The Rapture (4 page)

'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 carry, 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!'

'Off her now!' mutters Rafik, tugging so fiercely at Bethany's arm that my wheelchair threatens to capsize. I try not to scream, try not to think,
an upturned beetle.

'Yeah, a beautiful relationship, right? The best ever!' Bethany's head is next to mine now and she's whispering in my ear. I watch the lights flashing outside and listen for footsteps running. I don't hear any. 'But you never found out how the two of you would be together.
That's
your problem. You got emptied out. You had two hearts and one was gone. Hey. That sucks. The poor tragic cripple!'

Finally, Rafik has pulled Bethany off the chair, released my wrist and forced both her hands behind her back. Roughly, he shoves her against the wall and struggles to keep her in position while waiting for backup.

I reach my hand under lily seat and flex my fingers round lily thunder egg while the pressure swells in my head. For a few seconds I am too disoriented to speak. I look out of the window. The turbines spin their slow rotations on the horizon, far out at sea. My heart hurts. No, it aches.
So someone died a horrible death . . . You never got to know him properly
. Two hearts and one was gone
. Then the rage comes in, a big ugly slub of it. She has hurt me, seen things and said things she shouldn't have, and more than anything I want to damage her. Badly. I palm the stone and consider its decisive heft. It's aching to be thrown. Then I realise that if I don't get away from her right now, I'll do it. Or try to. And miss, of course, and fall out of the chair in a ridiculous lunge. And then it will be me who Rafik is restraining, and I'll lose my job.

At last the door bursts open and six psychiatric nurses pour in: four men and two women, all built like tanks. They swarm on to her and pin her to the floor while Rafik stands back, rubbing his wrist in pain.

'Little bitch bit me,' he mutters, wiping at the blood.

'I think we'll call it a day now, Bethany,' I breathe, trying to make sure the sob that's hatching in my throat doesn't make it to the surface. 'I'll see you next time.'

She seems to find this, or something else, unaccountably funny. In any case as I leave the room she laughs and laughs, like the horrible, crazy little girl she is.

Suppression is easily done. It's a simple matter of choice. My decision to forget what Bethany said - about things she can't possibly know - is a judgment call. I'm fully aware of what I am doing. In the time it takes to hurtle up the corridor to the lift, I have flung the moment from my mind and from my life, like toxic waste down a chute.

Chapter Two

My new home is minimalist. Things like nice cushions once mattered to me. Cushions that match your sofa, and perhaps also your curtains, cushions that end up on the floor when you and a certain poker player are doing the deed, with abandon, in front of a winter fire. But since my world got recalibrated overnight, I've stopped caring about interior decoration, and my only cushion-related concern is the quality of the gel pad I sit on to prevent pressure sores. Domestically speaking, my issues are ramps and wheel-in showers and worktops at the right level, and how to apply to the council to get further innovations installed at no cost. Thanks to someone else's misfortune, I have managed to acquire, at short notice, a self-contained ground-floor flat in Hadport that is already wheelchair-adapted. I'm aware that this represents a kind of jackpot in the disability world, and feel duly grateful. I feel other, less comfortable things too. The previous occupant, a young tetraplegic called Mikey, succumbed, suddenly, to 'complications'. His family's loss has become my gain. The flat was advertised by the owner, Mrs Zarnac, on a spinal injury website. I'm not superstitious. But I've made a point of not enquiring further about Mikey's complications, or asking in which room he died, or how many hours passed before his carer found him.

It's a ground-floor flat in the old part of Hadport. I don't see much of Mrs Zarnac, who lives upstairs. Lonely-looking older men visit her, and when she cooks for them, vinegar smells waft down. It crosses my mind she might be pickling them alive, one after another, for some dark embalming project. In a spirit of defiance and also as a perverse comfort, I have acquired a Frida Kahlo print which leans against one wall because I can't reach to hang it up.
Autorretrato con Collar de Espinas
: Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns. Against a backdrop of jungle leaves, Kahlo gazes blankly out from beneath the single eyebrow which, for aesthetically unfathomable reasons, she refused to pluck into a conventional twosome. It's a head-and-shoulders portrait, so you don't see her wheelchair. At her left shoulder is a black cat, eyes wild, ears cocked back, positioning itself to pounce on a dead hummingbird which hangs, wings outstretched, from a mesh of thorns around her neck. In Mexican folklore, the bird is meant to bring good luck or love. To her right, preoccupied with something in his hands, is her pet monkey, a present from her pathologically unfaithful husband, Diego. The same folklore says this creature is a symbol of the Devil. Two dragonflies and two butterflies dance above her head. I assume they represent the imagination, and the freedom it offers. Often I'll lie on my bed, trying to psychoanalyse the passionate and deranged Frida, forced to turn herself into a shrine to pain. She painted her own complex torture again and again, obsessively, in different guises, many macabre: the artist hooked to machinery, pierced by nails, surrounded by foetuses in jars, trussed into a surgical corset, as an antlered deer stuck through with arrows. She's an appalling role model. I am a Petri dish of nascent manias, many no doubt as poisonous as those that swarmed in Kahlo's head. The notion that medical technology will evolve, and I'll walk again in some state-of-the-art, semi-bionic way: I'll spend hours finessing that one.

