The Rapture (20 page)

'Gabrielle, can you explain why you're interrogating me?' He has not squatted to be at my level, as he usually does. Like a mountain range on the far horizon, or North Korea, he is keeping a strategic distance. I have never heard this coolness in his voice before and I never want to hear it again. If he just bent down now and took me in his arms -

Then I would succumb, and loathe myself even more.

'I don't like being lied to.' Folding my arms in unashamed hostility, I let this idea settle.

'I worked late. End of story. I'm sorry I missed your call.' Surely I am worth more than this. He looks at me with aggression. 'Can I ask what the hell's got into you?'

'For Christ's sake, just tell me the truth. Don't you think I deserve it?' This notion makes him shut his eyes. Perhaps he is hoping I will disappear. Perhaps I am hoping so too. But I am the pig-headed interrogator. 'Well?'

He looks down and flushes. 'Yes. But you have to trust me.' Oh please. I cannot believe that someone I care about - cared about -could allow such verbal dross to pass his lips. How could I ever have - 'Anyway, I still need to see Bethany.'

'Why?' I snap.

He looks at me levelly. 'Take me to her and you'll find out.' I'm trying to work out how I could have misread him so badly. He presented himself as being sexually insecure in the wake of his failed marriage. Was that so I would feel I was doing something for him, too? 'And where have you been all this time? You're not the only one who hasn't been able to get through on the phone,' he accuses.

Apparently I am a therapist to my marrow because I note, almost with detachment:
anger as a mask for guilt
. 'I told you. I was at the park.'

'At a time like this? At the park doing what?'

I roll back further. 'Meeting Joy McConey.'

'Oh Jesus,' he says, lifting his arms in a gesture of dismay. 'All on your own? Why on earth -?'

I flare. 'Because she asked me to. And I came back in one piece, didn't I?' One broken piece. 'Anyway, she's harmless.' Why am I suddenly the one defending my actions?

'I don't know why we're arguing like this,' he says, finally squatting so that our faces are level. 'Look, just tell me what Joy said. It's clearly shaken you up.'

If I can't tell him, who can I tell? I feel horribly alone. And by extension, weak and unloved. I hate myself for caving in to it. 'She's got cancer, and she thinks Bethany visited it on her as some kind of . . . retribution. For not helping her escape.'

He makes an exasperated noise. 'Right. All the more reason to prove there's a scientific explanation for what's happening with Bethany, rather than some pseudo-religious bullshit. come on,' he says, jerking his head at the road. 'Let's take your car.'

Co-operate with a man who has just betrayed me, and lied to my face, and has as good as admitted it? Help him? But Joy's bald head and the feel of her sweaty wig in my lap has disturbed me in a way I can't allow myself to process without coming to some very sick conclusions. It's eating at me. What if she's right? Despite my rage at the physicist's pathetic, clod-hopping, undignified charade, I find myself wanting -vehemently - to find an explanation for all this that does not involve a word as dogmatic and lazy as 'evil'. What the physicist needs from Bethany, I need too. If only to prove that Joy's reading of Bethany's motivation is as categorically wrong as it is possible to be.

The self-harm ward of St Swithin's hospital is an environment of complex despair, of extreme and conclusive failure. Here is where you end up, locally, if you can't even get suicide right. Chastened by its significance, and forced into a shaky concord that I can safely bet will not last the hour, the physicist and I enter with due reverence.

In one bed, there's an old man with a mane of white hair who sports a bloody, stitched-up scar across his throat of the variety that only an old-fashioned razor blade or a Stanley knife, brutally applied, will achieve for you. When we enter he sits up as though expecting visitors, then realises he doesn't know us and swings his majestic head towards the wall. There's a teenage girl not much older than Bethany whose skin is the blunt grey you get when you mix black and white paint. I recognise the most visible symptom of irreversible liver damage, caused by an overdose of paraceta-mol - which will prove fatal within a couple of weeks, unless she is offered a fresh organ. If she isn't, she will turn bright yellow and then she'll die. Her parents sit at their daughter's beside with a tearful boy of about thirteen. They are blank with disbelief. Or concentration. If they are praying, it's for deliverance in the form of another person's sudden death and a freak stroke of luck with the transplant list. The kid brother is too young for this. They all are. September must be a cruel month because the ward is almost full. In other beds, there are the hunched shapes of people whose eyes are turned inward. The silence of their stoppered, un-screamed pain waltzes around us in invisible currents, fleeting as the shape of wind on water.

