The Rapture (8 page)

'I thought so. Just had to check.'

'Isn't the twenty-ninth today? What is this?'

'I don't know. A weird and amusing coincidence. Look, thanks, Gabrielle, and sorry to wake you, lovely one. I'd like to talk but I'm going to be busy over the next few days. Look at the news and you'll see why. I might just be buying you dinner.' And he hangs up, leaving me disturbed and excited. By the phone call, and its content. And by the interesting expression 'lovely one'.

According to the TV news, a hurricane that has been brewing in the south Atlantic ocean is now whirling its way down the coast of Brazil. Its name is Stella. Its mass and speed qualify it as a super-hurricane.

And it is heading for Rio. Just as Bethany said.

Chapter Five

Television is a cruel medium, continually ushering newsworthy visitors, uninvited, into your living-room. After the commercial break, the guest of honour is carnage. The hurricane is busy flattening a sprawl of towns and villages down the coast of Brazil. On the screen, splintered trees and a blur of broken man-made lumber jostle along fast-flowing rivers of mud, or spin into the vicious cycle of a whirlpool system, where the flotsam of urban catastrophe churns circularly in all its heart-wrenching banality, with sofas, beat-up cars, road-signs, office equipment, hoardings and human bodies bobbing like oversized corks in a brown froth of mud. If Stella hits Rio it will be 'a disaster on an unprecedented scale', according to the CNN commentator, who is explaining with a set of rapidly evolving graphs how the vortex of wind is picking up momentum and vibrating its way south. Brazilians struggle in the flooded wreckage of what must once have been their homes - a sheet of corrugated iron here, a door-frame there, a child's bed. Desperate people clinging to gas canisters and oil-drums. Lives upended in the time it takes for a pan of beans to boil.

Hurricanes can threaten one place and hit another, veering off randomly, says a meteorologist. This is particularly the case with super-sizers. The current projection of the computer models is that Hurricane Stella will not hit Rio, but head out to the ocean where it will eventually dissipate. But no one wants to take chances: with a backward glance at the unhealed wounds of New Orleans and Dallas, a mass exodus has begun, bringing with it a new set of crises and panic-induced emergencies. There are three-mile-long tailbacks on the exit roads, and the trains are bursting.
A whole lot of people are going to get wiped out. Along with their chicken coops and their crap fencing and their screaming munchkins and their pet dog Fuckface.

Nightmares of a certain variety can do me in. I have not yet worked out how to avoid succumbing to them. As the TV horror blooms like a pornographic flower, I close my eyes and inhale, and I am back in the stench of my own private hell: a sewerish, earthy, petrol stink, the blinding, almost transcendental torture of my neck and chest, the odd blankness of my lower half, the choking smoke, the seemingly endless wait for help as I drift in and out of consciousness. Alex's groaning.

I held on to his elbow, the only part of him I could reach. At least it felt like an elbow. Rain was falling - big thundery drops, warmish, strangely greasy. It seemed we were outside. I felt soil, or silage, or compost, or mud. We'd been on a minor road. And were they nettles, stinging my arm? Or a new, excruciating form of torture, designed to make your brain float out of your head and hover somewhere above you like an alternative moon in a sky filled not with light, but with the eiderdown of irradiation that is the twenty-first-century urban night? My atheism forgotten, I mouthed the default prayer of the desperate, like a beached fish gasping its last. Mild concussion tumbled the phrases in a linguistic tombola.
As we forgive those, hallowed be Thy name, Our Father, Thy kingdom come, our daily bread, our trespasses, as it is in Heaven, deliver us.

Any port in a storm.

Enough. 'I am grateful it was T9 and not CI. I am grateful I am alive not dead, and I am grateful that for my mother it's vice versa, and that Dad doesn't know who the hell I am when I come to visit him. I am grateful, I am grateful, I am grateful,
cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera
,' I mumble, moronically, as I leave the room and perform my elaborate bathroom routine, and then return, refocused, to see satellite pictures showing a huge whorl of white vapour, whose central vortex, like a celestial plughole, is the hurricane's blind eye. A series of graphics explains the mechanics of super-sizers: the warming seas, the greater bulk of moisture and the flux of air above, the drama such combinations can trigger, the fact that with global warming, they will soon become 'part of the landscape'.

Part of the landscape.

I try out the odd expression on my tongue as I windmill my arms and watch people I don't know as they panic, improvise, weep, wave, and drown.

