Rushing to Paradise

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘4’ Watching the scene from the steps of the clinic, Neil sensed that he was witnessing a shrewd but cruel experiment. The rightness of the hippies’ claim to food was a secondary matter.

  Dr Barbara was testing the resolve of the sanctuary members, as she tested everything on Saint-Esprit. The albatross, the endang ered plants and animals and all those on the island were taking part in an endless trial to see if they matched Dr Barbara’s fierce expectations of them.

  Surprisingly, it was the women who were most stalwart in their refusal to aid the two hippies and their ailing child. Mrs Saito and Monique were united against the wavering men, and glowered at the cowed trio beyond the gate. Seizing upon their support, Dr Barbara strutted along the fence and tested the rusty wire.

  She was snapping her fingers at the air when Neil appeared beside her, two cans of dried milk in his hands.

  What are those, Neil? Did you find them on the beach?’ Neil showed her the intact labels. ‘I took them from the shelf 111 your office.’

  ‘Did you?’ Dr Barbara’s gaze was fixed upon Neil with an intentness he had never known before, as if she was curious to see his response to the confrontation she had devised. ‘Well, now uure going to take them back.’ No, doctor. I’m giving them to Trudi for the baby.’

  ‘And what happens when all the cans have gone? When there Isilt any food left because we’ve been too busy being kind to each other?’

  ‘That hasn’t happened, Dr Barbara. Not yet. We look after the iniinals. And the albatross.’ They’re in danger, Neil. That’s why we started the sanctuary. lut even here we have to be selective. Not everything can be saved.’

  ‘We can still be kind, doctor. You looked after me when the French soldiers wanted me to die.’

  ‘And I’m still looking after you. Things may not always go well here, and then you’ll come to me again. Now, take the cans hack to my office.’ No - NH

  stepped through the gate and stood beside the 1-12 squatting women, smiling at the unsettled child when it waved to him. ‘If I can’t give the milk to Gubby I’ll go and live with Trudi and Inger on the beach. I’ll fish for them and leave the sanctuary.’

  ‘Neil!’ Dr Barbara tried to hold him. ‘We came to Saint-Esprit together. You can’t leave..

  ‘We’ll start our own sanctuary, Dr Barbara.’ Carline strode forward to separate them, beaming tolerantly like a missionary separating two rival natives.

  ‘Barbara, let’s take time to think this over. I can air-freight a ton of powdered milk into Saint-Esprit. You’ll be able to bathe in the stuff.’

  ‘Neil’s our best spear-fisher,’ Kimo pointed out. ‘We need him here, doctor.’

  Neil waited, a milk-can in each hand, aware that Monique and Mrs Saito had sided with Dr Barbara. Both were already treating Neil as if he were an outcast.

  ‘He’s a lazy boy,’ Mrs Saito insisted. ‘He never works, he’s just dreaming all the time.’

  ‘Let him go, Barbara,’ Monique agreed. ‘He’s already living on the beach.

  Better to take the women. We can teach them to work.’

  ‘Yes…’ The suggestion cooled Dr Barbara’s temper. She nodded to Monique, and turned to assess the two German women. Already she seemed to be thinking far ahead, to another island and another sanctuary free of kindness.

  ‘All right, then. Monique, tell them that they can bring the baby and live in the camp with us. Neil, you’re in charge of them. They can stay, but only if you feed them.’

  ‘43 11 The Breeding-Station 1) R! A R I A 1 A WAN I El) A Clii L I) - not her own, she had wade clear, but an infant sired by Neil and conceived by either Inger or Trudi, a sanctuary first-born who would celebrate the new kingdom of Saint-Esprit. As Neil broke the surface of the lagoon and swam towards the beach the two women were waiting for him beside the barbecue. Regrettably, they were still far more interested in what Neil might bring to fill their stomachs than in any gift to Dr Barbara that he could place in their wombs.

  He waded ashore, weary after the hour of deep-water swim ining, and the weight of the wet-suit and oxygen cylinders. Inger cheered when she saw the dying grouper impaled on the steel arrow.

  Gubby swayed forward, chuckling to himself at the ihurdity of its size, while Trudi ran into the surf to steady Neil.

  ‘Neil! It’s so big. Jonah never saw such a fish.. irudi struggled with him in the bullish waves, her arms streaming with the grouper’s blood. Inger left the fire and pulled Neil from the water, relieving him of fish and spear-gun.

