The Rapture (13 page)

'Who wouldn't?' he mutters. He had better be very careful here. Does he realise that if he feels sorry for me, I will get out my thunder egg and smash his head in with it?

'At which point the very nice and well-meaning therapist invited me to "untangle" what was "realistic" and what wasn't,' I go on, determined to get this over with. I take another swoosh of wine. 'Untangle, unravel, unpack, deconstruct. You get to hate the jargon, when you're not the one who's using it. Actually you hate it when you are too. She got me filling in the kind of psychological questionnaires I used to design, right at the beginning of my career.'

'Humiliating?' he asks. He's blinking. They told us in rehab to watch out for people who want to help you, who make a beeline for you because you are needy, who want to be your saviour. Cripple pervs. If that's what this is about, he can leave.

'It was humiliating to begin with. But then interesting. Denial of reality can be helpful. Something blind and ungracious and determined took over. I made it take over. I realised that if I could work myself into a kind of righteous rage, almost a political rage, I could do things. I became evangelical about life going on as normal. I was going to start again, faster than anyone else, better than anyone else, and what's more, in a new place. I didn't want to be judged against what I was before. I wanted to be among strangers who'd never known me as someone who could walk. I wanted to present this as a
fait accompli
. I wanted to say, here I am, and this is what I am, so fuck you.'

The physicist smiles. 'I can see that. And that's one of the reasons -' He stops. 'You're cleverer than I am, Gabrielle. And you have a mean streak. So listen. You're not to ridicule me and make me feel like a twat.'

'Just please don't tell me you admire me for my courage.'

'I wasn't going to,' he says, standing up and moving his chair away from me. 'Put your arms round my neck,' he says, leaning down. I reach up to him. The physicist's chest is broad, as warm as bread from the oven. I can feel the thump of his heart. Which means he can feel mine too. 'Hold on tight.' He's clasping my whole torso close to his. 'I was going to say,' he says, lifting me bodily out of the chair and settling me against him with my knees over the crook of his arm. He is big and I am small but I'm still worried that I must feel like a sack of potatoes though he bears my weight as if it's nothing. Then his face is next to mine and he's rocking us both. We stay like that for a while, swaying together in the warm night air. The sky has darkened and the moon is a pallid crescent. It's absurd. It's romantic. It's ridiculous. I love it and I want to die, but not in the way I usually want to die. 'What I was going to say was, it's one of the reasons I keep wanting to do this.'

'What, weight-training?' Why can't I stop myself?

'Spoil it again and I'll drop you. Just shut up and listen because I'm being romantic here.' Yes, I think. You are. And I can't handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. I close my eyes. 'It's one of the reasons I keep wanting to hold you in my arms,' says the physicist. 'And then kiss you.'

'Did you like that?' he says finally, as our lips part. It was spectacularly potent. I am like a recovering alcoholic going back on the booze. I'd forgotten what kissing was like, what kissing does to the rest of you. But my body - what's left of it - hadn't. Hasn't. Is now in a turmoil of wanting, and not knowing how to get, how to have.

'Frazer Melville.' It's as though his name has been trapped inside me and his kiss has released it. He settles me on the sofa, still holding me close. 'Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville.' Like my Spanish mantra, it's similar to rolling a strange taste around on my tongue, a taste I could get addicted to. I want more. Of his name, of everything, of him.

He pulls back to look at me. 'Answer my question.' He sounds proud but a little pinch of worry has appeared on the bridge of his nose. 'Did you like it?'

When no human being of the opposite sex, public health professionals excepting, has touched you intimately in two years -

The feel of another body. The press of lips. It's too much for me. I am done for.

'Well,' I say, trying to sound hard-boiled but failing. 'The thing is, I'm supposed to have an insight into people's psyches. And an understanding of body language and the human impulse. It's the basic job description.'

'Meaning?'

'That if you were giving out any signals, I missed them.'

'But your lack of professional skills aside, my question was: did you like it?'

'No. I hated it,' I say. I am aware of the muscles around my mouth. They are doing something they're not used to doing. It's not that I don't smile, I realise. It's that I don't normally smile this wide. It's the mad banana smile from my nephew's birthday card. No, I didn't pick up his signals. Not properly. But he picked up mine: the ones I only half-knew I was giving. Oh, OK. The cleavage thing, the make-up, the perfume, the straight-out-of-hospital-into-green-stilettos - I know. But. 'But just to be sure, why not do it again two or three more times,' I say coolly, pulling a swatch of hair across my bald patch. 'And I'll let you know my final decision.'