The staff nurse is on the phone. 'I need the defibrillator,' she says. 'The new one. Yes. No. Yes. Hold on.' Registering our presence, she smothers the mouthpiece with her palm and offers us the valiant half-smile of someone doing their best, but basically pissing into the wind. Quickly, I introduce myself as a therapist from Oxsmith, and my companion as a colleague from Kiddup Manor. We're on a short assessment visit: Bethany's two psychiatric nurses can take a short break while we're with her. Perhaps they can be paged, and told to come back in ten minutes? When people are embattled in the way she is, they don't have time to suspect others of lying, especially from the moral throne of a wheelchair. The nurse nods, sends a page text, and indicates a door at the far end of the ward, before returning to her call. For the first time in my life, as I watch the two Oxsmith nurses leave, I am grateful for the understaffing of the NHS.

Bethany has the room to herself. She lies with her eyes closed, a negligible mound under the bedclothes, a handful of assembled bones hunched oddly in the manner of an archaeological find. Her newly shaved head barely dents the pillow. Her scalp is a ghoulish white, with a webbing of blue veins pulsing at her temples like a flesh-and-blood section of the Underground map.

The physicist locates a plastic chair and takes it round to the other side of the bed. 'Wheels,' Bethany croaks, her eyes still closed. Then she opens them blearily, blinks them into focus and flashes an exhausted smile. There's a whiff of chemicals, ointment, sweat. She glances at the physicist, who is now searching in his briefcase for something. She doesn't seem to recognise him. 'I heard the nurse say they're transferring me. You can't let them do that. You know what'll happen. I'll kill myself. Unless they give me some volts. Hey, you. Will they give me volts at Kiddup?' she asks the physicist. 'I need volts.'

'I'm not from Kiddup. I'm Frazer Melville. We met before. You showed me your drawings.'

She is wearing a hospital gown. Her arms are wrapped in bandages to well above the elbow. Her hands are bound more elaborately, the splayed fingers separated from each other with a thinner gauze, like the webbing of a water-bird.

'He's got quite a sex drive, hasn't he?' she murmurs, nodding to indicate the physicist. 'You can smell it on people.' Then she sighs, as though the observation has over-exerted her. I flush to the roots of my hair. Frazer Melville's eyes meet mine and his mouth twitches in what looks like a small, proud smile, and then he reddens too. The moment is so exquisitely appalling that it could be bottled and sold as a generic life-deterrent. Finally, he breaks the sick spell.

'Bethany, you made some drawings that interest me.' He fishes some papers from his briefcase and holds one out in front of her. 'I'd like to decipher this image. Find out what it signifies.'

But Bethany turns her head away as though unnerved by it. Her bandaged hands twitch and scrabble around on the white hospital sheet as though they have an agenda of their own.

'This vertical line,' he says, pointing. 'Can you tell me what it is?'

Bethany glances at it reluctantly and hesitates. 'It's hollow,' she mumbles.

'What I need to know is, where does it go to?' The physicist's eyes are intense. What is he getting at? What does he know that I don't?'

'Underground. All the way in, like right under the skin.' Her eyes seem to turn inward. 'It digs its way inside and then explodes and the whole thing cracks open and boom.' I flinch and picture Leonard Krall: his canine eyes, his energy, his creepy charisma.

'And if you follow it upwards, instead of down, where does it go to?'

'Just up,' says Bethany sulkily. From outside comes the piercing wail of a car alarm, the buzz of traffic, the faint keen of hungry gulls. When I look back at the physicist, I see frustration. He's trying to hide it, but can't. I'm torn. I am anxious that this line of questioning is stirring up difficult memories for Bethany. But having come this far, I need to hear something significant: something that will tip the balance back to the rational - and as far from the Joy McConey model of interpretation as can be reached. And I'm aware of the time constraint. The two Oxsmith nurses will return from their break any minute.

'OK, Bethany, listen to me,' I say, to break the impasse. 'Imagine you're at the point where the vertical line meets the ground and then just follow it.' She grimaces, as though she is contemplating an open wound. 'What do you see?'

