Rushing to Paradise Page 24

  ‘I’m sorry, Neil.’ Dr Barbara managed a contrite smile. ‘They knew it was time to go. They asked me to put them to sleep.

  Now you can help me take them to the garden. The French won’t find them there.’

  ‘Dr Barbara - Monique isn’t pregnant any more. What happened to the baby? Is she in the cr che?’

  �

  ‘No, Neil. We couldn’t leave her to die inside her mother. The other babies

  were younger, they would have known nothing when sleep came.’ Dr Barbara gestured with her spade, as if blessing the island. ‘She’s resting now in the garden, waiting for Monique to join her. We’ll grow lilies over them. Lilies of the sanctuary..

  ‘Doctor…’ Neil turned angrily to the silent tents beyond the cr che. He

  �

  counted the idling flaps, aware that the Canadian teachers, the two nurses and the Swedish women would be lying on the cold beds. ‘What about Nihal? And Martha and Helena?’

  ‘They’ve gone, too. They’ve all left together. They didn’t want to go, so I helped them on their way.’

  ‘Why? Dr Barbara, why?’ Neil shouted at her, but she seemed suddenly deaf. He stepped forward and kicked the blade from her hand.

  ‘Why did you kill them? They loved the sanctuary!’

  ‘They needed to rest, Neil. All of them - even little Nihal.’ Dr Barbara rubbed her jarred hand, smiling at the sky. ‘They were never really happy at the sanctuary. Saint-Esprit asked too much of them.’

  ‘You killed the men…’ Neil realized that he accepted the deaths of Kimo, Professor Saito and Canine, but the women’s deaths were meaningless. ‘Why kill the women?’

  ‘They weren’t strong enough. In a sanctuary only the strong can survive. You and I, Neil. We’ve earned the right to live.’ A faint cry, like a cat’s plaint, came from the tent behind the cr che. Rousing himself, Neil seized the spade and

  �

  held Dr Barbara away when she tried to embrace him. Blood leaked onto her teeth from an open ulcer on her lip. He hurled the spade at her feet and ran past her towards the cr che.

  �

  The New Zealand nurses lay on the floor of their tent, clothes and bedding strewn around them as they fought to save them selves. Patsy was barely conscious, and too exhausted to recognize Neil, but Anne raised one hand to him.

  ‘Neil, find the children… be careful… Dr Barbara..

  Neil sat her against the bed and forced her to vomit. She retched into her hands, wiping the bloody phlegm onto her tunic, then leaned on his shoulder and gasped at the air. Satisfied that she was awake, he turned to Patsy, slapping her cheeks when she fell asleep. He knelt across her knees, massaging her thighs and driving the blood towards her heart as the Waikiki lifeguards had taught him. Both the nurses were dressed in their working clothes. He remembered the syringes and ampoules on Dr Barbara’s desk, and all too easily could see her giving a promised vitamin booster to the younger women, helped by the trusting New Zealanders, the last to bare their arms to the lethal needle.

  ‘The children, Neil. And Nihal…’ Anne sucked the air through her teeth.

  ‘Don’t let Dr Barbara touch them..

  Neil clasped her hands, waving the flies from her face, but she pushed him away and sat herself on the bed. Leaving her to care for Patsy, he backed into the open air, uncertain how to force Dr Barbara to revive the women.

  She stood in the centre of the runway, smiling at a sickly albatross that tottered towards her from the beach.

  ‘Dr Barbara!’ he shouted. ‘Anne and Patsy are strong enough! They can share the sanctuary with us…’ He waited for her to reply, but he could see that she had lost interest in Neil and Nihal and the young women she had poisoned. She wandered across the runway, the glowing embers of the bonfires flitting around her feet, too distracted by the demons of her tilting world to hear the sounds of an approaching aircraft.

  A mile away, a French twin-rotor naval helicopter swept across the lagoon. Dr Barbara frowned as the craft scudded over the sand-bars, sending a froth of wavelets onto the black beaches. She pointed to the grey silhouette of the Sagittaire waiting beyond the reef. The corvette’s raked prow and flashing signal lights emerged from the haze of smoke that drifted from the island.

  ‘Neil… it’s time, Neil!’ Dr Barbara strode up to him. After a moment of indecision, when she seemed unwilling to recognize the approaching war ship, all her energy had returned. The insect bites glared from her bony forehead, and she

  was as committed and strong-willed as the woman Neil had first seen outside the hotel in Honolulu.

  In her hand she held the chromium pistol she had taken from David Canine.

  ‘The French are here, Neil.’

  ‘Dr Barbara, they’ll shoot you - ‘Listen to me… there’s still time.’ She raised the pistol, as if ready to fire at Neil. When he stepped back, hands trying to catch the bullet, she pointed to the dying bird on the runway.

  ‘Neil, we must kill all the albatross.’

