J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise

Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 1994

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1994

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

Introduction © Rivka Galchen 2014

‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Cover by Stanley Donwood,

Assembled from a digitally manipulated linocut, iPhone photos and a photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis.

Source ISBN: 9780006548140

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007384891

Version 2019-02-04

From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise:

‘Mesmerising and poetic … compulsive reading’

Financial Times

‘A subversive version of Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s relentless intelligence and wildly irreverent, absurdist humour collaborate in creating comically satiric sequences. A body blow to the pretensions in our century’

Irish Times

‘Rushing to Paradise, which marks a return to the ecocidal territory of his first novel, The Drowned World, and has much in common also with the atavistic violence of Hello America and High-Rise, is essentially a portrait of the imagination of disaster … His ear for the descriptive cadence is unerringly acute, and while his imitators can only struggle to render violence explosively literal, Ballard remains a profound elegist of decay’

Times Literary Supplement

‘A satisfyingly bizarre mixture of fantasy and fact … a dystopian vision of a paradise island overrun by a band of environmentalists’

Sunday Times

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise

Introduction by Rivka Galchen

PART I

1: Saving the Albatross

2: Protesting Too Much

3: The Dugong

4: The Shore Raid

5: Island People

6: The View from a Camera-Tower

7: The Rainbow Pirates

8: The Gift Mountain

PART II

9: The Ecology of Paradise

10: The Attack on the Beach

11: The Breeding-Station

12: Fever in the Blood

13: Hunters and Lovers

PART III

14: A New Arrival

15: Volunteers

16: A Banquet of the Fathoms

17: The End of Love

18: A Gift to a Death

19: Lilies of the Sanctuary

20: The Secret Door

The Sage of Shepperton

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Introduction by Rivka Galchen

‘On waking one morning, B was surprised to see that Shepperton was deserted,’ begins J. G. Ballard in one of the very last short stories he wrote, ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.’ B’s newspaper has not been delivered, the power is out, he goes next door to complain to his neighbour and finds no neighbour there, nor any traffic on the streets, nor anyone at the train station. ‘Thinking that perhaps some terrible calamity was imminent,’ he checks the transistor radio, and finds no signal coming from the UK, no signal from the entire continent.

The scenario is one we associate with alarm, and with apocalypse. Yet Ballard’s language tells a counter-tale. The gentle ‘perhaps’, the mild m’s of ‘calamity was imminent’, even the childlike ‘B was surprised’ as a reaction to a deserted Shepperton – these may be end times, but they aren’t being met with weeping and gnashing of teeth.

B drives to check in on a friend; she is not there. He breaks into Scotland Yard, into the Houses of Parliament, still he finds no one. B sails across the Channel to France; he returns. Only at the zoo does he find some signs of life. He sets free some caged hungry birds, and months later the birds visit his lawn, where he has scattered rice and seeds for them. B remains without a single human companion. Yet the story doesn’t end on a note of loneliness, or mourning, or madness, or with a slow radiation death, or a return of civilization, or a waking from a dream. Instead, ‘Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.’ It is a happy ending, and the penultimate one in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Its first publication of wide distribution was in the month after Ballard died.

A reader familiar with the work of Ballard will know in advance that Rushing to Paradise won’t be a simple story about hurrying over to an inarguable Eden. Unexpectedness is to be expected from any truly worthwhile writer, but with Ballard we find a more unexpected unexpectedness. Though Ballard may not be known for his sunniness, neither is he predictably dark. He is a man who in his autobiography Miracles of Life wrote of his years in the Lunghua internment camp in Shanghai, ‘I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart.’ Rushing to Paradise has a similarly honest and radical confluence of sentiments.

The novel is mostly set on or near a French Pacific island that is home to nuclear testing and also home to the albatross, a species of bird that Dr Barbara, a charismatic environmentalist, has resolved to save. Dr Barbara’s first stroke of good luck toward her publicly pronounced goal is when her young devotee Neil, just sixteen, gets shot in the foot by the French military – this wins her a useful media bonanza. Her next bit of good fortune is a shipwreck. Sure, Dr Barbara is not up to quite what we had originally thought she was up to, and the fortune and misfortune around her prove to be other than purely arbitrary. But Dr Barbara is not a simple villain, with simple victims.

I have too much respect for a novel that can actually be plot-spoiled, so I won’t share more turns of events in these prefacing pages. Instead I will simply point out: here we are, for most of the novel, on an island with its questionable cast. This is a classic situation in literature, and also – with variations on what isolates the characters – in Ballard. In Rushing, Ballard uses the situation so marvellously that one can’t help but think of that Duke Prospero, with his dubious renouncement of his own magic, and Caliban’s unsettling pledge of obedience. Ballard invokes this comparison consciously, it seems. Is the island the place of our most primitive selves, or is it the luxurious haven of refined civilization? Is the island the place we are fleeing to, or fleeing from?

The word ‘paradise’ has cognates in Old French, Late Latin, Greek and Iranian, and it has much the same tone and meaning in each of those sources. But the word’s component parts, para- cognate with peri- for ‘around’ and -dise from varied roots meaning to build or form, suggest a deliberately bounded space, even a compound of sorts. Thus the word’s etymology suggests an anxiety about the idyll: perhaps it needs high defences, perhaps it is difficult to escape. In this novel, we see these verbal undertones in the literal Pacific island, but also in the metaphoric islands of sexual enchantment and of ideals as they morph into moral high grounds. Much of the novel is told from close perspective of the young Neil, who finds himself in various havens he has trouble exiting, including the haven of youth. By the latter half of the novel, Neil hunts and eats animals he might have once thought otherwise about, but ‘fortunately the world supply of rare and endangered mammals seemed inexhaustible.’ And yet we know that ‘seemed’ is precisely the right word.

These are the whirled contradictions that make Ballard’s pages here seem not so much to turn as to rotate and tighten like a vice. Are you excited that there’s an intelligent, scientific, female lead? Well, that feeling will be complicated. Does the lampooning of a hyperbolic photogenic-conflict-obsessed media compel? That too won’t work out in the clean way you might imagine. For effects beyond mere playfulness, Ballard has hinged this novel on the albatross, a bird whose mythology is surpassed perhaps only by the fictive phoenix. Albatrosses, however, are not just literary, they are also real. The novel’s characters both think, and don’t think too hard, about allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In that poem, the man who killed the albatross, though he is blamed by his crew for the bad weather, and is forced to wear the dead albatross on his neck, is also the only member of the sailing crew who survives. We often forget this. The mariner’s burden is to tell his tale wherever he goes, so as to teach a lesson. But what lesson? His crime is what saved him. And the relation of his crime to the ship’s troubles is in many places undermined. It is the panicked sailors eager to assign blame whose lives are taken.

Ballard, we should remember, is arguably most famous for his fictive apocalypses, as in The Drowned World and The Crystal World. Rushing to Paradise could be said to be another of Ballard’s apocalypse novels, though its apocalypse is perennial and familiar, one of abuses of power and of personality cults among tottering grandness, extinctions and decays. Rushing is an apocalypse novel in much the same way as the wholly realistic Empire of the Sun, set in the World War Two internment camps of Shanghai that Ballard knew firsthand.

How does one end an apocalyptic story, a story that is, in its essence, about endings? In ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.’ it is only the alien birds that return to B’s lawn and are there to witness the instructive tale of a man who finds a way off the island, even as he stays on. In the case of Rushing to Paradise, we might think of ourselves as the threatened albatrosses who remain in flight overhead, looking for where we might, at least briefly, land.

New York, 2014

PART I

1
Saving the Albatross

‘Save the albatross …! Stop nuclear testing now …!’

Drenched by the spray, Dr Barbara Rafferty stood in the bows of the rubber inflatable, steadying herself against Neil’s shoulder as the craft swayed in the skittish sea. Refilling her strained but still indignant lungs, she pressed the megaphone to her lips and bellowed at the empty beaches of the atoll.