When my mind is in turmoil, my stomach needs fuel. Like many poor cooks, the scrambling of eggs is something I have learned to master in order to survive. I smash four into some melting butter, and start stirring. What I lack in culinary skills I make up for in coffee-making expertise: thanks to the benign influence of my first psychoanalysts, I have developed an anally precise morning-beverage preparation ritual, which involves the grinding of Colombian beans, the careful charging of my small but perfect percolator, filched from my father's flat when he retreated permanently to his private netherworld, and the frothing of hot milk with a special battery-powered gizmo that bears a passing resemblance to a dildo. Ten minutes later, breakfast prepared and consumed, I feel if not a whole woman again (that I'll never be), then three-quarters of one, which is as good as it gets for me on the rehabilitation front. I drive to work. On the radio, there's more news of Stella. At last, she is veering out to sea.

Through the open door of the recreation room at Oxsmith, you can hear the rapid clatter of a ping-pong game and the thud of MTV on the big screen that's surrounded by a group of kids. Along the south-east wall, a lone boy, prostrate, is chanting tonelessly on one of the scuffed prayer-mats while a Tourette's kid shifts from one foot to the other muttering expletives. I wheel my way past a hugely fat girl swaying to the music, her belly spilling over the top of her jeans, her face as smooth and empty as moulded plastic. She has wound T-shirts around her head to form a giant multicoloured turban. Watching her fixedly, a boy who a month ago removed his own eyeballs and had to have them surgically replaced, is gearing up to masturbate. Business as usual.

I find Bethany Krall watching CNN on the small television in an annexe off the main room, where two male nurses are talking desultorily and punching at their mobiles. She has made herself comfortable. Perched on a chair with her legs tucked underneath, she's chewing gum furiously, as if there's some kind of speed mastication record she's hoping to beat in the course of her day, which is somehow related to the unfolding nightmare on the screen. I can see immediately that she's riding high.

'It's back to the worst-case scenario,' says a woman on the TV. 'Hurricane Stella's changed course again, and she's now definitely heading for Rio. She'll hit any time in the next hour.'

'Yo, Wheels.' Bethany grins as she spots me, then fists the air like a triumphant athlete. But with a third coffee inside me, I am back on track, and I refuse to let the latest news shake me. The only sane approach to what's happened is to take it as given that Bethany's prediction of the hurricane is a guess based on something she has gleaned, via the internet, from some obscure weather station. Or simply coincidence. What did Frazer Melville say?
Case dismissed
. My job, as a professional, is to manage Bethany's conviction that it isn't a random fluke. And even reverse it. The alternative - the Joy McConey model - doesn't bear thinking about. The trouble is, when you deal on a daily basis with people's fantasies not coming true, there's no handbook on how to behave when they actually do. I'll have to run on whatever instincts I have left.

'Yes, you were spot-on, Bethany,' I say.

'Well,
duh
,' she says through her gum. Her face is still pale, but the cheeks carry a faint, waxy flush, reminding me of those Madonna statues that cry tears of blood on demand in mystically devout pockets of the world. 'Well, Wheels? Aren't you going to say anything?'

'I am,' I say non-committally. 'But I don't imagine it's what you'd most like to hear.'

'You're going to say it was just a random coincidence, right? Well, Joy was just like that at first. Back in the days when she was a zero too. So if that's what you want to believe, you go right ahead.' I nod slowly but say nothing. 'They always give people blankets,' she comments, jerking her head at the screen, and rolling her grey-green gum around on her tongue and teeth. 'Why's that? It's not like it's
cold.'

'Shock makes your body temperature drop,' I respond automatically, trying to hide my irritation at the laconic, I-told-you-so way she's watching the drama unfold. She can't seem to imagine what this means for individual lives. For her, they're like tiny pixillated screen-beings. Little Sims whose lives you can meddle with and overturn at will. 'Especially if you're wet. It's comforting.'

It's more than two years ago that I held Alex's elbow and thought that cold flesh needn't always be a bad sign. That if I just kept hold of it, kept squeezing it so he'd know I was there, passing on my warmth, everything would somehow be all right. I thought, too, about his family. Now everything would be out in the open. There'd be no avoiding it, no denying it, no more pretending. Sickness mingled with relief, and the hovering suspicion that I would probably panic later, if I could muster the energy. They would give me a tranquilliser of some kind, I hoped. Perhaps they already had. At that point, it didn't cross my mind that I was badly injured. The fact that I couldn't feel anything seemed like a blessing, a sign that I was intact, that I hadn't lost anything. Yes: I'd been given some kind of tranquilliser. How good of them, how thoughtful, professional and well-organised. I could close my eyes and sleep.

'My life is over
,' a weeping Brazilian woman in a floral dress tells the world, via a duhbed American voice. 'Everything has gone. My baby is dead.' Babies have a way of getting to me. I turn away. Through the window-bars, the sky is full of popcorn clouds.

'Right. We'll discuss this later. I can't hang around,' I tell Bethany.

