Rushing to Paradise

‘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.