‘Say no to biological warfare …! Save the albatross and save the planet …!’

A passing wave swerved across the prow, and almost struck the megaphone from her hand. She swore at the playful foam, and listened to the echoes of her voice hunting among the rollers. As if bored with themselves, the amplified slogans had faded long before they could reach the shore.

‘Shit! Neil, wake up! What’s the matter?’

‘I’m here, Dr Barbara.’

‘That’s Saint-Esprit ahead. The albatross island!’

‘Saint-Esprit?’ Neil stared doubtfully at the deserted coastline, which seemed about to slide off the edge of the Pacific. He tried to muster a show of enthusiasm. ‘You really brought us here, doctor.’

‘I told you I would. Believe me, we’re going to stir things up …’

‘You always stir everything up …’ Neil moved her heavy knee from the small of his back and rested his head against the oil-smeared float. ‘Dr Barbara, I need to sleep.’

‘Not now! For heaven’s sake …’

Already irritated by the island, which she had described so passionately during the three-week voyage from Papeete, Dr Barbara raised two fingers in a vulgar gesture that shocked even Neil. Between the lapels of her orange weather-jacket the salt-water sores on her neck and chest glared like cigarette bums. But her body meant nothing to the forty-year-old physician, as Neil knew. For Dr Barbara the polluted water tanks of the Bichon, the antique ketch that had brought them from Papeete, their meagre rations and sodden bunks counted for nothing. Albatross fever was all. If Saint-Esprit, this nondescript atoll six hundred miles south-east of Tahiti, failed to match her expectations it would have to reshape itself into the threatened paradise for which she had campaigned so tirelessly.

‘Reef, Dr Barbara! Time for quiet … I need to hear the coral.’

Behind them was the Hawaiian helmsman, Kimo, his knees braced against the sides of the inflatable as he worked the double-bladed oar. He sat like a rodeo-rider across the outboard engine, which he had tipped forward to spare the propeller. Neil watched him jockey the craft among the running seas, feinting through the gusts of spray. For a son of the islands, Neil reflected, Kimo was surprisingly hostile to the ocean. The sometime Honolulu policeman seemed to hate every wave, sinking the sharp blades into the swelling bellies of black water like a harpooner opening a dozen wounds in the side of a drowsing whale.

Yet without Kimo they could never have carried out this protest raid on Saint-Esprit. The disused nuclear-test island was a junior and more accessible cousin of the sinister Mururoa, which Dr Barbara had wisely decided to leave alone. Captain Serrou, the Papeete fisherman, was waiting for them in the Bichon, two miles out to sea. He had refused to join the run ashore, taking Dr Barbara’s talk of chemical warfare agents and imminent nuclear explosions all too literally. Only Kimo had the nerveless skill and brute strength to steer the inflatable through the reef and find an inlet among the deceptive calms that floated a few feet above a Himalaya of teeth.

‘We’re drifting …!’ Dr Barbara clambered over Neil and tried to seize the Hawaiian’s oar. The inflatable had lost headway, bows wavering as it fell back on the rising sea. ‘Kimo – don’t give up now …!’

‘Hang on, Dr Barbara … I’ll get you to your island.’

As Dr Barbara shielded the megaphone from the spray, Neil gripped the waterproof satchel that held her tools of trade. Needless to say, Dr Barbara travelled without any medical equipment. Instead of the hypodermic syringes and vitamin ampoules that would have cleared the ulcers on their lips, or even a roll of lint to bandage a wounded albatross, there were aerosol paints, a protest banner, a machete, and a video-camera to record the highlights of their raid. The television stations in Honolulu, if not Europe and the United States, might well be intrigued by the filmed material and its emotive message.

‘She’s coming, Dr Barbara.’ Kimo bent his back and drove the craft forward, a mahout of the deeps urging on a reluctant steed. Listening to the spuming air above the coral towers, he had found an inlet through the reef, a narrow gulley which the French engineers had cut with underwater explosives. Wider and less hazardous channels crossed the southern rim of the atoll, the route taken by the naval vessels supplying the military base. But the open lagoon exposed any unwelcome visitors to the soldiers guarding the island, who would be standing on the beach ready to throw them back into the surf, as the anti-nuclear protesters landing on Mururoa had discovered. Here, on the dark north coast, they could slip ashore unseen, giving Dr Barbara time to find the threatened albatross and rally the full force of her indignation.

Oar raised, Kimo ignored a black-tipped shark that veered past them, chasing a small blue-fish. He waited for the next swell, and propelled the inflatable through the whirlpool of foam and coral debris that erupted as the trapped air burst from the gasping walls. The reef fell away, slanting across the cloudy depths like the eroded deck of an aircraft carrier. They entered the quiet inshore waters, and Kimo fired the outboard for the final six-hundred-yard dash to the beach.

‘Kimo … Kimo …’ On her knees in the bows, Dr Barbara murmured the Hawaiian’s name, reproving herself for any fears that his commitment might falter. Neil had never doubted Kimo’s resolve. During the voyage from Papeete the large, stolid man had kept to himself, sleeping and eating in an empty sail-locker, preparing for the confrontation that lay ahead. He always deferred to Dr Barbara, stoically enduring the ecological harangues with which she greeted every unfamiliar bird in the sky, and clearly regarded the sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey as little more than her cabin boy. Kimo had sunk his savings into their air-fares from Honolulu and the charter of the Bichon, but at times, as he fiddled with the ketch’s radio, Neil suspected that he might be a French agent, posing as a defender of the albatross in order to keep watch on this eccentric expedition.

Eight days out of Papeete they passed a fleet of Japanese whalers, escorting a factory ship that left a mile-wide slick of blood and fat on the fouled sea. The spectacle so appalled Dr Barbara that Neil held her around the waist, fearing that the deranged physician would leap into the bloody waves. As they wrestled together, cheeks flushed by the reflected carmine of the sea, the pressure of Neil’s hands on her muscular buttocks seemed almost to excite Dr Barbara, distracting her until she pushed him away and shouted a stream of obscenities at the distant Japanese.

Kimo, however, had been eerily calm, soothed by the thousands of sea-birds feasting on the whale debris. During the last days of the voyage he sacrificed his own rations to feed a solitary petrel that followed the ketch, even though Dr Barbara warned him that he was becoming anaemic.

He fed the birds and, Neil liked to think, dreamed their dreams for them. In Kimo’s mind the freedom of the albatross to roam the sky deserts of the Pacific had merged with his hopes of an independent Hawaiian kingdom, rid for ever of the French and American colonists with their tourist culture, shopping malls, marinas and pollution.

It was Kimo who told Dr Barbara that the French nuclear scientists were returning to Saint-Esprit, which they had abandoned in the 1970s as a possible testing-ground after moving to Mururoa, an atoll in the Gambier Islands safely remote from Tahiti. The two hundred native inhabitants of Saint-Esprit had already been relocated to Moorea, in the Windwards, and the island with its camera-towers and concrete bunkers lay undisturbed during the long years of the nuclear moratorium.

However, the threat of a new series of atomic tests had failed to inspire Dr Barbara, a veteran of the protest movements who was helping to run a home for handicapped children in Honolulu. This restless and high-principled English physician was bored by the endless rallies against ozone depletion, global warming, and the slaughter of the minke whale. But Kimo also informed her that the French engineers on Saint-Esprit had extended the military airstrip, destroying an important breeding-ground of the wandering albatross, the largest of the Pacific sea-birds.

Saving the albatross, Dr Barbara soon discovered, held far more appeal for the public. The great white bird stirred vague but potent memories of guilt and redemption that played on the imaginations of the University of Hawaii graduate students who formed her protest constituency. Coleridge’s poem, she often reminded Neil, was the foundation-text of all animal rights and environmental movements, though she was careful never to quote the familiar verses.

