‘d by Canine, they had crawled down the hillside through the wdergrowth, unnoticed by the sunbathing hippies, and were OW ready to launch their punitive assault.
Twenty feet away, Professor Saito and his wife waited in a iallow gulley beside the stream, a camouflage of forest debris ped to their foreheads, hands clasping the bamboo spears they h;tcl freshly sharpened after breakfast. Neil was still surprised by meir new-found taste for action. For a few hours they ceased to c dedicated botanists and reverted to the spirit of the Japanese tiintrymen who tenaciously defended the Pacific atolls during Hc Second World War, waiting above the beaches for the ilerican marines to wade ashore. The Saitos were eager to J.1-end Saint-Esprit against waves of hippies, hotel developers and documentary makers, and their casualty rate might be equally heavy, to judge by their grim expressions.
Bored by the long wait, Neil pulled a parasol of dead palm fronds over his head, converting his shallow lair into a hunter’s blind.
Lying on his back, he raised his wooden club and aimed it at the largest of the albatross soaring above the wreck of the Dugong. He was about to squeeze his trigger finger when the blind collapsed in a flurry of dirt and leaves, and a sweating r-tire flung herself onto the ground beside him.
Neil, what are you doing? This isn’t a game!’ 4onique crawled into the space under the parasol, her face streaked with mud. As usual on these raiding parties, she had lost herself in the undergrowth and emerged with a spitting temper.
‘Where are the Saitos? Neil! Have you been playing with yourself? Dr Barbara told me to watch you.’ She stared short-sightedly at the surrounding ferns, like a harassed hostess who had mislaid her passengers. Even on Saint-Esprit her world seemed to be populated by rowdy tourists refusing to wear their seat-belts, unruly teenagers such as Neil, or misfits who were potential hijackers. They hovered in the aisles of her mind, ignoring her demonstrations of the oxygen mask and life-jacket.
‘The Saitos - are they here yet?’
‘Monique, they’ve been here for half an hour.’ Neil pointed to the Japanese couple in the gulley. ‘We can all have a rest now.’
‘There’s no time to rest.’ Monique crawled forward, her strong shoulders and buttocks pressed against him. Neil looked at the dark freckles on her neck and the scar on the lobe of her left ear - a love-bite, perhaps, left by some handsome co-pilot in a stop-over hotel? More likely, he decided, she had been nuzzled by one of her over-eager bears. Yet her fierce, unplucked brows guarded surprisingly delicate eyelashes. The heady scent of her body, the dark curves of her neglected breasts, had transformed the blind into an arbour of adolescent lust.
She thumped his head with her elbow. ‘Neil! We’re ready now - David is signalling..
Below them, little more than thirty yards away, was the hippie settlement.
Smoke rose hopefully from a cooking fire of driftwood and palm leaves, where Trudi and Inger sat with the baby. But there was little to cook. Despite the bright sunlight, the women were wan and dejected, barely able to brush away the flies that pestered their faces. The four Germans and Gubby suffered from chronic under-nourishment, and were too tired to bail out the Parsfal, now sinking slowly at anchor. They tried to beg from the visiting yacht-crews, but their derelict appearance and needle-sharing put off any would-be donors.
At low tide, even the sea seemed discouraged, rolling slackly against the black sand. Werner sat alone on the beach, gazing at the flaking acid paintwork of the yacht. He spent his time ‘33 H Jine iii ‘ driftwood shack or tending a plot of marijuana plants among the nearby palms. Meanwhile Wolfgang wandered along the shore-line, searching for the last of the stores that Neil hid bulldozed into the sea, his tattooed thighs flinching at the cold dves.
‘Neil, we’re going! Vite, vite!’ Professor Saito and his wife had leapt from the gulley and plunged into the sand. Carline was racing along the water’s edge towards the shacks, silver pistol in one hand, spray breaking around his long legs.
He snatched the canvas awning that formed the roof of Werner’s hut and dragged it into the sea, then scooped up the black sand and hurled it into the face of the patient German.
Pulling Neil by his shirt, Monique burst through the ferns and bellowed at Trudi and Inger in a hoarse voice that sounded like a garbled cabin announcement.
