The Ghost Road by Pat Barker Page B

occasions
when it was necessary to extract the maximum amount of information quickly. The
first question was always: Suppose you were lucky enough to find a guinea, with whom would you share it? This produced a list of
names, names which he would then ask them to translate into kinship terms. And
from there one could move to virtually any aspect of their society.
    When he sensed
they were getting tired he paid them their tobacco sticks and stood up to go,
but then one of the women caught his arm and pulled him down again. Poking him
playfully in the chest, she retrieved two words of English from her small
store: 'Your turn.'
    The questions
were posed again and in the same order. When he told them that, since he was
unmarried and had no children, he would not necessarily feel obliged to share
his guinea with anybody, they at first refused to believe him. Had he no
parents living? Yes, a father. Brothers and sisters? One brother, two sisters. Same mother, same father? Yes. But
he would not automatically share the guinea with them, though he might choose to do so.
    The woman who'd
pulled his arm looked amused at first, then, when she was sure she'd
understood, horrified. And so it went on. Because the questions were very
carefully chosen, they gradually formed an impression—and not a vague
impression either, in some respects quite precise—of the life of a bachelor don
in a Cambridge college. Hilarity was the main response. And
if the questions had led on to more intimate territory? If he'd been
able, or willing, to laybefore them the whole
constricting business of trying to fit into society, of living under and around
and outside the law, what would have been their reaction then? Laughter. They'd have gone on laughing. They would not have
known how to pity him. He looked up, at the blue, empty sky, and realized that
their view of his society was neither more nor less valid than his of
theirs. No bearded elderly white man looked down on them, endorsing one set of
values and condemning the other. And with that realization, the whole frame of
social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned—and sane—collapsed,
and for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed
people. A condition of absolute free-fall.
    Then, next day,
after a restless night, he and Hocart transferred to a tramp steamer for the
last stage of the journey, and there he met the logical end product of the
process of free-fall—the splat on the pavement, as it were—Brennan.
     
    * * *
     
    Smells of engine
oil and copra, of sweaty human beings sleeping too close together in the little
covered cabin on deck. Above their heads, offering no clear reference point
to northern eyes, foreign constellations wheeled and turned.
    Brennan slept
opposite, his profile, under a fringe of greying curls, like that of a Roman
emperor's favourite run to seed. He snored, gargled, stopped breathing, gargled
again, muttered a protest as if he thought somebody
else had woken him, returned to sleep. On the other side of the cabin was
Father Michael, trailing behind him the atmosphere of thetheological college he'd not long left behind—cups of cocoa and late-night
discussions on chastity in other people's bedrooms. Then
Hocart, looking much younger than twenty-five, his upper lip pouting on every
breath.
    Rivers supposed
he must have slept eventually, though it seemed no time at all before they were
stretching and stumbling out on deck.
    The deckhands,
emerging from their airless hellhole next to the engine, swabbed passengers
down along with the deck. They finished off with a bucket of cold water thrown
full into the face so that one was left gasping and blinded. Brennan stood,
eyes closed, one hand resting between his plump breasts, a hirsute Aphrodite,
water dripping from his nose, his foreskin, the hairs on his wrinkled and baggy
scrotum. It was impossible to dislike somebody who brought such enormous zest
to the minute-by-minute business of