Now that they had arrived at Saint-Esprit, where were the albatross? As they coasted towards the beach a flock of boobies circled the inflatable, a hooligan vortex visible to any French patrol boat five miles away. They mobbed the rubber craft, soaring along the wave troughs, beaks lunging at the open sores on Neil’s arms. Dr Barbara thrust the megaphone into their faces, and hopefully scanned the shore for any signs of a hostile reception party. Thriving on opposition, she was always disappointed to be ignored, and aware that she might have to make do with this audience of raucous birds.

The monotonous thudding of the inflatable’s bows against the waves had turned Neil’s stomach. He retched over the side, leaving a few grains of breakfast oatmeal – an obsession of Dr Barbara’s – on the greasy float. Fending off a persistent booby, he wondered why he had joined the protest voyage. Not only were there no nuclear tests, which he had secretly been curious to see, but there were no albatross.

‘Neil! You’ll be fine when we land.’ Dr Barbara wiped the phlegm from his mouth. ‘Try to hang on – I’m as nervous as you are.’

‘I’m not nervous. Where are the albatross?’

‘They’re here, Neil. I’m sure the French haven’t killed them.’

‘Do we leave if there are no albatross?’

‘There are always albatross.’ Dr Barbara held his head against her shoulder, a proud smile on her chapped lips. Her fading hair was swept back from her high forehead, as if she were determined to expose her principled brow to the malign and unscrupulous French. ‘If you look hard enough you can find them. Now, pull yourself together. We can’t film the landing twice.’

Neil tugged wearily at the satchel. ‘Seriously, doctor, I feel sick. It could be radiation poisoning …’

‘Very likely. It’s all that talk about Eniwetok and Mururoa. I’ve never met anyone who dreamed of nuclear islands.’

‘Save the atom bomb …’

‘Save Neil Dempsey.’

Neil allowed her to cuff him. Dr Barbara was able to switch from peremptory schoolmistress to doting mother in a way that always disarmed him. She was forever touching Neil, peering into his eyes and checking his urine as if carrying out a running inventory of his working parts, a calculated appeal to a sixteen-year-old’s libido that he could barely resist, whatever its motives. Once, when she hugged him playfully in the galley, a slice of sweet potato between her teeth, he had been tempted to strip naked in front of her.

‘Neil, get ready to start the film. I can smell the French …’

Neil slipped the camera from its waterproof case. Kimo had cut the engine, and they rolled with the waves towards the shore, where the palms formed a dense palisade above a beach of black volcanic ash. Dr Barbara threw aside her weather-jacket and stood legs apart in the bows, shoulders squared and blonde hair flying like a battle-standard on the wind.

As always, Neil enjoyed filming her in close-up. Through the viewfinder he could see the exposure sores on her face, and her left nipple extruding itself through the wet cotton of her shirt, an eye-catcher for the television news bulletins or the covers of Quick and Paris-Match. He steadied himself against the float as an overtaking wave eased them from its back, and zoomed in on Dr Barbara’s high nose and determined mouth, wondering if she had been plain or beautiful as a medical student in Edinburgh twenty years earlier.

‘Take lots of film of the island,’ she told him, now directing the documentary of which she was already star and scriptwriter. ‘And get as many birds as you can.’

‘There are no albatross. Only these boobies.’

‘Just film the birds – any birds. Good God …!’

Neil sucked his numbed fingers and fumbled with the miniaturized controls of the Japanese camera. He had been working as a part-time projectionist at the film school of the University of Hawaii when Dr Barbara recruited him, and despite everything he said to the contrary she instantly convinced herself that he was a skilled cine-photographer. Fortunately the camera refocused itself, and he began to film a panorama of Saint-Esprit. The atoll was a chain of sand-bars and coral islets, the rim of a submerged volcanic crater that enclosed a lagoon five miles in diameter. The largest of the islands lay to the south-west of the lagoon, a crescent of dense forest and overgrown plantations dominated by a rocky mass that rose to a summit four hundred feet above the beach.

Searching for the threatened sea-birds, the great ocean-wanderers, Neil panned across the cliffs. The fluted cornices of blue lava together resembled the corpse of a mountain dead for millennia, propped into the sky like a cadaver sitting in an open grave. A tenacious vegetation clung to the exposed chimneys, living wreaths feasting on a set of aerial tombs. No albatross had yet appeared, but a steel tower stood on the summit, its cables slanting through the forest canopy.

The slender lattice was too frail to bear the weight of a nuclear device, and Neil assumed that it was an old radio mast. As they rode the last waves towards the beach he fixed the camera lens on the tower, hoping that its rigid vertical would restrain his stomach before it could climb into his throat. Thinking of the newsreels of atomic tests, he imagined a bomb detonated at its apex, releasing a ball of plasma hotter than the sun. For all Dr Barbara’s passion for the albatross, the nuclear testing-ground had a stronger claim on his imagination. No bomb had ever exploded on Saint-Esprit, but the atoll, like Eniwetok, Mururoa and Bikini, was a demonstration model of Armageddon, a dream of war and death that lay beyond the reach of any moratorium.

The stern of the inflatable rose as the last breaker swept them towards the beach. Neil stowed the megaphone and camera in the satchel and sealed the waterproof tapes, bracing himself against the centre bench. Dr Barbara crouched like a commando in the bows, fists gripping the mooring line. Two-bladed oar in his huge hands, Kimo stood astride the engine, holding the craft on the curved shoulders of the wave. The rolling wall crumbled in a white rush that hurled the inflatable onto its side and sent the oar windmilling through the spray.

Bludgeoned by the violent surf, they swam through the waist-deep water as the craft broke free from the sea and slewed across the sand. Carrying the satchel over his head, Neil forced himself against the undertow and waded through the slurred foam. Kimo dragged the inflatable onto the narrow shelf below the palms, and calmed the trembling rubber hull with his massive arms. Dr Barbara retrieved the oar, but a wave struck her thighs, knocking her from her feet. She fell to her knees in the seething water, stood up with her shirt around her waist and seized Neil’s hands when he pulled her onto the beach.

‘Good chap … are we all here? Where’s the camera?’

‘It’s safe, Dr Barbara.’

‘Hang on to it – the world’s watching us through that little lens …’

She sat gasping on the sand beside Neil and wiped the water from her salt-roughened cheeks. Snorting the phlegm from her nostrils, she stared back at the sea, openly admiring its aggression. Still breathless, Neil leaned against the coarse sand. After the three-week voyage, the endless yawing and rolling deck, the sheer immobility of the island made him giddy. The black ash was covered with coconut husks, yellowing palm fronds, spurs of pallid driftwood and the shells of rotting crabs. Over everything hung the stench of dead fish. The sun had vanished behind the forest canopy and a cold spray enveloped the island. A few feet away, through the trees behind them, was an insect realm of high-pitched chittering, dank mist and over-ripe vegetation.

‘Right … time to move on.’ Dr Barbara stood up and shook the water from her shirt. ‘Kimo, it’s up to you to get us out again.’

‘We’ll make it, doctor. I’ll fool the sea for you.’ As the foam surged around his feet Kimo worked on the outboard motor, clearing the sand from the air intakes. ‘We’ll wait for high tide, two hours from now.’

‘Two hours? I hope that’s enough. The French may be having lunch … Now, where’s Neil?’

Neil touched her ankle. ‘Still here, Dr Barbara, I think …’

Dr Barbara squatted beside him, buttoning her shirt from his queasy gaze. ‘Of course you’re here. Don’t lose heart, Neil. I need you now – you’re the only one who can work the camera.’

She brushed the damp hair from his eyes and ran her hand over his muscular arms, as if reminding herself that he was still the pugnacious and lazy youth she had met one evening in Waikiki, dreaming of atomic islands and marathon swims. During the voyage from Papeete she had spared him from the more arduous tasks, leaving Kimo to shift the heavy sails and work the bilge pump, and Neil sensed that he was being saved for a more exacting role than that of expedition cameraman.

