Rushing to Paradise Page 23

  But he knew now that Dr Barbara was demented, and that he had to escape from Saint-Esprit and report everything he had learned about her to the French authorities at Papeete. Her sanctuary for threatened animals had turned into an extermina tion camp for the male race. She had killed not only her fellow expedition members but the visiting yacht-crews who stood in her way, the parents of the young women she had seized for her breeding programme and intended to mate with Nihal. And she had killed Gubby and Neil’s male first-born, forcing Trudi to abort the child.

  All the men had died, but Dr Barbara remained a danger to everyone on Saint-Esprit, and would kill again when it suited her. Neil was shocked that he had tolerated her for so long, mesmerized by this strong-willed woman who had played on his childish infatuation with nuclear death and the vacuum in his life left by his depressed and passive mother.

  Thinking of the robust affection that Dr Barbara had once shown him, Neil tried to find some way of excusing her. He could imagine her despairing at the sanctuary’s failure and the imminent return of the French military. In some deranged way she had seen Neil as part of the male world and its death-games that threatened everything she had worked for on Saint-Esprit.

  Yet as he ran naked from the burial garden he knew that his return to the weather-station was an act of faith in Dr Barbara part of him still believed in her and wanted her to need him. At night, as he lay in the sleeping bag, comforting himself with the scent of her urine, he was aware that she could easily track him to the cave and ensure that Mrs Saito added his bones to those on the slope below the pathway. Somehow he would manage to report her to the French authorities, and see that she was arrested and brought to trial, but he hoped that she would always remember the weather-station, one of the secret places of the heart where Neil would forever wait for her.

  These confused reveries of Dr Barbara had sustained him when he first reached the refuge. Exhausted by the climb, he had slept in the cave and dreamed of the

  lagoon as he seemed to swim through the shallows of his own death. On the fourth day his fever at last began to fade. His head and eyes soon cleared, and the blurred image of the hillside grew sharper as the world refocused itself. He tasted the salty wind stained by the albatross droppings, and could smell the bonfire that Mrs Saito had lit during a false alarm and then doused with sea-water, releasing a vast steam-cloud that capped the island for days.

  For three weeks Neil rested in the weather-station, dozing in Dr Barbara’s sleeping bag and recovering his strength as his body rid itself of the toxins that had poisoned him. Ravenous, he stole eggs from the nests on the cliff and gorged himself on the greasy yolks. Still naked, he crept down the forest slopes and searched the beaches for crabs and sea-snails. One dusk, among the rock pools, he trapped a small turtle, severed its head with a flint blade and drank its blood.

  The next day he explored the derelict hippie camp on the beach. Among the collapsed hovels and half-buried netting he found a ragged, hand-printed shirt and a pair of wave-washed jeans which he fastened around his waist with a length of electric cable. Already he took for granted that Wolfgang and Werner had never left Saint-Esprit, but lay in the deepest graves in Dr Barbara’s garden. David Canine had been right to believe that they were hiding somewhere on the island, certain that the Germans would not have abandoned Inger and Trudi to Dr Barbara.

  But was Canine aware that Dr Barbara had poisoned them? Neil assumed that the insecure and unhappy American had been drawn into her scheme to recruit more women to Saint-Esprit, and rid the sanctuary of its male population, without realizing how she proposed to achieve this goal. Perhaps she claimed that the van Noorts had died of a mysterious fever brought to the island by one of the donated animals, a virus that soon became endemic within the sanctuary, and persuaded him to scuttle the yacht and dispose of their bodies for fear of alerting the French authorities.

  Thinking of their meeting beside the prayer-shack, Neil guessed that Carline had been searching, not for yams and sweet potatoes, but for any sign of the Germans’ burial place, suspecting by then that he himself would soon be Dr Barbara’s victim. Carline had lacked the will to challenge her or warn any visitors to the island, while Neil had been all too ready to submit to Dr Barbara’s ruthless ambition.

  Neil had known that she was poisoning him, but dying at her hands at least brought him close to her and made him the centre of her attention. He had closed his eyes to the murders she had carried out, and by the end had been ready to be killed by her.

