The Rapture Page 3

  Swimming is both good and bad for rage. It can help to dissipate it, but it can also focus and refine it. I was told back in London that if I wanted to work at a senior level again, I’d need to deal with my ‘issues’. That, said my employers, would involve more intensive therapy, plus a written self-assessment and analysis. My reaction, when they told me this in the meeting — a warm afternoon, the sun just sinking behind the old Battersea Power Station — was what we in the business call ‘inappropriate’.

  ‘You’re talking to a trained psychologist, for fuck’s sake!’ I said.

  Or did I shriek?

  Yes, I must admit I shrieked. Shrieking is both deeply feminine and deeply unfeminine at the same time. When women imitate pressure cookers, they show their worst selves, the side that men call either ‘passionate’ or ‘mad’, depending on whether or not good looks are involved.

  ‘Don’t patronise me with lectures about coming to terms with the new reality: I live with it every day! I am the new reality!’

  Nor is shrieking a good way to communicate in a psychiatric establishment, if you are not an inmate, and indeed, if you have been until now classified among the sane, and in charge of others less fortunate.

  ‘Gabrielle, I have enormous sympathy and respect for you, and you have been through what no person should go through. With all your… terrible losses. But you work in the field,’ said Dr Sulieman when the members of the committee had trooped out, exchanging distressed glances. ‘See it from an employer’s point of view.’

  If my legs worked, I’d have kicked him. Violent urges came to me very readily back then.

  The ‘negative attitude’ I had towards my diminished status as a human being after my accident was unfortunately a ‘significant problem’. As Sulieman spoke, I inspected the print on the wall behind him, the image he had chosen as his own personalised backdrop: Monet’s lily pond, with its hypnotic plays of light, its strangely hot greens and blues. ‘A problem which, until it’s resolved, means we are unable to accept you back as a therapist at the present time.’ He’s into the classics, so where’s Kandinsky? I wondered. Where’s Egon Schiele? Where’s van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, where’s Rothko, where’s The Scream?

  I’d just spent an hour with my physiotherapist, learning how to hit people where it hurt. A karate chop to the balls. A squirt of vinegar in the eyes. A flung object, aimed at the head. Cripple power. A flicker of pity from my boss, and that expensive Venetian paperweight on his desk — a whirling rhapsody of trapped bubbles and squirls — would make contact with his skull.

  ‘I need to work, Omar. If you can’t take me back, then find me somewhere else.’

  ‘That’s not the best thing for you, Gabrielle. Or the people you’re helping.’

  ‘Look at this chair. I’m welded to it for ever. I’ll probably never have another relationship. Or children. Call me melodramatic, but the fact is, every night I lie in bed and hear the clang of doors closing on my future. So if I can’t do the thing I know how to do, and still can do, the thing you helped train me in, the thing I’m good at by all accounts, how can I even be me? If you can answer that question for me, bravo. Because I can’t. If I can’t work, I’m done for.’

  When a job came up at Oxsmith, he recommended me. Then, three months later, I heard that he was dead. Good people drop like flies, I thought. And I never thanked him the way I should have.

  Water under the bridge.

  In the art studio, Rafik’s pager has registered the arrival of a text which he now seems intent on answering. Meanwhile Bethany has switched tack. ‘I suppose you could be something the drugs do,’ she’s saying dreamily. ‘Something in my head. That happens. I’ve still got a load of psychotropic toxins in my bloodstream, they’ll never leave my body. Like saccharine. Did you know that saccharine just builds up for ever in your system?’ The notion that I might be a hallucination doesn’t seem alarming to her. In this moment, it quite appeals to me too. ‘So what do I call my new saviour? Spaz? Saint Gabrielle?’

  ‘Gabrielle’s fine.’

  She thinks for a moment. ‘Wheels.’

  ‘I’d prefer Gabrielle,’ I say, swivelling again to assess her profile. She closes her eyes. A moment passes.

  ‘You’re quite a fish, aren’t you?’ she says, her eyes opening again in unexpected delight. Dark, like night-pools. ‘Quite a mermaid. Always in the water! Up and down you go! You like getting out of that chair, don’t you? It’s like being freed from your cage!’ She beams, as if she has solved a puzzle in record time.