‘How long do we stay on Saint-Esprit?’ he asked.

‘Long enough to make the film. We can’t help the albatross yet, but we can show people what’s happening here.’

‘Doctor …’ Neil gestured at the deserted beach and the clouds of mosquitoes. ‘Nothing’s happening.’

‘Neil!’ Dr Barbara forced him to sit up. ‘Send some sort of current through that brain of yours. We’ve almost reached the year 2000 – let’s make sure the planet’s waiting for us when we get there.’

‘That’s why I came,’ Neil assured her. ‘I want to save the albatross, Dr Barbara.’

‘I know you do. I wish there were more young men like you. We’ve got to protect everything here, not just the albatross but every palm and vine and blade of grass.’ She waved away the mosquitoes that hovered over Neil’s lips. ‘We’ll even save the mosquito!’

Needless to say, she had forgotten to pack any repellent. Himself the son of a doctor, a London radiologist who had died three years earlier, Neil again wondered if Dr Barbara was a real physician. Through her damp shirt he could see the tattered underwear held together by safety pins, and the zip of her trousers tied into place with fuse wire. He followed her to the inflatable, which Kimo had readied for departure, its bows facing the sea. She sat on the rubber float, a worn hand touching the outboard, and stared in a bleak way at the waves. For all her calls to action, she seemed disoriented by the size of the atoll.

She rallied when Neil raised the camera and began to film her. A low cloud ceiling extended to the horizon, below which lay a grey, marbled air, the perfect film-light. Despite her ragged clothes, the sores on her lips and fraying hair, the camera lens instantly restored Dr Barbara’s confidence in herself. As always, Neil found himself drawn to this eccentric woman, and determined at whatever cost to protect her from reality.

Escorted by the mosquitoes, they set out to locate the airstrip, and followed the narrow beach under the overhang of palms. Kimo took the lead, machete in hand, pausing without comment whenever Dr Barbara stopped to rest. Waiting for her, Neil was aware of the radio mast high above the island, its antennae trailing them through the breaks in the forest canopy. A concrete blockhouse sat in a grove of tamarinds, a forgotten totem of the nuclear age that seemed more ancient than any Easter Island statue.

Rainwater leaked down the hillside, seeping between the moss-covered trees. After hiding among the ferns, a small stream fanned into a delta of silk-smooth ash and vented itself into the sea.

Neil bathed his feet in the cool shallows, the first fresh water he had felt on his skin since leaving Papeete. Dr Barbara knelt beside him and washed her arms and face. From a hip pocket she took a leather make-up pouch and combed her hair into damp waves. Dissatisfied with herself, she grimaced into the mirror and sucked the sores on her lips.

‘Not very good, but never mind.’

‘You look fine.’ Neil spoke sincerely, intrigued by the way in which this often scruffy middle-aged woman hovered on the edge of glamour. ‘Everyone will be impressed.’

‘You’re impressed, Neil. But that’s not what I meant. I want everyone to see how serious we are.’

‘You are serious.’ Tempted to tease, he added: ‘I’ll film you from your best side.’

‘Have I got a best side? What a dreadful thought.’

Neil filmed her as she followed Kimo through the forest, feet sinking into the spongy ground. The Hawaiian slashed at the ferns, exposing the rusty steel sections of a small-gauge railway. Everywhere lay the debris of Saint-Esprit’s earlier occupations. Wooden huts leaned on their worm-riddled stilts, roofs open to the sky, hibiscus and morning glory flowering between the floorboards. A prayer-shack of corrugated iron stood on a headland above the lagoon, surrounded by the graves of an overgrown cemetery laid out by the Catholic missionaries. The forest had long since reclaimed the modest farm plots. Breadfruit trees, jack and eucalyptus crowded together among the taro plants, wild yams and sweet potatoes.

Imposed on this smothered realm was the refuse left by the French engineers, a moraine of abandoned military equipment. Kimo rested on an empty fuel tank beside the railway line, hacking at the lianas that snared it to the ground. Cloudy wine bottles lay in a wooden crate at his feet, surrounded by truck tyres and coils of telephone wire. A second camera-tower stood among the deep ferns, its window-slits staring at nothing.

They crossed a drainage ditch and stepped through the screen of palms. The airstrip swept past them, freshly surfaced with pulverized coral, its eerie geometry forming the outlines of an immense white altar among the trees. A camouflaged radio-cabin stood in the undergrowth fifty yards from them, aerials pointing to the empty sky. At its southern limit the airstrip ended in a barrier of dunes, where an army bulldozer sat with its scoop sunk in the sand.

Swinging the machete in his hand, Kimo walked to the bulldozer and tapped its metal tracks. An empty beer can rested on the driver’s seat. Head raised, he stood stiffly in the strong wind as the sunlight flashed on the machete’s blade. Lost in some reverie of his Hawaiian kingdom, he at last turned and gave a dismissive wave, like a travel courier warning a party of visitors from an uninteresting site.

‘What is it, Kimo?’ Dr Barbara called. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘Albatross, doctor … just albatross.’

‘Albatross …?’ Dr Barbara seized Neil’s arm and hurried him across the runway. ‘Neil, the birds are still here! Get the camera ready.’

They reached the dunes and clambered up the slopes of churned sand, sinking to their knees in the black ash. Dr Barbara shielded her eyes from the wind and peered at the sky as Kimo strode down the beach to the headland beside the prayer-shack.

‘Kimo! Where are the albatross? I can’t see a single one.’

‘There are plenty, doctor.’ Kimo gestured in an offhand way at the hillocks of sand and beach-grass. ‘Every albatross you need.’

‘Kimo …?’

‘Over there.’

‘Dr Barbara …’ Neil lowered the camera, unsure whether to film her when she was caught off-guard. ‘They’re all around us. They’re not in the sky any more …’

A colony of albatross had nested among the hillocks, taking advantage of the wind that rose from the surface of the dunes. Their nests were little more than hollows in the sand, crudely lined with feathers and grass, but every one of them had been kicked apart. The heel-marks of heavy boots had stamped themselves into the rain-sodden ash. Fragments of broken shell trembled in the cool air, blurs of down quivering on their serrated edges. Dead chicks lay in the crushed grass, smeared with the yellow stomach oil that their parents had vented over them in their panic. Wings outstretched, dozens of the great birds rested at the water’s edge, clubbed to death as they tried to escape. The ruffled plumage glared against the black sand like ice-white blossoms thrown into a refuse pit.

‘Thirty-eight … nine …’

Kimo wandered among them, a stiff smile masking his face. The machete hung loosely in his hand, as if he were tired after cutting down the sky. Listening to his flat voice, Neil realized that the Hawaiian was counting the dead birds, and that in some way a finite number of fatalities would diminish the atrocity committed against the creatures.

‘Kimo …. why are they killing the birds?’

‘They need to extend the runway.’ Kimo spoke matter-of-factly. ‘On Midway the Air Force killed thirty thousand goonies last year. They get into the jet intakes.’

‘What about the French soldiers?’ Neil scanned the empty runway, as white as the feathers of the albatross. ‘They must be here somewhere.’

‘Maybe they’re bored. Killing is slow work …’

Unable to console the Hawaiian, Neil returned to Dr Barbara. She stood among the dead birds, hair floating from her forehead like threatening vapour above a volcano. As the wind stirred the plumage of the dead birds the beach seemed to shiver under her gaze. But her mouth was set in a curious grimace that was almost a smirk of satisfaction.

‘Neil, I want the world to see this. Make sure you include every bird. Especially the chicks.’

‘There are too many, doctor.’ Reluctantly, Neil raised the camera and searched for the wide-angle button. ‘They look like chrysanthemums …’

‘All of them! They deserve to be remembered. And don’t forget Kimo.’

