The Complete Short Stories

‘Maybe I’ll be as clever as you, Dr Christine.’

‘Ah, I think you’re moving in a much more interesting direction. In fact, Johnson, I’d like you to eat some of the fruit. Don’t worry, I’ve already analysed it, and I’ll have some myself.’ She was cutting slices of the melon-sized apple. ‘I want the baby to try some.’

Johnson hesitated, but as Christine always reminded him, none of the new species had revealed a single deformity.

The fruit was pale and sweet, with a pulpy texture and a tang like alcoholic mango. It slightly numbed Johnson’s mouth and left a pleasant coolness in the stomach.

A diet for those with wings.

‘Johnson! Are you sick?’

He woke with a start, not from sleep but from an almost too-clear examination of the colour patterns of a giant butterfly that had settled on his hand. He looked up from his chair at Christine’s concerned eyes, and at the dense vines and flowering creepers that crowded the porch, pressing against his shoulders. The amber of her eyes was touched by the same overlit spectrum that shone through the trees and blossoms. Everything on the island was becoming a prism of itself.

‘Johnson, wake up!’

‘I am awake. Christine… I didn’t hear you come.’

‘I’ve been here for an hour.’ She touched his cheeks, searching for any sign of fever and puzzled by Johnson’s distracted manner. Behind her, the inflatable was beached on the few feet of sand not smothered by the vegetation. The dense wall of palms, lianas and flowering plants had collapsed onto the shore. Engorged on the sun, the giant fruits had begun to split under their own weight, and streams of vivid juice ran across the sand, as if the forest was bleeding.

‘Christine? You came back so soon…?’ It seemed to Johnson that she had left only a few minutes earlier. He remembered waving goodbye to her and sitting down to finish his fruit and admire the giant butterfly, its wings like the painted hands of a circus clown.

‘Johnson — I’ve been away for a week.’ She held his shoulder, frowning at the unstable wall of rotting vegetation that towered a hundred feet into the air. Cathedrals of flower-decked foliage were falling into the waters of the lagoon.

‘Johnson, help me to unload the stores. You don’t look as if you’ve eaten for days. Did you trap the birds?’

‘Birds? No, nothing yet.’ Vaguely Johnson remembered setting the traps, but he had been too distracted by the wonder of everything to pursue the birds. Graceful, feather-tipped wraiths like gaudy angels, their crimson plumage leaked its ravishing hues onto the air. When he fixed his eyes onto them they seemed suspended against the sky, wings fanning slowly as if shaking the time from themselves.

He stared at Christine, aware that the colours were separating themselves from her skin and hair. Superimposed images of herself, each divided from the others by a fraction of a second, blurred the air around her, an exotic plumage that sprang from her arms and shoulders. The staid reality that had trapped them all was beginning to dissolve. Time had stopped and Christine was ready to rise into the air.

He would teach Christine and the child to fly.

‘Christine, we can all learn.’

‘What, Johnson?’

‘We can learn to fly. There’s no time any more — everything’s too beautiful for time.’

‘Johnson, look at my watch.’

‘We’ll go and live in the trees, Christine. We’ll live with the high flowers…’

He took her arm, eager to show her the mystery and beauty of the sky people they would become. She tried to protest, but gave in, humouring Johnson as he led her gently from the beach-house to the wall of inflamed flowers. Her hand on the radio-transmitter in the inflatable, she sat beside the crimson lagoon as Johnson tried to climb the flowers towards the sun. Steadying the child within her, she wept for Johnson, only calming herself two hours later when the siren of a naval cutter crossed the inlet.

‘I’m glad you radioed in,’ the US Navy lieutenant told Christine. ‘One of the birds reached the base at San Juan. We tried to keep it alive but it was crushed by the weight of its own wings. Like everything else on this island.’

He pointed from the bridge to the jungle wall. Almost all the overcrowded canopy had collapsed into the lagoon, leaving behind only a few of the original palms with their bird traps. The blossoms glowed through the water like thousands of drowned lanterns.

‘How long has the freighter been here?’ An older civilian, a government scientist holding a pair of binoculars, peered at the riddled hull of the Prospero. Below the beach-house two sailors were loading the last of Christine’s stores into the inflatable. ‘It looks as if it’s been stranded there for years.’

‘Six months,’ Christine told him. She sat beside Johnson, smiling at him encouragingly. ‘When Captain Johnson realised what was going on he asked me to call you.’