The Rapture (31 page)

'Where did you see us?'

'Up in the sky.' I wait some more. 'But we went different ways.'

'Where did we go?'

'After the thunder we went to the golden circle. Then we were caught up in the air. But you went to one place and I went to another place.'

'Look at me, Bethany'. Slowly she lifts her face and our eyes meet. Hers are glittering. 'Bethany. We won't go different ways. I won't leave you.'

She shakes her head slowly, as though it is an immeasurable weight. 'It doesn't work that way. But I just want to tell you, it's OK. You mustn't feel bad.'

'About what?'

She seems to be looking right through me, at something on the other side of my head.

'About the way it ends.'

Chapter Fourteen

I enter the kitchen feeling dazed. 'I just spoke to Ned,' says Frazer Melville, looking up from his laptop. I have left Bethany on the sofa, staring catatonically at the wall. 'How did it go with Bethany?' When I give him a condensed account, he sighs heavily. 'Jesus. Poor kid. No wonder she's screwed up.'

'What's the news from London?'

'The seismic data's been published on the web. The good news is, some prominent scientists are getting on board.'

'Who?'

'Kasper Blatt, Akira Kamochi, Walid Habibi, Vance Ozek.' I can't put faces to anyone but Kamochi, but the names are all familiar. 'The bad news is that Ned says the other lobbying they've done has hit a brick wall. No one wants to believe it. But the rumour's spreading on the net and the data's out there. By the way, he says to watch the news.' I flick on the TV and zap to BBC World. Another failed assassination attempt on the president of Iran: three bodyguards dead. They show some blood-stained paving. More food riots in South America. But it's the third, far more outlandish headline, that grabs our attention.

It concerns graffiti in Greenland.

The local correspondent's report thumbnail-sketches a territory of Inuits with huskies, snowmobiles, alcohol problems and, more recently, livelihoods collapsing due to climate change: a Danish-administered enclave which from June to August is bathed in nonstop, hallucinogenic sunshine. But during the winter months, like now, it's a land engulfed in darkness, illuminated only by electricity, the moon, and the night sky, with its canopy of stars and the magic swirls of aurora borealis -

And now, as discovered within the last hour, graffiti.

Giant graffiti. A jumble of numbers and letters. Some sort of code. It straddles fifty kilometres of ice cap, far from anywhere habitable. And it glows in the dark. Frazer Melville's face is breaking into a grin. A satellite image has appeared: a pale blue tracery of semi-legible numbers and characters - seemingly meaningless - etched on the night-darkened landscape. They're impossible to make out clearly but each cipher, says the anchorman, measures at least ten kilometres high and across. I can see the number 3, and the letters E and B and what looks like a hyphen, and an N. Out there in the darkness, on the Greenlandic ice, somebody with a monstrous ego has been determinedly expressing themselves. Or -

'Ned must've tipped off a local camera crew,' murmurs Frazer Melville. 'Just watch.' The camera lights create a halo around the Greenlandic reporter's head, broadened and flattened by the TV's wide-screen function. It's minus twenty degrees and he's trembling with cold beneath the fur-trimmed hood of his anorak. Against the velvet Arctic sky, there's a pulsing light-show of red, blue and green, a swish of colour that makes it look as if the scene has been filtered through the gaudy wing of a giant insect. 'The characters on the ice are so big you can only see them by satellite,' he shivers, the northern lights pulsing behind him. 'Space shots show they weren't there yesterday but there's no mistaking them today. They're calling it the world's biggest ever publicity stunt. I'm standing here on the down-stroke of the number four. Now this line forms a ridge that stretches all the way over to the horizon, as far as the eye can see.'

The camera pulls back to show it, at the same time revealing the reporter's female companion, whom he introduces as a local biologist. Bending down, she uses a small ice-pick to detach a chunk of whiteness tinged with a pale mauve glow which she holds out to the camera. She pronounces it to be a phosphorescent liquid that has frozen on contact with the ice. The notion seems to please her profoundly.

'The dye appears to be organic, and to contain the crushed shells of some form of crustacean. We don't know exactly what it is yet, we've sent samples to be analysed.' It's bluish-green with a touch of mauve: a colour Picasso liked. A colour I have seen before. In this very house, in a row of jars.

I laugh. 'How do you liquidise them?'

'Cement mixer, at a guess,' grins Frazer Melville. He couldn't look more thrilled if he had laid a thunder egg.