But the Hawaiian had lost interest in the birds, and was walking towards a camera-tower that looked out over the lagoon to the detonation zone four miles away. The iron-grey cement, and the hieroglyph formed by the camera slits, reminded Neil of the gloomy bunkers that he and his father had explored at Utah Beach on the Normandy coast, remnants of the Nazi West Wall that outstared time.

At the northern end of the runway the French engineers had set up their camp. A wooden pier jutted into the lagoon, a cargo lighter moored against its landing stage. Crates filled with signals gear sat under the trees beside a storage shed, from which a set of landing lights and an aluminium water tower had been unloaded. But there was no sign of any nuclear or chemical warfare equipment. Saint-Esprit, Neil guessed with some disappointment, was no more than a refuelling stop on the air-run between Mururoa and Tahiti.

After filming Dr Barbara among the dead birds he wiped the chick entrails from his running shoes and followed her down the airstrip. She strode through the powdered coral, white dust rising at her heels, a dead albatross clasped in her arms. Her chin and forehead were streaked with blood, a warning to the sky to hold its breath. Neil had been unsettled by the fate of the huge birds, but he already realized that he was filming a well-rehearsed scene in the theatre of protest. Kimo climbed the water-tower and hung the banner from its spherical reservoir, while Dr Barbara sprayed her slogans across the green canvas roofs of the three barrack tents, slashing blades of gaudy crimson through the khaki fatigues hanging on a washing line. They posed together, native Hawaiian and English spinster, committed to their shared defence of the threatened Pacific.

Ten minutes later, as he replayed the sound-track to a critical Dr Barbara, Neil became aware that he was not the only person to film this contrived scene. A hundred yards from the airstrip, by the path that led up the hillside to the radio mast, three soldiers in French uniforms were watching the display. While his men waited beside him, smoking their cigarettes, the sergeant took a leisurely series of still photographs with his camera, like a tourist recording a quaint folkloric rite. After replacing the lens shroud, he beckoned his men forward, and together they strolled towards the airstrip.

‘They’re here! Kimo, take the camera!’ Dr Barbara snatched the video-camera from Neil’s hands and thrust it against Kimo’s chest. ‘Neil, climb the ladder and wrap the banner around your shoulders.’

‘Dr Barbara … shouldn’t we wait? The soldiers are armed.’

‘Neil, try to help me.’ Dr Barbara propelled him towards the ladder and forced his hands onto the metal rungs. For all the excitement, her eyes were calm, as if she had colluded with the French soldiers and was relieved to see them arrive. Before pushing him up the ladder she spoke rapidly to him: ‘Neil, there are millions of young people like you all over the world. They won’t listen to me but they’ll follow you.’

Kimo had dropped his machete to the ground. He knelt on the runway and, with an expertise that surprised Neil, began to film the approaching soldiers. He recorded Dr Barbara shouting into her megaphone, and ended with a close-up of an embarrassed Neil on the ladder, the banner draped across his chest.

‘Go, Kimo … now!’

Dr Barbara pulled the Hawaiian to his feet. He held her wrists, as if uncertain whether to leave, and then tore himself from her and ran across the airstrip towards the forest, camera in hand. When he reached the prayer-shack he paused among the graves, waiting for Dr Barbara to follow before plunging into the waist-deep ferns.

The French soldiers made no effort to pursue him. As Dr Barbara bellowed at them through the megaphone they put out their cigarettes, amused by this over-excited Englishwoman tripping over the dead bird at her feet. Dragging the banner with him, Neil jumped from the ladder and tried to wipe the blood from her arms.

‘Dr Barbara, let’s go. They’ll arrest us.’

‘I’m staying, Neil. I want to see this through. Kimo can show the film to the world.’

‘Doctor, the world isn’t interested …’

He was about to follow Kimo across the airstrip when the French sergeant raised his right hand. He unbuckled the flap of his holster and walked forward, pointing to Neil.

‘Arrête-toi! Ne bouge pas!’

Cursing Dr Barbara, Neil sprinted along the airstrip through the trail of bloody feathers. Kimo was running among the trees, retracing the railway line towards the beach with a lightness of foot that Neil had never suspected.

‘Kimo … wait! Kimo!’

He was still shouting at the Hawaiian when he heard the pistol shot behind him.

2
Protesting Too Much

The protest rally at the University of Hawaii campus had reached a climax, its rhetoric as inflated as the helium balloons, emblazoned with ecological slogans, that rose from their cradles beside the podium. Lying in his bed on the sixth floor of the Nimitz Memorial Hospital, Neil watched the familiar scene on his television set. He turned down the sound as the last speaker, a local basketball commentator turned eco-evangelist, began his address to the student audience.

This aggressive sermon, which Neil now knew by heart, combined religious fervour, high-flown sporting analogies and blatant threats against the French consul in Honolulu and any French tourists daring to defile the beaches of Waikiki. Buying a Citroën or an Hermès scarf was a sin equal to the destruction of ten acres of rain-forest or the murder of a hundred albatross.

The hospital was almost a mile from the rally, but through the open window Neil could hear the amplified voice reflected across the rooftops. Megaphones hectored him in his deepest dreams. Even when he pressed the sound mute on the remote control, his last defence against the protest movements, the repeated slogan ‘Save the Albatross’ seemed to drum from the loudspeaker. Every mention of the wandering albatross – no specimen of which, an amateur ornithologist in the kidney unit informed him, ever nested in the Hawaiian Islands – produced a spasm of pain in his injured foot.

‘Save the frigate bird,’ Neil muttered. ‘Save the quetzal …’

The bullet from the French sergeant’s pistol had struck the ball of his right foot, exiting between the metatarsal bones and causing what his doctors termed a partial amputation of the big toe. Six weeks later, Neil moved in a painful, one-legged hobble, a legacy of the infected muscle sheath which the Papeete paramedics had allowed to run out of control while the French authorities tried to resist the world-wide media clamour for his release.

The wound was still leaking when Neil at last flew to Honolulu. But the bloodied bandages on the television newscasts had been a propaganda coup whose impact rivalled the stigmata of a saint. A breathless Dr Barbara embraced him on his stretcher and assured the cameras that these few crimson drops redeemed the ocean of blood shed by the slaughtered birds. Had she aimed the pistol herself, Dr Barbara could not have found a more valuable target.

Even Neil’s mother and his step-father, Colonel Stamford, had been impressed by Neil’s celebrity. They flew from Atlanta to be with him during his first week at the Nimitz, and sat by his bed surrounded by the huge bouquets that endlessly arrived from well-wishers. Accepting a rose from Neil, his mother gazed at the blood-red petals as if they had been dipped into her son’s heart. Neil promised his step-father that he would join them in Atlanta as soon as he was strong enough to walk to the aircraft, but the colonel urged him to remain in Honolulu for at least a further month, perhaps seeing Neil’s fame as a therapeutic process in itself that might free the restless boy from his memories of his dead father.

A helium balloon sailed over the hospital car park, bearing the stylized image of an albatross. On the television screen the basketballing evangelist had begun his final peroration. Neil kept his thumb firmly on the sound mute, but the door of his room opened. Nurse Crawford, a keen windsurfer from Cape Town whom he had first met at a beach party in Waikiki, walked over to the set and turned up the sound.

‘… And let’s not forget someone who gave everything in the fight against ecological terrorism – Neil Dempsey, lying at this moment in the Nimitz. That French bullet he took was aimed at every one of us, at every albatross and dolphin and minke whale. We’re with you, Neil, lying right next to you in that bed of pain …’

Nurse Crawford playfully lifted Neil’s sheet, rolling her eyes as he shielded his crotch with the remote control.

‘Neil, who’s lying next to you? I just hope you haven’t given everything. We’re all waiting for a special treat.’

Neil pulled the sheet from her hands but allowed her to pinch his ribs. ‘I’ll save some for you, Carole.’

