The Rapture (25 page)

'Stuck,' she says. 'Stranded.'

I glance across at Ned, who obliges me by rolling the chair around the back of the chaise-longue and settling it where I can rest my hand on it. Outside, the talking stops and I hear a single set of footsteps approaching. When the door opens, I can't look. But I know it's the physicist. I can feel him standing in the doorway, his height filling the frame.

'Gabrielle. Thank God you're here. It all worked out.' Frazer Melville sounds excited, unaware of the psychic pain washing the room. 'Hi, Bethany, hi, Ned.' I take a sip of coffee, blocking him out, savouring the miniature moment of escape.

'I was just telling Gabrielle about you and Kristin,' says Bethany. She grins wide, like a gargoyle, revealing a blackened tongue. 'But now you're here, you can tell her yourself.'

When she electrocuted herself, why didn't she just die?

Flushing fiercely, I glance sideways. He's moving towards me, but when he sees the look on my face - a look I can't hide - he stops in his tracks and his smile fades. Bethany sucks in her breath theatrically.

'Ooh, she's angry, Frazer, I'm warning you! You'd better protect your balls! Catch you later!'

Thrilled with herself, she snatches up her Haribos, runs across to the doorway, ducks under the physicist's arm and out of the room.

Ned, silently sipping coffee on the sofa opposite me, seems absorbed in his own painful thoughts. The physicist and I look at one another. I see the green shard but I won't let it pull me in. I long to be back in my wheelchair but if I transferred to it now, I'd reveal my weakness. Bethany is right. I am stuck.

'Gabrielle,' he says softly.

He comes forward - to do what, embrace me? Seeing me recoil, he hesitates, sighs and settles himself into the armchair next to my chaise-longue. He is too big and too close. I ache for him and hate myself for it.

'We kept you in the dark to protect you.' His voice is gentle but there's a hint of defiance.

'Like hell.' And anyway, I think bleakly. It's not about that.

'It's true,' says Ned, topping up my coffee. I breathe in sharply and feel the bile shoot through my blood. 'I can see why you'd be angry but Frazer figured that if you lost your job you'd be in big trouble. Personally and professionally. Seriously, Gabrielle. We thought it through.'

'I did lose my job.'

'Oh no,' says Frazer Melville. 'God. Oh, Gabrielle, I'm so sorry.'

'Don't mention it.' I take a sip. The coffee is good. Strong and dark and fortifying. 'I'm now officially unemployable.'

'Actually that won't matter in the larger scheme of things, if Bethany's right,' suggests Ned. Perhaps he believes he is being helpful.

Ignoring him, I address the physicist. 'I may be restricted, physically. But your behaviour suggests you think I'm mentally incompetent with it.'

'If you were to stay above suspicion with the police, you couldn't know what we were planning. Or what we'd done.' Frazer Melville's expression is pleading. 'I hoped I dropped enough clues for you to guess that I was behind it.'

'Which I did when I covered for you with the police and risked imprisonment for perverting the course of justice.'

From the next room,
The Simpsons
theme tune blares at unbearable volume.

'Someone wants some attention,' Ned sighs, rising. 'I'll go and sort her out.'

'Get those sweets off her,' I call after him. 'And if you have some, she needs fresh bandages.'

When the door has fully closed behind him, I take a deep breath. I can feel the physicist looking at me intently.

'Sweetheart -' He puts a hand on my arm but I shake him off violently.

'Don't touch me and don't call me that!'

'Hey, what's going on with you?' He sounds offended.

'Tell me, what else have you been up to with Kristin Jons dottir?'

The physicist's face switches from concern to bafflement. 'I haven't seen her. I've been in Thailand and Paris, in case you didn't know. Why are you so angry?'

Where to begin? But I can't. It's too humiliating. Whatever I say will sound bitter and self-pitying. I have my pride. I shut my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open them again he is still there. In the next room, the TV noise stops and Bethany protests. I hear 'bastard' and 'arsehole' and some quiet remonstrations from Ned.

'Well, if you won't tell me . . .'

'Do I have to spell it out? OK, I'll spell it out. I know about her. OK?
I know.'

'Get the fuck off me!' Bethany shrieks from the next room. 'Cocksucking arsehole! I can do it myself!' Then Ned's voice, sharp with alarm: 'Hey! Look what you've done! Jesus!'