A beleaguered-looking man from the Kennedy Space Center materialises. 'A man rang in. He didn't give a name, he just said to take a close look at Greenland. Then he gave the co-ordinates and hung up. We zoomed in and saw some faint light-traces. We sharpened them up and realised it was a message.'

Now they're re-showing satellite pictures of the thin stitching of ghostly ciphers. It's the kind of writing you imagine a spirit scrawling laboriously across a ouija board. 'The ice cap, shrouded in the darkness ofwinter, has been used as a giant blackboard,' says the anchorman back in the studio. 'But who's playing teacher? And what's the lesson? Well, here's where the geo-graffiti phenomenon gets interesting.' The camera focuses on the mystery ciphers, with a red graphic creeping across to delineate them more clearly. BH63N-os.24ECHq. 'To anyone with a background in science, this isn't even a code. The central ciphers 63N-os.24E are geographical co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, and the final three characters CH4 are the chemical symbol for methane. The location is rig a hundred kilometres off the coast of Norway known as Buried Hope Alpha, so we can assume that's what the letters B and H stand for. Now the rig's owned and run by the energy giant Traxorac, who are drilling for frozen methane. We'll be speaking to them shortly. But first, here's what Greenpeace had to say.'

'We like our stunts, but this one isn't ours,' says the spokeswoman emphatically but with what might be a hint of regret. 'I'd say that the message is probably an environmental one and that this rig needs investigating. Methane hydrates are highly volatile and if someone's decided to draw the world's attention to the dangers of exploiting them, we're gald.'

'Bingo!' whispers Bethany hoarsely, from the doorway. She's huddled in a duvet, her face flushed as though she has woken from a nightmare. 'Look,' she points at the screen. 'There's our rig. The one with the cunt in the crane.' Frazer Melville pulls up a chair for her and she settles in it heavily. She clutches her bandaged arms to her chest and fixes her eyes on the TV.

Evidence of human endeavour in a hostile natural setting can be a noble sight. Shot from the air, Buried Hope Alpha looks like the ambitious, life-enhancing piece of engineering that it was no doubt conceived to be. 'Traxorac has absolutely nothing to hide here,' says the rig's site controller, Lars Axelsen. The Norwegian stands on the vast platform wearing a hard hat. Behind him, overalled technicians come and go, clutching tools and palmtops. Far below them, the sea is a restless skin of dark blue, close to black, its high waves battering the struts. When asked his reaction to the message on the ice cap, he expresses puzzlement. 'We've sent down a remote-controlled vehicle to assess the picture, but the first reports indicate that everything's as it should be down there. Security is obviously our number one concern. If there does turn out to be some kind of malfunction, we wouldn't be able to rule out some form of sabotage. Or hostile intervention. With the terrorist threat out there . . .'

'Where would we be without al-Qaeda?' says Frazer Melville.

Axelsen furrows his brow. 'I'm not denying accidents do sometimes happen on these rigs, it's a risk that comes with the territory. But we have all the security systems in place and a system of checks and balances to ensure that . . .'

'Blah blah,' says Bethany, stretching theatrically. She seems to have made a dramatic recovery, but I am still anxious about her state of mind. She wanders over to the fridge and flings the door open wide. 'I'm hungry. I'm going to make an omelette,' she announces, dropping the duvet to the floor and reaching for a pack of eggs.

'Isn't methane one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases?' the anchorman is asking.

'Sure, if it's not handled correctly,' responds Axelsen. 'But we're extracting the hydrates under controlled conditions, liquefying the gas on the seabed and piping it up. I emphasise that we have nothing to hide. Come and see for yourselves. We're inviting members of the media here today, to take a look.'

While I zap channels, Bethany swiftly cracks six eggs into a huge Pyrex bowl, flinging the shells into the sink. On CNN, a marine biologist has appeared, with the verdict that the 'organic dye' is sea-water in which the ground-up remnants of the phosphorescent crustacean
Luxifer gigans
are suspended. 'It may have been spread from a vehicle on the ice cap itself, or offloaded from a helicopter on a carefully configured flight-path.' An Arctic pilot and a cartographer appear in the studio to discuss the logistics of the airdrop method. I flick over to Euronews, where a weather map shows storms heading for Britain. Bethany pours an alarming amount of salt into her egg mixture and starts whisking manically.

'Our last normal hours on Earth,' she says, lighting the gas. She scoops up a hunk of butter with her bandaged fingers and flings it in the pan. When it starts to sizzle, she sloshes in the beaten egg.

'I'd dispute the word normal. But what do you mean, hours?'

