The Rapture (18 page)

A silence. Thinking time for us both. He's looking at me expectantly. The ticking clock on the wall says it's eighteen minutes past ten. As I watch the seconds pass, my mind goes into overdrive. Money - or the lack of it - suddenly looms large. According to my lawyer, my compensation from the accident is a long way off. Has my one misjudgment rendered me unemployable? At nineteen minutes past ten, still aware of his eyes on me, I say, 'I'll pack up my office and get out of your hair.'

Sheldon-Gray looks alarmed rather than relieved. 'According to your contract, you have another month. Just be grateful I'm not taking immediate disciplinary proceedings.'

'These are very serious claims,' I say, sensing an advantage. 'Therapists who behave unprofessionally are a liability to any establishment. Surely you'd want to expose me officially?' He does the thing with his cuffs. I press on. 'Unless perhaps you have a staff shortage due to Dr Ehmet having gone? And recruitment at Oxsmith being -
I gather
- a regular problem . . .'

'You have four weeks,' he says brusquely. The cuffs now in order, some papers on his desk seem inexplicably to call for his immediate attention. 'And please don't ask me for a reference. Because I assure you, there will be no pity factor this time.' I am dismissed. I swivel to leave. 'But in the meantime,' he tells my retreating back, 'your contact with Bethany Krall is at an end.'

With an Indian takeway steaming on the passenger seat of my car, I drive over to Frazer Melville's home, where I have rarely been due to its lack of wheelchair-friendliness. It's a rented terraced house not far from the port. Inside, the walls are decorated with huge tattered maps, black-and-white botanical photographs which he has taken himself, and images of nature at its most dramatic: sunsets, rivers of molten lava, thunderous waterfalls. Like his office, it's an erudite, well-educated sprawl: the chaos of a creative and avidly curious individual who has omitted to organise any home help. He's pale-faced and monosyllabic. We pick at the food, straight from the cartons, almost in silence. I do not dare ask the question because I can read the answer on his face.

'I've printed out the replies I got,' he says eventually. 'Such as they are.' He jerks his head in the direction of the side-table.

I roll over and take a look. He has printed out seven separate emails.

Dear Frazer, begins the first. I read your e-mail with great amusement, and have passed it on to Judy, because she's always assuring me we scientists are a humourless bunch.
Nice one!! Anyway I look forward to hearing more from your mysterious Oracle with interest, and will mark up my calendar.

Best wishes, Cees.

PS Since you ask, I would estimate the chances of a cyclone hitting Mumbai on the date you mention to be 5,380 to 1 .

The second:

Dear Dr Melville, please accept my deepest condolences on your mother's death last month, which I heard about when I contacted your office this morning. All of us at the centre would like to send you our sympathies at this difficult time, and hope that you recover your spirits very soon. On a personal note I recall when my father died I was very shaken, and wasn't really myself for some months afterwards . . .

The third:

My dear dear Frazer, Hello from the Arctic! If you are serious about these 'predictions' being bona fide science (and from the tone of your mail I fear yes, you are) then this is a big professional mistake, whether your 'source' is right or not. As your friend as well as your ex-wife, I will now do what I hope you would do for me. I advise you, dear Frazer, to not take this further. You have a wonderful reputation in the field. I know how hard you worked for the name you have, so perhaps you already have second thoughts. In any case I promise you with hand on my heart I will not pass this on. I'm sure you have been under strain with your mother's death . . .

'The worst are the ones who didn't reply,' says Frazer Melville flatly. 'Because I know what they're thinking, and what they're saying to one another. They're dancing the fucking schadenfreude polka.'

'You're regretting it.'

'No. Yes. Not if Bethany's right. But if she's wrong - well, of course. I'll just have to plead insanity. At least I'll have a shrink to back me up.'

'An art therapist.'

He smiles forlornly. 'Beggars can't be choosers.'

***

But a few days later, he rings in triumph. 'She predicted heavy flooding in Bangladesh on the fifth and it happened. And now a cyclone's heading for Mumbai, due to hit tomorrow. Just like she wrote in the notebook. September the thirteenth. She predicted it over a month ago. Maybe more. No weather forecaster can do that.'

'Do you feel vindicated?'

'Don't you?'

'No,' I decide. I think of Bethany, chewing her green gum and punching the air like she'd won a prize. 'Just sick. And somehow . . . responsible.'

