Neil remembered this cryptic aside on the day of the Dakota’s arrival. All morning he had helped Monique to care for her ailing Father. A chronic kidney infection had flared up, resisting the antibiotics that Dr Barbara injected, so Kimo carried the old man to the clinic and laid him on the mattress in the cool sick-room. cjue and Mrs Anderson bathed him, but Didier was barely 2 conscious and clutched at his daughter’s hands, pressing them to his inflamed cheeks.
Distracted from her work on the terraces by the Dakota’s engines, Dr Barbara strode down the hillside towards the runway, now blocked by the bulldozer and the radio mast.
‘Dr Rafferty!’ Mrs Anderson called from the clinic. ‘Would you come, doctor?’
Dr Barbara hesitated, her attention held by the scattered albatross and the Dakota’s silver wings as they turned across the lagoon.
‘I’ve only a moment. What is it?’
‘Monique’s father - I think he should return to Tahiti.
Monique agrees with me, his fever is worrying..
‘I’ll have a look.’ Dr Barbara stepped into the clinic and stood in the modest sick-room, where the old Frenchman lay within the mosquito net, his skin so pale that he was barely visible through the white mesh.
Monique drew back the net, unhappy even to look at her father. ‘Barbara, I have to take him to Papeete. We should clear the runway and tell the pilot to land.’
‘The flight might do more harm than good.’ Dr Barbara smiled winningly at the old man. ‘You’re getting well, Monsieur Didier. We’re feeling better today, aren’t we?’
‘Dr Rafferty - ‘ Mrs Anderson was listening to the changing note of the Dakota’s engines, aware that the pilot might turn away. ‘This may be his last chance. I really do recommend..
‘Barbara, I’ll be back,’ Monique assured her. ‘In a month, at the minimum.’
‘Monique, I need you here.’ Dr Barbara closed the mosquito net. ‘Believe me, your father is through the worst. Putting him on the plane will kill him.’ Neil stepped forward and picked up the old man’s canvas bag.
‘I’ll clear the runway, doctor.’
‘Neil!’ Dr Barbara raised her hand to slap his face, but caught herself as Mrs Anderson stepped between them. ‘Go back to your work! If anyone speaks to the pilot, I will…
*
*
3 he Dakota circled the atoll, its slipstream scattering the ever autious albatross, their confused wings like leaflets dropped from a rescue aircraft. As if aware that any messages of good cheer would never reach the ground, Kimo and Major Anderson carcely raised their heads while they doggedly hacked at the wild yams in the cemetery. Professor Saito came to the door of the plant laboratory, shielding his weak eyes as the Dakota flew over the broken-backed wreck of the Dugong, and then returned dutifully to his endangered fungi before his wife could tap his elbow.
Monique and Mrs Anderson stood on the steps of the clinic, vaiting for Neil to drive the bulldozer forward and clear the runway. But no signal had yet been given by Dr Barbara. She leaned from the doorway of the radio-cabin, microphone in hand, waving to the aircraft as she reassured the crew and any Journalists aboard that all was well.
Would she allow the Dakota to land, unload its consignment of stores and evacuate Monique’s ailing father to Papeete? Neil remembered her speaking to
Captain Garfield during the sea plane’s concluding visit, insisting to the sceptical Australian that they had ample stocks of food and equipment and would catrvive comfortably on their own. While she urged the captain to restart his engines the expedition members had wandered towards the pier, staring at the wooden crates filled with fresh fruit, mineral water and shampoo like the inmates of a prison trin.
Now Monique expected Dr Barbara to tell the pilot to land.
But Neil was certain that she would never order him to clear the runway. She had stopped herself from slapping his face, but he could almost feel the stinging blow when he remembered the niger she had turned upon him.
For a moment a vent of hell had opened, and another Dr Barbara had glared out at him. He listened to the rumbling murmur of the diesel engine, and watched the bulldozer’s exhaust float across the runway to the radio-cabin. Already Mrs Anderson had turned away, shaking her head in dismay, and took up her vigil in the sick-room.
Neil switched off the engine and stepped onto the white coral.
Avoiding Dr Barbara, he walked to the headland beside the cemetery and watched the Dakota set course for Tahiti.