  As I try to fathom this, I don’t reply. But then it occurs to me she can probably simply smell the chlorine. ‘If I touched your hand I’d know even more,’ she says. The delight has gone, replaced by amused menace. ‘I didn’t even have to touch Joy McConey to know things. I saw what she had coming.’ If she’s asking permission, I am not giving it. I’ll shake hands on the first meeting but apart from that I don’t do physical contact. ‘I register stuff. But half the time it doesn’t mean jack shit to me. It’s, like, way over my head.’

  ‘Can you tell me more about this "stuff" you register?’

  She smiles. ‘Seas burning. Sheets of fire. Whole coasts washed away. The glaciers melting like butter in a microwave. You know Greenland? Basically dissolved. Like a great big aspirin that says Hazard Warning on it. Empty towns full of human bones, with lizards and coyotes in charge. And trees everywhere, and sharks and crocodiles in the underground. The lost city of Atlantis.’ Are these drug-induced visions? Daydreams? Or is it metaphorical?

  ‘It sounds like a dangerous world you’re describing. Dangerous and chaotic and life-threatening. A lot of people worry about catastrophic climate change. It’s not an irrational fear.’

  The latest projections predict the loss of the Arctic ice cap and a global temperature rise of up to six degrees within Bethany’s lifetime, if nothing is done now. I should be grateful to be childless. Just as the Cold War figures heavily in the fantasies of the elderly mental patients, climate-apocalypse paranoia is common among the young. Zeitgeist stuff: the banality of abnormality. Its roots in facts so appalling we turn the other way politely. I’d like to steer Bethany towards the subject of suicide, my main concern, on paper at least, because if she dies on my watch, there will be administrative issues that won’t look good on my first post-accident job. What is the likelihood of a repeat performance? Apart from the four attempts, according to the notes she is a regular self-harmer. They also label her well-informed, manipulative and prone to dramatic mood-swings, as well as psychotic fantasies, biblical outpourings and sudden, extreme violence. Again, unwillingly, I conjure the police photographs. Forty-eight stab-wounds. The screwdriver in Karen Krall’s eye. The film of skin forming on the blood like antique sealing-wax. The photographer’s flash stamped in it for ever, like a fossil star.

  ‘It is a dangerous world. And we’re in it. There’s no escape, Wheels.’ She gives a small mirthless laugh. ‘All of those people out there. Decent hard-working folks who ain’t never done no one no harm,’ she says, putting on a cartoonish yokel voice. ‘Dying a horrible death. All of us dying a horrible death.’ This notion seems to cheer, rather than frighten her. Suddenly there’s an electric energy about her. I sense an immense reservoir of violence and anger, a latent force that I find as compelling as it is alarming. I must watch out of my own perversity. ‘Have you heard of the Rapture?’

  ‘Vaguely.’ I know of it as an element of the Faith Wave creed brought over by the British citizens who abandoned their sunshine homes in Florida and returned to the UK after the global crash. Its popularity was expanded by celebrity conversions and a swathe of addictive, redemption-themed TV shows. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s salvation for the righteous. When the shit hits the fan, the true Christians go straight to Heaven in, like, a big airlift. The rest get left behind. Mercy for the pure in heart, justice for the rest. It’s all in the Bible. Look at Ezekiel, look at Daniel, look at The Daniel, look at R
evelation. All the signs are there. Iran, Jerusalem. Things are going to blow any day. Seven years of tribulation. Coming soon to a planet near you. The heat of Hell. The survivors, they’ll be trapped in it. It’s starting now, you can feel it. Plagues and pestilences and God’s wrath and the reign of the Antichrist. Who shall plant the mark of the Beast upon them.’

  There is a sick logic to the Faith Wave phenomenon, I reflect: in the face of more Islamic terror attacks, why not pit one insane dogma against another? Every week, there are mass baptisms, True Story gatherings, Commitment marches.

  ‘Do you have faith, Bethany?’

  ‘Faith?’ She snorts. ‘That’s a good one. Would I be here if there was a God? I don’t think so! But I have the mark of the Beast, look.’ She plants a forefinger on each temple. ‘Invisible in my case. That’s where the electrodes go.’

  ‘What did God mean to you, growing up?’

  ‘He never meant me any good. The thing I never get is, who created God? No one can ever answer that one. It’s like the universe. It’s ever-expanding, right? But what’s outside it?’