'I'm recontacting people about Hong Kong and Samoa. But I'm not hopeful. The people I tell either think I'm nuts, or they're jealous because they reckon I've invented a new machine that can detect early warning signals.'

Some days after the cyclone has wreaked its worst, killing more than three hundred in Mumbai, I drive to Frazer Melville's house.

He opens the door in silence. He has lost weight and his clothes hang loosely. He doesn't bend to kiss me, and there's no welcoming touch. I can feel he's withdrawing from me, and perhaps even keeping something crucial to himself. BBC World is on. As I had already heard on the news, much of Hong Kong island is on fire. A gas blast caused a high-rise to topple, killing eighty. Elsewhere hundreds more are dead, after lightning struck the boat settlements and the resulting blaze, fanned by tropical breezes, flared upward into the tinder-dry woodland of Peak District. It's evening over there, and Hong Kong seen from the air is a splash of orange in the South China Sea. Across the water in Kowloon, more fires are raging, triggered by gas blasts.

'You have to tell me what's going on,' I say eventually, nodding at the screen. 'Apart from this.'

'I had a call from my head of department yesterday,' he says. 'He's not happy about the fact I've been making scientifically unfounded statements.'

'A few e-mails to colleagues?'

'It's an abuse of my university status, according to him. He's old school.'

'So what's the punishment?'

'Oh, just the usual freezing-out, I imagine. But I'm not staying to find out. I told him I wanted a six-week sabbatical.'

'He agreed to it?'

'With insulting alacrity,' his smile is bleak. 'No one will speak to me, not even off the record, about these fires,' he says, waving at the TV. 'I'm persona non grata.'

'And Harish Modak?' I ask. There's an uneasy silence, which I take as a no. 'And the web?'

'Oh, it's spreading like bird flu.' He doesn't need to say that this is more a curse than a blessing.

'So sooner or later the science and news journalists will pick it up, then.' We let this thought hang for a moment. 'So what next?'

'We go to London and make the people who can make things happen listen to us.'

'Campaigners?' I ask.

He shrugs. 'A last resort is a last resort.'

'But how will their reaction be any different?'

He reaches for a bottle of whisky and sighs heavily. 'I don't know.' His face succumbs to gravity. 'Now do you want a drink? I'm having one.' He sloshes himself a glass, swallows it down in one gulp and then pours another.

The next morning is grey, and the weather has finally cooled a little. In the fields and hedgerows and on the industry-sponsored roundabouts, the reds and oranges and dark greens stand out like heraldic flags. It's effectively the second autumn of the year. The first shrivelled the leaves on the branches and sun-blasted the fruit to ripeness back in May. Now more leaves are falling, horse chestnuts are splitting open, and the hedgerows are studded with the ripening red of rosehips, deadly nightshade and hawthorn. I'm used to driving alone, my wheelchair folded on the passenger seat, and I'm finding it hard to adjust to having a person next to me instead. Particularly one as weary-looking and hung over as Frazer Melville is today. Last night I could see he was drinking too much but I didn't steer him away from it any more than I allowed myself to signal a desire for the physical intimacy I was aching for. Was I respecting his space, or just being a coward? He'd seemed almost oblivious to my presence, and I was too insecure to initiate anything. In any case, I rationalised, his bedroom is upstairs.

But now, the fact that we did not make love has spawned an unease, adding invisibly to the conflicted issue which has dominated the first twenty minutes of our journey: how much should we reveal about Bethany? I have insisted that her anonymity remain sacrosanct. Plus, I've argued, revealing our source as the inmate of a mental institution will hardly credit our case. He acknowledges this, but declares himself hamstrung: if he cannot refer to Bethany's insights into turbulence as a product of ECT, then he can offer no scientific evidence to back up his theory about sensitivity to geological and meteorological vibrations. Finally, we reach a fragile accord, but the subsequent wordlessness of our journey up to London bears witness to our misery and stress. After all that's happened, there suddenly doesn't seem much more to say. The bottom line, as he has pointed out repeatedly, is that we have nothing left to lose. And therefore no choice, following our snub from Harish Modak, but to plead our case to environmental pressure organisations unrelated to the Planetarians. Frazer Melville, BAYMA, PhD and various other acronymic suffixes, has effectively lost his job, and I am on the verge of losing mine. If his silence represents optimism about our current mission, I wish I could share it, and be blessed with some inkling as to what 'the Tribulation' might actually involve beyond some vague notion of floods and locust-plagues. A nuclear accident, perhaps?

