Rushing to Paradise

by J. G. Ballard

  Mrs Saito would lead him from the door, allowing him to exercise himself and pointing to the familiar trees with the formal manner of a psychiatric nurse.

  Was Dr Barbara waiting for them to recall her to the sanctuary, or trying to provoke them into reporting her to the yacht crews who visited the island? Major Anderson sat in the cockpit of his sloop, every detail of her misrule registered by his stern posed beside Dr Barbara, aware that the Andersons would never alert the French authorities while Neil remained with her, fearful that he might become her next victim.

  By now, Neil’s days as a hunter and his nights as Dr Barbara’s lover had set all his doubts aside. He was ruled by the temper of this drugged and wayward woman, unnerved by the strength of her thighs when she rode him like a trainer breaking a colt, using her long breasts to bridle his mouth. Bruised by her hands, but eager to be used by her, he was obsessed by the scent of her nipples, which were scarred by ulcers as if the deranged Gubby had devoured them while she smothered him.

  Seizing Neil’s shoulders, she knelt across him, urging him on long after he was exhausted.

  At times it seemed to Neil that she was testing him against the men she remembered from her past, measuring his heart and lungs and genitals against those of the yacht-captains and life guards who had been her lovers. Wiping the spit from his face, she stared at him with the knowing gaze of an adult abusing a child. When she urinated on him, smiling as the hot jet stung the salt-water sores on his chest, she playfully pressed her hand over his mouth and laughed through her chipped teeth as he fought and gasped for air.

  At the end Neil would take her sweat-drenched head in his hands and hold it to his shoulder, embracing her while he smoothed the hair on her forehead. Trying to calm her, he caressed her cheeks, listening to the albatross bicker over the bone tip. He knew that Dr Barbara was preparing him for the task that lay ahead, satisfying herself that he was equal to whatever demands she would make on him. He waited for her to show him the affection she had displayed during the voyage from Honolulu, but affection was far from Dr Barbara’s mind.

  The albatross screamed through the nights, crying to the bones.

  The white seaplane had landed, and was taxiing across the lagoon. As he sat on the steps of the weather-station, the charcoal ashes at his feet, Neil watched Captain Garfield manoeuvre the ‘73 craft towards the pier. Plumes of spray lifted from the surface of the lagoon, like vents of steam from the drowned crater of the volcano.

  Making his monthly visit despite Dr Barbara’s interdiction, Captain Garfield would bring mail, a sack of children’s get-well cards, fresh fruit and milk, one or two curious journalists and more donated animals for the sanctuary. Distracted by their tasks, or by the rigours of deck-chair and hammock, the expedition members scarcely noticed the seaplane mooring by the pier. Often Carline would not even leave his charred seat in the radio-cabin, and Kimo would merely flick the flap of his tent, while Monique briefly glanced at the new arrivals over her taro cake.

  From a bamboo bird-cage on the pier a flash of gaudy colour caught Neil’s eye, the plumage perhaps of a fire-maned bowerbird from a donor in Papua New Guinea or a rare Spix’s macaw from a Peruvian sympathizer. Regrettably, as Neil and Dr Barbara had found, the glamorous birds that most appealed to the consciences of animal rights enthusiasts tended to be the stringiest in the cooking pot. The sanctuary needed more humdrum fowl, more farmyard ducks and geese.

  ‘Dr Barbara…’ Neil called to her as she washed in the water he had carried from the stream, soaping her arms and shoulders under the curious gaze of the albatross.

  ‘What is it, Neil? Have they brought us a cow? Monique will be making cheese.’

  ‘No, but there’s something strange… David’s getting up.

  And Kimo.’ Carline had taken off his straw hat and was walking towards the pier, saluting the seaplane’s disembarking passengers like a district commissioner greeting a consular delegation. Kimo had rolled from his hammock and tossed aside the grass crown he was weaving. Major Anderson was rowing ashore in the dinghy, while his wife had left the kitchen and hurried across the runway.

  Monique dusted her floury elbows and abandoned the bread board. She stood behind Mrs Saito under the flapping bed-sheets, watching Carline greet the new arrivals. Two uniformed men with holsters on their belts were walking towards him, caps amicably raised.

  ‘Dr Barbara - ‘ Neil squinted through the soaring birds.