The door opens and Kristin Jons dottir walks in, smiling.

She comes towards me, her hand outstretched. She has one of those faces you'd look at twice without quite knowing why. A broad forehead and calm eyes. A serenity. 'Gabrielle. I'm so pleased to meet you at last.'

In the next room, Bethany has begun a new tirade.

'Gabrielle,' says the physicist, ignoring the noise. 'This is Kristin.'

Reluctantly, I take the hand she offers, but drop it again as swiftly as possible.

'Kristin Jons dottir with a soft J, pronounced Y,' she says, smiling. 'I am Icelandic.' There's a catch to her accent that might make you want to hear more, if you were in love with her. It strikes me that she seems to feel no embarrassment about meeting me. She even looks happy. Because - I flush as it dawns on me -the physicist never even told her we were lovers. Just as he never told Ned. I am no threat to her. And never have been.

'I looked you up,' I say. 'But the soft J wasn't mentioned.' If she hears the irony in my voice, she ignores it. She is still smiling, taking me in with her calm, friendly eyes. The world of women is divided between those who can be bothered with make-up, those who can't, and those who don't need it in the first place. She's the last: a fresh-air woman who offsets her carbon emissions.

'I've been looking forward to this. Encounters with art therapists aren't normally on the agenda of someone specialising in the world fifty-five million years ago.'

What about encounters with your lover's cast-off girlfriends?
I flash the physicist a furious look and he replies with a shrug, as though aggrieved. Ned comes in, looking shaken, greets Kristin, and slumps down gratefully on the sofa opposite me.

'Whew. Jesus.'

'All sorted?' I ask.

'She scratched me.' He shows his forearm, striped with beads of blood. 'So, Kristin. What did Harish Modak say?'

She takes a breath. 'He's still reluctant.'

'I'll go and ring him,' says the physicist, rising to his feet. He probably can't leave fast enough. 'Ned, perhaps you and Kristin can fill Gabrielle in some more?'

'Sure thing,' says Ned, lifting a laptop from the floor and booting it up. 'Just give me a minute and we'll do a visual.'

'So, Kristin. Geology,' I say, when the door has closed behind the physicist. I pull the thunder egg from its pouch under my seat. I feel like hurling it at her, but instead I hold it out. She takes it, and a smile of great beauty illuminates her face. Her eyes are a delicate greyish green. She weighs it in her hand, then shakes it. 'Solid. You've never been tempted to crack it open?'

'I'm waiting for the right moment. It's an heirloom.'

She smiles. 'Where's it from?'

'Nevada.'

'If it's fromthe Black Rock Desert, it probably has a lovely opal filling. Some of them are agate. Or a mixture.' So she can identify a piece of rock as fast as I can diagnose a loony. I hate her with a hate that I fear may be deeper than the deepest love. Handing the thunder egg back, she clasps her other hand over mine, enclosing it around the stone. 'You're upset with me. And you're right to be. I owe you an apology.'

I shrink into myself. She is looking me in the eye with a terrible calmness. With a sharp movement, I tug my hand back. The last thing I've expected is candour. It might be more than I can bear. I take an inward breath. I too must be candid.

I say, 'Yes. I think you do.'

Ned is watching us with interest. A spot of red has appeared on each of Kristin Jons dottir's cheeks.

'The way I handled things when you rang me out of the blue like that was unforgivable. I'm afraid I panicked. It never crossed my mind that you would find out about me, and then call. It threw me totally.'

'I bet it did.'

'You must be quite a detective.'

'Not really. I just followed up a few clues.'

Ned interjects anxiously. 'I told you: none of us felt good about keeping you in the dark.' Heavily, he rises from the sofa and begins hanging a white bed-sheet from some nails above the fireplace. It seems he is constructing a makeshift whiteboard.

Kristin says, 'I can only apologise. Again. When Frazer showed me the drawings and told me about Bethany's ability, I wanted to talk to you. But he insisted that if we were going to intervene with her, you mustn't be involved, because you'd be compromised professionally.'

'Intervene
is an interesting euphemism for what you did. So tell me. At what point did you decide to kidnap my patient?' From the corner of my eye I register Ned's increasing unease.

'When we learned she was being moved to another facility. Where there'd be no access to her. The fact that she was in a public hospital made it easier.'