She looks puzzled, then aghast. 'Fuck, it's water! Everywhere!' Behind her, through the window, the tops of silver birch trees thrash in the breeze, their leaves shimmering like shoals of fish.

'It's OK, Bethany,' I say. I nod at the physicist to continue. We seem to have reached a grudging accord, a temporary
modus vivendi
that will see us through our joint task but no further.

'So this whole thing is underwater?' he asks. 'Not on land?'

'I guess it must be. I guess it must be at the bottom of the sea.'

'What's the temperature like?'

She shivers and looks scared. 'It's freezing. Like there's ice.'

'And if you look up?' asks the physicist, scanning Bethany's features urgently. 'If you look up towards the sky?' Something seems to have excited him. Even though I don't know what it is, it excites me too and I feel a kind of hope.

'There's something like scaffolding. It's huge.' She seems to find the image distasteful.

'What colour is it?'

The question throws her for a second. 'It's made of iron. It's dripping.'

'What else?'

'A crane.'

'What colour's the crane?'

'Yellow.'

'YOU are sure?'

'For fuck's sake. I said yellow.'

'OK. Yellow.'

'And it stinks. Rotten eggs. Dead jellyfish. It's gross.'

I associate a rotten-egg smell with sulphur. But the physicist's face gives nothing away. 'And did you see anything else?'

'Just the scaffolding stuff and a crane on it and some, like, buildings on the platform and some kind of. . . spire. I need some more volts.' The physicist is blinking.

'You're sure? Just the crane and the platform and a spire?' She nods. 'And the smell?' His face has gone as pale and translucent as skimmed milk. We sit in silence for a moment. In the distance, a phone rings. 'Well, in that case I'll be leaving you,' the physicist says abruptly. And he stands up to go. 'Thank you both. You've been a great help.'

'What about my volts?' says Bethany.

He shrugs. 'How long will they keep you in here?'

'Until the people in white coats come and take me away.'

He looks at her sharply, as if she has read something going on in his head.

I turn to face him full-on. 'Aren't you going to tell us what this all means?'

He heads for the door and opens it. 'I will. But just now, I'm afraid I can't.'

Does he think I'll let him walk away that easily?

'So what now?' I ask. I have followed him out to the corridor but he doesn't stop walking.

'I'm going to south-east Asia. I'll be out of circulation for a while.' He glances at me sideways, uneasy. Now that he has got what he wanted, it seems he can't get away fast enough.

'South-east Asia? What sort of trip is this? You never mentioned it.'

We reach the double doors to the main ward, where he indicates that this is where we part ways. 'I'm taking time out. A field trip. Botanical photos. That's all you know. About anything. Today never happened. None of it. Next time you see me, you'll understand.'

'What do you mean, today never happened?'

He looks at me with an odd thoughtfulness. I am lured in by the green shard. 'Do you trust me?'

A wash of bitterness. I laugh uneasily. When in doubt, joke. 'Do you think I'm stupid?'

'No. You're clever, and imaginative, and capable of thinking on your feet. All of which I'm absolutely depending on, Gabrielle.

Now go home, and I'll see you when I see you.' He sounds almost flippant - as though he too has the right to approach this thing humorously. He does not. Then, sickeningly, he leans as though to kiss me. I swivel sharply away, out of his reach. What kind of kiss was he planning? A friendly peck on the cheek? Or something more intimate, for old times' sake, the very morning after he has stuck his tongue down a blonde's throat?

'How can you do this to me?' I whisper. I can feel my whole torso shuddering. The new expression on his face - pity - is as unmistakable as it is appalling.

He says, 'Because I have to.'

And he pushes his way through the doors and he is gone and my soul shrivels.

No, he doesn't have to. He has a choice.

'What were you thinking, when you put that fork in that socket?' I hurl at Bethany on my return. I am transferring my rage with the physicist on to her and so what. 'You could have died. Look at you.'

'I sense negative emotions.' She flashes me a metallic grin.

'Swap roles then.'

'OK, as your therapist, I'd say you need to steady on. But first I need to get out of here. You have to help me escape.'

Izgoy, izgoy
. 'You will leave. But only when it's time.'