  The Secret Door

  LOWERED FROM THE HELICOPTER, the last of the stretchers settled itself onto the after-deck of the Sagirtaire. Neil shielded his face from the downdraught of the propeller blades, and followed the French medical orderlies onto the landing platform. Spray spangled Patsy Kennedy’s cheeks and forehead like ice-beads on a frozen fish, but beneath the damp fringe her eyes seemed to recognize Neil. Passive and troubled, they stared at his freshly shaven face, as if afraid that he would hurt her. When he tried to touch her chin she flinched and turned her head from him.

  Nihal, the Canadian teachers and the other women were safely below, being treated by the emergency medical team flown out to the corvette. All had survived -

  Martha and Helena van Noort, and the two Swedish wives - though none was yet aware of the fate that had overtaken their parents and husbands. Even the French officers who interrogated Neil had scarcely grasped the scale of the year-long massacre they had interrupted. Fortunately for Neil, a still shaky but lucid Anne Hampton had assured them of his role in saving the women’s lives.

  Major Anderson and his wife stood by the starboard rail with their binoculars, surveying the smoke-stained foliage of the forest slopes above the runway. Patsy Kennedy was carried past on her stretcher, and they broke off their search for Dr Barbara to pat her shoulder. Neil waited for them to approach him, but like everyone else they were wary of him, as if he were one of the survivors of a tragedy at sea who had turned to cannibalism. Neil suspected that for all their concern they still regarded him as Dr Barbara’s principal accomplice.

  Neil could feel the bruises that the Andersons had left on his arms when they stepped from the helicopter onto the runway, almost ready to assault Neil in their anger and relief. As he stood, drenched in blood, among the slaughtered albatross Mrs Anderson cupped her small hands over his eyes, trying to shut out forever everything he had seen on Saint-Esprit.

  The stains of the birds’ blood clung to their weather-jackets, and reminded Neil of the carmine streamers of shark repellent that had leaked from the jacket he found trapped beside the reef.

  Close to death from exposure, the Andersons had survived their intended death-voyage to alert the French authorities on Tahiti.

  As Dr Barbara expected, their fire-damaged sloop sank in the first rain-squall. After losing almost all their equipment, includ ing the major’s jacket, they drifted in their dinghy until seen by a Japanese whaler.

  Whatever the Andersons assumed, Neil had killed none of the birds. He remembered his last sight of Dr Barbara, covered in blood as she slashed with her machete at the albatross, firing dementedly at the dying birds with Canine’s pistol while the helicopter hovered over the runway, its loudspeaker blaring through the carnage. Dr Barbara had been poisoning the birds for weeks, setting out infected fish for them, saving them from a fate worse than their own extinction. Death, for Dr Barbara, was a secret door through which the threatened and the weary could slip to safety.

  Alm
ost to the end, Neil had believed her. Without ever admitting the truth to himself, he had known from the start that she had killed Gubby and Monsieur Didier, that she had poisoned the unwanted members of the yacht-crews and mur dered Kimo,

  Canine and Professor Saito. But had he tried to warn the French, passing a message to a visiting craft, he would soon have found himself in the cemetery by the prayer-shack, or lying beside Dr Barbara’s deck-chair in the burial garden.

  He had accepted Dr Barbara’s deranged logic, aware that he was only secure when he was with her and doing whatever he was told. From their first meeting in Honolulu she had played on his dreams of death, his senseless guilt over his father’s cancer and the fantasies of nuclear apocalypse that presided over Saint-Esprit. She had known, long before Neil, that he was sexually obsessed by her and unable to resist her ruthless determination to build her sanctuary.

  The real sanctuary Dr Barbara had sought had been for herself, and for the cruel and dangerous strengths that no humane order could tolerate. Despite all she had done, part of him still believed that Dr Barbara was right. He searched the fire-blackened slopes of the island, hoping that she would evade the French landing party. He guessed that she had prepared for the end, laying down a cache of emergency supplies on an outlying sand-bar of the atoll, and was now hiding in one of the remote camera-towers, at last fulfilling Neil’s dream for him. Had the Andersons died at sea, she would soon have been alone on Saint-Esprit, free to make her escape on a passing yacht and reappear with her protest banners on the streets of Manila, Cape Town or Hong Kong.

  Even now, Neil found himself unable to betray her. He told the Andersons and the captain of the Sagittaire that she had become deranged after the helicopter’s arrival and had drowned herself near the reef, in despair that the sanctuary would become a nuclear testing-ground.

  As steam pumped from the corvette’s funnel Neil counted the camera-towers for the last time. Dr Barbara had shown him a dream of death more real than any fantasies of nuclear war. He could still see her on the runway, spattered with the entrails of the dead albatross. She had thrown away the pistol and smiled a last bloody smile at Neil, as if regretting that she had not been able to welcome him to her realm. Then she ran towards the forest, past the clinic and the animal enclosures and her private garden, where the French landing party were now disinterring the first of her victims.

