Rushing to Paradise

by J. G. Ballard

  After a last look at the cr che, Neil crossed the runway and set off for the

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  beach, eager to haul ashore the yellow ray. Already he could see the fish lying in the netting fifty yards from the skiff, where the tethered parachute sucked like a lung at the wind. The idle waves tossed the yellow carcass to and fro like restless dogs bored by a creature they had killed.

  Exposed to the sunlight, the ray’s underbelly was smeared with the carmine stripes of its own blood. Neil seized the slack netting and began to disentangle the sodden mesh. Trapped within it were ribbons of kelp, dead squid and blue-fish, sea cucumbers and a rusty food can.

  ‘Major…?’ The yellow fish he had glimpsed in the whirl of foam beside the reef was an inflatable life-jacket, punctured in a dozen places, stained with the red shark repellent leaking from its shoulder capsule. Neil pulled the bundle of rubber tatters from the netting and brushed aside the threads of kelp, trying to remember the yellow life-jackets that the Andersons had worn. Scores of ocean

  yachtsmen had died, their jackets floating the seas for years, and he could imagine the old major and his wife swimming from the sinking sloop and deciding to slip the release cords on their jackets and sink arm in arm into the Pacific deep.

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  ‘95 He was running along the beach, impatient to tell Dr Barbara of his find, when he saw that a large, high-masted ketch had entered the lagoon, the Petrus Christus registered in The Hague.

  Sails furled, it moved towards the pier under its engine, whose rapid rhythm matched the beat of Neil’s heart and sent an urgent tocsin across the water. A sun-bronzed woman in her early forties was at the helm, while her husband stood by the fore-mast, a balding man with two blonde-haired daughters of Neil’s age.

  Dr Barbara strode in her measured way along the pier, boots ringing against the timbers. She ignored Neil, who was waving to her from the beach and holding up the tattered jacket, and continued her appraisal of the ketch, like an excisewoman at the bar of a secret harbour.

  A copper-skinned boy emerged from the cabin and stood in the cockpit beside the girls’ mother. A Moluccan some three years younger than Neil, he already had the physique of a professional boxer, his trim waist carrying a deep chest and a pair of powerful shoulders. His jaw squared when he noticed the unfriendly scowl on the face of David Carline as he paced restlessly along the pier, waving his straw hat with the gestures of a tetchy traffic-master on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

  Neil climbed the iron steps from the beach, waiting for Dr 1arbara to ask the visitors to leave once they had filled their water tanks. Hands on hips, she continued to cast her eye over the ketch, and it occurred to Neil that she might once again be taking an interest in the sanctuary. Perhaps she hoped that this Dutch family had brought with them some valuable creature to be given pride of place among the endangered animals.

  But her gaze had settled on the pretty daughters, already slyly smiling to each other over Neil, and on the handsome Moluc can. Already the youth had noticed his chief rival on Saint Esprit and was returning Neil’s level stare.

  Dr Barbara silenced Carline and raised her hands, her smile of greeting so broad that it almost eclipsed the sun.

  ‘Welcome to Saint-Esprit! We need every volunteer we can find. I hope you enjoy a long stay at our sanctuary island…

  On the beach behind her the pregnant women gathered, Inger, Trudi and Monique, their oceanic bellies ready to drown the Pacific.

  ‘97 16 A Banquet of the Fathoms I HL PA FII A Y WAS SI LEPER than he remembered. Fifty feet from the summit, Neil was forced to sit on the eroded steps he had helped to carve on the final approach to the radio mast. Calming his lungs, he listened to the fractious chittering of insects in the forest. Saint-Esprit seemed restless with itself. Palm fronds rasped in the wind, the notched trunks of the rare bamboos grated together, waves boomed through the wreck of the Dugong.

  Above him the albatross circled, crying mindlessly at the sky and aggravating the sharp migraine that had plagued him for days.

  Even that morning’s swim in the lagoon had failed to clear his head. Neil gripped his thighs, trying to steady the sweating muscles that still jumped in a fever of their own. The effort of spear-fishing in the lagoon each day had leached all the fat from his skin, and the strings of his muscles reminded him of the anatomical plates in his father’s textbooks, the skin flayed back to expose the knotted cords and straps.