‘Hearts are bursting, Neil.’ She grimaced at the television screen. ‘Now, look who’s here. The great lady doctor, still itching to save the world. What do you think of her new hairdo?’

Neil rearranged his get-well telegrams. ‘It looks great. Dr Barbara’s all right. I like her.’

‘Of course you do – she nearly got you killed. Who can compete with that? But you take care, Neil …’

‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry for me, Carole.’

‘That’s what you said before you left with Kimo.’ Still puzzled by Neil despite the weeks spent bathing and feeding him, Nurse Crawford sat on the bed. ‘Why did you sail to the island, Neil? You aren’t interested in the albatross.’

‘Maybe not. Saint-Esprit’s a nuclear test-site, like Eniwetok and Kwajalein Atoll. I wanted to see it.’

‘Why?’

Neil shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet. I didn’t get a chance to find out. Maybe it’s where the future begins.’

‘The future? Neil, all that atomic war stuff is over now.’

‘Not for me.’ Neil aimed the remote control at her and pressed the mute button. ‘The point about Saint-Esprit is that they never exploded a bomb there.’

‘So?’

‘It’s still waiting to happen. Life and death, Carole, things they’ve never heard about in Waikiki.’

‘They’ve heard about life and I’ll stick with that any day. It’s your lady friend Dr Rafferty I’m not sure about.’

Neil let this pass. ‘She wants to save the albatross. Is there something wrong with that?’

‘Maybe there is, Neil. Yes, I think there is …’

*

When Nurse Crawford had gone Neil returned to the protest rally. Dr Barbara had stepped to the podium, where she received a standing ovation from the action committee – a retired astronaut, two over-earnest academics, a public-spirited car-dealer and three wives of local businessmen. In phrases that Neil had learned to lip-read off the silent screen she saluted the students for their support and cash donations. Her blonde hair floated freely about the well-tailored shoulders of her safari suit, but her modest smile was firmly in place as her level blue eyes, steadied by some internal gyroscope, assessed the size of the audience and the likely take of dollar bills.

‘Save the phoenix …’ Neil murmured. The rally, for all the balloons and applause, had attracted fewer people than Dr Barbara’s previous jamborees. Indignation, even the fierce variety patented by Dr Barbara, had a short shelf life. The albatross was her trademark, that long-winged, ocean-soaring, guilt-bringing bird. But practical results, of the kind achieved by Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Live Aid concerts of the 1980s, had eluded Dr Barbara. The French government still denied that nuclear testing would resume at Saint-Esprit. For all the footage of graffiti-scrawled camera-towers that Kimo had supplied to the TV networks, an anti-nuclear campaign could no longer bring in the crowds. Too many of the people at Dr Barbara’s rallies were tourists, elderly Japanese couples and family groups from Sydney or Vancouver, for whom an ecological protest meeting was an established part of the holiday street scene, along with the fire-breathers, pickpockets and nightclub touts. Dr Barbara was a minor media phenomenon, appearing with her bird-atrocity footage on chat shows and wild-life programmes. She attracted a troupe of dedicated admirers, but failed to enlist the support of the established animal rights groups.

Nonetheless, she was as undeterred as ever, and addressed the rally with all her old fervour. The salt-water ulcers had healed, along with the eye infection that she refused to allow the French doctors to treat with their antibiotics (‘tested on animals and third-world volunteers!’). She had put on weight, thanks to a regime of fund-raising dinners, and the micro-climate of TV studios had left her face attractively pale.

Neil remembered how she had cradled him in her arms as he was carried from the plane at Honolulu Airport – so different from the aggressive stance she had taken as he lay bleeding on the runway at Saint-Esprit, when she faced the pistol-waving French sergeant with the triumphant gaze of a huntress guarding her prey. Despite all her efforts, however, her audiences were declining.

‘Doctor, you’ll have to shoot me in the other foot …’

Neil massaged his aching calf, thinking of the bedraggled and eccentric woman he had first seen five months earlier outside a Waikiki hotel, shouting abuse at the doormen exasperated by her high-pitched English voice and the banner she waved in the faces of the guests.

Neil was leaving the hotel after a farewell dinner with his mother and step-father. Having completed his tour of duty in Hawaii, Colonel Stamford was being reassigned to a base in Georgia. Neil’s widowed mother had met the colonel soon after her husband’s death, while she worked as the catering officer at a U.S. officers’ club in London. Neil liked the amiable Californian, who was forever urging him to enlist in the Marine Corps and find a new compass-bearing in his life, and accepted the colonel’s suggestion that he join them in Honolulu.

Neil was still unsettled by the suicide of his father, a radiologist who had diagnosed his own lung cancer and decided to end his life while he could breathe without pain. But suicide was a suggestive act, as a tactless counsellor at the hospital had told Mrs Dempsey, often passing from father to son like a dangerous gene. Trying to distance himself from his memories of his father, Neil gave up any hopes of studying medicine. The vacuum in his life he filled with body-building, judo and long-distance swimming, lapping hundreds of lengths each week at his London pool. He swam the Thames, despite the efforts of the River Police to stop him, from Chelsea Bridge to the first lock at Teddington. Above all, he revelled in long night-swims, when he moved in a deep dream of exhaustion and dark water.

The powerful physique of this moody sixteen-year-old, and his plans to swim the English Channel at night, together appealed to Colonel Stamford, who talked to Neil of the great seas around Hawaii. Once he arrived, the Waikiki beach world swallowed him whole. He missed his girl-friend Louise, a highly strung but affectionate music student, and sent her video-cassettes of himself surfing near Diamond Head. Bored with his class work, he dropped out of high school and crewed on yachts, worked as a pool attendant and then found a part-time job as a projectionist at the university film school. During his spare time he prepared for the challenge he had set himself, the thirty-mile swim across the Kaiwi Channel from Makapuu Head to the neighbouring island of Molokai.

When his mother and Colonel Stamford told him of their imminent move to Georgia, Neil asked if he could remain in Honolulu for the summer. To his surprise, his mother agreed, but Neil was aware that in her vague way she had begun to reject him. An anxious and easily tired woman, she saw in his square shoulders and boxer’s jaw an upsetting reminder of her dead husband. She and the colonel settled Neil into a student rooming house near the university, and celebrated their departure with a last dinner in Waikiki. Afterwards Neil kissed his mother’s over-rouged cheek and accepted his step-father’s kindly bear-hug. He then walked through the lobby doors and straight into the quixotic and testing world of Dr Barbara Rafferty.

When he first arrived for dinner he had noticed the shabby, middle-aged woman in a threadbare cotton dress. She crouched between two limousines in the car park, unwrapping a paper parcel, and Neil assumed that she was a beggar or down-and-out, hoping to cadge a few dollars from the delegates to a maritime safety convention. Two hours later, when he left, she was still there, hovering around the ornamental fountain that faced the entrance. Seeing Neil emerge from the hotel, she waved a makeshift banner and shouted in a strong English voice:

‘Save the albatross! Stop oil pollution now!’

Before she could confront Neil the doormen bundled her away. Handling her roughly, they propelled her into the drive beyond the hotel gates and flung the banner onto the ground. She knelt beside it, skirt around her white thighs, a hand to her bruised chin.

Drawn by her English accent, Neil helped the woman to her feet. She accepted his handkerchief and wiped her tears, flowing from indignation rather than grief.

‘Are you one of the delegates?’ She frowned at his youthful face. ‘If they’re sending their midshipmen they really must have something to hide.’

‘I’m not a delegate.’ Neil tried to calm her trembling shoulders, but she pushed him away. ‘I’ve been saying goodbye to my mother and step-father. He’s a colonel in the U.S. Army.’

‘The American Army? One of the world’s greatest environmental threats.’ She brushed the dirt from her hands. ‘No use saying goodbye, they said goodbye to us a long time ago. Listen, do you have a car?’

