Rushing to Paradise Read online

  ‘We want you to get better, Neil,’ Dr Barbara told him as she drew the sheet down to his waist. ‘You’ve always done so much for the sanctuary. Now promise me that you won’t get up again.’

  ‘It’s good for me to get up.’ Neil tried to settle his aching head into the damp cavity left in the pillow by Professor Saito. ‘I feel better when I’m walking around. Anyway, I wanted to help Mrs Saito.’

  ‘You frightened her badly. Her nerves have been rather stretched recently. I worry for Mrs Saito, as I worry for all of us - I hope we’re equal to the demands we’ll face.’

  ‘I am, Dr Barbara.’

  ‘I know you are. But I want you to stay here until you’re well again.’

  ‘Will I be well again?’ Neil turned to see her response, and a wave of vertigo swayed through his brain like a giddy wind. He felt both cold and feverish,

  as if he were swimming through the confused waters of the lagoon where.. the deep currents met.

  ‘Sometimes I think - ‘Of course you’ll be well again. I’ll always look after you, Neil.’ She sat lightly on the bed, her head inside the mosquito net, sharing this damp bower in which two of her patients had already died. Neil liked her to sit beside him, as she had done during their days together in the weather-station, surrounded by the white plumage shed by the albatross. The threat of the French return and the prospect of the sanctuary’s end had drained the colour from her skin, exposing the insect bites that stared from her cheeks and forehead like semaphores of alarm. Outward ly she seemed calm and almost serene, as if she had decided to reject the possibility of failure. Her enlarged pupils worried Neil, and when she reached to the bedside table and took the syringe from the kidney basin he almost expected that she would inject herself.

  ‘Turn over, Neil.’ She spoke softly, in a voice she might have used with a docile elderly patient. ‘Time for your medicine. This will make you feel better.’

  Neil bared his left buttock to the needle, dreading the fierce local reaction that always followed the injections. He closed his eyes as Dr Barbara searched among the old entry points.

  ‘Exactly what is the medicine, doctor? It usually makes me feel worse.’

  ‘Medicines often do - the best medicines. This one will cool your blood, and make the fever go away. Now, toes curl..

  Neil felt the needle sink through his skin. The plunger moved under the pressure of Dr Barbara’s strong fingers, but a tic jumped across the muscle in her nose, twitching her left nostril, as if she were re-calculating the dosage. Her fingers took over, forcing the plunger to its base.

  ‘Is this the fever that Professor Saito caught?’ Neil asked. He lay on his side, as the sweat ran from his face onto the pillow, and let his hand rest against her thigh. ‘And Monique’s father?’

  ‘That’s it. A rare fly-fever, local to Saint-Esprit. But you’re much stronger than Professor Saito.’

  ‘So the albatross might catch it?’

  ‘Perhaps they will.’ Dr Barbara returned the syringe to the kidney dish and massaged Neil’s hip. ‘You’ll sleep soon and dream about them - I often hear you talking to the birds.’ Neil looked up at her steely but vacant eyes. She smiled in a lopsided way, like a long-term psychiatric patient, and he sensed that part of her mind had left her and gone to live on the wind with the great white birds.

  ‘Dr Barbara - why do only men catch the fever? None of the women have been sick.’

  ‘That’s true. But in many ways men are weaker than women.

  They haven’t our resistance. Still, Mrs Saito hasn’t been very well. I think she might fall ill soon.’

  ‘I think she might… and the Swedish wives.’ Neil stopped himself, confused by the deviant logic that ran through their conversation. The sound of the women’s voices by the mess-tent warned him that he was now the only adult male on the island.

  ‘What about the French, doctor? They’ll land soon, won’t they?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. This is their place of death. The sanctuary is too much of a rival for them.’

  ‘And David?’ He decided not to mention the scuttled yacht, reluctant to undermine Dr Barbara’s calm resolve. ‘He might come back to help us.’

  ‘I doubt it, Neil - he’d done all he could here.’

  ‘He was very tired. Like Kimo and Professor Saito.’

  ‘Exactly. It was a kindness to let him go.’

  ‘They were all very tired.’ He waited as an attack of nausea rolled by like the waves washing through the wreck of the Dugong. When it passed, he asked: ‘Why do the men get so tired?’