In rehab, I read a manual about paralysis and sexuality, entitled
Sex Matters
. A good, self-explanatory title, involving a mini-pun, as titles often do.
Sex Matters
recommends that you and your partner take things slowly. That when contemplating sex, you explain to him, if he doesn't know already, what that might involve. What can go wrong, what positions might be favoured, what embarrassing accidents might occur. Screw that. Screw taking things slowly. Despite the bandaged wound on my thigh, and the fact I must be extra careful with it, and despite the bald patch on my head, I want to know what it's like. Now. With the physicist. With the physicist Frazer Melville. Whether he is ready for it or not.

'Kiss me again, Frazer Melville,' I tell him. 'And then take me to bed.'

Later, as I fall asleep next to him, with the fan churning the hot night-air across our skin, I know something important. I am still a woman whose body can experience physical delight. A woman who has missed, more than she ever admitted, the intimacy, tenderness and intensity of sex. And if her lower section can't muster an orgasm, her nipples and brain most certainly can.

Chapter Six

The trouble with the principle of 'time out' is that one patient's personal hell is another's idea of a cushy number. Like any bottomless pit, Bethany Krall, freshly ensconced in the peer-free zone referred to as 'seclusion', is enjoying the increased attention levels she is receiving. Therapist contact has been upped to five hours a day in the wake of her attack on Newton, and she is on 'one-to-one': 24-hour risk-assessment with a nurse in continuous attendance, who will be watching for self-harming behaviour. We're on a rota basis. Her food is brought in on a tray. 'Room service,' she calls it: that, too, suits her current narcissistic mood. When she needs the toilet, she is escorted there by Lola or another female nurse, who keeps her in full view at all times. Lola has told me that Bethany makes the most of this, and performs scatological running commentaries for the benefit of her audience. We discuss the damage she has inflicted but she is unrepentant. Instead, she is eager to know the gory details. In particular, which part of the globe the surgeon extracted from Newton's scrotum when removing his irretrievably damaged testicle.

'I'm betting it was Scandinavia. As in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.' If nothing else, it seems her knowledge of geography has expanded, thanks to the atlas she's brought in with her.

'Perhaps if you stay in solitary confinement long enough, you'll eventually get an education and become Bethany Krall, Professor of Earth Sciences,' I suggest. She laughs, a dirty, full-throated laugh that is too old for her, and the braces on her teeth flash in the light. Twinkle twinkle. There has been a lot of gaiety from Bethany since she has been moved to a bare cell in McGrath Wing, where we now find ourselves, with Rafik in attendance. But none of it is of the balanced-member-of-the-community variety.

'I wonder if that episode reminded you of anything that happened two years ago, at home?'

She smiles patronisingly. 'Wrong questions again, Wheels. You're one fuck of a slow learner. By the time you get what's going on, you and your spazmobile will be, like, ten metres underwater. Bibble babble, with bubbles. Hey, joke.' Oh well, I think. So be it. Nothing can get me down today. I smile benignly at little Bethany Krall because I can afford to.

I am a woman who has had sex.

I could ask for more intensive sessions with Bethany in the wake of her attack on Newton. But resuming our previous arrangement would run
counter to protocol
as the hospital's bureaucratese has it. Nor am I keen to risk further interrogation from Sheldon-Gray, after my recent debriefing with him, which took the form of questions fired at me from the rowing machine.

'How's Newton doing in hospital? Ungk. Are you sure you have the physical backup you need for this job? Gah. Has your confidence taken a battering in the wake of this? Ungk. Have you done your police statement? Do you need some time off, now that the thing's been paperworked?'

I struggled to answer him coherently and convincingly as he to'd-and-fro'd, shovelling his sweaty air from one side of the room to the other, as though it were a task he could later tick off the day's list: transport X molecules of gas from A to B. I stuck to my plan of keeping it short. The tiny digital clock on his exercise device showed me that our entire conversation lasted one minute forty-eight seconds. At the end of which I showed him the drawing Bethany had made of the stick-figure.

He raised his eyebrows. 'Good work. Pursue it.'

I told him I would, and left.

'That stick-figure you did in red crayon,' I now ask Bethany. 'Which I think was probably your mother. What were you thinking about, when you drew it?'

'I don't do stick-figures,' she says sullenly. I take it out of my folder and show it to her. She squints, frowns and shoves the drawing back at me with a stumped expression. 'Not mine. Someone else must have done it. Someone who can't draw for shit.'

'I was with you. After you drew the fall of Christ, you did this.'