  For the first time, despite the sun, the water in the lagoon had been almost too cold for him. He had swum out for two hundred yards, but then turned back to sit shivering on the wind-swept sand. When the van Noort sisters approached along the beach, ready to start their tiresome teasing, he left his scuba gear and set off for the summit, hoping to lose his fever in the cooler air of the high ground.

  As he climbed the last steps to the radio mast, Neil could see the sisters trying on his oxygen harness, their pale hair as white as the plumage of birds.

  Like everyone else on the island, they were hungry all the time, and their teasing had a serious purpose, part of the campaign to irritate Neil and keep him fishing for as long as possible. The trouble with Saint-Esprit was that there were too many mouths to feed, and too many of those mouths belonged to pregnant women and adolescent girls, two groups with the voracious appetite of a great white shark.

  Dr Barbara’s surprising invitation to the van Noorts had now turned into an open recruitment drive. In the month since their arrival they had been joined by two New Zealand nurses, Anne Hampton and Patsy Kennedy, who were working their passage on a South African yacht sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Keen environmentalists, they quickly fell under Dr Barbara’s steely spell, and decided to remain on Saint-Esprit and help with the work of the sanctuary. Used to dealing with teenage patients, they soon tried to take Neil in charge, organ izing every minute of his day for him, with Monique’s and Mrs Saito’s encouragement.

  Soon after their arrival, a catamaran crewed by three Mexican ocean-racers put in for repairs. The burly trio of petroleum engineers took a keen interest in the desalination plant, whose modest performance they offered to improve, and in the drain age systems of the plant and animal enclosures.

  Despite their dash and expertise, Dr Barbara was cool to them, and clearly relieved when their twin-hull slipped away through the reef. Yet only the next day a sloop sailed by an elderly Canadian couple and their grand-daughters, two school-teachers in their late twenties, arrived to a warm reception. Neil had hoped that the Mexicans would stay, evening the balance between the sexes, and tried to imagine Dr Barbara having an affair with one of the engineers.

  But Dr Barbara was happiest when surrounded by women, and it occurred to Neil that he might soon be the only man left on Saint-Esprit. A series of close-knit groups had formed at the sanctuary, from which he and David Carline were excluded.

  At the centre of this women’s republic was Dr Barbara, presiding from her office in the clinic, guarding the store of canned food and the medical supplies that had failed to save Professor Saito and Kimo from their wasting fevers. Around her were the original foursome: Mrs Saito, Monique, Inger and Trudi.

  ‘99 Beyond them lay an outer circle of novices, none so far pregnant, the van Noort sisters and the New Zealand nurses, nowjoined by the Canadian women, all committed to the success of the sanctuary.

  Whenever Neil approached, bringing a large grouper to the kitchen table, or hoping tojoin in their easy laughter, he felt like an intruder at a private party.

  The women would stop their talk and stare at him, waiting for him to return to his tent with his tray of food. For all their chumminess with each other, there was a ruthlessness about them that unnerved Neil, which he had last seen displayed by his five-year-old cousins during their childhood nursery games, decapitating a loyal teddy-bear for the smallest pcccadillo.

  F-Ic and Carline had been left to care for the dying Kimo on their own, bathing and comforting the feverish Haw
aiian, clumsily trying to ease his distress as the sweat drained from his wasting body and soaked the mattress in his tent.

  Only Dr Barbara had called, to give him his daily injection, and in a callous gesture she had ordered Monique to cut his food ration days before the end.

  Neil had hunted for taro to pulp and boil, feeding the ailing giant as his head lolled against his knees.

  As the number of mouths to feed had grown, more of the animals in the sanctuary were slaughtered for the cooking stove, the rare plants plundered for edible corms and bulbs. The lucky few that survived were little more than a shop window to impress the visiting delegations. Not only had the women excluded Neil from the treats of the table, often fobbing him off with a charred fish-tail perfunctorily grilled by Inger as she chattered in German to Trudi, but he was also denied the pleasures of the bed.