  ‘It’s… hard to explain. Men do tire easily. I’ve been a doctor for a long time, Neil, and as a whole men aren’t very well.’

  ‘Can’t you make them better? Treat them with your medicine?’

  ‘I have tried. But men carry a weakness they’ve borne with them from the past. Their genes have been poisoned by all that aggression and competition, so they’re like soldiers who have seen too much of battle. We need to let them rest.’

  ‘Where, doctor?’ Neil tried to address his mind to this vast recreational problem. ‘There are an awful lot of men around.’

  ‘We can always find somewhere for them.’ Dr Barbara was watching Neil in her kindliest way, as if mentally assign ing him some quiet sward where he could convalesce for ever. ‘Men exhausted themselves building the world. Like tired children they’re always fighting each other, and they can’t see how they hurt themselves. It’s the women’s turn to take over now - we’re the only ones with the strength to go on.

  Think of all-women cities, Neil, parks and streets filled with women..

  ‘Like Saint-Esprit, doctor?’

  ‘Yes, like Saint-Esprit. A sanctuary isn’t a place for the weak, it’s a place for the strong. I’ve tried to set an example here, but I’m not sure now.

  Perhaps even women aren’t strong enough. We’ve given too much, too much of everything, and especially too much love. Now it’s the end of love.’ Despite his fever, Neil gripped her hand, wanting to reassure her. ‘I’ll stay with you, Dr Barbara. I won’t ever leave.’

  ‘No, Neil. You’ll stay here.’ Her hand touched his forehead.

  ‘You’ll stay on Saint-Esprit forever.’

  Another air-raid alert was taking place. Supervised by Mrs Saito, the women ran from the mess-tent and took up their positions at fifty-yard intervals down the runway, striking the empty fuel drums with their machetes. Too tired to think in the clamour, Neil stood in the crushing sunlight outside the door of Dr Barbara’s office. Scarcely able to breathe, he held his rib-cage between his hands, trying to force the air into his lungs. He could hear his erratic heart pounding against his breast-bone, its rhythm confused by the drum-beating women. Sweat streamed down his thighs, and he felt more ill than at any time since the start of the fever. He wanted to call Dr Barbara, but she was striding towards the runway, arms raised proudly to the banners.

  Determined to leave his sick-bed for as long as he had the strength to stand, Neil fastened the kimono around himself and shuffled to the nearest of the animal enclosures. Almost all the creatures had gone, but two lemurs cowered among the debris in their den. Once Neil’s pride, the spectral creatures backed away from him, as if aware that they were only a few steps from the evening’s menu.

  In the next enclosure a solitary peccary snuffled up to Neil, hungry for its feed. The hog-like beast danced around him, snout jabbing his ankles, trotters scattering its calcified droppings. In its search for food it had attacked the wire fence, beyond which Dr Barbara’s private garden sloped upwards to the forest wall.

  Neil leaned against the fence, pressing his inflamed forehead to the wooden post. Despite the excitements of the past days, Dr Barbara had been busy in the garden, digging more beds for the flowers she hoped to plant, apparently confident that she would remain on Saint-Esprit. One of the beds had been completed that morning, the broken soil still dark with the night’s rain. Her spade rested against the canvas chair, a straw hat
over its handle.

  The peccary nudged Neil’s legs, fretting to be let into the garden, nostrils scenting a treasure of insects in the damp earth.

  Neil ignored the creature and stared at the straw hat, a man’s expensive panama that he had never seen Dr Barbara wear. The rotting brim had been patched with strips of raffia, and he remembered David Canine sitting beside the radio-cabin, threading the fibres into the scarecrow bonnet.

  Had he bequeathed Dr Barbara this tattered relic before leaving with the two Swedish husbands? As his fever ebbed for a brief moment, Neil parted the barbed wire and stepped through the fence. The peccary squealed past him, ripping its coarse pelt on the wire, and raced towards the flower-beds.

  Neil paused by the deck-chair, recognizing David’s hat. Beside the newest of the flower-beds a shallow grave had been exca vated. On its damp floor, two feet below the surface, lay a parcel of Neil’s clothing, a faded shirt and cotton

  shorts, and the leather belt with the royal Hawaiian crest that Kimo had given to him.

  Curious why Dr Barbara had decided that he would never need his clothes again, Neil drew the kimono around his chest.