  For reasons of her own she had relented, perhaps testing him to see if he was the first of the men on Saint-Esprit with the strength to survive her.

  And despite the deaths, Dr Barbara had been right - the men were weak, and the women strong. Kimo, Carline and Professor Saito had failed her and failed the sanctuary. Even now, after everything he had endured, Neil felt guilty that he had let Dr Barbara down. Secretly, he wanted to stay on Saint-Esprit until he had proved himself to her again.

  Still wary of Dr Barbara, however, he only left the weather station after dusk. When night had settled over the island he made his way down to the runway and waited among the trees beside the aqueduct. Usually the women sat by the camera-tower, where they lit a fire after their meal, chanting a French round-song that Monique had taught them. Mrs Saito’s preparations for the French naval landings had brought everyone together, and even the Swedish wives took part in the monotonous singing. Since the alarm first raised by their husbands, who now lay in each other’s arms in Dr Barbara’s garden, only two high-altitude aircraft had circled Saint-Esprit. Few sea-borne visitors ever called at the island, deterred by the grudging welcome and the rumours of a grim-faced animal rights sect in their Calvinist haven.

  A passing multi-hull crewed by midshipmen in the Colombian navy anchored in the lagoon for no longer than it took them to refill their water tanks, watched by the intimidating group of pregant women. The Colombians brought with them a breeding pair of rare spider monkeys, but one sight of the abandoned cages in the animal enclosures and the fearsome knives hanging from the kitchen walls was enough

  for them to decide on another sanctuary for the threatened creatures. They thankfully raised anchor and sailed away to the fierce rhythm of beaten fuel drums.

  Mrs Saito had rung the loudest clamour from the dented metal, her small back turned defiantly to the nervous cadets, her raised fists threatening the van Noort sisters and the Swedish women when they were tempted to leave with the Colombians.

  By now they were locked into Mrs Saito’s mounting delu sions. The ceremonial slaughter and roasting of the peccary, which Neil watched from his hide beside the runway, was an almost eucharistic rite, with the cowed Nihal served the first bloody haunch of flesh. Surrounded by the pregnant women, he uneasily sank his teeth into the meat and returned their approv ing smiles, aware that his real part in this intense drama had yet to be assigned to him.

  Meanwhile, Dr Barbara worked in her garden among the graves, re-interring the feet and hands which the mischievous peccary had dragged into the light. She stirred the soil with care, singing to herself as she patted the earth with her spade, not wishing to disturb the reveries of sleeping men.

  *

  *

  A glutinous mist rose through the forest, an oily wraith that lingered among the dusty tamarinds and eucalyptus, as if con jured by the waves from the ruptured fuel tanks of the Dugong.

  Secure in his sky-island, Neil watched the sickly albatross totter along the cliff, shaking the heavy vapour from their wings. A virulent plague had broken out among them, transmitted by some infected bird released from the sanctuary, and the healthier albatross had begun to leave Saint-Esprit.

  Neil finished the blood-stained baguette and let the blood trickle from his arm onto the last crust. He threw his shirt onto the steps of the weather-station and lay back in the sun, already thinking about his next meal. Once he was strong enough, he would steal the scuba gear from Nihal’s tent and fish for grouper in the
lagoon. When Dr Barbara saw him with his spear-gun and wet-suit, ready to take his place again as the sanctuary’s hunter, she would appoint him her deputy while she served her long prison sentence. In time, Monique and Mrs Saito would respect him, and Inger and Trudi would defer to him as the father of their children.

  The mist coiled into the cave, a cloud of acrid dust tinged with fuel oil.

  Neil roused himself and stepped onto the parapet.

  Streamers of smoke wove through the trees on either side of the path, and a blizzard of unsettled insects swept the cliff face. The albatross rose from their rocky perches, soaring out to sea as the grey billows enveloped the summit.

  Thrashing the smoke with his bloodied shirt, Neil made his way to the path.

  Rivulets of flame ran down the hillside like miniature lava flows, igniting the dry undergrowth and devour ing the copper parasols ofthe dead palms. Drops of oily rain struck his chest and face, carrying with them the stench of diesel fuel.