But the fact is there are still times when I just want to die.

I have another Kahlo reproduction, which hangs in my hallway:
Cuando te tengo a ti Vida, Cuanto te Quiera
. Its title means, When I Have You, Life, How Much I Love You. This being too schmaltzy a sentiment to articulate aloud in English, even to myself (my inner cynic balks), I nevertheless find myself rolling the Spanish words around my mouth and finding them, with the distance of foreignness, a comfort.
Cuando te tengo a ti vida
, cuanto te quiera.
Watching TV puts your own hell in a different perspective, if that's what you want. Today I do.

I make coffee, with which I permit myself four squares of dark chocolate, transfer to the sofa, flick through the movies on offer, hesitate between a documentary about famine and
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
, and end up plumping for the news. Two more suicide bombings in Jerusalem. Abductions, limbs lost, children orphaned. Black-clad women wailing their grief in Iran. The row about Chinese and American greenhouse gas emissions has ratcheted up a notch, while the heatwave has spread to the whole of Europe, felling old people in precise strokes, like an efficient industry. The morgues are, in the reporter's phrase, 'bursting at the seams'. Spain, France and Italy are the worst affected.

Or the lucky ones, according to a spokesman for one of the Planetarian-inspired eco-groups that sprouted after the Copenhagen climate summit failed to deliver. After he retired and spent more time with his periodicals, my father developed a habit of referring to our era as 'the Age of Dogma'. He used the growth of the Planetarian movement to prove his point: he saw it like the Faith Wave, as another example of how like the weather, the moral debate and its proponents had become more extreme, self-righteous and fanatical. Then his brain turned to Emmental and I heard no more from him on the subject. Which was a shame because he would have had interesting things to say about its more recent manifestations. 'These are natural, organic losses,' the spokesman says reassuringly. Although he's a radical, he talks in pastel, like the kind of low-key but efficient salesman who, when selling you a product, makes sure to tell you that he owns one himself, and that he is more than satisfied with it. 'Human culls are not a new phenomenon,' he says. 'Desperately sad though it is for the families of those elderly people affected, I think there are positive aspects to these deaths, which we have a responsibility to assess.'

'Would you also like to see a zero birth-rate, to follow that argument to its logical conclusion? As advocated by thinkers like Harish Modak?' asks the interviewer. I have heard of Modak, seen his photo: a strong-faced, elderly Indian with hooded eyes. His name crops up constantly in eco-debates and he has inspired a thousand survivalist settlements worldwide. A prophet of doom, is the general consensus in the British tabloid press: a fun-killer, an eco-bogeyman.

'Of course. As would any rational person who'd like to help ensure minimal human suffering in decades to come. You'll find there's a groundswell of opinion. The times are changing and we're changing with them. Adapting. As we've always done. But personally I'm prepared to take the argument further than Harish Modak does, much as I admire him. Look at the financial resources being pumped into combating diseases like Aids and malaria, when logic tells us that epidemics are simply Gaia's very efficient way of keeping populations down. And if that's the case, when we intervene to combat organic illnesses, all we're doing is encouraging population growth, and therefore exacerbating the -'

I flick off the TV. Only two years ago, when I was in rehab, people like this man, with his talk of positive shrinkage, were seen as marginal eccentrics at best, and at worst, eco-fascists and eugenicists - a source of relief to those of us who found themselves at the top of their waste-of-carbon lists. But now, within a few months, what began as a movement conducted on the blogo-sphere has found its way into the mainstream. I have seen enough neglected and damaged kids to have strong opinions about people's 'right' to have children. But disease is another matter.

Diseases like
malaria
. Diseases that foreigners get.

Inhaling minimally, and pondering the interesting evolution of the word 'organic', I manoeuvre myself off the sofa and into my chair. A singleton weekend looms and I must find ways to fill it.

