word. Kita was nursing him.
Njiru hung malanjari leaves from the gable end of the hut where the scare ghost shivered in the draught, and began chanting the prayer of exorcism. His shadow came and went across the dying man’s face. At one point Rivers got cramp in his legs and tried to stand up, but the people on either side of him pulled him down. He must not walk under the malanjari leaves, they said, or he would waste away and become like Mbuko.
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.’
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 peacetime, 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 chocolat
e, Prior leaning against the wall, Hallet sitting cross-legged on his sleeping-bag, both of them staring round like bigeyed 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.