  ‘Poor Neil! It must have been a battle for you.’ Inger rubbed away the pressure bruise around his mouth. ‘Trudi, he’s been kissing someone again. I think Neil has a lady friend in the We’ll give you the biggest share,’ Trudi assured him as she. Hed the grouper to the fire. ‘You have half, and we take the rest. What a swimmer - you could swim back to Honolulu.’

  ‘Don’t give him an idea. We’d be starving without Neil.’ Neil stood swaying in the ashy sand, and flicked drops of ttrr t iic dJhted Gubby. The women unbuckled the shoulder harness and lowered the oxygen cylinders to his feet.

  They unzipped the wet-suit, rolled the collar and flayed the black rubber skin from his shoulders. Inger squatted on her heels and pulled his swimming briefs to his ankles, plucked a strand of kelp from his scrotum and sat him down on the sand.

  Waiting to catch his breath, Neil played with the baby while the women gutted and cleaned the fish, their forearms smeared with the entrails. The butcher’s blade flashed between their hands as they severed the head and tail, stripped the heavy skin and impaled the scarcely dead beast on a bamboo stake.

  Satisfied by the first sounds of fat hissing on the charcoal, the women draped a towel around Neil and dried him vigorously.

  ‘Neil, you’re the new Johnny Weissmuller,’ Inger told him.

  ‘Maybe you’ll take us to Hollywood. Think, a Tarzan with two Janes…’

  ‘No-one can fish like Neil,’ Trudi agreed as she licked the blistering flesh.

  ‘Not Wolfgang, and definitely not Werner. One day soon we’ll love you, Neil..

  An hour later, when they had finished their meal, Neil reflected that it was a perfect day for a seduction, but it was the women who would seduce him, and in their own good time. Sea, sun and sky could not have been arranged more skilfully had Dr Barbara herself been in charge of the mise en scene. The sanctuary island was Neil’s amatory bower, or so Dr Barbara hoped. After a week of storm-cloud and incessant gales, a benign sun now calmed the surface of the lagoon. During the days of rain the water had been too turbid for Neil to fish, and Inger and Trudi sat morosely under the dripping rattan of the beach hut he had built for them. They fiddled with their coral beads and refused to meet Neil’s eyes when he served them their ration of fried plantain and sweet potato.

  Now the water had cleared, and the fish rose to the surface of the lagoon, ready to attend a banquet. Dr Barbara had even allocated a jug of the coconut wine that Kimo brewed to Professor Saito’s recipe. Convinced that the sexual auguries were in the right sphere, Dr Barbara allowed them to take Gubby ‘45 ii the clinic, as it the infant might remind Neil of his expected Juries.

  I)espite the sun and the drowsy, groin-stirring pleasures of the wcet wine, Neil doubted that Dr Barbara’s hopes would be fulfilled. He had been too tired, first by the task of building the but, and then by the far greater effort needed to catch enough fish for the four of them, and had strained his lungs while trawling

  for the bulldozed oxygen cylinders that had rolled into the deep trench beside the reef.

  Once he found the cylinders a steady supply of fish reached the charcoal spit, and Trudi and Inger soon rediscovered his attrac tions, but they still saw Neil as little more than a mascot and older brother of Cubby. Both women had begun to put on weight. Cut off from their amphetamines, acid and pot, they were transforming themselves into a pair of robust and strong chinned Bavarian Hausfrauen. Years of experience in the bars outside the American air-bases made them more t
han a match for a sixteen-year-old, especially one as guileless as Neil.

  Dr Barbara insisted that the baby be weaned, and Trudi reluctantly left Cubby at the clinic. She and Inger had both been pregnant when they joined Werner and Wolfgang, and gave birth together in Vancouver. Too feckless to care for her own child, a baby girl with a black American father, Inger abandoned it to the care of a Catholic adoption agency. Free of responsibility ]low, she and Trudi spent their time sunbathing outside the hut and waiting for the next meal.

  'oiivc done woiiUers, Neil,’ Dr Barbara had complimented him after the first month of this new regime, as she watched the two women saunter back to their tent.

  ‘They do look splendid.’ It’s hard work, doctor.’ Neil sat beside her desk in the clinic, ea7ing at his latest urine sample. ‘Is this what marriage is like?’

  ‘Not exactly. In marriage it’s women who do the work and the i.icn who take it easy - it’s called going to the office.’ She stared at the plant laboratory, from which Professor Saito rarely emerged, and at the radio-cabin that Carline had begun to rebuild. ‘Rather like Saint-Esprit, in a way.’ [46 Are there any office jobs here, Dr Barbara?’

