The Rapture (6 page)

'What species of science type?' I ask, suddenly interested. The Bethany-puzzle is still vibrating.

'The lesser-spotted biologist, the two-toed statistician, I don't know. The usual suspects.'

'OK.'

'OK what?' The exertion has turned his face as pale as the buttermilk wall behind him.

'OK I'll come. Thank you. Can you get me an invitation?'

He does a double-take. 'Of course. Leave it with me. Rochelle will contact you.'

Working out Bethany Krall for myself isn't an easy ride. Like extreme weather, her moods vary wildly. Some days she is talkative, while on other occasions she barely acknowledges me, refusing point-blank to enter into a dialogue, even about cloud formations or another favourite topic, plate tectonics. Her artwork is impressive. She works on several large and evocative sky paintings, and dashes off a series of brooding charcoal drawings of storms spreading over wide featureless landscapes. More and more, she doodles rocky surfaces from which a vertical line emerges, heading skyward but fizzling into nothingness near the top of the page. Sometimes it takes root underground, its trajectory veering to the left and then ending in what looks like a cartoon bang. Is it plant or machine? When I ask her about it, she is non-committal: the scene is something that keeps 'appearing' after ECT. Perhaps it's on another planet, she offers. But to me it whispers Freud. I try to draw her out a little on the subject of her religious background, in the hope that it might lead to some revelations about her family. She can quote the Bible extensively, but is as scathing about God as she is about doctors, repeating the question she raised when we first met: what has God ever done for her?

'That presupposes that God exists,' I prompt her. But at this, she falls silent. If Leonard Krall abused his daughter sexually, and her mother colluded in the atrocity, then her need for vengeance would be easily explained. I work with her patiently, trying to edge towards the subtle alteration of perception that might one day enable her to escape the tortured landscape of Planet Bethany and move to a place of lesser punishment. But if revelations are on the horizon, they are a long way off, and I'm aware of my failure.

Our next meeting takes place outside. It is still breezeless, and so oppressively hot that I have taken to carrying a little lacquered fan with me everywhere, like some old-world geisha. Above us the sky is that intense Hockney blue that seems to almost gag on its own density. High scatterings of clouds above, like flung chalk dust, and stripes of darker vapour below. The heat is vengeful, vengeful. Rafik is shadowing us, a few paces behind: I have told him to make sure that if Bethany touches me, or makes any sudden move, he must intervene immediately. I'm taking no chances. I don't trust her further than I can spit.

Five years ago, the British seasons made some kind of sense. Not any more. One side of Oxsmith's façade is set on fire by the hectic leaves of a Virginia creeper, which blaze like fish-scales. Some have already curled to brown and been shed. A cluster of lilies, withered and papery, mauve and delicate orange, rears up valiantly from the drought-struck lawn. In my previous life I would have photographed distressed, moribund blooms such as this, and then taken the image further in the studio, fast and angry, nudging at them with pastels, or brush-and-ink, revelling in the accidental splatters, the emotional jolts that change the way you think about what you see, because you've seen it anew, transmogrified it, forced it to sing your song. For the first time in months, I feel a spasm of creative desire. Why not begin all that again? Do I have to deprive myself of things I once found good?

Yes. No. Yes. Yes. It seems I do.

'The tornado in Scotland,' I begin. 'The one that struck Aberdeen -'

'A lucky guess,' she interrupts breezily. 'Coincidence. That's what you're thinking, right?'

I smile. 'But I admit it was odd.'

She cackles but says nothing. We move in silence for a while.

'So this car crash you had,' Bethany says abruptly. 'Fucking spectacular, eh.' I am confounded. I haven't told her anything about the accident. How does she know it was a car crash? What does she mean by
spectacular?
'Anyway, tell me something. I'm curious. What's it like being '

'Disabled?' I offer, to regain control, to buy time, as we round a bend. '
Confined
to a wheelchair?'

'I was going to say
challenged
,' she ripostes merrily. 'Or
differently
abled, yeah?' It seems that today is a good day.