  He assumed that she intended to destroy the germ-laden fabric, though she had allowed Neil to wear the garments until he had collapsed under the mosquito net in the clinic.

  Lilies grew from the flower-beds in the garden, trampled by the peccary as it rooted in the soft soil, dragging at the tags of cloth that its snout had uncovered. Excited by its finds, it raced back to Neil and licked the salty sweat from his knees, then scuttled away to tug at a rubber-cleated boot that emerged from the ground.

  All over the garden the disturbed flower-beds were waking their secret sleepers. Neil gripped the spade and began to loosen the soil around the boot. Its pair emerged, followed by a man’s linen trousers, the calves stained with blood.

  Neil brushed away the sandy earth, still hoping that Dr Barbara had chosen to bury this contaminated clothing rather than burn it in the clinic’s incinerator.

  “But the boots and trousers contained a man’s legs, blond hairs stiffening in the sunlight. Scattering the soil across the bemused peccary, Neil uncovered the arms and face of the younger of the Swedish yachtsmen. He lay back on the corpse of the older husband, whose hands gripped his waist, as if hitching a ride into the grave.

  A long-limbed man lay in the adjacent flower-bed, wearing the camouflage trousers and French combat boots that had once made Canine a figure of ridicule.

  The American’s eyes were closed in a frown, nervous of the soil that covered his cheeks, and his hands were clasped around the Swedes’ video-camera. Neil could imagine him standing by the graves, unsure whether to film the macabre scene for Dr Barbara and never realizing that he was about to become part of it.

  Seizing the spade, Neil heaped the soil into Carline’s face, covering his last grimace. As he swayed among the dead men he was aware of the camera-towers watching him across the lagoon.

  The old bunkers had been denied their nuclear finale, but were making do with these few small deaths and another yet to come.

  The albatross sailed over the banners proclaiming their safety on Saint-Esprit. The women struck the steel drums with their machetes, but Dr Barbara was trying to silence them. She stood on the steps of the clinic, the kidney dish in one hand, searching the plant laboratory and the animal enclosures for any sign of Neil.

  Neil threw the spade into Carline’s grave and climbed the slope to the trees that formed the rear wall of the garden. While he forced the loose wire from its posts the peccary was dragging a human hand from the soil. The muddy fingers rose through the trampled lilies, trying to clasp the sky. As the fever flooded his brain Neil stripped the kimono from his shoulders and ran naked into the safety of the forest.

  A Gift to a Death

  THE BIRDS WERE STARTING TO DIE. While Neil lay in the deep ferns beside the runway he counted three of the dead albatross on the landing pier, their dishevelled wings hanging through the wooden slats. A fourth bird tottered past them, flat eyes staring at the lagoon. Too exhausted to take to the air, it sat glumly on the iron railing, unable to read the sky. A dozen of the creatures lay on the bonfire beside the radio-cabin, their wilting plumage like flowers on a funeral pyre.

  Could he eat the albatross? Thinking of their oily flesh, and the cruel malady that now swept the colony, Neil fixed his eyes on the trestle table outside the kitchen. Three freshly baked loaves of coarse white bread steamed on an oven tray where Inger had left them to cool. Already a small, crimson-hooded honeyeater

  which had escaped from the aviary was watching from a nearby tree, as hungry as Neil.

  Inger moved cumbersomely around the kitchen, hefting her abdomen as if already pushing a pram, and washed her arms in a canvas bucket. The camp was silent, and few of the women had stirred from their sleeping bags. Neil stepped from the ferns and slipped through the screen of palms, ready to launch himself at the baguettes once Inger settled down to her morning doze.

  Anne Hampton, the older of the New Zealand nurses, emerged from her tent with a towel around her shoulders and stared frowzily at the protest banners across the runway.

  The signal bonfires with their freight of dead birds waited to be lit, and the protest banners flaunted their slogans at the empty outside the mess-tent, ready for the press conference that would never be held if the French, as Neil assumed, failed to arrive. He waited for Dr Barbara to appear on the steps of the clinic, but she slept late, rarely stirring until noon. By then Mrs Saito would have roused the younger women and set them their tasks for the day, collecting driftwood for the fires, painting placards to be nailed to the trees and keeping an exhausting watch on the horizon.

