Rushing to Paradise. Rivka Galchen

arrived at the quay by dusk, as the French volunteers sat in their deck-chairs beside the gangway, their anti-nuclear banners swaying in the riding lights of the ship. Neil stowed his bag in the cabin and tested the unlocked door into the forward hold. He joined Professor Saito and his wife in the galley, where he shared their modest macrobiotic meal. Afterwards they invited him to their cabin, where they earnestly discussed the damage to Japan’s wild-life by the post-war policy of industrialization at any cost.

      A dedicated taxonomist, Professor Saito was a slim, unsmiling man who seemed barely older than Neil. The cabin was crammed with textbooks and research reports on the world’s myriad endangered species, which the botanist seemed to be classifying single-handedly. He had begun to catalogue the insect life aboard the Dugong, and had even noticed a fall in the expected number of rats in the bilges.

      Mrs Saito was a small, brisk woman with strong hands that almost pulled Neil’s wrists out of joint when she greeted him. She was devoted to her husband, forever watching him like an experienced manager supervising a novice boxer. Through the flicker of her chopsticks she stared at Neil’s skin, once reaching out to touch his arm as if she expected to see his radiation burns. She told him that they travelled to Saint-Esprit as the delegates of all the nuclear casualties of World War II.

      ‘We can save the albatross, Neil,’ she assured him.

      ‘Of course we can, Mrs Saito,’ Neil replied, uncertain whether her remark was a question.

      ‘If we save the albatross we can help the spirit of many people in Hiroshima.’

      ‘The dead people?’

      ‘And the other people today. They live on in the albatross.’

      Her husband sucked at his sake. ‘It’s England’s sacred bird?’ he asked. ‘A totemic figure?’

      ‘Yes, it is, in a way …’

      ‘It’s a beautiful bird. Is Saint-Esprit beautiful?’

      ‘It certainly is,’ Neil assured him. ‘It has a very strange atmosphere, you know. There are all these amazing towers.’

      ‘Towers?’ Professor Saito sat up. ‘Like … obelisks? Stone columns, with religious inscriptions?’

      ‘No. Camera-towers, made of concrete. Waiting for a nuclear explosion …’

      Neil tried to calm himself, but the silence that followed his brief outburst lasted until he left the cabin and closed the door on the Saitos. He spent the next two hours on the quay, talking to an earnest American woman, a computer sciences major at the University, who prepared coffee for the French students. At midnight he climbed the gangway and went to his cabin. He sat by the open door, listening to the strange scratching sounds that emerged from the Saitos’ cabin, and watched the distant lights of Waikiki through the salt-smeared porthole.

      For the first time he wondered if he had the courage to turn the seacock and sink Dr Barbara’s dreams to the harbour bottom. Even a few feet of water in the forward hold would postpone their departure long enough for Irving Boyd to have second thoughts about the voyage.

      The students were drowsing in their deck-chairs, and the scent of cannabis drifted over the silent ship. Neil stepped from the cabin and eased open the door into the hold. As he turned the wheel of the seacock he vowed to work hard for Dr Barbara and somehow reinstate her as a practising physician.

      Headlights flared across the hatchway above his head, illuminating the foremast which reared into the night like a crippled gallows. As the Saitos stirred in their cabin, Neil climbed the oily ladder to the deck and crouched behind the satellite dish. The students were shouting to each other and there was a panic of running feet on the gangway. A taxi approached at speed along the quay, its beams dipping and flaring as the driver braked beside the moored craft, searching for the Dugong. Dr Barbara leaned over his shoulder, pointing to the white wings that veered from the dark water.

      Seeing her, Neil felt a surge of relief. He knew that he could sink the ship, but not while Dr Barbara walked its bridge. He met her on the gangway, taking her hands when she stumbled towards the deck. Her hair was uncombed, and she gasped through her smeared lipstick, as if she had just been embraced by a violent lover.

      ‘Neil, thank God you’re here. I knew I could rely on you.’

      ‘Dr Barbara? What is it – did someone attack you?’

      ‘They’ve attacked all of us!’ Dr Barbara stared wildly at the ship, as if unable to focus her eyes. ‘The French have informed the United Nations. Nuclear tests resume at Saint-Esprit on July 15. Neil!’

      ‘July 15 …?’ Neil tried to restrain her whirling hands, moving across the night air like deranged birds. ‘Dr Barbara, that means there’s no point in going. We’ll never get there.’