'I'm fine with paralysed.'

She stops and closes her eyes. 'He was driving, right?' she says, knowledgeably.

My brain jams, then restarts with an internal thud, catapulting me into the offensive. 'OK, so tell me more,' I say. 'Since you know, let's hear the rest.' But I immediately regret it. In giving in to my anger, I've betrayed myself.

'I can't see the details. But I know the result.'

So do I, and so does everybody, big deal, I think, and move on. But how can she know who was driving? Because men usually drive? Just another 'lucky guess'? For a few minutes there's no sound but the crunch of gravel under her feet, and the quieter press of my wheels. If I give her something, she might give me something in return.

'OK,' I say. 'Here's the short version. It's night-time. He's driving, as you suspected.'

'Knew.'

'Well, you knew right. Anyway he loses control, the car veers off the road, it rolls over a few times, I land in some mud, and when I wake up in hospital they ask if I'm aware of a loss of feeling anywhere.'

My voice has stayed calm but my heart is bashing and I'm unbearably hot, and suffused with a feeling of disgust, as though I have rolled over a slug and it's stuck to my wheel and any minute I'll feel the slime of its prolapsed innards against my palm. Next to me, Bethany nods as if recognising the scenario. Nothing fazes her. On the contrary, what I've said seems to give her nourishment.

'But it was your fault, right?' Like a lot of disturbed kids, Bethany has a sure instinct for locating one's jugular vein. I shut my eyes and stop the wheelchair. When I open them again, Rafik is at my side. I breathe in and out slowly.

'In a way it was, and in another way it wasn't,' I say as evenly as I can, moving on. 'Depending on the mood I'm in on the day, Bethany. I wonder if there's anything that feels familiar in that, when you look at your own life?'

But she isn't going to be side-tracked in that direction. Her refusal to countenance the past has shown no signs of erosion. The occasional biblical quotation - usually citing chapter and verse from Ezekiel, The malonians or the Book of Revelation - is the closest she comes to revealing influences from her life in the outside world. It could be months, or even years, before Bethany decides she trusts somebody enough to talk about her parents. If she ever does. And why would she? She'd have everything to lose, and precious little to gain. If whatever happened to her was bad enough to prompt her to kill her mother, then convince her that she herself had died -

'So just how paralysed are you?' she asks. I've recovered now.

'My legs don't function,' I answer, pushing my wheels faster. Rafik holds back; she stays alongside. 'I can't stand up or walk, but I can still swim. It's my arms that do the work.'

'She can still swim,' she says, as though pondering it. 'But can she have sex?'

I take a breath. It's the question everyone secretly wants to ask, in a normal world. But a maximum-security forensic hospital for criminally insane minors is not a normal world. 'I have no feelings below the waist. I'm what's called a T9 paraplegic, complete,' I reply. 'Meaning nothing much happening from the belly-button down. Or thereabouts.' Slowly, and with much experimentation, I discovered in rehab that I can still, just about, experience arousal of sorts -though most of it seems to take place in my head, via my breasts. Not something I feel the need to share with the suddenly inquisitive Bethany Krall.

'I'm wondering why you ask,' I continue carefully, grateful for once that there's no eye contact. In opening the door to a discussion of her own sexuality and experience, have I launched her on a ghost-train? But she seems not to have heard, or has chosen not to answer.

'I didn't choose this,' I say softly - though in my dark raging moments I fear otherwise. 'But I can live with it.' Can I? As a vision of making love with Alex on the poker table enters my head, my ribcage tugs inward like I'm wearing a corset that's being tightened by a cruel Elizabethan. 'Maybe you can under- stand that? Spur-of-the-moment, random actions that have lifelong consequences?' Her mother hovers between us but Bethany resists the bait. 'You've been at Oxsmith for two years now. But do you understand why you're here?'