  ‘God never meant you any good in what way?’ She shrugs, and looks away. Either she doesn’t know, or she is withholding. I wait a moment but when I see I’ll get nothing I try another tack. ‘What was it like being a child in your family, Bethany?’ She shrugs. ‘You can quote the Bible. So I’m wondering what sort of influences you had.’

  ‘Are you? Well wonder on.’

  She looks edgy. ‘We believe in the universal sinfulness of all men since the Fall, rendering man subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Them.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Hey, she’s hot! How many degrees has she got up her ass?’

  ‘So tell me what else you’re thinking about.’

  She perks up, splaying her hands in front of her and flexing them as if to test their competence as grabbing tools. Her nails are as filthy as animal claws. One scratch, and she’d infect you. ‘Half the planet drowns, I can tell you that. Islands sinking, coasts getting eaten up by the sea. The land getting smaller. Water sloshing all over it in these giant tsunamis, the temperature zinging up. The stuff on the way, that’s just part of it. I’ve seen it in the Quiet Room. Earth looks like a gobstopper. You can zoom in. Satellite vision, Wheels. You hear what I’m saying?’ She is nodding so hard that her whole body begins to rock with the movement. She can’t seem to agree with herself enough. ‘Yeah. I have fucking satellite vision. Like the Hubble telescope.’

  The Quiet Room is a nondescript chamber on the second floor of Virgil Block, where they administer a muscle relaxant, a general anaesthetic and then electroshock therapy to inmates who have not responded to other treatments. The thought of a sixteen-year-old enjoying it makes me feel queasy.

  ‘It’s not just weather that’s causing it. Weather’s just like a side-product,’ she’s telling me, still rocking, a fleck of spit gathering at the corner of her mouth. I try to quell my distaste for this girl, and for the unimaginativeness of her cataclysmic visions — visions already shared by half the population, along with a belief in miracles and tarot readings, if the polls are anything to go by. ‘It’s the kind of thing that could land you in a desert of chemical crystals. Or leave you stranded somewhere in a wheelchair.’ She raises her eyebrows at me meaningfully. ‘On a black rock with dead trees. It’s not just heat, it’s geological activity, worse than the worst earthquake.’ She is alert, flushed, vivid. The stock diagnostic phrase ‘a danger to herself and others’ slides through my mind. The cynicism has given way to manic excitement. ‘Cracking, not where the tectonic plates meet but in other places, new places.’ The words are tumbling out in a rush, making the fleck of spit pulse. ‘Belching out these unbreathable toxic gases. You know why it’s so hot at the Earth’s core? Because this planet’s just a chunk of some supernova that exploded, like, aeons ago.’

  I wonder what channels she had been watching. Discovery, BBC World, Cartoon Network, News 24, CNN. But where? When? The TV in the rec room seems permanently fixed on MTV. The internet. A million websites, a zillion images — you can go anywhere, believe in anything, see carnage of every variety, scare yourself to Neptune and back. If global warming is terminal proof that we have fouled our own nest, Bethany is evidence that some human minds can draw energy from the fact.

  ‘You know what I mean by the Earth’s core,’ she says, touching her heart with spread fingers. Her father is a preacher: I wonder how much of her presentation comes, unconsciously, from him. Or perhaps it’s just an ability to convey conviction that she has picked up, a charisma. ‘I mean its centre. I mean its soul. I saw it when they zapped me. You’re not supposed to remember anything about the shock, right? But I do. My whole body wakes up. I came back from the dead, you know. Like Lazarus. Or Jesus Christ. I can see things, Wheels. Disasters. I’ve made notes. Dates, times, places, everything. Just like a weathergirl. They should employ me. I’d get paid a fucking fortune. I can see stuff happening before it happens. I feel it. Atoms popping about. Vibrations in your blood. These huge fucking wounds. The planet in meltdown. This freezing stuff, pouring from the cracks. Then it heats up, like some kind of magma. And whoosh. The promised land.’

  She smiles, bright-eyed, and for a tiny, fleeting fraction of time, she looks ecstatically, murderously happy.