On that cheerful mental note, we enter the capital.

Saving the world from ecological disaster is big, slick business. The organisation's funding engine may be fuelled by mass col- lective guilt, but its public face is as confident and forward-thinking as the building that houses it, from its solar-panelled façades and discreet roof-windmills to the impressive collection of donated artists' work in the lobby. I'm struck by the scale of the operation, the corporate competence of the administrative machine. Money and conviction make for a potent mix. In the waiting area, dominated by a TV wall showing highlights of public campaigns, we are offered lattes. Ten minutes later we are ushered up to the tenth floor, from where the erratic cubist panorama of London's skyline is on display beneath a thickening lid of cloud. I take in the drab municipal greys, interrupted by green swathes of park, and the landmarks I remember my father pointing out to me on our outing here together six years ago, when his brain and my legs still functioned, in what proved a last, unintended family farewell to the city: the Swiss Re building, the Post Office Tower, the great wheel of the Eye, Nelson's Column and St Paul's. In between, the snaking lines of red buses. We rode on one that day. Upstairs. We talked and talked.

We sat upstairs.

It's clear from the respectful greeting given to Frazer Melville by the chief ecologist Karla Fitzgerald and her team, that my physicist's name carries a certain cachet.

'We came to see you in person because this is an unusual situation,' Frazer Melville begins after he has settled on the sofa and introduced me simply as 'Gabrielle Fox, a friend who shares my concern'. He's nervous. Can Karla Fitzgerald sense it too? She smiles easily, but she's business-like. She apologises for not being able to spare us more than ten minutes: she has another meeting at eleven. We have discussed how to pitch our story, and where to begin.

'The Istanbul earthquake was very accurately foreseen by someone who we have reason to believe has access to a very specialist predictive system,' Frazer Melville's tone is professional, but I can see Karla Fitzgerald's instant, quiet shock. 'The same system enabled this individual to pinpoint the date of the hurricane in Rio some weeks in advance,' he presses on. There are photographs on her walls of children. Karla Fitzgerald's own, when young perhaps. No: grandchildren. 'The same source is now speculating -'

But Karla Fitzgerald has stood up abruptly, her hand raised in an emergency stop gesture. Abandoning her desk, she comes across and settles next to Frazer Melville on the sofa. My heart plummets.

I've sensed sympathy too often not to recognise it now.

'Look, before you go any further, I must tell you that this information isn't new to us, Dr Melville,' she says gently. She could be talking to one of her grandchildren. 'We've already heard about those predictions. And where they come from. We do recognise it's quite a coincidence. But no more than that.' Has Bethany contacted them herself? 'Several organisations, ours among them, were approached some time ago by a very disturbed woman. She claimed the disasters were being caused by a child in a psychiatric institution where she used to work. Somewhere on the south coast. Hadport, I think.' There is nothing to say. Karla Fitzgerald looks apologetic. 'The girl's name was . . . Bethany?' Frazer Melville looks down at his hands. 'Look. I appreciate your both taking the time to come and see us. A lot of people are very concerned about these issues, and so they should be,' Karla finishes diplomatically. 'We always tell them that the best way to help is to make a donation, or become active in the organisation. I have some membership forms here,' she says, standing again, returning to her desk and reaching in a drawer. She fans out some bright papers. 'Is that something that might interest either of you?'

Beyond humiliation, we drive home in silence.

Sex is a great healer, but once again the physicist is not interested. He flinches from my touch. I feel spurned, even though I know it means nothing. Might mean nothing. Doesn't necessarily mean anything. I should go home but I make the mistake of not doing so. Instead -

Anger management theory, which I have only recently been propounding to a roomful of surly psychotic teenagers, has it that one should not allow irritants and grievances and defeats to accumulate. That one cannot read the minds of others, any more than one can make the world accord with one's own vision of how it should be run. But soon the physicist and I have begun a heated argument in which I fail quite spectacularly to practise what I have spent so much time preaching, both to myself and to others. I insist that we must do something more, something that will make a difference. Still smarting from our defeat, he wants to know what, now that we have burned our bridges. Tell new people, I say. People who will believe. He is scathing about who those people might be.