Rushing to Paradise

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.’