J. Ballard - Rushing to Paradise

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 A paragraph in a Honolulu newspaper reported that the French authorities on Tahiti had withdrawn their approval for the re-occupation of Saint-Esprit by the original inhabitants.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.