She laughs, but it's mirthless. 'I'm here because of people like you refusing to see what's going on even when it's staring you in the face. Much easier to lock me up than to listen to what I'm saying.' Suddenly she's on a furious roll. 'You pretend things aren't happening because that's what you want to believe, and by the time you do, it's too fucking late. The tornado in Scotland. You want to think it was a lucky guess. You're welcome to. But I saw it. And then it happened.'

'Like you said yourself: a lucky guess.' I see Karen Krall's bloodied face: waxy, like a melted doll's. You can't help wondering what sort of force Bethany needed to ram the screwdriver into her eye socket like that. What sort of noise the puncture would make. 'But how do you see your future?' I ask, to take my mind off it.

'You mean, do I want to leave Oxsmith one day? Be released into the
community?
Get married, become a mum, lead a normal nine-to-five life - all the things little girls are supposed to want?'

'Little girls?'

'Cut the crap. I mean those moronic teens in your moronic teen group talking about their moronic boyfriends and their moronic sex and their crack-head retard babies.'

'Forget about the other girls' ambitions, Bethany, whatever you think they are. What do
you
want?'

She stops, and together we look at the wall of red creeper. 'If I had a baby I'd call it Felix. That means happy, right? It would be kind of an ironic name.' I wait for more, thinking: the name I always had in mind was Max. 'But I won't be having a baby.' Me neither. They said I nearly died, there was 'no way of saving anything'.
Anything
: an interesting euphemism. No Max. Not now, not ever.

'But how can you know you'll never have children?'

'What's the point, when the world's fucked? I'd have to be a sadist.' Harish Modak and the Planetarians would agree with her. They're singing from the same hymn-sheet.

'I can think of a million reasons,' I say. A foolish reflex, because if she were to call me on it, I am not sure I could name a single one. But Bethany's inner whirlwind has moved on. She has leaned down, and I feel her breath on the back of my head. This is her favourite way to threaten me.

'Me getting out of this place all depends on you, Wheels,' she whispers, coming so close that her mouth nuzzles the hair by my ear. Her babyish, hoarse voice worms deep into me, insistent as an exotic parasite. 'I'd say it depends on how good you are at your so-called job.' A familiar sting of pain travels up from my smashed ninth vertebra to my neck. I shudder it away and shift in my chair. I've learned over the past two years that when half of you is dead, the other half can come violently, almost malevolently alive. 'Joy McConey got nine out of ten but in the end it wasn't enough, she just wasn't up to it. Didn't have the nerve. She's paying for it now. But maybe you'll be the one. Have you ever thought that you were brought here for a purpose?'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning are you going to help me escape from here or not?'

I look at the wall again, its splash of triumphant, bloody red. A gust of wind strokes it, detaching a slew of brittle leaves. I don't reply, just turn and look at her. Her eyes have gone distant and dreamy, as if she is peering at something beyond the horizon or in a parallel place.

'There's a thunderstorm coming tomorrow. From the west. I like storms from the west. Hey. Tell you what. I'll come and watch it from the Creativity Workshop.' She pauses. 'You never call it that, do you? Too right-on, yeah?' I fight a smile. 'There's a good view. We could eat popcorn together, Wheels. Cuddle up together and share a Coke like at the movies.' She pauses and I can feel her grin. 'You could pretend to be my mum.'

Chapter Four

I have stopped at the swimming pool on my way home from work. Six-thirty is a good time, in this heat. Although at over thirty degrees, the water is never truly refreshing, you'll get a lane to yourself, if you're lucky. But it seems I'm on a doomed mission. As I'm parking, a blue Renault hybrid pulls up sharply in the disabled space next to me and the woman passenger inside stares at me pleadingly. It's her. The woman with the lustrous red hair and the pale eyes. There's a man with her. He's blond, balding, harassed-looking, and probably what they call time-poor. Older. He looks at me over the steering wheel and gives a helpless, frustrated gesture, as though I should be able to identify and sympathise with his plight. Then, as the woman starts to open the car door, he stops her with a swift movement. And suddenly they're struggling, locked in a graceless, desperate tussle. I picture the dull, bestial unhappiness of a couple shackled to one another by their mortgage and their children's shared DNA. I have no doubt that their fight concerns me in some freakish but unfathomable way. Having secured my parking space, I now hesitate. Although I am getting better at it, manoeuvring the wheelchair out of the car is still a hassle. I don't like the idea of this couple being there, fighting, while I do it. I've seen the crazy red-haired woman once too often.

