Rushing to Paradise. J. G. Ballard
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the fate of the huge birds, but he already realized that he was filming a well-rehearsed scene in the theatre of protest. Kimo climbed the water-tower and hung the banner from its spherical reservoir, while Dr Barbara sprayed her slogans across the green canvas roofs of the three barrack tents, slashing blades of gaudy crimson through the khaki fatigues hanging on a washing line. They posed together, native Hawaiian and English spinster, committed to their shared defence of the threatened Pacific.
Ten minutes later, as he replayed the sound-track to a critical Dr Barbara, Neil became aware that he was not the only person to film this contrived scene. A hundred yards from the airstrip, by the path that led up the hillside to the radio mast, three soldiers in French uniforms were watching the display. While his men waited beside him, smoking their cigarettes, the sergeant took a leisurely series of still photographs with his camera, like a tourist recording a quaint folkloric rite. After replacing the lens shroud, he beckoned his men forward, and together they strolled towards the airstrip.
‘They’re here! Kimo, take the camera!’ Dr Barbara snatched the video-camera from Neil’s hands and thrust it against Kimo’s chest. ‘Neil, climb the ladder and wrap the banner around your shoulders.’
‘Dr Barbara … shouldn’t we wait? The soldiers are armed.’
‘Neil, try to help me.’ Dr Barbara propelled him towards the ladder and forced his hands onto the metal rungs. For all the excitement, her eyes were calm, as if she had colluded with the French soldiers and was relieved to see them arrive. Before pushing him up the ladder she spoke rapidly to him: ‘Neil, there are millions of young people like you all over the world. They won’t listen to me but they’ll follow you.’
Kimo had dropped his machete to the ground. He knelt on the runway and, with an expertise that surprised Neil, began to film the approaching soldiers. He recorded Dr Barbara shouting into her megaphone, and ended with a close-up of an embarrassed Neil on the ladder, the banner draped across his chest.
‘Go, Kimo … now!’
Dr Barbara pulled the Hawaiian to his feet. He held her wrists, as if uncertain whether to leave, and then tore himself from her and ran across the airstrip towards the forest, camera in hand. When he reached the prayer-shack he paused among the graves, waiting for Dr Barbara to follow before plunging into the waist-deep ferns.
The French soldiers made no effort to pursue him. As Dr Barbara bellowed at them through the megaphone they put out their cigarettes, amused by this over-excited Englishwoman tripping over the dead bird at her feet. Dragging the banner with him, Neil jumped from the ladder and tried to wipe the blood from her arms.
‘Dr Barbara, let’s go. They’ll arrest us.’
‘I’m staying, Neil. I want to see this through. Kimo can show the film to the world.’
‘Doctor, the world isn’t interested …’
He was about to follow Kimo across the airstrip when the French sergeant raised his right hand. He unbuckled the flap of his holster and walked forward, pointing to Neil.
‘Arrête-toi! Ne bouge pas!’
Cursing Dr Barbara, Neil sprinted along the airstrip through the trail of bloody feathers. Kimo was running among the trees, retracing the railway line towards the beach with a lightness of foot that Neil had never suspected.
‘Kimo … wait! Kimo!’
He was still shouting at the Hawaiian when he heard the pistol shot behind him.
The protest rally at the University of Hawaii campus had reached a climax, its rhetoric as inflated as the helium balloons, emblazoned with ecological slogans, that rose from their cradles beside the podium. Lying in his bed on the sixth floor of the Nimitz Memorial Hospital, Neil watched the familiar scene on his television set. He turned down the sound as the last speaker, a local basketball commentator turned eco-evangelist, began his address to the student audience.
This aggressive sermon, which Neil now knew by heart, combined religious fervour, high-flown sporting analogies and blatant threats against the French consul in Honolulu and any French tourists daring to defile the beaches of Waikiki. Buying a Citroën or an Hermès scarf was a sin equal to the destruction of ten acres of rain-forest or the murder of a hundred albatross.
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.’
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