'I don't draw like that. That's a kid's drawing.'

'I wonder what the kid who drew it was thinking.'

We look at each other a moment, and then she turns her face away.

It dawned on me, during the labyrinthine discussions I used to have with my psychoanalyst, that most women carry in their heads an idealised mother. A home-baking, perfect-gravy mother, a waiting-outside-the-school-gates mother, a mother with whom to share lip-gloss and T-shirts, a mother to confide in, to laugh with over a TV sitcom. A counterweight to the mother they have in real life - the mother who, in Bethany's case, filled her so unassailably with the urge to kill that she reached for a Phillips screwdriver and made the rest history.

'You just don't get it,' she mutters. 'Look. This earthquake is right round the corner. It's hitting Istanbul the day after tomorrow. The pressure's building up in the faultline, I can feel it. I'm telling you. I was right about the hurricane. I was right about Jesus tumbling down the mountainside. What happens when you see I'm right about this, too?'

'What would you like me to do, Bethany? If you were right?'

'It's just time someone believed me. Don't you get it?'

Our time is up: Rafik opens the door on my nod. As I turn to leave, Bethany is looking at me intently, as though measuring the angles of my face. Then, fast as a change of wind, her mood has shifted and she's laughing softly to herself.

'What's funny, Bethany?' I ask lightly, pleased that we are back on safer ground. 'Can I share the joke?'

'Wow, Wheels,' she laughs, delightedly. 'You're the joke. Congratulations.'

'On what?' I ask, uneasy.

She smiles to show the braces on her teeth. She says slowly, savouring it: 'On getting laid.' I roll an inch back. 'Ha! A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me, he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts!'

'My private life is my business, Bethany.' It comes out too sharply. She has caught me unawares and I have let it show.

'Not any more,' she grins. 'Hey. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. He stuck it in you! Rejoice!'

Rafik turns away discreetly. Bidding them both a swift goodbye I roll speedily out.

Since half of my body withdrew from the game, I have learned to notice, relish and even fetishise life's miniature but extreme delights. Like my oriental lilies opening in a splash of ghost-white petals and filling the flat with their alarming, erotic pungency. Or my Bulgarian choral music drifting through from the next room, mingled with homelier noises: a metallic clatter, an air-blast of burnt toast, and the muttered cursing of a physicist called Frazer Melville preparing, at my request, a pot of lapsang souchong tea in an unfamiliar kitchen. It is Thursday August 21st, but I am determined not to let Bethany's catastrophe calendar - which predicts a massive earthquake tomorrow - spoil my day. So far I am succeeding. I am enjoying being myself and no one else. I may even have looked in the mirror and taken pleasure in my own reflection. Frazer Melville and I have been under my duvet for the best part of fourteen hours. We have been 'experimenting'. We are absurd. We are a woman in her thirties and a man in his forties. And we're behaving like two teenagers discovering sex for the first time. Frazer Melville and I probe, explore and exchange information - shyly, boldly, teasingly. What if I do this?
That's good. Not there. But there, like this. No: can't feel a thing
. A lot of the focus is on my breasts. Hallelujah: I have landed myself a tit man. Last night, he cautiously entered me again. I felt nothing physically, not even a phantom tweak of something residual in my pelvis. But in my head it was quite another matter. In my head it was explosive. In our different but perhaps not-so-different ways, Frazer Melville and I appear to be enjoying ourselves.

But it can't last. I can't let it.

I say, 'We have to do something.'

He sighs, shifts, perches his head on his elbow, looks at me hard, and takes a deep breath before he speaks.

'I agree.'

'So if it hits tomorrow -'

'I contact scientist colleagues with the other predictions Bethany's made.'

I am more relieved than I care to admit that he has been giving the idea consideration.

'Without mentioning her,' I specify. 'She can't be named.'

'Of course. In any case it would be scientific suicide.'

'How will you go about it?'

He shrugs. 'I tell a selected cross-section of scientists who I know to be open-minded, that some predictions have been made by a certain source. That they've proved accurate. That the earthquake's the latest example of this. That there are further predictions which will need testing. That I believe there's a scientific explanation which demands investigation. But more importantly, the regions concerned would benefit from being warned because lives are at stake.'

It sounds simple. Too simple. But at least we have a plan.

We lie in bed until midday and then go and see a genial, forgettable movie. He is not used to being so close to the screen, and I am not used to being kissed in my wheelchair during a film, and attracting whistles from the people in the rows behind us. So it's a new experience for both of us. If either of us has an apprehension that this might be the last day that our world is happily balanced, we hide it well.