Neil followed her to the beach, aving his cudgel in the air. The German women sat beside the fire, watching without any change of expression. Gubby noticed Canine’s whooping figure, rolled his eyes and began to chortle.
The Saitos stopped beside the fire, trembling with indignation.
Professor Saito glared at the passive women as if they were the most shiftless of his students, while his wife scattered the embers with a vicious kick.
Neil waved reassuringly to Trudi, patted the baby’s head and ran on, swinging his cudgel at the salt-stained screen of the television set half-buried in the sand. The sharp explosion startled everyone. Gubby began to cry and Trudi rocked him against her breast. Wolfgang gave up his trawl of the sea-bed and waded back to the shore, while Werner shook his head over Neil’s clumsy aim.
The commando raid was over. Led by Carline, who had confiscated the last food cans from the hippies’ store, they ran along the beach towards the runway. Neil hurled his club into the sea and limped past the grove of marijuana plants, careful not to damage them.
Yukio, well done! Good work, Monique!’ (arline was waiting for them behind the bulldozer, pale eyes flushed by the excitement. Kimo, although a trained policeman, refused to lead the raids, but Canine took an almost boyish pleasure in harassing the hippies. Like a scout-master supervising To Neil’s surprise, all this had begun to irritate Dr Barbara. He hid expected her to welcome the relentless activity, but she soon hccame bored with thejob-rosters and work-targets that Carline id Professor Saito devised. The flower-beds around the clinic ijid mess-tent planted by Mrs Saito, the decorative stone p thways laid out by Monique, the ever-deeper storm-drains dug by Kimo, together provoked Dr Barbara into fits of unpatience. By making a fetish of self-discipline and the work ‘Ll1ic they were institutionalizing the sanctuary and suppressing die anarchic spirit that had brought them to Saint-Esprit. Mon Line’s dourness had come to the forefront, like Kimo’s tendency to isolate himself on his bed with his dreams of an independent Hawaiian kingdom, a realm that Neil guessed was shrinking to the floor-space of his tent. The Saitos rarely strayed from the plant laboratory, while Carline, conversely, had taken to roaming the island on his own, his tall and long-boned figure following the ancient trails of the original natives as if hunting for new opponents.
In the six weeks since the destruction of the radio-cabin the sanctuary had come to resemble the encampment of a religious sect. A fence of telephone wire enclosed the tents and animal enclosures. No longer were the goats and hens free to roam at will, defecating in the kitchen, nor were the laundry lines spattered with the droppings of exotic birds. The creatures were penned within an elaborate steel and glass aviary donated by a farm-equipment manufacturer in Idaho.
At times, as he fed the loris and lemur, the Bolivian peccaries, the kangaroo rats and the Javanese palm civets, each in its labelled hutch, it seemed to Neil that he was running a zoo, the opposite of the free-range sanctuary that the expedition had vowed to establish. How long would it be, he wondered, before they began to cage the albatross? Of course, the cages were for the creatures’ benefit.
Unfettered freedom, as Professor Saito pointed out, soon led to chaos. By placing Saint-Esprit on a more military footing they had in ised the effectiveness of the sanctuary. The populations of the protected mammals had begun to grow, and the rare plant species flourished on the terraces and in their laboratory seedling trays.
Not everyone, however, thrived on the new regime. The chilling hours of spear-fishing in the lagoon - a temporary expedient Dr Barbara assured him, to increase their protein intake - left Neil shivering in his sleeping bag. Concerned for him, Dr Barbara began a series of blood and urine tests
, and even suggested that he spend a few days at the clinic.
But Neil declined, relying on the warmer weather at the year’s end to heat the lagoon. Despite the pleasure he felt as Dr Barbara ran her hands over his diaphragm and liver, searching his bony ribs and shoulder blades, he was always uneasy inside the clinic.
The narrow bed, with its open mosquito net, resembled a trap waiting to catch its next patient.
No-one had yet been cured by the clinic, but Monique’s father had died there, in circumstances that not only the Andersons found distressing. The ordeal of Didier’s first month on the island and the nights of feverish sleep had wasted the old ecologist. When Neil began to fish in the lagoon the nutritious bouillabaisse that Monique prepared soon revived him. He sat up, became alert again and offered Neil an informed commentary on the odours emanating from the animal cages.