  ‘No, and a good thing too.’ She turned to face Neil with one of the intense smiles that always prefigured, he had noticed, a sudden swerve of policy. ‘As it happens, though, I do have a job for Inger and Trudi.’

  ‘Great.’ The prospect cheered Neil. ‘They could work on the farm.’

  ‘Not the farm. I’m thinking of something more suited to their talents.’

  ‘Talents?’ Neil pondered this abyss. ‘They’re only good at lying on their backs.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Dr Barbara took the urine sample from Neil and returned it to the rack. ‘Something along those lines had occurred to me.’

  ‘What about the kitchen? They could help Monique.’

  ‘They’re overweight as it is. No, Neil, I think they should each have a baby.’ Neil turned to see how Gubby greeted this, as he sat in his baby-chair beside the window, eyes following Dr Barbara’s imperious gestures. ‘Well, Inger left her baby in Vancouver. And Trudi already has Gubby.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s… not very well.’ She allowed Gubby to play with her fingers, though Neil was aware that she never looked the swollen-headed child in the eye.

  She touched Neil’s still warm urine sample, as if drawing inspiration from it.

  ‘They need a fresh start, with a new husband. It would mark a true beginning, and really send a signal to the world.’

  ‘If you spoke to them, doctor… I know they’re both interested in sex. But who would be the fathers?’

  ‘I’m thinking of only one father, in point of fact.’

  ‘Wolfgang? He’s their partner. Sometimes Werner slept with Trudi, if she was feeling edgy..

  ‘No!’ Dr Barbara ruled this out. ‘You can’t breed thorough breds from damaged blood-lines. Their DNA must look like used ticker-tape.’

  ‘What about Kimo?’

  ‘He’s saving his semen for the new Hawaiian kingdom.’

  ‘Or David?’

  ‘47 1 00 old. And anyway he’s already married.’ Dr Barbara H cssed the urine sample to Neil’s forehead, like an archbishop owning an adolescent king. ‘Neil, I was thinking of you.’ Doctor…?’ Startled, Neil tried to evade her advancing ile, approaching him like a tsunami. ‘I don’t think they tild - You’re young, in the peak of health, and ready for responsibi Inv. Why do you think I’ve been testing your blood and urine all this time? You do like them, don’t you?’ Dr Barbara seemed

  suddenly anxious for Neil. ‘Or is Trudi too petite for you? Inger is a lot more sturdy, but those heavy breasts might be a little tIocating.

  1 like them both. They’re-‘ 1Dr Barbara had always been matter-of-fact about sex, noting in her diary how often he masturbated, but now her frankness unnerved him. He watched her stride up and down the floor, counting the chairs and medical vials with the distracted manner of a caged mathematician. For reasons of her own she had begun to neglect herself, no longer bothering to comb her hair, another sign that she hungered for change.

  Dr Barbara had become bored with the sanctuary. Work filled every hour of their lives, and there was an unending struggle to maintain the animals and find enough food for themselves. She reluctantly accepted a consignment of animal feed that a Japanese whaler delivered to the island, but this respite merely allowed Kimo and Carline to laze in their tents. As the men weakened, more and more of the work now fell to the women, and in Dr Barbara’s eyes the sanctuary had begun to imitate the worst kind of bourgeois life that she had known during her bleak Scottish childhood, with all of the chores and no conveniences.

  Watching her as she stared severely at Gubby, Neil guessed that she was eager to let another radical dimension into the sanctuary, a disruptive element that would first unsettle and then steel them. All along she had tested them, exposing them to the French guns and the media glare, then rejecting the watching world and its aid. They had coped with these challenges, but by laying duckboards and digging deeper latrines, and Dr Barbara was now looking for another means of provoking them. Their sexuality, dormant since their arrival at Saint-Esprit, offered a potent weapon of self-disruption. The absurd confrontation over the powdered milk had left her angry with Neil, but now she realized that his urgent hormones could soon quicken the plodding pace of sanctuary life. Even the slightest hint that Neil was sexually involved with Trudi and Inger, and the father of their expected children, would light a touch-paper inside the minds of Monique and Mrs Saito.