  ‘They’re French gendarmes..

  Dr Barbara buttoned her shirt and stood beside Neil, looking down at the pier. For the first time she seemed unsure of herself, sniffing her clean finger-tips as if searching for the reassuring scent of dirt and blood.

  ‘So… it looks as if we’ll have to go, Neil. I really didn’t think they’d come.”Why are they here, doctor? Did someone tell them about Gubby?’

  ‘They must have done. It wasn’t a secret - most of the yachts have radios.’

  She gave Neil a dazed smile and embraced him. ‘I’ll get ready.’ She dressed quickly, packed her few clothes and the hypo dermic into the satchel and stood in the doorway of the weather-station, surveying the island like a distracted dreamer about to dismiss a vision from her mind. Even the albatross were deserting her.

  Alarmed by the seaplane, thousands of the birds had left the bone-strewn cliffs and soared out to circle the reef.

  ‘We’ll go, Neil.’ Dr Barbara listened to the fading cries. ‘It’s best if they don’t find the cave. I’ll leave the sleeping bag - you can rest here when you want to be alone. You’ll think of me, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll come with you to Papeete, doctor.’ Neil tried to encourage her, but she had already retreated into herself, no longer the fierce lover and huntress, and once again the threadbare ob stetrician he had met in Waikiki. ‘I’ll tell them that you didn’t kill the baby.’

  ‘But I did, Neil. I did. I want you to stay here and carry on the work. Mrs Saito knows what to do.’ Taking the satchel from her hand, Neil followed her down the pathway. On the pier the gendarmes were speaking to Carline and Monique, pointing like interested tourists to the plant laboratory and the animal enclosures, the mess-tent and clinic.

  Aware that Dr Barbara was about to be arrested, Neil had decided that he would leave with her in the seaplane and assure her of at least one sympathetic witness at her trial in Papeete. He tried to think of some ruse that might save her, again wondering if they could marry - his mother would be shocked by her new daughter-in-law, but Colonel Stamford might well approve.

  Twenty minutes later, when they emerged from the forest, everyone had returned to the pier. Neil waited for Inger and Trudi to point accusingly at Dr Barbara, but they were sitting on the beach and admiring the seaplane’s graceful lines. There was still time for Dr Barbara to escape. She and Neil could swim to one of the outer islands of the atoll, trap the fish and birds and hide out forever among the hundreds of sand-bars.

  ‘Neil - ‘ Dr Barbara stopped at the edge of the runway. ‘Listen - that sound.

  What is it?’ Engines… ‘ The satchel in Neil’s hand already seemed lighter. A propeller turned and caught the sun, throwing a spear of light at the cliffs behind them. ‘Dr Barbara - they’re leaving… the gendarmes are going!’ Dr Barbara leaned against the bulldozer, her shoulders straightening as the seaplane eased away from the pier. One of the French policemen crouched in the open hatchway, saluting Monique and Mrs Saito. Already Mrs Anderson had returned to the kitchen. Her disappointed husband stood on the beach beside his dinghy, still searching the hillsides for any sign of Neil and Dr Barbara and unaware that they were waiting behind the bulldozer. Kimo ambled back to his hammock through the clouds of coral dust whipped up. by the seaplane’s engines, while Inger and Trudi sat on the sand and held their skirts to their knees, waving to the young crew-men aboard the plane.

  ‘Dr Barbara…’ Neil raised the satchel like a battle-trophy.

  They didn’t tell the police - it means you won’t have to go. You c
an stay on Saint-Esprit.’

  ‘It means more than that, Neil. A great deal more.’ Dr Barbara was smiling modestly to herself, a hand stilling Neil when he tried to shout above the roar of the engines. In their bamboo cages on the pier three sulphur-crested cockatoos had turned their backs to the seaplane and were already eyeing the formid able figure of their new mistress.

  (; irlinc stood by the radio-cabin, holding the scorched microphone as the seaplane taxied to its take-off point. He watched Dr Barbara approach him with quiet pleasure, openly admiring her courage, and glad that he had kept the promise he had made to himself.

  Shoulders square, Dr Barbara strode towards him, ready to issue her first orders of the day.