  Signal lights flashed between the bridge and the runway. The corvette’s engines drummed against the deck, impatient to begin the return voyage to Papeete.

  The Sagittaire’s captain had told Neil that the French government would sign the new test-ban treaty and had no intention of resuming the programme of weapons tests. Their patience had been exhausted by the nuclear and environmental demonstrators, and they shrewdly decided to leave Dr Barbara and her party alone on Saint-Esprit, confident that this puritanical sect led by the unstable woman doctor would soon destroy itself and so help to discredit ecological movements throughout the world.

  ‘No sign of her…’ Major Anderson lowered his binoculars, clearly wishing that he could direct the corvette’s fire onto Dr Barbara’s forest stronghold.

  ‘They’ll need weeks to search the whole atoll.’

  ‘She walked into the sea,’ Mrs Anderson reminded him. ‘Neil saw her - there was nothing else for her to do.’

  ‘I might believe it - others wouldn’t. For someone obsessed with death, that woman has a knack of clinging to life..

  ‘Neil…’ Mrs Anderson swallowed her scruples and took Neil’s arm in a show ofsolidarity. ‘When are you speaking to your mother?’

  ‘Tonight - they’re arranging the radio-link.’

  ‘Good, she’ll be glad to hear from you. All the same, be careful what you say, especially about all those tragic babies. Poor things, she’ll hear about them soon enough.’ Mrs Anderson checked herself, and her small face brightened like a hopeful moon.

  ‘Remember - whatever happens, you’re free of her now.’

  But was he free of her, and did he want to be? Aware that the Andersons were uneasy with him, like the entire crew of the Sagittaire, Neil crossed the deck to the port rail. A white-masted yacht flying the American flag had emerged from the smoke that drifted over the water in the lea of the island. Its helmsman was

  unlocking the door of a large wicker cage that held a pair of gaudy but timid sun-birds, ready to release them to the sanctuary sky.

  The corvette pulled away from the reef, and Neil looked down for the last time at the hulk of the Dugong. Others would visit Saint-Esprit once the French had left. One day, perhaps, they would come across an elderly British doctor living among the sand-bars in a nuclear shelter, eager to start a new colony of threatened species. Then Neil, too, would join her, happy to be embraced again by Dr Barbara’s cruel and generous heart.

  The End

  PRAISE FOR JG BALLARD

  ‘Ballard has claims to be the most interesting living English writer at work.

  He offers a consistent and unmistakable view of the world, an alternative reality, strange yet coherent.’

  —Guardian ‘One of the most brilliant and unnerving of writers Ballard is a writer with talent to burn.’

  —The Times ‘A writer of extraordinarily distinctive vision and power.’

  —Literary Review ‘Is Ballard our best novelist? Perhaps. He’s certainly the most interesting, the one whose account of the last half of this century has the most to tell us.’

  —New Statesman & Society ‘Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer.’

  —William Boyd, Daily Telegraph ‘One of the most sensitive and enigmatic novelists of the present day.’

  —Times Literary Supplement ‘Present in everything Ballard writes is that sense of a unique and profoundly original mind.’

  —Angela Carter, Guardian Rushing to Paradise is the story of sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey, who finds himself caught up in an campaigner Dr Barbara Rafferty’s obsessive crusade save the albatross on the deserted Pacific atoll of Saint-Esprit. The threat to the rare birds’ breeding-ground comes from the engineers and soldiers of the French, who have recently returned to their former nuclear testing site to build an airstrip. When Neil is shot on a foolhardy rescue mission led by Dr Barbara, the attention of the world’s media turns to the tiny island and its stricken birds. International pressure soon drives away the French, and Saint-Esprit becomes a sanctuary - a remote paradise home for Neil, Dr Barbara, an odd team of eco-enthusiasts and idealists and a growing collection of the world’s endangered species. They all have their own reasons for being there, but in time they will discover that some species are in more danger than others.

  J.G. Ballard’s outstanding international reputation is founded on a remarkable body of highly original work, dating back to his 1961 novel, The Drowned World, and including such wide-ranging fiction as Crash, The Crystal World and The Day of Creation.

  Now in his first novel since The Kindness of Women, the sequel to his semi-autobiographical bestseller Empire of the Sun, J. G. Ballard has written a brilliant and controversial satire on extremism, guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of environmentalists, animal rights activists and feminists.

  J.G. BALLARD was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ballard and his family were placed

  in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF In 1956 his first short story was published in New Worlds and he took a full time job on a technical journal, moving on to become assistant editor of a scientific journal, where he stayed until 1961.

  His first novel, The Drowned World, was written in the same year. His acclaimed bestseller Empire of the Sun, first published in 1984, won the Guardian
Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. In 1991 J.G. Ballard published the sequel to Empire ofthe Sun, The Kindness of Women.