'Yeah. Anger management, right?' She smirks, then turns back to the screen, where they have moved briefly to other news: Japan's stock market has gone berserk, an actress who once starred alongside Tom Cruise has taken an overdose, the body-count in Iran has reached half a million. I'm just rolling out of the room when a stupid but brutal thought strikes me. I stop in the doorway and turn round.

'What else do you feel you have known about in advance?'

She shrugs. 'Lots of stuff. That earthquake in Nepal two weeks ago? I told you about it.'

'Did you?' At a recent session in the art studio I recall her reeling off a list of dates, places and events while drawing a diagram of what might have been a sex act performed by machines. But I was more interested in the artwork than the manic rant that accompanied it.

'Yes. And you didn't listen,' she says, catching the nurse's eye and offering him some gum, which he declines. I did listen, I think defensively. But I filtered. The way you have to, to make sense of anything these kids say.

'What else?'

'Try listening next time,' she says, yawning. 'It's not like it's going to stop happening.'

'But this - thousands of people killed or made homeless, and if it hits the city -'

'It will.'

'Then thousands more lives about to be ruined -'

'That's OK, it's cool,' she interrupts. 'Heard of a fait accompli?

Anyway, how come you suddenly care about all those South Americans? Because you didn't last time I mentioned it.' She shakes her head in disbelief. 'It's like Dr Ehmet. Hassan to you.

He's Turkish, right? But when I tell him about the earthquake destroying Istanbul, it's like talking to the wall.'

'An earthquake in Istanbul?' Perhaps the filter needs adjusting. Just as an experiment, of course. My stomach tightens. 'Remind me.'

'Next month. Put August the twenty-second in your diary, Wheels. It's going to make this thing look like a fun ride at Disneyland Paris.
Ay caramba!'

When I return two hours later, Bethany is still lounging in her chair, one leg splayed over the arm-rest, chewing her gum and watching Hurricane Stella whirling through Rio, a mass of roiling water, vapour and debris.

'Oi!' Bethany greets me with a waved hand in the air. 'Come and join me.' I manoeuvre alongside her. On the TV, helicopters pester at the storm's tail like gnats, relaying images of the disaster zone: filthy corpse-bearing torrents that fill valleys and swamp plains, relief trucks blocked by precipices of rubble, and out at sea, glassy slicks of oil from shattered tankers. As Stella wreaks her worst on Rio, a deeper metropolis is revealed, skewed and ravaged, beneath the flesh of the old: a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of liquid streets and bust-apart shacks and unidentifiable shards that were once part of - what? Playgrounds, schools, bars, hospitals, brothels, homes where children bickered and adults made love and cooked rice and gave birth: the ebb and flow of simple, frustrating, difficult, normal, grief-smudged, passion-fuelled human existence. A fierce sunball hangs low over Rio, French-kissing it, upending day and night. Against it, an aerial view of the city blanketed by a swirl of cloud silhouettes the white statue of Christ the Redeemer on the mountain, with his outstretched arms blessing land, ocean and sky. Absurd, but it has never properly struck me before that the figure itself is standing to form a giant human cross. There's something both terrible and poignant about the scale of it, as if its vastness and grandiosity is in reverse ratio to the economy that raised it, concrete testimony to a grandeur of spiritual ambition not matched on the ground.

'It's a credit to the foresight and expertise of the statue's designer, Heitor da Silva Costa, that Christ has withstood the force of the three-hundred-kilometre-per-hour winds,' says a commentator. 'More than ever, in these terrible times, the Redeemer is a symbol of hope '

'Hey, watch this, Wheels,' says Bethany excitedly. 'Here comes the good bit.'

'What do you mean by
good bit?'
I snap, furious. Sometimes it's a struggle to stay professional. Often you fail. And so what.

'Shhh!' she commands. I watch her sharp little profile. From the attentive, bright-eyed way she's observing the events unfolding on the TV, you might think she'd had a hand in orchestrating them. The picture has flipped to another angle. It's shakier footage this time, live, taken from high above the city, across from the statue. The picture zooms in on the white-robed figure of Christ high above the forest below. 'A figure of eternal peace,' says the news commentator. 'Standing on the mountain-top of Corcovado, in the world's biggest urban park, encapsulating the spirit of Rio itself and the hopes of a hundred million Brazilians that one day the devastation wrought today by Stella will be . . .' The camera seems to jolt, and he hesitates, only to be cut off by a disembodied Portuguese voice which interrupts him in a fast, excited burst. Apart from the earlier camera-jolt, or what seemed to be a camera-jolt, it's not clear immediately from the image that anything is wrong. Have I missed something? More voices join in, in several languages, all suddenly talking at once, in apparent confusion, as though a hundred TV channels have merged. The image flickers and resettles, the zoom pulls out then hurtles back in. Technical problems.