Unwilling to abandon my swim, I decide to drive around the car park in the hope they'll assume I have gone, and then leave themselves. Pulling out, in my mirror I see the woman turn to yell at the man again. Her features are stamped with misery. Something is severely, irredeemably wrong. It crosses my mind that they could be the parents of an Oxsmith patient: they seem about the right age to have a teenager. Mental illness in a child can exact a terrible price. Whole families implode. But if the woman wants to speak to me, why not ask for a meeting in the normal way? When I get back to my parking space they have left and I can enjoy the pool. But it takes thirty lengths' worth of hard swimming to eradicate the woman's stare.

The storm has erupted. The thunder's on a spin-and-tumble cycle and the sky is mottled with grey and black cloud. When Bethany arrives in the studio - a bulky, Mohican-haired female nurse is already sitting in - we watch the sky froth and churn. The view is operatic, the arms of the white windmills revolving intently in the distance, forked lighting cracking over the ink-pool of the sea, trees straining at the roots, their canopies stirred up like seaweed, sometimes a filament whipping off to become a missile. As the lightning-flashes illuminate the room and plunge it back into shadow, Bethany wanders around turning her head this way and that, as though sensing the air's pulse. She opens the window and thrusts her face out, inhaling the air through the white bars.

'I'd like to climb to the top of a mountain. Just stand there and let the lightning hit me. Kapow. Right into the brain. Or dive into the sea when it's on fire.'

'I wonder what other kind of thoughts you have, about death,' I say, because it's worth a try. But she pays no attention. Today I'm an irrelevance, a petty distraction from her queen-sized thoughts. When she finally stops pacing, she stands in the middle of the room, her face spattered with raindrops, breathing in deep lung-fuls of thunder-air, eyes closed.

'Here,' I say, shoving some charcoal at her with an aggression I somehow can't quite hide. 'You came here to draw, so draw.'

Surprisingly, she obeys. I watch her at the worktop, her face concentrated, her body bent oddly close to the paper. She works fast, fluidly, intensely, almost tearing at the page. Charcoal dust flies up. Every now and then she wipes the sweat from her face, leaving a dark smear of grime. What she is sketching now - a series of swirls and arabesques - doesn't correspond to the landscape outside. She covers the paper hastily, letting each sheet fall to the floor when she tires of it. In one, there's a human shape: a man diving off a cliff.

'Who's that?' I ask, pointing.

'Ever seen those cliff-divers, on TV? In Acapulco? They spread their arms and they dive off into the sea. Like Christ.'

'Would you call yourself a believer?'

'No.'

'You used to be. The church you belonged to -'

'His church. Not mine.' She points to her temples. 'Look. The mark of the Beast. Doctors do that. They put stuff in and they suck other stuff out.'

'Tell me what sort of man your father is, Bethany. Even if you have mixed feelings about him, I wonder if there's something you could describe about him?' She shakes her head. 'Or your mother?'

'Hey. I'll tell you something. Useful fact about electricity. Lightning isn't supposed to strike twice in the same place. But some people have been hit by it three times. It's the metal in their blood. My blood's full of metal.'

'Do you feel you attract trouble?' I ask, rolling a piece of chalk between my fingers. I am getting a visceral urge to draw - or more simply just to make a mark on something as proof of my own existence. But something deep and tribal, something with its own arcane emotional rules and rituals, forbids me. Bethany shakes her head and smiles, then tut-tuts.

'Therapy questions will get you nowhere. Try asking some real ones.'

'Give me some suggestions. Let's do a role-reversal.'

'Nice try,' she laughs. 'But who the fuck would ever want to swap places with a spaz?'