  Dr Barbara had assigned neither the van Noort girls nor the two nurses to his tent, perhaps fearing the fever that affected him, and which her injections did nothing to cure. Sometimes he suspected that he had completed his role for Dr Barbara, and that his successor had already been appointed.

  Looking down at the camp, he could see Nihal, the fourteen-year old Moluccan,

  standing under the open-air shower behind the clinic. Despite her heavy abdomen, Monique was climbing the ladder with a canvas water bucket which she tipped into the overhead tank. Trudi dropped Nihal’s swimsuit to his ankles, exposing his small buttocks which she cheerfully soaped.

  Dr Barbara watched from the deck-chair in her private sanctum, the wired enclosure on the higher ground above the clinic. Here she had begun to cultivate a modest garden, laying out a series of flower-beds below the overhanging trees in which she hoped to grow medicinal herbs. The garden was her retreat, to which no-one was admitted, and she sat alone in the evenings beside her large spade, surveying the sanctuary she had created.

  She lay back as Nihal took his shower, but her eyes never left his sleekly muscled body. She had become almost obsessed with him, and suggested to Neil that he teach the youth how to spear-fish.

  But Neil was uneasy with this boyish intruder and his sly eyes, all too aware of what was going on in Dr Barbara’s mind.

  Besides, the lagoon was Neil’s domain, the reservoir that held all the adolescent obsessions with nuclear death that had brought him to Saint-Esprit. Its deep waters seemed to merge with his own bloodstream, as he filtered through his dreams those drowned bones he had glimpsed in the submerged bomber. The camera-towers stood around the lagoon, still waiting to record a nuclear event that would now only take place within his mind.

  Then at last he would be free to leave Saint-Esprit and its resting dead beside the prayer-shack.

  Standing on the cliff among the albatross, Neil followed the course of a single cumulus as it moved across the lagoon, mirrored by the halo of its own reflection in the glassy aqua marine. It sailed towards the north-west, cleared the reef and set off on its long sky-journey to Tahiti.

  However, its white shadow remained within the lagoon, a few hundred yards from the bomber on the sea-bed, well beyond the outer limit of Neil’s fishing ground. As the waves smoothed themselves in the falling wind, he saw a white triangle that resembled the bows and keel of a sunken yacht, an inverted craft hanging from the under-surface of the water as it sailed across the lagoon.

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  Had one of the visiting yachts foundered, only a mile from the sanctuary, as everyone slept in their tents? Refreshed by the cool summit air, Neil ran down the lower slopes of the hillside and pushed through the deep ferns towards the runway.

  For reasons he never understood, many of the yachts had chosen to slip away at night. The van Noorts, an amiable Amsterdam architect and his handsome wife, set sail before dawn, much to their daugh ters’ surprise, passing a message to Dr Barbara that they would return from Tahiti by the month’s end. The elderly Canadians had also sailed after dusk, without saying goodbye to their grand-daughters, and simply telling Monique and Mrs Saito that they would return after a visit to Bora Bora.

  Neil, by chance, had seen the Canadians leave. Drifting through his night fever, he sat up in bed as a spectral sail crossed the dark lagoon. He heard Carline’s voice, and the oars of a dinghy labouring in the water. He fell asleep but later, when he woke, all was quiet in the windless night and the Canadian couple had cleared the reef. Streaming with sweat, Neil left his bed, hoping to revive himself in the cold surf.

  Carline’s tent was empty, flaps open on an undisturbed sleeping bag. Neil crossed the runway to the beach and saw him hurrying between the shadowless palms.

  Without noticing Neil, he strode past in his drenched clothes, exhausted by his hours of rowing. He returned to his tent and roped the flaps together, sealing himself away from Dr Barbara and the sanctuary.

  Remembering that uneasy night, Neil stood beside the runway, eyes spurred by the fierce coral glare. Perhaps Carline had tried to overtake the Canadians, hoping to leave the island with them? The American was wandering around the open ground by the prayer-shack, hunting for sweet potatoes that would augment the modest rations

  which the women allowed him. Under the straw hat his face was sallow and toneless, and despite the hunt for food his eyes forever strayed to the line of graves. So many corpses now lay in the cemetery that the contours of the head land had begun to change. Kimo was covered by a tumulus of stones and earth, decorated with his Hawaiian independence mementoes, and dwarfed the miniature grave of Professor Saito.