‘I came by bus,’ Neil lied. The army-surplus jeep he had bought to please his step-father was parked a hundred yards along the beach, but Neil decided to distance himself from this unstable Englishwoman. As he folded the banner he noticed the slogan hand-painted in red ink. ‘“Save the Albatross”,’ he repeated. ‘Do they need saving?’

‘They certainly do. Still, I’m glad you’ve heard of the albatross.’

‘Everyone has.’ Neil gestured to the evening sky over Diamond Head and its corona of soaring birds. ‘They’re just a common sea-bird.’

‘They’ll soon be a lot less common. The French are killing them at Saint-Esprit, poisoning them by the thousand.’

‘That’s a shame …’ Neil tried to seem sympathetic. ‘But it’s a nuclear test island.’

‘You’ve heard of that, too? I’m impressed.’

A tourist party emerged from the hotel and waited by the limousines, but a dispute between the drivers and the courier left them standing in an uneasy huddle. Seeing her chance, the Englishwoman unwrapped her banner. In an effort to make herself presentable, she brushed the blonde hair from her high forehead and relaxed the muscles of her face, imposing a fierce smile on its warring planes. She pulled a bundle of leaflets from her bag and pressed them into Neil’s hands. ‘Start giving those out. You can tell the doorman you’re a guest at the hotel.’

‘Look … it’s too bad about the albatross, but I have to go.’ Neil was aware that at any moment his mother and the colonel might leave the hotel and be surprised to find him involved in this curious demonstration. Hiding his face behind the leaflets, he noticed that the Save the Albatross Fund invited contributions to the treasurer and secretary, Barbara Rafferty, at a children’s home in a poorer district of Honolulu.

‘Come on, don’t look so shy.’ The woman seemed amused by Neil. ‘Help me hold the banner – you don’t have to think everything out first. And why are you so muscular? Steroids aren’t good for the testicles. In a few years you won’t be any use to your girl-friends.’

‘I don’t need steroids …’ Neil released the banner, which blew against the woman, wrapping the red-lettered strip around her like a bandage. ‘Good luck, Mrs Rafferty.’

‘Dr Rafferty. You can call me Dr Barbara. Now, stand there and shout with me. Save the … albatross!’

Neil left her shouting at the bored tourists as they rolled away in their limousines towards the Waikiki nightclubs. Ecological movements had always failed to stir him, though he sympathized with activists who were trying to save the whale or protect the beaches where rare species of turtle laid their eggs after immense oceanic journeys. The whales and turtles were swimmers like himself. But the obsessive do-goodery of so many animal rights groups had a pious and intolerant strain. It was necessary to test drugs, like the antibiotic that cured the rare strain of pneumonia he contracted after swimming the Severn. His mother and Louise would go on using lipstick and mascara; to spare them from cancer of the lip or eye a few rabbits might usefully die in the laboratory rather than the cooking pot.

But something about the lonely campaign of this English doctor had touched him. The departure of his mother and the arrival of Dr Rafferty in some way seemed connected. Neil knew that he was drawn to older women, like the manager of the rooming house and a middle-aged lecturer in film studies, both of whom had noticed Neil and begun to flirt with him. As he waved goodbye to his mother and Colonel Stamford at the airport, he found himself thinking of Dr Rafferty.

A week later, in downtown Honolulu, he saw the blood-red banner tied to the railings of the Federal Post Office building. A small crowd had gathered, waiting as two policemen cut through the cords. Dr Rafferty stood nearby, chanting her slogans like a scarecrow wired for sound. She was hoping to be arrested, and was more concerned to provoke the bored policemen than convert the passers-by to her cause. An elderly man in a black suit and tie, like a kindly usher at a funeral parlour, tried to speak to her, but she waved him away, watching the traffic for any sign of a news reporter with a camera. The policemen confiscated the banner, and one of them struck her shoulder with his open hand, almost knocking her to the ground. Without complaint she turned and walked past Neil, losing herself among the lunchtime pedestrians.

Despite this set-back, she kept up her one-woman campaign. Neil saw her haranguing the surfers on Waikiki beach, handing out leaflets to the tourists in the Union Street Mall, buttonholing a group of clergymen attending a conference at the Iolani Palace. Often she was tired and dispirited, carrying her banner and leaflets in a faded satchel, the bag lady of the animal rights movement.

Neil was concerned for her, in exactly the same way he had worried over his mother in the months after his father’s death. She too had neglected herself, endlessly fretting about Neil and the unnamed threats to his well-being until he felt like an endangered species. Remembering those fraught days, he sympathized with the albatross, wings weighed down by all the slogans and moral blackmail.

To his surprise, he found that there was an element of truth in her campaign. A paragraph in a Honolulu newspaper reported that the French authorities on Tahiti had withdrawn their approval for the re-occupation of Saint-Esprit by the original inhabitants. Army engineers were extending the runway, and it was rumoured that the government in Paris might end its moratorium on nuclear testing.

Neil secretly admired the French for their determination to maintain a nuclear arsenal, just as he admired the great physicists who had worked on the wartime Manhattan Project. As a young air force radiologist in the 1960s, Neil’s father had attended the British nuclear trials held at the Maralinga test site in Australia, and his widow now claimed that her husband’s cancer could be traced back to these poorly monitored atomic explosions. She often stared at Neil as if wondering whether his father’s irradiated genes had helped to produce this self-contained and wayward youth. Once, Neil rode out on a borrowed motorcycle to the cruise missile base at Greenham Common, moved by the memory of the nuclear weapons in their silos and by the few women protesters still camping against the wire. Without success, he tried to ingratiate himself with the women, explaining that he too might be a nuclear victim.

The power of the atomic test explosions, portents of a now forgotten apocalypse, had played an important part in drawing him to the Pacific. As he screened cold-war newsreels for the modern-history classes in the film school theatre he stared in awe at the vast detonations over the Eniwetok and Bikini lagoons, sacred sites of the twentieth-century imagination. But he could never admit this to anyone, and even felt vaguely guilty, as if his fascination with nuclear weapons and electro-magnetic death had retrospectively caused his father’s cancer.

What would Dr Rafferty say to all this? One afternoon in Waikiki he was buying an underwater watch in a specialist store when he saw her unpacking her banner and leaflets. Neil followed her as she wandered past the bars and restaurants, shaking her head in a dispirited way. She stopped at an open-air cafeteria and stared at the menu, running a cracked fingernail down the price list. Suppressing his embarrassment, Neil approached her.

‘Dr Barbara? Can I get you a sandwich? You must be tired.’

‘I am tired.’ She seemed to remember Neil and his artless manner, and allowed him to take the satchel. ‘Look at this place – buy, buy, buy and no one gives a hoot that the real world is disappearing under their feet. I’ve seen you somewhere. I know, steroids – you’re the body-builder. Well, you can help rebuild my body. Let’s see if they serve anything that isn’t packed with hormones.’

They sat at a table by the entrance, Dr Barbara handing her leaflets to the passing customers. She ordered a tomato and lettuce sandwich, after an argument with the waitress over the origins of the mayonnaise.

‘Avoid meat products,’ she told Neil, still unsure what she was doing in the company of this British youth. ‘They’re crammed with hormones and antibiotics. Already you can see that men in the west are becoming feminized – large breasts, fatter hips, smaller scrotums …’

Neil was glad to let her talk, and watched the sandwich disappear between her strong teeth. For reasons he had yet to understand, he enjoyed seeing her eat. Her clear gums and vivid tongue, the muscles in her throat, all fascinated him. At close quarters Dr Barbara was far less dejected than the woman he saw arguing with the police and tourists. Her strong will overrode the shabby cotton dress and untended hair.

She sat back and polished her teeth with a vigorous forefinger. ‘I needed that – you’ve done your bit today for the albatross.’ She noticed Neil glancing proudly at his rubber-mounted underwater watch. ‘What is it? One of those sadistic computer games?’