She looks down at the dark wood floor with delicacy, as though she is considering whether to polish it, and what product she might use to achieve maximal results. She is so patently unaware of the damage she's wreaked, and so obviously pained by my hostility, that it almost hurts.

Ned steps back and contemplates his handiwork, then shifts the position of the laptop on the coffee table so that the screen is projecting on to the whiteboard, and adjusts the focus. Kristin Jons dottir leans forward on her chair earnestly, hands clasped together. Despite her good skin and fine, intellectual-looking bones, she probably never spends time gazing into mirrors. She doesn't need to. She doesn't need to because she knows who she is. Her sediment has settled, I think enviously. While mine is still moiling about. Perhaps that's why Frazer Melville found her irresistible. Perhaps it isn't a rejection of my paraplegia after all. Perhaps it's a hundred thousand times worse.

'When I saw Bethany's drawings I was intrigued by the way in which these images occurred. These projections, these . . .' Her Icelandic lilt trails off.

'Visions,' I finish. 'Psychotic visions.' For some reason I want to call a spade a spade. I want to be blunt and charmless and graceless. Despite the gloom, I can see the red of Kristin Jons-dottir's cheekbones intensifying. Perhaps it has sunk in that my feelings towards her are neither benign nor sisterly. 'Bethany says visions. Just so you know.' How empiricists - and I include myself - disdain anything that smacks of the supernatural, of manipulative TV series, of low-budget believe-it-or-not, of strange-but-true.

'Sorry to interrupt but I'm going to close the blinds now,' says Ned quietly. 'So I can project these images for you. And we can move on a bit?' We both nod at him distractedly and the room darkens.

She says, 'It's not my field, so I can't presume to comment on the genesis of the, er -' She elegantly replaces the word 'visions' with a hand-gesture indicating something ephemeral being flung outward from the temples. 'But with respect to the actual depictions -'

'What Kristin's getting at is, we need more information in order to locate the site of this possible disaster,' says Ned, clicking his mouse. 'Take a look at this.' One of Bethany's drawings appears on the sheet. He adjusts the contrast. 'It's got a lot of detail on it. Not the kind of detail you'd be aware of. Unless you knew the mechanics of rigs.' He points to the platform, and the line that works its way down beneath the sea. 'Images like this are what make us concerned that she's seen the beginnings of a submarine landslide triggered by activity at one of the rigs. But we don't know which one. They're all fairly distinctive.' He shoots me an amused glance. 'The people who discover the sites are allowed to christen them, so they've mostly got quite fanciful names.'

Kristin gets up. 'I'm going to get Frazer. I think he should be in on this.' Something has finally got through to her. Good.

'You were pretty tough on her there,' says Ned, when she has gone. 'Tougher than you were with me. And I was the one who kidnapped Bethany.'

I don't answer. If he's blind and stupid, then that's his problem.

As Ned Rappaport scrolls through a list of images, I shift my legs into a new position on the chaise-longue. I will need all my strength to face the physicist again.

'OK. Here are all the offshore rigs that we know are already experimenting with exploiting methane, plus ten that we suspect are converting from oil or gas production.' With a click, the whiteboard is filled with a patchwork of images of ocean rigs, their platform scaffolds and spire-like derricks rearing from the sea: bleak constructions of iron and concrete, pounded by stormy seas or blanketed with snow or parked in sunlight in the iridescent turquoise of tropical waters, seemingly far from any coast. 'The derricks are all bare metal but as you can see the lifting cranes come in all colours, just like cranes on land. I gather Bethany says the one we're after is yellow, so . . .' He shrinks the patchwork to several tighter images. On each of them stands a canary-coloured crane, several new-looking, but most with flaking paintwork. 'Of these eight here, the three off the coasts of China, India and New Zealand are closed for machine refits, and one of the Russian ones hasn't been operational for the past year. That leaves us with four suspects.' He clicks again, quartering the whiteboard. 'Buried Hope Alpha in the North Sea, Mirage in Indonesian waters, Lost World in the Caribbean, and Endgame Beta off the coast of Siberia. For various reasons to do with chronic mismanagement, my hunch is Endgame Beta.'

Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are talking animatedly as they enter the room.

'Any luck with Harish?' asks Ned. They look at one another and make a joint decision.

'Some. But let's talk Gabrielle through this first,' says Frazer Melville.