Sex is many things, but that night, for us, it is an urgent and elaborate distraction from the subject we are both determined to avoid, now that we've agreed on a strategy. Frazer Melville undresses me and makes me close my eyes. I must promise not to move a centimetre 'or it will all go wrong'. Intrigued I wait, rigid, smiling. I feel him take his clothes off. Then I feel him come close to me. I smell chocolate. Then he touches my left nipple, but not with his tongue. With something cool and heavy. He works slowly on whatever he is doing. I feel his concentration. Half-guessing what he is up to, an electric pulse spreads outward from my breasts across my shoulders and spine, along my arms, into the tips of my fingers, across the back of my neck.

'Now this one.' He caresses my right nipple, the same cool pressure, and I feel the flesh swell.

'Open your eyes.'

He has painted my nipples with chocolate paste. Where did the paste, and indeed the idea, come from? They are huge and nearly black. They glisten. I laugh. 'Well, I knew you were fond of chocolate.'

'Two of my favourite things both at once,' he murmurs. His voice is thick. Frazer Melville's erect penis is sticking out of his fly. I take it in my hand, feel its heft. 'I can't wait any more,' he says. 'I'm starving.' And then he's sucking my breasts and we are both getting smeared with melting chocolate. He has discovered a way of propping me up using pillows and cushions. Me naked except for the bandage on my leg, he fully clothed. I feel like a greedy queen being worshipped and serviced.

Looking into my eyes, Frazer Melville takes me and takes me and takes me. I can't feel a thing. But as he moves back and forth inside me he says my name over and over again. I gasp, utterly confounded. And I think: perhaps I am still a woman after all. No, not perhaps. Yes, yes, I am. A woman who can make love, and drive a man -

He comes with the raucous, unashamed cry of a caveman.

***

I'm woken at one by rain slamming against the windows. Outside the trees sigh and creak. I settle my head on Frazer Melville's solid, smooth-skinned shoulder and think about what last night did to my soul.
Cuando te tengo a ti vida
, cuanto te quiera
. But then I remember the date and the rapture quietly deflates. I reach out and switch on the radio, turning the sound down low. I get the BBC World Service, stalwart friend of the hardened insomniac. There's a documentary about dwarfism. I learn the word
achondroplasia.
The average height of an adult dwarf is one hundred and thirty-two centimetres for men, one hundred and twenty-three for women. Voices and more voices. The night ticks on, and Frazer Melville breathes gently beside me. Thunder and wind outside. I fall asleep briefly and reawaken to catch the end of an arts programme. Everyone's speaking in the same reasonable tone. There's a discussion about new trends in Bollywood, with clips from classic and contemporary Indian movies. There is nothing on the three o'clock news: relieved, I am just drifting back to sleep with a sports quiz on in the background, when there's a news flash.

I hoist myself up in bed. I try to do it gently, but my movement disturbs Frazer Melville, who sits up, his yawn as wide as a silent shout. And then listens. I turn up the volume and we take in the news like two parallel shock-absorbers. All through the five-minute broadcast, I feel oddly calm and in control. Something inside me refuses to shift. Perhaps I am in denial. I can still smell the chocolate on my skin.

When the news ends, Frazer Melville says, eloquently, 'Oh no. Oh Christ. Oh fuck.' Like him, I want to start up a litany of swearing, an anti-prayer. Or fall asleep again, pretend it's a dream, start life again in the morning, properly, normally, and for real. But when you fall asleep a sceptic and wake to news that makes you a believer, the experience is as fundamental as having your whole skeleton replaced. You can't ignore it. I feed a match to the lamp by the bed, a Moroccan cage of metal that sends angular shafts of candlelight flickering around the room. Outside, the storm has died away and the rain has become sporadic, undecided whether to stay or go.

'Whoever we told, they'd never have believed us,' I murmur. We have been lying here for some time. It is the only thought to cling to, under the circumstances. If I am being the rational one, what is Frazer Melville up to? His breathing is over-controlled. Perhaps he is fighting something. Tears? A heart attack? Men do that. They die in women's beds from sex or shock. Or both.

'Remember - we had this discussion yesterday,' I say, raising myself clumsily on one elbow to make eye contact with him and assess his mood. 'We had it several times. It was light-hearted, maybe. But we had it. We agreed that if we rang the Turkish embassy and told them they needed to evacuate a city of fifteen million people by the twenty-second of this month because a kid in a maximum security hospital had a vision -'