I begin to tidy up the clay-working area. A minute later, the bell rings for lunch and the nurse comes for her and she is gone.

The clouds are massing outside, unfurling in silent grey waves of vapour. Watching them roll and spread, I realise that I need Bethany. When I concentrate on her, exquisitely unpleasant though it sometimes is - I can forget myself. And forgetting can be addictive, I've learned that by now. Bethany has no love for the world. If you feel that way, and maybe have cause to, if you believe you died at the age of fourteen, there can be worse things than being here, imagining that you house a ghost - a kind of raging electric Gaia - that empowers you. Bombarded by cataclysmic predictions about the consequences of global warming, and with a childhood forged in the increasingly popular notion of hellfire, why
not
give way to the delusion that you have special powers? With the temporary memory loss that comes with ECT, you can be born again every week, to voice extravagant threats or, in another mood, to find solace in small enclosed things, your anxieties and dreams in deep storage. I know about that, I've lived it: the hopes quietly shelved or violently thrown aside, the sustaining beliefs about humanity's importance in the universe rendered absurd, meaningless.

The sky is almost black now. It could be night. The clay corner is a disaster area, so it is only half an hour later, when my next session is due to start, that I roll over to where Bethany has been working, and see, next to the charcoal skyscapes and the skydiver, the crude red crayon drawing she has left on the worktop. It could have been done by an eight-year-old. It's a stick-figure, lying askew. Female, to judge from the triangular breasts and the triangular skirt.

Something is sticking out of her eye.

Strokes among the young are on the rise, according to Mary, my physio at the rehab centre: an oddly unpublicised side-effect of alcohol and drug abuse. Many wheelchair-users are of my own generation or younger, often accompanied by parents or even grandparents. I see proof of this on my early morning outings, when I'll find myself doing an ungainly little swizzle-dance in front of another set of wheels, positioning my chair to leave my camarade de guerre enough space on the pavement. As we do this, those of us still blessed with the power of speech commiserate about dog-shit, and inspect one another's wheelchairs just as blokes eye up one another's cars, or mums compare baby buggies, and we smile ruefully in recognition of our shared knowledge of a world in which practicalities and the subtlest of physical pleasures - the delicate aftertaste of artichokes, a particular piece of music, not to mention the erogenous zones that emerge to compensate for those we have lost - have come to mean more than we could ever have imagined before. Like it or not, and I do not, I have become a member of a community. Though I would rather saw off my own head than join a club, or counsel wheelchair users -something I might be qualified to do. I have enough of my own stuff to deal with. And look how well I'm doing!

I have a job, along with an office I can call my own, and a spider plant that refuses to die no matter how much coffee I pour on it. I am also in charge of several junior nutcases, including a sixteen-year-old murderess obsessed with the Apocalypse.

Blessings:
count them daily, Gabrielle.

Practise what you preach. Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera.

Keep a fucking gratitude journal.

When I get home from my morning glide, there's a package waiting for me, and a card. I recognise the erratic handwriting on the parcel as my friend Lily's. She's written a note instructing me to have a wonderful day. Inside the packet is something soft wrapped in scented tissue. Fabric: fabric whose heft indicates it is unashamedly expensive. As I pull the tissue apart, a sudden flood of red silk spills out and collects on my lap. A dress. I hold it out. It has spaghetti straps, a swooping de'colletage, sequins on the hem: it's the kind of dress a Brazilian transsexual would kill for. Tears shoot into my eyes when I realise the date, and what I have suppressed. Can I really have become so disconnected from myself?

The card is from my brother Pierre and his family in Canada. One of the twins, Joel, the younger by nine minutes, has sent a drawing of me in my wheelchair. I am holding a balloon. I have a wide banana-shaped smile on my face and the long sharp eyelashes of a beauty queen.