  The little botanist was so wasted by the time of his death that Neil had carried him in his arms, followed by Dr Barbara and his bad-tempered widow, pregnant with Neil’s child.

  ‘Neil? What are you doing here?’ Canine struck the ground with his stick, as if hoping to rouse Wolfgang and Werner from their subterranean sleep. ‘You can look for yams somewhere else.’

  ‘I’ve been up to the summit,’ Neil told him. ‘I wanted to count the albatross.’

  ‘Why, for Pete’s sake? Save your energy. Did you see anyone?’

  ‘No-one, David.’

  ‘No fires or caches? A lean-to shack, maybe?’

  ‘Nothing. Werner and Wolfgang left the island long ago.’

  ‘That’s what Barbara says. But I know better.’ Carline stared at Neil’s hands, almost suspecting that they held a secret message from the Germans. Neil realized that Carline was lonely, and jealous of any contact Neil might have with the two hippies. His scarecrow figure seemed about to root itself among the stunted yams. He chewed his thumb and sniffed hungrily at the blood, then wiped it on his matted hair, now grown so long that Neil suspected he was trying to resemble a woman.‘David, come fishing with me. We’ll catch a small shark and cook it on the beach.’

  ‘Barbara gets first choice.’ Canine glowered at the camp, where the women were gathering around the mess-tent, ready to hold one of their endless meetings.

  ‘There they go again. Better get out of the way, Neil, it’s indoctrination time.

  So, you’re planning to leave Saint-Esprit?’

  ‘Not for a while. What about you, David?’

  ‘I wouldn’t try to reach Tahiti in that skiff. You might not make it out of the lagoon.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave.

  Why should I?’

  ‘I can think of a few reasons.

  Everything’s changed, Neil.

  Your time here is over.’

  ‘I’ll hang on.’ Neil stared at Professor Saito’s grave, re membering his last anguished babble inside the mosquito net as his wife tried to calm him. The botanist had turned against the sanctuary, and had rambled to himself about the seaplane and the albatross, confusing them in his mind. ‘Why do you stay, David?’

  ‘Unfinished business…’ Canine raised his bleeding fore finger to the light.

  ‘There’s blood on the wind, Neil. Try not to get spattered. Even a drop can kill.’

  ‘Then get away from the sanctuary. Go back to Boston, and your w
ife and daughters.’

  ‘My wife and daughters?’ Canine smiled to himself at Neil’s na vet

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  . ‘They’re

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  here on Saint-Esprit… you talk to them every day, you’ve shared your bed with them. Men are very different, Neil, each of us is an exception to the rule. Women are all the same. They may look different, but deep inside they’re Barbara Rafferty. Remember that, Neil..

  Striking the grave, he shuffled through the cemetery, eyes on the sky as if ready to rush to the radio-cabin at the first sight of a rescue plane.

  Neil watched him wander into the forest, and stood for a silent minute beside Kimo’s grave. He missed the phlegmatic Hawaiian, with his moods and surliness, his hundred little kindnesses towards Neil and his earnest attempts to wean him from his dreams of nuclear weapons. During their first uneasy months on the island Kimo had regarded him as little more than a nuisance, a mascot exploited for his injured

  foot, but later he recognized his commitment to the sanctuary. He admired Neil’s swimming and fishing skills and in a clumsy but big-brotherly way tried to protect him from the women. At the end, before he died, he had taken Neil’s hands, as if hoping that he would return the favour and intercede with Dr Barbara to save him.

  Neil paused at the smaller grave beside Kimo’s tumulus, also aware that he had begun to miss Professor Saito. By some sleight of hand the introverted botanist had managed to be happy with his fierce and unpleasant wife, a notion that Neil found hard to grasp but which offered a curious sense of comfort. Coming so close together, the deaths had stunned everyone and pre vented them from mourning the two founder-members of the expedition. Saint-Esprit’s endemic fly-fever, Dr Barbara warned them, preyed on the weak and irresolute.