  ‘77 PART III 14 A New Arrival Bruised by the waves, the giant fish lay in the drift-net below the reef, its yellow gills streaked with blood. Thirty feet away, in the safety of the open water, Neil steadied himself against the guy-rope that

  ran from the stern rail of the Dugong.

  The fish was the largest he had caught, a rare species of ray that had strayed from the sea and buried itself in the snare, which he and Kimo had laboriously stitched together from the badminton nets donated to the sanctuary by a sports equipment manufac turer in Tokyo.

  Leaving the creature to thrash itself towards the shore, Neil swam to the skiff where Inger and Monique rested under an awning of parachute silk. They had cheered him on during his struggle to trap the fish, aware that its flesh would provide a procession of meals. Already Neil could see them gorging themselves on the strange meat, their chins streaming with hot fat as they tore apart the barbecued flesh. For a few days they would no longer need to raid the animal enclosures. Far too many of the threatened creatures had ended their visits to Saint Esprit in the cooking pot, though fortunately the world supply of rare and endangered mammals seemed inexhaustible.

  ‘Well done, Neil!’ Monique called to him from her cushioned sun-lounger.

  ‘What a battle for you. And what a fish.’

  ‘It’s as large as you are, Monique.’

  ‘Good, I’m so hungry I could eat myself’ Neil clung to the side of the skiff, grinning through the bright water. ‘I’ll tell you the tastiest bits.’

  ‘That’s very cheeky. Don’t you think, Inger?’ i8i ‘Wait till Dr Barbara sees the fish. We’ll give you the biggest helping, Neil,’ Inger reminded him.

  This assurance was a courtesy that would be forgotten once they sat around the table in the mess-tent. Eager to get to the kitchen and spur the weary Kimo into lighting a fire, Inger stood up and lowered the parachute canopy, air-dropped by M decins Sans Fronti

  �

  res

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  with the latest batch of pharmaceutical supplies.

  Resting in the surf, Neil lay back to admire the women. Both were magnificently pregnant, so heavy with child that he feared the rocking motion of the skiff would send them into labour. He remembered Trudi’s unhappy delivery, and Dr Barbara’s ‘Push… push… push’ as she urged the young woman to expel the malformed foetus from her womb. The boy - he had only learned its sex from Professor Saito, unhappily drunk and indiscreet on his home-brew sake -had died soon after, but neither Trudi nor the other women had been too dismayed, aware that the child carried a genetic defect.

  Dr Barbara had prevented Neil from seeing the infant, but once it was sealed into its coffin she allowed him to bury it beside Gubby in the cemetery. Kimo and Professor Saito attended the modest service, and the weeping botanist delivered a brief oration in garbled Japanese as Neil laid his first-born to rest.

  This time, Neil vowed, there would be no unhappiness and no congenital defects. For all the vigour of the sea, thrusting at the skiff like a demented midwife, Neil found it hard to believe that either Monique or Inger would miscarry.

  Nothing could dim their appetite for air, sun and food.

  Monique stood in the bows, swimsuit rolled around her waist, exposing the large breasts that seemed to be filled by scarcely smaller pregnancies of their own.

  The hard-working and over-serious Air France hostess had become a sedate Juno, forever playing her earnest pranks on Neil, hiding his clothes and lipsticking obscenities on his back as he slept.

  At times Neil wearied of her stolid humour, and missed the prickly and quick-handed Frenchwoman who had ruled proudly over her kitchen. But at least he had shared her tent and her bed, if not her heart, though the memory of their few nights together - a narrow window of opportunity after Monique’s ovulation - had already begun to fade. Once Neil had sired their children the women tended to forget him with dismaying speed.

  Inger, like Monique and Trudi, had close-cropped her hair into a mannish trim that emphasized the heavy bones of her skull. She stood confidently in the stern, gathering the parachute silk around her like a cloudy pink crinoline. One hand rested on her belly, as if waiting for the latest bulletin from the growing baby.

  According to Dr Barbara, both these sleeping infants would be girls, increasing the female population of Saint-Esprit to the point where it well exceeded the number of

  men, but Neil was glad that there would be more women on the island. He was grateful to luger and Trudi, and even Monique, for everything they had done to steer him to manhood. While they bore his children they had also brought the adult Neil into the world, turning him from a child into a bearded seventeen-year-old patriarch.