  Monique and Inger stood on the cliff above him, each holding ajerry can taken from the bulldozer’s fuel store. Both were tired after the long climb from the camp, but they vigorously sprayed the diesel oil onto the forested slope, and then snatched the burning tapers from the tinder fire at their feet and hurled them into the air.

  ‘Monique, Inger…!’ Neil wiped the oil from his mouth and shouted up to the women. ‘You’ll kill the albatross..

  Monique pointed to him and shook the Jerry can. Looking up at her bared teeth, he realized that she had been eager to kill more than the birds when she set out to climb to the summit.

  Hands over his face, Neil searched for the pathway in the seething smoke. Mrs Saito stood by the door of the weather station, a pruning knife in one hand. She held Neil’s shirt to the sky, a child’s daub of her national flag, and drove the knife through the sodden fabric, slashing it into bloody strips.

  Neil slid down the bone-strewn slope, trying to escape from these violent women who pursued him through the forest. Each carried his child like a gift to a death. Seeing him below her, Mrs Saito threw aside his tattered shirt and seized her Jerry can. She showered the fuel into the air, drenching Neil in the volatile

  oil, and urged Monique to aim a burning taper at him as he lay among the sun-baked skulls and drumsticks of the endangered birds.

  But Monique and Inger were staring at the sky, arms raised to follow an intruder into the island’s air-space. A light helicopter that Neil had last seen on the landing deck of the Sagittaire was approaching Saint-Esprit from the north-west. It flew over the distant sand-bars of the atoll, circled the scuttled Petrus Christus, which the pilot had noticed in the clear waters of the lagoon, and set course for the main island.

  Already Monique and Inger had dropped their fuel cans and were hurrying down the hillside. When Neil climbed the slope to the pathway Mrs Saito sprang through the smoke towards him, her eyes sharper than the pruning knife in her hand. She slashed at his oily hands, her voice lost in the steel band below and the beat of the helicopter’s fans as they cuffed the air. Shouting at the flames, she ran down the path, following the burning forest as it rushed headlong to the sea.

  ‘Man…! Lazy man…!’

  Lilies of the Sanctuary

  SILENCE, STARTLING ITSELF, had returned to Saint-Esprit.

  Neil stood in the centre of the runway, surrounded by the dead birds, and surveyed the empty and unguarded camp. Tent flaps stirred in the pale wind, and flies feasted on the unwashed oven dishes in the kitchen. Had Dr Barbara and the women abandoned the island, taking passage on a visiting whaler? Blackened by the bonfires, the protest banners hung askew between the charred palms. Everything that might conceivably burn had been hurled onto the pyres, and glowing embers still skittered across the runway. Sections of duckboarding and chairs from the mess tent, cartons of animal feed and plywood placards lay in the mounds of sodden ash, their cores still smouldering after the night’s rain.

  No-one, however, had seen these signals of despair. Neil squatted beside one of the fires, warming his hands at a glowing cave, in which a dead booby had been roasted to its bones. He picked at the carbonized skin and tasted the oily flesh with its tang of kerosene.

  For three days Saint-Esprit had been on fire. After escaping from Mrs Saito and her attempt to burn him alive, Neil had lived among the secret rock-pools below the cliff. Watched by the dying albatross, he trapped the fish and crabs as an immense anvil of dark smoke rose above the island, readying Saint-Esprit for the hammer that would split it to its core. For the first time since landing on the atoll he watched the horizon and willed the French navy to arrive, but the reconnaissance helicopter had not returned. At night he slept in the camera-tower beside the stream, guarded by Dr Barbara’s obscene cartoon, while the flames leapt ever higher from the bonfires and set alight the trees beside the runway.

  He was still numbed by the hatred he had seen in the eyes of Monique and Mrs Saito, and his infected arm-wound and the diesel oil that clung to his skin warned him that only death awaited his return to the sanctuary. From the forest above the plant terraces he saw them sitting with Dr Barbara in her burial garden. As they rested, pregnant and crop-headed among the graves, he guessed that they had known all along of Dr Barbara’s plan to rid Saint-Esprit of its men, but he still found it painful to accept that he had been discarded by them.

