J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise

Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.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.

EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007384891

Version 2014-09-25

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.

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