‘It’s a deep-water chronometer. I’m planning to swim the Kaiwi Channel to Molokai.’

‘Swim? It’s rather a long way. Why not take the plane?’

‘That isn’t a challenge. Long-distance swimming is … what I do.’ Trying to amuse her, he added: ‘Think of it as my albatross.’

‘Really? What are you trying to save?’

‘Nothing. It’s hard to describe, like swimming a river at night.’ Exaggerating for effect, he said: ‘I swam the Thames from Tower Bridge to Teddington.’

‘Is that allowed?’

‘No. The river police had their spotlights on. I could see the beams through the water …’

‘Long-distance swimming – all those endorphins flowing for hours. Though you don’t look under stress.’ Dr Barbara pushed aside her leaflets, intrigued by this amiable but obstinate youth who had come to her aid. ‘Perhaps you’re a true fanatic. Physically very strong, but mentally …? When did all this start?’

‘Two years ago, after my father died. He was a doctor, too. I needed to stop thinking for a while.’

‘Good advice. I wish more people would take it. What about your mother?’

‘She’s fine, most days. She married an American colonel. He’s kind to her. They’ve just gone back to Atlanta.’

‘So you’re alone here in Honolulu, planning to swim the Kaiwi Channel. Do they know about it?’

‘Of course. They don’t think I’m serious. It’s too far, even with a pace-boat. But that’s not the point.’

‘What is?’ Dr Barbara leaned forward, trying to see through the hair over Neil’s eyes. ‘Or don’t you know?’

Neil covered the dial of his chronometer, as if keeping a secret sea-time to himself. ‘People think you’re alone on long-distance swims. But after five miles you’re not alone any more. The sea runs right into your mind and starts dreaming inside your head. You won’t understand.’

‘Perhaps I do.’ Dr Barbara’s manner was less brisk. She held Neil’s hand between her own, as if welcoming him across a threshold. ‘Now you know why I want to save the albatross.’

Neil felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm, broken nails searching for his heart and life lines. He could smell her breath, keen and freshly scented. Already he had warmed to this older woman; perhaps she would protect him as well as the albatross?

‘When I swim to Molokai you could come along. It’s best if there’s a doctor in the pace-boat. Are you qualified?’

‘I certainly am. I was a Hammersmith GP for six years. Still, I don’t think you’ll ever need a gynaecologist – unless you use too many steroids.’

‘My father was a radiologist at Guy’s. Once he took an X-ray photo of my skull.’

‘I wonder what he found.’ Dr Barbara brushed the hair from Neil’s broad forehead. ‘Now, do you want to help me pass out these leaflets? I’m going to the airline office across the street.’

‘Well … it’s not my—’

‘Come on. Being embarrassed will do you good.’

She waited as Neil paid the cashier, smiling at no one in her self-absorbed way, as if she was digesting more than a sandwich. Neil followed her through the tourist crowds. Like all older women, she had easily taken the initiative from him. Too shy to help with the leaflets, he stood behind Dr Barbara, pretending that he had nothing to do with this eccentric Englishwoman.

However eccentric, Dr Barbara surprised Neil by recruiting her first disciple. When he next saw her, on the steps of the University Library, she was accompanied by a tall and deep-chested native Hawaiian in his late thirties, who gazed at the world with a slight convergent squint that gave him a look of permanent irritation. He thrust the leaflets into the hands of the passing students like a debt-collector reminding them of their dues. Neil at first resented him, naively believing that he alone had discovered Dr Barbara.

The scowling Hawaiian was Kimo, a former sergeant in the Honolulu police, a long-standing anti-nuclear and animal rights protester who had been forced to resign from the police after taking part in a campaign for an independent native Hawaiian kingdom. In 1985 he volunteered to sail aboard the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior, which resettled the islanders of Rongelap Atoll, 100 miles to the east of Bikini. Many of the Rongelapese had been contaminated by the radioactive ash that fell on them after the Bravo hydrogen bomb test in 1954, and over the decades suffered from high rates of leukaemia, stillbirths and miscarriages. The Rainbow Warrior moved the islanders to Kwajalein Atoll, and later sailed for New Zealand, where she was sunk by French agents hoping to put an end to anti-nuclear protests in the South Pacific.

Dr Barbara had known Kimo for the past two years, and it was the former policeman who told her of the threat to the wandering albatross on Saint-Esprit. Inspired by the image of the great sea-bird, Dr Barbara launched her one-woman campaign, which Kimo had now decided to join, hoping that public concern for the albatross would revive the flagging anti-nuclear cause. Offering his savings, he paid for the printing of a new leaflet, which reproduced a photograph of dead birds lying beside a vast runway filled with implacable nuclear bombers.

Kimo’s arrival restored Dr Barbara’s waning energies, and brought Neil into the group as its cadet member and dogsbody. He tagged behind them as they strode through hotel lobbies and department stores, guarding the leaflets while Dr Barbara hectored everyone in her piercing English voice. To Kimo, forever flexing his shoulders at the nervous security guards, Neil was little more than Dr Barbara’s chauffeur. A foot taller than Neil, he stared straight over his head whenever he conveyed Dr Barbara’s latest command.

Still uneasy in Kimo’s presence, Neil drove the jeep, collected the leaflets from the printer and helped to paint the banners. He remained unsure of Dr Barbara, and was sceptical that she was a doctor at all, until the evening when Kimo was injured in a fracas outside a pool hall.

Neil drove him to Dr Barbara’s single-room apartment at the rear of the children’s refuge. As she treated the Hawaiian’s bruised hands, working confidently with the instruments in her ancient leather valise, Neil gazed around her dingy room, at the leaflets piled on the dressing-table and the unironed clothing heaped at the foot of the narrow bed. The modest apartment, looking out onto fire escapes packed with broken furniture and beer crates, defined the meagre existence of this woman doctor.

Why did she not practise her medical career and join one of the established animal rights groups, instead of serving as a glorified children’s minder at the underfunded refuge? Neil had noticed that the Greenpeace and environmental activists kept their distance from Dr Barbara, as if they suspected that her passionate defence of the albatross concealed more devious aims.

Nevertheless, Neil found himself increasingly committed to the great white bird. Chanting ‘Save the albatross’ gave an unexpected focus to his life. When, two months after their first meeting, Dr Barbara told him that she and Kimo had decided to sail to Saint-Esprit, Neil took for granted that he would be a member of the crew.

As the last of the helium balloons floated towards the sea, the sounds of the protest rally drummed at the windows of the hospital room. Neil forced his head into the pillow, trying to ignore the pains that played their hourly medley across the strings of his leg. He watched the silent television screen and the closing moments of Dr Barbara’s speech. Jaw-bones straining from her cheeks, blonde hair forgotten in the wind, she raised her elbows to reveal the damp armpits of her safari suit. She seemed happier and more determined than Neil had ever seen her. Was she genuine or a fraud? In some way she transcended the question of her own authenticity, and was able to believe sincerely in the threatened bird while manipulating the emotions of her audience.

All along, Neil assumed, she had hoped that the French soldiers on Saint-Esprit would seize them, while Kimo escaped with the video-camera and its precious footage. The Hawaiian had hidden for a few last moments among the waist-deep ferns, and had filmed Neil being shot down by the sergeant, a scene endlessly replayed on television across the world. The existence of the camera, a present from Colonel Stamford, had probably prompted their mission to the island. The French government insisted that it had no plans to resume nuclear testing on Saint-Esprit, but Dr Barbara and the albatross were launched and airborne. A defence committee was formed while Neil and Dr Barbara were held at Papeete, and protesters demanding their release marched through London and Paris. Donations flowed in, and environmentalists argued her case from a hundred pulpits and lecture platforms.

By the time of her return to Honolulu, two weeks later, Dr Barbara was the new heroine of the ecological movement. Yet her real motives, like his own, remained a mystery to Neil.

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