'It might all happen sooner.' She sounds hopeful. She fishes two nectarines from the fruit bowl and begins to juggle them. 'The smell's getting stronger. I can feel it coming. Maybe it's all happening sooner than I thought. I'm getting headaches.' She tosses the nectarines back in the bowl, grabs the remote control and starts zapping. 'Hey, The Simpsons!' Lisa and Bart are in a tent. A monster appears. Marge scolds it and tells it to go away. It obeys. 'Maybe it'll even hit this afternoon. Can't you smell it? I can. Rotten eggs.' Her face has a dark, riotous look. 'It happens everywhere. Here and in the golden circle. And there came a rushing as of a mighty wind. The sea catches fire. I saw the end of the whole fucking story.' The omelette starts to bubble. 'I saw Bethanyland. I saw it with my own eyes.'

The phone rings. I pick up and press the loudspeaker. It's Ned. His voice urgent. 'Gabrielle. I'm sorry. But you have to leave, now.' Frazer Melville draws a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose, as though summoning his thoughts to an internal muster station. 'They raided the anaesthetist's flat. It's quite possible they've traced him and he's told them where you are. Take the Nissan that's outside. The keys are in it. And a mobile. Don't stop anywhere for long. Keep an eye on the news: you've got a TV in there. Head south towards London and we'll send a helicopter. Find somewhere we can land and send us the coordinates.'

He hangs up. Claustrophobia engulfs me. I force myself to concentrate. 'We need to avoid the worst of the traffic chaos,' I say. 'Because once the story's out, if other scientists start backing it publicly, which they will when they've seen the data, then there's going to be mass panic. We should head for the Thames estuary. Everyone else will be leaving it.'

'Helicopters need space,' says Frazer Melville. 'It's got to be a playing field. Or a car park.'

'The golden circle,' says Bethany, poking at her burning omel-ette. The smell of the smoke makes me want to retch. 'That's where we get caught up in the air. I saw it.'

'But where is it?' asks Frazer Melville sharply, snapping off the gas. Bethany is rummaging in a drawer for a fork.

'How the fuck should I know? It's golden. It's a circle. A great big circle.' She begins shovelling the steaming egg mess into her mouth, straight from the pan. 'Christ, I could eat a fucking horse.'

'We need a satellite map,' I say. Seconds later, on Frazer Melville's laptop, we have the British Isles, seen from space. 'Now find it,' I tell Bethany.

She plonks the frying pan on the table, perches on a chair, and points her laden fork at the screen. 'There,' she says, indicating a section of south-east London. Frazer Melville zooms in.

'But that's the East End,' he says, staring blankly. 'That's the ' 'Yes,' she says non-committally, still eating. 'That's it. That's what I saw. That's the golden circle.' She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, leaving a greasy trail. 'That's where we get caught up in the air.'

Frazer Melville zooms in further, until there's no mistaking it. I should have guessed. The Paralympics were held there some months after my accident. I watched some of the games on TV in rehab with several other newly injured patients. We were all cheered and energised by the stream of wheelchairs racing around the track at dizzying speeds - though no one warned us about the slump that would hit afterwards, when we were struggling with floor-to-chair transfer techniques and failing over and over again. We christened it Post-Paralympic Inadequacy Syndrome, which allowed us to joke about something that wasn't funny. A necessary condition of psychic survival.

'You could land a helicopter there easily,' says Frazer Melville. He has been Googling. 'There's a concert next week, but nothing listed before then. It's empty.'

Hard to imagine, though I read that after the 2012 Games they dismantled half of it, and sold the seats.

A depth charge of fear vibrates its way up from my smashed vertebra. My breath shakes as I exhale, as though I've been punched in the chest. It's odd, and new, to want so fiercely to live. But the smell of burnt egg has got to me. Hurtling to the bathroom, I throw up the entire contents of my stomach. I throw up until my head is spinning furiously on the axle of its own emptiness. When I breathe in again, a weird, self-disgusted despair has engulfed me. It's a despair that's intimately connected to my Alex-dream. I don't know how, or why. But the knowledge is rooted too deep for me to argue with.

When I come back, Frazer Melville is heaving bags out of the back door and into a grey hatchback. Everything looks different. As though this is a place I am remembering rather than seeing, a place I am looking back on from a time in the distant future. There is an invisible line across my abdomen beneath which I feel nothing. But now, above it, in the section that has nerves, a muscle clenches like a sea anemone. I spread the flat of my palm across the bare skin and I can almost feel an alien growth burgeoning like a parasite that has a knowledge I don't possess, a brain of its own, a will.

It's screaming no.