Dr Barbara had insisted on having her way, but a wary silence hung over Saint-Esprit, deepened by the old Frenchman’s illness and the sense that they were cut off from the world beyond the horizon. By shutting everyone else out they had also shut themselves in. The black beaches of the atoll were effectively a wall, and the whole Pacific was Dr Barbara’s moat.
Few craft visited the island now that the publicity barrage of the early months had passed. A week after the Dakota’s departure a catamaran crewed by three off-duty officers in the Peruvian Navy anchored in the lagoon. Dr Barbara invited them to inspect the sanctuary, and spent an hour in the mess-tent, sharing the bottles of wine which they brought ashore. None of the expedition members joined them, but Neil and Canine rowed out to the catamaran and recorded messages that the Peruvians would later transmit to Neil’s mother and to Mrs Carline.
Listening to himselfas he reassured his mother that all was well, and then to Canine’s proud description of their success in establishing the sanctuary, Neil was aware that their words no longer matched the reality of Saint-Esprit. He spoke truthfully to his mother, saying that the mosquitoes and sand-flies bothered him, that he was working hard, ate well and had not been ill, and that the bullet wound on his foot had healed completely. But he sensed that he and Carline were reading from an old script. A different Saint-Esprit had emerged, with a phantom runway inside Dr Barbara’s head, on which strange cargoes were being landed.
When the Peruvians set sail, an hour before dusk, only Dr Barbara waved them goodbye. Afterwards she stripped and swam in the sea, then dressed and climbed the path to the peak, where she stood in the darkness among the albatross.
The next morning Neil was not surprised to find that the radio-cabin had burned down during the night, and that every one assumed the hippies were responsible.
*
* l3arhara, there’s a tiiiie to do iiotliiu and a tinie to act! Pistol in hand, Canine paced around the still smoking embers of the cabin, a heap of charred wooden boards that had collapsed over the gutted radio. ‘In football there’s an offensive game as well as cieensive. We’ve been far too passive.’
‘1 lave we?’ Dr Barbara seemed unconcerned by this act of Vandalism. She waved the smoke into her face, savouring the ring of pine-oil distilled from the burnt timber. ‘What do you ‘.uggest - a punitive expedition?’
‘I suggest drawing a line!’ Carline pointed to the distant shanties. ‘They have sex on the beach, drink our water from the s, ream, smoke their pot and beg for food.’
‘It sounds like sheer heaven. I may join them.’ Dr Barbara rested an arm on Neil’s shoulder. ‘We must be charitable, David.
Nothing is more irksome than the sight of people working all day. Besides, does it matter? Since no planes will be landing here hardly need a radio link.’
‘Barbara…’ Exasperated, Carline raised the pistol to his temple. ‘What’s next - the mess-tent, the clinic, the plant lab? I hey destroyed my airport! We have to act!’
‘All right. We’ll send Neil down there. He knows them well perhaps he can find what happened.’
‘A fifth column? Good thinking, Barbara.’ Carline holstered Ill’s revolver, smiling at Neil. ‘Now, Neil, all you have to do is build a wooden horse.
1 horoughly briefed by Carline, Neil set out for the beach. The ccond of the hippie yachts had left with its British and Austral an crew, leaving the two German men on the Parsfa1, the two -omen and the retarded child. Sometimes they drifted up to the camp, hanging a
round the kitchen in the hope of finding powdered milk for the baby. Trudi, a small, dark-haired woman her twenties with a pallid but attractive face and an atlas of dead veins on her arms, often carried the child to the animal enclosure, begging Neil for a pail of goat’s milk and a few eggs.
Liking the child, he usually helped her, and declined the LSD Ps she offered in exchange. z6 ‘Go on, they’re good,’ she always assured him. ‘You’ll see a new island, filled with birds.’
‘They’ve already come back, Trudi.’
‘But inside your dreams.’ Despite Canine’s hostility, the Germans greeted Neil affably, ready to share with him the cans of food they had rescued from the sea, stripped of their labels by the rushing surf.
‘Every meal is a surprise,’ Werner, the Parsfa1’s skipper, told Neil as they settled around the fire. ‘That’s what God intended when he made the Earth. Maybe we ate nuts or fruit, or the fish in the sea. Now we know exactly - lasagne, Wiener schnitzel, eggs benedict - it’s so boring.’ A stocky Rhinelander with a tattooed cheekbone, he dandled the child on his knees, opening the door of a miniature house he had built from driftwood and shells.