  He remembered his long afternoons with Trudi and Inger, when they had played like children with each other’s bodies.

  Sadly, their happy hours with Neil now meant nothing to the German women, let alone Monique and Mrs Saito. They had used him to sire their daughters and then rejected him as soon as Nihal arrived with his younger and fresher blood.

  Wiping the booby’s fat from his lips, Neil walked along the runway towards the camp. The charred banners hung from their overhead ropes like the tails of fighting kites shot down in combat. A gust of wind sent a flurry of hot ash across the ground from a smouldering fire, as if the sanctuary was still venting its anger

  on the world.

  Neil climbed the steps of the clinic and pushed back the open door. His unmade bed stood where he had left it in the sick room, the impress of his shoulders in the damp mattress, dried blood streaking the grey shroud of the mosquito net.

  Dr Barbara had ransacked the medical cabinets in her office, pulling back the drawers of her desk in a last frantic search. Phials and syringes lay scattered across the floor, as if she had inoculated a fleeing garrison in the final hours of Saint-Esprit. Neil sat on her narrow bed, avoiding the unwashed underwear between his feet, and raised the pillow to his face. He imagined Dr Barbara forcing it over his mouth and nose, and waiting until his breath fell silent. Somewhere among the ampoules on the desk, among the sedatives and abortifacts, was the poison she had concocted to kill Kimo, Canine and Professor Saito.

  The botanist’s silk kimono hung from the sick-room door.

  Neil touched the worn fabric, and then stepped from the clinic into the open air. Nursing his wounded arm, he walked through the drifting ash to the women’s quarters. Outside Monique’s tent lay Mrs Saito’s wooden clogs, the only sign of tidiness in the disordered landscape. Neil raised the canvas flap and peered into the dim interior. A bitter scent rose through the swarming flies, a medley of mouth-wash, antiseptic fluid and a cloying Japanese perfume that evaporated from an open jar among the novels on the bamboo table.

  Mrs Saito and Monique lay together on the small bed, hands clasped around their waists. Flies festered on their bruised lips, drinking the tears that filled their eyes. Their naked shoulders were speckled with soot that had blown from the bonfires, scattered over them like confetti at a sapphic wedding. Mo nique’s strong mouth was drawn across her teeth in a last grimace, her gaze fixed sternly on the green roof. Mrs Saito rested beside her, small hips dwarfed by the Frenchwoman’s heavy thighs, her face collapsed upon itself like a papier m ch

  �

  � mask. Her nose had

  swollen and darkened, and
her thickened forehead resembled her husband’s, as if she had already assumed his identity, determined to dominate him even in death.

  Neil closed the perfume jar, trying to comprehend the strange pride that had led the two women to scent their dying-space for those who discovered them.

  Spitting a fly from his mouth, he stepped from the tent and steadied himself against the white geometry of the runway.

  In the next tent, as he guessed, Inger and Trudi lay beside each other, Inger’s strong arm around Trudi’s slender should ers. The dark had entered their faces and drained the flesh to the waiting bones, and flies fought among the open needle-marks on their arms. Already they resembled the pair of shabby hippies who had lived with Wolfgang and Werner on the beach.

  Neil drew the cotton sheet across the women, trying not to look at their abdomens, where his daughters lay in their flooded wombs. But his head rang again with the warning pain that had sent him racing from Dr Barbara’s garden.

  ‘Neil…? You’ve come back.

  Blood smiled. Dr Barbara stood beside him, spade in hand, beaming at him with surprise and pleasure, as if interrupted while gardening by an unexpected friend.

  Her shirt was stained with the yellow craw-fluid of albatross, but she seemed unaware of the destruction around her, the exhausted bonfires arid the dead women in the tents.

  ‘Neil…‘Proudly she touched his beard. ‘I hoped that I’d see you again. Mrs Saito said - ‘She’s dead, doctor.’ Neil stepped back, aware of the soil freshly caked across the polished blade in her hand. He feared the spade, which Dr Barbara might still use to bury him. ‘They’re all dead - Inger, Trudi and Monique.’