  Lying by the beach fire, and playing with the fish-tail in Gubby’s hand, Neil gazed at the two women asleep beside him. The pearls of needle-scarred tissue on their thighs and arms had almost vanished. The listless hippies with their waxy and toneless skins who had limped ashore from the leaking yacht had been transformed by the diet of fish and Dr Barbara’s vitamin injections. Without a second thought both had turned their backs on Werner and Wolfgang, who remained in the ruins of their shack encampment, trying to ready the Parsfal for sea. Fre quently separated from her baby, Trudi was still unsettled by life in the sanctuary. Small and sharp-featured, she was the more astute of the pair, but neither she nor Inger had any idea of the plan that Dr Barbara had devised for them.

  ‘Gubby, Gubby…’ Neil circled the child’s head with the fish-tail, tickling his nose as Gubby followed his hand with a wondrous stare, eyes like camera windows under the bunker-like mass of his forehead. ‘It’s a flying fish, Gubby..

  ‘You like children, Neil,’ Trudi remarked. The women had woken and leaned on their elbows, exposing their breasts to the sun. ‘Did you have a young brother in England?’

  ‘No. But Gubby’s fun. And he’s very intelligent.’

  ‘Of course. He’ll play games forever.’ She pinched the child’s nose, laughing when he emitted a trumpet-like roar. ‘He loves you, Neil. You must be a natural father.’

  ‘Well…’ Neil replied cautiously, aware that Dr Barbara was standing among the trees above the beach, a latter-day Margaret Mead watching the courtship rituals of an island tribe. ‘I might be… I won’t know until I’ve tried.’

  So you should try.’ Inger lay on her side, inspecting Neil with a practised eye. She noted his long, swimmer’s thighs and muscled J oulders, and mentally weighed his sand-covered scrotum. She ‘uched his leg, running her forefinger across the hard tendon Love his knee-cap that gathered his thigh muscles together like rhc clasped reins of a charioteer. ‘Neil, did Dr Barbara talk to you?’

  ‘Talk? What about?’ imporant things, of course.’ Inger sipped from the wine jug.

  1 Dr Barbara only talks about important matters. Life and death, iwr precious

  animals.’ The albatross,’ Trudi reminded her.

  ‘Naturally. Never forget the albatross.’ Inger brushed the sand from Neil’s nipple. ‘One day they’ll fly away and there will be no wore sky.’ No more life and death. Dr Barbara is too serious for life and (Lath. Trudi lay
with her back to Neil, elbow resting on his hip.

  ‘Now we must do what Dr Barbara tells us - fish and dream and make peace in the afternoon.’ Inger searched Neil’s hair for any fleas. Lying between the two women, as the surf hissed against the sand and Gubby chuntered to himself, Neil felt the wine dim his brain, a haze of soft flesh and uttural endearments.

  ‘luger…?’ Yes, Neil?’ Dr Barbara has a new idea. For you and Trudi.’

  course. We always follow Dr Barbara’s ideas.’

  ‘She explained it to me.’ Neil searched for a delicate phrasing.

  ‘She wants another baby.’

  ‘That’s nice. But she has you. You’re her baby.’

  ‘What she means is, she wants you to have a baby. You and Trudi.’

  ‘But how?’ Trudi seemed genuinely puzzled as she turned to face him. ‘We can’t do it ourselves, even for Dr Barbara.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t do it yourselves…

  ‘Show us, Neil.’ Inger sat up, her breasts brushing Neil’s chin. ‘Can you show us, please? There must be some special equipment. Is it here? Or down here, maybe? Trudi, I think it’s disappeared!’

  ‘Poor Neil! Take him to the clinic and tell Dr Barbara… borrowing the dinghy, Neil had loaded it with heavy stones from the beach, though Kimo had often warned him that ic pearl-fishermen’s inertial diving might damage his lungs. But was too tired to wear the oxygen cylinders and mask, and the dden descents gave him a brief but clearer look at the lagoon H cps.

  He had rowed two miles from the shore, to a point where the cs of sight from the camera-towers seemed to intersect. For some reason he had convinced himself that a caisson designed to hold an atomic weapon, or a device for anchoring nuclear mines, lay on the lagoon floor. If not the weapon itself, he would have found the core site of Saint-Esprit, the epicentre of all his dreams Mururoa, Bikini and Eniwetok.

  I -us feet touched the smooth sand, the momentum of his dcent carrying him onto his knees. Still clutching the stone slab, he watched the pressure bubbles from his goggles race towards the surface. Speckled sea-snakes haunted the cliffs of dead coral that rose like encoded palaces through the dim water.