‘This is your house, Gubby, we’re all going to live here.’ Gubby chuckled noisily, struggling to add more shells to the roof and fending off the playful fingers of Wolfgang, the yacht’s navigator, a quiet, emaciated man whom Dr Barbara suspected of harbouring TB. The two men were happy to play with the child and watch the women work. Trudi scavenged the beach for coconut husks and palm fronds, which she stuffed into her sling. Inger, a once robust blonde with dyed yellow hair and a pockmarked face, thighs covered with needle scars, fed the fire and selected one of the cans from their modest cache.
‘Say a spell, Inger,’ Wolfgang urged as she opened the can.
‘For asparagus soup, bratwurst or pickled herring…?’
‘Shoe polish - I’ll paint Gubby’s bottom.’ She leaned over and drew two horns on the child’s swollen forehead. ‘Now he’s a little devil..
“Trudi picked another can. ‘He’s a devil already. Gubby, you’ll frighten Dr Rafferty’s beloved birds.’ To Neil, whose broad shoulders she was always appraising, she said: ‘So you came to save the albatross?’
‘Yes… in a way.’
‘What way? You mean you don’t want to save them? I’ll tell Dr Rafferty.’ iu (nough for Neil.’
‘Maybe he’s crazy,’ Inger surmised. ‘Island fever, there’s no Lire. Gubby, he pushed all your food in the sea.’ Neil played with the baby, still trying to decide which of the vomen was the mother. Lamely, he said: ‘I had to - Dr Barbara)il( red me to get rid of everything.’:nd you always do what she orders?’ No. Mostly when she tells me to do things I don’t do them.
)nlv the important ones.’
‘Those are the ones you shouldn’t do.’ Inger picked at the rilarged septum of her nose. Milk from her breasts stained her ided denim vest, but she seemed too drained to feed a child.
When people say something is important, never do it.’ ou’re right, Inger.’
Neil lay beside the fire and watched the LL1Py laughing at the waves. The treasures of the reef were almost:xhausted, but the hippies were unconcerned.
They were under-ourished and easily tired, but he found them refreshingly Jeasant company after Dr Barbara’s rigorous regime .1-le knew hat they were
uninterested in the sanctuary, and would never ive bothered to burn down the radio-cabin. Their ocean battered yacht rode at anchor and one day, on the merest whim, hey would decamp and sail away.
Meanwhile, however, their lassitude was infectious, and more iingerous to the sanctuary than Wolfgang’s TB. The sudden drop their food ration left the expedition members with little energy to pare. After the day’s work they lay in their tents, or wandered ong the beach in the hope offinding a few cans surrendered by the ives.
Only Carline now seriously believed that the hippies had urned down the radio-cabin but Dr Barbara, concerned by the ccline in morale, seized on the notion and did her best to provoke rHe dormant hostility to the idle and workshy Germans.
After their supper one evening Trudi walked up from the ach, and Dr Barbara made a point of barring her from the: ess-tent. Strangely torpid, Gubby lay in Trudi’s arms, his ighter gone.
But Dr Barbara was in no mood to compromise, and sent lonique back to the kitchen with the cup of goat’s milk she had brought for the child. ‘I haven’t any medicines to spare,’ she told Trudi. ‘Besides, the only medicine the baby needs is food. If you’re not eating enough your milk will dry up.’
‘There isn’t any food, doctor - the sea’s empty now. Neil can give us some eggs. I have acid left.’
‘Trudi, we don’t want your drugs, and the eggs are for Monsieur Didier.’ All reasonableness, Dr Barbara explained: ‘If you haven’t any food you’ll have to sail away.’
‘But we can’t leave without supplies - it’s six days to Tahiti.’
‘Then you’ll have to work like the rest of us. The four of you can easily gather enough food from the forest. You could even fish outside the reef.’
‘That’s too tiring. And we don’t like the food in the forest.’ Carrying the inert child in her sling, Trudi turned back to the beach as Dr Barbara stood hands on hips. Neil and Kimo avoided the young woman’s dejected gaze, unhappy with the lack of charity shown by the sanctuary.
Aware that Monique’s father had been too ill to taste a single egg, Neil asked: ‘How is Monsieur Didier, doctor? Monique says he’s stopped eating.’