  Unimaginably atrocious things have surely been done to Bethany, to make her do what she did: things that can never be undone. And she has done an unimaginably atrocious thing in return. I doubt I will ever get to the bottom of the trauma that led her to take a Phillips screwdriver to her mother, though I might take a second look at the photo of the father and hazard a guess that some of the damage came from him too. What matters now is Bethany ‘moving forward’, as the jargon goes, on a shiny conveyor belt of psychic progress. People like me are supposed to believe in repair, and I once did, until I became the object of my own clinical trial. After which—

  Not any more. Damage limitation, perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes not. When you stop being a woman, as I did on May 14th two years ago, there are things you see more clearly. Sexuality confounds matters, insinuating itself into every exchange. Freed of all that, you can see things for what they are, like kids do, and old people. That’s my theory. But it’s only a theory. And anyway, who says I am free?

  ‘So you see, with all that going on in my head, it’s like non-stop around here. Things to think about, things to do, that’s me,’ finishes Bethany. But after the rush of information, the burst of energy, she seems suddenly deflated, dissatisfied with herself. Her fantasies are a fertile oasis in the desert of her boredom, and a corner of her consciousness knows it.

  ‘Things in the self-destruction department.’

  ‘Things in the self-destruction department.’ She mimics me well enough to make me wince internally. ‘Bibble babble, bibble babble, bibble babble.’

  I let my eyes wander around the room until I catch sight of myself in the mirror, and make a swift, stranger’s appraisal: a woman with extravagant brunette hair, who may be skilled at her work, and good-looking in a seriously-damaged-goods sort of way, but who is clearly forever dependent on others. Who will never walk again, never have sex, never give birth. Who shall remain forever beholden to others.

  Bethany has stopped rocking and is looking at me intently. I don’t say anything, but an instinct makes me assess the distance between us. And the angles. When my father moved into the care home five years ago, my brother Pierre came over from Quebec and together we cleared out his bungalow. One of the souvenirs I took with me was a freak of geology known as a thunder egg which Maman kept on her dressing table: a perfect, fist-sized sphere of flint which passed down her family, along with the eccentric story that if someone sat on it for long enough, it would hatch. Maman was much attached to the thunder egg, and now I am much attached to it too, though not for the same romantic reasons. In addition to the regulation personal alarm all staff car
ry, and in defiance of the hospital’s strict regulations, I keep the stone ball in a hanging pouch under my seat, in case of emergencies, along with my miniature spray-can of photographic glue — also illicit — which I’ve been reliably told is as effective as mace. But if I can’t react fast enough, and Bethany reaches for a sharpened pencil and stabs me, how long will it be before Rafik — still busy — intervenes and activates his alarm? Trapped as I am, I’d be a lot quicker to kill than Mrs K.

  Almost as though she has read my thoughts, with a swift movement — too sudden for me to react — Bethany has reached out and grabbed my wrist with her small, surprisingly muscled hand. Her skin is clammy, her grip too tight.

  ‘Let go of me, Bethany.’ I take care to say it quietly and levelly, to hide the inner scream. Rafik has jumped to intervene but I signal to him that I will deal with this for now. Still gripping my wrist, Bethany turns my hand over so that the palm is facing upwards, and puts her finger on the pulse. I feel it begin to race under the pad of her skin. ‘Let my hand go, please, Bethany.’

  But she is somewhere else. Her face has a mesmerised look. ‘So someone died,’ she says, in her baby voice. ‘Someone died a horrible death.’ My breath catches roughly in my throat. ‘There’s no point telling me he didn’t,’ she continues excitedly. ‘Cos, fuck! I can feel it in your blood!’ She narrows her eyes. ‘I died once, so I know. I recognise the symptoms. Death leaves a mark. Did you know that blood has its own memory? It’s like rock, and water, and air.’ I look down at my pinioned wrist. I know my arms are stronger than hers. But when I start to pull away, she tightens her grip and I think with an inner lurch: perhaps they’re not.

  With a practised movement, Rafik has swiftly grabbed her other arm. ‘Easy, Bethany. Let go of Miss Fox now.’ Smoothly, he pulls off the cap of his belt-alarm.

  ‘And you never got to know him properly, did you?’ Bethany is whispering. A flashing light in the corridor outside indicates the emergency call has worked. They’ll be here in seconds. Again I try to pull away, and fail. Rafik has a firm hold of her shoulders now but she’s gripped a handle of my wheelchair and barnacled herself to it. The fingers of her other hand, which Rafik is trying to prise away, now tighten further on my wrist, pressing deep into the pulse. ‘It wasn’t fair, was it? It was just the beginning of a beautiful relationship!’