  As soon as their babies were born, Dr Barbara would see that he slept with them again. He remembered their last nights together, now five months away, before Dr Barbara confirmed that they were pregnant. Monique had woken with surprise to motherhood and began to shed her stuffiness, though she had never relaxed with Neil even when they were in bed together, assigning him portions of her anatomy and taking him through their sex act as if demonstrating a complex piece of cabin equipment to a dimwitted passenger. Once, in an unguarded moment, she spoke almost resentfully of her father, and how the great animal rights activist had been a stern and obsessive parent, insisting that even the way in which she tied her shoe-laces was a challenge of self-discipline.

  By contrast Inger and Trudi were like older sisters cheerfully committing incest with him. Neil loved their darting hands that stung his buttocks when he was clumsy or over-ardent, warning him to think more of their pleasure than his own. He loved their teeth biting his nipples, fingers gripping his testicles as if weighing the sperm he was incubating for them. Sex with Inger and Trudi was a happy version of the sex he had known with Dr Barbara, and belonged to a realm which he was certain few people on the planet had experienced.

  He was surprised and hurt when they pushed him from their beds once Dr Barbara announced that they had conceived. Only Trudi had taken pity on him when she found him mooning on the beach, and took him to his tent for a last hour together, even though she was three months pregnant. When she left him he sensed that she was slipping away to join the camp of an enemy.

  Neil! Wake up!’ Monique pulled his beard as he dozed over the oars. ‘Inger, he’s asleep again.’

  ‘Come on, Neil…’ Inger crammed the parachute between her thighs and heaved on the oars. ‘You can be tired later on. irudi’s coming - she must have news from Dr Barbara.’ Neil steadied the oars and pointed the skiff towards the beach. irudi was running down the sand, her fists pummelling the air.

  She raced through the surf and seized the bows of the skiff, steering it onto the shore through the last of the waves.

  Abandoning the parachute when it ballooned over the side, Inger and Monique clambered across the seats, patted Neil and leapt into the water.

  ‘Good news!’ Monique whooped. ‘Inger, did you hear? No defects!’

  ‘Trudi! You did it this time!’ The three women were up to their thighs in the surging waves. The foam seethed around them, as if the sea was releasing its spawn in a vain attempt to impregnate them. Smiling wanly to himself, Neil waited while the women embraced and romped, celebrating another birth to come. Despite his vital contr
ibution, they took him less seriously than he hoped. Only later, as they strode up the beach, did Trudi notice Neil and return to coiiipliment him. it’s wonderful, Neil!’ she told him, her small face lit with pride and relief. ‘You can be very happy. It’s a girl for Dr Barbara - and for you.’

  ‘That’s great, Trudi.’ Neil held her narrow waist as she tottered in the waves, aware that this was the last time he would embrace her. ‘And no sign of any defects…

  ‘Defects?’ Trudi seemed dazed. ‘Of course not. It’s a girl.

  You’ll have a new Gubby to play with.’

  ‘Gubby was a boy.’

  ‘Never mind. A girl is even nicer - you know that, Neil.’ She ran off, shouting: ‘Dr Barbara wants to see you at the clinic. She has a special job for you.. As Neil approached the camp the women’s laughter still sounded from their tents. The noise had sent the peccaries stamping around their wire pen and set off a sympathetic screeching of cockatoos and lorikeets. All the creatures on Saint-Esprit, even those destined for the dining table, were celebrating the new addition

  to the sanctuary family.

  In the year since their arrival on the island the sanctuary had stabilized itself. Despite the decline in media interest, the French authorities had made no attempt to re-occupy Saint-Esprit, clearly relieved to have the nuclear atoll off the world’s front pages. Journalists still visited the island, reporting on the large stock of endangered birds and mammals landed by visiting ships, or brought by Captain Garfield’s seaplane on its occasional visits.

  Saint-Esprit was now a moored ark filled with bizarre specimens - tenrecs and dwarf lemurs from Madagascar, palm civets from Java, Texan kangaroo rats and musk-shrews from Zimbabwe.

  Almost every corner of the globe was represented by some eccentric mating couple, and once they produced their offspring they would advance, two by two, towards the kitchen cleaver.