‘He’s as well as we can hope. But he is very old, Neil. One day soon he’ll probably leave us. The sanctuary is a wonderful place to say goodbye to everything.’ She watched the goats foraging in the undergrowth beside the animal enclosure, their heads through the wire fence. ‘Still, we have to think about the living.
We’ve done so much, but everyone seems rather down.’
‘They’re tired, Dr Barbara. Maybe they need the television cameras to keep them going.’
‘Let’s hope not. I’ve got to find some way of rallying them, especially David and Kimo. The women are starting to do all the work. We can’t sit back or the sanctuary will run to seed.
Remember that we’re not alone on Saint-Esprit.’
‘Werner and Wolfgang won’t harm us, doctor. They’re stoned most of the time.’
‘Perhaps. But they may become desperate, Neil. We really must keep our guard up…
*
*
9 i. L.wd t!c JhftkcH litchc the Ikt ]11OI1111I, Neil discovered that one of the birds was missing. He was certain that he Germans had not stooped to stealing the hens, but decided to,,iv nothing until he had searched the surrounding forest.
Wading hrough the dense ferns below the plant terraces, he noticed that I Dr Barbara was already at work, preparing the ground for her endangered bamboos and orchids. Already he suspected that she had removed the chicken, just as he was sure that she had set fire to die radio-cabin.
He watched her arms rise and fall as the hoe struck the knotted soil. It was only eight o’clock, but already she was bathed in sweat nid dust, while the rest of the expedition team sat on their beds m d pondered the day ahead. Dr Barbara was impatient with them ill, eager to turn the screw. He knew that she had refused to
allow Monique’s aged father to leave Saint-Esprit, not because she had dosed the runway but in order to provoke everyone with her, it-)Parent callousness. Dr Barbara loathed the status quo, and riirived on tension and conflict. Yet he still admired her more than iiiy woman he had ever met, and liked to watch her strong arms striking the hard soil and the way she brushed her fraying blonde hiir from her forehead as if dismissing an insolent breeze.
Hearing him, she turned to stare through the trees. Neil stepped Hto the shadow of a eucalyptus, and decided to make his way)Wfl to the beach to satisfy himself that the Germans were lilocent of stealing the chicken.
Pushing aside the waist-high ins, he strode into the deep forest, feet sliding on the spongy
soil ici rotting bark. The stream slid down the hillside, a silver rpent that briefly showed its back to him. He reached the path rough the dappled world where Dr Barbara and the skipper of n c Croix du Sud had walked arm in arm, and approached the inera-tower hidden behind its screen of vines and palmettos.
The fronds swayed in the sea air that cooled the narrow valley, ving Neil a glimpse of a bizarre image within the foliage. A inented artist had recently been at work, using a palette nfined to a single primary colour. A bloody scrawl covered the cy concrete, drawn from the diary of an obscene child.
Neil separated the branches and stared at this crude finger painting, in which threads of animal tissue and a few feathers were smeared onto the cement. A grotesque goat stood on its rear hooves, immense penis swinging between its legs, ready to mount a woman with pendulous breasts and a strong, pointed nose.
The blood had scarcely dried, daubed onto the wall in a few violent seconds.
In the entrance to the tower was a dark pool, speckled with fat and gristle, where a chicken had been slaugh tered, its head, feet and gizzard lying on the stone.
Neil stepped across this greasy ooze and climbed the staircase, following a blurred trail of bloody heelprints. The camera chamber was empty, and a dusty light filtered through the leaves beyond the aperture, but Neil could see the white rag that lay in the corner.
Kneeling down, he held it in his hands, and unfolded the stained tatters of one of Dr Barbara’s cotton shirts, saturated like a tampon with the chicken’s blood.He squeezed the drenched fabric, as if pressing the sex from Dr Barbara’s pubis, and felt the blood run onto his hands. He tried to guess who had drawn the threatening goat poised to copulate with her. The artist had deliberately left the shirt for him to find, as if inciting Neil and everyone else on Saint-Esprit to enter an even more violent future than that which had once awaited the albatross.
‘U 10 The Attack on the Beach 0 I:(k A ABOUT TO BI(;v.
Parting the ferns with a cut1ous hand, Neil crept towards the trees above the beach as te other members of the raiding party took up their positions.
Rushing to Paradise Page 13
