J. Ballard – Rushing to Paradise (страница 3)
‘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
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