Later that day, four morbidly obese girls start fighting in Physical Expression and I have to call in extra backup, so by the time I get the message to come to Dr Sheldon-Gray's office, I'm as miserable as any wheelchair-user is allowed to be on her thirty-sixth birthday in a town where she has no friends. But Sheldon-Gray has news for me. As per my spur-of-the-moment request, my boss has engineered my social debut at the charity function at the Armada Hotel tonight.

'Buffet dinner included,' he beams, handing me the invitation. 'Drinks from seven-thirty.'

She shall go to the ball!

After the day I've had, it's a deeply unappealing prospect. When I asked for the invitation, I was in one of those optimistic, enquiring moods that can occasionally overtake me, and which I have taught myself to indulge, to counteract the darkness. Today, in a different cast of mind, the notion of cornering some hapless scientist and quizzing him or her about the background to Bethany's delusions suddenly feels idiotic, unprofessional and shamefully naive.

'Thank you,' I tell Sheldon-Gray. 'I'd love to come.'

No more dramatic entrances in impossibly high stiletto heels for Gabrielle Fox, I think some hours later, as I negotiate a pool of grease on the tiled floor of the Armada Hotel's giant industrial kitchen. She is Cinderella brought low, arriving at the ball via a service entrance because of lack of access front-of-house. The bang of pots and pans, the sizzle of fat and the hiss of pressure-cooker steam are noises she will come to know well in her new life. Twang that guitar. I trundle my way past churning dishwashers, vast hobs and sauce-splattered chefs, and out via the kitchen's double swing-doors and a bleak corridor into the sudden gaudy hubbub of the charity reception. Where spread before me is everything I used to enjoy, in an ironic way, in the world of Before, but have developed a dread of since the accident: tuxedo'd men, women parading the sparklier end of their wardrobes, waiters with drinks and fiddly, experimental-looking things to eat on trays. Later, there will doubtless be speeches by men who praise the untiring efforts of the stalwarts behind the scenes. But I remind myself that if nothing else, I have a mission: to find someone I can interrogate about natural catastrophes -such as tornadoes in Aberdeen - and how one predicts them. Hoping to find a guest-list without having to enter the throng, I manoeuvre my way across its perimeter behind a screen of potted plants. But I have been spotted by a tall woman who has laid a manicured hand on my arm, and is now bending down, as though on a giant hinge, to clink her necklace in my face.

'Welcome. What a gorgeous dress you're wearing.'

'Oh thank you,' I muster a smile. 'It's a present from a friend. It's the first time I've worn it.'

The fact is, I feel fraudulent, undignified and inappropriate: a non-woman pretending to be a real one. The blood-red dress, which would look elegant on an upright woman, feels brash stuffed into a wheelchair, with my boobs popping out like two scoops of vanilla ice-cream yelling, lick me. I am a cleavage on wheels. I am Disabled Barbie Goes to a Party but Does not get Laid for Reasons that Escape No One.

'It's so heartening to have some real victims of the condition with us tonight,' the woman is telling me conspiratorially, her hand still on my arm. 'It brings home the urgency. And it's positive. I'm all for positive. And I bet you are too.' And she bats my bare shoulder in a 'go, girl!' gesture. 'You're so brave,' she says, expanding on her theme as we make our way through to the main hall, a sea of arses and cummerbunds. 'Don't tell me you're not. I know how cruel it can be, my niece Jilly had it. Jilly's father always called it SB. Short for son-of-a-bitch.'

Finally I am with her. Spina bifida. Oh Jesus, how do I get rid of her? This town needs a gas chamber.

'I'm sorry. This is from a car accident,' I say, patting my chair as if it is my good old friend, which it is not and never will be. 'Perhaps those people over there can help you?' I suggest, pointing out three other wheelchair-users who I presume to be genuine victims of 'SB'. This is their gig: they can do the talking.

'An accident?' she wants to know. Curiosity is an attribute one can applaud in oneself but despise in others.

'Car.' I have learned to keep it brief.

'Lord, what a terrible shame. You're so attractive!'

I know, I want to tell her. It should have happened to someone really ugly. And then it wouldn't have mattered.