  The honeyeater flitted to an empty table, eager to make its assault on the bread. Neil whistled at the bird, holding its attention until Anne plodded away to the showers. As yet no one had reported these early-morning thefts of the bread, and Neil hoped that the food was left for him deliberately, one of the few vestigial memories of the sanctuary’s happier days. Despite Dr Barbara’s attempt to poison him, he liked to think that Inger and Trudi retained a small core of affection for the young man who had been their lover and fathered the children they carried within their wombs.

  Inger slouched in a kitchen chair, large and unkempt, feet on the stove to rest her swollen legs. A kettle rumbled towards its boiling-point, but she was lost in her thoughts of the child waiting to be born during the coming week, the first of Dr Barbara’s babies to be allowed to greet the sanctuary. Soon after, Monique was due to give birth, followed by Trudi and Mrs Saito, and a unique generation of infant girls would begin the repopulation of the women’s republic of Saint-Esprit.

  Neil silenced the honeyeater with a raised forefinger. Inger’s head lolled against her pillow as she crooned a Bavarian lullaby.

  He stepped across the open ground to the mess-tent, waved the flies from the trestle table and selected the largest of the loaves, placing his grimy hand on the warm crust.

  ‘Salaud..

  ‘Lazy shit…! Get the bastard..

  ‘Inger, we have him..

  The steel blade of a carving knife stabbed his left forearm. Too shocked to feel the pain, Neil turned as Monique lunged at him from the side-door of the kitchen. She was almost cross-eyed with anger, a streak of white flour like an arrow through her black crew-cut hair. Facing him was Trudi, who had been hiding behind the water-butt, a meat cleaver in her small hand. Waving it to and fro, she was calmly sizing him up as if he were a pig about to be slaughtered.

  ‘Monique, the other arm…! Little shit, he won’t steal again..

  ‘Inger, cut him now..

  As the blood streamed down his arm, Neil stepped back and tried to defend himself with the baguette. The women had been waiting for him, and the unguarded bread of the previous mornings had been a decoy. What dismayed him was the open contempt in their eyes. He side-stepped Monique when she lunged at him again, hissing as if he were a mongrel do
g with a vile disease that might infect her baby or her precious bears.

  ‘Monique, it’s me!’ he shouted. ‘We sailed on the Dugong together. We came to save the albatross…

  ‘You came to save yourself!’ Monique tried to slash his arm again, still nimble despite her pregnancy, eager to avenge herself on all the passengers whose seat-belts she had tightened. ‘Go and live with the fish! Find another island - we

  rule Saint-Esprit!’ Inger strode from the kitchen, brandishing a shovel-blade filled with hot charcoal. Cursing Neil, she scattered the blazing ash across his bare feet.

  ‘Trudi, make him dance for his bread! On the table, Neil, you can dance for us… Trudi darted forward and sank the cleaver into the table-top.

  Neil feinted at her face with the bloody baguette and leapt across the stinging cinders. Pursued by the foul-mouthed women, he ran across the runway towards the trees. As he passed the clinic he noticed Dr Barbara standing behind the mosquito door, an arm around Njhal’s shoulders. Chin raised, she surveyed the scene without expression, as if disturbed by a game in a children’s playground.

  Sucking his blood from the bread, Neil squatted in the door of the weather-station and shielded his wounded arm from the eyes of the ailing albatross on the cliff above him. The women’s anger had startled him, and he felt too disturbed to eat the grimy bread.

  He knew that Mrs Saito had disliked him from the start, perhaps seeing in Neil the toughness and self-confidence so lacking in her husband. Monique had always been wary of him, suspecting his motives for coming to Saint-Esprit, but he was sure that Inger and Trudi had been fond of him.

  Now they had turned against Neil, partly because Dr Barbara’s contempt for men had infected their minds, but also because he knew the truth about Dr Barbara and all the deaths of the sanctuary, a truth that they still hid from themselves and of which he reminded them.

  Despite the sun, Neil shivered inside Dr Barbara’s blanket. He pressed the worn fabric to his face and inhaled the faint odour of her body, thinking of the sweat that had once bathed his skin, a sea more potent than any through which he had swum. He wrapped his wounded arm in his shirt, remembering how he would stand naked beside Dr Barbara as she washed his clothes in the water he carried from the stream. He found it difficult to accept that she wanted to kill him, as she had killed Professor Saito, Kimo and David Carline.