Tragically, on the very evening that he made his first steps to the latrine, Didier had suffered a massive stroke.
Monique found him the next morning when she brought him his breakfast.
Drained of all blood, his small face resembled a wizened pomelo, blanched lips splayed against his tobacco-stained teeth. Professor Saito remarked to Dr Barbara upon the bruises to his chin and forehead, but he helped to bury the old man in the cemetery beside the prayer-shack. Carline delivered a brief sermon, and Dr Barbara did her best to comfort Monique, assuring her that everything had been done for her father.
Neil, however, had seen more than the bruises. Dr Barbara had burned the soiled linen in a brazier behind the clinic, and when she sent Neil to stir the ashes he found that the pillow case had been too drenched to ignite. Smears of blood covered the torn cotton, marking out the image of a face in which ‘37
jicekbones, chin and brow-ridges were clearly visible.
Watching tic flames consume the fabric, Neil imagined someone stepping through the darkness, parting the mosquito net and pressing the pillow over the old man’s face, and the long teeth splitting his ps as he struggled for breath.
Neil remembered the obscene graffiti on the walls of the ctmera-tower and the sexual threat against Dr Barbara. Someone had mutilated the chicken and drawn the priapic goat coupling with the strong-nosed woman - Kimo, Carline, perhaps Werner in one of his deranged acid reveries? Had the German crept into the clinic in the hours before dawn, thinking that Dr Barbara was a1cep under her mosquito net…
Neil tried to warn Dr Barbara, but as he spoke she smiled at hun and stared at his blood and urine samples lined up on her Jcsk like the pieces on a chess-board.
‘No-one would want to harm me, Neil. Not even Werner.
Pvc sacrificed everything for the sanctuary.’
‘I know, doctor. But the dead chicken and the painting on the camera-tower…’ He was too embarrassed to describe the image. ‘It was a kind of warning.’
‘Neil…’ Dr Barbara moved a vial of blood as if about to mate a king. ‘You were probably running a slight fever, or dreaming of nuclear war. Saint-Esprit is at peace with itself. Too much so, I sometimes think..
And so it seemed to the outside world.
Major Anderson and his wife had been distressed by Didier’s death, standing apart from the other mourners at the funeral, but they would say nothing to Neil when he tried to question them. The few visitors to Saint-Esprit - curious journalists alerted by the closure of the runway, passing Australian and American yacht-crews with gifts of endangered animals, and a party of French environmentalists with a large consignment of threatened plants - found the albatross returning in their thousands to the island, guarded by a taciturn group under the leadership of a strong-willed but restless matriarch. They had rejected the world beyond the reef, like any fundamentalist sect, and politely refused the offered gifts, merely asking the visitors to assure their friends and relatives that , it, scene they had returned to their simple tasks of hoeing, planting and carrying water. Around this dour tribe the endangered plants and animals thrived and bred like visitors from another planet.
Neil’s only respite from the spartan regime was the time he spent with the hippies, slipping Inger and Trudi the few scraps of food he could scavenge from the kitchens. For all the attention to life on Saint-Esprit, he sensed that a darker island lay waiting to emerge, willed into being by Dr Barbara as she played with her vials of blood, and by the artist of the sinister graffiti on the camera-tower.
Neil had come to Saint-Esprit dreaming of the nuclear flash, but a different kind of death waited in the wings, ready to take the stage.
After the punitive raid, when he had rebuilt the fire for the women, he came across Werner in the clearing beside the tower.
The German spent hours wandering the hillside, searching for rare barks and fungi, from which he had already distilled a modest pharmacopoeia of hallucinogens.
As Neil approached the tower, hiding among the cycads, he saw that Werner was kneeling beside a dead albatross. The German was plucking its wings, as if to find a quill with which to embroider the obscene painting of Dr Barbara and the goat.
When he stepped behind Werner, ready to challenge him, Neil realized that he was digging a grave for the bird. Werner muttered a mantra over the creature, plucked a feather from its wing and stitched it through the collar of his sheep-skin jacket.
Blades of grass, a withered flower and a chicken’s foot already decorated his lapels, as if he intended to become a walking reliquary of everything that had died on Saint-Esprit.
‘Neil? Where’s your battle-spear?’