In my new life as a queen of tragedy I have a classical lightweight wheelchair that folds into the car, which this afternoon I am using to trundle along the pedestrian area of Hadport, with its tiny boutiques selling candles and wind-chimes and horoscope jewellery and over-packaged soap, then into the shabbier side-streets of kebab outlets and newsagents, then past the cinema, the sports centre, the bird-spattered statue of Margaret Thatcher, and the elderly, pony-tailed New Ager selling fluffy worm-puppets on long strings. Today there's an outdoor market with fresh fish and ripe fruit on display: the smell of mackerel and cheeses and sugar-toasted peanuts mingles with the salt ocean air and the tang of warmed seaweed. After the downpour and the gales, the sun is back, a relentless fireball. The heat is abrasive, a hair-dryer with no off switch. Surfaces glitter in the shimmering air. Everyone is wearing sunglasses. I can't think of the last time I saw anyone's eyes in daylight. Or the last time I bared mine.

I head for a café. I have discovered, whose three crucial attributes I regularly celebrate: disabled bathroom facilities, a view of the waterfront, and good coffee. Here I settle at a corner table near the window and read Bethany Krall's medical report, the first part of which is written by Dr Ehmet, listing the various drugs she has been administered over the months, before Cotard's syndrome and electroconvulsive therapy entered the equation. Antipsychotics and antidepressants, plus drugs to counteract the side-effects: Prozac, Cipramil, Lustral, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Tra-zodone, Effexor, Zoloft, Tegretol. The next part is written by Hamish Bates, a therapist who worked with Bethany for two months before leaving for the private sector. According to him the ECT 'gave her relief from the delusion of being dead, but stimulated a preoccupation with climate change, chemical pollution, weather patterns, geological disturbances, and apocalyptic scenarios'. He is interested in Bethany's frequent references to the Rapture, 'a notion that is heavily debated in the Faith Wave's Armageddon discussions, along with the belief that the Messiah will return after a seven-year period of "Tribulation" or "End Times", in which God will punish humankind for its sins, by means of plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, etc. With the spread of war in the Middle East and the fear of biological weaponry further exposing the cultural nerve, it is no surprise that a notion such as the Rapture has seen a resurgence.' Having done his Googling and recycled some five-year-old
Guardian
op-eds, Hamish Bates allows himself to wax philosophical in his final paragraph, speculating that Bethany's recurring themes are 'classic metaphors for the turmoil of the mind, prompted by the geological disasters and meteorological vagaries of our times: clusters of catastrophes that cry out to fit into a pattern, be it accelerated global heating or divine retribution for man's sins'.

I may question Bates's originality, but I agree with his assessment. Bethany's pain is planet-shaped and planet-sized: she has her own vividly imagined earthquakes and hurricanes, her own volcanic eruptions, her own changing atmosphere, her own form of meltdown.

The pool is swarming with kids at weekends, so I spend the rest of the day and Sunday at home with the fan on, surfing the net for information on electroconvulsive therapy and state-of-the-art wheelchairs which I can't afford. My curiosity on those matters satisfied, I move on to a subject which has been at the back of my mind since the TV debate on human cull caused by the heatwave. The Planetarian movement's spiritual leader - though he publicly distances himself from its wilder outpourings - is the Calcutta-born, Paris-based Harish Modak, a geologist and one-time colleague of the late James Lovelock, who came up with the notion of Gaia, the planet as a self-regulating organism with its own 'geophysiology'. I skim Modak's latest article, which appeared recently in the
Washington Post
. There is 'colossal arrogance', he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last for ever. If we look at the planet's life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind's meagre history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on Earth has lasted the blink of an eye. 'We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see if not its disappearance, then its extreme marginalisation.' Modak cites climate model projections which back this up starkly, and reproduces the famous table which demonstrates how, if the planet is allowed to heat up by three further degrees, positive feedbacks will force it up to four, then five, then six. 'The Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" has descended on those of us living in the twenty-first century as never before,' Modak concludes. I rather like his grandiloquence. He'd probably object to anyone saying it, but his sentiments have a biblical as well as a Hindu ring to them. 'For the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent - is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene-pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them.'

Although more conservative and measured than the Planetarian on the TV, Modak's underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.

Once a year Hadport is home to the national British chess championships. Chess players are notorious for both their terrible dress sense and their lack of orientation skills. It was a week ago that I first caught sight of the carrot-haired woman -in her forties, badly dressed, dishevelled - opposite my flat. At first I assumed she was one of their strange tribe, stranded in Hadport after her lost chess match like a misplaced evacuee. She looked off kilter. But then I had other thoughts, prompted by the fact that she was empty-handed. Every woman - whether or not she plays chess - carries a bag. Her lack of this standard accessory made me think that perhaps she was local after all: local enough to be a neighbour who has popped out on a rare bag-free errand. Or mad. A bagless woman can look, and feel, almost obscenely naked. Dewombed. In a world increasingly full of distressed people, every small town has its aimless oddballs, men and women who drift in and out like flotsam.