Rushing to Paradise. Rivka Galchen

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      Neil massaged his aching calf, thinking of the bedraggled and eccentric woman he had first seen five months earlier outside a Waikiki hotel, shouting abuse at the doormen exasperated by her high-pitched English voice and the banner she waved in the faces of the guests.

      Neil was leaving the hotel after a farewell dinner with his mother and step-father. Having completed his tour of duty in Hawaii, Colonel Stamford was being reassigned to a base in Georgia. Neil’s widowed mother had met the colonel soon after her husband’s death, while she worked as the catering officer at a U.S. officers’ club in London. Neil liked the amiable Californian, who was forever urging him to enlist in the Marine Corps and find a new compass-bearing in his life, and accepted the colonel’s suggestion that he join them in Honolulu.

      Neil was still unsettled by the suicide of his father, a radiologist who had diagnosed his own lung cancer and decided to end his life while he could breathe without pain. But suicide was a suggestive act, as a tactless counsellor at the hospital had told Mrs Dempsey, often passing from father to son like a dangerous gene. Trying to distance himself from his memories of his father, Neil gave up any hopes of studying medicine. The vacuum in his life he filled with body-building, judo and long-distance swimming, lapping hundreds of lengths each week at his London pool. He swam the Thames, despite the efforts of the River Police to stop him, from Chelsea Bridge to the first lock at Teddington. Above all, he revelled in long night-swims, when he moved in a deep dream of exhaustion and dark water.

      The powerful physique of this moody sixteen-year-old, and his plans to swim the English Channel at night, together appealed to Colonel Stamford, who talked to Neil of the great seas around Hawaii. Once he arrived, the Waikiki beach world swallowed him whole. He missed his girl-friend Louise, a highly strung but affectionate music student, and sent her video-cassettes of himself surfing near Diamond Head. Bored with his class work, he dropped out of high school and crewed on yachts, worked as a pool attendant and then found a part-time job as a projectionist at the university film school. During his spare time he prepared for the challenge he had set himself, the thirty-mile swim across the Kaiwi Channel from Makapuu Head to the neighbouring island of Molokai.

      When his mother and Colonel Stamford told him of their imminent move to Georgia, Neil asked if he could remain in Honolulu for the summer. To his surprise, his mother agreed, but Neil was aware that in her vague way she had begun to reject him. An anxious and easily tired woman, she saw in his square shoulders and boxer’s jaw an upsetting reminder of her dead husband. She and the colonel settled Neil into a student rooming house near the university, and celebrated their departure with a last dinner in Waikiki. Afterwards Neil kissed his mother’s over-rouged cheek and accepted his step-father’s kindly bear-hug. He then walked through the lobby doors and straight into the quixotic and testing world of Dr Barbara Rafferty.

      When he first arrived for dinner he had noticed the shabby, middle-aged woman in a threadbare cotton dress. She crouched between two limousines in the car park, unwrapping a paper parcel, and Neil assumed that she was a beggar or down-and-out, hoping to cadge a few dollars from the delegates to a maritime safety convention. Two hours later, when he left, she was still there, hovering around the ornamental fountain that faced the entrance. Seeing Neil emerge from the hotel, she waved a makeshift banner and shouted in a strong English voice:

      ‘Save the albatross! Stop oil pollution now!’

      Before she could confront Neil the doormen bundled her away. Handling her roughly, they propelled her into the drive beyond the hotel gates and flung the banner onto the ground. She knelt beside it, skirt around her white thighs, a hand to her bruised chin.

      Drawn by her English accent, Neil helped the woman to her feet. She accepted his handkerchief and wiped her tears, flowing from indignation rather than grief.

      ‘Are you one of the delegates?’ She frowned at his youthful face. ‘If they’re sending their midshipmen they really must have something to hide.’

      ‘I’m not a delegate.’ Neil tried to calm her trembling shoulders, but she pushed him away. ‘I’ve been saying goodbye to my mother and step-father. He’s a colonel in the U.S. Army.’

      ‘The American Army? One of the world’s greatest environmental threats.’ She brushed the dirt from her hands. ‘No use saying goodbye, they said goodbye to us a long time ago. Listen, do you have a car?’

      ‘I came by bus,’ Neil lied. The army-surplus jeep he had bought to please his step-father was parked a hundred yards along the beach, but Neil decided to distance himself from this unstable Englishwoman. As he folded the banner he noticed the slogan hand-painted in red ink. ‘“Save the Albatross”,’ he repeated. ‘Do they need saving?’

      ‘They certainly do. Still, I’m glad you’ve heard of the albatross.’

      ‘Everyone has.’ Neil gestured to the evening sky over Diamond Head and its corona of soaring birds. ‘They’re just a common sea-bird.’

      ‘They’ll soon be a lot less common. The French are killing them at Saint-Esprit, poisoning them by the thousand.’

      ‘That’s a shame …’ Neil tried to seem sympathetic. ‘But it’s a nuclear test island.’

      ‘You’ve heard of that, too? I’m impressed.’

      A tourist party emerged from the hotel and waited by the limousines, but a dispute between the drivers and the courier left them standing in an uneasy huddle. Seeing her chance, the Englishwoman unwrapped her banner. In an effort to make herself presentable, she brushed the blonde hair from her high forehead and relaxed the muscles of her face, imposing a fierce smile on its warring planes. She pulled a bundle of leaflets from her bag and pressed them into Neil’s hands. ‘Start giving those out. You can tell the doorman you’re a guest at the hotel.’

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