‘I threw it in the sea.’ Neil raised his palms in apology. ‘I lit the fire again for Inger and Trudi. I’m sorry about the raid, Werner.’
‘We’re used to it now.
Anyway, there was no battery for the TV set. But it was nice for Gubby to look at.’
‘I’ll find another set for him. It’s just David, he gets carried away. He isn’t really serious.’
‘I think he is serious.’ Werner turned to examine Neil, as if measuring him for a grave. ‘Everyone is serious here, except ‘39 ii Be careful, Neil. He’s a small man but he has a small island that makes him big again.’ Neil helped him to lay the bird in the grave and scoop the sand over its blurred plumage. Trying to reassure the German, he said: ‘Nothing lasts forever, Werner, even on Saint-Esprit.
You can’t have a funeral for every leaf that dies.’
‘You’ve been talking to Dr Barbara too much. There should he a ceremony for everything. Each breath you take is a celebration, with a special ceremony for the last breath. Not just our last breath but the last breath of every bird and flower.’ Werner’s nostrils caught the smell of wood smoke from the fire.
You 11 eat with us, Neil?’
‘No, it’s for you and Gubby. I’ll try to bring some rice tomorrow.’ Before leaving, he asked: ‘Werner, what would you do if a shark was washed ashore - or a whale?’
‘I’d wear its eyes, Neil. Like I’ll wear yours. Then they’ll see a new life far away from Dr Barbara.’
Shortly before dusk, Trudi and lnger shuffled down the airstrip and appeared at the gates of the camp. They sat in the dust, Gubby lolling in a sling around Trudi’s neck. The swollen moon of the child’s head swayed on its weak neck, and its eyes searched the trees as if unable to find anything to laugh at. Taking pity on them, Kimo brought a rucksack from his tent and handed each of them a candy bar.
While they licked the chocolate from their fingers Carline prowled the nearby fence, smiling uneasily to himself, and Mrs Saito emerged to berate them in a torrent of Japanese.
Roused by all this, Dr Barbara at last strode from the steps of the clinic.
She glanced with some irritation at Monique, who was still scouring the cooking pans outside the kitchen, and kicked aside one of the ornamental tiles that the Andersons had laid on the pathway.
Hands on hips, she surveyed the two women through the wire, treating their thin arms and pallid faces to a show of sympathy. ‘Inger, if you’re going to spend the night here you sh
ould hriiit a blanket.’
‘We have no more food, doctor.’ Inger spoke matter-of-factly.
‘We can’t steal from the ships and the people give us nothing.
This afternoon you took our last cans.’
‘You stole them from us in the first place. We need them just as much as you do.’
‘We found them in the sea. All of them. Neil swam for one of them.’
‘Then go back to the sea.’ Dr Barbara was staring at the wreck of the Dugong, already bored by the hippies’ plight. ‘Take your yacht and fish beyond the reef.’
‘Fish?’ Trudi pressed the baby’s head to her empty breast.
‘We’re too tired - you can fish all day and only catch enough for one person.’
‘Then go back to Tahiti - why stay and starve?’
‘We like the island, doctor. It’s our island too.’ Dr Barbara struck the wire gate with an angry fist. ‘It’s not your island! Saint-Esprit belongs to the albatross and any other creature that needs sanctuary..
‘My baby needs sanctuary.’ Trudi comforted the restless child.
‘Give us a little milk for Gubby. Just for the baby.’
‘The dried milk is for emergencies only. Besides, it’s not good for the child.’
‘Dr Barbara…’ Kimo steadied the trembling gate, his huge arms raised as if to calm the air. ‘We can give something to the baby. Just for now.’
‘Of course - and tomorrow?’
‘I’m thinking now, doctor.’
‘And I’m thinking about the future.’ Dr Barbara stared challengingly at the others, as if reminding herself that they shared the sanctuary with her. ‘David, I’m sure you agree with me?’
‘Of course, Barbara…’ A series of contrary scowls crossed Carline’s face as he fidgeted with himself. ‘It’s a difficult one, but I go along with you.’
‘Good. Yukio, what about you?’
‘We can adjust the food schedules…’ Nervous of his wife, the botanist temporized. ‘Maybe the schedules are right.’
‘They certainly are. We spent enough time on them.’
Rushing to Paradise Page 14